*This work is "design fiction" in the sense of being speculative fiction written specifically about design issues. There's not a lot of that stuff around. This piece is about as good as that can get.
THE POST-SPECTACULAR ECONOMY
Date Published
October 2011
I.
It is fashionable these days for economic historians to indentify the London riots of 2011 as the tipping point of late capitalism. Some have labelled the unrest “violent consumerism” and others “acquisitive rioting”, but the consensus is that it represented a temporary subprime economy in which Reebok trainers were as fungible as barrels of oil, except purchased not with electronic money wired from computer to computer but with bricks delivered from garden walls to plate-glass windows. (((If you don't think this is one of the aw3somest lines ever, you can stop right here because the entire piece is written in this idiom.)))
The fires, however, have attracted the most scrutiny. They were numerous, of course, and included the mighty Sony distribution centre, which taught Enfield what a million melting DVDs smell like. But of all the warehouse fires during that week’s troubles, none burned quite as brightly as the inferno that consumed the Ikea in Edmonton, now known as “the bonfire of the commodities”.
The Ikea fire has become the sine qua non of the demise of conspicuous consumption. Ikea’s very business model had been based on the fact that furniture was less expensive than air. For air, or empty space, was the one thing that had to be eradicated from its flatpack boxes, as it made the furniture too expensive to ship. Logically, then, (((okay, we're venturing into some real Stanislaw Lem territory here))) the oxygen fuelling the Edmonton fire was more valuable than the millions of pounds’ worth of stock inside. This argument was slow to dawn on the public, but once it had grasped just how devalued its beloved commodities had become, behavioural patterns started to change. The Ikea fire became the blaze that consumed consumption.
The commodity, it was universally acknowledged, had been degraded. And the design industry – the commodity’s wet nurse – took a blow in the groin of its confidence. It was not long before designers in all sorts of fields began to question whether they were not complicit in a spectral economy with the same perverse logic as Ikea’s. At the following Salone del Mobile in Milan, for example, furniture designers staged a protest over their perceived exploitation by manufacturers....
