“Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains/And there’s no end in sight/I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.”
—Arcade Fire, The Suburbs (2010)
When my wife and I lived just north of Boston, we’d drive past wood-paneled, yellow-painted two floor colonials and Queen Anne Victorians, pastel blue Cape Cods and rustic brown salt-box houses, until the meandering cow path of Lowell Street shunted us onto the Middlesex Turnpike toward the Burlington Mall. I never enjoyed malls when I was young; our closest was the Monroeville Mall where George Romero filmed Dawn of the Dead, and I disliked the creepy uniformity of those spaces, the steep escalators and strange indoor fountains, the shiny linoleum, piped in Top 40, and artificially lit interiors. Over time, I defeated my own snobbishness. The futuristic slickness of the Apple Store, the faux-exoticism of Anthropologie, the seediness of Spencer Gifts and Hot Topic, the schmaltziness of Yankee Candle. “Not only is the mall a place of material reward,” writes Matthew Newton in Shopping Mall, “it is also a space to meditate on your surroundings,” where wandering “feels almost like slipping off into a dream.” The few things I bought at the Burlington Mall included a pair of swim trunks at Macy’s, my glasses, and maybe bubble tea slurped through one of those unnervingly thick straws. What I did do, however, is stand in the second-floor food court overlooking the turnpike glazed in January snow with the low-winter sun of early dusk appearing as if a squib of yellow butter scrapped lightly across browned toast glowing golden. I see no shame in admitting that I love the mall.
Everyone in literary circles has met the man whose family had homes in Manhattan and upstate New York, in rural New England and in Hilton Head, and somewhere in Europe, but who hates Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, even Starbucks. These types emphasize that family wealth isn’t theirs, but their parents’, and the bright orange sashimi and red tuna nigiri sitting in an open fridge at Wegman’s, the fake distressed wood of Pier 1, the cutting fragrances of Sephora were only bourgeois affectation for the rest of us. A privilege of the wealthy class tourist is the ability to whole-sale skip over life in the middle, even while that middle disappears. Despite not needing the money, these types often romanticize manual labor, seeing in summer gigs as a dishwasher something authentic, the callouses from scrubbing a rough steel-wool pad across pasta-caked plates and burns from scalding water, the rhythmic mindlessness of loading glasses and bowls into their plastic tray and then sending them on a conveyer belt through the industrial washer. Such fantasies are a rejection of the suburban, the bourgeoise, the basic. “The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world,” such a man might quote from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, “The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.” ($15.49 on Amazon Prime). Despite being privileged enough to grow up upper middle-class, I’m close enough to the factory that I see something of the tourist in that aforementioned pose, and 12 years in inner-city public schools at least kept me honest. I don’t know much about class, but I know that most people who don’t have a choice in anything but the dishwashing rarely have the option to run that steel wool across the bright reds and blues of Le Creuset when they get home. Poverty is a luxury that only the rich can afford. As for me, I’ve always loved Williams-Sonoma.
During the mid-19th century, an economist enthused that capitalism has “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations,” name-checking the marvels of “steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs… canalization of rivers,” while asking “what earlier century had even a presentment [of] such productive forces?” He was a paragon of bourgeoise tastes, an avid reader of the sentimental novels of Honoré de Balzac, a fan of maudlin Romantic music, and a perennial smoker of cheap cigars. Today he’d no doubt enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte at the Burlington Mall. His name was Karl Marx and the selection quoted is from The Communist Manifesto. Marx’s critique is pertinent because he acknowledges what’s seductive about capitalism. Any radical analysis that ignores what’s so great about owning stuff isn’t really a radical analysis at all; any claim that television isn’t actually amazing, or junk food never tastes good, or pop music is anemic is just bohemian posturing. Sing me a song of Chipotle’s burrito bowl, all gristly steak, synthetic cheese, and fatty guac; of the glories of an MTO hoagie ordered from a Wawa screen; of the bruising trauma of the NFL; of the spectral sublimity of Netflix. Marx’s denunciations of capitalism—written with the support of his wealthy friend Friedrich Engels—were trenchant because he didn’t confuse ethics with aesthetics. By contrast, Pete Seeger—who God bless him was right about war and labor, and produced some catchy songs as well—couldn’t shake the condescension of an upstate New York childhood being raised by two WASPy Julliard professors. “Little boxes on the hillside/Little boxes made of ticky tacky/Little boxes, little boxes/Little boxes all the same.” We’re to look down on these middle class dupes for their spiritually bereft lives, their desire to golf and drink martinis. Seeger—whose family had a rural New Jersey estate and died with $5 million to his name—saw those tracts of suburban sprawl as deadening. But you know who I bet wouldn’t mind one of those ticky tacky little boxes? Homeless people.
