If the withering of demand produces the withering of production, what produces the withering of demand? Efficiency of production leads to the exhaustion of consumption. Over time all production simply conquers demand. Some commodities never really recover from this. Like parsnips and housing. Other commodities, like prostitutes, energy and digital media storage, we have not yet had our fill of.
Most prominent among this later category is the commodity "service". What is service? Well, genealogically it can be nothing else than the entire terrain of the infantile, when we infants were being absolutely served, and when we were not being served, we were absolutely alone, and absolutely helpless. This at any rate is the dominant experience dynamic of the terrorized, anxiously-attached, neglected modern infant.
So a technology that deflates service can only be therapy, and not just a cure for bougy neurotics, but one that makes them better parents....
1 comment:
"Bougy"?? I said-a-what-the-huh? Peritropichkaya, what I wonder are the truly essential commodities? The ones not subject to wild, pathological over-inflation, the ones for which demand will never run out? Shirelyovicheva, they can never be artificially deseminated to create global catastrophy. That old batty samurai Kurosawa told us that clean air and water are primary. Any others come to mind? Other than a mother's love... ahhh. (That "ahhh" was a Freudian slip called me having an orgasm)
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