Comodification and comformity as a weaponized trap
Becoming a vehicle for capitalistic desires of abundance and overconsumption. We’re asking, what would an underconsumption-core of love look like? What if we could take only what we required in the moment, better able to understand ourselves and our needs in the context of the present?
I used to blame advertisers for that restlessness and dissatisfaction, but I don’t think that’s right. We were already restless; we always have been. The advertisers just figured out how to nurture, tend, exacerbate, and capitalize on the pre-existing condition, that innate restlessness, promising that something new is going to set all to rights. W
... See moreKurt Armstrong • Repair and Remain
We are formed by the structures of modern society to be insatiable consumers of an increasing range of commodified things and experiences and services. There is no art in this, because the tacit assumption that we must buy into along the way is that there is no limit to what we can consume.
L. M. Sacasas • The Art of Living
In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of sel
... See moretheconvivialsociety.substack.com • Ill With Want
Human creativity and productivity are the basis of economies. Since it is assumed there are no limits to our imagination, economists believe endless growth is possible, and is the very definition of success and progress. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War provided the stimulus for global economic recovery. The transit
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