We at fearlessrevolution.com try to sort out sustainable practices from profligate ones and communicate the difference. Still, at least one aspect of online commerce still haunts me. Despite the many "healthy choices" out there on the Net, I remain a bit afraid to rely on the Web to satisfy my material needs. My worry isn’t because I feel vulnerable to stratagems calculated to command my attention, upscale my appetite, and grab my gelt.  No, what haunts me is that e-commerce is loosening longstanding social constraints to deciding to buy, period. That is, we could be making impulsive buying decisions simply because transactions are so much easier and more private than ever. After all, on the Internet, only the data-miners know you're a compulsive shopper, not your peers.

When I reported on IT trends for a research firm during the dot-com boom, I was exposed to a lot of high-tech hype and early e-commerce. After that millennial e-optimism vaporized -- along with my job -- I went home and described seven principles for living in (what seemed like then) a hyper-competitive economy that was trending into dangerous territory. I believe that my injunctions (including the one I recently offered) remain on point, but please shout out if you disagree. Here’s another of them; obvious, perhaps, but implementing it involves overcoming some subtle challenges: 

     Conserve resources by not buying what you don't need, especially online.

First, understand that it's harder to decide not to buy than what to buy. This means resisting applied psychology pandering to vague longings and being guilt-tripped for not "supporting the economy." A modicum of mindfulness can save you time and money, and preserve habitats to boot. You might even become more sociable and gain some peace of mind. The injunction implies that every time we engage with the marketplace, we take an unblinking look at our cravings and perceived needs, and consider their value to our true selves, our social relations, and the planet.

Once we decide to buy stuff, it doesn't have to be brand-new (except perhaps for food). Half the major items I've purchased over the last decade (including two computers, printers and disk drives and four automobiles) came from Craigslist, yard sales, family, neighbors, or colleagues. By recycling goods I have saved bunches of money and got to know interesting people. Some of these gray market purchases were a bit dinged and a few weren't all that useful, but at least most of them have survived their half-life and aren't in some landfill.

Before consummating a deal, I like to fondle the goods and look my counterparty in the eye. This might explain why I have never used eBay (aside from disliking its irritating founder, Meg Whitman). I worry that if I learned how easy and reliable trading on eBay usually is I might do more of it and accumulate stuff I don’t need. I should probably try to get over my reluctance, but I think on balance it serves me well.

There's a word for that: Hylephobia (fear of materialism). It's hardly a recent malady or peculiar to me. Just look at what that wise old Scot, David Hume, had to say:

"This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society. There scarce is any one, who is not actuated by it; and there is no one, who has not reason to fear from it, when it acts without any restraint, and gives way to its first and most natural movements." - "Of the Origin of Justice and Property" in his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)

So, this outspoken and courageous philosopher, who battled the Church of England and his many critics, was worried about rampant materialism, and before mass production and marketing. Was he hylephobic?

Hume wasn't opposed to personal possessions or property, but he realized that acquisitiveness needs to be short-circuited. He goes on to say in the same passage that not our will power or fellow feelings but society itself restrains our avidity for possessions, an urge he says that "is much better satisfyed by its restraint, than by its liberty, and that in preserving society, we make much greater advances in the acquiring of possessions, than in the solitary and forlorn condition, which must follow upon violence and an universal licence."

This is pretty strong stuff. Greed can be good, Hume asserts, only insofar as we have a social contract that limits it. And that is one thing we are doing in these pages and at FearLess Cottage: mediating avidity for possessions by reinforcing social norms to channel it in salutatory directions.

Here’s where my injunction’s "especially online" clause kicks in. We mostly engage in Internet commerce in solitary settings. We stare at our screens, select our goods, key in our credit card, and then edgily wait for delivery to our doorsteps. Few others bear witness to those frictionless exchanges between us and the cloud; no one is at our side or up there who might inquire "Do you really need this? Now?"

Perhaps entrepreneurs will soon provide us with bots that question our online buying decisions before allowing us to consummate them. That would be a step forward. But it would be far better for us to internalize that dialog and engage in it with our peers -- as we do here -- rather than to exist in such a "solitary and forlorn condition." 

By Geoff Dutton