Futureless vicissitudes: Gestural anti-consumption and the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer

Abstract

In this paper, we challenge the prevalent idea that anti-consumption functions as an ideological act of antagonism. We enlist the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher to account for the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer, a politically hollowed-out and knowingly helpless subject endemic to the futureless vicissitudes of semiocapitalist consumer culture. Drawing on netnographic data and interviews with ‘digital detoxers’, we explore how gestural – rather than transformational – anti-consumption emerges through individuals’ reflexive awareness of their political inertia, the lack of collective spirit to bring about improved conditions, and their perpetual attachment to market-based comforts and conveniences. Our analyses reveal three features that underpin the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer’s resigned acceptance of the reigning political-ideological status quo: magical voluntarism, pragmatism and self-indulgence. In the absence of any unifying and politically-centred solidarity projects, mere gestures of resistance are undertaken towards managing personal dissatisfactions with – instead of collectively transforming – their structural conditions.

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Marketing Theory
2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–22
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DOI: 10.1177/14705931231153193
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Futureless vicissitudes: Gestural
anti-consumption and the reflexively
impotent (anti-)consumer
Quynh Hoang
University of Leicester School of Business, UK
James Croninand Alexandros Skandalis
Lancaster University Management School, UK
Abstract
In this paper, we challenge the prevalent idea that anti-consumption functions as an ideological act of
antagonism. We enlist the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher to account for the re-
flexively impotent (anti-)consumer, a politically hollowed-out and knowingly helpless subject
endemic to the futureless vicissitudes of semiocapitalist consumer culture. Drawing on netnographic
data and interviews with ‘digital detoxers’,weexplorehowgestural –rather than transformational –anti-
consumption emerges through individuals’reflexive awareness of their political inertia, the lack of
collective spirit to bring about improved conditions, and their perpetual attachment to market-based
comforts and conveniences. Our analyses reveal three features that underpin the reflexively impotent
(anti-)consumer’s resigned acceptance of the reigning political-ideological status quo: magical voluntarism,
pragmatism and self-indulgence. In the absence of any unifying and politically-centred solidarity projects,
mere gestures of resistance are undertaken towards managing personal dissatisfactions with –instead of
collectively transforming –their structural conditions.
Keywords
Anti-consumption, semiocapitalism, futurelessness, technology, Terminal Marketing, digital detox,
reflexive impotence, Fisher
Introduction
With the resurgence of public interest in political movements and the impact of a global ‘return to
politics’on consumer culture (Cronin and Fitchett, 2022: 134), renewed attention has been directed
to political ideology as a crucial motivator for anti-consumption (Cambefort and Pecot, 2020;Ulver
Corresponding author:
Quynh Hoang, University of Leicester School of Business, University of Leicester, Brookfield, Leicester LE2 1RQ, UK.
Email: nqh1@leicester.ac.uk]

and Laurell, 2020). In the case of ideological progressivism on the political left, anti-consumption
practices often appear in demonstrations and protests related to addressing environmental issues,
unethical corporate behaviours, and social injustice (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004). In the context
of re-emerging social conservatism on the political right, anti-consumption activities such as brand
rejection and corporate boycotts are a mainstay of new rightist groups’efforts to challenge liberal
business practices and influence civil debates (Cambefort and Pecot, 2020). Moreover, while anti-
consumption has long been impelled by anti-imperialist movements to signal discontent with
globalisation and the neoliberal model of global capitalism (Varman and Belk, 2009), socio-
economic populist groups have also made political use of reducing and rejecting consumption to
protest unfair domestic market forces (Hershkovitz, 2017). Many of these cases underline that anti-
consumption practices can reflect ideological attachments that are oppositional to the perceived
structures of power that underpin today’s socio-economic life. However, despite the revitalisation of
antagonistic politics across consumer culture, we should not lose sight of those forms of anti-
consumption that function apolitically and, in doing so, potentially reproduce and perpetuate the
status quo.
In this paper, we set out to conceptualise how anti-consumption practices, when lacking dis-
cernible political alternatives at their core, are incessantly assimilated into the circuitry of semi-
ocapitalism and its desiring forces (Hietanen et al., 2022). In the absence of any genuinely
transformative politics, we identify what we call ‘gestural anti-consumption’, a performance that
works to relieve individuals’personal dissatisfactions with, rather than to collectively transform, the
underpinning semiocapitalist hegemony and its futureless vicissitudes (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Fisher,
2014a). When undertaken in a ubiquitous market-society where market fundamentalism
1
reigns
supreme and all beliefs in some kind of post-capitalist future are slowly being ‘cancelled’, anti-
consumption functions as a mere gesture of resistance rather than a genuinely antagonistic force.
Consumers and anti-consumers, we argue, become conflated and integrated as the one ‘(anti-)
consumer subject’. This singular and amalgamated (anti-)consumer subject position remains
deadlocked in its actual effects while only appearing differentiated in superficially experiential and
symbolic terms. Without unifying political alternatives underpinning them, this subject’s gestural
anti-consumption practices remain tied to self-expression and self-fulfilment which are fully
commensurate with market logics and can be safely commodified. By adapting and extending the
late cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s (2009: 21) concept of ‘reflexive impotence’, we unpack how
gestural anti-consumption unfolds via the intersection of the (anti-)consumer subject’sreflexive
awareness of her political inertia, inability or unwillingness to bring about structural change, and
perpetual attachment to the desiring forces of capitalism itself. This paper is underpinned by two
interrelated research questions: What are the main features of gestural anti-consumption? How is the
perceived impossibility of structural change prefigured into practices of gestural anti-consumption?
To address these questions, we reflect on netnographic data and in-depth interviews with people
who engage in ‘digital detoxing’, that is individuals who limit or temporarily abstain from the
consumption of digital technologies. Digital detox, while classifiable as a form of anti-consumption,
has become, as Syvertsen (2017: 96) emphasises, a mundane and routine act of consumption itself –
a‘part of everyone’s toolbox’in coping with digital overload and dissatisfaction –rather than a
collective action to address the root causes of consumption-related problems. For many individuals,
digital detox practices are not motivated by political solidarity against a shared adversary, whether
‘Big Tech’firms who ostensibly manipulate their consumption or the liberal capitalist structures of
power that make such manipulation possible. Crucially, digital detox does not function according to
the typical formula of collective ideological resistance –‘a clear-cut case of “us”and “them”’
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(Syvertsen, 2017: 96) –rather it is often a case of disorganised individuals undertaking ephemeral
and practical attempts to make their consumption better work for themselves.
Our paper makes two important contributions to the emerging strand of ‘terminal’(Ahlberg et al.,
2022)or‘de-romanticist’(Fitchett and Cronin, 2022) writings within critical marketing scholarship.
First, in line with this strand’s calls to revisit and de-romanticise the institutionalised concepts of our
discipline, we offer an update to the subject position of ‘the reflexively defiant consumer’(Ozanne
and Murray, 1995). Under semiocapitalism, we suggest that resistant consumer subjectivity is better
understood as ‘the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer’. In contrast to the celebratory view of an
autonomous, self-determining postmodern rebel who, through critical reflection, ‘choose[s] to defy
or resist traditional notions of consumption’(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 522), we offer an image of
an increasingly helpless subject who, with reflexive awareness of his or her utter embeddedness in
commodified desiring flows, is disinclined to genuinely defy dominant market forces. In this regard,
we challenge the prevalent idea that ‘anti-consumption must be an act of ideological extravagance –
wandering beyond the accepted limits of cultural acceptance’(Kozinets et al., 2010: 226–227).
Second, our analyses provide clarification for how any potentially energising relief from
capitalism ultimately capitulates under what has been theorised as a cultural atmosphere of ‘no
hope’or futurelessness (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Fisher, 2014a;Hietanen et al., 2020). By tracing how
the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer is as much aware of the problems of technologically-
mediated consumer capitalism as she is of her own powerlessness to confront them, we illustrate
how living with the slow cancellation of the future impairs any efforts of resistance. The value of
identifying the lived effects of this ‘futurelessness’is not simply in offering a pessimistic perspective
on subjects’potential for resistance, but is in the implication for fellow (anti-)consumer researchers
to think more ‘futuristically’about where our critiques could –or should –land. For the analyst-
activist to genuinely challenge the futureless vicissitudes of consumer culture, it becomes necessary
to locate ongoing epistemic enquiry not just at the level of the structural but also at the level of the
experiential. This means taking into account capitalist subjects’own justifications for pursuing
personal interests and pleasures rather than any kind of political praxis when faced with systemic
problems.
Theoretical underpinnings
Anti-consumption and political ideology: A brief background
Anti-consumption can be defined as ‘intentionally and meaningfully excluding or cutting
goods from one’s consumption routine or reusing once-acquired goods with the goal of
avoiding consumption’(Makrietal.,2020: 178). Anti-consumption practices are expressed
through three non-exclusive forms: rejecting (i.e. refusing or avoiding); restricting (i.e. re-
ducing); and reclaiming (i.e. changing or co-opting the meanings of) goods, services or
experiences (Lee et al., 2011). Although the drivers and manifestations of rejecting, restricting,
or reclaiming consumption are manifold, the motivating role of political ideology has been
underwritten by a significant stream of research (Izberk-Bilgin, 2012;Kozinets and
Handelman, 2004;Ulver and Laurell, 2020). Political ideology denotes a fantasy frame-
work of beliefs, aspirations and aversions concerning the proper functioning of society and
how it might be achieved. At an elementary level, political ideology can be mapped out on a
continuum with liberal progressivism on the left and conservativism on the right (Cambefort
and Pecot, 2020). Although many cases of anti-consumption detected in consumer research are
motivated by leftist ideology –for example, liberals’‘anti-unethical’and ‘anti-colonialist’
Hoang et al. 3

