The Consumatronic 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” is a euphemism for the intravenous narcotics of consumption that numb the pain of living in a sick society:  the rent we struggle to pay, the life lost sitting in traffic, the boss who had a go at us 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.

But this shopfront, even though artificial, feels 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 of our lives, the ever-increasing list of things we do to survive this system.  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. 

Hostages to the illusion of safety and stability, we refuse to 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 to construct it.  We are too busy and at the same time too sedated to wake up from our consumatronic coma.  Besides, everyone else is doing exactly the same.  Surely all of this cannot possibly “collapse”?  

Necrocapitalism always does its very best to make sure we only see what’s on the surface of this 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 under the hood of this 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, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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