Our Consumer Society

We live in a consumer society. Our lives revolve around shops, supermarkets, new experiences, new stuff, a world surrounded by image, advertising, marketing, one-day delivery, product placement, gadgets and fast fashion. We are – supposedly – shallow, obsessed with the self, narcissistic and vein, building personal castles of consumption on the foundations of what we don’t really need.

But is this true? In some sense, of course, we’ve always consumed. And while we do consume the latest frivolous fashion and want the latest pointless gadget, we also consume meaningful things – new foods and books, travel and art.

So consumerism is a broad and vague concept. From the Latin – consumere – it used to mean to use up and was limited to candles, food, drink, wood – things that you would literally consume, would disappear. But it is obvious that through the modern period and increasingly from the 1950s, something has changed. Something new has happened. A consumer revolution, maybe? Consumption expanded, across the globe, across the classes. It began to dominate our lives. At some point we transformed into a consumer society.

The consumer society is different from previous forms of consumption. We have a wider variety of goods and shops, more pervasive marketing, everything is commercialised and exchanged, and consumerism has become not just about producing new goods, but has become a cultural phenomenon.

In his classic 1993 book Land of Desire, historian William Leach says that “The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratisation of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society”.

And historian Peter Sterns defines consumerism as: “a society in which many people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display”.

So today, I want to explore our consumer world, our landscape of desire. What does consumerism mean? Is the term even useful? Is the West “shallow”? What does it do to us to be surrounded by image, advertising, and celebrity? Is consumerism making us ill, alienating us from our true selves? Is there any possibility of ethical or conscious consumption? Is there a way out?

First, we need to look at the history of how consumerism developed, what we might have lost and when and why this change happened, to really understand what our consumer society is.

Modern consumerism, as we understand it today, began to develop in the city states of Renaissance Italy in the 15th century. Trade between the Far East, Middle East, and Europe increased, merchants became wealthier, and disposable income became more common.

Artisans and shopkeepers traded in, owned, and collected increasing numbers of household wares like jars, bowls, plates, cutlery and textiles like clothes or curtains. Carvings and tapestries and art became more elaborate and more widespread.

But the new economics of consumption – the newfound wealth of merchants exploring the globe – developed alongside an already existing moral economy in Italy that questioned consumerism’s benefits and sought to moderate its excesses.

Aristotle – whose works became more widely read during the renaissance – had argued that the displaying of wealth should be done virtuously. A wealthy man, he said, to be admired, should contribute to public works and communal feasts. Brash undirected luxury was immoral. It had no social use.

For Plato, too, luxury led to laziness, corruption, and an inward drive for ever-increasing selfish desires.

The ancient Stoics also rejected the idea of becoming attached to anything material and fleeting. Identifying with and becoming attached to an external world outside of your control would only lead to frustration when those attachments were challenged, perished, or were taken away. The Ancient Greeks, for the most part, had emphasized the inner life.

The Christian church, which of course had a strong presence in Renaissance Italy, adopted the values of these Ancient Greek philosophies.

And so many in places like Florence, Venice and Milan were sceptical of this new commercial culture. The newly wealthy merchants had to ensure that their possessions were consistent with the conservative sensibilities of the time.

In 1497, one friar started a “bonfire of vanities” in the middle of Florence – board games, instruments, cosmetics, clothes and tapestries – anything that could tempt one to sin – were all burned as citizens danced around the bonfire.

Venetians passed laws trying to regulate luxury, taxing spending at weddings and prohibiting certain dress styles, and tapestries more that 1.5m in length.

As commerce thrived across Europe, other European states followed.

In England, for example, wearing purple silk and gold was restricted to royals. In London in 1574, a tailor was sent to prison for wearing a “pair of hose lined with taffety, and a shirt edged wieth silver contrary to the ordinances”.

Meanwhile in much of Asia, the Buddhist tradition, much like the stoics, rejected the idea of attachment to possessions.

It was only in the 18th century that these attitudes began to change.

As global trade increased, people began collecting new and unique candlesticks, exotic linens and textiles, spices, tankards, birdcages, porcelains, stockings, pipes, and soaps.

A taste for new foods and drinks – made cheaper and more abundant by the Atlantic slave trade – increased and consumers became addicted to coffee, tea, chocolate, and especially sugar.

Cotton from plants – again, made cheaper with slave labour – instead of animals were cheaper, took dyes better and suddenly clothes became more colourful and more varied.

All of this coincided with the development of modern marketing, advertising, and salesmanship as merchants sought new ways to promote new goods.

English pottery maker Josiah Wedgwood invented the modern salesman in the 18th century.

As historian Neil McKendrick writes, Wedgwood used “inertia-selling campaigns, product differentiation, market segmentation, detailed market research, embryonic self-service schemes, money-back-if-not-satisfied policies, free carriage, giveaway sales promotions, auctions, lotteries, catalogues… advanced credit, three-tier discount schemes, including major discounts for first orders, and almost every form of advertisement, trade cards, shop signs, letterheads, bill heads, newspaper and magazine advertisements, fashion plates and fashion magazines, solicited puffs, organized propaganda campaigns, even false attacks organized to produce the opportunity to publicize the counterattack”.

