Lost in Consumption: The Age of the Consumatronic Zombie

Global industrial society may have successfully catered to the primal impulses of food, comfort and ownership, but it would end up blatantly neglecting humanity’s most basic emotional needs. When we created this civilisation, we somehow thought that if we solved issues of scarcity, efficiency and comfort, everything else would fall into place. We thought we were solving the big issues when in fact, we were shoving them all under the carpet.

As we embraced the comforts of a consumatronic existence, we virtually abandoned our inner world. Surrender was total and unconditional. With few exceptions, we became morally unconscious, largely disowning the parts of ourselves from which we used to draw our self-awareness, perspective, and purpose. As more of us today fail to even recognize our own emotions, it is no wonder we feel lost. A human who is unable to look into themselves is a dead human. A human who has stopped questioning reality has effectively lost their access to reality. They are no longer sentient. Many organisms we consider non-sentient have at this stage become more sentient than us. They are fully awake, immersed in objective reality, deeply grounded in every second of their existence. This is not something you can say about humans anymore.

The rapid loss of consciousness humans experience today is the direct result of the commoditisation of self-awareness itself within the capitalist matrix. We communicate through apps. We feel through sponsored videos. And we see the world through other people’s propaganda. As humans became obsessed with turning themselves into machines, they opened the door to the bulldozers. Endless ancient forests of emotions were cut down to make space for the technobrutalism of a transactional society driven by profit. After the industrial revolution, some emotions were allowed to crawl back in and fill the gaps of an otherwise hideous technological dystopia, much like weeds repopulating a former industrial site. But it was too little too late. By this time, we had already become pawns in someone else’s chess game. The necrocapitalist dystopia had enslaved us, and why wouldn’t it: it has no heart, and if it does, it is a very different type that we will never understand, let alone be understood by it.

When consumption becomes a compulsion, the human enters their consumatronic state: a low-consciousness existence where any genuine sense of self has been confiscated. Consumatrons reclaim a semblance of their previous consciousness through the acquisition of ready-made personalities affixed to the goods they purchase. With their own consciousness virtually decomissioned, consumatrons desperate for a sense of self turn to prefabricated versions of consciousness conveniently provided by the necroeconomy at a price. Identity loses all internal referencing and becomes a product. It is now transactionally defined, available for purchase or short-term lease much like a borrowed Halloween costume.

Through this process capitalism managed to own our innermost parts, the ones we thought would never be up for sale. We’ve been pimped by this system like no other whore before: after starving us of natural dopamine, capitalism now sells it back to us in miniscule increments in the form of products, likes, apps and cat videos. We have lost sovereignty over our inner world simply because there is no space left for it. Our cognitive capacity has been saturated by the white noise coming from product placements and AI slop.

Mature, adult consumatrons eventually enter a state of generalised cognitive retardation as the necroeconomy thinks, buys, and decides for them. Having forgotten what it feels like to be sovereign, the consumatron settles for the counterfeit identity it has purchased. It feels almost real, after all, it is reassuringly endorsed by their brand of choice: the party they vote for, the profession they practice, the clothes they wear, the celebrity they have never met but who they’ve chosen to religiously emulate: even though the celebrity itself is nothing but a made up, sponsored, fake person. Customization options are infinite, perfecting the illusion that the consumatronic zombie has single-handedly evolved themselves through their own free will into something truly unique and individual. At a price, of course.

Consumatrons are former homo sapiens whose sovereignty has been compromised in exchange for the intravenous salary drip of the necroeconomy. Any human living in a late-stage capitalist dystopia is ultimately a zombie: drawing whatever sense of self they may have from ready-made, hyper-vivid illusions made to order by someone else. The “final product” is forever adjustable and customizable, something the consumatron appreciates: it allows them to maintain the illusion that they are in control of their identity as they build on it through the purchase of accessories and added personalities that bring them ever so much closer to the stereotypes they have chosen to conform to: a specific face structure, a career, fashion style or home decor.

