Book Review: Addictive Consumption: Capitalism,Modernity and Excess

From consumption to addiction

Reith situates the notion of consumption historically, dissecting its characteristics and problematizing its deployment as a set of social practices shaped by notions of luxury, excess and respectability (Reith, 2018: 16). The anxiety around consumption is rooted in “the idea of consumption as a fearful, disruptive force with the power to enslave the individual”, which imputes to consumption the power to disrupt social order and geopolitical relations (Reith, 2018: 18). Conversely, the diffusion of mass consumption into the lower strata of society led to widespread anxieties concerning the reshuffling of the working class and the bourgeoisie, and particularly when the origin of the consumed goods was foreign (Reith, 2018: 20). Ultimately, the category of the addict, one surrenders to or becomes enslaved by the consumer good or luxury, shifts according to how public discourse apprehends a specific commodity. Furthermore, Reith situates addiction to consumption, understood as a relation between powerful commodities and weak individuals that became schematized as a hybrid medical-moral problem (Reith, 2018: 35). The modern idea of the addict arises in bourgeois industrialism, fusing protestant work ethic with industrial productivity (Reith, 2018: 35). The notion of addiction belies a more deeply rooted idea of will as the capacity of rational subjects to enact self-disciplining behaviours that promote productivity and proper democratic citizenship (Reith, 2018: 38). Drawing on Foucault’s constitution of subjects, Reith argues that the moral discourses of addiction preceded medicalized studies and taxonomies that classified and marginalized people hailing from lower classes, othered ethnicities - with a particular focus on women’s consumption (Reith, 2018: 40).

Conceptually, addiction has become medicalized and quantified with biological markers, resulting in a spread of “addict identities” – applicable to new forms of consumption, goods, or activities (Reith, 2018: 53). Reith turns to Hardt and Negri’s notion of intensification as the mode of modern consumption, described here using Schor’s idea of turbo (as in faster or more frequent time frames) or Ritzer’s notion of hyper as “continual and ever-increasing” consumption (Reith, 2018: 56). The proliferation of accessible and cheap credit, contactless transactions, and digital currencies has narrowed the wait time of consumption and relies on social media, ubiquitous mobile technologies, and platformized data collection - as the main factors behind intensification (Reith, 2018: 55).

New addictions on the horizon mean new opportunities

The second half of the book applies the schema established in the first half of the book to different commodity microcosms. Whether it concerns alcohol, drugs, food or gambling, new commodities appear and become the subject of consumption by various individuals located in specific social strata. When those social strata are part of the working class, discourses appear driven by health concerns or social reprobation (Reith, 2018: 98). Reith highlights that these addictive commodities are always doubly framed as objects of conspicuous consumption with different outcomes based on economic class, ethnicity, race, and gender (Reith, 2018: 98). If someone consumes alcohol as a social activity in moderation, it is praiseworthy, but if consumed in excess or expressly for intoxication, it is worrisome.

Reith also takes to task the DSM-5 classifications of addictions which are often brought up as the backbone of legislation seeking to curb addictive behaviours. Vague terminology in the DSM, like ‘tolerance’ or ‘persistent desire’, frame the institutional boundary between socially desirable and addictive consumption (Reith, 2018: 68). While Reith’s work draws on commonalities between forms of addiction, it is crucial to highlight videogame addiction’s specific context (Williams, 2003; Reith, 2018). Videogame addiction, or internet gaming disorder (IGD), is still hotly contested because, as Bean et al. discuss, “the symptoms listed for IGD are behavioral and psychological in nature […] but appear to be devoid of a cultural or phenomenological understanding of the origins of those behaviors” (2017, 379). Nevetheless, Reith describes this as the outcome of medicalizing addiction by creating standardized sets of diagnostic criteria and brain scans (Reith, 2018: 61). What is then the limit or distinction between addictive commodities or activities? The answer seems to be none, so long as we only focus on what lights up the brain (Reith, 2018: 65).

