Market Segmentation: Autonomy, Empowerment, and Spent Youth

Marketplace vendors acknowledge, even boast, what they are doing: in business lingo, individuation of choice is "market segmentation," which is portrayed as consistent with a shift in general consumer patterns from family needs and wants to individual consumption. The child embedded in a family community makes a poor shopper. But the child liberated through marketing to become a four-year-old "individual" becomes an apt consumer capable even of being an "influencer" over income dispensed by subordinate parents. But in truth, such childhood autonomy only leaves the child vulnerable, unprotected, and susceptible to manipulation.

The misuse of terms like "autonomy" and "empowerment" to rationalize selling to children far too young to possess either liberty or judgment (the two key components of self-determining power) is typical of an infantilist ethos that reinforces consumer market ideology by providing corporate predators with an altruistic ethic to rationalize selfish ends. Genuine empowerment always treats the person as an end in herself and is defined by the domain of education, not advertising. It is measured by increased capacity to resist manipulation, not increased vulnerability to it. Hence infantilization is empowerment's antonym.

This is not an analysis drawn from the old Left cultural critique of capitalism that must be read into the marketplace. I repeat: it is what marketplace vendors acknowledge. The cultural pathology of late consumer capitalism effectively prioritizes consumerism at the expense of capitalism's traditional balance between production and consumption, work and leisure, and investment and spending. The behavior of the late consumer capitalist turns out to be remarkably unaccommodating to civilizing tendencies. It mimics infantile aggressiveness in striking ways. The consumer at once both imbibes the world of products and so conquers it and yet is defined via brands, trademarks, and consumer identity. She trumpets her freedom even as she is locked in the cage of private desire and unrestrained libido. She announces a faux consumer power even as she renounces her real citizen power. The boundary separating her from from what she buys vanishes. She becomes the goods she buys - a Calvin Klein torrid teen or a politically conscious Benetton rebel or a Crate & Barrel urban homesteader or a plasma television Nike spectator "athlete."

In thinking he has conquered the world of things, the consumer is in fact consumed by them. In trying to enlarge himself, he vanishes. His so-called freedom evaporates even as it is named, for it seals off the public consequences of private choices. In short: the modern consumer is radically individuated rather than socially embedded.

This is a loss recovery from which may be more difficult than the loss itself.