Consumer: a word we’re so used to hearing or uttering, we don’t even blink mentally in its presence. It merely fills in the syntax of our discourse, and kind of replaces the potential ambiguity of a “him”/”her”/”them” with the presumption of a professional grasp of what lies beneath.
Think of number, repetition, mechanization, efficiency. Of the time when we made the product, packaged it, advertised it, and sold it to the consumer – basically a big mouth waiting at the end of the conveyor belt to be fed with something he’s been repeatedly assured was good for him. The consumer is, in fact, the by-product of the industrial era. As such, he shares the same substance with its originating source: he’s reduced to the silent materiality of an object.
As a massive iron impetus still keeps The Age of the Number moving its myriad feet in the direction of Maximization, the rest of the world is leaving the march for multiple interactive gatherings of a more immaterial nature. So we partly put down our measuring devices and began to seriously talk about relationships. But what bell rings you the word “consumer” relentlessly popping up?
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"We're all used to thinking of ourselves as primarily mental realities, and of other people as immediately physical realities. [...] And we vaguely see others as mental realities, though only when we're in love or in conflict does it really dawn on us that they, like we, are predominantly soul."
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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