Capture and convert: productive addictions and data

Concerning food industries, Reith describes a trend in which “corporations have been highly successful in attempts to co-opt or subvert the authority of regulatory bodies and expert organizations” (Reith, 2018: 104). This is regulatory capture, the strategy where a corporation repositions itself through “pledges” or “responsibility deals”, dodging undesirable legislation. The institutions that are supposed to regulate or evaluate how a corporation operates are crucially dependent on the platforms provided by those same corporations, compromising their impartiality (Reith, 2018: 95). Hence, “Big Gambling” as an instance of regulatory capture (Reith, 2018: 126) implies a similar phenomenon as Big Food, Big Tobacco and Big Sugar: a codependent situation where regulators rely on industries self-regulate.

The discussion about gambling also brings up a contributing factor: technological infrastructure. Drawing on the work of Manuel Castells in The Network Society (2010), Reith explains that the development of technology parallels the expansionist interests of capitalism itself (Reith, 2018: 128). Discussing Big Gambling, Reith rightly turns to anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll’s work on gambling and her concept of “addiction by design” (Reith, 2018: 127). Gambling spaces and machines’ sophisticated designs are aimed to “engineer experience” (Reith, 2018: 127). In her book, Schüll describes gambling operators’ drive to increase “‘time-on-device’ [which] moves in tandem with the industry’s desire for continuous productivity” (Schüll, 2012: 58). Regulators recharacterize what Schüll describes as productivity for the companies into “unproductive consumption”, where money that should be allocated for desirable consumption evaporates (Reith, 2018: 141). Gambling engenders regulatory anxiety because it seems irrational. In trying to analyze and dismantle that irrational behaviour, regulators are forced to rely on Big Gambling’s host of data insights: Who enters the casino, for how long, and under what circumstances.

The undercurrent of this model implies that although consumer behaviour appears irrational, it remains productive because it provides consumption data. Rather than acting in pathological ways, consumers do what the designers want them to do (Reith, 2018: 138). Ritzer’s concept of “hyper” consumption is supported by the concept of the “prosumer” (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). While gambling appears unproductive, Schüll explains that gambling operators view consumers as data producers while regulators view them as consumers. Ritzer and Jurgenson refer to this situation as a “false binary” (2010: 17). The data gleaned from consumption and required by institutional organizations are drawn from consumption directly. The idea of “putting consumers to work” is omnipresent and achieved by making consumer behaviours productive by transforming once unproductive and irrational behaviours into productive and profitable (for Big Gambling) activities. When every aspect of modern living can be reduced to data, arguably every act of consumption becomes productive.

Discussion: What’s missing and where to now?

The historical account of addiction and luxury as entwined narratives of modern consumer culture covers long timespans. It nevertheless sets up a narrative trajectory for the commodities found in the later chapters of this book and offers an uncompromising survey on close to five centuries of the demonization of individuals through labels of addiction. Those individuals are women, people of color, working-class or neurodivergent. Reith’s work reveals how their behaviours have been censured based on highly subjective and artificial criteria of proper living in the protestant, neoliberal, and Western modern contexts. Addiction is discussed as a medical diagnosis, but one whose criteria are under fire for semantic vagueness, conflicts of interests, biological determinism, and bias. Reith explains that acceptable consumption and addiction are moving targets and that the regulatory bodies are entangled with the industries they are supposed to regulate. However, one area of the book falls short: the final chapter on gambling, which Reith fuses with gaming, without specific allowances for the latter. The panic surrounding IGD is relatively new, and by anchoring it through gambling, Reith masks the complex nature of videogames. Videogames are both consumer goods and telecommunications technology, which creates specific impasses for theorizing and regulating them.

In providing a more medium-agnostic account of addiction as a discourse running through multiple commodities, medium specificity must be sacrificed. The book’s broader focus provides broader perspectives between types of addictions, but also limits the ability to focus on specific addiction discourses. For instance, in the discussion of gambling addiction, Reith uses terms like electronic gaming machines and the gaming industry (Reith, 2018: 128) to refer to Big Gambling, before moving on to social gaming (Reith, 2018: 129), referring to freemium game models, comprising anything from gambling apps to games like Candy Crush Saga. This tactic highlights the slippage between the gambling and gaming industries but becomes troublesome since gaming, as play, is merged with gambling. This elides the specific issues of responsible gaming as they pertain to videogames, which have been a subject of discussion unto themselves.

