The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
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“Murketing”
Though specialization and comparative advantage play a huge role in our consumer cluelessness, our ignorance about the real story of our belongings comes mainly from the systems of misinformation we call commercial culture. Advertisers and marketers offer information about products, but they systematically screen consumers from information about their social and environmental impacts. They seduce us with stories about sexiness and sociability, cool and control, power and possibility, but they don’t tell stories that don’t sell—stories of extraction, production, and distribution. We see the dorm refrigerator, but not mountaintop removal mining; the laptop computer, but not the mountains of electronic waste in China. Instead of telling the whole truth, marketers often sell the half-truth (and half is a generous estimate), decontextualizing products from their real histories and recontextualizing them in fantasy worlds where costs are invisible and benefits are immediate. Thanks to such “murketing,” we routinely make our consumer choices in ignorance of their actual effects and our own responsibility.22
Murketing: 1) Promoting consumption by converting human hopes into commercial fantasies, half-truths, and lies; 2) The process of making complexity and complicity invisible.
It seems perfectly natural that companies promote the positive attributes of their products and conceal the negative implications, but if we don’t know the whole truth about the goods, we can’t make good decisions. It’s hard to do real cost-benefit analysis when the benefits are touted in ads, and the costs are hidden from sight. In theory, the free market operates on the premise that rational people make informed decisions about consumption, so you would think that business executives, who are typically the most vocal proponents of free-market economies, would tell us everything we need to know. But in reality, advertisers operate on the belief, obviously true, that emotional promises can influence good people to make uninformed decisions about their actual consumption. In such a system of irresponsible consumption, it’s virtually impossible for individuals to be responsible consumers, or to live sustainably. Until we change the system so that we routinely learn how our commodities and clothes are made, we’ ll be covering up our environmental and social shame with fig leafs and other fashions.23
The Really Good Life
When we furnish our rooms or fill our closets, we say “I want that,” but we also tell manufacturers “make more of that”—setting in motion a whole process of extraction, production, distribution, marketing, and sales. In the process, we tell each other that this level of consumption is normal, natural, and good. We buy into a system of commercial capitalism, a story of nature converted to commodity, converted eventually to garbage. Each of our decisions, therefore, is a case study in ethics, a determination about the nature of “the good life.” As we peruse the stuff available to us, we’re making judgments about which goods are good for us and why. We don’t think we’re engaged in ethical reflection, but we are deciding what we value, and how we will embody our values in the material world. Our rooms and our belongings send messages about identity and community, but they also express our ethical sensibilities, whether we like it or not.24
The problem, it seems, is that we apply ethical norms almost exclusively in our face-to-face and intentional interactions. We don’t feel responsible for what we don’t see and don’t intend. In a system of invisible complexity, we don’t usually consider our inevitable complicity in this system of material goods. Consequently, we seldom think of our everyday purchases in terms of value—except, of course, when they’re cheap enough to be a “good value.” But style itself is a value, and the ability to keep ethics out of aesthetic judgments is also a value. The question for consumers—which is all of us—is how we can take responsibility for the systems that provide our belongings. When Chinese workers are poisoned in the process of recycling our computers, what is the moral implication for us? The answer might be as simple as paying attention to our things, but saying that it’s simple doesn’t make it easy.
Getting Over Stuff
Many students find the full story of their stuff to be depressing. Indeed, when we know about the implications of our consumption, shopping trips can start to feel like guilt trips. But why should we feel guilty for doing precisely what society expects us to do? Over the course of the twentieth century, American institutions—corporations, advertisers, retailers, mass media, and government agencies—worked extremely hard to shape a “morality of spending” that taught individuals how to work and spend for their own good, but also for the good of the economy, which now depends on consumer spending for two-thirds of its activity. In a consumer culture, consumption is what perfectly normal people do. And when normal people don’t shop, as in times of recession, the economy suffers.25
Another typical response to learning the full story of our material goods is anger. We’re mad about acting in ways that contradict our values. We feel trapped living in a system that expects us to be complacent while our consumption compromises the planet’s life-systems. We’re also angry that no one—not parents, not schools, not churches—has bothered to tell us how our habits harm our habitats. We’re furious because it’s so easy to be ignorant, and so hard—systematically hard—to be informed. Ultimately, we’re mad at ourselves for being tricked into habits we hate and love at the same time.26
Some students have responded by cleaning and greening their rooms. Such creative individuals are choosing to buck the trend of upscaling college dorm rooms by downscaling their lives and living spaces. Downscaling is a kind of right-sizing, bringing environmentalism out of the closet and into the dorm room by getting our possessions to measure up to our deepest values. These students are starting to think twice about buying or bringing excess furniture, electronic devices, and clothing to school. When they truly need something new, they look to conscientious companies like IKEA or to Energy Star appliances and electronics. They use the Web to access secondary markets like Craigslist and Freecycle, or visit secondhand stores, extending the useful life of the embodied energy in used couches, chairs, computers, and TVs. Embracing a kind of voluntary simplicity, they make themselves at home both in their rooms and in the biosphere. More importantly, in the process, they change the character of “cool,” teaching both friends and marketers a different way to think about, buy, and sell stuff. Fortyone percent of students pay attention to social messages in advertising, and two-thirds like green business practices and fair labor standards—so it’s easy to see how they can begin to change a commercial culture that makes it hard to be good.27
Some students simply make do with less. When they learn that the most efficient dorm refrigerator has one-tenth the space of a standard-size refrigerator but uses three-fourths of the electricity, they decide that keeping their beer or bottled water cold no longer seems that cool. They practice dematerializing, looking for ways to find fulfillment without the material mess that often accompanies consumer goods. This consumer resistance involves defiance of commercial and peer pressures to consume, defiance that can be hard to sustain without a support system of like-minded friends. At some schools, students accomplish this by going public with their concerns. While many student newspapers still sponsor contests to identify the coolest dorm rooms—following the lifestyle sections of mainstream newspapers and shows like MTV’s Cribs—a few student newspapers are sponsoring contests to identify the “greenest” rooms and apartments, further transforming the social construction of cool on campus. Because 64 percent of college students consider word of mouth important in their purchasing decisions, creating communities of creative consumption makes a world of difference—and a difference for the world.
Many such students embrace the philosophy that less can be more fun. Owning less stuff often gives us more time because we don’t have to work so much to pay for so