Everything is defined by consumer activity these days it seems. And never is this more exemplified than around holidays. Take this weekend for instance, nn the one hand we have Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving, where deals aplenty are offered to entice consumers into the spending frenzy that is Christmas, and on the other, Buy Nothing Day, the culture-jam event designed to break our addiction to contemporary consumer lifestyle. Both ideas bug me, although I lean more towards Buy Nothing, but that is mostly for two reasons--I have no money to spend and I don't like crowds, so it is easy for me to stay away from the shops. Less easy is the un-plug from cyberspace-turn off the lights and everything else bit that goes along with Buy Nothing Day. I have to pick up a friend from the airport and for him to make his way here via public transport is just shy of torture in my book, but perhaps that is just an excuse. Unplugging from the system is difficult, perhaps even more so in the short term, not impossible, but difficult. And the difficulty highlights just how dependent we are.
I was in the bookstore at the seminary I teach at the other day and stumbled across a book in the $1 section written about Christianity and the economic systems. The book was published in 1922, pre-Wall Street Crash, pre-Great Depression, pre-WWII, and yet the issues and questions it raised seem strangely prescient--a call to rethink how we view economics, how we practice faith and how we think about money in general. I seem to have spent much of this past year dealing with economics on some level, nearly all of it from the challenging side, and have been really shocked by the resistance to change that seems to swirl around the economic questions of our time, conventional wisdom seems to rule the day.
One of my favourite websites is Paleo-Future, here's an ad from the 1964 touting the longevity of Scheaffer pens, but there is also the conceptualizing of a 'credit card ring'--this is how we imagine the future, novel extensions of what we already have--our life, just a bit more futuristic. You can still buy a Scheafffer pen I think, but the pen has succumbed to the keyboard and the typepad. As for the credit card ring, well, maybe next year.