Digital-era capitalism shifted the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual
Evidence
Just as Ford tapped into a new mass consumption, Apple was among the first to experience explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society of individuals and their demand for individualized consumption. The inversion implied a larger story of a commercial reformation in which the digital era finally offered the tools to shift the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual, liberating and reconfiguring capitalism’s operations and assets. It promised something utterly new, urgently necessary, and operationally impossible outside the networked spaces of the digital. Its implicit promise of an advocacy-oriented alignment with our new needs and values was a confirmation of our inner sense of dignity and worth, ratifying the feeling that we matter. In offering consumers respite from an institutional world that was indifferent to their individual needs, it opened the door to the possibility of a new rational capitalism able to reunite supply and demand by connecting us to what we really want in exactly the ways that we choose. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 95
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Fordisim/taylorist mass production literature and the broader theme of how platforms personalize exchange, parallel to Zuboff’s own ‘individualization’ thesis and to concepts like mass-customization in business history. — connects to: Early digital commerce promised personalized consumption aligned with genuine consumer interests — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 143; Modern politics shifted focus from aggregate goods to discrete individuals; The rise of mass media and consumer leisure transformed American life at century’s turn. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1315 (+1 more)