“Modern bourgeois society,” Marx writes “is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Dispute the prescription if we must, Marx was perceptive in his diagnosis—for all of the material plenty that industry supplied to some, capitalism depends on exploitation, it is defined by inequity, it requires alienation. The problem isn’t the ticky tacky houses, the problem is that people in McMansions have convinced those in those little boxes that their enemies are people in public housing (and government assistance is nefarious socialism). Engels and Marx used an occult rhetoric of wizards, specters, and hauntings, and it’s apropos, for capitalism itself is a religion. “Under capitalism,” writes Eugene McCarraher in The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, “money occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted.” If our religion is capitalism, then our theology is consumerism and our God is the Invisible Hand. Our prayers are “Have It Your Way,” “Think Different,” and “Just Do It;” our avatars are Ronald McDonald, Mr. Peanut, and the Kool-Aid Man; our relics are the Golden Arches, the Mercedes trinity, and the Pepsi Tao. Our liturgy, that’s advertising. It’s produced some great and beautiful art. What I would argue to you is that all of it—the television commercials and the print advertisements, the marketing campaigns and the logo designs—constitutes the United States’ artistic patrimony; that our great literature is the jingle, the copy, the billboard, the TV spot. It’s true that capitalism exploits humans—you get no disagreement on that. Furthermore, as we peer down on our remaining decades and realize it was industry itself that took us to the Anthropocene’s sweltering apocalypticism, and suddenly Marx sounds Panglossian.
Still, I can appreciate Super Bowl ads, I can enjoy TGIFridays, I can prostrate myself before capital’s liturgy even with my impious heart. You need not be Catholic to be moved by Dante, so why can’t three minutes about Budweiser and Clydesdale horses move me? “Endure, and keep yourselves for days of happiness,” wrote Virgil in The Aeneid, all in the service of Caesar Augustus, an authoritarian dictator; Donatello’s bronzed “David” is a moving evocation of the body’s perfection produced for the Florentine Medicis, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s tonalities are immaculate, albeit composed for Joseph Stalin. When the tyrants are dead, maybe it’s easier to appreciate beauty, but soon enough the ice caps will drown billions of us all, so why not enjoy our equivalent artists and their preferred medium now? James Walter Thompson who filched the Rock of Gibraltar for the Prudential Insurance Company in 1890; Doyle Dane Bernbach and their lemonish Volkswagen; Ogilvy and Mather with contracts for Schweppes, Guinness, Rolls-Royce, Sears, Dove, and so on. The little narratives constructed by these (mostly) men, tiny portraits and miniature novels, weren’t created just to sell people things, for as Jackson Lears writes in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, “they also signify a certain vision of the good life; they validate a way of being in the world. They focus private fantasy.” Wherever people are hungry they’ll purchase food, wherever they’re thirsty they’ll buy drink, but commercials sell you an entire worldview. Every culture has myths, ordering stories of reality. In Athens, to live the good life depended on reason; in Jerusalem it was to commit yourself to faith, and on Madison Avenue it’s to live for consumption. We don’t have Hesiod’s Theogony or the Torah, our scripture is a 30-second spot. Our myth tells you that you are incomplete, disordered, and unhappy, but that the solution involves the accumulation of things, beautiful things, tasty things, sexy things, amazing things, and that through such commodities you become perfectible, as surely as an ancient Greek making offerings at Delphi ensured his favor among the Olympians, as much as a Medieval penitent paying an indulgence ensures release from Purgatory. Does any of it work? Well in the immediate sense, paying the indulgence makes you feel better too. But look, the churches are defunct and our faith is dying as our shopping malls are boarding up, our prayers as unanswered as the next shipping delay. Still, as the Sibylline Oracle at the Mall of America says,
The heartbeat of America is open
happiness, when a diamond is
forever in the happiest place on
earth.
