Quotes 7-21-2014
by Miles Raymer
“He was of an age where it was never possible to pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another just so. They gained reputations as conjurors. Others found their errands running at cross purposes and were never able to to anything; they ended up seeming mad, or else perceived the futility of what they were doing and gave up, or turned to drink. Daniel was not yet certain which category he was in, but he suspected he’d find out soon enough.”
––The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 16
“Total American household debt topped out at $13.9 trillion in 2008. Coming out from under that would take decades, and economists were cautioning that, even then, today’s youth would not likely enjoy anywhere near the standard of living of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
For the first time, millions of families began to look over all the stuff they didn’t need and hadn’t even fully paid for and asked not just ‘why me?’ but ‘why?’ It was a collective existential question––a soul-searching reevaluation of the nature of modern life. ‘What was I thinking?’ became the unspoken litany of the so-called ‘consumer society.’ Some began to question the value of accumulating more and more possessions that added little or nothing to their sense of happiness and well-being.
At the same time, parents were being bombarded by dire warnings of catastrophic climate change as a result of two centuries of industrial activity that had created untold prosperity––the average upper-middle-class person’s wealth exceeding that of emperors and kings just four centuries earlier––at the expense of Earth’s ecological endowment. Was their wealth saddling their children and grandchildren with an even bigger environmental debt that might never be paid back?
Families began to realize they had been sold a bill of goods, that they had been sucked into a debilitating addiction fed by billions of dollars of corporate advertising that had left them at the doorstep of ruin and despair. It was a collective ‘ah ha’ moment when large numbers of people stopped dead in their tracks and began to reverse course. The way out was to turn the entire economic system on its head––buy less, save more, and share what one has with others. Runaway consumption would be replaced by a shareable economy.”
––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg. 233