Image: Marginal Utility

Marginal Utility

By Rob Horning

When shopping nirvana shrivels away like the mega mall growing incrementally smaller behind you at the end of a long day, and buyer's remorse begins gnawing at your nerves, and you begin to fret the futility of it all, Rob Horning's blog, "Marginal Utility", steps in to stimulate your woefully neglected neocortex. Read, laugh, weep, but above all: realize. You'll feel smarter again in no time.

Sharing: The New Imposition

[5.Oct.09] :. Twitter is less about disseminating information than it is about subjects trying to make themselves feel more real, ontologically speaking, in a increasingly mediated world.
 

Your Brain is the New Factory Floor

[10.Aug.09] :. "[M]ore and more, 'production' -- that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations -- has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor..."
 

The Myth of the Rational Market

[21.May.09] :. How silly we were to believe that investors always acted with predictable rapacity and efficiency.
 

Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

[27.Mar.09] :. In a sense, panic is an imprecise word to describe the emotion of financial crashes; paranoia better suits.
 

Doomed to Dilettantism

[5.Feb.09] :. Information has never been easier to come by, yet it's never been harder to turn information into knowledge.
 

Depression Modern

[9.Jan.09] :. Americans can't afford to spend like they used to, but is frugal living ever really going to become trendy?
 

The Database of Self

[2.Oct.08] :. Technology's ability to digitize everything threatens to reduce curiosity to trivia collecting and our sense of self to TK.
 

Brand Evangelists

[25.Jul.08] :. Companies would like product placements in our personal narratives, and marketers are eager to show them how it can be done.
 

Hurray for Hype

[30.May.08] :. Enjoying popular culture is necessarily a social experience; hype supplies the ground rules.
 

Renters: Enemies of the Ownership Society

[4.Apr.08] :. In light of the recently burst housing bubble and the resulting inflation, this renter is having a hard time maintaining sympathy for borrowers who went in over their heads, buying homes with far more space than needed.
 

The Design Imperative

[29.Jan.08] :. No longer a prole with a dirty toilet, thanks to that fancy toiletbrush in hand, one becomes a fledgling design critic and a curator of the tastefully appointed museum that used to be a one-bedroom apartment.
 

The Attention of Last Resort

[18.Jan.08] :. Instead of promoting the sharing of ideas and opinions among friends, social networking sites promote posturing and marketing, friendship as spectatorship, surveillance, and imitation, and give us the attention we crave.
 

Paul Krugman’s ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’

[7.Dec.07] :. Krugman may be hoping to discredit the very label conservative, so that it could be used as a cudgel the way liberal had been used by the Limbaughs of the world the past few decades.
 

Financial Fantasies

[20.Nov.07] :. What truly moves markets is a mystery, but what moves humans to participate is pure fantasy.
 

Inevitable Consumption

[19.Oct.07] :. Was the housing bubble symptomatic of the infantile mentality that Benjamin Barber, in his recent book, insists that shopping-mad Americans have had foisted upon their selves? Or is there a different lesson to draw?
 

Too Many Mirrors

[17.Aug.07] :. Style is often described paradoxically as an indescribable quality, as something timeless, which is precisely what makes it so useful to the fashion industry.
 

Elitist Dumpster Divers

[13.Jul.07] :. Freegans might seem like environmental crusaders, but they parasitically glean the leavings of those they deride, the people who have actually struggled to make a difficult peace with an imperfect economic system.
 

Disposable Personality

[18.May.07] :. We've grown accustomed to the planned obsolescence of our products; we assuage the continual threat of obsolescence of our personalities by continually changing, refreshing ourselves like an email inbox.
 

The Pleasures of Propaganda

[16.Mar.07] :. Animated Soviet Propaganda, a recently released collection of cartoons the Russians commissioned to indoctrinate children with the presumed moral superiority of communism, reminds us how nice it is to have prejudices aroused and confirmed.
 

The Fear of Success

[9.Feb.07] :. It seems we've come to believe that it is better to feel like we lost the game than to dare consider that the refs threw it. Such passivity spills over into self-doubt, which further fuels the fear of success.
 

The Patent Medicine Paradigm

[15.Dec.06] :. Take this and you'll feel better. Today's branded products work just like the patent medicines of old.
 

Freedom from Choice

[13.Nov.06] :. Thanks to an ever diversifying market, our consumer choices are supposed to reveal precisely what we prefer. But is all this choice overwhelming our personal preferences and sweeping us up into futile overconsumption?
 

Virtual Utopia

[9.Oct.06] :. Utopias we can recognize as such are doomed to failure, forever resigned to fantasy. Is online universe Second Life such a place, where one experiments harmlessly with fantasy, or is it an organic necessity, an inevitable outgrowth of an intolerable present?
 

Sympathy for the Middleman

[15.Sep.06] :. Despite mounting debt, it's imperative that we continue to laugh at calls for austerity and conservation, and celebrate those noble marketers that keep us consuming -- whoops, I mean innovating.
 

Oh, the Tangled Webs We Weave

[21.Aug.06] :. The apparent escape into the cultural niches available online will eventually lead directly into data-collecting advertisers' traps.
 

flag Creativity

[14.Jul.06] :. Like Calvinists who stockpile life's finer things in hopes of shoring up their sense of themselves as elect, hipsters surround themselves with the trappings of creativity and trust that this substantiates their claim to being cool.
 

