Superfluous Luxuries: How science was put in the service of greed

…We take for granted those technologies that even 50 years ago would have been inconceivable. Our heightened state of consumerism has facilitated the mass development of technologies that would usually only serve the elite, had it not been for the abundance of cheap oil. Most people who are lucky enough to possess such products as mobile phones can barely imagine a life without them, and such products have become accessible only through the abundance and resultant low cost of oil. As we become more efficient at refining and building on technology, the research and development of which is provided by demand, its presence balloons pervasively and before long such a technology becomes another debatably essential commodity. In this country we have 99.5 TVs/100 households, 75.8 computers/100 homes and 116.6 mobile phone subscriptions/100 people. This serves as a fairly accurate reflection on the state of our consumerism, or our state of consumerism.

A massive distance has been established between those technologies which contribute positively to our lives and those which are wholly unnecessary. The former is a product of our curiosity and innate inclination to better our collective existence, the latter a product of an insatiable desire to obtain superfluous luxuries, as well as an exploitative market that will jump on anything that sells. We are conditioned to believe that certain products are the keys to happiness or essential to our day-to-day lives. In the UK our children are some of the most exposed to advertising in the world, conditioned to demand the latest in toys, gadgets and games; ingraining this insatiability at the most influential age. Objectively the size of your TV, model of your mobile or quality of computer games contributes only to short term superficial happiness. We have become obsessed with making luxuries accessible commodities, maximising efficiency and minimising any kind of physical exertion where possible (by this I mean the prevalence of electric everything, from whisks to foot scrubs).

In oil we found a resource unrivalled in its energy efficiency. This resource has severely shaped our society and dictated the course of the developing world. It is unsurprising that such means were exploited to maximise produce with the ethical dilemma of climate change going undiscovered. Nor is it surprising that corporate interests have done their best to battle and suppress such information when it had become conclusive and a threat to profits. The power and political establishment that is an inevitable product of such monopolies has safeguarded the sustained mass manufacture of these now ubiquitous technologies.

This facility of development has produced some undeniably incredible products, such as the manufacture of life saving drugs, but most are outweighed by their contribution to environmental degradation. In principle the ability to fly anywhere in the world at an amazingly cheap price is an incredible opportunity and a spectacular achievement of science, yet it is wholly unsustainable. A code of ethics is essential in regulating the potential for this sort of exploitation. Nothing is worth the earth.

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