tetw:

A Tetw reading list

The Gollum Effect by Venkat Rao – Gollum is both employee and consumer. A prosumer locked in a death embrace with a product. He is a raving fan.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed by David Cain – Companies seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can…

Consumer Vertigo by Virginia Postrel – A new wave of social critics claim that freedom’s just another word for way too much to choose. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Inconspicuous Consumption by Virgina Postrel – African Americans not only have less wealth than whites with similar incomes, they also have more of their assets tied up in cars.

Sweatpants in Paradise by Molly Young – It is sometimes possible to define the depth of an experience by means of how radically it slows or hastens your sense of time. Swimming, fighting, nightmaring, enduring a migraine, having sex: these are all activities that move at exceptional rates. Shopping, too, and if you don’t believe me, just enter a mall before sundown and see how you feel when you reemerge into darkness.

How Not to Offend by Marshall McLuhan – If it is a duty to buy those appliances which free the body from toil and thus enable housewives not to hate their husbands, equally urgent is the duty to “be dainty and fresh.”

Nothing Grows Forever by Clive Thompson – How can we make the global economy work for 7 billion humans? Stop buying so much stuff.

The Truth About Money by Gregg Easterbrook – No matter how you chart the trends in earning and spending, everything is up, up, up. But if you made a chart of American happiness since the end of World War II, the lines would be as flat as a marble tabletop.

Selling Out by David McRaney – Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.