The Consumatron Theme Park

Necrocapitalism manages to hide its dark agenda behind the most colourful, mesmerizing shopfront: an endless theme park of consumerism, where our physical senses succumb to the lights, the smells, the sounds, the promises of a better “life”. “Retail therapy” as it is called, is a euphemism for the intravenous narcotics of consumerism which numb the pain of living in a sick society: the rent we struggle to pay, the life lost sitting in traffic, the boss who just had a go at us for no reason just half an hour ago. The psychonomy has no choice but to become even more controlling and oppressive, as 8 billion people fight over dwindling resources. This will require an ever more cunning, hypnotising and sinister unhappiness machine of consumerism.

But this shopfront, even though completely artificial, is what feels most vividly real to the vast majority of us: work, coffee, shopping, ice cream, a walk in the park, a dinner in the city, a doctor’s appointment. Everything is working like clockwork, down to the last detail. We feel safe, secure, and tranquilized by all the busyness in our lives, the ever increasing list of things that we have to do to survive within this system. If nothing else, we have the excuse of being too busy to wake up from our consumatron coma. Besides, everyone else is doing exactly the same. Surely all of this cannot just “collapse”?

We happily accept this manufactured normality which has been carefully drawn and coloured-in by our favourite brands – and we believe all of it, every single bit of it, because we desperately want to feel reassured. We are hostage to the sense of safety and stability that we must secure no matter what, refusing to even entertain the thought that maybe this colourful theme park is built on top of a cemetery populated with the graves of everything and everyone who had to die in the process of building all the fun rides and hot dog stands. Maybe the cemetery is set on top of a dark swamp, ready to swallow and recycle everything as the ground becomes too heavy to hold the jenga towers of this civilisation.

Necrocapitalism always does its very best to make sure that we only see what’s on the surface of the swamp, like a car salesman about to rip us off. We only see a freshly painted car. We never see the ugly mechanics of the system that lies under the hood of this necrocapitalist vehicle, and the nasty fuel it runs on. If we were to open the engine and take a look, we would see a rusty, overheating pile of junk ready to explode. We would see natural destruction, climate catastrophe, extinction and exploitation, the real drivers behind this beautifully illuminated, ephemeral theme park. The quicksand is getting hungry.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books