The marketplace is an aberrant artifice that conceals consumption’s real sources

Evidence

It’s not the Honorable Harvest that is the aberration, though—it is this marketplace. As leeks cannot survive in a cutover forest, the Honorable Harvest cannot survive in this habitat. We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 726

Categorization

• SHARE: The Potemkin-village-of-an-ecosystem and Santa’s-sleigh illusions framing would land well with a friend working in design or sustainability communications.
• XREF: connects to: Money is an impersonal standard that negates the content of goods — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 65; Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production; Consumer society destroys objects to prove wealth rather than use them — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 210 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Market relations are real yet systematically hide their basis in production #corroborates (0.95) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 890
• Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production #expands (0.92)
• Market ideology is real practice, not fantasy, because it legitimately misrepresents production #expands (0.92) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 890
• Markets conceal their own mechanisms of visibility and knowledge production. #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 283
• Money is an impersonal standard that negates the content of goods #expands (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 65
• Under capitalism consumption targets abstract value rather than bodily need #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 753
• Directly producing one’s own subsistence reveals dependencies that commerce hides #corroborates (0.80) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 27
• Consumer society destroys objects to prove wealth rather than use them #expands (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 210
• Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110
• Early consumer capitalism marketed indulgence as foreign and disavowable #exemplifies (0.72)