rejection of global brands that offend their moral shibboleths –antagonisms have also been
detected between social conservatism and the market. Examples of rightist anti-consumption
include boycotts of supermarkets that sell Halal products by nationalist groups in England
(Lekakis, 2019) and Christian-conservative groups’rejection of Disney products following the
brand’s corporate decision to better represent gay employees and consumers (MacDonald and
McDonald, 2014).
Recognising that anti-consumption is neither an exclusively left- nor right-wing activity, Pecot
et al. (2021) suggest that political extremism in general should be understood as an important
predictor for anti-consumption. Individuals positioned at either extreme of the left-right political
spectrum are more likely to be suspicious of consumerism and to engage in anti-consumption
compared to those in the centre ground. It is the political centre –or ‘mainstream’–that is un-
derstood to function as ‘a constant adversary’for politically extreme individuals to fight against
(Ulver and Laurell, 2020: 490). Whether extremely leftist or rightist, those who undertake anti-
consumption in opposition to this real or imagined mainstream adversary are assumed to have
committed to a form of lifestyle activism within a movement of like-minded political subjects ‘pos
[ing] a viable alternative’to the existing system (Izberk-Bilgin, 2012: 678; Kozinets and
Handelman, 2004).
Nevertheless, a ‘viable alternative’that can truly supplant the existing system is rarely, if ever,
taken seriously or considered achievable by lifestyle activists whose practices are typically un-
dertaken in the individualist pursuits of self-expression, social distinction, therapy or hedonism
(Kozinets, 2002). Although lifestyle activists may share political beliefs that deviate from the
mainstream, it is rare that these beliefs are mobilised in ways that lead to authentic and durable
change. For example, Moraes et al. (2010: 293) argue that individuals and groups who ‘share their
own notions of the good life’engage in oppositional practices that, while potentially aligned with
extremist views, are undertaken ‘not with a view to change society at large […] but with the aim to
restructure the meanings of their own lived experiences as seductive alternatives’. High-profile anti-
market or anti-marketing events such as Burning Man have long provided us with illustrations of an
anti-consumption that is largely deskinned of any revolutionary potential; serving to provide
weekend-trippers with a short-lived, experiential sense of respite from (rather than reformation of)
dominant market structures (Kozinets, 2002). For Kozinets, consumption might fall under scope for
extreme criticism at such events and alternative modes of exchange are encouraged, but they are ‘not
about major social change’(Kozinets, 2002: 36); instead, they are more about personal growth and
expression, and thus denuded of the political narratives that might motivate enduring and genuinely
transformative solidarity in wider cultural life. Similarly, Mikkonen et al. (2011: 99) illustrate how
online cadres of lifestyle activists who reject the hyper-consumerised ways of celebrating Christmas
engage in mischievous anti-consumption discourses as a way of pursuing a cynical and playfully
self-aware identity project, ‘the Scrooge’, rather than to genuinely educate and rescue seasonal
shoppers from marketers’manipulation. Even commercial brands sometimes seek to incite con-
sumers’rejection of –and resistance against –dominant market institutions, not in the pursuit of any
kind of post-market politics but simply to achieve legitimacy for their own offerings (Koch and
Ulver, 2022).
Central to the above anti-consumption projects is the absence of earnest political demands and
the subordination of meaningful critique to individual conceits and self-interest, what has been
referred to as ‘the hollowing-out of political subjectivity’, resulting in a subject positioning founded
on ‘base pragmatism and instrumentalism work[ing] in the service of the dominant ideology’
(Treadwell et al., 2013:4–8). Moreover, the pluralisation of politically hollow anti-consumption
projects works to ossify the status quo by aligning resistant energies with individual-expressive
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rather than collective-transformative logics, ensuring that no single anti-consumption position is
consolidated enough to become a genuine threat. No matter how cynical or dissatisfied anti-
consumers are, without social solidarity and popular political dissensus, their behaviour is better
understood as an alignment to the unrelenting individualism and diversification of consumptive
capitalism, rather than as ‘reflexive defiance’(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 516) to it. The result is, we
argue, a form of anti-consumption that remains gestural and, for the most part, objectless. However,
while it might be devoid of collective political objectives, gestural anti-consumption is not without
objects, as it constitutes a series of ‘alternative’consumption choices rather than the refusal of
consumption altogether (Chatzidakis et al., 2012;Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). To help us to better
understand the political objectlessness of gestural anti-consumers and what underpins their inability
or unwillingness to pursue genuine transformation, we now turn to Fisher’s (2009) onto-affective
concept of ‘reflexive impotence’.
Reflexive impotence and semiocapitalist horizons
A common theme of critical marketing scholarship is that consumption today functions within a
culture of disavowal whereby consumers are fully aware of their own complicity in systems of
power and domination yet maintain an ironic distance to their actions (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016;
Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). Under these circumstances where consumers can disavow yet none-
theless participate in and reproduce the problematic aspects of dominant systems, an incontestable
status quo is maintained through what Fisher (2009: 21) refers to as ‘reflexive impotence’, that is,
‘They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it’.Reflexive
impotence denotes a state of being fully aware of one’s dissatisfaction with today’s increasingly
technologically-saturated consumer-capitalist zeitgeist but acquiescing to it under the belief that it is
unrealistic and near impossible to change the system. Even when undertaken on mindless autopilot
or without significant meaning, day-to-day consumerist preoccupations such as routinely logging
calories on digital self-tracking devices (Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018), keeping smartphones
charged for idle scrolling on public transport (Robinson and Arnould, 2020), posting photos to
social media (Kozinets et al., 2017) or binge-watching the latest ‘trending’TV series via streaming
services (Jones et al., 2018), all remain deeply entrenched regimes that many of us cannot imagine
no longer doing.
Collectively these vortices of digital artefacts and signs (‘semios’)–and the resigned acceptance
that perpetuates their consumption –can be located within the parameters of ‘semiocapitalism’,a
technologically-mediated global capitalist formation reliant on identifying, influencing and au-
tomatising consumers’informational and semiotic flows, techno-cultural activities and modes of
personal stimulation, expression, and meaning-making for its regime of accumulation (Hietanen
et al., 2022;Hoang et al., 2022). Under semiocapitalism, consumers remain plugged into what
Fisher calls ‘the drip-feed of digital stimulus’because of: (1) the pervasive lures of an always-on
digital culture that is seductively (and competitively) desirous, indulgent and egotistic; and (2) the
naturalisation of ritualistic compliance that works to obviate any opposition to it (Dean and Fisher,
2014: 30). Importantly, semiocapitalism reproduces itself through the mixture of ‘perpetual
pleasure’and ‘an endless insomniac drift’which always happen simultaneously (ibid.). Although its
subjects almost never feel wholly present when consuming under semiocapitalism, its endlessly
rotating carousel of pleasures keeps the majority committed. The result is reflexive impotence, a
deep sense of inertia that is ontological–affective: what is felt becomes what is lived, and what is felt
is that there is no popular impetus for change.
Hoang et al. 5

There are three critical aspects to reflexive impotence’s onto-affectivity. First, Fisher’s (2009: 21)
concept has an intellectual dimension centred on ‘marketplace metacognition’–a subject’s social
intelligence about his or her positioning as a consumer and marketers’operations upon them
(Wright, 2002: 677). Within a networked, gadget-driven, and computer-literate consumer culture,
subjects are often not ignorant to market actors’attempts to surveil and influence them but are also
appreciative of the many indulgences and conveniences on offer (Hietanen et al., 2022). Consumers
are painfully aware of the benefits that their digital consumption provides, resulting in a state of
ambiguity that is conceived of as vaguely manageable rather than resolvable. This is seen in what
Fisher (2009: 25) calls an ‘ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture’wherein time becomes frag-
mented into ‘digital slices’that allow consumers to treat their relationships with technology as
discrete encounters with benefits, which compensate for the cumulative costs of semiocapitalist
subjugation (e.g. addiction, targeted advertising, algorithmic manipulation, etc.) (Hoang et al.,
2022).
Second, reflexive impotence has an attitudinal dimension best described in terms of ‘post-
pessimism’,‘the understanding that neither an optimistic nor pessimistic attitude is justified due to
the lack of alternatives’(Gonnermann, 2019: 27). Gonnermann describes post-pessimism as an
attitude ‘meandering between resignation and stoic acceptance’(p. 37). Reflexive impotence, for
both Fisher and Gonnermann, is not the same as apathy. Instead, it mirrors closely the idea of
‘disaffected consent’(Gilbert, 2013: 18) whereby subjects feel that they have no choice but to accept
that the existing socio-economic world they live in, while deeply problematic, constitutes the only
viable form available to them. Experienced as ‘a penumbral burden of suppressed meanings and
closed-off social possibilities that cannot be completely eliminated or denied’(Gibson-Graham,
1995: 25), the post-pessimistic attitude is characterised by recognition that today’s capitalist
zeitgeist is here to stay for better or worse; all other possibilities are cancelled (Ahlberg et al., 2022).
The result is a cultural atmosphere of futurelessness (Fisher, 2014a) where any conceivable futures
that are radically different to the semiocapitalist present have evaporated. The prevailing assumption
is that ‘capitalism can only be resisted, never overcome’(Fisher, 2009: 28).
Third, reflexive impotence has a behavioural dimension centred on a kind of play-acting
whereby consumers ‘act as if’they are unaware of what they already are well aware (Fisher, 2009:
13), namely, that their consumption may have negative effects on themselves and others, and that
any anti-market behaviours they pursue will likely not result in any significant changes. An example
of this is Bradshaw and Zwick’s (2016: 278) account of the sustainable business field under
‘sustainable capitalism’which allows subjects ‘to act as if they are doing something of significance
in the face of clear evidence to the contrary’. This logic is exemplified by e-commerce websites
selling ‘ethically sourced’products with eco-friendly shipping options and promises that each
online purchase supports environmental causes thereby ensuring the very consumerist act buys
one’s redemption from being a consumer, negating the felt need for any radical change (Cronin and
Fitchett, 2021).
Taking these key dimensions together, reflexive impotence might be reasonably deployed in
helping us to identify the main features of gestural anti-consumption and how the perceived
impossibility of structural change is prefigured into its performativity.
Research context: Digital detox
In today’s semiocapitalist culture of technological dependency, practices of digitally-oriented anti-
consumption have become hugely popular (Syvertsen and Enli, 2020). Digital detox, as a blanket
term that captures this trend, was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013 and is defined as ‘a period
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of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or
computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical
world’(Strutner, 2015). Although this definition exclusively emphasises temporary rejection,
digital detox also encompasses diverse and much less rigid forms of restricting and reclaiming
digital consumption.
Far from being a renegade, fringe act of disruption, an entire cottage industry has developed
around digital detoxing including health care, travel, tourism, and hospitality, as well as a social
media trend amongst influencers and micro-celebrities (i.e. ‘#digitaldetox’). Scores of self-help
guides, websites, apps, tools, devices and training have emerged to assist consumers with un-
plugging from digital culture (Syvertsen and Enli, 2020). A cursory browse online reveals hundreds
of digital detox retreats, camps and holidays offered by specialist operators. For example, a major
international service provider, eponymously entitled ‘Digital Detox’, arranges for-profit summer
camps (‘Camp Grounded’) and ‘unplugged’nights out and mystery trips (http://digitaldetox.org).
Microsoft, Apple and Google have all incorporated ‘Screen Time’or ‘Digital Wellbeing’features
into their operating systems to assist users to detox. Demand for ‘dumb’or ‘minimalist’phones such
as the Light Phone, the Punkt MP01 and the rebooted Nokia 3310, which are marketed as anti-
thetical to smartphones, further reflects a commodifiable desire amongst consumers to reduce digital
distractions.
Neither politically leftist nor rightist, there nonetheless exists the façade of vaguely anti-market
and anti-corporate sentiment to digital detoxing. For example, the manufacturer of The Light Phone
proclaims on their website: ‘Light was born as an alternative to the tech monopolies that are fighting
more and more aggressively for our time & attention. Light creates tools that respect you’(The Light
Phone, 2022). Comparably, the Mental Liberation Front (MLF), a spinoff group of Adbusters,
espouses critiques of Big Tech’s corporatism and privacy issues but, despite the group’s vaguely
militaristic discourse, does not advocate the total rejection of technology. Instead, the MLF en-
courages their ‘true warrior[s]’to ‘[s]witch to an alternative, open-source email service, like
Tutanota, that exempts [them] from relentless surveillance’,to‘[u]se a search engine other than
Google’,‘to use my smartphone with a little more discretion and thoughtfulness’and so on
(Adbusters, 2022). As aptly described by Hietanen and colleagues:
[W]hat we usually see are approaches to ‘fight’technology with, of course, more technology […]We
fight Google with Google-esque alternatives, and we fight Facebook, and proclaim its death, of course,
with Facebook-esque alternatives that are what it was in its ‘early days’.(Hietanen et al., 2022: 174)
In the absence of articulate political demands, digital detox appears to be less about transforming
the digital marketplace and more about redeeming and reinvigorating one’s own consumerist tastes
and preferences.
Research methods
Two main sources of data are drawn upon to inform our analyses of digital detoxing: a 12-month
netnography and 21 in-depth interviews. First, non-intrusive observational netnography was con-
ducted by the first author who collected data from online conversations and interactions centred on
digital detoxing over an approximately 12-month period (Beckmann and Langer, 2005). This ob-
servational form of netnography has been advocated by prior researchers as an effective mode of
allowing the researcher to access naturally occurring data while minimising any influence
on consumers’disclosure of their experiences (Canavan, 2021;Cronin and Cocker, 2019).
Hoang et al. 7

