It's buy, buy, buy or it's bye bye

David Sherman

Maybe you thought you were a butcher, a baker, a computer chip maker. Maybe a father, grandmother, beauty queen, retired dentist. No more sucking up patients’ bad breath, no more of bacon flecks to pry out from yellowed teeth.

Maybe you thought you were retired. Happily. Read when you want. Nap when you like. Take a hike wherever. Devote your winter to the slippery fortunes of your favourite hockey team. Maybe to your friends and family. The old fart in the mirror, you’re all that and more.

But, in the real world, you’re only one thing. A consumer.

Yes, Mr. Rogers was right. We were groomed to consume. As children, the world was a tree of shiny objects … Ho ho ho … and the role assigned to you was to buy those seductive trophies as fast as you could until your remains were planted in an expensive urn or gilded coffin. Even dead, you are to continue consuming.

To facilitate your role, they invented debt. No matter your income, any bauble could be yours. Lay away and wait? How quaint. They created credit cards and credit lines and mortgage credit lines, car loans and time payment. You could have whatever instantly even when your pockets were empty.

For only $99 a week you can enjoy a gleaming, jealousy-inducing, 200 horse-power almost anything and cruise to the box stores. In seven years, it’ll be yours, with only mechanics to pay to keep your almost 400 payments running.

We are bipeds born to spend, taught to spend more than we have, taught to want more than we need.

Much of the world depends on us doing just that. We stop buying more than we need, the economy would collapse and take most of us down with it. Its survival depends on regular injections of your cash, continuously, like someone with diabetes needs their insulin fix.

Perhaps we can trace it back to the immortal phrase, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Some feared Alexander Graham Bell’s phone was going to destroy life as they knew it. They were considered troglodytes. The telephone was the devil. If you’ve spent time trying to communicate with a person in a call center in Mumbai, after being on hold for 40 minutes, you know the naysayers were not far off. And they had no crystal ball, no idea how Steve Jobs’ phone was going to change civilization, predicated, of course, on it being the greatest sales device since sex. It took Steve Jobs and the smart phone to turn us all into idiots with a direct line to hell.

We are strangling in chargers and wires to keep our phones, tablets and computers vacuuming everything it can glean about us and storing it “in the cloud.” Nothing fascinating about these clouds against a white sky. These are data farms, gorging on water and power to know everything it can know about you. And plotting how to know more. Knowledge is profit. Jobs. Share price. Private jets. It collects us so it can sell everything it knows about us to anyone willing to pay to sell you stuff you can probably live without.

Our new television was designed to suck data. It does it well once you can push enough buttons to get it to the channel you want. Our last TV told us it needed to be replaced and stopped. The screen said it was obsolete. Time to retire. It was a Samsung, an innovator in lowering the prices of its widescreen “smart TVs” because it was selling whatever data it could mine from our viewing habits. When its capabilities to listen to your life terminated, it committed suicide.

Our new TV, a Roku, is the size of a billboard, cost less than $600 and exists solely to track everything we watch. Will even track our voice commands if we want to talk to it. It’ll change channels, adjust volume and cook a rare steak if I ask. Then sell the fact I’m a carnivore. There’s money in meat, especially if it’s you buying it.

With a single button our new not-that-smart TV will take you to Netflix, Disney or Amazon. I would imagine those household names paid for the privilege of being only a click away. First, though, you have to identify yourself. If you have not been introduced to the TV, it won’t let you watch. Tad anti-social without proper introductions.

Luckily, it doesn’t demand a passport. You have to press on your name half-a-dozen times as you face north, keep one leg in the air and bark like a dog. (It’s measuring your IQ and how desperate you are to watch the hockey game.)

But, if you want to watch CNN and end up in a straitjacket or the Canadiens play hockey and put you in a straitjacket, you are obliged to push many buttons many times. The profanity is your contribution to the process.

It's designed to drive you to a place where it can monitor and sell your habits. The day it sees you watching a football game in your underwear you will see ads for football games, underwear and CTE treatments. Be warned, if you get randy in front of the TV, you might find you and your partner performing on Pornhub.

Climate disasters are nothing compared to the disaster that would await if we stopped buying more than groceries. Floods, hurricanes, monsoons mean pumping money into the economy from insurance or government. Disaster is an economic boon. Cleanup, construction, redevelopment pour billions into the economy. War is a gold mine. Blood earns money. Planes, ships, bullets and guns create jobs. Can never have too many guns. People die but the economy goes boom boom, too.

Stopping spending would be the real enemy.

And there are new and better ways to find out what you buy, would like to buy, convince you to buy.

That little sucker in your hand, the smart phone that seemed miraculous when you first held it in your hand – the New York Times in my pocket!!! – kidnapped your life. Not only does it drill advertising into your head, it reads your email, tracks the stories you’ve read and your Google searches. Look for a plumber and you’ll be getting ads in whatever you’re reading for plumbing supplies until you search for a kitchen supply store. You know what you’ll be seeing next.

I don’t know if Jobs knew he was creating a miniature shopping center, collecting billions from Google so it can track everything you search as Google searches your Gmail and stores your search preferences. Not curious, just greedy. Revenues in ’24 only $350 billion U.S.

If the TV lets you watch the hockey game, you can indeed catch most of it, though the puck is lost sliding through ice decorated with ads, some painted, some computer generated so when the Canadiens play in Dallas we can see ads for a Quebec restaurant chain. The day is coming they’ll be generating underwear ads on the boards for you, while your neighbour is seeing ads for Subaru. He looked at one online last month. Computers don’t forget.

Yes, there are ads on the ice and the walls, the stairs and the scoreboard, the players’ uniforms and helmets and … I can’t think of a place there aren’t ads. Aimed at you for that moment. Order whatever steamed junk food you feel like eating or just about anything from a number of companies determined you spend without leaving home. Have a cold drink. A beer? Now! Go! Hit the fridge. The economy depends on you.

Our spinning world and probably your job or your kids’ jobs, depend on you spending. You sure you don’t need a new carpet? How about wine glasses? A new sofa? An SUV?

Governments need your sales tax, the world needs Walmart, Costco, Target, Ikea and a million other shops and box stores. Salespeople need the jobs so they can spend enough to keep their jobs.

You gotta spend like your life depends on it. It might.