I don’t think that you can build a post-consumer society if you can't build an even partially post-consumer lifestyle.
A society is a collection of people who have a network of relationships with each other. The attributes of the people, and the nature of the relationships between the people, define the nature of the society. (The character of the society may be unpredictable - that is, the attributes of the society may be impossible to predict based on knowledge of the people and their relationships.)
A group of consumers who have a network of relationships with each other based on the logic of consumerism is a consumer society. Depending on the characteristics of the particular consumers and the particular forms of relationships, the character of the overall society could vary widely.
A collection of post-consumers in a network of relationships with each other based on any form of non-consumer logic is a post-consumer society. As ‘post-consumerism’ is less one particular thing and more an umbrella term for what it is not, this society could exhibit any number of not predictable emergent characteristics.
There are at least two key components here:
the characteristics of the individuals in the society, and
the nature of the relationships between those individuals.
The characteristics of the individuals to a large degree informs the possibilities for the nature of relationships they may have with each other. Conversely, the nature of the relationships they have with each other will inform what characteristics ‘want’ to arise or express in the individuals.
If this sounds complex, don’t worry. I’m sure what I’ve just presented is a gross simplification of the true complexity of societies. But this simple model is useful for now because it allows us to say that:
A collection of consumers who are waiting for a post-consumer society to exist before making any changes in their own lives is a consumer society filled with angsty anti-consumer wannabes (who probably despise themselves).
And also we can say:
A collection of consumers who vocally oppose the effects of consumerism yet continue to uphold and participate in relationships based on the logic of consumerism is one particular, peculiar form of consumer society.
If we want a post-consumer society, our simple model implies that we need to change the characteristics of the individuals in the society as well as the nature of the relationships between those individuals.
But, as stated above, each of these things effects the other. The individuals inform the relationships and the relationships inform the individuals.
What to do?
My answer is to stop overthinking things already and get on with making the changes that are within your control, and then FAFO from there.
It is much easier for me to begin the work of changing the characteristics of myself as an individual than it is to change the nature of my relationships with everything that I’m in relationship with (friends, family, boss, employer, local government, my church, my pets…). That’s where I can begin.
And once I begin working on the characteristics of myself, particularly as I internalize those characteristics, the changing nature of my self as an individual in a web of relationships with other people and things will exert some kind of influence on those things.
Of course, mostly the influence will be from those other things upon me. I still live in a consumer society. Holding fast in my post-consumer individual characteristics is very difficult.
This is why it’s so important to Find The Others - other individuals who have approximately similar goals as yourself, who are attempting to cultivate similar characteristics within themselves. When you form relationships with individuals like this, you can begin the work of forming non-consumer or post-consumer kinds of relationships with them. This reduces the influence of consumer logistics on your life.
It will take a long, long time for the process of early-adopter post-consumers changing their own characteristics, Finding The Others, and forming new kinds of relationships with each other and with other things, to form anything close to what might one day be called a true post-consumer society. It’s easy to get bummed out that we’re still enmeshed within the logics of consumer culture, which is why I think it’s important to embrace the transition logic of Pareto decoupling.
But I can’t think of any other way to get there. And maybe the nature of change will surprise us. Perhaps we’ll stumble upon an inflection point and get to live through one of those “years where decades pass” events. Perhaps not. Perhaps that event is far past the horizons of our lifespans. No matter.
All this is to explain why I think that the first place to start with The Flotilla is with our own lives, at the household scale. I think that trying to skip straight to the fun stuff - the Flotilla, group projects, things that impact other people - without getting our own shit together first, is actually irresponsible and risks triggering serious negative unintended consequences.
I think that a lot of the failures of previous attempts to create alternative forms of society can be explained by getting this sequence mixed up. I think if you sit in a room and think up a bunch of rules for the ideal nature of relationships between individuals, and then take a bunch of more or less off the shelf individuals (even though they may be LARPing as alt because they read a few books and took the right drugs and learned the right buzzwords) and throw them together, it’s doomed to fail. It’s doomed to fail because that’s the exact kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place: linear, mechanistic thinking, thinking that you can come up with a Plan and then arrange people like cogs in a machine and then turn the crank and watch it go.
As urgent as our predicaments are, and as strongly as we yearn for a vision of the future we can see so clearly, I think we need more the attitude of the gardener, the wildlands horticulturalist, the steward.
I think to build the society we want we need to start with ourselves.
Goals of this phase include:
to habituate post-consumer modes of living at the scale of our own households.
To deprogram ourselves from the consumer modes of thinking we were born into,
to unlearn the thought-terminating clichés of industrial consumer culture.
To build resilient, rugged, even anti-fragile systems at the scale of our own lives to reduce the amount of logistical overhead we have to do to maintain our own personal life support systems, so that we can show up in the world to deliver our gifts more fully, AND to learn in the relatively safe sandboxes of our own lives how some of these principles work.
To find and connect with other people who are on similar journeys, both a bit ahead and a bit behind us. In an ideal flow we learn something from someone a bit ahead of us, incorporate it into our own practice, and then as soon as possible turn around and teach it to someone coming along behind us.
To define "enough" for ourselves in terms of material sufficiency
To decouple our personal Quality of Life from Amount of Resources Consumed, beyond a reasonable threshold of sufficiency, in our own minds, experientially, not just academically.
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…and, I think the greatest danger with this approach is getting stuck in endless self-improvement. More on that later.