The Remote Control Organizer
The price we pay for overabundance.
I clearly remember the moment when I finally realized that I live in America. It was probably ten years after I arrived in New York with my family as a teenager. I don’t remember why, but I found myself at The Container Store, a big-box retailer for all things related to organization and storage. There, I came across a remote control organizer. It looked like a miniature magazine holder, a little wooden platform on which thin metal rods bent like very large staples created compartments that could hold remote controls for your TV, VCR (they still existed), DVD player, CD player, a cable box, and whatever other gadgets were in your home entertainment system. As I convulsed with laughter, a friend I was with looked at me perplexedly. It took me a while to regain my composure and to explain the source of the hilarity. What we were looking at, I explained, was the final destination of American overabundance, a completely unnecessary object to hold other quite unnecessary objects, and that the sheer array of remote controls in an average American house commanded someone somewhere to think up such a thing and actually produce and sell it.
My laughter was not without a degree of bitterness. Because the absurdity we were witnessing was not altogether innocent. The remote control organizer became my own private symbol of a consumer society that to me felt increasingly inhuman, and being inhuman is only a step away from being inhumane. Every few years my mind keeps coming back to that moment, as it did again this week as I was reading Jean Baudrillard’s first book, The System of Objects. Published in 1968, it had an obscure life until Baudrillard became famous for describing the Western postmodern society in his 1981 masterpiece, Simulacra and Simulation.
The book is a slog of abstractness until you get to the last part, in which Baudrillard tackles advertising, and there his insights are brilliant. He describes a society he was witnessing as one ordered by and preoccupied with acquisition of objects. Newly freed from post-WWll poverty, the West was engaged in rebuilding itself with an unprecedented level of material comfort. America, the only Western country to come out of the war rich and powerful, led the way. It was quickly exporting its cultural norms, and Western Europe was lapping them up. The central of these norms was the idea that accumulation of objects was the principal project of contemporary human life, and that one’s personality was increasingly tied up with one’s possessions. To develop this personality, Baudrillard posited, American-led capitalism created an abundance of superficial choice. The underlying technology would be limited in order to be scaled up to mass production levels, but the finishing touches would form a nearly endless array. The days of Henry Ford proclaiming that you could get a Model T in any color, as long as it was black, were over. Today, you can customize your car in a seemingly limitless way to fit your personality. That this personality is a capitalist construct has been hidden by another industry that exploded in the post-WWll West, advertising. In the immortal words of Don Draper, the Mad Men protagonist, “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
Baudrillard points out several things that I found interesting. First, that advertising is also a product and we have learned to consume it as such – see, all the people who watched the Super Bowl two weeks ago for the ads – and it is the only product that is free. Second, that advertising artificially merges the messy, incoherent, and essentially negative character of human beings with the ordered, coherent, and essentially positive order of products. Through this magical transformation the human becomes a curator of his or her life.
Furthermore, advertising demands that this curation is constant. It has to, because we have entered the era of overabundance of objects, and in order to sell them our needs and wants must be constantly manufactured along with them. By now advertising works at the second remove, to borrow a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, by shaping the canons of our behavior. The abundance of objects has conditioned us that our needs are purely material, and that the capitalist system is capable of satisfying all of them, and that our only job, at which we toil for hours every week, in the malls and on our screens, is to buy exactly the right thing.
The pernicious side of such thinking is, as explained brilliantly by the psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, and the eponymous TED Talk that is actually worth watching, is that it often leads to paralysis, but more importantly, to the fact that if you don’t buy exactly the right thing, the fault is yours.
All this work of consuming comes at a price, and the biggest one is that the constant satisfaction of our manufactured material needs and wants takes energy away from satisfying other, deeply human needs. By concentrating our attention on objects instead of people, our society has been deskilling us in dealing with other human beings. The fact that the pop philosopher Alain de Botton has something called the School of Life in order to teach people about human relationships is but one sign. After 9/11, as my beloved city reeled from pain, President Bush urged Americans to band together by going shopping and to visit Disneyland. For him the attack on American freedom was the attack on the American freedom to consume.
The thing about consumer mentality is that it is easy. Our connection with objects is easy (because they are ordered, coherent, and essentially positive), connection with people is hard (because we are messy, incoherent, and essentially negative). Objects demand nothing but your money, but people demand much more. The flip side, of course, need not be spelled out. Or maybe it does, so here it is: the rewards you reap from genuine human connections are infinitely more satisfying. Deep down we still know this because human nature is too strong, but we are at a loss as to how to form and maintain these connections. That need too has also been commoditized, by life and relationship coaches, because we have been conditioned that buying is our only power and our only purpose. What we have gained in consumer abundance, we have lost in human richness. That is why my laughter over that remote control organizer was bitter.