Throughout the 19th century consumerism continued entering the home. In Britain, a new trend – wallpaper – led to sales going through the roof. Art, photography, and miniature replicas of statues and ornaments became cheaper to reproduce and manufacture. Clocks and watches became more popular.

Then, glass windows were invented.

Shop windows, glass cabinets and displays created a new relationship between the consumer good and the consumer. “Perhaps more than any other medium”, the historian J.W. Lungstrum writes, “glass democratized desire even as it democratized access to goods”.

And in the 20th century, DIY, tools, commercial music, radio, cinema, and television, technology and gadgets and computers supercharged the consumer revolution. McDonalds opened its doors in 1955. Credit cards were introduced in 1958. Comic books and Hollywood, Microsoft, and Apple took over the world.

Supermarkets and shopping malls sprang up and governments invested in highways to connect them. In 1946 there were just 8 suburban shopping centres in the US; by 1960, just 14 years later, there were almost 4000.

These new cathedrals of commerce epitomised the shift in culture. Famed architect Victor Gruen designed the largest shopping mall in the world in Detroit in 1952. It had a hundred stores, private roads, a power plant, a police force, a water system, and was designed as a self-contained city. Gruen’s next project in Minnesota was even more ambitious. He designed it so that deliveries, the organising of stock, and wires and pipes were accessed from the back, hidden from view, so that everything appeared on the shelves as if by magic.

Gruen believed that these new developments could be the hearts of the new suburban communities that were springing up and that were in desperate need of a kind of spiritual communal core. Later in life he became appalled at how they turned out. He wrote that instead of providing the “need, place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market and Place, and our own Town Squares provided in the past”, they’d become “bastard developments”. He retired to Vienna, becoming a science fiction writer commenting on the environmental destruction our new suburban culture was causing.

So while consumerism developed over centuries, the post-war consumer revolution – the one we’re all a product of and living in right now – was a fundamental break from the past. Mass consumption became national, international, advertising pervaded every living room through radio and television and then the internet. Disposable income increased for many. Rock and roll, birth control, and the swinging sixties made hedonism and the enjoyment of new desires respectable. But if consumerism is so broad, so vague, so far-reaching, what, really, does a consumer society mean?

What does consumerism mean?

Ok, so we’ve looked at some history. What about the culture, the psychology, the sociology, the philosophy of consumerism?

There is clearly not one single consumerism, though. We consume everything from food to music, to essential oils to new package experiences. Is it all just hedonistic? No, clearly not. We consume books and audio books and online lectures, we consume healthy foods we don’t necessarily enjoy, we use gadgets like sports watches that we don’t necessarily get pleasure from.

But consumerism is even more complicated. It’s not just stuff. It’s a cultural activity, a subject, certain attitude towards the world. We have to remember that “going shopping” and “being a consumer” is a cultural activity that has norms – it is done in different ways depending on the person, the place, and the historical period. It’s not just the act of purchasing and consumption – it’s the perspectives, the specific activities, the marketing, the relationships that go with it.

Consumer groups, cooperatives, political parties and pressure groups and lobbies all developed through the 19th century. Consumers organised, there are book genres and discourses about shopping conscientiously, and consumer groups lobby the states for rights and consumer protections.

So apart from the obvious – an increase in global trade, the black death played a huge role, by the way: so many died that the survivors were better off financially and had more disposable income – apart from this stuff, can we identify any cultural dynamics that might help us understand consumerism today? I think there are two that provide a good route into its psychology and sociology: the production of new desires and social mimicry.

Some objects – some consumer goods, fulfil a simple natural biological need – we eat to satiate ourselves, we buy a bed to sleep on, a home to protect us from the elements. But we’re not just a needs species, we go beyond our simple needs, create new desires, new ways of being in the world.

We seem to have a desire for the new – but really understanding what that means has only developed over the past few hundred years.

We can see this shift in what desire means across the 19th century.

Sociologist Colin Campbell argues, for example, that romanticism – that hugely influential pan-European movement that emphasised feelings, sentiments, emotions, novel experiences and adventure and creativity – was an important part of the development of consumerism’s outlook.

He wrote that the consumer “withdraw(s) from reality as fast as he encounters it, ever-casting his day-dreams forward in time, attaching them to objects of desire, and then subsequently “unhooking” them from these objects as and when they are attained and experienced”.

As modernity developed and we were unshackled from the circularity of traditional life, of the same routines every day, month, and year, we began to want to collect something new: experiences.

Oscar Wilde satirised this idea of new experiences in his 1891 The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian exchanges his soul for everlasting youth so that he can live endlessly as a hedonist.