Because you’re in good hands,
so don’t leave home without it.
We bring good things to life, and
go the extra mile. The power of
dreams is the relentless pursuit
of perfection, good to the last
drop.
Eat fresh, expect more, and pay less—
anytime, anywhere. Because you’re
worth it.
Can you hear me now?
Critique my little cento, but whatever way you arrange it, some version of this lyric will be a more enduring work than anything by T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. If you can only feel sublime in a cathedral, I pity you, because the numinous can be smuggled into these commercial prayers, however empty their promises. Virgil, Donatello, and Shostakovich all exploited emotions, and they were servants of nefarious masters as well, and yet it would be a fool who thought that The Aeneid, “David,” and “Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47” don’t intimate the shores of eternity, the breath of transcendence. Materialism in its most raw and literal form has little to do with it. “It isn’t the whiskey they choose,” wrote David Ogilvy in Ogilvy on Advertising, “it’s the image.”
Like a wounded gladiator, Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene limps back to the Three Rivers Stadium locker room after a bruising first two quarters. A tow-headed little boy follows the football player and offers to help his hero, but the famously gruff Greene declines. Then the child offers him his Coke, and again he’s turned down. True to the rule of three, Greene finally accepts the supplication of sugar water, and downs the Coca-Cola while the boy turns back. Before the child can return to the stands, “Mean” Joe says with a smile “Hey kid, catch!” and throws his jersey to the boy. The Hero’s Journey as envisioned by McCann Erickson in 1979. A 2020 neurological study demonstrated that 90 percent of NFL players have suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy from injuries sustained on the field. Leo Burnett had similar masculine ambitions when tasked with reorienting Marlboro Cigarettes towards the men’s market in 1954. Across a blasted, rugged, western terrain, all otherworldly plateaus and the burnt ochre sun of dusk, rides a cowboy. The visuals are John Ford, the music is from The Magnificent Seven, the most iconic of the “Marlboro Men” was Darrell Winfield, who played the role for 20 years after working as an Oklahoma rancher. Marlboro sold a fantasy, that of the homesteader, the bootstrapper, the stern and taciturn settler kept company by his shadow. This isn’t a place—Marlboro Country is everywhere. Two years after the character’s introduction, Marlboro’s profits increased 300 percent from $5 billion to $20 billion. Five of the men who played the Marlboro Man died from lung cancer.
Calvin Klein’s in-house ad agency borrowed Western accoutrement in a 1981 television ad. Brooke Shields whistles “My Darling Clementine,” laying odalisque in jeans and cowboy boots, wearing a pewter belt buckle and a slightly open red blouse. “You know what comes between me and my Calvins?” Shields asks. “Nothing.” If the point wasn’t already clear, Tom Richert writes in The Erotic History of Advertising that it was an “unmistakable double entendre when framed with a camera shot that took thirteen seconds to slowly move along the length of her inseam before including her face.” Shields was 15. In a 2021 Vogue interview, she recalled “I was a kid, and where I was, I was naïve.” Three years later, and Steve Hayden, Lee Clow, and Brent Thomas would take advantage of the slightly warming Cold War and the ominous connotations of the year “1984” in their famed Ridley Scott directed Super Bowl spot for Apple Computers’ new Macintosh. A group of androgynous, grey-hued drones shuffles in lockstep into an industrial hanger where they watch an address by an obvious Big Brother stand-in delivered on a massive blueish telescreen. “We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology,” says the speaker, “where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts.” But then, a solitary rebel emerges, a blonde woman in red running shorts and white tank top who seems like she has escaped from an aerobics studio, sprinting through the grimy and steamy hanger, pursued by riot police, and in the last moments of the ad she flings a sledgehammer at Big Brother’s screen, which explodes. Whether this incarnation of ’80s material excess was targeting Soviet communism or IBM is ambiguous, but a voiceover informs us that “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” It aired only once, during Superbowl XVIII. The estate of George Orwell sued Apple Computers.
