What we often find in consumer capitalism is this endless expansion of tools, articles, infrastructure, vehicles, and services of convenience that remains virtually unchecked.
Virtually unchecked in that much of productive activity is constantly ballooning up to its limits - limits both economic and material - as it bends towards the twin motivational impulses of capitalist and consumer: of the capitalist desire to constantly expand by strip-mining deeper and deeper the valleys of consumerist desire, and of the consumerist desire to pursue allowed desires in every direction, even as they decay and weaken over time and repeated exercise.
This expansionary impulse is partially attributable to an inherent lie in market exchanges, which on the surface assume a sort of tit-for-tat moral logic: you give me this, I give you that, and we are square. The lie resides in the exchange itself: the desire for this object of exchange is often artificially created through ad propaganda and exaggerations, a soft form of psychological warfare, and that is besides the fact that the value of the object itself includes a surplus value that is skimmed off of labor, and at the same time, skimmed off of the consumer, as many modern goods rarely offer the functionality or the lifespan that an informal consumerist social contract may entail.
Besides material and economic limits, this expansion process finds itself subject to two major inflection points of social acceptability, points which of course are not mutually exclusive: the point of absurdity, and the point of redundancy.
These inflection points would pose a bit more than superficial constraints if the resulting desire for greater simplicity and ruggedness was not also eagerly offered satisfaction by capital, but alas.
The point of absurdity is straightforward enough: convenience objects become so exaggerated and comedic that they become objects of ridicule, and their extreme functions of convenience eclipse individual sovereignty, as opposed to complimenting it, a problem that occasionally shows up in the service industry too.
The point of redundancy marks a point at which nested convenience begins to get in the way of its self and causes more work, by attempting to do the work of the individual taking advantage of it. A great example of this - and this originally inspired this particular diatribe - is the automatic window button on a car. I absolutely can't stand these things. It was one thing to introduce power windows, which also introduced another mechanism that could break down, because it was easy enough to crank the damn windows with your hand. But then they had to introduce an automatic button, which depressed past a certain point, causes the window to completely roll down. Of course it was too difficult to hold your finger on a button for a couple of seconds to roll the window up or down. And the auto button reliably introduces more work, as you can never quite depress it softly enough while driving, and the whole window comes down, which is unintended, so one has to fight the button to get the window to the right height.
But to avoid the risk of sounding like I'm rambling and whining about some privileged first-world problem (perhaps I'm too late), I'll just state that I digress.
Moving on, this relentless pursuit of convenience entails the removal of all sharp points and regions of friction, the erasure of unpleasantries, which though provides for a seamless and unsurprisingly pleasant experience, only results in a dashing away of said experience at the first contact of discomfort, through the extreme contrast of the unpleasant event to a fleeting, illusory state which is supposed to be devoid of all discomfort, which coincidentally or not, results in a desperate dependence on the providers of the comfort state.
And so a tension forms, with power exercised to maintain this comfort state at all costs, and discomfort is to be violently discarded wherever possible, which more often than not results in the heaping of such displeasures on individuals unable to exercise the power to remove them.
This unsustainable practice is only temporarily sustainable by displacing and concealing the many costs that come with adding complexity and using up more energy, as demonstrated in this superb essay. This implies a linear passage of use-able energy to useless (or even damaging) waste, which, on a finite planet, is apparent enough to the average observer - without engaging in reams of complex math-work - that the ratio of energy to waste will eventually progress to unfavorable proportions.
