The Future is More Stuff

Let me tell you about my smartphone.

Not the one I have now - the one I had in 2015.

It took decent photos, browsed the web reasonably well, and let me text my friends. When it eventually died, I replaced it with a newer model that... took slightly better photos, browsed the web a bit faster, and let me text my friends.

The improvement was real but marginal. The genuine quality-of-life upgrade was minimal. It's the same pattern, repeating with almost every technological "advancement" of the past decade.

We were promised Utopia. We got 15 different food delivery apps. And the ability to have an AI read and write our emails for us.

This isn't a rant against technology.

Lord knows, I've written enough of those lately.

No, it's a consideration of what we've been doing with our innovative capacity, and whether we're allocating our collective "genius" effectively.

Because when I look around at our vaunted technological progress, I can't help but notice that we're drowning in slightly better stuff while the rudiments of human flourishing remain stagnant or deteriorate and decay.

There's progress here, but it's not science fiction.

It's barely even science.

The Innovation Treadmill

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, the average work week would be about 15 hours. Technological advancement would free us from toil, creating a society of abundance where creativity and the "proverbial" pursuit of happiness could be our primary occupation. How laughable that seems now. Instead, we've created a world where work colonizes every aspect of life, where productivity tools "empower" (spew) us to work at all hours, and where tech innovation primarily serves to create new needs rather than satisfy existing ones.

We now work longer hours than we did in the 1980s, despite massive gains in productivity and efficiency. Why?

New technology creates efficiency, which theoretically should reduce work. Instead, capitalism absorbs that efficiency into increased production and consumption, creating new jobs centered around making, marketing, selling, and servicing more stuff.

Take streaming. Netflix began as a simple alternative to Blockbuster. Now we have Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Peacock, Paramount+, and countless others. Each requires a subscription, each fragments content across platforms, each demands our attention and money.

Did we need more streaming services?

No.

They exist because companies need new profit centers, new and ever more sell-able "Stuff" - not because they meaningfully improve our lives.

Marginally Better, Fundamentally Unnecessary

Discussions about "innovation" follow a predictable pattern: new technology X will solve problem Y, revolutionizing sector Z. But when we zoom out to see what actually changes in our lives, the pattern looks suspiciously like: new technology X creates slightly shinier version of existing product Y, which you now need to replace every year instead of every 2 years.

A friend of mine bought a "smart" refrigerator. It has a touchscreen that displays recipes, can be controlled via a smartphone app, and (allegedly) tracks food freshness. It cost $4,800. After two years, the manufacturer stopped updating the software. Now half the features don't work, the touchscreen occasionally reboots itself mid-defrost, and the compressor makes an ominous clicking sound.

Meanwhile, my in-laws' boring "dumb" refrigerator continues functioning perfectly after 10+ years of service.

A 2023 model car has 17 sensors, 4 cameras, automated parking assistance, lane-keeping technology, and a dashboard that would make a 2010 SpaceX engineer whistle with appreciation. Do these features meaningfully improve transportation? Not really. The core problem - getting from point A to point B safely and efficiently - remains unchanged. Instead, these innovations primarily address secondary problems created by cars themselves - like parking assist for vehicles that have grown too large for reasonable urban use, or distracted driving alerts for people staring at the car's own touchscreen interface.

If an alien anthropologist studied our innovation ecosystem, they might conclude that our civilization's primary goal is to manufacture and consume ourselves out of existence.

Going by revealed rather than stated preferences, I'm not convinced they'd be wrong.

The Consumption Treadmill

Our economy has become a treadmill of consumption.

Work more to buy more stuff, which wears out or becomes obsolete quicker than ever before, necessitating more work to buy more stuff.

Planned obsolescence - the intentional design of products to fail or become outdated - has become standard practice. Your phone slows down after two years. Your printer mysteriously stops working. Your television becomes incompatible with new streaming protocols. All by design.

The average American now consumes twice as many material goods as 50 years ago. And studies show fuck-all corresponding increase in happiness or life satisfaction. In fact, many metrics of wellbeing - from mental health to social connection - show decline during a period of unprecedented material abundance.

Vance Packard summed it up back in 1960:

“We are being urged to buy more of the things we do not need, with money we do not have, to impress people we do not like.”

You read that right.

1960.

65 years ago, and it's only grown worse.

We're surrounded by more things but experience less joy. Consumption has been un-tethered from genuine human needs. Marketing doesn't just sell products - it manufactures desires, creates artificial scarcity, and constructs identities around brands. We're not buying things because they improve our lives; we're buying them because we've been convinced that our worth depends on ownership.

And the cycle accelerates. Fast fashion pushes clothes through stores at breakneck speed. Electronics become outdated before their boxes are fully unpacked. Apps constantly update, requiring newer hardware. The pace grows ever more dizzying, the waste, mountainous.

The Environmental Catastrophe of Stuff

The production of consumer goods accounts for about 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Each smartphone contains dozens of rare minerals mined under horrific conditions. The average American generates about 4.5 pounds of trash daily - much of it perfectly functional items discarded to make room for newer versions.

E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream globally, with less than 20% recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or is shipped to developing countries, where toxic materials leach into soil and water.