Rachel Bowlby writes that Gray “exchanges his moral self for the unbounded liberty of the new hedonist”, and there is no limit to “to the number of personalities he can adopt, to the experiences he can try”.

The modern world created adventurers, explorers, dandies, and flaneurs, moving through the world just to collate and understand the new.

Already in 1655, philosopher and scientist Robert Boyle had written that while “other creatures were content with easily attainable necessaries”, humans had “a multiplicity of desires” and “greedy appetites”.

In 1741’s Fable of the Bees, Bernard Mandeville had argued against the received wisdom of Christianity, the Ancient Greeks and the Romans that private vice and selfish individual desire were pernicious. Instead, he said, they were socially useful – they created more trade, more commerce, and in the end made everyone better off.

Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume agreed to an extent, writing that indolent luxury was still pernicious but that an “increase and consumption of all the commodities, which serve to the ornament and pleasures of life, are advantages to society”.

When Wilde was writing in the 19th century, Paris was becoming an international hotspot for new department stores, which placed a universe of exotic goods on display.

In The Ladies Paradise, Emile Zola wrote about the allure of the new stores. He called them “alters” – a miracle – a “machine” – and remarked that “mad desires were driving all the women crazy”.

Other Parisians and critics talked about the new type of person: the flaneur – the person strolling aimlessly around the Parisian arcades, taking it all in, experiencing as much as possible.

At the beginning of the 20th century, as Henry Ford popularized a new method of standardised mass production, capitalists and then advertising executives on Madison Avenue wondered how new desires could be maintained, even created from thin air.

The father of public relations and Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, wrote that, “mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained”. Business “cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable”.

Freud became central to the new advertising industry. Admen drew on his theories of sexual desire, oral gratification, and the pleasure principle to sell new brands.

The psychologist and marketer Ernest Dichter famously recommended: “don’t sell shoes – sell lovely feet!”.

The shift unfolding was that consumerism and the marketing developed with it wasn’t about needs, it was about new fantasies, new lives, becoming a new and different person. It wasn’t about the present, it was about the future.

Lehman brother’s Paul Mazur wrote, “we must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs”.

Some of these new desires, new dreams and visions were practical – the washing machine freeing up the housewife’s time, the automobile, the typewriter – and others were criticised as luxuries – sports cars and endless new fashions.

Retail analyst Victor Lebow wrote in 1955: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate”.

The landscape of desire was production and consumption, marketing, advertising and the individual.

As the philosopher Jean Baudrillard – who will come to shortly – points out in his classic The Consumer Society, heroes of production – colonisers, explorers, founders, industrialists – gave way to heroes of consumption – celebrities, gilded princes, and sports stars – notable figures that wore the latest designs and drove the flashiest cars.

But we don’t just consume alone. We don’t invent our own desires independently. Those figures – the heroes of consumption – and our social life more broadly provide models for mimicry. We’re an inherently social species.

In the old Royal Courts of Europe, adopting conspicuous styles stood one out from your competitors. Now, celebrities and models set trends, but we all like to be ahead of the pack.

In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the upper class phenomenon of buying, displaying, and wearing luxury goods to distinguish themselves from their peers.

In 1950, the economist Harvey Leibenstein adapted the idea of conspicuous consumption – he noted how not only did the wealthy adopt new styles to set themselves apart, but that the middle classes then copied them to try and display social status. He called it the bandwagon effect.

The Veblen effect – as its come to be known – describes the acquiring of consumer goods being not just about use, utility, beauty, boredom, or innovation – but about status. The value of a good is not determined by its usefulness but by the social value of displaying it.

But status is not just a surface phenomenon – being in the know is about having the right knowledge, the right know-how, knowing the direction of the wind. It’s all necessary to being accepted in the correct circles, whether that’s about class, or being a fashion designer or an inventor. Even science has fashionable trends.

As the sociologist Roberta Sassatelli writes, there is “the knowledge (gastronomic or social) that derives from having eaten out, tasted this or that dish, having used a given type of cutlery, and having managed well the phases of the meal, that is tasting, commenting on the dishes, chatting and exchanging information”.

This act of social mimicry functions in a strange way, almost as if it is an engine. Often, once the vulgar, lesser, lower classes begin to adopt a style, then it no longer distinguishes the upper classes who brought it into fashion and used it to distinguish themselves as unique, as special. And so trends keep revolving as new new trend-setters turn away from the crowd and adopt new styles.

The sociologist Georg Simmel writes that, “as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of the demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in turn differentiated them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on”.

Baudrillard argued that in the post-war consumer society not only is their conspicuous consumption but a “fantastic conspicuousness”, we’re everywhere surrounded by styles and images to imitate, new gadgets to employ, and the turnover rate for new fashions is inexorable.

