Stuffocation: Why We've Had Enough of Stuff and Need Experience More Than Ever by James Wallman

Author:James Wallman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780812997606
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-16T14:00:00+00:00

10

Facebook Changed How We Keep Up with the Joneses

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a boom time in America. Trade and industrialization produced huge wealth for millionaire families like the Astors and the Vanderbilts. To advertise their standing in high society, these families held outlandish parties—a black-tie dinner eaten on horseback, for instance. And they decorated their mansions with the sort of details you would see in Italian palazzi and French châteaux—like the Louis XVI–style sports pavilion at the Astor country estate.

At the tail end of this era, which was named the Gilded Age, a sociologist by the name of Thorstein Veblen considered the society flourishing around him, and realized how similar, in some ways, it was to primitive societies. It did not matter, Veblen realized, if you were born in the caves of France in the Neolithic era, in a pole and thatched hut in the Middle Ages, or in an elaborate mansion in the nineteenth century, you would still spend a considerable amount of your energy displaying your fitness markers to other humans. And while barbarians did this through displays of physical strength, Veblen decided, the best way to do it in modern society was through wasteful displays of spending money. In his satirical 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, he gave this practice of buying things for social status, rather than practical value, a new name: “conspicuous consumption.”

As wages rose and the cost of consumer goods like cars and radios fell in the twentieth century, conspicuous consumption became possible not only for rich families like the Astors, but for the masses as well. And just as Veblen had made fun of the leisure class, so another writer, a man named Arthur Ragland “Pop” Momand, mocked the working classes in a new comic strip in the New York World newspaper. The strip, which debuted in 1913 and ran for twenty-six years, was named Keeping Up with the Joneses.

Inspired by suburban life that Pop had seen in an outer borough of New York, Keeping Up with the Joneses starred Ma and Pa McGinnis. In one of the early stories, Ma is out shopping with Pa, whom she calls by his first name, Aloysius. We see Ma dressing him in ever more colorful clothes: pink socks, a red tie, yellow gloves, green spats, and, finally, a fuzzy hat.

“Ah!” she declares, happy at last. “Now my love we will show that Jones woman that her husband is not the only Adonis that can wear pink socks an’ a fuzzy hat! Oh! You are so noble looking Aloysius!”

In the last scene, we see Aloysius, having escaped his wife, leaning on a bar. He holds his head in one hand, as he talks half to himself and half to the barman. “Curses on them Jones’s an’ th’ pink socks!!!” he says. “Gimme another deep one Jerry!!”

Whether you join Aloysius and curse the Joneses and conspicuous consumption or not, there is no denying that it was a key element of the fuel that made materialistic culture take off.

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