“I think our economic model, in a big sense our whole economic system protects itself by making people dependent upon it. By making sure that any change, any departure from that sys-tem, is going to be hard. And it's going to lead to hardship, both individually and on a large scale as well. We can't change our economic system without it falling apart, without things crashing really hard. Just like as an individual you can't let go of your job and all that stuff without crashing pretty hard.”

“Intellectual and cultural knowledge of the kind we used to acquire off-line, at a slower pace, in a less distractible and distracted mode, are threatened with extinction as new waves of data, in unmanageable quantity, come online. The subtler properties of language, its potential for irony and its connotative richness, whose apprehension requires sustained and careful attention, are at risk when speed of access and ease of understanding are at a premium. The consequences of this for literary and philosophical writing are obvious; less obvious, but intimately connected, is the damage done to language as a means of careful argument, including political argument.”

“Advertising and marketing by capitalist firms have sought to make consumption the marker of social status, encouraging a competitive spiral of acquisition that preempts other less socially divisive ways of spending time and energy. People are exhorted to define and value themselves in terms of what they can afford to acquire even if this means borrowing to do so.
Not only is everything promoted as new or improved, bigger or better, faster or smarter, but there is a constant suggestion that in purchasing it the buyer will gain some enviable personal distinction.”

“Left-wing critics of capitalism have been more bothered hitherto about the inequalities of access and distribution that a consumer society creates than about how it confines us to market-driven ways of thinking and acting. Employment is almost always prioritised over other goals. Labour militancy and trade union activity in the West have been largely confined to protection of income and employees' rights within the existing structures of globalised capital and have done little to challenge, let alone transform, the 'work and spend' dynamic of affluent cultures.”