How Consumers are Like Zombies
The comparison between consumers and zombies is a powerful and unsettling metaphor that has been deployed by cultural critics, philosophers, and filmmakers to diagnose the pathology of consumer capitalism. It is not merely a colorful analogy; it reveals deep structural and phenomenological parallels between the living dead of horror films and the living consumers of advanced industrial societies.
Here is a systematic exploration of how consumers are like zombies.
1. The Automatism of Desire: Wanting Without Will
The zombie is defined by automatic, insatiable, undifferentiated appetite. It does not choose to hunger; it simply hungers. It does not deliberate on its object; whatever is before it becomes its object.
The Consumer Parallel: Consumer desire is increasingly automatic and non-cognitive. It is not a response to genuine need or reasoned preference, but a conditioned reflex triggered by advertising, product placement, and social media algorithms. The consumer does not choose to want; the want is implanted.
Loss of Autonomy: The Kantian subject, who freely gives the moral law to himself, is replaced by the consumer subject, who receives his desires from the market. He is heteronomous, not autonomous.
2. The Insatiability of Appetite: The Hunger That Cannot Be Sated
The zombie is characterized by perpetual, unquenchable hunger. No matter how many it consumes, it is never satisfied.
The Consumer Parallel: Consumer capitalism requires perpetual dissatisfaction. If consumers were ever content, the economy would collapse. Therefore, the system engineers hedonic adaptation—the treadmill of desire where each satisfaction merely opens a new lack. The new car becomes the old car; the new phone is obsolete in months. The consumer, like the zombie, is condemned to a hunger that can never be fully fed.
The Promised Satisfaction: Advertising promises fulfillment, but the product, once consumed, fails to deliver the promised transformation. The consumer, puzzled, shuffles toward the next object of desire.
3. The Mimeticism of Consumption: Following the Horde
Zombies move in swarms, herds, hordes. They do not act as individuals but as an undifferentiated mass, each one drawn to the same stimuli as all the others.
The Consumer Parallel: Consumer desire is radically mimetic (René Girard). We do not want things because we independently recognize their value; we want them because others want them. The frenzy of Black Friday, the queue for the new iPhone, the viral TikTok product—these are zombie swarms, each consumer drawn by the movement of the others.
Loss of Individuality: The consumer believes he is expressing his unique identity through his purchases, but he is actually performing pre-scripted, mass-produced subjectivities. He is a zombie dressed in branded clothing.
4. The Corporeality of Consumption: Eating Without Being Nourished
The zombie consumes flesh, but this consumption does not sustain or nourish. It is pure, sterile destruction.
The Consumer Parallel: Consumerism is oral, incorporative. We "devour" products, experiences, lifestyles. But this consumption does not nourish the soul. It leaves the consumer as empty as before, requiring ever more consumption to fill the void.
The Commodity as Dead Flesh: The commodity, under capitalism, is dead labor—the congealed remains of human creative energy. To consume it is to incorporate the dead. The consumer is a necrophagous being, feeding on the preserved corpses of human productivity.
5. The Loss of Interiority: The Hollow Self
The zombie has no inner life—no reflection, no memory, no anticipation, no remorse. It is pure exteriority, pure stimulus-response mechanism.
The Consumer Parallel: The consumer is increasingly defined from the outside. His identity is not an interior achievement of self-reflection but an exterior assemblage of branded commodities. He is what he buys. His interiority—his unique history, his moral struggles, his private hopes—is irrelevant to his function as a consumer.
The Phenomenological Reduction: The consumer lives on the surface of himself, a hollow man in a hollow world.
6. The Commodification of the Body: The Consumer as Consumable
The zombie is both consumer and consumed. It eats the living, but it is also dead flesh, a walking commodity.
The Consumer Parallel: Under surveillance capitalism, the consumer is the product. His attention, his data, his browsing history, his biometric information—these are extracted, packaged, and sold. He consumes commodities, but he is himself a commodity to be consumed by advertisers and platforms.
The Cannibalistic Circle: The consumer consumes the products produced by the system, and the system consumes the consumer's life-time, attention, and subjectivity. It is a closed loop of mutual devouring.
7. The Pandemic of Consumption: The Infection of Desire
Zombie outbreaks are pandemics. The condition is transmitted through a bite; each victim becomes another zombie.
The Consumer Parallel: Consumerism is an infectious disease. It spreads through visual contact (advertising), social proximity (peer pressure), and digital networks (social media influencers). Each consumer, once infected, becomes a vector, transmitting the virus of desire to others through display, recommendation, and envy.
The End of the World: In zombie films, the pandemic eventually consumes everything. There is no outside, no uninfected sanctuary. In consumer capitalism, there is no outside to the market. Every human activity, every relationship, every moment of life is potentially commodifiable. The consumer-zombie has inherited the Earth.
8. The Utopian Promise: What the Zombie Lacks
The zombie is defined by what it has lost—consciousness, will, interiority, mortality, humanity. It is the living dead, the animate corpse.
The Consumer Parallel: The consumer, in this metaphor, has lost something essential: the capacity for genuine need, autonomous desire, and non-commodified satisfaction. He has forgotten what it is to want something because it is truly needed, to create something for its own sake, to be satisfied with enough.
The Critique: The zombie consumer is not a biological mutation but a social construction. He has been made, not born. And what has been made can be unmade.
Conclusion: The Wake-Up Call
The metaphor of the consumer-zombie is not a counsel of despair but a diagnosis aimed at awakening. It says: You are asleep. You are dead while you live. You are devouring without nourishment, moving without direction, desiring without will. This is not the life of a human being.
The zombie is the negative image of the human. It is what we become when we lose the capacities that define our humanity: critical reason, autonomous will, genuine need, authentic relationship, and the ability to say "enough."
To recognize the consumer-zombie in ourselves is the first act of de-zombification. It is to open our eyes, to remember what genuine hunger feels like, to withdraw from the swarm, and to ask, with the ghost of philosophy: "What do I truly need? What is worth wanting? What kind of life is worthy of a human being?"
The zombie does not ask these questions. The consumer, in his zombified state, does not ask them either. But the consumer, unlike the zombie, can wake up. The metaphor is therefore also a hope: that the dead may rise again—not as monsters, but as human beings.