The Underground Empire

[8.Jun.06] :. Are the outposts of underground culture -- bookstores, record stores, etc. -- places where American curiosity and enthusiasm are kept alive, or places where ingrained snobbery is allowed to snuff it out?
 

Headphones and Head Space

[5.May.06] :. The quest for a perfect synthesis of public and private existence may lead us to online 'metaverses' where we don't really exist at all.
 

The Attention Economy

[13.Apr.06] :. Amatuer online blogs and MySpace pages give currency to a growing 'attention economy', wherein the most successful have garnered the most flattering friends - and advertisers.
 

The Snacks Attack Society

[9.Mar.06] :. Shopping, cooking, eating, washing dishes... it's all such a time-sucking, distracting chore. Best to wrap it all up in plastic and hurry it along, lest lost time eat at you.
 

Shopping Paranoid

[14.Feb.06] :. Beware, be wary on your hunt for the perfect (you name it); for you are the hunted.
 

Information Whirlwind

[10.Jan.06] :. The prestige of sharing an extensive downloaded music library is wearing so thin that it's becomming almost as transparent as that ever-blowing cyber wind.
 

Holiday Shopping: The Good Fight

[14.Dec.05] :. Warriors of Consumption, Black Friday Masses, The Joys of Discretionary Spending, The Privilege of Spending.
 

The Usefulness Trap

[16.Nov.05] :. Removed from the velvet-draped display; torn from the colorful packaging; off the rack and in the closet... it's just not all it seemed to be. The use value falls so short of the hype value of commodities, that actual ownership and use of a thing is disappointing if not disillusioning.
 

The Customer Is Always Wrong

[4.Oct.05] :. Among other things, customer service is little more than survelliance with a smile. The end of craven customer service could return some dignity to the world of consumption.
 

Buy Me Beautiful

[9.Sep.05] :. Thanks to cosmetic surgery, our bodies are now commodities.
 

The Consumer in the Kitchen

[12.Aug.05] :. Nixon and Khrushchev's kitchen debate taught Americans that our citizenry is 'free'-- to shop.
 

The “Me” Syndrome

[8.Jul.05] :. Marginal Utility -- The 'Me' Syndrome -- The glamorization of the rich inner life is the primary achievement of the culture industry, since what it sells is the kind of ripe fantasy that only one with a rich inner life would prefer to actual living.
 

Inefficient Intimacy

[13.Jun.05] :. Pornography simplifies sex by making it a commodity. In the desire to accumulate more, intimacy is irretrievably lost.
 

Meters, Purple People Eaters and The Revolution Betrayed

[10.May.05] :. On Taste tracking software; is it an anonymous angel? or something rather sinister?
 

In Search of Real Amateurs

[13.Apr.05] :. Should the majority rule in terms of what art our society makes? Audience-vote-driven entertainment effaces the art being voted on and supplants it with the audience's self-regard, so that it all merely reflects the power the audience feels. Expertise on the subject is irrelevant; being heard and counted among the voters is all that matters.
 

Indecent Consumption

[9.Mar.05] :. Why try to form a labor union at your local Wal-Mart when you can strike an equally seditious blow against the system by jerking off to photos of women in latex underwear? No matter how much we label pornography's users as 'addicts' or 'degenerates' and tout religious values, porn is not an immoral anomaly; it's a capitalist inevitability.
 

An Etiology of Boredom

[26.Jan.05] :. In a land of plenty, the commodity of respect -- the sense of being socially recognized -- continues to be rationed, rendered scarce.
 

Traveling the Public/Private Divide

[5.Jan.05] :. Portable entertainment and communication technology has obliterated the distinction between public and private spaces, and the inconsiderateness that accompanies these devices is fast becoming the public status quo, which drives more people to tune out, hastening the spiral toward complete incivility.
 

Celebrities and the Barnum Effect

[1.Dec.04] :. Ah, the shine of a pretty new thing, the clever ploy of its packaging. We enjoy the fantasy that such things arouse, and then, when shoddy reality sets in, we tip our caps to the ingenuity by which we were led to indulge the fantasy.
 

Thrift Store Gentry

[3.Nov.04] :. The thrift store shopper needs to turn a misfortune into a virtue; that of the conscientious non-conformist.
 

Convenience and the Cost of Free Music

[6.Oct.04] :. Horning is not sure if he should admire those who maintain a personal ethical code and refrain from downloading free music -- a function the record industry has enabled -- or despise them for holding back the revolution.
 

We’re All Walking Sandwich Boards, These Days

[15.Sep.04] :. Perhaps people seem so much like ads because ads now make up the only universally acknowledged public discourse; ads are the only kind of communication now accepted in public space.
 

The New Sumptuary Laws for Modern-day Subjects

[12.Aug.04] :. Now that the unwashed masses can afford dry cleaning, ads must teach the non-elite that freedom 'from' want is really just the freedom 'to' want.
 

The Mystery of Consumer Demand, or Personality as Inventory

[14.Jul.04] :. Theories about consumers have change over the years, as they should. These days, we see ourselves as the sum total of the things we possess, as opposed to the sum total of things we have experienced.
 

The Myth of the Rebel Consumer

[16.Jun.04] :. One can use the thrift store purchase of a Herb Alpert record to express dismay at the current state of the music industry, and use the coffee grinder at home to thumb one's nose at Starbucks and somehow feel righteous about such seemingly savvy shopping methods. But expressing one's politics through what one buys is no politics at all; at best it is but a vote of assent for the existing economic arrangements.