have it as their primary goal and the corporations must satisfy the consumers. Nevertheless, the world would be more sustainable if the human urge to squander resources could be piped into socially beneficial efforts rather than into corporations’ bank accounts.
November + December 2008
[ 4] Griskevicius, V. et al. “Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption: When Romantic Motives Elicit Strategic Costly Signals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (2007): 85-102.
a group of psychologists recently found that “although mating motivation did not lead women to conspicuously consume, it did lead women to spend more publicly on helpful causes [ 4].”)
Whenever resources are squandered, there must be some “sink” into which those excess resources are poured. For example, when a species of birds tends to have long colorful tails, their resources are being poured into the populations of snakes and other predators that are better able to catch and eat the birds because of their highly visible tails. When people drive BMWs and other luxury cars, the resources are being poured into the corporations that produced them. (When people drive luxury SUVs, the resources used to buy the gas needed to move so much metal around ultimately end up poured into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and other pollutants.) Snakes and corporations serve the same role in this system; they are the keepers of the unfakeability needed to make a trait costly.
Corporations, like snakes, are not evil. They are simply tasked with a single purpose— maximizing shareholder value. Unless there is a profound shift in the corporate law in the U.S. and many other capitalist countries, we can reasonably expect that environmental sustainability will never be the primary goal of corporations. At best, it will be an indirect goal, when consumers
Many behavioral patterns that people exhibit are being enhanced by online tools. We are able to communicate over great distances, play games with millions of people, and spawn fast-spreading grassroots political movements. There are also a variety of environmental efforts that seek to harness the strengths of information technology, using social networking systems, blogs, mobile devices, and new design techniques. However, there are few if any online systems that seek to achieve environmental ends by explicitly encouraging people’s evolved desire to squander resources. If people are going to engage in conspicuous consumption, they may as well do it in a way that is sustainable. We need online social tools that can help enable pro-environmental conspicuous consumption.
An awareness of the characteristics of a good medium for conspicuous consumption—one that is obvious, accurate, and unfakeable—can help inform the design of these online tools. The Web is very good at making projects obvious—the popularity of some websites grows so rapidly that it becomes problematic to scale fast enough. “Accurate” and “unfakeable,” though, are a bit trickier. Accuracy is difficult because what constitutes “value” may vary across communities; monetary expenditures, time, skills, or other factors may be the key to social status within a given group. Making the display of conspicuous consumption unfakeable requires the community to settle on an inherently hard-to-duplicate medium, to agree on some standard through which to verify authenticity, and/or to enact ways of punishing fakers. Reputation-management systems may be able to help with both accuracy and unfakeability to some degree, as can connections to existing institutions with credibility and longevity.
This article is a call for readers of this magazine to design and build systems that enable communities to engage in conspicuous consumption in ways that recycle resources into the same
References:
Archives