And what if consumption has superseded itself with the advent of Internet advertisement?
Since commercials are now possible on global scale, while being contextually aimed at specific audiences, it becomes less and less interesting to mass-produce for crowds subjugated by manufactured desire for standardized objects. Manufacturing myth, like cars, TV’s or CD players, is no more necessary to reach a sufficient audience for your business. For you are no more limited to sell your goods on a purely local scale. With little investment, you can propose your Aberdeen-made blueberry and minth liqueur to a car mechanic in the suburbs of Beijing, who, just by chance, happens to like that sort of thing. If he’s in a hurry, you can even ship it with FedEx. All you have to do is to have your ad placed on spetialized sites (say “weirdliqueurs.com”): something youknowwho contextual ads and co. can take care of for you in no time.
What you can do, anyone can. Any product can be distrubuted and sold on global scale. You no more need to find yourself an optimal client nest beyond hills, seas and roadway crossings. You don’t need to spend thousands on commercials in general magazines that’ll only bring something if you sell millions of products. Small things can survive – many of them, in fact. And with the small things, the small desires for them. Many small desires that haven’t been manufactured for you by dinosaur brandmakers but that just happened to you, on last-year’s Seoul trip, say, where, looking at the Han river, you began to like that blueberry liqueur.
What this possibly means for our World is the end of mass production, mass labour, mass consumption, mass braindeath. Some time soon, you’ll make money by being creative again. And at this very moment, we’ll enter into the new age of diversified consumption.
As for the new pathologies of the eight billions of singularities to come, that is another story to be told by science-fiction.
