Or: good consumer as unsolvable problem

I used to know someone who I privately regarded as "the perfect consumer." This, because they were susceptible to all manner of advertising with practically no pushing—after one or two views of an advertisement brought to them by the cookie-driven algorithm, a package appeared: the latest cool sneakers, a vintage something-or-other, a set of trendy cocktail glasses. I found all of this embarrassing. How could someone be so comfortable filling their home with the stuff of Instagram ads? Their home acted as a sort of showroom for what money spent on the internet yields—plasticky, cheap things, things designed for brief use, dust collecting, and photographing.

It is mean-spirited to think of anyone this way, and also obtuse, since, as it turns out, anyone on social media, watching television or movies, or online shopping—AKA anyone in the world right now—is a perfect consumer to someone. Everyone can be and is targeted by ads. (I click on them often and can think of at least one instance—a pair of shoes, in fact—where I caved.)

The descriptor here—"perfect"—is a stretch, but I know at least that I am a very good consumer. I diligently keep up with shows that are released weekly, I scroll incessantly and pathologically, and I talk about all of it all the time. I myself feel like a machine for turning over stuff online; my schemes, whether I choose them or not, are getting other people to watch/read/listen to what I am, so that they might listen to what I have to say in the end. I'm writing good consumer:: at least partly for this reason, and it's worked out in some way—I am always tickled when someone mentions something I've written here that we haven't yet talked about, evidently admitting in a slanted way that they are keeping up. A good consumer of good consumer::—is that good consumer squared?

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I write this "bonus content" not as a manifesto but as a reminder to myself of what this project is, and as the summer slowly wraps up, marking the end of the project as you and I know it. As it turns out, it's hard to keep the critical wheels turning, and I'm not totally sure that I should be doing it for free and without some pretty intense editorializing. It’s getting less and less interesting, this project; it’s a project for the summer, for a time when pleasure-seeking and consuming becomes the priority. But now it’s the fall, and I’ve spent most of my money on things I’d rather not admit.

But I write this also as an exercise: to parse more closely what it is that led me to write in this tone which is dubious of my necessary incorporation into a capitalist society, and at times outright insufferable, but one which is also highly—actually, entirely—dependent upon the capitalist churn to function. What would happen if the Pixar movies, the weird posts, the bad Netflix shows, the podcasts disappeared tomorrow?

I consider myself a writer knowing that I am, in truth, a content creator, if also a failed one. I don't know what it says about me that I feel the need to get to the bottom of all of this: "content," "creation," "capitalism," "consuming."

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The other night at dinner I caught myself saying, "I always think about..." before trailing off into a memory I'd only recently thought of, once. I corrected myself—I didn't always think about that thing, or really think about it at all. I say that phrase a lot: "I always think about..." But it's rare that I regularly think about one specific thing, rather than an ambient stream of goings on and buzzwords and memories; this is spectacularly normal, in fact, despite the population I'm around frequently saying they always think about XYZ.

But I really do think about consuming stuff always, mostly because I can feel it all as a physical sensation, something my body wants to do and gravitates towards even as it knows that to scroll the phone, tweet the tweet, watch the movie, eat the food is not the right thing to do. This tension is, itself, consuming.

When I was in college I was obsessed, if briefly, with documenting how much plastic waste I created in a day, a granular and physical manifestation of what I'm doing now, in writing. I had an Instagram account dedicated to this act, when I was most interested (yet dubious—always dubious) in the concept of being "zero waste." The account was ugly photos of things I was throwing away; the account was deliberately ugly as an affront to the zero wasters of the era, who posted meticulously clean, green and glass and white interiors of waste-free kitchens. I understood myself as outside of that, but I couldn't square that I wanted it, too.

It was a weird thing to do—fine. But inspired nonetheless, and curious in that I wanted so badly to document, to see what I was wasting. Hence the granular and physical: I've shapeshifted into a thinking monster, the kind of person convinced only of what happens inside my head and its importance, not something as useless and frivolous as the trash I make every day. (This is kind of sad to me, writing it now.)

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But to be a good consumer is not to be a thinking monster, an internal person exclusively. Output requires input requires output here: if I want to continue writing about the things I consume, which is all the things I do every day, besides think, it requires that I buy something, or look at something behind an ad with a timer on it, or read a book that's been gifted to me (or that I've pirated, or that I’ve bought).

To be a good consumer is to be obedient, if a little petulant.

To be a good consumer is to be a capitalist. Isn't it?

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Lately I’m feeling I’ve got a knack for reviews, ouroboros of ego that I am, as if I haven’t made myself practice reviewing things in this little tone for nearly ten weeks now. I think reviewing is a little in my nature, though: for the past two years I was, by day, going to a campus either to grade or teach, or critique in workshops among my peers. By night—really, also by day, since time all runs together in grad school—I edited books, edited newsletters, read slush for a magazine, and wrote my own stuff. It’s in my bones, I think, to give feedback. It’s now in my bloodstream to frame any of it as consumption rather than something else, like participatory engagement or a career.

What I’m trying to say: this is a framing issue. Historians understand framing, or they should, as Howard Zinn so loudly and a little over-zealously does in the opening to his PEOPLE’S HISTORY; visual artists understand framing on levels I personally do not, to the point that they control seeing itself; and writers do think about framing, though I don’t think we ever quite talked about it this way in my MFA.

My writing—by which I mean my writerly presence on the page, that tone I did a poor job of explaining earlier—is the frame through which anyone reading my work is seeing the object I’m writing about. Which I obviate only because it is really fucking weird that I made the frame capitalist-yet-begrudging-of-capitalism; it’s, maybe, a bad frame. Or it’s a struggling on my part, at trying to get at the weirdness, which in this case is precisely the weirdness of being a consumer in and of a system you would really rather not be complicit in. It’s weird to write about that feeling, just as it’s weird to tweet about how much you hate capitalism from an iPhone in your air-conditioned bedroom. (I did once get this comment as a reply to an Instagram story, and I levelled with him. What are you suggesting, exactly? That I’m meant to love absolutely the conditions of my oppression under all circumstances? The guy thanked me for my earnest engagement if I remember correctly.)

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“from birth he was sickly and consumptive,” reads the example sentence for the Google definition of consumptive. Of course, that word doesn’t refer to consumption, but rather to having a wasting disease (especially tuberculosis). I knew this prior to googling mostly because I have, many times in my life, tried to incorrectly use consumptive. The metaphor writes itself.