Modern Consumerism and Buyer's Choice

With the introduction of the 'Boycott Sopa' app, information instantly available to consumers is set to change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/12/boycott-sopa-app-informed-consumer-citizen?INTCMP=SRCH

Knowledge is power. And for consumers that power comes from where they choose to spend their money.

If you want to update Marxism you might say that, as well as using workers as the means of production, consumers are used to convert produce into money. Workers control the means of production and consumers control the profit, so a boycott is a strike further along the chain.

Our culture still tends to see workers as possessions of employers, but that view is changing as more and more people start thinking about ‘work/life balance’. Even the term infers that your work no longer defines you (cf. Fight Club “You are not your job” and such reactionary institutions as HM Queen and the quiz show Fifteen to One that categorise people entirely on the basis of name and occupation).

On the surface consumers are celebrated for their independence, but companies use all manner of tricks to maintain ‘customer loyalty’. In reality ‘loyalty’ is mostly inertia. Evidence from the fossil record and from evolutionary psychology suggests humans have flourished because we excel at adapting to change, but it doesn’t follow that we crave it. We cope by being very good at re-establishing stability once it’s been lost. Marketing and sales people play on our instincts to manoeuvre us onto plateaus they create for us - farmed salmon in sea-cages thinking ours is the whole ocean to swim in.
By becoming aware of the nets we make them disappear. We must overcome our fear of the ocean and head out for the deep water of freedom.

Because...

On a Facebook discussion thread I was asked to justify why it's ok to laugh at Bill Hicks' call for anyone in marketing or advertising to kill themselves (see link - NSFW)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

I declined to do so at the time, partly because the person I found myself arguing with wasn't looking for an explanation, he was looking for a victory. And partly because he asked me if it was ok to call for people in marketing and advertising to kill themselves then what next? Would we do the same for Jews?
Inwardly invoking Godwin's Law , I didn't engage with him. An hour later on my walk home along the seafront an answer occurred to me and I stopped to write it down. What follows is as it came to me.


Because...

Because there are two gods in my world: Truth and Beauty, and either one is diminished by the absence of the other.

Because walking home along the shore at the end of my working day listening to a well-written song, watching a gull soar on the breeze, I can start to cry at the inexpressible wonder of it all.

Because I loathe the culture of aspiration and the cycle of economic disaster and recovery it perpetuates. The embedded false inadequacies it inculcates, the endless procession of need-thrill-remorse-need-thrill-remorse instilled in the hearts of the naïve to line the pockets of the insincere.

Because it is abhorrent to me that some spend their days convincing the adequate they are not so, covering the truth with lies, using conjuror’s tricks to convince people to part with their money – money that, while earned by time and effort, its only value to the banks and corporations is pieced together from promises and greed and fear – to spend on anything; anything that will give them hope. A hope that must be made to die quickly or it will quench the insatiable need to buy things and fortunes will no longer be made so easily.

Because the market thrives on shattered dreams and misery and the promise of better that is only made good long enough to create another hopeless, cardboard aspiration. And because the world is made worse with every selfish lie, every dark deception, every failing hope, every moment of despair that profits the deceivers.