We are skeptical of communities whose identity is rooted in the singular peculiarity of a shared obsession with a specific brand or those that advocate for the wholesale purchase of the grand and abstract, like gods, aliens, or geographic exceptionalism. Communities are defined by their consumption. The war of truths rages on, but the demilitarized zones are the zones of commerce. As long as we believe in the collection of stuff, there is inertial stability. We long instead for communities that share nothing more than sweaty and sinewy humanity in its various shapes, forms, and conditions, spontaneously emerging not only in response to unscheduled spectacles and unscripted disasters.

Undergirding this cultish collectivism centered on a product is a matrix of complex systems. These temporally and spatially interwoven mechanisms may be visible or invisible and adapt to conditions through a neverending genesis of pervasive and persuasive forms. The objective is to produce scarcity and provoke compulsion to consume fenced commodities (material or ideological). The assumption is that contesting or providing circumstantial opposition to these systems must be equally adaptive and iterative, mimicking the behavior it is trying to combat. 

We are bombarded with messages that you and I are less than, not fully realized, requiring self-enrichment and self-betterment and that through the transaction of stuff and its consumption, we will survive our corporate and corporeal solitude.

The outcome is a seductive fallacy of a theory: that substitution, rather than a complete rejection of participation, is a form of liberation. Awareness and behavioral adjustment to these conditions are not the same as confronting the conditions themselves. While a radical praxis of non-consumption is not viable, the option remains for a gentle consumption reminiscent of pre-capitalist communities. Survival hinges on a mantra as counter-offensive: to want less, to be less.