The Story of Stuff

If you've got 20 minutes, check out The Story of Stuff, a succinct and engaging explanation of why the U.S. (and increasingly, the world's) economy is not sustainable.

Sounds dry, I know, but with clever animation and wry humor, it really brings the message home without a droopy eye in the house.


I loved this image of government's subordination to big corporations. Did you know that 51 of the 100 largest "economies" in the world are actually multinational corporations?


Consumption is the culprit, of course. Narrator/writer Annie Leonard points out that planned obsolescence (and perceived obsolescence) are not natural laws, but were actually intentionally developed by industrial designers working for corporations in the years after World War II. Why? To feed the U.S. economy back to war-time levels.

Fashion, of course, is the poster child for planned obsolescence. There's a particularly funny sequence about the heels of shoes getting fatter and thinner every year.

Sponsored by the Tides Foundation, The Story of Stuff was created by a D.C.-based communication design firm called Free Range Studios, makers of some other web-based animations you may have seen (Grocery Store Wars, promoting the organic food industry, and The Meatrix, about factory farming and "the lie we tell ourselves about where our food comes from").

Free Range Studios' viral videos can be summed up in a simple equation:

Quality imagery + something to say = success on the Interweb