social life or utilitarian existence?

Matt at the Problem Attic has a post "Social Relationships vs Utilitarian Relationships", provoked by the blog Ran Prieur, the quote (from a post on November 13) began:

In a tribe, purely utilitarian relationships are forbidden! The economic is a subset of the social...

By contrast most of us exist in a web of economic relationships, many of which are almost purely economic. So:

We love people we don't depend on, and we depend on people we don't love, or even know.

So the original post concludes:

...you can build a global hell-world out of nice people with just one trick: the purely utilitarian relationship. It's the basic chemical bond of Empire. And we can dissolve Empire, one cell at a time, by befriending the people we exchange money with, and building gift economies with our friends and families.

Matt then comments:

I'm still absorbing it, and struggling to fully understand it, but I think there's something there. I know I'd often far prefer to just hand over the money to a robot, and I've recently begun to make an effort to at least smile and make eye contact over the shop counter. The biggest problem, I think, is that it's hard to be friendly and human when neither of you wants to be there in the first place.

I think though, that subverting the empire is even simpler than this, at least in its beginnings. Part of the problem is Matt's last phrase. Now, we can't do anything about the shop assistant "wanting to be there" (except perhaps by treating them as people?) but perhaps we can about us not wanting to be there, if we don't really want to buy the thing, why are we there?

There's potentially a joy in shopping - much as I detest going shopping - when we know the shop keepers (even a little bit) and/or when the product is "interesting". I like shopping for bread at Wild Wheat because they have all sorts of fun breads, I like shopping for meat because the butcher knows me by name... I hate going to the mall, because the goods are all the same, made in sweatshops and sold by robots to lobotomised shoppers.