Reddit reviews Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

>You introduced me to the concept of presentational versus participatory art, and I've since shared this idea with others! THanks!

I'm really glad. It's such a simple idea, yet it reveals so much.

>What is it about modern capitalism that shuts so many of us down?

It's difficult for me to give a short answer on this one.

In a nutshell, austerity. People don't have the resources to maintain themselves because of economic policies and business practices that disenfranchise the working class. As /u/HadMatter217 and /u/chunter16 pointed out, work and careerism now permeates our private and social lives. There's this notion that every hour of our day and every thing we do should be geared toward making money, or at least some abstract notion of entrepreneurialism. Hobbies can wait until after you have that CS career.

But I want to dig a little deeper. It's easy to gripe and not be substantial, but the problems we're dealing with are deeply rooted. Read the Wikipedia entry on post-Fordism for a summary of the current model of production, particularly the part about the change from Fordism to post-Fordism. Basically, Fordism was the old style of organizing labor into specialized, standardized (Taylorist) routines, as in factory jobs from the first half of the 20th century. The idea here is economy of scale: churning out a lot of the same product. Meanwhile, due to a strong labor union presence (a large, homogenized work force is easily unionized) to balance wages and profits and the Keynesian policies prevalent in the US, Canada, the UK and so forth, workers were generally taken care of. It was certainly easier to leave your work at work back in the 1950s, especially compared to now.

I'm not saying Fordism was perfect or anything. To the contrary: it fell out of favor because it's unsustainable (and because of financial crises brought on by the US Federal Reserve's move toward fiat currency in 1971 and the 1973 OPEC oil embargo). Mind you, the system that has come to replace it is also unsustainable. Remember that the post-war period was one of US expansionism, and that tendency has only increased in the era of neoliberalism. Those factory jobs have been moved to countries where capitalists can exploit labor without dealing with those pesky regulations and paying fractions of what Western workers demand. (See "global labor arbitrage".)

Post-Fordism places emphasis on flexibility and economies of scope. Thing is, it doesn't do away with any of the problems that create economic inequalities and market crashes in the first place. Furthermore, these newly ineffective ways of dealing with catastrophic problems are deeply politicized. As Mike Featherstone says in the preface to the second edition of Consumer Culture and Postmodernism:

>The promise of consumer culture is central to the expansion of the new Asian economies, in particular China and India, which have staved off the possibility of a severe global recession over the last decade. Yet, this expansion of consumer culture means more goods, more air travel, more waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. This dimension of the politics of consumption pushes consumer culture onto the international political agenda, with various national politicians seeking to engage in a tit-for-tat blame-game, or to deny the problem exists. Consumer culture, then is difficult to relinquish or scale down as it has becomes both a major source of industrial production and employment. In addition it is a key mode of legitimation, a visible sign of the economic success and standing of a nation-state. Curbing consumption is not a popular option which means politicians, seek out ‘technological fix’ solutions which will allow the economy to proceed at full speed, but somehow clean up or recycle pollution and waste. Hence, the interest in the development of nanotechnology and other new technologies which will allegedly produce waste-eating organisms, along with the interest in more efficient forms of power such as the hydrogen engine, or nuclear fusion energy. If consumer culture is central to the contemporary neo-liberal increasingly globally integrated economies of nation-states, and politicians’ electoral success depends upon economic growth, to seek to constrain consumption becomes the unpopular and potentially unelectable option. (xvi-xvii)

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And then this question...

>And what light might be at the end of the tunnel? (What is the way out, if you can think of any?)

If nothing else, we can raise our consciousness. Be aware of the patterns so that when the opportunity presents itself we can recognize and change them. Be proactive on a social and political level. I'll have to add to this later, or we can PM or something, otherwise I'll never finish this comment.