Reality for Sale
An Object Oriented Democracy
This project explores a speculative future with a new political system based directly upon consumption and object assemblages.
In this world political parties has been transformed in to cooperations trying to guide and direct private consumption into collective movements aimed at market forces.
This is done in an attempt to rejuvenate politics and individual citizens voices against globalized market forces and the power of huge private companies.
This project tries to map and operationalize the political and mental dynamics of such a system through design.
The Political Machine
Consumer Manual
Community Equity
Market Share
Product Development
Future Vision!
Beneath the future political party lies a bitter self-knowledge of its own inadequacy in being able to solve the greatest and very complex problems of our time solely through traditional political method and rhetoric.
Instead, politics aim to directly influence market forces and shape and facilitate private consumption in a way that is ideologically in line with the party’s ideas and values.
Seen through this lens, the political process becomes a matter of exposing the composition of consumer products and the underlying infrastructures underneath these systems. This knowledge is then held up against the party’s own values and vision for the future when deciding wether to support or oppose a product and producer.
In other words, the focus has shifted from opinion polls to market shares and from value-setting legislation to value-based product development. The diagram above shows how the new poltical cooperation functions.
The Political Caricature
Strategic Profile Template
This shift in political focus is also reflected in the use of social media. As a phenomenon, companies have benefited from the opportunity for individuals to express their unique lifestyle and personality in a way that has formed the basis for precise commercial segmentation and targeting.
But the fragmented individualism has now been replaced by a popular hack into the possibility of expressing oneself in another way. In an attempt to gain greater political agents and have their voices heard, citizens in greater and greater numbers are sacrificing their individual profiles in favor of their political cause and position.
The new political companies make digital templates available so that the individual’s political position is supported in larger collective movements. It is thus a strategic use of caricatures to send strong collective signals to the market through its own means. A renaissance of the union in a digital edition.
The Habitus Apparatus
In order for us as individuals to create an overview and navigate in this system and society, the so-called habitus apparatus has been developed. A personal digital tool for scanning and registering all your belongings and new acquisitions. Through this device it is possible to see the mapping and composition of the total consumption / object network that makes up who you are.
Objects are registered as a product under the manufacturer and will in addition be able to be categorized within clusters of object types and use in the home. Since such a branched network of products will typically be able to achieve a certain size, the display can be projected through the projector lens on the back of the device.
The device allows you to control and adjust your private consumption in a way that is in line with your value attitudes and thus shape the market to go in the direction of the future you want and hope for. That way, ideology becomes a form of ecologically lived life and you get the opportunity to calibrate your words with action.
In addition to personal use, the device will also be available within companies to map their overall connections. As a manufacturer, you are encouraged to provide the most detailed value chain and product composition linked to the scan mark of your products.
Future Child Drawings
Through my research I was luckily able to a attain a collection of handdrawn self-portraits made from a group of future children. These drawings mirror the implicit mentality at work in the future society and should be interesting to discuss through critical analysis. Perhaps these children see all the things they own not only as things but as real parts of themselves and who they are? What would this mean and what consequences would it have?
