The planned obsolescence of other people: Consumer culture and connections in a precarious age

Abstract

Recent scholars note that the hidden appeal of modern commodification is in its false promise to resolve our ambivalence about relationships and eliminate the anxieties and uncertainties of contemporary connection, care and intimacy. The rise of ‘insecurity culture’ – through the spread of job and relationship insecurity – increases the uncertainties that consumer culture must assuage. This article uses 50 in-depth interviews to explore the ways in which adults manage this uncertainty in relationships at work and with friends in the community through consumer culture. Compared with data presented elsewhere, in which informants use spending to convey care and connection in efforts to resolve the ambivalence of oft-insecure relationships, this paper documents a consumerist ideology that pervades their talk about relationships at work and with friends. I define this ideology by its component parts: choice, authenticity and people's replaceability. While informants use material consumption to connect, then, the consumerist ideology in their talk frequently serves to dislodge their commitments, working paradoxically to subvert the very relationships they seek to forge.

Keywords:

• consumption
• friendship
• work
• insecurity
• ambivalence

Acknowledgements

This article is based on research supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the Sloan Work-Family Early Career Development Grant; and was written with support from the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia and the Bankard Fund for Political Economy. Versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Being Human in a Consumer Society’ conference at the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, Spain, and the seminar on ‘Gender and the Two Sides of the Market: Caregiving, Flexibility and Insecurity,’ held at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. I thank these kind audiences as well as Arlie Hochschild, Marianne Cooper, Cameron MacDonald, Jennifer Petersen, Jennifer Cyd Rubenstein, Denise Walsh, Christine Williams, Gertraud Koch as editor of the journal's special edition, and three anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Roscoe Scarborough for excellent research assistance.