Quotes About Commodification

Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is.

Two accusations against our political inheritance have lodged in the brains that I have examined in this book: first, that 'capitalist' society is founded on power and domination; second, that 'capitalism' means 'commodification', the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.

Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.

The effect of pornographic fantasy is to 'commodify' the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price.

We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

I call tennis the McDonald's of sport - you go in, they make a quick buck out of you, and you're out.

Strange, mused the Director, as they turned away. Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays, the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicating of existing games.

He believed the best use of human beings was as compost or incubators.

The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.

Factory farming is the attitude that commodifies sentient life.

But as Michael Sandel, a Harvard philosopher, explained in his 2012 book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, we have moved from accepting a market economy to creating a market society, one in which everything is seen through the prism of price.

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

The sheer magnitude and sameness of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods that Americans have grown to expect can be really disorienting.

The whole world is being 'deculturalized' into a uniform 'Coca-Cola society,' wanting and needing an American way of life.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

How do you take a medium seriously when it is so laced with high decibel reminders to run right out to your supermarket, your drug store, your friendly car dealer, your favorite department store and buy.... That's the twentieth century marching song — buy!

One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs -- a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days.

All rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude.

This idea of 'cool capitalism' is still capitalism. It doesn't matter if Elon Musk quotes Nas.