Our oceans contain more microplastics than fish by weight. Much of this comes from packaging and synthetic materials used in consumer goods. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans 1.6 million square kilometers. And still, the production lines run, churning out more stuff destined to become waste.

How can we reconcile our desire for the newest gadget with the environmental catastrophe each upgrade represents?

Do we simply pretend not to see the connection?

Innovation for Whom?

And who benefits from this particular flavor of innovation?

When innovation focuses on creating marginally better consumer goods rather than solving fundamental problems, it primarily serves two groups: corporations seeking profit and wealthy consumers whose basic needs are already met.

Look at where technological investment flows. Apps for food delivery in wealthy neighborhoods receive millions in venture capital funding, while innovations in sustainable agriculture for food-insecure regions struggle for support. Smart home devices flood the market while affordable housing technologies remain underfunded.

To quote Alan Ginsberg,

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”

The madness might as well be venture capital.

Research and development follow money, not need. The problems of the wealthy - how to get slightly better entertainment, slightly more convenient services, slightly more exclusive products - receive disproportionate attention because solving them is profitable.

The needs of the poor and the suffering - affordable healthcare, clean water, sustainable housing, accessible transportation - remain unaddressed because confronting entrenched power structures and prioritizing human well-being over profit is taboo.

This mis-allocation of innovative capacity isn't an accident. It's the predictable outcome of allowing market forces alone to direct technological development.

When profit drives innovation, we get more profitable stuff, not solutions.

The Illusion of Progress

Our collective fixation on stuff-as-progress has concrete consequences. It diverts resources from public goods toward private consumption. It accelerates environmental degradation. It entrenches inequality by focusing innovation on the needs of those who can pay.

The economist Thorstein Veblen noted over a century ago that much consumption serves primarily to signal status rather than meet needs.

“Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure...In order to avoid stultification he must conform to the accepted code of reputability. He must consume wealth conspicuously.”

How many new products exist solely to create new status hierarchies? Each promises to transform your life through data collection and connectivity. Each delivers marginal utility at best. Each creates new vulnerabilities (hacking, planned obsolescence, subscription dependence).

Cryptocurrency is a clear example, become clearer in the past 18 months. Despite massive investment and endless hype, its primary real-world application remains speculation - gambling with digital tokens named after slurs and enriching corrupt politicians. The promised revolution in finance has mostly materialized as new ways for the already-wealthy to become wealthier.

Trapped in the Paradigm

The most frustrating aspect of this situation is how difficult it is to escape individually. You can refuse to upgrade your phone, but eventually security updates stop, apps become incompatible, and planned obsolescence forces your hand. You can avoid fast fashion, but finding durable alternatives requires time and money many don't have. You can buy second-hand, but as fast fashion products disintegrate, so does the pipeline of resell-able products.

You're still stuck.

The system is self-reinforcing. Companies invest in making products obsolete because it drives sales. Investors reward companies that grow rapidly, not those that make durable products. Marketing creates artificial needs because satisfying real ones isn't profitable enough. Politicians promote consumption because economic growth metrics depend on it.

So, the cycle continues. More stuff. Slightly better stuff. More marketing to convince us we need the slightly better stuff. More debt to buy the slightly better stuff. More work to pay off the debt. More environmental damage to produce the stuff. More waste when we discard it for the next slightly better iteration.

This, right here, is why labor-saving devices haven't saved labor, why communication technologies haven't created more connection, why abundance hasn't given us a 4 day work week. The gains get captured by the same system that produces the stuff, channeled back into making more stuff rather than improving our mutual - our shared - well-being.

The Dead End of Consumer Innovation

The tragedy is in the opportunity cost. Every engineer designing a slightly better juicer with smartphone connectivity is not designing better public transportation. Every marketing dollar spent convincing people they need new sneakers is not spent educating about climate change. Every factory producing incremental gadgets is not producing renewable energy infrastructure.

And when genuine innovations do emerge, they get absorbed into the same paradigm; solar panels sold as luxury add-ons for suburban homes instead of tools for collective energy resilience. AI used to optimize ad targeting. Electric vehicles marketed as status symbols (with an upgrade cycle) while public transit systems crumble. Even mindfulness becomes a subscription app, data-mined and gamified. The system metabolizes everything to sustain the churn—always more products, more data, more demand. Innovation isn’t stifled; it’s redirected, diluted, and repackaged until it serves the market, not the moment.

We keep coming to the same, infernal dead end - an innovation ecosystem that produces more and marginally "better" stuff while almost every other aspect of our existence as a species worsens.

It's the result of specific choices about how we organize our economy, what we incentivize, what we value. But those choices are buried under layers of marketing, masked by the temporary dopamine hit of acquiring new stuff, obscured by endless hype about how the next generation of products will finally deliver us to the promised land.

The future is more stuff.

And it's more of the same: slightly better products that fail to address our deeper needs, slightly shinier objects, slightly more sophisticated marketing that keeps us trapped in cycles of work and consumption - acquiring, discarding, and replacing in a Groundhog Day of hyper-consumerism.

Always mistaking new for better and accumulation for progress.