Emo Ergo Sum

I buy, therefore I am.

The Temu logo displayed on a smartphone screen.

OK, so I’m paraphrasing. Apologies to Descartes — and by that I mean d’cart I wheel my stuff around the store in. Hahaha! That’s two things about me: I rape the earth for the transitory contentment conferred by consumer goods I don’t really need. AND I’m unbelievably hilarious.

Now, I must say, I wasn’t always so militant about the future of the planet we have all but finished burning to a crisp to advance our petit bourgeois aspirations. For 25 years, I actually worked for Advertising Age, a trade publication devoted to all things marketing. My precise job was as a critic of advertising — but definitely not a critic of advertising and marketing per se. I saw these as reasonable and intermittently effective tools of capitalism, and more of a symptom of the consumer society than a cause. If people put a value on things, I figured, by economic definition that was the things’ value.

Plus, even at their most insipid, those ads picked up the tab for the entirety of mass media — including journalism. So in a very real way, they underwrote a key pillar of our democracy. As the digital revolution continues to wreak havoc on the mass media economy — and with it most serious journalism — we realize that the end of the mass-advertising epoch comes at a great cost to society.

Furthermore, I was always irritated with the Naomi Kleins of the world for presuming to be the arbiters of ethical consumption. It’s not too hard to accept that a 600 horsepower car might be an obscenity. But who gets to draw that line? In parts of Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, there are scarcely any chairs. I own many chairs, which I habitually and egregiously sit in without a care in the world. Am I then a furniture whore? My refrigerator drawers and shower mat are plastic. To whom do I surrender?

But then, again, for 30 years it has been abundantly clear that human — and especially Western, and especially American — consumption has destroyed our habitat. Greenhouse gasses. Melting ice caps. Rising sea levels. Catastrophic weather events. Species extinction. Oceans and organisms polluted with microplastics, all thanks to the emissions of factories, power plants, automobiles and the lethal accumulation of man made waste, whether plastic, carbon or radioactive.

If the human race is a victim of its own reckless consumption, should we not fix our gaze upon the industry that exists expressly to get us to consume more, whether it underwrote the Beverly Hillbillies and the Pentagon Papers scoop or not?

Here I must quote my friend and mentor Lazar Dzamic and his colleague Paul Kitkatt, recovering marketing gurus who a few years back took stock of their life’s work and its toll.

• Advertising is the Goebbels of capitalism that promises eternal aggressive economic growth.

• It is an industrial system of scientifically ‘organised seduction’ that has weaponised social sciences to keep us in a state of permanent want.

• It preys on our cognitive biases, evolutionary and social structures and impulses for the purpose of extracting profit.

• It is generating, perpetuating and exploiting various kinds of anxieties and it trains us to be impulsive, trivial, unreflective and selfish.

I’ll stop there, but I’ll just say that, like Earth’s atmosphere, at that point Lazar and Paul were just getting warmed up.

Which brings me to the football game I didn’t watch on Sunday. The Super Bowl, of course, is a de facto national holiday. People gather and stuff themselves with nachos and pixels in a sacrament of ravenousness — a lot like Thanksgiving, minus the family psychodrama. If we're speaking of bowing at the altar of mindless consumption, next to Super Sunday, Black Friday looks like Good Friday.

As I say, I took a pass on the game this year, and therefore also the commercials — of which, back in the day, my evaluations were extremely closely followed and debated by the entire marketing industry. But those days are over, and I don’t even bother to look at the spots online, because — what’s a nice way of saying this? — I simply don’t give a shit. This year, after the game, based on something I read somewhere or another, I did check out one. For Temu, the Chinese-owned online retailer of all sorts of crap at very low prices. You may be familiar with them for their mobile ads which seem to constantly take over my iPhone screen as I scroll various news aggregators. The ads are filled with busy and distracting little widgets that allow the user to get the remarkable prices even remarkabler.

But this was Super Sunday, so they spent some tens of millions of dollars to run six commercials on the big game. Watch one, and you won’t even need to see where I’m going with this. The ad itself delivers you to that jaw dropping destination. (You’ll have to sit through two other ads before you get to the Temu spot, because of course you will.) It’s a Pixar-like animation, to the background of a song:

Feels like a dream, feels like magic
Now I can believe I can have it
Ooh, ooh Temu. Ooh, ooh Temu.
All of my wishes came true!

Shop like a billionaire! Temu.
Shop like a billionaire! Temu.
Ooh, ooh, Temu.
Ooh, Ooh, Temu.

[voiceover] Download the app and shop like a billionaire.

Meanwhile, onscreen, the enchanted girl from the first frame becomes transformed by twinkling Temu dust into an enchanted shopping Cinderella who can have everything billionaires have. A $9.99 table, toaster or dress, a $9 skateboard or a 99-cent electric toothbrush (just like Warren Buffet’s!). Yep, all of her wishes came true.

Now I suppose the ultimate message gets through (see “all sorts of crap at very low prices,” above). But the proximate message of the lyrics — that your once unachievable dreams, fantasies, hopes and aspirations are within reach via a discount-shopping app — is the kind of smoking gun that would make consumer-society critic Klein hoot with vindication. “Some so-called ‘advertising critic’ thinks I’m a hyperventilating scold, does he? He thinks I strain myself (and credulity) purporting to divine moral bankruptcy from innocuous ad slogans? Well look at these Temu ads, motherfuckers! They’ve said the quiet part out loud. Boom!”

That’s not a direct quote. I’m just supposin’. The ad itself, as I promised you six paragraphs ago, requires no supposing whatsoever: discretionary income can buy you happiness.

Apart from the brazenness and shallowness of the appeal, my old critic self would accuse this advertiser of not just manipulating its audience but also insulting its audience. Look, I know people get in fistfights for a $99 Black Friday TV at Walmart and all that, but “all of her wishes came true”? Is that electric toothbrush really The Impossible Dream?

Not peace on earth? Not cures for sickle-cell anemia, Alzheimer’s Disease and diabetes? Not saving the planet? In my opinion, that’s selling 160 million Super Bowl viewers short. Show me the death of fascism and, say, 99-cent AirPods and maybe we can have a conversation. I have an email into Mr. Buffet to see if he agrees.