The Macintosh ad illustrates the brilliant vampiric logic of capitalism, for a totalitarian must continually dominate those whom he oppresses, but the capitalist insidiously convinces to you that he’s your friend. By outsourcing tyranny to the individual, everything is much more seamless. Capitalism privatizes totalitarianism, which on the whole is much more effective. In a review of the ad that ran in Harper’s for its 30th anniversary, Rebecca Solnit outlines how Silicon Valley has been instrumental in coarsening the discourse, increasing the gap between the wealthiest and everybody else, and ironically manufactures their products in Chinese factories that evoke the dreary setting of the commercial, before concluding that “If you think a crowd of people staring at one screen is bad, wait until you have created a world in which billions of people stare at their own screens while walking, driving, eating in the company of friends—all of them eternally elsewhere.” If resistance took only flinging a hammer at a screen (where’s the sickle?) fighting authoritarianism would be so much easier, but the genius of capitalism is that any rebellion can instantly be integrated into the status quo and used to sell jeans, computers, and beer. Like a virus, capitalism just mutates to overcome the vaccine. Thomas Frank writes in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the New Gilded Age, an anthology coedited with Matt Weiland, that the counterculture’s “frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monomyth of mass as well as adversarial culture… Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival.”
Well, true. Still, I hope that filching the subversive to sell soap has the unintended consequence of injecting resistance into mass culture, that if we can hear the quiet chords of redemption in Virgil and Shostakovich, that we can also see rebellion in a Macintosh ad, even if the intent was duplicitous. Few ads are more cynical than McCann Erikson’s 1971 Coca-Cola Hilltop ad, in which dozens of vaguely countercultural looking young women and men sing a paeon to the glories of pop in an Italian field with glassy eyed Peoples Temple intensity. “I’d like to buy the world a home/And furnish it will love/Grow apple trees and honey bees/And snow white turtle doves,” they sing in perfect harmony. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke/And keep it company/That’s the real thing.” Obviously this millennium of fraternity and fizzy water deserves scorn, and yet dialectically it does contain a kernel of resistance against its own best interests, this evocation of a utopian moment, this depiction of a better world, even if you’ve got to have a Coke at the same time. Media theorist Marshal McLuhan claimed in The Mechanical Bride that “To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit… To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads,” but 25 years later in 1976 he’d admit in Advertising Age that his subject was the “greatest art form of the twentieth century.” Again, both of these things can be true. Not for nothing did Marx think that capitalism was the most revolutionary movement up until that point, and consumerism does unify people in a type of cracked democracy. Andy Warhol, our greatest theorist of commercial semiotics, wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol that a “Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” It can both be true that capitalism is an exploitative system and that Cokes are good.
Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men—which introduced many of us to the history of advertising—features Hilltop in a crucial scene, with the implication that the show’s alcoholic, philandering anti-hero Don Draper was responsible, inspired to appropriate the hippie aesthetic after a California Esalen-retreat. Draper is a Luciferian figure, simultaneously beguiling as cankered, and despite his worst intentions sympathetic. What makes him fascinating isn’t that he’s a monster, but that he’s human. Mad Men’s best monologue, or at least its most memorable, is in the season finale of the first season when Draper gives a presentation to Kodak executives about a campaign for their new slide projector. Loading up happy pictures of his own troubled family, and Draper intones that nostalgia is a “twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called a wheel, it’s called a carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels… to a place where we are loved.” Sometimes Draper is understood as a sociopath, but that’s incorrect—he has a surfeit of empathy. If he didn’t, such a presentation wouldn’t be possible. Part of what fascinates about ad men is that it’s such a succinct and obvious way in which writers could sell out, in the commodification of creativity we see both warning and pride. Draper is the suit who reads Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, a cerebral soul who is an embodiment of the axiom that ad men are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Partially the reason why so many ad men wrote novels and Madison Avenue became a subject for serious post-war literature, the dejected copywriter as an existentialist hero. There’s Frederic Wakeman’s misanthropic The Hucksters and Jack Dillon’s The Advertising Man, but nothing is more associated with this sub-genre than Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Wilson’s protagonist Tom Rath is a Manhattan public relations consultant, overworked and jaded, who says “I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness,” for he is “not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who’ll say anything for pay.”
Ad men completely reshaped the mental topography during these years. Louis Menand writes in The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War about how the postbellum world was dominated by “commercial and entertainment culture: movies and television, newspaper and magazine photographs, advertisements, signage, and labeling and packaging.” This was the silver age of mental coercion (ours is the golden), when Soviet writers like Mikhail Sholokhov and Nikolai Ostrovsky were used to produce official literature that extolled collectivization and the command economy, where in the latter’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered a character could shout “all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world—the fight for the Liberation of Mankind!” Capitalist propaganda is far more subtle, rather we have “those Golden Grahams/Graham cracker tasting cereal/That taste is such a treat!” I’ve no clue who wrote that particular jingle, but Madison Avenue has always had an outsize concentration of literary ambition. Who among you knew that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo all worked as copy-writers? Rushdie may have penned The Satanic Verses, but he also wrote “Naughty! But Nice” for Fresh Cream Cakes while working at Ogilvy and Mather; Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby with its description of “such beautiful shirts,” that rain of blue, and green, and yellow that Daisy sends down onto Jay, but while first living in Iowa the author’s line “We Keep You Clean in Muscatine” was emblazoned on laundry trucks throughout the city.
There’s no simple correspondence here, no one-to-one symbiosis, but the experience of DeLillo at Ogilvy and Mather must have informed his writing. In DeLillo’s White Noise, erstwhile professor of Hitler Studies and small liberal arts faculty member Jack Gladney exists, like all of us, in the medium of commercials. Thomas DiPietro records the author as saying in Conversations with DeLillo that America’s central commandment is “consume or die,” and that’s on display in the novel. Commodity fetishism is the contrition through which the capitalist soul is formed, where one “found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me… I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.” In White Noise, Jack mumbles the prayers of our faith—”Mastercard, Visa, American Express.” Good copywriter DeLillo must have been, White Noise expresses a truth of advertising—all of this purchasing isn’t about stuff, it’s about identity. Before the omnipresence of consumer culture, if you needed to plow—you bought a plow. If you needed to shovel—you bought a shovel. But as the sacrament of Jack’s purchasing demonstrates, the simulacra of reality that is late capitalism asks you to buy (and sell) your soul. White Noise is an example of the advertising turn in literature, where a character’s personality is signaled through the products that they buy. Victorian novels let you understand characters through phrenology, the slope of a brow signaling criminality or the distance between eyes demonstrating intelligence, but in post-modernism it’s the brand of ice cream somebody eats or the type of car they drive.
