Quotes About Commodification

Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous—they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup. (In account books, slavers called their human cargo "pieces," a revealing term.)

money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

either they're trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig's Uncle Bertie's left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers' tears) or

Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.

Slaves today are cheaper than they have ever been. The cost of slaves has fallen to a historical low, as little as $10.

The process of viewing another as consumable, as something, is usually invisible to us. Its invisibility occurs because it corresponds to the view of the dominant culture. The process is also invisible to use because the end product of the process - the object of consumption - is available everywhere.

Marriage is the commodification of affection, copulation, and, reproduction.

Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

One of the drawbacks of sleeping with whores, he thought lazily. You got what you paid for, and not a goddamn thing more.

Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'. Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.

In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur. Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur.

The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need. If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like Gunsmoke, the situation would not be so grave. The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.

They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Der Verfall des Schenkens spiegelt sich in der peinlichen Erfindung der Geschenkartikel, die bereits darauf angelegt sind, daß man nicht weiß, was man schenken soll, weil man es eigentlich gar nicht will. Diese Waren sind beziehungslos wie ihre Käufer.

Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

ask you to think a little bit about what the media's products are, which I put out as a question before. Are they selling an entertainment thing? Are they selling news? Are they selling information? No. They're selling you. They're selling you to advertisers. You are their product. There's no question about that. So

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

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.

Anything pretty,' Claire will tell you, 'it's only for sale because no one wants it.

It helps to know you're not any more responsible for how you look than a car is. You're a product just as much. A product of a product of a product.

The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.