Whom one is speaking to – or which aspect of their character – fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. ‘Indulge Your Desires’ comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than...

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are...

It wasn’t some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in...

Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street.

Little people doing little things in little places everywhere can change the world.

In a lot of ways that poor little potato’ – Evan pointed directly at Jade’s French fries – ‘symbolizes the reckless consumerism that plagues America.

It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be...

Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that’s lacking breaks – a swarm of...

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity,...

People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

I buy the most expensive trash bags, and the lowest quality products to consume and throw away. As a lover, I’m always thinking about the end user.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to...

We no longer live life. We consume it.

I’m just an actor. My performance is not more important than your life. Stop watching. We’re false images designed to sell you products by exploiting your insecurities. To make you spectators in life, not participants.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them….Long after he’s dead, someone else...

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a...

If everyone wanted peace as much as they want a new iPhone, then there would be peace.

The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try...

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Who talks about values, morals, and truth in all this? Nobody! There are just no outlets that can speak through all the noise! Between television, the internet, college campus, bars, parties, and work hours, there...

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an “urban Thoreau”) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of “work, produce, consume, work,...

Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film – another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that...

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV...

Americans used to be ‘citizens.’ Now we are ‘consumers.

Escape is a consumer goods like another

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but...

Marketing’s illusive promise is that this one product will change your life, make you feel more sexy, satisfy all your heart’s desires.

If you can’t reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an...

A customer facing crucial decisions: What should I wipe myself with? What should I brush with? His personal hygiene was deteriorating rapidly as he stared at the rows of possibilities, sweating profusely. Would he ever...

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But...

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call “maximising utility”. The ultimate objective of mankind...

On ne peut pas tout avoir. Et puis d’abord où le mettrait-on?

In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it’s just the perceptions that...