Kyla sent me a blog post that does a wonderful job of criticizing Buy Nothing Day. Like many second-wave liberal beliefs, Buy Nothing Day confuses anti-oppression rhetoric with cool aesthetics:

You disapprove of Black Friday because you believe your consumption preferences are superior to the preferences of those people. You believe that materialism is inauthentic and morally inferior. You believe that the pleasure from consumption is the wrong sort of pleasure to have.

Society is structured such that it is impossible not to compare your standard of living with those of other people (real or fictional). You can’t just get a better house on sale, so people try to make their lives more enjoyable with tangible consumer goods. Deals on goods can make a big difference for lower-income people, so don’t trivialize their interest.

Rather than saying “I did my part by not buying stuff on sale (even though I can afford to buy gifts at regular price)”, work toward restructuring society so that people are not pressured into measuring their standard of living. Give them the carrot of free paths to happiness rather than the stick of consumer gilt. At the very least, go after the advertisers who encourage desire in the first place and the retailers who create false scarcity rather than the people who are human enough to be affected by these tactics.

As The Rebel Sell discusses, protest has become (or always was?) a consumption pattern. In particular, boycotting and other abstinences are indistinguishable from positional goods. I receive social status when I don’t do certain things.

One of the most popular contemporary consumption patterns is to live a sustainable lifestyle. From recycling to gardening, these activities are obviously fashionable. The problem is that a few fashion-forward individuals are not enough to save the planet. In such a serious collective action problem, it is not enough to tell people that destroying the environment isn’t cool.

Most of the destruction is being done by corporations, which are not designed to follow individual fashion (although I gotta say, Starbucks is rocking those knee-high boots). People need to stop focusing identity-forming positional consumption, which separates people, and get together to change the system.

Even worse, environmentalists are against some of the very collective actions that have the most potential to save everything! I would happily campaign for intense urbanification and nuclear power, to name two.

Getting people to stop consuming stuff and start working together could require a complete overhaul of civil society, which is at least as daunting as reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels.