Noam Chomsky asserts that the 2004 US presidential election was just another consumer marketing campaign, unrelated to the issues — and that most people don’t and won’t care, until their opinions matter.
My friend Jerry Michalski thinks “consumer” is a bad word — it describes a passive, one-way consumption relationship with the productive side of society (business, in the cases he describes).
(Expanding on Jerry’s message, here are Dan Gillmor on reclassifying “consumer” and Doc Searls: “Jerry Michalski calls consumers ‘gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash.‘”)
Politics is now borrowing the same consumer marketing model, with a similar set of sad, passive consumers at the end of the line. Welcome to “consumer politics.”