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It is now a year since widespread civil unrest in major UK cities cost five lives and an estimated £1billion to police and clear up. Despite the feel-good factor surrounding the Olympics, the same tensions and divisions in British life remain and in terms of the underlying causes, little has changed. The fact remains that the riots could easily happen again. That we have not witnessed any similar disruption this summer may be one fortunate consequence of the appalling weather, which, up until last week at least, has kept people in doors and out of trouble.
News footage of one riot looks pretty much the same as any other and the images of smoke-drenched inner city locations, masked rioters fighting police, burning shops and wrecked cars would certainly have been eerily familiar to anyone old enough to remember the disturbances of 1981. But scratch beneath the surface and you'll quickly find that the troubles of last summer are very different to unrest of the past.
At their heart, the riots of the 1980s were predominantly about needs - jobs, education, opportunities, policing - the riots of 2011 were mostly about wants - TVs, sportswear, mobile phones, excitement.
Wanting things is nothing new, but today our entire economy is based on want, not need. Commerce has colonised almost every area of our lives. Whether it's something as noble as watching the Olympic beach volleyball or as prosaic as taking a leak in a public toilet, our waking hours are dominated by attempts to attract our attention and engage us. It seems impossible to undertake any activity at all without a word from our sponsor, who invariably promises that they alone can satisfy a specific, unsatisfactory hole in our lifestyle.
A result of this relentless barrage of information has been to subtly changed the reason we want 'stuff': not because it satisfies a need - for things like shelter, communication, a bed, or water - but because it satisfies a want -for things like a second home in the Algarve, a Samsung Galaxy, a Tempur mattress or a bottle of Evian.
Unlike needs, wants are not permanent. Rather than providing us with satisfaction obtaining Product A simply leads us to want something else - Service B perhaps. This is because whatever choice you make means that you will suffer an inconvenience. If you decide to buy a Audi, you're missing out on a Mercedes or a BMW; if you have the ice cream, you'll be missing out on the cake.
No matter how trivial these dilemmas appear, there will be somebody willing to take advantage of the opportunity to provide a solution - why not have cake and ice cream? These in turn lead to further consequences - worries about putting on weight or an unhealthy diet - and in turn, further opportunities to provide another solution - low fat cake and ice cream.
Five years ago, a phone with a camera in it seemed like a neat idea. Today your phone has two cameras. Next time you upgrade it might be to one with a HD camera.
There is no benefit is too small and no inconvenience too minor to be packaged together as a compelling proposition. When Bill Johnson, the CEO of Heinz, announces the launch of a new product - Instant Beans on Toast - that is going to take the hassle out of making what is surely one of the world's simplest recipes and argues, without irony, that its introduction is the response to an identifiable market need, then we should begin to realise that any inconvenience at all in our lives is really too much.
This is all well and good if you've got the money to pay for everything now, but just because you haven't, it doesn't mean you want these things any less. Like the riots, this recession feels very different to those of the past. Certainly GDP is much higher than it was in the 1970s and 80s, which is in itself a good thing, but the gap between rich and poor has never been greater.
I believe that the riots were, in part at least, a consequence of keeping people in a permanently dissatisfied state and persuading them that their lives will be improved by owning something they haven't got, can't afford and almost certainly don't need. Should it come as a surprise that given the opportunity to get their hands on these consumer desirables for free, people from all backgrounds, ages and walks of life thought nothing of resorting to criminal activity in order to do so?
Morally reprehensible? Certainly. But is it just the looters who are in the wrong?
We might take some comfort from the fact that, by their nature, these items will not have kept their new owners satisfied for long. But given a similar opportunity, is it unreasonable to assume that the same behaviour will occur again?
While consumption remains society's primary aspiration it will always be a question of when and not if we will see riots taking place in the future.
Steve McKevitt is author of Everything Now published by Route Publishing, priced £8.99.
Follow Steve McKevitt on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@StevenMcKevitt
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At the same time they are being told that others are given immense rewards for achievements that are hard to fathom let alone make any moral or social sense. The net result is alienation.
If we restrict consumerism by restricting production, gods will become more expensive making recurrence of riots more likely.
If we produce more goods more cheaply and more people can buy goods. likelihood of riots recurring is reduced.
So, if we do not want riots we should consume more.
We live in a society where there is generally speaking, no respect for law. This attitude permeates our nation from top to bottom, across all classes, genders, ethnicities, religions.
If you drive down the motorway, you will see the outside lane full of drivers exceeding the speed limit. Why? Because they do not fel like obeying that law. People take drugs, because they don't feel like obeying that law. People in Swansea demonstrated recently that the only reason people obey parking restrictions is because they will get a fine if they don't. Policemen take bribes from journalists. MPs fiddle their expenses. Bankers - do I need to say more?
Higher rate taxpayers and the self employed routinely fiddle their tax - a bit.
Poor people cannot participate in most of those crimes. So they misbehave in other ways. Rioting is typically a poor person's game. It's not to do with consumerism.
The riots occurred because we are all bent.
And while I understand your comment about frivolous technology, your opinion is too sweeping and general. Not all innovation is frivolous - creativity does not have to be in your face useful, utility can express itself in subtle ways.
Lastly, while it is important not too become obsessed with 'wants', I wouldn't dismiss it as a frivolous preoccupation. A want is a very powerful basic emotion, and everyone is entitled to want nice/beautiful things, regardless of their economic situation. The communist regimes of the late 20th century ignored this important fact, and therefore failed better the lives of the very people they purported to care about.
manipulated to the point where it’s devalued. Its now marketing muzak. Consumers, able to communicate amongst themselves, are getting wise to the wiles being deployed against them. If advertising and government want to avoid the eventual outcome of this, they can meet the advance halfway. By taking the people’s side, and seeing if its still possible to win them around.
“the gap between rich and poor has never been greater.”
So what is the sponsor’s message at work here? The richer the better? You can never have enough of a good thing? Everything is not enough? Either that ethos will correct itself, or something else will correct it. Simply because it is physically unsustainable in homogenous systems.
Of course there is not as single person in this country, yes not one, who even slightly believes that the riots had anything to do with excessive immigration, and especially so since the BBC shots either blocked their faces or only presented aerial shots from high above.
As for consumerism, one has to ask are they running out or a commodity called blame? There must be a world shortage of blame when it comes to finding excuses for supporting the governmental policies of the last 4 decades, and in particular supporting the policies of the last Labour administration - not that this present lot have any intentions of changing anything of course.
People riot and become violent when they are disatisfied. It can be about consumer goods, about religion, about anything they hold for true they hold for "normal" to have or to do and they don t have.
Can there be a culture that eliminate violence and riot? No. Not until you have some level of individuality within the human specie.
This is basic behaviour of humans in society, consumer culture or not.