Eco-friendly products that succeed in the marketplace "get it":
"Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. [..] However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive.
The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering. Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume."
So, scolding is a type of manipulation that doesn't work, let's instead use this one, which does?.. I don't even oppose their goals, but I still find this kind of anti-Enlightenment realpolitik inherently repulsive. (Cf.: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-o....)
I feel you. Whenever this topic comes up I am somewhat torn. On the one hand just pointing out facts should clearly suffice everyone to behave properly on the other hand it clearly doesn’t.
Where I often land is, that the dichotomy between scolding and persuasion might simply be a false one. The Viridians, if I may call them that, also seem to think that we can only do one or the other, that we have to decide. It is however not necessarily inconsistent to both scold and try to persuade people, especially for organizations or movements.
In our personal relations we are either angry at someone and might scold them or we are more sympathetic and might try to persuade, both behaviors are mutually exclusive as they are grounded in different emotions. However, a societal movement is not bound by personal emotions like that and can, maybe should employ both strategies and probably more.
As an individual it can also be fine to "scold" more in one case and persuade more in another, whatever seems more authentic and fits the situation and the personal background and emotions. There might simply be no need to decide on one strategy.
"Manipulation" is a pretty broad and loaded term. If I put a lot of effort into making a beautiful product(compared to an ugly product with the same exact feature set), because I know it will increase the sales of it - am I manipulating my potential buyers?
I'm perfectly serious, it's literally the foundational text on the subject and we still have that text for good reason.
Here's the first paragraph:
> Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.
> I'm perfectly serious, it's literally the foundational text on the subject and we still have that text for good reason.
So we know what mistakes of the past to avoid?
Before taking Aristotle seriously, remember that Aristotle believed that women have fewer teeth than men and that objects fall toward the ground at a constant speed. He's certainly worth understanding due to his influence on western civilization, but that doesn't mean you should believe anything he says. His ideas predate a lot of our modern understanding of logic and therefore don't follow it. If you're interested in history, have at it, but if you're trying to figure out what to believe today, Aristotle can safely be ignored.
The fact that modern philosophy teaches Aristotle (and many other philosophers whose ideas are obviously wrong and outdated) as if we should believe what they believe, is why I generally am comfortable dismissing most academia around philosophy as worthless. There's plenty of valuable philosophy out there, but the people with good philosophical ideas are generally practicing experts in other fields. Darwin, MLK, or Mr. Rogers are better philosophers than any of the philosophers typically presented as such. Philosophers present as philosophers because they can't or won't deal with the limitations of coming up with useful ideas that stand up to scrutiny.
The bit that you quoted basically takes a long time to say, "People use rhetoric intuitively but you can study, learn, and practice rhetoric to get better at it." At least that's not obviously false, but it's not particularly insightful, and it's certainly not a reason we should value rhetoric. Most people at some point in their lives pick their nose, some better than others, and it's certainly a skill that can be developed, but that's certainly not a defense of nose picking.
> So, scolding is a type of manipulation that doesn't work, let's instead use this one, which does?..
Sure. If it was a for-profit product they would arrive at the exact same conclusion for the purposes of marketing. Any serious pro-environment protestor that wants Americans to care about their movement has to market it effectively. Your movement has to be a product, something that people are afraid of missing out on lest they be a square.
It sounds horrible, yes. But this is the status quo for all environmentally harmful marketing so it also becomes the status quo for protest. I'd love to live in a country where conscious protest is considered normal, but America isn't that.
> I still find this kind of anti-Enlightenment realpolitik inherently repulsive.
It's post-enlightenment. Individual righteousness means nothing when the most important "cause" the average American can be made to care about is what the new iPhone looks like.
It's pretty difficult for me to see this as manipulation, because the alternative is what, making products that society doesn't want?
To me, "manipulation" usually implies some sort of dishonesty or omission of relevant facts, and I'm not seeing that here. This is roughly "the customer is always right" as it applies to the design of green products.
If like me you’re someone with no prior idea of what this guy was talking about, the first 1/3rd it going to be hard to get through.
However the latter 2/3rd talking about how to approach what items to remove or retain in your life is pretty solid and worth a browse.
In fact the following is pretty much what I’ve been doing this past month:
>You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
>Beautiful things.
>Emotionally important things.
>Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
>Everything else. "Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."
>You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Nothing wrong with organizing your stuff or getting rid of low quality items, but in the era of inflation, offshoring of production, and the cheapening/enshittification of goods, assertions like this:
> 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.
need reevaluated. Scissors of equivalent quality to the ones you bought in the 90's for $10 will set your grandkids back $200, if they can even find any.
It seems like for this to pay off, we need to imagine a rather specific transaction: good scissors are hard to find for theoretical grandkids, so they ask if you have any scissors and you give them your scissors. Maybe, but there are other scenarios where your grandkids don’t live nearby and buy their own scissors at a store without asking you, and later your junk goes carted off to the landfill after you die. So that bet might not pay off, because the transaction didn’t happen.