Ok, so consumerism is about creating new desires and social mimicry. But, you might be wondering, what’s bad about this? Where’s the problem? I buy new camera equipment, lights, microphones, books – I have a bike that would have been impossible to manufacture only twenty years ago. All of them are desires that have been created and, well, I watch reviews and see what photographers use etc, so it is social mimicry. But I find all this stuff useful. I find the task I use them for meaningful, and I hope you do to. So again, where’s the problem?

We can categorise the problems critics have identified into two parts.

One is quite simple. Consumption per se isn’t bad, but its side-effects, its unintended consequences, and certain types of consumption, are. They are things like addiction, environmental degradation, exploitative labour practices, off-shoring, etc.

I’ll return to these issues shortly. The other problem critics have identified is more philosophical, sociological, and psychological – it’s that consumerism effects us in our very psyches – we have a modern consumer mentality, and it’s out of joint.

One touchstone for this type of critique is the economist Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society published in 1958. Galbraith argued that now the very basic needs of most Americans had been met, new demands had to be created artificially.

Growth required consumption and so it was the job of capitalists to be endlessly creating new desires to keep people running circuitously around the hamster wheel.

He argued that our post-war society was one addicted to consumption at the expense of social and political problems. In a consumer society, dominated by industry, growth is the central goal. There is, he says, an “inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation”, as people borrowed more and more on credit cards. The focus on private goods produced “private opulence and public squalor” as people became more hedonistic and neglected their communities, civic society, and environments. He described people driving their “mauve and cerise, airconditioned, power-steered, and power-braked automobile” through badly paved streets to have picnic of “exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream”.

Because we became so focused on consumption, other values became marginalised.

We can understand this as a critique in the tradition of what’s often been called alienation. Karl Marx had argued that capitalism alienates us from our true being as species. We fetishize commodities because of their monetary exchange value, which covers up the social processes that went into the manufacture of the product. We see the world through the lens of a cash nexus which covers up what’s really going on under the surface.

Arguments about and definitions of alienation have taken many forms, but its most accessible popular understanding is that we buy stuff we don’t need, sold by adverts we don’t want to see, that make us desirous of things we need to desire, in an addictive society that distorts and discounts our true needs.

In his book Empire of Things, historian Frank Trentmann argues that we used to see ourselves as part of the world – more holistically – and that the entire world and our experience of it was thought of more organically, more immediately, and even more sacredly.

He says though that this was “torn asunder” by René Descartes, who, in the 1640s, argued that the mind was an entity separate from the body and the material world. A century and a half later, Immanuel Kant is said to have completed “humankind’s victory over things”.

What this means is that many philosophers of the Enlightenment argued that we could stand apart from the world, rationalise it, calculate it logically, see things objectively.

This shift contributed to our mistaken belief that we could simply control the world around us, that we could manipulate and collect and examine objects and, as a consequence, consumer goods.

Of course, we know this is a mistake. Things have an effect on us, the world around us has an effect on us, no matter how much we try to be the owner of our stuff, our stuff, in many ways, become the owners of us – they determine what we think, how we perceive ourselves, what we do. They can turn us into addicts, they can frustrate us, they can lead us down routes that aren’t good for us without us even knowing it. That’s the alienation argument. We’re a sick society.

Marx called religion an opiate of the masses. It kept people docile, easily controlled, under the thumb of their rulers, distracted from the real problems around them. Now, many have argued, consumerism has become the opiate of the masses.

The English novelist J.B. Priestly bemoaned in the middle of the 20th century that Britain was becoming like “Southern California, with its TV and film studios, automobile way of life (you can eat and drink, watch films, make love, without ever getting out of your car), its flavourless cosmopolitanism .and bogus religions”.

Or take this quote from Frankmann’s Empire of Things describing a cinema goer of the 1920s: “One young British woman, a shorthand typist who went to the pictures four times a week, found that seeing “marvellous places” like New York and California on the screen left her “miserable and unhappy sitting in my stuffy little office all day with nobody to talk to but myself (which I don’t) and to go home to a house that should have been knocked down five years ago”.

These quotes suggest that what we’re surrounded by is somehow wrong. That we’re subjected to and forced to absorb and embody great images of desires that we don’t have but others – mysterious others, often out of reach, often manipulated and polished to sell more adverts – do. The images aren’t real, they’re not representative of reality, they have no depth.

The postmodern consumer society is associated with the MTV viewer, channel hopping, flipping through images with an easily accessible remote, listening to disjointed sounds and flashing images without really feeling anything.

The viewer, in sociologist Mike Featherstone’s words, “merely enjoys the multiphrenic intensities and sensations of the surface of the images”.

It’s all connected. Because flipping through MTV works through the same logic as fast-fashion and gadgets with built-in obsolescence: its all fleeting, nothing lasts, quality diminishes – it’s designed so that you consume it quickly and move on to the next thing.

This is a common critique of a postmodern culture that some say underpins our consumer culture. If you look at art, literature, and film they jump around stylistically.

