From The Manufacture of Needs"...It is impossible to detail the rest of the miraculous manufactory of needs of the high-tech society, so vast and complex has it become. Suffice it to note that among its essentials are waste and throw-away consumerism (fifty-two tons of garbage per person in an average American lifetime); planned and built-in obsolescence and shoddy production; unnecessary packaging and product differentiation; consumer credit (and debt), discount rates, and tax incentives; malls and shopping centres (33,000 in the United States by 1994, more than the number of high schools), development of new products (at the rate of $80 billion a year in the United States) and then the production of them (at the rate of 17,571 new entries in 1993, going up around 10 per cent a year). Put them all together they spell "consumers" as in "consumer society", which is what the West is acknowledged to be. --Kirkpatrick Sale |
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