the post consumerist society

I have been reading some fairly heavy books on urbanism, which touch on modern society and the modern economy. They talk about the Ford-ist economy of mass production, and how on the ground this was followed by the consumer economy. That is, if you go round a modern western city, they are no longer based around heavy industry or indeed manufacturing things. The reek of the local brewery, tannery or linoleum works are no longer a feature of British cities.

The modern city seems to be built around satisfying the needs of a consumer society, a society that is much more about providing services and consuming goods, than it is about making old fashioned widgets that could the be distributed unchanged across the entire world.

However, on thinking about it, I think that there is now a stage beyond a society and economy based on consumer goods, to a society and economy based on consumer experience. I was watching the Made in Chelsea Come Dine with Me special, in fairness there was not a lot else on. Although the rich Chelsea residents were clearly very rich, they actually lived in quite spartan houses. Basically the houses we saw seemed to have been conventional traditional city terraced houses, where all the interior walls had been ripped out to create rooms for entertaining than stretched across the breadth and length of the entire floor of the flat. The rooms were however still fairly spartan, the basics for entertaining were all there, dining tables, chairs, large sofas, generic artwork and photos that was tasteful in an unremarkable way, but not much else.

One woman, was it Toff, or Binky, served champagne from blue china cups, all her champagne flutes had been broken at a previous party. Another, or was it the same, had guests smashing lobsters with hammers on plates.

For entertainment one person had some can-can dancers, supposedly flown in form the Moulin Rouge, while another had some elderly man in a cod Napoleonic costume demonstrating how to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre. They seemed to open a lot of bottles of champagne.

While these people were clearly very rich, their houses were relatively small, they seemed to have relatively few possessions, unless they rented mountains of storage which seemed unlikely, but they were spending a lot of money on their lifestyle. Even a low key dinner party was vastly expensive.

These people may not be exactly typical, but I think that they are an extreme example of where Western society is at at the moment. Many people are living in a post scarcity society. There is no point in buying any more physical goods, our houses are full, we don’t have the time to read ,or watch, or wear, or whatever, what we do have.

What we do want, is to subcontract out the elements of our lives that we cannot be bothered with. So we will willingly pay people to cook for us, or make coffee for us, or entertain us, or clean for us, or style our kitchens, or invest our money.

The modern economy is increasingly based on a Disney style attempt to attract and amuse, while we become disengaged tourists in our own lives.

Why the Usual Suspects annoys me, and the author's implicit contract with their audience

I have never really cared for the ending of The Usual Suspects, although I know that a lot of folk do like it. For me it undermined what went before, and I felt rather cheated and annoyed as a result. 

I suppose that the audience is making an investment in any work of linear narrative work of art that they are participating in. If you sit down to watch a film or play or read a book, then you are forced to follow the linear narrative, and even if it is enjoyable enough going, then you do feel that you are making a certain sacrifice. That there is a certain implicit contract, that you expect things to resolve themselves in the expected manner, or in a satisfyingly novel manner. That is why not many people will embark on reading a book that they know to be unfinished, for example the Mystery of Edwin Drood, and no one would expect to publish a half written book. 

There are certain writerly conventions, for example

with a Philip K Dick book with various nested narratives, you might expect this nesting to continue. In a more conventional piece of romantic fiction then you might not;

by and large something will stick to the genre it started as, there are relatively few popular exceptions, such as Dusk Till Dawn;

the level of descriptive detail will generally be sustained throughout, though some modernist works will mention major events almost in passing, the end of The Magic Mountain, or Proust do this;

you are expected to read the entire work from beginning to end, though some authors deliberately insert random text to force you to skim, for example Douglas Coupland;

improbable aspects are introduced at the start of the work, rather than the end; 

The reader not only invests time, they also invest belief in the characters and situations, so while there might be some scope to play with the ‘reality’ of what is being relayed, too much undermining of the credibility of the story will just annoy the reader, unless there was never really any reality in the first place. With certain authors you know that you are in slippery territory when you start, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, George Perec, some science fiction. While the author might be clever inserting themselves as a character, or lyrics from popular songs, or jokey names for characters, or even parallels to historical events, for the reader these can strain the credibility of the piece and undermine it. The reader wants to be entertained, but they want to be laughing at the joke, rather than being the butt of the joke. For me, this also means avoiding any overt use of imagery, so no obvious allusions to Shakespearian plots, or classic literature, instead plausibility should be the benchmark of what is being described. 

In terms of plausibility there is either a sort of psychological plausibility, that is how you feel the world is, or a physical plausibility, that is how you see that the world is. So Kafka might be psychologically plausible, while lacking physical plausibility.