Fast-fashion trends come and go, styles in fashion and film are just stuck together in pastiche, the world moves so fast that nothing can be properly understood, analysed, critiqued – there is, in the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s words, a “depthlessness” to our world.

It’s driven by production and consumption but psychologises us by infecting our culture too.

The Frankfurt School philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Hollywood and the wider culture industry that developed across the 20th century was shallow – everything was standardised to reduce costs and commodified to reach the widest consumer market. All culture – music, fashion, art, film – was reduced to the lowest common denominator so that it could be consumed by the largest number of consumers.

They write, “culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together”.

Each character can pop up interchangeably in each film. Ironman and Captain America can be replaced with new incarnations. Each new storyline in a television is easily recognisable. The same types of humour resonate throughout. And product placement is everywhere.

It is simple. Easy. Consumable.

We can see similar arguments in three more thinkers: Fredrich Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and David Harvey. They all put emphasis on the culture of our postmodern consumer society too. That it’s obsessed with image, with shallowness and lack of depth.

I want to quickly go through each one, because there are similarities in them that can help us understand what unifies many of the critiques and so we can then better think about solutions. We’ll then turn to what they might have left out, what criticisms of them are, before trying to think about consumerism in a new way.

Jean Baudrillard published The Consumer Society in 1970. I love this quote that really encapsulates the FOMO of consumerism, how forward looking he was. He wrote that consumerism came with a “revival of a universal curiosity in respect of cookery, culture, science, religion, sexuality, etc. “Try Jesus!” runs an American slogan. You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of “missing” something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some “sensation”. It is no longer desire, or even “taste”, or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease”.

Baudrillard was concerned primarily with image and language – the signs of consumer advertising and commercial language. He talked about the dizzying abundance of those signs, and argued that we were so saturated in the language of consumerism that that language dominated our lives more than any other way of communicating with each other.

He wrote: “There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species”.

For Marx, under capitalism, what he called the “use value” of an object – the real value of what it’s worth to me and us societally to use this mug, say – had been been replaced in our heads with an exchange value – we think instead about how much an item is worth economically. For example, someone might like this mug because it cost a lot of money and has diamonds implanted in the rim, not because they like it aesthetically or think its the perfect size. Fetishizing commodities in this way also hides the social labour, the real work, the real lives, that went into making the object. We simply think of it market terms.

On top of use value and exchange value, Baudrillard added a third value: sign value. We value things not by how useful they are, or even how much we can get for them, but on what they signify to others socially. I might like this mug, for example, because it’s a fashionable Ted Baker mug.

Baudrillard argued that this sign value was like a hidden language we all speak.

We live in a network of brand names, consumer images, movie stars with new shoes, and social status that depends largely on where we live, what we own, what our position is at work – and all of these things have a direct effect on what we value, what we desire, and what these things say about us to others. Baudrillard called this network a code, and he said we were more concerned with the code than we were with reality – the real.

He sees this consumer code as being like a language that speaks to us. We don’t desire new things at random – desires must be created, coded, they must fit into the system of fantasy. New goods must somehow be inserted into the existing order of consumption.

Our desires aren’t just biological, personal, individual, or based on use-value – usefulness – or exchange value – that this is a gold plated laptop so will be worth more – but are socially constructed. We are coded to desire socially depending on others, and this determines how we think.

Our needs aren’t rational, nor are they even about maximising utility. Social power rules. We are socialized, culturalised, consumerised by an abundance of messages, flashing lights, screens and magazines.

What drives this? Baudrillard returns in many ways to Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. We want to distinguish ourselves, setting ourselves apart socially.

He calls this a “dialectic of conformism and originality”. We both want to conform – be part of the pack – and be original – stand outside the pack.

There is, Baudrillard says, “a “need of the individual to differentiate himself” as one more element in the repertoire of individual needs, which it sees as alternating with the opposite need to conform”.

Manufacturers want to fit these new desires – this code – into our lives without continuously upending their whole manufacturing lines.

Modern furniture is designed to be flexible, mobile, interchangeable, without depth so it can fit in different spaces and be moved easily. Everything is in neutral colours and like IKEA, fits together like a puzzle, like a code.

Tradition, uniqueness, odd shapes, personal history is no longer important in the home. It’s about flatness, neutrality – every home looks the same.

Apple resembles this, resembles IKEA. You’re sold a new Mac and now you need an iPad, iPhone, iWatch, Airpods. And, if you don’t have Apple, you need one because you might be left out, you can’t use iChat, you can’t send photos easily to your friends – the consumer code draws you in – if not, you’re ostracised.

Baudrillard says, anticipating Apple, “few objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects which “speaks them”. Shop-windows, adverts, brand names, all come together in a cohesive vision”.

Baudrillard is famously pessimistic about this state of affairs. He argues we’re so soaked in this culture that we can no longer discover our true authentic needs.

