The Role of Stuff and How It’s Changing

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Bruce Sterling. He’s the kind of author who can cram so many interesting ideas into a single page of prose that the experience can be exhausting if you spend too much time dwelling on them. But for me, that’s part of what makes him fun.

Back in the day, Sterling was one of a number of contributors to Whole Earth Review, later Whole Earth, one of the truly seminal publications of the last several decades. Their byline, “Access to Tools, Ideas, and Practices” was a gross understatement of the treasures of thinking one found there. I still miss it since it ceased publication years ago. One of the schools of thought that came out of this community was the Veridian Design Movement that was active near the turn of our century.  They were concerned with how we ought to consider living and our environment in the 21st Century. One of the final discourses of the Veridian Design Movement was “The Last Veridian Note” by Sterling. You can find it on the Veridian web site, http://www.viridiandesign.org/. In it, he offers some interesting observations and advice about the place of material possessions in our lives, and how to think about them:

Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

Sterling is not in favor of eliminating all material goods. Instead, he suggests that the rules we have developed to decide what we keep and what we acquire are in need of adjustment. We each need to deliberatively find a new touchstone of value for the things we have and want.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”

The whole Veridian web site is wonderfully thought-provoking. I recommend giving it a long, hard look.