A Different Drummer

This whole article by Douglas Coupland in the Guardian is well worth a read, but this paragraph just jumped out at me:

I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.

Spot on. It's not just cell phones though, it's the way that so many luxury items, now mass market must-haves, move from being the domain of pretentious yuppie asshole-dom to regular everyday things - once we can all afford them.

Things like olive oil, espresso coffee, laptop computers, mobile phones and complicated gourmet/organic food were once all signs of a wanker: some asshole yuppie who wants the whole world to know how much better he is than everyone else through conspicuous consumption of unnecessary bullshit vanity items.

Now, every call centre worker and supermarket clerk has their special coffee order, laptops and mobiles are bare necessities for university students, and McDonalds sells a lemon, thyme and poppyseed muffin on its breakfast menu.

It's only a yuppie thing if we can't afford it.