After obtaining ethical approval for the research, the first author collected data from public sites, that
is, online spaces that are free to publicly access without any restrictions (i.e. no registration or sign-ins
required) (Beckmann and Langer, 2005).
Following Kozinets’(2020: 227) five criteria for selecting suitable netnographic sites (i.e.
relevant, active, interactive, diverse, data-rich), the Nosurf Reddit page (‘stop wasting life on the
net.’) was chosen as the primary site for observation. As an online group with over 150,000
subscribers at the time of data collection, Nosurf is designed for individuals to exchange ideas and
support each other in cultivating ‘a healthy, mindful, and purposeful internet use’(Nosurf, 2021).
Reflecting a wide spectrum of lived experiences centred on rejecting, restricting or reclaiming
digital consumption, the site attracts thousands of new members each month, having a high fre-
quency of postings with a total of more than 15,000 threads (between January 2018 and November
2021) and an average of about 119 new threads each week (at the time of data collection in 2021),
showing a significant level of activity, interaction and a sense of a living culture.
In working our way through the Nosurf Reddit page, we were conscious of the paradox of people
posting online about trying to reduce being online. We recognise this paradox as illustrative of the
very real messiness, ambiguity and contradiction that characterises gestural anti-consumption.
Maintaining an appreciation of the makeshift and imperfect concessions that ‘real’people rely upon
when they are knowingly constrained by –yet reliant upon –digital culture afforded us what
Kozinets (2020: 288) calls, ‘an intuitive grasping of the reality of another real-seeming person’. The
principle of ‘listening’which means unpacking deeper layers of meaning behind each post including
how and what people chose to share was also followed. Listening allows the netnographer to counter
surface-level misconceptions, ‘to engage completely with posts, by avoiding removing these from
their embedded context’, and to actualise ‘the ethical imperative of hearing the emotions behind
participants’words’(Winter and Lavis, 2020: 59).
Keeping with netnographic principles recommended by Kozinets (2020), pertinent data was
identified based on rich content, descriptiveness, relevant topic matter and conversational par-
ticipation by a range of posters and was subsequently downloaded into a Word document. A
collection of high traffic threads with a large number of response postings was identified by applying
the ‘Top ’filter on the forum. In total, 124 threads (originally posted between 2019 and 2021) were
selected for further examination. As recommended by Kozinets (2020: 136), verbatim posts were
supplemented by the first author’sreflective field notes, resulting in 528 pages of textual data. Out of
respect to the posters, we have not reproduced anything that we considered to be overly sensitive.
Only publicly-accessible posts that are visible to everyone were collected. All usernames have been
replaced with pseudonyms.
Following a combination of purposive and snowball sampling, the first author reached out to the
Nosurf group and to her social circle to recruit participants for undertaking in-depth semi-structured
interviews. A recruitment poster was placed on Nosurf with an invitation to contact the first author
via email. The combined sampling measures resulted in a total of 21 participants including 15
women and 6 men, ranging in age from 19 to 39 years and living in different countries. Due to the
geographic dispersion of the sample and COVID-19 lockdown restrictions at the time of data
collection, all interviews were conducted remotely and, ironically, by digital means. Of the 21
participants, 20 interviews were conducted via video calling software and 1 via asynchronous email
exchange.
The interviews began with a series of grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988) and were followed
by open-ended questions, probes, and prompts to enable participants to explore their digital lives, their
understanding of digital culture, and accounts of detoxing regimes. Interviews lasted between 1 to
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2 hours, were audio-recorded, pseudonymised and transcribed verbatim resulting in 464 pages of
textual data. Table 1 provides some brief information of those participants.
The netnographic data and interview transcripts were brought together as a combined data pool
for analysis. The unified analytic approach adhered to a hermeneutical back-and-forth and part-to-
whole procedure (Kozinets, 2020;Spiggle, 1994) which involved the first author’s iterative
movement between constituent parts of data and the emerging composite understanding of the entire
data pool. Lists of provisional themes were formed, challenged, modified, and further developed
over time as the first author continually coded, categorised, and abstracted data while consulting the
literature to support the emerging themes (Spiggle, 1994). The other authors collaborated on
subjecting interpretations to scrutiny, seeking out disconfirming observations –what Spiggle (1994:
496) calls ‘refutation’and Kozinets (2020: 377) calls ‘troublemaking’–and agreed conceptual
explanations for the final themes.
Findings
Using insights from the digital detox context, we report on what we consider to be the three main
features of gestural anti-consumption: magical voluntarism, pragmatism and self-indulgence. First,
at the heart of gestural anti-consumption, we argue, is the magical thinking that it is within each
individual’s volition to make their world better for themselves, resulting in ‘privatised’acts of
resistance centred on self-improvement rather than collective change. Second, we discuss the
fantasy of pragmatism as supported by acts of ‘functional stupidity’and ‘functional alibis’that, in
tandem, enable detoxers to situate their privatised resistance within the narrow parameters of
Table 1. Participant information.
Pseudonym Age Sex Occupation Living location
Mike 19 Male Mixed martial arts practitioner Sweden
Jane 24 Female PhD student USA
Thomas 22 Male English language teacher Vietnam
Jason 33 Male PhD student UK
Lucy 31 Female PhD student Cyprus
Michelle 21 Female Undergraduate student Vietnam
Rosa 24 Female Undergraduate student Netherlands
Matthew 29 Male Non-profit worker UK
Emma 24 Female Graduate student UK
Chloe 21 Female Undergraduate student USA
Caroline 20 Female Undergraduate student UK
Anna 30 Female HR manager Vietnam
Alice 26 Female Graduate student USA
Amy 22 Female Food manufacturing specialist Canada
Julie 27 Female Secondary school teacher Canada
Amelia 28 Female Nursing assistant USA
Rachel 26 Female IT specialist USA
Jack 25 Male Software engineer Brazil
Paul 27 Male Non-profit worker UK
Sophia 29 Female Software engineer USA
Sarah 39 Female Retreat coordinator USA
Hoang et al. 9

