4
be reduced to a sack of metal buttons or the cycles of the natural world since everyone had clothing that was tailored

issue
shells or beads that you could then carry artificial light meant that work days could because tailors were the people who
easily on your person to other places. Un- be standardized. made most of the clothing. There was
Fluxion
like milk or lettuce, currency didn’t spoil, There was also a wide range of nega- no angst at not being a perfect size 8
thereby enabling people to store profit tive physical side effects of industrializa- because there was no perfect size 8 to fit
from one season to the next and it making tion, notably pollution and a wide range of into. This has startling implications when it
possible the amassing of huge wealth by workplace hazards from injuries caused by comes to body image and self-perception.
Culture
some people. machinery to illnesses caused by exposure Of course clothing is an ideal example to
So the simple substitution of currency to toxic substances. But for the purposes use because factory made clothing is liter-
for barter enabled humans to transcend of this discussion, the significant impact ally all about fitting in, but other consumer
space and time—a marvelous develop- is the way industrialization changed and items were just as powerful. Consider the
ment but one that was not without a dark was changed by abstract notions of the automobile. Nicholas Cugnot, Gottlieb
undercurrent. In abstracting the value value of labor and the ability of humans Daimler, and Karl Benz were all inventors
of goods and services, it also served to to conceptualize almost anything as a of early automobiles, but they remained
abstract labor, quantifying the work that commodity. expensive luxury items until Henry Ford
went into the making of any item. Which Before factories began mass-produc- discovered a way to make them afford-
set the scene for the next upheaval in ing, say, clothing, consider the action of able for average people. Mass production
social-economic history: the industrial acquiring a new shirt. You or the shirt meant that it was something the average
revolution. maker would have to make or obtain person could obtain and therefore a car
It’s difficult to overestimate the impact fabric. Measurements would have to be was eventually something that was par for
that industrialization has had on the world. taken, a pattern made or modified, pieces the course. If you don’t have one, you are
in abstracting the value of goods and services,
it also served to abstract labor, quantifying the work
that went into the making of any item. Which set the
scene for the next upheaval in social-economic history:
the industrial revolution.
It altered the very foundations of human cut, and the sewing done by hand. In the not up to snuff; you are not even making
society, and some would argue sparked postindustrial world, each step would the passing grade.
the massive sixth wave of extinction that is be the domain of a different worker, so Somehow, somewhere along the road
in progress. that no one worker would have either of economic development, capitalism be-
First there was the physical impact the responsibility (or satisfaction) of came consumerism. In order to maintain a
of industrialization: the factory. It meant completing an article of clothing from healthy economy, people must consume
that people had to report to a certain start to finish. The implications of this new at a steady rate, which means that con-
place at a certain time to begin work, and process for both the producer as well as sumption alone takes primacy.
that work became a measured commod- the consumer are startling. The key to consumerism lies in blurring
ity. Prior to the factory, people either Not only does factory production the line between “need” and “want.”
lived agrarian based lives that revolved mean that the people making the product Of all the alarming, fanciful, stark, and
around seasonal cycles and weather, or become part of the factory cog work, but shocking visions of the future put forward
they worked in workshops or cottage the consumer at the end of the process by writers since ancient times, perhaps
industries which, as the name implies, never knows the item as the product of the most frighteningly accurate is Aldous
were trades that could be engaged in at another individual. This also meant the Huxley’s classic “Brave New World.” In
home. The advent of electricity at roughly beginning of the need to “fit in”—literally it he captures the very essence of the
the same time as the rise of the factory in the case of clothing. Once upon a time economic machinery that drives modern
mean that workers were removed from there were no “off the rack” clothes and society. The basic tenets of consumerism
48
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