Stuff!

“Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Victor Lebow (Retailing analyst) in Journal of Retailing, quoted in Durning, How Much is Enough? (1992)

I just found out about this amazing web-site: The Story of Stuff. It is similarly motivating to WorldChanging, but I think somehow more practical and inviting. The center of the web-site is an animated video with a somewhat friendly host bordering on preachy but still entertaining enough to be watchable. The two major problems I can see is that she is preaching to the converted and that the video, which will be the most dessiminated part of the web-site, focuses heavily on the negative aspects of over-consumption, leaving only the possible individual resolutions to the last minute (of 20 total). the response to over-consumption is not asceticism, but it may be hard to get people to understand that at the onset and initially people are turned off.