If scissors turn out to be valuable in the future, maybe you could sell them, but probably to a stranger. It’s not obviously a good investment?
Currently, most people don’t bother to try to buy or sell used scissors. They buy new scissors at a store. It’s pretty easy to end up with scissors scattered throughout the house, so having a hook where you put all the scissors is a first step to figuring out how many you can get rid of. Or at least it avoids buying new scissors because you can’t find them.
I think you seriously misunderstood what you quoted. He's not saying you should maintain your items, he's saying time spent maintaining items is wasted time (with caveats that you didn't quote).
"Scissors of equivalent quality to the ones you bought in the 90's for $10" isn't the goal here. The goal is that you don't have items that require maintenance unless they fit into the categories mentioned, and IF you judge an item to be in one of the categories, they should require minimal maintenance.
I have three pairs of scissors for different purposes (hair, kitchen, medical) and all of them are under $12 on Amazon (well, the hair scissors are some no-brand from a pharmacy, but similar-looking ones on Amazon are $6-$8). All of them work well for their intended purpose--maybe there's some minor improvement that could be made, but it's not significant. The hair and medical scissors will probably outlive me given how infrequently I use them. The kitchen shears might need replacement at some point (I think they could rust in the joints if I'm careless with leaving them in water) but they've lasted me over a decade and if I buy 2 or 3 more pairs in my lifetime that's not exactly a tragedy. Outside of putting them back where they belong when not in use, I will not maintain these scissors--if they so much as require sharpening, I won't do it, because the cost (both monetary AND environmental) of sharpening is greater than the cost of replacing them.
Are any of these scissors equivalent in quality to $10 scissors from the 90s? I don't know, but I don't particularly care.
Good scissors seem to obviously fit into the "Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function" category, so I'm not sure what to do with your specific example.
I can't easily come up with examples of items which don't fit the taxonomy that my beneficiaries would nonetheless appreciate receiving in my will, and I think "if I don't want it my grandkids definitely won't" is a pretty good rule of thumb here.
Any time I read about how a mass market "should" do this or that for the environment, I am reminded of this Viridian manifesto:
https://www.viridiandesign.org/manifesto.html
Eco-friendly products that succeed in the marketplace "get it":
"Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. [..] However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive. The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering. Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume."
So, scolding is a type of manipulation that doesn't work, let's instead use this one, which does?.. I don't even oppose their goals, but I still find this kind of anti-Enlightenment realpolitik inherently repulsive. (Cf.: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-o....)
I feel you. Whenever this topic comes up I am somewhat torn. On the one hand just pointing out facts should clearly suffice everyone to behave properly on the other hand it clearly doesn’t.
Where I often land is, that the dichotomy between scolding and persuasion might simply be a false one. The Viridians, if I may call them that, also seem to think that we can only do one or the other, that we have to decide. It is however not necessarily inconsistent to both scold and try to persuade people, especially for organizations or movements.
In our personal relations we are either angry at someone and might scold them or we are more sympathetic and might try to persuade, both behaviors are mutually exclusive as they are grounded in different emotions. However, a societal movement is not bound by personal emotions like that and can, maybe should employ both strategies and probably more.
As an individual it can also be fine to "scold" more in one case and persuade more in another, whatever seems more authentic and fits the situation and the personal background and emotions. There might simply be no need to decide on one strategy.
"Manipulation" is a pretty broad and loaded term. If I put a lot of effort into making a beautiful product(compared to an ugly product with the same exact feature set), because I know it will increase the sales of it - am I manipulating my potential buyers?
Before dismissing the value of rhetoric, I recommend reading it: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html
I'm perfectly serious, it's literally the foundational text on the subject and we still have that text for good reason.
Here's the first paragraph:
> Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.
> I'm perfectly serious, it's literally the foundational text on the subject and we still have that text for good reason.
So we know what mistakes of the past to avoid?
Before taking Aristotle seriously, remember that Aristotle believed that women have fewer teeth than men and that objects fall toward the ground at a constant speed. He's certainly worth understanding due to his influence on western civilization, but that doesn't mean you should believe anything he says. His ideas predate a lot of our modern understanding of logic and therefore don't follow it. If you're interested in history, have at it, but if you're trying to figure out what to believe today, Aristotle can safely be ignored.
The fact that modern philosophy teaches Aristotle (and many other philosophers whose ideas are obviously wrong and outdated) as if we should believe what they believe, is why I generally am comfortable dismissing most academia around philosophy as worthless. There's plenty of valuable philosophy out there, but the people with good philosophical ideas are generally practicing experts in other fields. Darwin, MLK, or Mr. Rogers are better philosophers than any of the philosophers typically presented as such. Philosophers present as philosophers because they can't or won't deal with the limitations of coming up with useful ideas that stand up to scrutiny.
