the trouble with ephemeralization
by Vinay Gupta • May 4, 2008 • Science • 2 Comments
http://www.alternet.org/story/84190/ – interesting piece about somebody’s observations on Ikea and how it affected her family business, although she still buys it.
Bucky called this ephemeralization – stuff gets cheaper and lighter and less complex. Really surprising to see how it is playing out.
The Wikipedia article and the story about the Ikea bed seem to be treating ephemeralization in an equivocal way.
Fuller’s concept referred to superior design–more efficient use of materials, better performance, etc.
The description of Ikea goods in the article, on the other hand, is just the opposite: flimsy, inferior goods designed to be used and thrown away.
Hm. Some of these Ikea things use 10% of the wood of the equivalent option – honeycomb shelves, for example.
And really excellent ephemeral design would make the situation even more extreme – slowly the world would fill up with shelves and chairs which lasted forever, were very cheap, and came from a big factory that just plunked them out. I’m all for efficient manufacturing and high quality design, but there are going to be implications for things like the future of the “job.”
Here’s one model: each job, of whatever kind, requires a certain amount of raw materials – there are underlying physical goods required for the processes, like medicines for a doctor, or the goods the clients work with for an accountant. My feeling is that the number of “real jobs” is actually limited by raw materials pricing – that if we had 3 or 4 billion “real jobs” we’d need 38 planets to sustain us.
We may already be in a situation where we can’t make more “jobs” because each one causes the price of raw materials to rise, making some other job uneconomic to do, leading to a need for labor which is limited by raw materials, and expanded (to some degree) by ephemeralization.
And this is key: I think the real problem with conventional development plans, which envisage everybody slowly or rapidly becoming as rich as Europe and then America is that there just isn’t enough raw materials to support it.
Ephemerialization solves one half of that problem – makes the raw materials go further. But I’m fairly sure we haven’t see the last of mass production, so we might wind up with one really big, really efficient plastic bucket factory which does the entire global run…
You see what I’m saying here: the real economic situation around raw materials is a key, and much neglected, economic pivot point that ephemeralization directly impacts.
It’s like energy density per unit of GDP – basically the amount of energy required to make each dollar
http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1004985
but for *everything*