The bigger their identity hole, the harder the consumatron has to work to find meaning and purpose in their manufactured existence. Deep down they are still human, but they’ve lost their way back to their humanity. They roam the dystopia in a disoriented state, busy consumer bees working to perfect themselves, having been convinced by the Unhappiness Machine that they are virtually worthless.

As more of us become consumatrons, society falls into a collective existential depression where nothing feels real except for the meaningless chase of the latest trends by spiritually mutilated humans that were taught, from a very early age, to hate themselves and seek emancipation in only one place: products. We are constantly made aware of our human imperfections by a psychonomy which recognized very early on that insecure, selfish and narcissistic consumatrons will buy more stuff while at the same time become ideologically and politically inert. This was a double win for capitalism and the cleptocratic oligarchy that orchestrates the consumaverse.

Capitalism employed a tried and tested method to convert humans to consumatrons: mentally injuring them first, then offering them a “cure”. The psychological damage that capitalism’s hypocrisy inflicted on humans was the equivalent of taking food away from a hungry person and replacing it with heroin. Industrial mass production obliterated the individual by homogenising society, while a marketing and advertising sector pretended to do exactly the opposite: worship the individual, helping them “reclaim” their individuality through retail compulsions.

After cleverly taking much of our identity away, this system tried to sell it back to us for a fee. Mental illness became the biggest money maker in the late-stage capitalist dystopia, sustaining an entire circular economy of psychological trauma: we are so mentally damaged by this system that we spend the rest of our life buying products that promise to heal the psychological disfigurement we’ve been subjected to.

Human beings in the capitalist dystopia grow up incomplete and unbalanced, becoming perfect targets for profit. Deprived of the formative experiences and stimuli the physical and natural world used to provide, they are more susceptible than ever to mental illness and the aggressive onslaught of the technological dystopia they are being asked to live in.

Even though our minds are being tricked by this dystopia into an illusion of self, our bodies can still tell what is real from what isn’t. The inability of modern humans to access and query their inner world by themselves, without the aids of the dystopia, results in lives that feel more like out-of-body experiences. The emptiness of this colourless, odourless, vegetative existence is no accident: it is there precisely so it can be filled with products. This economic system does its very best to make us feel as vacant and lifeless as possible, so that we spend our whole life desperately trying to heal our trauma through consumerism.

Like children given everything in life but never allowed out of the house on their own, modern consumatronic humans are missing out on the most important part of life: themselves. As long as the sponsored walls of this consumatronic farm shield us from the genocides, tragedies and the ugliness that lies outside the fake metaverse, we will be unable to access ourselves: explore our vulnerabilities, fears, and the beauty of an unpolished but genuine life. As we lose the skills by which we can probe, query and question an increasingly artificial world in full crisis mode, our ability to see through this holographic consumaverse is disappearing. We are at the doorstep of a cognitive Armageddon where we become progressively dumber just as the virtual reality we created grows a brain of its own.

By far the greatest damage this dystopia inflicted on the human psyche was the loss of the ability to enjoy life on our own terms, to find fulfilment in simple things without FOMO, without some app watching us, without the artificial aids of the necroeconomy telling us how to feel, when to clap, when to cry and who to vote for. Capitalism redefined happiness as the ownership of products in order to effectively monetize it. But happiness has nothing to do with ownership, in fact it is not even about joy. Happiness is about being human: feeling all your feelings when you want to, how you want to. Happiness is about being real. In the consumatronic theme park everything looks polished and happy, but none of it is real. Happiness comes with a finite expiration date: served and sold as a perishable consumable that wilts quickly like flowers in a vase.

Our capitalist psychonomy thrives upon mental illness, and this is why the self was stolen from us: to make us the most empty, unfulfilled, and greedy versions of ourselves. But beyond the Netflix sedatives and holographic walls hiding the genocides taking place, real happiness does exist: in moments, in sudden twists and turns, in the richness and diversity of images, places and things to be experienced directly in the flesh, not as an item on the shelves of the consumaverse. All you need to do is be awake to it all. Happiness is earned by going on a journey, not by outsourcing it to AI. And this is why it will never be found within the confines of the necroeconomy. The place to look for it is the same it has always been: inside you.