If you didn’t already know that Patrick Bateman was a sociopathic serial killer in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, or that he imagines himself to be, than you at least understand that he’s a conceited prick with his “six-button wool and silk suit by Ermenegildo Zegna… cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar… Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rosetti,” along with all those Eddie Money cassettes. By comparison, a very different personality is conveyed in the brands named by Jeffrey Eugenides in The Marriage Plot, where “Sometimes Madeline made him tea. Instead of going for an herbal infusion from Celestial Seasonings, with a quotation from Lao Tzu on the package, Madeline was a Fortnum & Mason’s drinker, her favorite blend Earl Grey.” The vaguely New Age-y affectations of Celestial Seasonings with its sleepy bear on the box rejected in favor of the stolid, slightly stodgy, sort-of-fussy Fortnum & Mason’s with the Royal Seal on its packaging, so that Madeline isn’t some hippie, but rather a serious person, an Anglophile even (or at least that’s what she’s trying to convey, she owns both brands clearly). Not even poetry is so otherworldly to ignore capitalism’s siren; Frederick Seidel has been writing about his luxury Italian motorcycles for decades, of Ducatis “all around, all red, all beautiful,/Ducatis as far as the eye can see,/Each small and perfect as a ladybug,” published in 2019 in The London Review of Books. Clive James provides ingenious readings of modernist poetry’s relationship to advertising in Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, noting that “Theoretically [poets] have despised the land of Just Add Hot Water and Serve, but in practice they loved the slogans. Readymade cheap poetry, the scraps of advertising copy, properly mounted.” He enumerates examples from e.e. cummings, Eliot, and Philip Larkin, though reserves attention for poet—and advertising executive—L.E. Sissman who could write of how “The maître d’/Steers for my table, bringing, in his train,/Honor in Pucci, Guccis, and Sassoon.” Bateman with his business cards and Madeline with her tea; Seidel on a motorcycle and Sissman’s song of Pucci, all of these brand names tell us something.
But of course they do in real life as well; we interpret peoples’ consumer choices in our day-to-day interactions far more than we do in fiction, and what we look for are signs of ideological affiliation. As our politics become only more tribal, what we eat, what we wear, what we drive all become signifiers, readymade symbols that advertise our identity. Imagine somebody who drives a Ford pickup, enjoys a Coors with his Chick-fil-A as compared to a woman who owns a Subaru with a radio tuned to NPR on her way to Trader Joe’s. You know exactly who these people are, or at least who they’re supposed to be. Often this has little to do with class in any traditional socio-economic sense, as “lifestyle usurped the more traditional class markers of income, and even education and occupation,” as Lizabeth Cohen explains in A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. Cohen asks you to predict the different sorts of people who would buy a “Cadillac over a Chevrolet, a ranch house instead of a Cape Cod, The New Yorker over True Story magazine,” and you immediately understand her point. It speaks to something deterministic in the American psyche since the type of ice cream we buy predicts who we’ll vote for, though I offer no appraisal on this one way or the other, just the observation. And politics is only one vestige of this, obviously, consumer choices are instrumental in the formation of identity within and across races, genders, sexualities, and religions as well. We shop, therefore we are.
It becomes impossible to imagine anything different, what Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism as the process by which the market “subsumes and consumes all of previous history.” Marxists use the term “late capitalism” as an optimistic shorthand, when the internal contradictions usher in the millennium of socialism. While I think that we’re definitely in capitalism’s end-stage, I’m not quite as sanguine, because I suspect that what the contradictions of the system will generate is nothing. As with anything consumed without respite, you eventually run out, and history is no exception. How will we define ourselves when the final bill comes due, when the eternal credit card is maxed out, especially since we’re incapable of imagining anything other than capitalism? In aforementioned Dawn of the Dead, all of those survivors of the zombie apocalypse hole up in the Monroeville Mall, where to get through to the other side of consumerism you must yourself become consumerism. With undead cannibals smashing their gory faces against the automatic doors and marauding through the asphalt flat lot, inside we’d raid Footlocker and Dick’s, we’d engorge ourselves at Cheesecake Factory and Red Robin, and we’d wait for the zombies to consume us all. “What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space,” writes Naomi Klein in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, “release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.” As Klein describes it, advertising and design mark everything in our reality, and we’re so constricted we can’t even imagine what wild open space would look like. For all that consumerism has promised us—comfort, security, identity—it was always the assurance that we could keep on purchasing our freedom that was the biggest illusion. Now the shipments are on back order and the shelves are empty, but for the time being you can still have whatever it is you want delivered right to your front door, never mind that the driver can never stop working. What happens after collapse when we can no longer define ourselves through products? No clue—the burden of defining some better world falls to those left behind after the rest of us have already left. In the meantime, have a Coke.
Bonus Links:
—A Brief Late-Stage Capitalism Reading List
—When Capitalism and Christianity Collide in Fiction
Image Credit: Free SVG
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