[imagesource:netflix]

Perfectly timed to issue a warning ahead of the consumer madness of Black Friday, Netflix’s latest doccie Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy says it all.

Nic Stacey’s documentary is partly about the dark arts of marketing that manipulate us into buying ever more products that we do not need, while also delving into the hidden environmental costs of such rampant overproduction – asking to put the onus back onto the companies making the shit rather than on the consumers who are forced to buy it all.

Whistleblowing ex-employees and industry insiders of big brands like Adidas, Apple and Amazon tell all in this eye-opening documentary, revealing the technologies of subliminal persuasion.

“You’re being 100 per cent played, and it’s a science,” says Maren Costa, a former designer at Amazon who helped develop the site. She says marketers even use testing and data to determine which colours on the “click to buy” and “free shipping” buttons will make the most money.

The other high-ranking whistleblowers include an ex-Unilever CEO and a former Adidas executive who allowed their good conscience to ask some hard-hitting questions about the exorbitant industries they helped perpetuate.

Financial Times notes that Buy Now! is not just about the mechanisms of modern hucksterism, as it also examines the results of the addictive consumption and excessive production that drive each other in an ecologically catastrophic vicious circle.

The film includes nightmarishly evocative CGI images — cities engulfed by ever-swelling mountains of junk — but even more immediate is actual footage of a Ghanaian beach swamped in a tide of discarded clothing.

Also shocking is a testimony from a repair expert who explains how corporations conspire to make their products unmendable so customers keep buying new things — and creating waste. Also among the witnesses is the self-styled “trash walker” Anna Sacks, a specialist sleuth of consumer detritus who finds luxury branded bags slashed to create more demand for high-end goods while also adding to the ever-growing trash pile.

We produce about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste globally each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. We also make 92 million tonnes of textile waste annually, per the World Economic Forum. And, in 2022, we produced an estimated 62 million tonnes of waste globally from electrical and electronic equipment (e-waste), says the World Health Organization.

I know, those numbers are hard to conceptualise. Watch WALL-E for an idea.

Nirav Patel, a former Apple software development engineer, says in the film that these facts seems far from the minds of those in the tech industry — and, we might guess, other industries.

“In my own personal experience, if you’re a designer or engineer in one of these companies, waste never enters the conversation,” he says. “There is no meeting within a company building a laptop or phone or other device that’s, ‘Let’s talk about what happens as the end of life.’”

The film offers ways to be more mindful as a consumer like mending instead of throwing things to that “magic place called ‘away'” as environmental health and justice advocate Jim Puckett notes, and of course, not giving into the shopping gimmicks and buying way, way less.

But the film also puts the onus on the companies and corporations driving this greed, asking them to seriously consider the end journey of the products they make, without lies and manipulation. Fat chance, but we keep trying.

Watch Buy Now! on Netflix:

[source:financialtimes]