instrumental rather than political concerns. Third, by exploring the pleasures that digital detoxers
derive from minor symbols of resistance, we highlight the self-indulgent and interpassive character
of gestural anti-consumption, in contrast to the active struggles and self-sacrifice implicit in more
authentic resistance. Taken together, these three features demonstrate how gestural anti-
consumption, while couched in an oftentimes superficially oppositional ethos, functions only to
gesticulate and relieve reflexively impotent (anti-)consumers’frustrations with the current semi-
ocapitalist order without challenging it.
Magical voluntarism: The privatisation of resistance
The theme to emerge most forcefully from our data centres on the redirection of attention away from
structural issues to oneself, suggesting a strong private character to gestural anti-consumption.
Digital detox, for many of our participants, is undertaken exclusively to manage and ‘correct’the
personal problems that they encounter in their digitally-saturated lives rather than to confront the
systemic causes of those same problems. Such self-orientation relates to what Fisher (2009:19,
2011) refers to as the ‘privatization of stress’whereby the growing problems of disaffection,
depression and anxiety within our ultracompetitive and image-obsessed consumer culture are often
diagnosed as individual pathologies and treated as private issues that are fixable through self-care,
responsibility and personal agency (also Lambert, 2019). Across our data, we see instances of a
‘privatisation of resistance’that is characterised by a pervasive atmosphere of inner-directed guilt,
shame and unhappiness. In the absence of meaningful alternatives to the technologically-mediated
capitalist system, many digital detoxers are unable to configure their dissatisfaction in any structural
sense, instead thinking of themselves as the only problem they might conceivably repair. For
example, one poster in the NoSurf group discusses how she has come to accept the impossibility of
bringing about a ‘perfect system’versus the relief she gains through self-control:
Personally I genuinely feel a lot more in control of myself. Last year I struggled heavily with Youtube
binges, but I’ve come to feel a lot more in control of myself simply by starting with accepting myself.
Understanding that the reason why I go to these things are because I feel lonely, or because I enjoy the
thrill of watching a funny YouTube video, or the feeling that I’m learning something. And in breeding
this control over myself, I found it really important to first notice when I was about to apply self
judgment. That feeling of revulsion –the frustration that’s akin to slapping your computer or keyboard
when it’s not working the way you want. And to attempt to replace it with a zen acceptance: instead of
hating myself for getting sucked down a rabbit hole, to learn to understand its causes, and why I am here.
We often blame social media for being addictive, which is ABSOLUTELY true…But what we ul-
timately need to learn to take control of, is that there is a part of our minds that crave that dopamine to
begin with. The ultimate way to breed control is not to find some perfect system of punishment to suck all
the fun out of social media, but in fact to learn to find fun effectively in other places. (‘Cindy’, Nosurf)
Although critically aware of the market causes for her distress, such as the addictive properties
programmed into social media platforms, ‘Cindy’attributes the distress that she’s experiencing to
her own neurochemistry: ‘there is a part of our minds that crave that dopamine’.‘[W]idespread
pathologies’, under late-stage capitalism, as Fisher (2009: 21) suggests, are treated ‘as if they were
caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family back-
ground’. Cindy refers to her reflexive impotence as ‘a zen acceptance’through which she comes to
terms with her inability to change a system where it is incumbent on individuals to resolve their own
psychological distress.
10 Marketing Theory 0(0)

Comparably, ‘Mike’, a 19-year-old fitness enthusiast who lives in Stockholm and aspires to make
a career out of mixed martial arts, emphasises a need to repair oneself rather than society. Mike who
gave us little information about his present employment status or whether he is in full-time study,
spoke about his efforts to help a friend to open an MMA-centred gym. Clearly invested in
physicality, contact sports and the non-digital arenas of life, Mike nevertheless shows a broad
understanding of technology, social media, Internet companies and their business models. Despite
his knowledge, however, he registers his over-reliance on digital devices as his own fault and
personal responsibility:
I’ve been trying to cut down on my [digital] consumption, but it’s still quite high. It’s quite embarrassing,
but you know first thing in the morning when you wake up, you usually check it [the phone] […]So
yeah, I think that people need to take responsibility and that’s what I’m trying to do. But I think that it’s
hard to do that because, you know, when you do that, you have to realise that you’re flawed and you’re
not complete….(‘Mike’, 19)
Mike’s call for people to ‘take responsibility’and his mission to somehow battle his own ‘flaws’
and ‘incompletion’suggest his resistance is directed against personal shortcomings rather than any
structural problems, thereby privatising and depoliticising his anti-consumption practices. By
channelling resistant energies into themselves rather than collective action, Mike and other detoxers
exemplify the ethos of ‘magical voluntarism’(Fisher, 2011: 131); an idealist perspective on human
agency whereby it is more conceivable for subjects to achieve success and happiness by their own
self-directed wish-fulfilment than by collective and political solutions. Under magical voluntarism,
any meaningful supportive relation between the collective body and the individual must be
abandoned, and we are resigned to accept that the only help we should realistically hope for is from
ourselves; ‘[i]f we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct
ourselves’(Fisher, 2011: 131). Magical voluntarism is sometimes euphemised by digital detoxers as
‘mindful’or ‘healthy’consumption as illustrated by the following Nosurf poster, ‘Janice’:
[…] i think there is a way to mindfully consume internet / tv content. [...] i think that there is something
beautiful about being able to find online communities and people who inspire you. but the problem for
most people, most of the time, is that it isn’t mindful. it’s a mindless scroll […] in the same way you can
have a healthy or unhealthy relationship with food consumption i believe you can be healthy in the way
you consume content / movies / articles. surfing or scrolling with no intention is like eating a whole bag
of hot cheetos because it feels nice. i want to be the master chef who is cooking people a healthy meal that
will make them feel full and good. not empty and craving more. (‘Janice’, Nosurf)
Janice’sdesiretobe‘the master chef’who can produce utterly enrichening outcomes from her
internet consumption reflects the illusion of entrepreneurialism –the principal architecture of
magical voluntarism –or, rather, ‘the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make
themselves whatever they want to be’–(Fisher, 2014b: n. p.). The illusion of entrepreneurialism is
nurtured by the belief that ‘little mundane utopias’(Bradshaw et al., 2021: 521), like Janice’s
‘online communities and people who inspire’, are out there to be found and connected with
through enterprising digital consumption. Through subjects’fetishisation of market objects and
little market-located utopias, semiocapitalism is insulated from critique and magical voluntarism
is allowed to supersede collective political action. For some digital detoxers, the courage to aspire
for systemic change is so obscured by magical voluntarism that even quixotic desires for restoring
Hoang et al. 11

lifestyles from bygone eras are more conceivable than political solidarity. As illustrated by
‘Natalia’s’post:
I was born in the early 80s so the bulk of my childhood was in the 90s. Looking back, that decade seemed
to have the perfect balance of technology and life…We spent waaaaay more time offline than we did
surfing. We used technology, but today, technology uses us…Like many of you, I fell into the trap day-
after-day of pulling out the phone at the moment of idleness or boredom and began mindlessly scrolling.
A lot of times, my mind would be completely blank as I scrolled. I was like a zombie. When I noticed my
toddler son looking at me to play with him while I ignored him to respond to some asshat on Facebook, I
knew I had to change. While it’s still an ongoing journey for me to limit my online time, I came up with
my own mantra, “live like it’s the 1990s,”and made a few rules for myself to help me. (I must ac-
knowledge there there [sic] some modern-world demands that necessitate modern-day technology like
smartphones, so while we can’t completely go back in time, there are a few things we can do to help
revisit that lifestyle of yesteryear). (‘Natalia’, Nosurf)
Natalia’s nostalgic yearning to ‘live like it’s the 1990s’suggests that a personal experiment in
simulating an imagined past is sometimes preferable to striving for a shared future. This aligns with
what we might consider to be the ‘hauntological’affectivity of magical voluntarism; the pervasive
feeling that we are haunted by our own lost optimism (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Fisher, 2014a).
Nostalgia for a pre-WiFi, pre-social media, or pre-smartphone era across our data pool not only
reveals detoxers’longing for a ‘non-digital’past but also their reflexive impotence to change the
present or future, resulting in a hauntological tendency to ‘continuously recycle the old rather than
invent any new energizing alternatives’(Ahlberg et al., 2021: 168; Fisher, 2014a). Whether through
recycling older lifestyles, fetishising mundane utopias or executing acts of self-control, digital
detoxers uphold a magically voluntarist illusion that most choices are conceivable except for the
collective choice to band together and change the basic operating conditions of our consumer
culture.
Pragmatism: The functional ethos of resistance
The second theme to emerge from our data centres on pragmatism as a fantasy framework that
structures gestural anti-consumption. The rhetoric of pragmatism is a mainstay of the reigning
market capitalist ideology and is constituted by the triumph of ‘hard-boiled practicality’over the
‘motley of far-fetched and impracticable idealists both within and without the marketplace’(Cronin
and Fitchett, 2021: 10). Under the truncated parameters of capitalist meritocracy, those things that
can be chosen, evaluated and consumed for their practical results are enshrined as more marketable
and, thus, more ‘valuable’ideologically than less concrete, less determinate arenas of life like
political revolution and social change. Claims to pragmatism are abundant throughout our data. To
mitigate digital culture’s worst effects, most of our participants incorporate self-described ‘practical’
detoxing routines into their lives and doggedly set up ‘small wins’for themselves, like successfully
minimising their screen time over the week, switching to a dumb phone at the weekends, or
deactivating a social media account for a month. Here, practical (i.e. short term and nominal)
lifestyle adjustments are favoured over more radical political activities, what many detoxers
perceive to be ‘na¨
ıve utopianism’(Fisher, 2009: 16).
Despite many of our participants displaying an in-depth knowledge about –and dissatisfactions
with –the functioning of a digitally-mediated marketplace (e.g. many spoke about internet cookies,
smartphones listening to their intimate conversations and social media causing their loneliness and
12 Marketing Theory 0(0)

