Buy Nothing Day

If I had to give one easy piece of advice that will massively improve your cybsersecurity and that of the world, it is: Buy nothing this Black Friday!

This weekend is book-ended by two orgies of consumption, "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday". These events on the technological neo-pagan calendar replace "Thanksgiving".

This makes for some interesting social anthropology. As Roy Schestowitz notes this week on Techrights, Thanksgiving is an ancient festival related to harvest-festival and other seasonal celebrations that express gratitude for our blessings. By contrast, capitalist festivals express dissatisfaction with the world by indulging in futile attempts to "fix" unhappiness by buying more stuff we don't need with money we don't have.

I take some inspiration here from rehashing snippets from two older essays originally published on the much under-rated Cheapskate's Guide blog, about e-waste and hoarding. Both are symptoms of our copious over-production of electronics.

The first essay expressed my horror at understanding the implications of Waste Electronics and Electrical goods (WEE), a topic I was honoured to share in conversation with an early activist in this field Gerry McGovern and some members of my own family who've won science awards as experts in this area.

The second recalls my distress at seeing the degradation experienced by people addicted to technology as a comfort instead of a tool. That's no small statement, as I've been too close to miserable, life-destroying addiction in many of its stinking and rotten forms. I've seen too many victims of heroin, alcohol, gambling, pornography and other traps.

As you enter a techno-hoarders house the first thing that hits you is the smell. Instead of the musty paper aroma from books and newspapers, or of rotting food and waste piled-up, with technology it is phenolic smell of circuitry. How many giant TVs, game consoles, and phones do you need? Why do people get into such catastrophic excess? The psychology of "technological poverty" or Affluenza (see Hamilton and Graff, and a book by Gerhardt 2010) is fascinating and troubling.

Hoarders were once maladjusted to late twentieth consumerist excess because, archetypally it was an old person who, having lived through world wars and rationing, insisted on preserving, adapting, repairing and creatively making-do. Every bottle and jam-jar was a useful object, to be kept 'just in case'. Today we have the opposite situation, where manufactured plastic and electronic goods flow into our lives as a river of tat too fast to be eliminated as waste. We are overwhelmed by an intolerable glut of wealth.

Extremes of individualism encourage "yours and mine" lifestyles in which enough is never enough and showing off gadgets is a respectable hobby. The technologically bewildered person cannot select what to buy next, throw out or keep, because their value judgements are disrupted. Nothing says first-world poverty quite like two gold iPhones, one in each back jean pockets. Acquisitive behaviour is rooted in fear, particularly of deprivation, or uncontrolled change, perhaps with unresolved loss behind it.

The phrase "There's an app for that" epitomises our fruitless struggle to organise and bring meaning to life through gadgets and gizmos. Fear and insecurity, and a sense that "nothing is good enough" drive the insatiable urge to buy more "solutions". The industry relies on techno-shaming and instilling a fear that you will be "left behind".

So gadgets end up making-up for deficits of self-confidence, life-purpose, meaningful identity, caring interpersonal relations, and mastery, all of which have been stripped away by empty consumerism and surveillance capitalism. They express our inability to talk to each other, a result of distracted immersion in social media and other addictive digital pursuits.

But in our hearts we surely know that most of the stuff we can buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is low quality rubbish that does more harm than good. It relies on ignorance and misinformation and is lethal for the environment. Rather than return defective devices, many people will simply bin them, or order a replacement. Much of the e-waste that goes into the ground is brand new, still boxed and sealed.

As June Saruwatari describes in her book Behind the Clutter our search for temporary meaning and purpose in the digital subtracts from meaning and purpose in our real lives. While we may have perfect online profile and hundreds of "friends" and "followers", our real lives are a clutter of unfinished business, put-off tasks, unrealistic dreams that technological and material clutter stands-in for.

What bugs me more now, and why it's time to revive this thread, is that low quality consumer electronics is also lethal to cybersecurity. So much of the goods sold are dangerously misconfigured IoT devices. People buy mountains of products that simply do not work as advertised or meet even modest expectations of digital safety and interoperability.

So do yourself and everyone a favour this weekend and celebrate Buy Nothing Day. You know in your heart that you don't need that thing you're thinking of. You could choose heroin, alcohol, wanking yourself senseless in front of your "fucking big television", or choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players…. But in a choice between "the economy" and human survival on this planet, please for the sake of fuck take a nice, free walk in the park this weekend and choose life.