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Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, is a compelling narrative of consumer culture, drawn occasionally from his regular notes from the field for the New York Times Magazine.

Multinationals don’t determine brand meaning, he argues. People do. Yet people don’t tend to leverage that power toward resolving economic or social justice conflicts. In Walker’s world, they often use it to leverage for more personalized consumption options. In Walker’s world, in fact, people brand themselves.

It reminds me of Susan Sontag’s essay “The Image World” from On Photography. In it, Sontag describes what now seems like a quaint and charming albeit totally out-of-date scenario: residents of non-industrialized countries shy away from being photographed, “divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimating looting of the personality or the culture.” Whereas, she goes on, “people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken—feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.”

If we replace “photography” with “branding,”—or, you know, “creating invested relationships with branded products”—we’ve got a decent approximation of the state of the world. At least, the state of the world Walker describes.

Rob Walker’s an incredibly smart and invested journalist, and I’m honored to have the chance to talk to him about our consumer culture. The interview that follows touches on a lot of issues. (I’d have liked to have touched on even more, but we’ve agreed to do at least one more discussion—particularly on gender and branding, and graffiti and self-publishing—in the future.) Most important to this discussion, however, is the book. Buying In poses an essential question about how we position ourselves in consumer culture, and that question is: what makes you feel real? And knowing you have the power to change it, will you make use of it? Read More »