The Digital Age And the Zenith of Mass Consumption
How technological society accelerates our consumption of endless production
In mass society, the law of supply and demand no longer functions organically. You don’t build a horseshoe for your neighbor who needs one because he asked you to make it. Instead, you create a factory that produces horseshoes and flood the market with them. But once that market fills up, your business plateaus. And in mass society, you cannot plateau, because to cease growing is to fail. Failure is unacceptable. Perpetual growth becomes the only option.
This shift fundamentally changes how we think about work and its relation to our products. We no longer make products for our people, our village, our city, or the local army. Instead, we produce for an abstract audience, an ideal consumer. What begins locally (perhaps in your village or city or province) eventually scales to mass production. Things change. We no longer make seventy different kinds of casks for our winery; we make twelve standardized versions because they’re mass-produced. Diversity lessens. Standardization increases.
But there’s a problem here, perhaps not so subtle. If you must always be creating, always growing, always expanding, you will never be satisfied with local, organic growth connected to place and specifically designed for the people around you. Consider clothing: it used to be that many clothes were made, manufactured, or at least modified by local tailors. Nowadays, they’re mass-produced, largely uniform, and stylistically tame (with some exceptions, of course). Individuality slows as mass production increases.
So companies must find new markets: overseas expansion, international reach. Constant growth is imperative. If you don’t grow, it’s a crisis.
In digital society, mass production reaches its zenith
The issue I want to address is how digital society represents the zenith of mass production and mass consumption. Digital products can be consumed in the blink of an eye, consumed again and again without end. We mass-produce content (TikTok, YouTube), and these platforms not only produce content at scale but use us to create it for free. Millions of pieces of video and audio content are created, and millions (probably billions) are consumed every minute of every single day. It’s endless. There’s no end to the movement of swiping a thumb across the screen.
We swipe across smooth, flat, easy, frictionless, resistance-less screens, and more product appears. More consumption happens. Ad revenue grows. Watch time increases. There’s no limit to the amount of product created and consumed. This is mass society on steroids. The digital age is, so far, the zenith of our ability to produce and consume, and we continue expanding into new markets as more people digitalize.
But as more and more of the world goes digital, I wonder: what happens when we reach everyone? Will we find more ways to produce, more ways to consume, faster and faster? Will brain implants enable us to consume more? Will wearable glasses allow us to watch multiple short videos simultaneously, to experience hybrid digital events all at once? Will we simply watch four shorts instead of one to quadruple our consumption?
I don’t know. But I do know the world we inhabit is characterized by endless consumption, endless production, and the resulting loss of individuality.
The sameness of everything
Everything is the same now. Nothing feels different. Yes, there are holdouts: places where uniqueness survives, people who hold to the light of art. We must cultivate those areas. But in general, mass society (mass digital society) has created the sameness of everything. AI accelerates this trend.
All answers are the same. All AI writing sounds the same. All prompts begin to sound the same. Nothing changes because everything must be standardized to be consumed by the maximum number of people for the sake of GDP.