| Born to Buy | Juliet B. Schor | Academic |
| High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them. |
| No Logo | Naomi Klein | Casual |
| In the name of protecting the brand from dilution, artists and activists who try to engage with the brand as equal partners in their "relationships" are routinely dragged into court for violating trademark, copyright, libel or "brand disparagement" laws - easily abused statutes that form an airtight protective seal around the brand, allowing it to brand us, but prohibiting us from so much as scuffing it. |
| Crap | Wendy Woloson | Casual |
| An object"s relative crappiness lies in the extent to which it offers false hope, was produced to hasten its own obsolescence, has no clear purpose, and/or has no emotional, utilitarian, or market value. |
| Affluenza | John de Graaf | Casual |
| The more real wealth we have - such as friends, skills, libraries, wilderness, and afternoon naps - the less money we need in order to be happy. |
| Life Inc. | Douglas Rushkoff | Casual |
| The efforts may be local, but the effects are global. Every gallon of gas we don't burn is a few bucks less going to exploit someone in the Middle East. Every student we educate properly has more potential to create value for us all. Every plate of chard we grow is another patch of top-soil saved, another square foot of room on a truck, and another nail in the coffin of Big Agra. Every Little League game we coach is an assault on the obesity epidemic, every illiterate adult we teach to read may become one fewer welfare case to fund, and every hour we spend with friends is that many eyeballs fewer glued to the TV. The little things we do are big, all by themselves. |
| Culture Jam | Kalle Lasn | Casual |
| Advertisements are the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants. From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV, microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of about three thousand marketing messages per day. Every day, an estimated 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials, and more than 200,000 TV commercials are dumped into North America's collective unconscious. |
| The High Price of Materialism | Tim Kasser | Academic |
| ...we need to feel autonomous and authentically engaged in our behavior. We constantly strive for increased freedom and more opportunities to experience life in a self-directed manner. These needs are most apparent in our strong motivation to express ourselves and to follow our own personal interests. Rather than feeling pressured or burdened by our circumstances, we need to pursue activities that provide us with challenge, interest, and enjoyment. By doing so, we can feel ownership of our own behavior, and thus feel both authentic and autonomous. |
| Brandwashed | Martin Lindstrom | Casual |
| ...the minute we're born, we may already be biologically programmed to like the sounds and music we were exposed to in utero. |
| The Hacking of the American Mind | Robert Lustig | Casual |
| Now look at the corn-fed steak. See all that marbling? We love it, because that's where the flavor is. And after grilling, it practically cuts with a butter knife. That marbling is fat in the muscle. That's muscle insulin resistance. That cow had metabolic syndrome; we just happened to slaughter it before it got sick, and now we're consuming the aftereffects in each and every Big Mac. |