Everything is alienated because everything can be exchanged away. Nothing is transcendental. Everything is pastiche – the car advert relies on the sunglasses, the sunglasses are sold with holiday packages, the dream is a holiday in Bermuda because that’s where Brad Pitt went – all of these phenomena build, construct, and direct your desires – but true meaning, what we really need, is lost.

He uses the example of Kitsch products to illustrate what we means.

Kitsch goods are everywhere. They’re “trashy objects”, “folksy knick-knacks”, “souvenirs”, he says. But they’re shallow imitations. They’re no longer connected to the real reason, the original reason, the piece of art or historical building they imitate. Kitsch is the ultimate in artificial desire.

Baudrillard writes, “Kitsch can be anywhere: in the detail of an object or in the plan of a new residential area, in an artificial flower or in a photo-novel. It can best be defined as a pseudo-object or, in other words, as a simulation, a copy, an imitation, a stereotype, as a dearth of real signification and a superabundance of signs”.

They are just “part of the package, the constellation of accessories by which the “socio-cultural” standing of the average citizen is determined”.

Pop art functions in a similar way. It’s all surface, it uses the signifiers of the world around us, and slaps it together, ignoring the true deep meaning that’s been hidden.

Baudrillard says: “whereas all art up to pop was based on a “depth” vision of the world, pop regards itself as homogeneous with this immanent order of signs: homogeneous with their industrial, mass production and hence with the artificial, manufactured character of the whole environment”.

We see a similar critique of the shallowness of our postmodern landscape in the American philosopher Fredric Jameson. His essay, turned into a book, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in 1984, has been called the most discussed article of the 1980s.

For Jameson, there is a particular reason consumer culture is shallow.

He writes that our postmodern culture is schizophrenic, it jumps from place to place – and relies on “a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image” and the “weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality”.

He argues culture has become so shallow that our relationship to the depth of history has been lost.

Culture is fragmented because capitalism is fragmented. We are detached from everything because we have to be – styles change, trends change, conditions change, jobs change, information changes quicker than we can keep up, and so we’re psychologically schizophrenic, frantically trying to keep up.

Jameson famously compares Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots from 1887 – a modernist painting – with Andy Warhol’s postmodern 1980 Diamond Dust Shoes.

He argues that Van Gogh’s shoes are connected to a real world.

He says, “the whole missing object world which was once [the shoes’] lived context. . .the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth”.

On the other hand, “Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer… We are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality”.

He says the same process is visible in our broad cultural understanding of the Vietnam War. He says its shaped not by reality, not by real history or understanding, but by Hollywood films, protest music, flashy televisions news. Like Warhol’s shoes, it is disconnected, more imaginary than real.

The Marxist thinker David Harvey writes more about the economic foundations of this depthlessness.

If you study at the supply chains of any fast fashion company, any tech company, in fact, the majority of consumer goods, you’ll find that it is fractured, outsourced, subcontracted, divided into small parts and separate companies across the globe, a button made here, a screen there, a screw in one place and a thread in another.

For Harvey and Jameson, these facts of material production – how the economy is structured – is the reason the culture that results from it is so shallow. It doesn’t have time to be anything but and it is constantly pushing for new trends. By the time a story, a news item, a television show, a piece of art, or even a topic of discussion is produced, the world is moving on, manufacturing new product lines in new places based on new ideas.

Harvey sees our postmodern consumer society as a result of the shift from Fordism – vertically integrated factories all owned and controlled by a single company overseeing each part of the process – to what he calls “flexible accumulation”.

Flexible accumulation is defined by outsourcing and subcontracting to break up the process into smaller bits, offsetting risks, making smaller companies to compete with one another for contracts so as to get the lowest price, being able to drop a manufacturer and hire a new one as soon as needed, when a style or trend changes. This leads a fractured economic system across the globe and a fractured culture as a result. New communication technologies, GPS, data centres, electronic banking, etc, add to the speed and flexibility of the system.

Harvey writes that “the mobilization of fashion in mass (as opposed to elite) markets provided a means to accelerate the pace of consumption not only in clothing, ornament, and decoration but also across a wide swathe of life-styles and recreational activities (leisure and sporting habits, pop music styles, video and children’s games, and the like)”.

And so lifestyles are adopted and discarded at the same rate as new trends, nothing is around long enough to be examined, understood, or identified with in any depth – we become detached, postmodern, lost.

Fashion trends are adopted, mimicked, stolen, and ripped off; fads and countercultures are co-opted, profited from, then discarded. “All that is solid melts into air”, as Marx wrote.

Everything is disposable, single use – napkins, cups, cameras, batteries, and pens are used up and thrown away.

Because everything is fast, a quick turnover in images follows. Sponsorship, television styles, new cars, new styles in cinema and literature, new memes and new celebrities.

Harvey illustrates how this shift between integrated Fordist factories and global flexible accumulation has effected our culture with the proliferation of galleries. He says that in New York in 1945 there were just a handful of galleries. Now, 150,000 artist in New York claim professional status. There were 680 galleries producing more than 15 million art works across a decade.