The bit that you quoted basically takes a long time to say, "People use rhetoric intuitively but you can study, learn, and practice rhetoric to get better at it." At least that's not obviously false, but it's not particularly insightful, and it's certainly not a reason we should value rhetoric. Most people at some point in their lives pick their nose, some better than others, and it's certainly a skill that can be developed, but that's certainly not a defense of nose picking.
> So, scolding is a type of manipulation that doesn't work, let's instead use this one, which does?..
Sure. If it was a for-profit product they would arrive at the exact same conclusion for the purposes of marketing. Any serious pro-environment protestor that wants Americans to care about their movement has to market it effectively. Your movement has to be a product, something that people are afraid of missing out on lest they be a square.
It sounds horrible, yes. But this is the status quo for all environmentally harmful marketing so it also becomes the status quo for protest. I'd love to live in a country where conscious protest is considered normal, but America isn't that.
> I still find this kind of anti-Enlightenment realpolitik inherently repulsive.
It's post-enlightenment. Individual righteousness means nothing when the most important "cause" the average American can be made to care about is what the new iPhone looks like.
It's pretty difficult for me to see this as manipulation, because the alternative is what, making products that society doesn't want?
To me, "manipulation" usually implies some sort of dishonesty or omission of relevant facts, and I'm not seeing that here. This is roughly "the customer is always right" as it applies to the design of green products.
If like me you’re someone with no prior idea of what this guy was talking about, the first 1/3rd it going to be hard to get through.
However the latter 2/3rd talking about how to approach what items to remove or retain in your life is pretty solid and worth a browse.
In fact the following is pretty much what I’ve been doing this past month:
>You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
>Beautiful things.
>Emotionally important things.
>Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
>Everything else. "Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."
>You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Nothing wrong with organizing your stuff or getting rid of low quality items, but in the era of inflation, offshoring of production, and the cheapening/enshittification of goods, assertions like this:
> 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.
need reevaluated. Scissors of equivalent quality to the ones you bought in the 90's for $10 will set your grandkids back $200, if they can even find any.
It seems like for this to pay off, we need to imagine a rather specific transaction: good scissors are hard to find for theoretical grandkids, so they ask if you have any scissors and you give them your scissors. Maybe, but there are other scenarios where your grandkids don’t live nearby and buy their own scissors at a store without asking you, and later your junk goes carted off to the landfill after you die. So that bet might not pay off, because the transaction didn’t happen.
If scissors turn out to be valuable in the future, maybe you could sell them, but probably to a stranger. It’s not obviously a good investment?
Currently, most people don’t bother to try to buy or sell used scissors. They buy new scissors at a store. It’s pretty easy to end up with scissors scattered throughout the house, so having a hook where you put all the scissors is a first step to figuring out how many you can get rid of. Or at least it avoids buying new scissors because you can’t find them.
I think you seriously misunderstood what you quoted. He's not saying you should maintain your items, he's saying time spent maintaining items is wasted time (with caveats that you didn't quote).
"Scissors of equivalent quality to the ones you bought in the 90's for $10" isn't the goal here. The goal is that you don't have items that require maintenance unless they fit into the categories mentioned, and IF you judge an item to be in one of the categories, they should require minimal maintenance.
I have three pairs of scissors for different purposes (hair, kitchen, medical) and all of them are under $12 on Amazon (well, the hair scissors are some no-brand from a pharmacy, but similar-looking ones on Amazon are $6-$8). All of them work well for their intended purpose--maybe there's some minor improvement that could be made, but it's not significant. The hair and medical scissors will probably outlive me given how infrequently I use them. The kitchen shears might need replacement at some point (I think they could rust in the joints if I'm careless with leaving them in water) but they've lasted me over a decade and if I buy 2 or 3 more pairs in my lifetime that's not exactly a tragedy. Outside of putting them back where they belong when not in use, I will not maintain these scissors--if they so much as require sharpening, I won't do it, because the cost (both monetary AND environmental) of sharpening is greater than the cost of replacing them.
Are any of these scissors equivalent in quality to $10 scissors from the 90s? I don't know, but I don't particularly care.
Good scissors seem to obviously fit into the "Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function" category, so I'm not sure what to do with your specific example.
I can't easily come up with examples of items which don't fit the taxonomy that my beneficiaries would nonetheless appreciate receiving in my will, and I think "if I don't want it my grandkids definitely won't" is a pretty good rule of thumb here.
Related. Others?
The Last Viridian Note (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33674735 - Nov 2022 (5 comments)
Bruce Sterling: The Last Viridian Note - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=383591 - Dec 2008 (1 comment)
As the credit's left to the end: this was written by Bruce Sterling.
The Viridian Design Movement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viridian_design_movement
Should have "[2008]" in the title, probably. If someone with powers could edit that in, I'd appreciate it.