Onerous consumption: The alternative hedonism of off-grid domestic water use
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the contemporary, industrialized, urban world practices of domestic water usage typically transcend the physical boundaries of the home as indoor plumbing connects with municipal sewer lines and water mains. These infrastructural connections sever the sites of individual water consumption from the sites of its collection, storage, purification, and distribution. But what happens when individual homeowners become self-sufficient for gathering, conserving, and recycling water? Drawing from ethnographic research conducted amidst off-grid homeowners this paper examines how practices of domestic water conservation and usage unfold when individuals become self-sufficient for water. We find that off-grid homeowners engage in what we call “onerous consumption”—a type of alternatively hedonistic consumption characterized by burdensome involvement in the gathering, conserving, channeling, utilization, and disposal of resources. We argue that “onerous consumption” results in a profound awareness of resource utilization and consequently leads to greater resource conservation. We reflect on the value of the concept of onerous consumption for research and theorizing on sustainable and ethical consumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".