They’re all bound up in the production of new images that can be exchanged and co-opted by our consumer culture, which ultimately is about moving things on as quickly as possible.

The problem, he says, is “Capital flight, de industrialization of some regions, and the industrialization of others, the destruction of traditional working-class communities as power bases in class struggle”.

Ok, let’s summarise. There are two critiques. The one we just covered is about alienation, about us psychologically. That there’s a depthless, everything is surface, everything moves too quickly, and, according to many, we’re alienated from our true needs, from the true use value of objects and goods. This is a kind humanist critique. It focuses on us.

The other critique is somewhat simpler. It’s that consumerism is destroying the planet, the environment. That consumerism is bad not per se, but because of appalling work conditions and labour rights and child labour in places like Bangladesh.

I want to argue now that both can be seen as a type of depthlessness. Asking the questions, ‘what’s the opposite of depthlessness?’, and, ‘what would depth mean?’, might help point us in the right direction.

This humanist problem – the problem, essentially, of alienation – has been criticised by people who say alienation from what? Is there really any true authentic self to be alienated from? Aren’t we all the product of self-creation, an assemblage of experiences, differing from person to person, place to place?

This is Douglas Kellner’s critique of Baudrillard – that he says we’re surrounded by image and sign and a hyperreality that alienates from the real of existence, but he posits no way out, no theory of change. If consumerism alienates but there is no true self anyway, on what basis can consumerism be wrong?

I think this is true, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be alienated from our true needs, that certain things have a negative effect on us and the world, and other things a better effect. That some states of affairs in the world are more desirable than others.

I want to quickly draw from two philosophers – Sartre and Spinoza – to make the case that to challenge the negatives of consumerism, we should aim to turn the depthlessness that is central to critiques of it into its opposite: depth. In turn, we aim to turn an alienated life into a more fulfilling one.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote that the “main problem of social life is to pin down meanings so that they stay still for a little time”.

Whether it is fast moving images or our clothes being made by children thousands of miles away, this idea holds. There’s so much going on that it’s impossible to understand it all, to pin it down – and so in many areas we live shallowly, not understanding, not thinking, not able to fully comprehend what goes into the construction of our every day lives.

So how do we pin down our fast moving consumer culture to analyse it in depth?

Spinoza suggested that we look at the world from what he described as the perspective of eternity. We should examine the causes of things – where they come from, how they function – and we should always analyse our ideas, actions, and desires, looking outwards and understanding them in the wider context of the world. We should look at things, essentially, in depth. We should understand where our food and clothes come from and the effect they’re having.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre made a similar point. He argued that our projects, our ideas, our opinions, and values – our perspective on the world – should rhyme. We should look at how things inform and effect one another.

He argues that our experiences should fit together in a structure of meaning that we then impose onto the world. Meaning can be made deeper, more connected, more, well, meaningful, by uncovering and creating patterns between things so that the world rhymes, so that there’s rhythm and coherence.

So if I make Youtube videos, I become interested in cameras for filming, but I also then become interested in photography, and in how and where my cameras are made, what other things I can do with them, and the history and philosophy of them.

These are brief references to two philosophers I’ve introduced in depth before on the channel, but I think they get at something that shines a light on the depthlessness of consumer culture. And they help with a problem I think thinkers like Jameson and Baudrillard run into.

After reading them you have the impression that consumerism is one totalising thing, everything gets lumped in with it – everything is just consumed and all images and adverts and consumer goods are equally negative and equally alienating. It ignores that not all things are consumed “shallowly” – some are experienced, approached, and consumed with depth.

I buy new cameras and microphones, books, a drone, clothes, new foods, seek new recipes and holidays – precisely because they bring me the opposite of depthlessness, they create depth in my life. So to finish, let’s have look at how depth is created, but what the limits of this way of thinking in this way might be.

Sassatelli argues that often, rather than simply consuming brainlessly, consumers are active in the act of consumption. They’re also often decodifying, reinterpreting, and criticizing the PR, adverts, and products they consume. We’re not just zombies, taken in by every advertising board we see.

She writes that “consumption often consists in re-framing the meaning and uses of material culture by translating the purely commercial value of goods into other forms of value: affection, relationships, symbolism, status, normality, etc”.

She continues: “recent studies of audiences and media consumption show that spectators actively de-codify messages and images, referring them to the context in which they are experienced, to their own social position, gender, life course, and so on”.

Take DIY. Yes, new tools and paints and furniture are advertised and sold to us, but they’re often de-commodified, made personal, adapted, decorated and adorned with family photos or meaningful items. There is a “de-commoditized sphere” in the home, or between friends, at events and online.

We use musical instruments to create new, individual, unique music, we paint and discuss and trade on social media, we fill photo books, we give gifts – all of these things transcend the flatness of consumerism and bring in more personal, social, ethical, or transcendental ideals.

