I started this column on a chairlift at Berkshire East, the ski resort in Charlemont. I finished it the old-fashioned way: in my office, pecking away on my old Dell computer.
I wasn't writing on the chairlift to show my ability to multi-task, using technology to make my work transportable, to seamlessly blend work and play. I was just screwing around with a new gaming device that Santa, the bastard, brought my daughter for Christmas. I couldn't figure out how to play any of the games, but my daughter showed me how to write on it. As I scribbled, she talked at length about her next techie desire: an iPhone.
The iPhone is a curious gadget, one that can easily be seen as just one in an endless procession of soon-to-be obsolete crap that'll end up in our ever-growing waste stream when something better comes along. I look at it a bit differently: the iPhone, smaller than my wallet, can do for a few hundred bucks what it used to take thousands of dollars of audio, video and computer equipment to do. To me, the technology behind the iPhone spells the likely demise of the endless procession of electronic crap: if you can hold the entirety of the virtual world in your hand, what else do you need?
As someone born in the pre-dawn of the computer age, I've been susceptible to the inexhaustible temptation of the newest technology. I've joined the masses of consumers being alternately delighted and bankrupted by gadgets that initially opened up a world of new experiences before becoming outdated and comparatively limiting.
I've had my fill of new gadgets and I don't think I'm alone. The economic collapse has many factors—a lack of regulation of financial markets, the exporting of American jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets and so forth—but it coincides with a kind of consumer exhaustion particularly afflicting baby boomers like me: a growing awareness of the heavy environmental cost of rampant consumerism and a midlife recognition that things—fancy electronics, cars as big and plush as living rooms, appliances and home furnishings so voluminous that we build bigger and bigger homes to hold it all—don't make us as happy as we'd hoped.
As much as I want the old mills throughout the Valley to come to life again, making things here rather than in China, I hope equally that our national leaders don't pursue an economic recovery that depends on the same kind of consumerism that filled our landfills, dotted our countryside with shopping malls and drove credit card-happy Americans deep into debt.
If not more stuff, what will Americans consume?
Not long ago, Northampton was the scene of a flap over a proposed hookah bar, an establishment in which people sit around and smoke flavored tobaccos from communal water pipes. Due to the city's all-out ban on smoking in public places, workplaces, bars and restaurants, the hookah bar didn't get the permits it needed to open.
While I understand the rationale for banning smoking to protect public health—in this case, the health of anyone who might have worked in the hookah bar—I regret that the restrictions have killed the opportunity for would-be hookah bar patrons to have a new experience. One hookah bar wouldn't, by itself, contribute vastly to the local economy, but it would have added a touch of diversity to the range of experiences available here.
The Valley has often seen itself as an economic and political backwater, an afterthought in the halls of power on Beacon Hill. But while we've seen our mills close and our economy stagnate, we've also had success in building a more sustainable economy, one based on a diversity of independent businesses, on local agriculture, on the preservation of land and natural resources that make the Valley a desirable place to live or visit.
The Valley is poised to play a leading role in an economy in which consumers value new experience over new stuff. The vitality of places like Northampton has been based less on its proliferation of retail businesses than its proximity to a wide range of experiences that are hard to find in other places. After all, you can buy high-tech gadgets everywhere.
