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The Diderot Effect


dimreepr

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10 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

consumption isn't need

I didn't say it is. You seem to have answered your own question. We can now debate the term need. Or we can talk about how good marketing strategies are and how they trained your mind and that of many others to have the feeling that the hole inside and the feeling of unhappiness or incompleteness can disappear if only you would get your hands on this new see-through toaster that lets you see exactly at what stage of development your toast is.

 

Edited by Silvestru
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If you're talking about the effect, by definition it focuses on stuff that's not needed, so your OP is asked and answered.

If you're talking about the desire for new tools, I don't think we'll ever tire of it. We can, however, debate what makes a good tool, and what is merely marketing manipulation. Is that new smartphone an organizing time-saver, or is it a time-sucking diversion? Is a "fully-loaded" automobile a better value than one without all the bells and whistles? Or should we all take buses?

If you're talking about the stuff we actually consume/use up, we have our own affluence to blame. The better off people are, the more new stuff they want to try, the more they want to taste, the more they want to have. We tend to abuse this, which has the add-on effect of making more people affluent, so the cycle continues. 

Can you solve this problem without destroying many economies? If you stop making so much stuff, who benefits first? Who feels the impact first?

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21 hours ago, Phi for All said:

Can you solve this problem without destroying many economies?

I don't know without trying.

21 hours ago, Phi for All said:

If you stop making so much stuff, who benefits first?

 our children?

21 hours ago, Phi for All said:

Who feels the impact first?

We all do, if we're lucky.

Edited by dimreepr
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  • 1 month later...

"The appetite grows with eating."..

 

Sell of iPhones, high-end smartphones, top-notch computers, is example of it. (Some) users want to have the best one on the market, even though they don't need them at all, or worser they can't afford them.. I could understand it from point-of-view programmer (who must check if the all his/her games and applications run flawlessly on newly released machine). But somebody who can't afford them?! They are pretending to be reacher than they really are..

 

Edited by Sensei
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