You have to make the shift from being a consumer in the economy to becoming an owner-and you do it by becoming an investor.
Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.
The thing that our system is designed to do is keep us alone and isolated in our little consumer bubble. And the most revolutionary act of all might be finding a community of like-minded people where you can talk about these issues and figure out what to do together.
My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.
Here in particular the idea of contextual communication - i. e. communicating the right message, at the right time to the right audience - seems to generate an increasing effect on the consumer in a manipulative way.
Well, the common enemy in North America is the Western consumer. The consumer has driven oil up to $50 a barrel so we have to have these wars. I think it's incumbent upon us to.
In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.
Different groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in life, and government guarantees of consumer protection.
In the last century the practice of medicine has become no more than an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry and the other aspects of the huge, powerful and immensely profitable health care industry. Medicine is no longer an independent profession. Doctors have become nothing more than a link connecting the pharmaceutical industry to the consumer.
You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.
The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.
What does a tax do? It takes either from the producer or the consumer a more or less sizable portion of the product destined in part to consumption and in part to savings, in order to apply it to less productive or even destructive ends, and more rarely to savings.
The main goal is not to complicate the already difficult life of the consumer.
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply.
The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer. . . . [Consumers] make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.
The Internet will win because it is relentless. Like a cannibal, it even turns on it own. Though early portals like Prodigy and AOL once benefited from their first-mover status, competitors surpassed them as technology and consumer preferences changed.
Go where your customers take you! For example, did you know that Sony's first product was a rice cooker? Since abandoning the rice cooker, it has merely managed to become the world's biggest consumer electronics company.
The reason for backing tracks is to not veer off too far from the record and have what the fans actually want to hear. Artists use backing tracks just so they can stay close to the record and what the consumer heard for the first time. It's not to be confused with lip synching or anything like that cos that's not happening at all.
