Now more than ever, customers look for sustainability when shopping, despite the increase of damaging industries such as fast fashion, which are overproducing and polluting. This is because of the many benefits that sustainable shopping offers, including the lack of slave labour, fewer pollutants and of course, the use of organic and renewable materials.
Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began:
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I know what Zweig meant. In the days when I traveled a great deal, often to supposedly remote places, my ambition was not to reach somewhere no human foot had trodden, but where Coca-Cola or Nescafé was not on sale. This was no easy matter, and I hear from time to time that even the peak of Mount Everest is now littered.
Zweig attributed the extinction of national and cultural differences in Europe to the rapid Americanization of the continent after the First World War: Perhaps Midwesternization, at least as far as aesthetics were concerned, would have been a better term for it. The domination of American fashions, in clothes, music, literature, architecture, was complete, according to Zweig. Europe has become a cultural colony of the United States, and it welcomed its own subjugation, insofar as such colonization brought material comfort and required meager intellectual effort of citizens.
“It is tempting to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.”
American or not, mass amusements now prevailed over more refined aristocratic or upper-middle-class ones so dear to Zweig. Football (soccer, not the American variety) became the measure of all things. Zweig’s theory was that the American civilization that conduced to material comfort and prosperity was so boring that it provoked, by reaction, sensation-seeking:
It is tempting, then, to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But as with so many things, it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.
When I see young people en masse, I think that they are all the same: They dress the same, their tastes are the same, their interests are the same, etc. And yet, when I speak to them individually, I find that there is the same irreducible individuality to each person. Human beings by their very nature are privileged, or condemned, to be unique.
We see the end-of-the-telescope phenomenon in Shakespeare. When he depicts the lower orders of society as a collective, he depicts them most unflatteringly; they are stupid, unthinking, brutish, and fickle. But when he depicts them as individuals, he has the utmost sympathy for them…
At the end of his article, Zweig tells all his readers who feel as he does that they cannot defeat modern trends, and therefore the best thing for them to do is to retire into a kind of inner immigration, cultivating their own interests quietly without stridently or uselessly condemning what in fact cannot be changed.
this is an insane way to talk about a predominantly singleplayer/co-op game, to be clear
Microtransactions and subscription based games have completely ruined video game analytics and given journalists even more brain rot than before
yeah
[Image caption for original post: article headline reading “Elden Ring Loses Almost 90% Of Its Concurrent Players On Steam”, with a subtitle reading “Elden Ring launched to a great start and has been going strong for a long time, but losing players over time is inevitable, it seems.”
For the-most-wonderfulest-thing’s addition: tags reading “Not everything is a forever game; the best games are often contained experiences; experiences that end and you can walk away from satisfied; the infinite-profit bullshit is antithetical to games as art and it really gets me angry.” End caption.]
This same willful ignorance of companies is also prevalent in consumers: unless ethical information is available at the point of purchase, it “feels better” to remain ignorant rather than seeking out the truth.
‘Brands that fail to serve the greater good could lose customer loyalty’
‘We are facing an uphill battle on the trauma inflicted upon us all: lives lost, devastation of healthcare systems all across the world, coping as best they can with what they have. The overnight loss of income and ability to support your family. The enormous sense of loss at not being able to hug a loved one. Trauma like this pervades our subconscious for generations.
This is why I believe that March 2020 marks the end of consumerism as we’ve come to know it. We won’t forget the new practices that helped us through the crisis. “E pluribus unum” (Out of many, one) may be our country’s motto, but if these last few weeks have taught us anything it’s that it just takes one to protect the many. Today we become aware through the pervasive spread of this virus just how strong our individual actions can be. That staying home is an effort in saving lives. Once we emerge from this, think about transferring that notion to buying power. Imagine the power of individual action, and the strength it gives every single dollar spent.
What does this mean for brands? It means that they just got a new competitor from a tertiary category: community. How brands choose to use that information is up to them, but my recommendation is that they embrace and react to what consumers will be asking themselves: Why am I spending this dollar? Who am I spending it with? And, what greater good will it serve? It is my belief that only then will any loyalty be gained in this new dawn of consumerism. ‘
