As soon as we entered the mall, we ran into a large group of girls getting excited over a doll that was simply a furry brown rectangle with eyes. I felt old and embarrassingly analog in front of all these young women who behaved as if this pile of synthetic fibers were a rock star or a genie who granted wishes. "Jellyfish!" they shouted, "Jellyfish!" I suddenly became an innocent anthropologist before a primitive culture that was completely incomprehensible to me. Why were these people so excited about an object with no objective value that the observer could grasp with the naked eye? Did it perhaps have healing or magical properties? It was evident that the product contained some kind of value that went far beyond reality. All civilizations and cultures have created things to which they have attributed an invented symbolic charge, from religions to everyday superstitions. The novelty in these times of ultra-liberal and digital capitalism is that useless objects are bought and sold en masse, and the meaning given to them is volatile and changing.
Without the creation of needs that aren't needs, a good part of the global economy would neither exist nor be able to continue its unstoppable growth, extracting the fruits of consumers' labor, convincing them to use them to acquire junk that they will soon throw away in the trash. If before, workers were exploited by owners who refused to recognize their rights, who grew rich by making them work long hours in poor conditions in exchange for low wages and few insurance policies, now it seems that the way to squeeze the most profits is by convincing them to spend their profits on products that are nothing more than frauds. Just the other day, I saw an advertisement for a cream to "treat" invisible blemishes—a striking oxymoron considering that a blemish is often precisely what you see. But advertising has a masterful grasp of the human psyche; it knows much more about us than we do ourselves, even more so in the age of algorithms. And it has effective mechanisms to push the envelope, as Roig said. A blemish that can't be seen, but is there and could be discovered at any moment, is one of the irrational fears we women have had throughout our lives. And not because of the blemish itself, not only because of the aesthetic defect of not presenting an immaculate face, but precisely because of the notion of purity that, strange as it may seem, remains present in our subconscious. It also connects with the hidden defect that can emerge at any moment without warning, with imposter syndrome, which is an inexhaustible gold mine for self-esteem merchants, whether they manufacture cosmetics, clothing, or hair dye. Don't do it, girls, don't calculate how many hours of your work, of your life, have been stolen from you by exploiting your complexes, complexes often created by the industry itself. And on top of that, by telling you it's all "because you're worth it." Yes, you're worth being ripped off.
But it's not just women who live in the prisons of hyperconsumption. Public and common spaces free of consumption have been increasingly reduced. How long did it take for Barcelona's green islands to gentrify and fill up with cute cafes and shops of all kinds? Shopping has long been a dominant part of leisure time for young and old, but now we have commercial establishments inside our homes, inside our children's bedrooms through screens. Advertising, in that sense, has become a new iron cage. The more empty objects we buy, I think, the more we empty ourselves.
