#hyper consumerism

And this doesn't only happen in new fandoms of new media that are already corrupted with hyper consumerism and programmed obsolescence thanks to corporations turning fandom into another profiting tool, I'm seeing this on fandoms who existed before this consumerism/corporativism frenzy. Back before all of this dystopic development, one could post their silly hc of their blorbos and wake up the next day with hundreds of notes and other people branching off of them. It felt like a community who shared the same tastes. Do that in nowadays fandom culture, you'd be lucky if it ends up reaching 20 notes.

It's either producing and producing and PRODUCING high quality stuff and manage to create a small community around it or better stay in the sidelines consuming, consuming, and consuming. Because your contributions will never be enough to satisfy this horrifying mindset that has been installed in our minds thanks to subtle yet insistent propaganda:

And sadly, we probably won't go back to the good old days in where your silly 100 words crack drabbles of your blorbos could become fandom classics, or when a silly doodle would end up sparking a whole AU within the canon material. We are part of a disgusting and depressing corporative internet, and sadly, we're here forever. And it becomes more and more true with the death of livejournal, the disappearance of dreamwithd and kink memes and with the turning of fanfic.net into an adware farm.

Maybe I'm in the wrong, and things will end up changing in the future. We may end up creating another internet like the one from the past. But with how the world is regressing and how corporativism, programmed obsolescence and hyper consumerism culture are praised to high end, is hard to have hope.

It would be hard to argue that Disney is at the forefront of producing movies critical of society or require the viewer to face existential questions about our everyday existence. However, Wall-E (2009) proves to be one of the most effective and entertaining critiques of consumer society in recent popular culture. Set in the future, Wall-E depicts hyper-consumerism as the catalysis for ecological degradation and the production of an uninhabitable earth for organic life (apart from the one surviving cockroach!). The viewer then gazes on a post-ecocide life, composed of ruined urban landscapes, a mass of defunct Wall-E robot units and mountains of compacted rubbish heaps produced when the Wall-E robots still functioned. The only sign of life being the one functioning Wall-E, who is the star of the film, and the robot’s one ‘friend’, the sole surviving cockroach that follows Wall-E on his daily chores.

The clear message of Wall-E is that humanity is heading for ecological crises if there are not major transformations in consumer habits. Indeed, international relations theorist Cynthia Weber, has argued that Wall-E undermines those market-based solutions to ecological problems put forward by liberalist like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The presence of the corporation Buy N Large throughout the film suggest that putting faith in the corporate sector and the market to solve environmental problems is one that, at least, needs to be questioned – or even abandoned. We then have a critique of liberal political and economic thought in Wall-E, which is unexpected for a Disney branded film.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Wall-E is representation of the human body. As a result of Earth being uninhabitable, those surviving humans have purchased places on Buy N Large cruise spaceships. The idea being that those lucky humans can spend their time in leisure waiting for the Earth to regenerate itself and become sustainable for organic life. The viewer is then given an idea of how a seemingly paradisiacal way of life with only consuming and no work could potentially transform the human body through the acceleration and intensification of consumerism. Rather than using their bodies for mobility, the human population of the Buy N Large spaceship use electronic hoovercrafts. The result is that the dependence on the hoovercraft transforms the human body and a process of de-mineralisation occurs where the density of the skeleton has decreased to a degree it no longer supports the weight of the obese occupants.

In addition, the hoovercrafts are also wired for consumerism and the occupant is plugged directly into Buy N Large advertisements and products, which produces a life where humanity can no longer have a perception or experience outside of consumerism. In other words, consumerism has becoming so omnipresent that it has become ubiquitous with everyday life and the consumer no longer is required to travel to the shops. Of course, we can dismiss Wall-E as far-fetched and fantasy, but those that are sceptical of the hyper-consumer body need only look as the Toyota I-Real concept car to realise capital is attempting to produce similar consumerist technologies that are represented in Wall-E. What Wall-E leaves the viewer is with a message to keep open spaces for non-consumerism before it is no longer possible to distinguish between the everyday and consumerism.

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