A Word from Mr. B

"Here we are at the heart of consumption as the total organization of everyday life . . . Everything is appropriated and simplified into the translucence of abstract "happiness," simply defined by the resolution of tensions . . . Work, leisure, nature, and culture, all previously dispersed, separate, and more or less irreducible activities that produced anxiety and complexity in our real life . . . have finally become mixed, massaged, climate controlled, and domesticated into the simple activity of perpetual shopping.

Everything is finally digested and reduced to the same homogeneous fecal matter (this occurs, of course, precisely under the sign of the disappearance of "liquid" currency, the still too visible symbol of the real excretion of real life, and of the economic and social contradictions that previously haunted it). All that is past (passed): a controlled, lubricated, and consumed excretion is henceforth transferred into things, everywhere diffused in the indistinguishability of things and of social relations."

-- Jean Baudrillard, "Consumer Society"