Stuff. You like stuff, right? You like living in a castle made of empty I-Phone boxes while the environment melts into a flood of baby panda’s tears trickling into a river topographically spelling out “help me” on GoogleEarth? You like stuff, yeah? You love stuff? You like your brands too, yeah? You like your Nikes so much you got knee replacements with a swoosh on them. Your internal monologue is introduced by a bland floppy-haired ident twat springing up to sell you a Three disillusionment tariff through the power of creative bankruptcy? You love stuff, that’s why Christmas exists. You love stuff, almost as much as you love the idea of Chinese children crawling through a flaming alphabet of hypodermic needles to pick out the letters DKNY to sew on your bum flannel. Buy buy buy! You love your ‘stuff’. But is it making you happy? You work seven million hours a second just so you can drive around in a tank and shop at Waitrose. You’re kidding yourself. And secretly you know it’s your fault that everything has gone to shit. Admit it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Wish you were dead yet? Go on, pop off to Harrods and buy yourself a Vivien Westwood noose.
If it’s any consolation, and you’re still reading, I’m the same. We all are. Buying new stuff makes me feel all tingly inside. For about 5 seconds. Then when that wears off I go out and buy more stuff until, like a rat in a cage with a ‘buy’ switch to the brain, the urge is sated. CDs are my heroin and my 1 bedroom flat is buckling under the weight of my addiction.
But even before the economy went all apocalyptic, wasn’t it starting to seem a bit hollow and pointless? Tiring, even? Ever resent the endless stream of crap that appears over night that’s not really much different to the endless stream of crap that was there yesterday but that you have to buy to replace the last lot of crap in case that load of crap goes wrong or starts to look out of fashion or gets the bad Aids ? I’m knackered just thinking about it. Life has become like an endless supermarket sweep with a demented, naked Dale Winton bearing down on you with a chainsaw. What’s really tiring is keeping up-to-date with wanting stuff you didn’t know existed. Until recently, I hadn’t had a new phone for 8 years. I was quite happy playing Snake and sporting an embarrassingly big bulge in my pocket. Then I got a new phone with GPS and a fat Elvis wobble-head, and suddenly I’m psychotic with fantasies of phone promiscuity. I want another new phone and I want it now. I want apps. I want an app with bits of skin flying off a baby’s face to accurately represent up-to-the minute stats on infant mortality rates. I want a 3-D giraffe that makes inappropriate sexual innuendo in the presence of old women. I want virtual stuff that does nothing other than create the desire for more stuff I didn’t know I wanted.
Basically, I’m mad with consumerist power. But I have no money. That’s what credit’s for. So yeah, something’s not right. The fact that there’s something not right is the subject of recent book, All Consuming, by Neal Lawson. Lawson argues that we’re all willing victims of an industrial-consumerist complex that gives the illusion of choice, freedom and the ultimate transcendental shopping experience. We’re all rats in a big shopping cage desperate for our next purchasing hit. Lawson argues we’re working longer hours, getting more stressed and are increasingly unhappy as we try to ‘fit in’, in a society where fitting in increasingly means buying more stuff. It’s a seemingly inescapable vicious circle, with notions of happiness and free-time being sold back to us by companies aware that, in a turbo-consumerist society, these are the one thing that money can’t buy. The environment suffers, social relations suffer. A new selfishness seems to be at large compounded by the ‘me-first’ individualism on which consumerism depends. According to a Douglas Coupland Holzerism, shopping is not creating. Shopping is creating, it seems: creating and compounding a whole heap of new social problems. Collectivism, altruism and community are eroded as we concentrate on fashioning our own individual identities by buying stuff. Lawson argues this shopping daze focuses us inward, increasing voter apathy and reducing civic participation. Big companies can have their wicked way with us because we’re too entranced by all the pretty shiny things to pay attention, collectively mobilize and fight the consumerization of every aspect of our lives.
I agree with pretty much all of this. It’s hard not to. Thing is, I kind of agreed with it before I read the book and I’m not sure whether it has the persuasive power to change anybody’s mind. In fact, in places I found myself mildly irritated by Lawson’s nagging tone: he occasionally comes across like a grumpy old man, angry, resentful and confused by a rapidly changing world. It really doesn’t help his argument. Neither is he helped by a tendency towards broad pronouncements backed up with relatively few facts and citations. The book feels rushed. It would have been more persuasive had Lawson taken the time to ground his arguments in the context of wider sociological and political debates. There are a few references to how Lawson has been inspired by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, but no proper discussion of his work. Strange too that despite citing rapidly increasing shifts towards privatisation as key causes of individualism and a diminished sense of collective responsibility, Lawson avoids analysing the Labour government’s role in reproducing such Thatcherite themes.
To be fair, reading the book did make me reflect on why I bought the book and why it’s sitting on my shelf next to copies of No Logo by Naomi Klein and Affluenza by Oliver James. Strangely, the opportunity for self-reflection (i.e. on the consumer product he’s produced and the kind of ‘consumer identity’ it plays into) isn’t taken up by Lawson. Still, the book’s publication is a good reminder of what you already know deep down. But buy it? I’d take Lawson’s advice and put the basket down.
vdofisdpofi! 