The 21st Century Dissident
In such a tumultuous world we live in, we seek resistance in all that we do, and many of us realize the "power" of our consumption. We live in a world of consumption, they say, and thus we exist as consumers, capable of affecting the world through our consumption choices. Right? The notion of a consumer society that is still prevalent today originated from the postmodern era of philosophy (the 1990s). The basis of their argument is that the world has shifted in the past few decades, and so has capitalism. "We are at the end of production," Jean Baudrillard posits. Capitalism (specifically in the global North) is no longer reliant on its mass-production Fordist model that manufactures goods based on functionalism (aka use-value), but has moved forward to a type of capitalism that hinges on consumption of meanings, concentrated in the form of the sign-value. This post-production stage of capitalism, as stated by Baudrillard, is a society where "everything...is im...