depression), they stopped short at substantively thinking of an alternative, suggesting instead that:
‘it’s impossible to stop this wheel’(‘Jack’, 25); ‘to win that battle is not that easy’(‘Mike’, 19); ‘it’s
freaking impossible to avoid this stuff […]it’s just like such an uphill battle’(‘Sophia’, 29); ‘there’s
nothing I could do about it as a single entity’(‘Jane’, 24); or ‘I’m not advocating complete ab-
stinence, but relegating the internet to being the tool that it was designed to be’(‘Kevin’, Nosurf).
By clinging to the felt impossibility of change, digital detoxers spare themselves the risk of diverting
‘intellectual resources into “non-productive”critical thinking, existential anxiety, and other mis-
eries’(Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 1209). To come to terms with their lack of alternatives, many
detoxers uphold a kind of ‘functional stupidity’(Alvesson and Spicer, 2012) that limits their critical
faculties and restricts all rebellious efforts to instrumental, narrow concerns. Functional stupidity is
understood as the ‘inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflexive capacities in
anything other than narrow and circumspect ways’(Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 1201). For digital
detoxers, reflexively exercising their functional stupidity allows them to disavow larger systemic
issues that they feel unable to reverse and risk distracting them from nominal gains in their own
digital lives.
‘Chloe’, a 22-year-old environmental science student who had been living with her boyfriend’s
family during the COVID-19 pandemic and, as part of her detox regime, uses a website blocker and
applies a grayscale method (i.e. putting her phone screen in black and white) to reduce her screen
time, explains how verbalising her reflection on privacy concerns risks introducing ‘unproductive’
anger to her life:
I would say on a day-to-day basis it [privacy violation] doesn’t bother me so much, but it really bothers
me that people are not really talking about it very much, or like if they do, it’s in a very like “Oh well,
what can you do?”or like “we have no privacy, you know?”. I guess that’s just the way it is […] I can’t
like spend all my time, you know, just getting angry about it all. You know ‘cause that would be very
unproductive. But it’s just like if I talk to someone else about it, they’re not like, “yeah, you know, we
should write a letter to our state legislature”and I ask like “why aren’t there better laws around this?”and
people would just be like, “well, why are you so worked up about it? (‘Chloe’, 22)
To avoid disagreements with others, Chloe keeps her thoughts about digital dependency, privacy
issues and so on, to herself. By engaging in a ‘process of stupidity self-management’(Alvesson and
Spicer, 2012: 1207–1208) that involves giving up thinking or debating about the system, Chloe
prevents herself from getting ‘getting angry about it all’and spares herself the trouble of ‘explor
[ing] substantive questions through dialogue’(p. 1208). Comparably, in a Nosurf thread about
online fandoms, their toxicity and lack of authenticity, ‘Patricia’alludes to how she consciously
tempers her critical reflexivity when indulging in selected fan activities:
I still make time to take care of my mental health and live in the real world first, but the surplus of
positivity and artwork (art is really motivational for me) keeps me in two fandoms. I don’t argue in
ridiculous conflict [sic], but instead I take the time to learn the lessons this story teaches, and draw what
makes me happy. That is what a fandom was meant to be about. (‘Patricia’, Nosurf)
‘Patricia’defends her continued fandom by engaging in what Keinan et al. (2016) refer to as a
‘functional alibi’; a means of reducing any personal guilt by emphasising consumption’s functional
values such as ‘the lessons this story teaches’or its ‘surplus of positivity and artwork’. Similarly,
‘Oliver’, another poster in the Nosurf group, justifies his digital consumption through elevating the
usefulness and functionality of the Internet:
Hoang et al. 13

I don’t think the point is to flat out not use technology at all, i think the main idea is to limit or stop
viewing overstimulating content on the internet/tv, its the difference between using YouTube to learn
how to play an instrument or learn new math equations and just mindlessly scrolling through YouTube
for hours on end, living without tech would be miserable, the idea of this sub imo isn’t to really get rid of
tech from our lives, but rather stop doing useless stuff like scrolling for hours watching things that will
never help you. (‘Oliver’, Nosurf)
In Oliver’s narrative, digital consumption is shielded from critique because of the functions it
serves, like helping users to learn a musical instrument or how to solve mathematical problems. His
rejection of total digital abstinence reveals a conscious dependence on the digital marketplace
whereby functional alibis are relied upon as a matter of ‘pragmatic survival’(Dean and Fisher, 2014:
27). By setting aside loftier ambitions for systemic change in favour of the post-pessimistic rhetoric
of small wins, digital detoxers such as Oliver will their reflexive impotence into existence. Whether
through functional stupidity or functional alibis, digital detoxers dispense with any kind of op-
timistic or pessimistic social possibilities and commit their disaffected consent to the semiocapitalist
present.
Self-indulgence: The thievish joy of resistance
Lastly, our findings reveal self-indulgence to be a key dimension of gestural anti-consumption. For a
number of our participants, digital detox functions as a joyous rather than strenuous activity. In
contrast to more transformative acts of resistance which are typically marked by personal sacrifice
and the deferral of enjoyment, digital detoxers seem to derive a kind of perverse pleasure from their
abstinence. For many of these individuals, the identity –or ‘appearance’–of detoxing provides a
great level of pride and joy regardless of how much or how little they commit to that identity. In such
cases, detoxers often do not directly exercise willpower or enact resistance per se, but undertake an
‘interpassive’(Fisher, 2009: 75;
ˇ
Ziˇ
zek, 1998) gesture whereby the act of resistance is delegated to
someone or something else –such as a dumb phone or a blocking app (like ‘Cold Turkey Blocker’or
‘AppBlock’)–that performs anti-consumption for them. Instead of revolutionary acts, some
‘symbol’of abstinence, usually a commodity form, is enjoyed and fetishised by digital detoxers as a
gesture that enables them to roleplay as rebellious actors without needing to do anything of
substance. This joy is not unlike the pleasure that ‘clicktivists’or ‘armchair activists’derive from
virtual gestures (such as signing and sharing an online petition) without needing to undertake any
real-world sacrifice themselves (Hopkinson and Cronin, 2015). The phenomenon has been referred
to as ‘thievish joy’, that is, the ‘joy of having escaped the task implied in the activity as well as the
belief that such a delegation is possible’(Walz et al., 2014: 67); or rather, the joy that comes from
believing you have gotten away with something for nothing.
Across our data pool, we observe instances of thievish joy experienced through distractions or di-
versions that, while bringing about some form of abstinence, typically work to redirect detoxers’at-
tentions elsewhere: ‘I’ve been playing like a puzzle game on my phone to not use Reddit…it’snot
necessarily a huge step above Reddit, but at the very least like it’s not consuming content’(‘Alice’,26);
‘The best thing I’ve done has been setting an extremely strict Cold Turkey block on all my computers for a
span of several days at a time’.(‘Av a’, Nosurf); ‘Man I just uninstalled and blocked Facebook and
instagram on my phone and my phone is SILENT now. I feel like I have more control over my phone than
it does to me. The goal is to reduce my phone to a tool that is there whenever I need it instead of a toy’
(‘Tyle r ’, Nosurf). In many of these cases, some ‘symbolic act’(i.e. gesture of resistance) takes over the
functioning and meaning of ‘the original symbolized activity’(i.e. actual resistance), allowing detoxers to
14 Marketing Theory 0(0)

