> so much of our built society [..] is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible.
Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.
Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.