We are staying at a friend's "spare" house at the moment and it is thankfully well-equipped with everything we need to survive here: vessels for cooking, a stove, water heaters for the bathrooms, and (most importantly) an internet connection.
The dishes of the house have a strange peculiarity to them. While most of them are fine, the plates quite frequently crack in half when hot food is placed on them. We've broken all but two at this point.
This got me rolling on the concept of "Commodity Thinking" and the possible misinterpretations. As a young university student, I remember Walmart coming to Canada and our initial joy in having a store for household goods (like plates) that we could actually afford on our savings from high school summer jobs. A weekend trip to Walmart was fairly common and for a reasonable price (it felt like almost *everything* was $20) you could pick up a small bit of furniture, kitchen goods, or cables for your electronics. I remember the feeling at the time that these items weren't particularly well-made, but given my financial circumstances, I didn't very much care.
As I stumbled my way through my Computer Science degree I distinctly remember making one of these (less and less frequent) Walmart visits and thinking to myself as I stuffed some pressed-fiber furniture into my car: "This isn't really anything... it's just garbage. I'm buying disposable furniture." It became increasingly apparent over the coming years of my adult life that a great deal of the middle-class Canadian lifestyle revolves around disposable things that really shouldn't be disposable: a cheap night table for a university student, a $80,000 truck for a wealthy individual entering their middle age.
I grew into a new ideal: buy quality. Things should really last. Who needs to buy more than one set of utensils over their entire lifetime? This is why people of class hand down well-made heirlooms, whether sound systems or bedframes or classic cars. Conflate quality with prestige and you have a recipe for the purchase of brands which only hint at elitism. See: "How to Be Fashionable or Consume Like Me.pdf"
At one point, I realized I was a part of a much larger movement of thinking which flowed along similar lines, looking for answers. "Consume Like Me" actually had very concrete answers, even if they were the wrong ones. The rest of the internet go tied up in arguments formulated as blog posts I remember with the titles of "The Best" (arguing for the highest-quality things) and "The Worst" (arguing for disposable or borderline-disposable things). Obviously googling for those blog posts now is not possible. I'm sure they're our there somewhere.
Anyway. All of this is intended to provide some background on the idea that Commodity Thinking is really NONE of these things.
Commodity Thinking does not pretend that a Maserati and a Honda Civic are the same car. But while working in San Mateo, our business lead drove a (leased) Maserati and our tech lead drove an (ancient) Honda Civic.
They both managed to get to the office just fine.
There is an internal examination we need to make here. Why are we buying or leasing the Maserati? If it's genuinely that much more fun to drive or fuel efficient then perhaps the cost is worth it. The point of Commodity Thinking isn't to cut every blade of grass to the same height or to pretend these differences do not exist. Commodity Thinking says "a car is a car" (though, it should be noted, a car is not a truck) but this isn't to be taken in some sort of self-righteous, absolutist sense. It's to be taken in the literal and rational sense. However, there is a big world of diminishing returns out there. A Maserati is unlikely to provide benefits corresponding to its price tag just as a TATA Nano is unlikely to provide returns which outstrip its convenience as a motorcycle with four wheels. Both cars are an inefficient glitch in the market, to some degree. If we were to lay out "cars" on a bell curve and stick the Honda Civic at the peak, it's entirely possible that folding the curve around that centre point -- so that outliers and deviants on either side met their nearest neighbour from across the way -- would mean that a TATA Nano and a Maserati were, essentially, the same car.
I should clarify here that such a ridiculous example does not serve to argue for Honda Civics as if they somehow represent an ideal in cars. "A car is a car." Examining ourselves, we can see to what extent this is true. How much gratitude do we feel simply for having access to such a mode of transportation at all? THAT'S how much we subscribe to Commodity Thinking. As odd as it may initially seem, the car itself is largely orthogonal to the discussion about cars.
Hopefully other aspects of the Hacker Ethos bend such a discussion a bit. Cars which produce zero pollution are vastly preferable to those which produce some pollution. Cars which produce zero *net* pollution would be even more preferable. And so forth. But that's not really relevant to the discussion on Commodity Thinking beyond the hat-tip toward the idea that "a car is a car but obviously not all cars are equivalent even if they really are, at their core."
I would suggest that one might examine one's own behaviours in a framework which evaluates waste to get a sense of whether one treats items as a commodity or not. Buying a cheap phone and throwing it out every year is wasteful but buying a $2000 phone is probably just as wasteful, if in completely different ways. Waste can come in terms of finances, materials, time, energy, or thoughts. We humans will continue to consume things... it's a naive (though common) fantasy that a person can get to zero consumption. But with each market engagement we can repeatedly ask ourselves: "what is it I'm really buying?"
I doubt owners of our current house knew they were purchasing plates which explode upon contact with hot food but they may have had some sense that perhaps the plates wouldn't survive many years or many owners.
As a commodity car is just a box that gets you from A to B, a commodity plate is just a smooth, reusable circle where you put your food three times a day. If the box and the circle can last a lifetime (or longer), great. If not, one hopes they'll at least survive a few decades of use.
-steven