fall under the illusion of being an active resistor (Walz et al., 2014: 68). Detoxers’acts of abstinence, in
most cases, do not allow them to achieve distance from the marketplace, but largely lead to the privileging
of new commodity forms –whether substitute games, assistive apps or rediscovery of the now ‘silenced’
no-longer-so-distracting phone as a tool.
The thievish joy that detoxers derive from the appearance of resistance mirrors what Dean and
Fisher call ‘little nuggets of pleasure’, moments of levity that allow subjects to distract themselves
from, or otherwise to disavow, the ‘overall dreariness’of their reflexively impotent existence (Dean
and Fisher, 2014: 29). For Dean and Fisher, ‘dreariness and the little nuggets of pleasure are [not]
opposed to one another’(p. 30), but are inherently interwoven, resulting in half-measures and bleak
prospects, a kind of ‘entertainment that doesn’t really entertain’(p. 33). Whatever abstinence they
can accomplish serves only as a gateway for other kinds of consumer desire to emerge and become
materialised through new, perhaps drearier, commodities and technologies that function as tem-
porary surrogates for the abstained object.
In the following description of leaving Facebook, a poster on the Nosurf group, ‘Lucas’, reveals
how abstinence is only made achievable through working closely with the abstained object and
ensuring that substitute commodity forms are in place:
[A] couple of years ago I went on a Facebook diet. I started with un friending anyone who had annoying
posts, and anyone I didn’t want to talk to iRL. That cut the friends down. Then I removed almost all of
my photos and previous posts. That took ages, and sometimes posts popped up again. I scrubbed it all
clean. Then I unliked any books, movies posts and anything I had commented on. That took a while.
Then I turned all privacy settings to maximum. At this stage I was very seldom logging into Facebook
and only used it to receive invitations from my college friends. The last thing I did was get in touch with
the group of friends, make sure I had all their numbers and email addresses and set up a group text
message thread for chat and get together invites. Then I left Facebook for good. (‘Lucas’, Nosurf)
Here, rather than undertake radical critique or militant political acts against Facebook, Lucas
enrols a series of incremental micro-processes via action tools and settings available through
Facebook such as unfriending, unloading photos, ‘unliking’, gradually tweaking privacy settings
and so on to perform his resistance for him. Lucas characterises the micro-processes that allow him
to go without Facebook as ‘[going] on a Facebook diet’. By undertaking a personal ‘diet’rather than
participating in some dramatic collective purge, Lucas expresses his will to reject Facebook, but to a
large degree escapes the pressure of needing to exercise any willpower or creativity in the process,
simply outsourcing his agency to machinic settings within rather than outside of the Facebook
system. Only when some substitute (albeit drearier) commodity form (the ‘group text message
thread’) becomes available, is rejection considered complete.
Comparably, ‘Rachel’, a 26-year-old software specialist, relies on services like the Self-Control
app to lock herself out of certain websites, and keeps a special physical lockbox to seal away her
smartphone. By delegating her restriction efforts to dedicated commodity forms, Rachel achieves
periods of digital abstinence that enable her to pursue more wholesome and less-mediated activities
like going to church and spending time with her pet:
When I’m working and I don’t need my phone, I will often lock my phone in the box, like they sell these
little lockboxes that I think were originally designed for people that are like really struggled with losing
weight and food […] [I]f you look at the reviews, I mean there’re like drug addicts using these kinds of
things, but a lot of people use them for phones and stuff too […] Sometimes I’d just like, I locked my
phone in a box for Easter and was like I’m not going to look at my computer or anything. I’m just going
Hoang et al. 15

to have a nice Easter and play with my dog and go to church and you know do all the things that are in
person and that was really nice. (‘Rachel’, 26)
Here, Rachel’s smartphone lockbox functions as ‘an object-thing’that ‘acts in [her] place’
(
ˇ
Ziˇ
zek, 1998: n.p), freeing her from needing to exert any control over her consumption. Such
gestures of interpassive resistance provide psychic relief and allow her to dedicate her energies
elsewhere, assured in the belief that the market itself is already undertaking action on her behalf.
Although dreary and limited in their effects, the appearance of resistance provided by ‘object-things’
negates the felt responsibility for actual resistance, allowing for a sense of thievish joy.
Discussion and conclusion
Our analyses of digital detoxing have allowed us to conceptualise gestural anti-consumption as
scaffolded by magical voluntarism, the fantasy of pragmatism and self-indulgence. Considering
these three features altogether, gestural anti-consumption can be defined as a performance of
dissatisfaction with consumption, characterised by an apolitical and privatised resistance, func-
tionalistic ethos and interpassive character rather than genuine anti-market efforts and collective
pursuits of structural change. Resigned to the unchangeability of their structural conditions, re-
flexively impotent subjects settle for whatever efficiencies and pleasures they can derive from better
coping with the insecurities, instrumentalism and cynical opportunism prescribed by the coordinates
of the existing system. Our conceptualisation of gestural anti-consumption has two important
contributions for de-romanticist marketing scholarship (Fitchett and Cronin, 2022)–what has
recently been branded as ‘Terminal Marketing’(Ahlberg et al., 2022).
First, it allows us to update the concept of ‘reflexively defiant consumer’(Ozanne and Murray,
1995) with the ‘reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer’, a subject position that, we argue, is more
closely aligned with the brutal realities of semiocapitalist society wherein any anti-consumption
initiative simply represents new consumption opportunities. The original and visionary archetype
introduced by Ozanne and Murray in the mid-1990s –and long heralded as the default subject
positioning of market-located rebels, resisters and bricoleurs –was largely informed by the
postmodern pastiche and irony that carried through that decade. Ozanne and Murray compellingly
made a case for the possibility that post-Cold War, post-politics, post-ideological consumer subjects
of the late 20th century were sufficiently decentred, empowered, and self-reflexive to truly defy
dominant consumption regimes through ‘forming a different relationship to the marketplace in
which they identify unquestioned assumptions and challenge the status of existing structures’
(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 522). Ozanne and Murray foresaw that by being critical and creative
through reflexive consumption choices and lifestyles, an organised mass of individuals could
‘become the architects of their own history’(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 523). Optimistically,
Ozanne and Murray foresaw the potential for genuine freedom –‘the idealism of a true democracy’
(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 524) –in a kind of hypermuscular agency of networked individuals and
their capacity to challenge standard meanings and tastes in search of new consumption styles and
sign values. That vision, as we can appreciate from our terminal standpoint today, can hardly be
realised for a generation ‘whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had
even happened’(Fisher, 2009: 9). The truncated agency and depressive reflexivity of today’s (anti-)
consumers, we argue, can lead to neither authentic defiance nor Ozanne and Murray’s vision of true
democracy.
In the ubiquitous unfolding of semiocapitalism, defiance becomes predicted, neutered, and
integrated into the marketisation of more signs and sign values ‘to the delight of consumers eager for
16 Marketing Theory 0(0)

