Consumption. Mark Hudson

1The Meanings of Consumption

      Coachella is a music and arts festival that happens every April in the city of Indio, California. Coachella is so cool, so self-explanatory that the answer to the number one question on the website’s FAQ “But Why?” is “Because.” Its 2019 music headliners featured heavy hitters such as Ariana Grande. It puts the festive in festival with the Pantene Styling Lounge, which encourages people to “be at the top of your content game & get your hair styled with glittery gold accessories,” and the “Sound + Sun = Fun” experience, where “Wearing Bose Frames & pairing them with your phone doesn’t just give you music for hours & style for miles – it also unlocks exclusive audio content in the official Coachella app.” Its 2019 sponsor list runs from Absolut and Amazon to Uber and YouTube. The UK’s Sun deemed Coachella “one of the most ‘FOMO’-inducing events of the year” (Wakefield, 2019). For those, like ourselves, who need the urban dictionary to understand even outdated terms, FOMO is fear of missing out – the anxiety you experience from missing a crucial event, often brought on by viewing posts on social media.

Part of the story of Coachella revolves around the importance of the festival as a vehicle for marketing. The sponsors not only appear prominently on the webpage but they are integrated into the very event itself, putting their names on parties and activities. This may represent a change from some concerts of the distant past, such as Woodstock, but this marketing path has been well travelled by big events such as Lolapalooza, which debuted way back in 1991.

      What is also notable about Coachella and many similar culturally important events is that they are no longer merely events that people enjoy as consumers. They are also inputs into the production of something that had barely been conceived when Lolapalooza first grunged its way on stage. The 2019 Coachella festival was attended by the likes of Kendall Jenner, Olivia Culpo, Hailey Bieber, Gigi Hadid and Emma Chamberlain, some of the biggest influencers in the world. To take one from the list, Emma Chamberlain is an eighteen-year-old who, in 2019, had 8 million YouTube subscribers and another 7.7 million followers on Instagram. By some estimates she was earning around $2 million from the ads on her YouTube channel alone (Lorenz, 2019). Her product, distributed on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, is herself, or at least an infotainment version of her life. Influencers like Chamberlain make money by signing contracts with brands eager to have their products associated with people’s real life stories. Of course, the more followers an influencer has, and the better able they are to create sales for their sponsors, the bigger the contract. Chamberlain, for example, has a partnership with Hollister, which involves her posing for Instagram posts in its clothes. Our interest in their daily lives really functions – from their point of view and that of their sponsoring companies – only to make us into more enthusiastic consumers.

      Influencers are not only selling their public lives to promote consumption, but their ability to do so is determined by the creation of an aspirational, interesting and enviable lifestyle through the products that they consume. So their status is largely based on the careful curation of their own consumption. For an influencer, whose stock-in-trade is living a life that others want, a media feed without Coachella is an incomplete and below average product, like a car without air conditioning. The idea that people are worth following because of the interesting ways they create an identity through consumption demonstrates the increasingly strong connection between who a person is and what they consume.

Influencers also demonstrate how new technologies and platforms are designed for commercial purposes. Instagram was originally touted as a venue for people to share pictures with friends, but it quickly transformed into a marketing tool – both for the collection and sale of data about our consumer preferences to advertisers and as a more traditional advertising venue – in order to maximize its revenue stream.

      Do influencers represent a worrying new trend in which people famous for doing nothing other than showing off their lives peddle a shallow, materialistic and yet unattainable version of the “good life” to their impressionable followers? Should the idea that someone’s life can become a marketable, commercial product give us cause for concern?

What Are We Talking About? Consumption and Political Economy

      As its title suggests, this book is about consumption. What the title does not make clear is what we actually mean by that word. Consumption did not always mean what it does now. Back in the day, it meant the “using up” of things, like physical strength, which meant that it was used to describe the exhaustion of the body caused by tuberculosis (Trentmann, 2016). From this definition, it is clear that consumption had something of a negative connotation, associated with wastefulness and tragic wasting away.

The word “consumption” has benefited from a remarkable transformation to become associated with the pleasures of enjoying goods and services such as those offered by Coachella. Different scholars have put forward very different definitions, from the relatively narrow to the very broad. On the very broad end of the spectrum, in the discipline of economics, consumption generally means the use of goods and services by households (McCabe, 2015: 4–5). Historian Frank Trentmann defines consumption as “a shorthand that refers to a whole bundle of goods that are obtained via different systems of provision and used for different purposes” (Trentmann, 2012: 3). This broad definition allows him to place very different goods and services, acquired and used in a wide variety of ways, under the category of consumption. To use his examples, buying a Ferrari and turning on a shower are both consumption activities. For Trentmann, the key difference between the two is that one is a luxury, purchased to display your status in society, and the other is more of a necessity and done without any showy considerations. We might also add that the Ferrari is produced by a for-profit company, while the water that streams out of the shower is, for most people, provided by a utility, owned, controlled or heavily regulated by the government. Clearly, Trentmann’s definition can be applied across almost all societies, political economic systems and historical periods. This definition could be used to describe someone in the United States in 2019, buying (or stealing) a digital download, and someone two thousand years ago, eating a root vegetable pulled out of the ground for the communal pot in a hunter-gatherer society.

      Those opting for a narrower definition often attempt to distinguish between consumption done in different manners with different motives. Historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb define consumption in a consumer society as taking place in the context of the market, and in which people have sufficient discretionary income to buy for fashion and novelty rather than necessity and durability (McKendrick et al., 1982: 3). An extension of a consumer society’s attraction to fashion and novelty added by some scholars is that “wants and needs [are] infinitely stretchable” (Stearns, 2001: 16), so that people are willing to “take up everything that is endlessly produced” (Clarke et al., 2003: 27). This creates a distinction between the motives of people in a pre-consumer society – those who are satisfied with some (admittedly unspecified) level of comforts from consumption – and those in a consumer society – who behave in a manner which reflects what economists define as non-satiation of wants.

Writers taking the role of consumption in defining people’s goals and identities one step further often talk about consumerism, or a consumer society, as one in which “many people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display” (Stearns, 2001: ix). The addition in this definition is the “formulation