In 1970, Baudrillard pointed to the typewriter that can write in 13 different fonts and a diction machine to record notes as examples of pointless gadgets. To me, these seem useful – I use different fonts to convey different ideas or emotional tone quickly – it’s another layer to language. And others find recording to remember important things easier than jotting them down.

Sassatelli also points to how the Walkman was criticized when it was first released for representing “alienation, anomie, and atomization”, despite listening to music on the go clearly also being representative of many other things – escape, heightened experience, resistance, creativity, energy.

She also writes about the positive experience of connoisseurship, of collectibles, of hobbies: “the pervasive allure of connoisseurship may be seen as having to do with mastering objects and demonstrating aestheticized detachment from them: by piling up a complex repertoire of knowledge, the connoisseur finds a way to get close to commodities while distancing him or herself from their immediate hold”.

Others have pointed to cinema, television, and image being deeper than is often assumed.

In his book on Baudrillard, Adam Roberts writes that for Baudrillard Vietnam was “a war flattened and emptied out to a basic layer of violence, mixed in with popular culture and TV, accompanied in many people’s imagination by a soundtrack of 1960s pop-music. But the violence and death was not “hyper-real” or “simulated”, it was real”.

My point is, in among the problems we’ve identified with consumer society, everywhere we look we can also find depth, meaning, usefulness, creativity, connection too. And we can apply this seeking after depth to our understanding of how things like supply chains work, what we think is unethical and ethical, what we want to support and avoid, what we want to push to regulate, organise against, and politically change. I think this is the opposite of depthlessness, the opposite of alienation.

But am I being naive? Am I ignoring other issues? The breadth and scope of the problem. The addiction to new fashions, pointless new purchases, pollution or child labour?

I guess, at least in part, what I’m arguing is that if you look at the consequences of your purchases in depth, if you think about the message, the result, the meaning in your own and other’s lives, then you can become an ethical consumer.

Is this true?

Even as that term “ethical consumption” has become more popular, as we’ve become increasingly adware of the pitfalls of fast fashion and the environmental desegregation of consumption, bottled water sales, to take just one simple example, have continued to rise and are projected to do so indefinitely. Palm oil – a major cause of deforestation – is still in half of packaged products. Fast fashion companies continue to pay below the minimum wage. Garment factories continue to burn down.

But working out whether more conscious consumerism works at all is difficult to do.

On the one hand, we continue to outsource to countries like Bangladesh and see the tragedies that are the result of poor health and safety, terrible regulations and labour practices. But at the same time, the ILO – the International Labour Organisation – says that child labour is down by a third since 2000. 61% of fashion companies have committed to using sustainable fabrics.

That is, when there’s cultural pressure on manufacturers, on what we eat and wear, there does appear to be some change.

On the other hand, Northwestern University professor Brayden King has argued boycotts have a negligible effect on a company’s sales revenue. He says that the problem is that “we can’t pay attention to any single controversy for very long”.

Yes, we talk about the tragic Rana Plaze building collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 when 1134 died for a bit, but then we move on to other things.

Terry Hathaway at the LSE writes that “even the most hyper-vigilant, well-informed shopper cannot know everything – the labour (and conditions), the tools (and the production of these tools), the raw materials (and their extraction), the energy, etc – that goes into making even the most simple products. Instead, the consumer must buy in partial ignorance of all of the factors, primarily on the basis of those attributes that are the most conspicuous and, to some degree, based on trust”.

He continues, “shopping at Whole Foods could be construed as support for higher welfare meat and organic agricultural methods, but it will equally support union busting, low wages for workers and right-wing libertarian politics”.

So here is the crux of it. Our consumer society is messy, complex; it both sustains us creatively and destroys the planet. So maybe it is a useless concept. I think we’re better off thinking about it in its original sense – to use up – as, not a noun that describes our society, but as a verb – as something we’re all doing. And like anything we do, there is a chain of activity – social and historical, environmental and economic – that supports the consumption and that we in turn support by consuming. Only by studying and understanding the issues in depth can we grapple with these problems. Thinking about regulation, changing the economic system, organising politically is a part of this depth – everyone’s interpretation of what to do will be different.

For example, journalist Alden Wicker argues ethical consumption doesn’t work. We should instead donate some of the money we spend going greener on donations to NGOs and green politicians.

And commentator Robert Reich has reminded us that when “you hear a company boast about how environmentally friendly it is, hold the applause. Under super-competitive capitalism—what I’ve termed “supercapitalism” – it’s naive to think corporations can or will sacrifice profits and shareholder returns in order to fight global warming. Firms that go green to improve their public relations, or cut their costs, or anticipate regulations are being smart, not virtuous”.

So its important to approach this with a multifaceted attitude. Depth means more eyes on all the issues. Depth means engaging with the politics. Depth means exploring our own desires and beliefs vigilantly. Taking an issue – something we consume – and understanding its ramifications, something I want to try to apply next time.