I was thinking a lot on the way to work this morning about how the language we use reinforces the ontology of consumerism. And how like, there is a consumerist ontology. It's the one we live under, where every action we take necessarily means the depletion of some abstract thing (often a constructed thing, which I'll get to in a second). The "consumption" of it. The catch-all phrase of "consuming media" that refers to everything from playing games to watching movies to reading books. Even though nothing is consumed there! Nothing was depleted! But because we so frequently use the word "consume" to describe this, the thing we "consumed" (which is just an experience we enjoyed) becomes a "product" that sombody else "owned." This justifies monetizing it, and it makes the unlicensed experience of it "theft." We're left with this idea that something has been stolen by our watching of a film or listening to of a song unlicensed, because we've been taught that this amounts to "consuming" something that belongs to someone else.
the tl;dr of this post is that our culture has made "Consumption" into such an abstract concept that it can be--and frequently is--used as a catch-all for all the interactions we have with the world around us. For living life itself. This is an abstraction that must be fought, because it is the very abstraction by which we are swindled out of our ability to have homes, by which public places vanish into private ones, by which the egregious IP laws we live under came to exist, by which we are denied socialized healthcare, by which we are denied public transportation, by which we are denied the right to repair, and by which the consent to live under each of these conditions is consistently manufactured.
