This is not a "gotcha! checkmate idiots!" post, I'm genuinely curious what you think about this. This is the forum for asking questions right?
I have very niche interests. I like specifically shaped plushies of a specific franchise called fumos. I like data hoarding so I like being able to buy a 16TB hard drive and just dump whatever the fuck I find on the internet on it. I like commissioning gay furry porn. I can think of many other niche things. A specific brand of cheese I like, a specific brand of shoes that don't hurt my feet, specific kinds of fashion I like to wear, etc etc etc.
I like being able to do these things despite them not really appealing to a huge majority mass of people. And I understand why I can do that in capitalism: because it's a market everyone can sell stuff in and people (theoretically) chose what to buy, instead of it being chose for them. Thus, it's viable and sometimes even optimal to find a niche to appeal to rather than to make something general and for everyone. That's why it's profitable to make fumos.
Under a planned economy, how exactly can this work, though? An overseeing body will care about an overarching goal, and therefore things that are not useful to achieve that goal will be pushed back or completely discarded. Put yourself in the lens of some top-of-the-hierarchy bureaucrat: why bother making something like fumos? It's a luxury no one truly needs. It's a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. Why bother with 16tb hard drives for personal computers? Most people don't need more than 1tb or 2tb. Better to just give those to state companies that need them for servers and such. Giving them to data hoarders is again, a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. You can just save (what you deem) important things in a central archive.
I know I am talking purely about luxuries, but these things can be severe too. Why bother finding treatments for illneses that affect only very small percentages of the population? Why bother with clothes that can fit specific body shapes that are not found in the vast majority of people without hurting them? Why make game controllers shaped for the minute proportion of people that don't have five fingers?
Actually why make games in the first place, even? Wouldn't it be counter productive? That shit can lead to addiction and workers slacking off, meaning less productivity. From the point of view of The Administration it's only a waste of time. It furthers the goal more if there's no games. Why fund them?
I understand this kind of thing sort of happened in the USSR, there being very few brands of things to pick from, all the economy being spent on the army instead of things that made people happy, etc. I'm no historian so I'm not going to dwell on it specifically too much though.
I don't want to live in a world where everything is only made if it fits The One General Purpose. I guess the reply to this would be "fine, some things can be independent", but what is allowed to be independent and what isn't? How is that decided? How can we be sure it's enough?
For the record, I don't think niche things can only exist with a profit incentive. But I do think they can't exist without an incentive at all. If the body that controls all the funding and resources has no incentive, even if people out of the kindness and passion in their hearts want to do these things, if the government says "no, that's useless", there's nothing they can do.
I also don't think the solution to this can be "well just make sure The Administrators do allow these things", systematically they have an incentive to never do it, and a system that depends on a dice roll for nice people over and over and over is not a system I'd ever trust
Anyway thanks for reading. I mean no ill harm this is an actual question. o/
[pictured: a fumo]
I have a feeling that it would be more along the lines of the patron-client model that propped up the creative economy of Renaissance-era Italian city states. The key difference being that, with basic needs met, you'll no longer have to bear the last name Medici to have the resources needed to become a patron.
On the other hand, I also think that, in light of the climate crisis, we may have to significantly scale back the commodity economy. One way I envision this playing out is a reservation system for raw material on a community basis that would enable a grassroots patron-client and gifting ecosystem.
[pls note I have no sources to back these theories up. They're a hodge-podge of stuff I've come across over the years]
My theory for commodities under global warming is reject planned obsolescence, embrace planned endurance. Focus on making everything absurdly tough, user servicable, and repairable. Sure, you might not get a new cell phone for 83 years, but your cell phone is designed to last, with some replacement parts, indefinitely.
That is one part of the equation, sure. Buy It For Life should be a cornerstone of transition economies, at least. However, I feel like future policymakers will have to be more radical and find ways to shelve commodification as a mindset altogether. This includes the concept of "shopping" as a leisure activity, but also other things such as consuming entertainment at the volumes we do today, and reduction in the role of consumption in courtships. I'm not even sure if such a shift is possible, and would possibly cause widespread resentment if it were to be implemented at scale.
We weren't always like this. If it can be done it can be undone. It's hard to overstate how hard all the marketing and credit card companies work to keep people buying shit. If you controlled the advertising you could turn it around, tell people that what they really want are things that and durable and well made.