Transcript
BENJAMIN BARBER: Let me just try to summarize, I can't obviously in this period do more than summarize an argument, and though this is a book that is critical of consumerism, I will forgive you if you want to buy the book at the back of the room and consume it. As I said on the Colbert Report when I was on there and Colbert introduced me as the guy who was there to sell his book against consumerism, as I said, if you're addicted to pills, think of it as the last pill you have to take to get over your addiction to pills, and that's roughly its position here.
Let me talk about what I'm trying to do in the book because this is not simply another book about consumerism. We know that conspicuous consumption, commercialization, commodification, shopaholism, these are features of the landscape that commentators and writers have been talking about way back before Vance Packard and "The Hidden Persuaders," so that we know the critique of advertising. It's a very old one. Tom Frank wrote an early about it, advertising in the 1960s and its relationship to the counterculture. So the phenomena I'm looking at, a highly commercialized society in which many goods that were not originally material have become commodified and material and in which the commercial culture tends to push out everything else is not itself a new phenomenon. But I do want to suggest it has now reached a point where there is a critical change in the impact of that commercial culture such that it now threatens democracy and also capitalism itself in the way at least I want to understand capitalism.
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