All Hollow

The more someone (quite literally) buys-in to the manufactured, packaged, polished images of commercialism and pop-cultural ephemera, the more dissatisfied and existentially hollow a person tends to feel. The consequences and intrinsic subjective burden of adopting (and absorbing as constitutively self-productive) within your own self these various aspirations towards beauty, wealth and endless consumer acquisition are generally not positive in nature. The endless sinkhole of reflexive self-definition through attachment to possessions, on a unified spectrum from mental to material and back again, provides a perfect consumer and productive subjectivity.

Turning this situation inside out: we can consider that the primary agency (and not-quite-subjectivity) in this relationship is fundamentally not the consumer; nor for that matter is it in this view the corporation or the various commercial self-interests so overtly prominent in the manufacturing and motley production and logistical networks which envelop consumer items and their targeted audiences. The primary agency and self-seeking driver of all this noise, dissatisfaction and economic turbulence is that of the amorphous, indistinct and distributed replication of culture and communication itself, and as instantiated in any one of us or any (other) component or artefact of consumer desire (on a broad spectrum from ballpoint pen to Lamborghini). The complex, emergent system of self-replicating information storage, transmission and communication is primary; it merely finds itself expressed most efficiently in ways which generate and reproduce those dissatisfied individuals and cartwheeling consumer markets and economies of desire.

The world reproduces itself through us and also through the alluring, cumulative fantasy of subjectivity and desire which it bestows upon us. We are also our own products and the curators of our selves. Cultivating a mental state of being calm, fulfilled, detached and well-balanced in such a world as this is quite positively an act of rebellion.