This week's strip: "Pickypocket"

Just in time for Black Friday!

I’d never heard of Buy Nothing Day ‘til now, reading an old punk-anarchist friend’s online argument that it’s “ill-conceived, privileged, and useless.” He’s got a point – and I’d add “undersold”, no pun intended, given it’s been around for 17 years and still makes barely a ripple annually.

Still, there’s something to it. For ten of those years at least, we’ve been buying instead of building, with increasingly little to show for it. We aren’t a manufacturing economy anymore, but pretty soon we won’t be a consumer economy anymore, either. With our vast land and resources we’re capable, somehow, of the next big thing, but nobody knows what it is.

posted by Joan at 12:25 AM ·