more immersion, technological gadgetry, and “convenience”associated with further escalating the
automation of consumption’(Hietanen et al., 2022: 172). In this context, the ‘reflexive act’is not
‘mass refusal’(Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 523) but is mass resignation to accepting digital
consumer culture’s small ‘goodies’, comforts, and conveniences (Dean and Fisher, 2014: 29). In the
absence of any unifying political alternatives to carry it further, the reflexive act can only result in a
politically hollowed-out subjectivity, borne not from apathy but from the sobering realisation that
any attempts at rejecting, restricting or reclaiming consumption remain in the service of one’s self
rather than for anything bigger.
In some ways, gestural anti-consumption relates to –but also differs from –the act of ‘virtue
signalling’(Levy, 2021). In terms of similarity, virtue signalling and gestural anti-consumption are
both matters of superficial performativity and not political praxis. However, while virtue signalling
functions as a communicative and conspicuous act undertaken purely as an act of moral ostentation,
gestural anti-consumption as a cynically pragmatic act is undertaken instrumentally, modestly, and
not always publicly to make one’s personal consumption work better for oneself. Although both
concepts function to varying degrees at the levels of self-expression and self-fulfilment, gestural
anti-consumption is not about signalling to others the moral urgency that the world must be changed
but is instead about acquiescence to the perceived reality that so little of the world can be changed.
Reflexively impotent (anti-)consumers might also be considered ‘futureless subjects’which
brings us to our second contribution. Our analyses help to trace the lived consequences of a cultural
atmosphere of cancelled futures –or futurelessness –that ossifies capitalism and all of its horrors as
permanent features of tomorrow (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Hietanen et al., 2020;Hoang et al., 2022).
The voices of digital detoxers in this paper reflect the cultural ‘suspicion’that ‘the end has already
come’and that ‘it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and re-permutation’
(Fisher, 2009: 3). Today detoxers can deactivate their Facebook or Instagram account like they did
with their MySpace or Flickr accounts long ago, but tomorrow only brings for them new com-
mitments to Twitch, Discord, the Metaverse or the whatever. Although they can delight in the
minutes they claw back from their digital screens through monitoring and setting goals on Apple’s
Screen Time or the Cold Turkey Blocker today, those minutes will inevitably be stolen back by the
more addicting amenities of tomorrow that will require newer, more assistive and more invasive
tools to suppress. It is almost a point of fact that there are ‘no breaks’and ‘no “shocks of the new”’ to
come (Fisher, 2009: 3); only renewed, rebooted, retweaked, resolved, reinvigorated commodified
objects that are perpetually subsumed and consumed ad nauseam in the marketplace. The resigned
acceptance that the latest technologies and their pathways to manipulation are here to stay, for today
and for many days to come, reflects a ‘pervasive sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political
sterility’(Fisher, 2009: 7). What our analyses show is that the slow disappearance of any optimism
for new and imaginative futures does not just bring about the nostalgic yearning for some less
tarnished material culture of our pre-smartphone, pre-Internet collective past (Ahlberg et al., 2021)
but also a compensatory hungering for pseudo-resistance that temporarily staves off (or perhaps
disguises) the futureless vicissitudes of today’s semiocapitalist consumer culture.
In conclusion, we argue for a de-romanticist approach to conceptualising anti-consumption,
consumer resistance, countercultural practices and so on. Here, we depart from the predominant
understanding of anti-consumption as grounded to alternative ideological attachments or a com-
prehensible political dissensus (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004;Ulver and Laurell, 2020). Our
central argument is that consumption and anti-consumption are not poles apart but are increasingly
and despairingly linked as two sides of the same coin under the interminable and indefatigable
reflexive impotence that pervades the present (Fisher, 2009). Through reflexive impotence, the
consumer and anti-consumer become conflated as the one (anti-)consumer –a subject that cannot
Hoang et al. 17

bring into clear relief a conceivable means of moving beyond the capitalist hegemony and its
disappointments. This subject looks to itself and its own consumption for solutions to shared
injustices and systemic challenges, rather than to collective political acts and thus remains en-
trenched in consumerist individualism.
Beyond the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer, questions must also be raised about the future
(lessness) of the (anti-)consumer researcher. Arguably, any romantic or optimistic accounts of anti-
consumption that elevate anti-consumers’market-located transformative power to an idealistic level
might simply strengthen the capitalist status quo (see Ahlberg et al., 2022); but what about the
lasting impact of a terminal, de-romanticist research tradition that merely confirms time and time
again the ideological first principle that no alternative to consumer capitalism will ever be con-
ceivable for its subjects? This cynical realism or ideological deadlock of consumer culture will
surely remain ossified if even those of us who tenaciously critique it contribute to its hypostatisation
through repetition, theorisation and confirmation. Future work might therefore self-reflect on the
horizon endpoint of a tradition that concentrates so much on anatomising capitalism’s seemingly
intractable hold over reality: will that endpoint be one where the (anti-)consumer researcher remains
as reflexively impotent as those subjects that he or she identifies as such? As recently discussed by
Coffin and Egan-Wyer (2022), the critique of capitalist ideology remains an urgent task, but any
interventive potential for the tradition requires analyst-activists to move beyond solely decon-
structing capitalism’s ills. ‘Capitalism is problematic, yes’, they agree, ‘but so too are aspects of the
human condition, which will be altered in a postcapitalist society but not entirely negated’(Coffin
and Egan-Wyer, 2022: 63). What is perhaps needed from future research is a willingness to delve
deeper into the reflexive subject’s conscious and unconscious processes that underpin, precede and
ultimately calcify the structures that we often find to be so stubborn in their effects. To better
understand –and someday overcome –the futureless vicissitudes of today’s semiocapitalist
consumer culture, it will be necessary to think beyond depressing structural horizons and more
about the human conditions, beliefs and fantasies that prolong our long, dark night at the end of
history.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Editor and three anonymous Reviewers for their
insightful comments that helped us to develop a stronger paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Quynh Hoang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5015-142X
James Cronin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3842-3546
Alex Skandali https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0934-9802
18 Marketing Theory 0(0)

Note
1. Though various definitions exist, we use the term ‘market fundamentalism’to refer to the dominant cultural,
political and economic framework that fanatically elevates a belief in markets and market-based choices,
competitiveness, individualism and self-interest as the only pathways to securing comfort and progress for
society. Our understanding maps onto that of Soares who describes market fundamentalism as ‘the existing
socioeconomic construction of society with an accompanying worldview that bolsters that system. It exists
to the exclusion of all else –there is no space for alternative views or dissent’(Soares, 2006: 276).
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Quynh Hoang is Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Leicester School of Business, UK. Her
research is primarily concerned with the social and cultural aspects of consumption. She is par-
ticularly interested in anti-consumption and consumer resistance to the digital marketplace, the
Hoang et al. 21

functioning of ideological fantasies in consumer culture and the intersection of ideology, sub-
jectivity and affect. Address: University of Leicester School of Business, University of Leicester,
Brookfield, Leicester LE2 1RQ, UK. [email: nqh1@leicester.ac.uk]
James Cronin is Professor in Marketing at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His
current research interests centre on the functioning of ideology within consumer culture and the role
of fantasies in the marketplace. His work broadly sits in the areas of interpretive, critically oriented
and theoretically informed analyses of consumption, shared social processes and marketing. His
research has been published in journals including Marketing Theory, European Journal of Mar-
keting, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Consumption, Markets &
Culture and Sociology of Health and Illness. Address: Lancaster University Management School,
Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK. [email: j.cronin@lancaster.ac.uk]
Alexandros Skandalis is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Lancaster University Management School.
His research interests revolve around consumer culture, cultural sociology, cultural industries and
sustainability. His work has been published in several academic journals such as Sociology, Gender,
Work & Organization, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of
Marketing Management and Marketing Theory, amongst others. Address: Lancaster University
Management School, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK. [email: a.skan-
dalis@lancaster.ac.uk]
22 Marketing Theory 0(0)