When it comes to gaming studies, there is a much broader tradition of studies of play to consider (Caillois, 2001; Malaby, 2007), especially in terms of how addictive consumption reconfigures play (Zanescu et al., 2021). Game studies have long dealt with moral panics, including early indicators of addictive consumption discourses. More particularly, moral panics concerning the place of videogames in childhood development and deviancy have been a hot topic for the better part of the last 35 years. Kocurek examined the panic concerning videogame violence and how it coalesced around Death Race (1976). Williams, mentioned above, explored the historical phases of social discourses reacting to new technologies like games and how anxieties concerning deviant and unproductive behaviours coalesce (2003). More recently, new scholarship has focused on the renewed panics around juvenile addiction to games (Carter et al., 2020). Some of these works are more recent than this book, but discussions around microtransactions and gambling in games were already percolating in 2017 and 2018 when the Dutch Gambling Authority and the Isle of Man were tabling legislation to combat predatory AAA games industry practices. Given all these particularities, I think folding games into gambling underplays the problematic configuration of videogames. They are all at once: a consumer good that triggers moral panics of addiction and deviancy, a set of telecommunication technologies that exert infrastructural pressure on regulators, and social spaces where players come together.

All this said, scholars operating in any field confronted with issues of addiction and increasingly biopower-focused perspectives of such medicalized terminology benefit from Reith’s work. Gambling studies, consumer studies, communication studies, game studies and journalism, to name a few can take the model assembled by Reith throughout this book and apply it, with the necessary modifications, to any technology or commodity. For instance, the boom around accounts of game addiction and children involves issues of infrastructural capture, data production and addiction discussed in the book itself. For folks studying issues concerning excess consumption of drugs, food, or gambling, the second half of the book presents invaluable case study work and examples of legislative projects that can be brought to bear in future analyses. For scholars in consumer studies, the issues discussed here are even more pressing as Reith discusses a broader socio-political pattern of framing consumption itself, with varying frameworks based on the specific commodities or services.

For scholars concerned with videogames and videogame platforms, there is a wave of timely work over the last few years. Carter et al. have mainly been focused on how children playing Fortnite rationalize the labels of addiction and their play activities (2020). What others consider addiction might be the shape of a healthy and supportive social situation. Elsewhere, Zanescu, Lajeunesse and French take a political economic approach to studying the consumption architecture of games like DOTA 2 that rely on “battle pass” subscription models (2021). Joseph also examines “battle pass” business models and their implications in Apex Legends (2021). French and Whitson have focused on the tenuous barrier between productive and unproductive consumption and play (2021). Whether focusing on productivity, business models, platform configuration, or the accounts of consumers (including children), consumer studies and games studies scholars are grappling with the new paradigm of hyper-intensified consumption that Ritzer and Jurgenson discussed.

The study of platformization is another research field that parallels Reith’s work and where this text should be used, especially in the sector of cultural production as conceived by Nieborg and Poell (2018). This view examines how Big Data businesses and platforms are constantly iterating their profit-generating practices. Addictive consumption is undoubtedly part of experimentation with predatory consumption models. Platformization includes games but goes beyond considering the potential for regulatory capture that has become a foregone conclusion in the era of Big Data discussed by Efrat Nechushtai (2018). Nechustai explores how infrastructural capture occurs, explaining that regulators are trapped by economic dependency on telecommunication providers, which they should be critical of (2018). Reith’s deconstruction of regulatory capture is correct but can be further developed to account for new platform ecosystems (Srnicek, 2017). The links between Big Data, prosumption, and platformization are already infrastructurally calcified in cultural and technological industries, similar to the accounts of other “Big” industries. Big Data corporations are agnostic towards the commodity but drive towards a larger goal of producing actionable and profitable data, which many communications scholars have begun to address as the uncomfortable proximity of Big Gambling, Silicon Valley, and the games industry at large (Wajcman, 2019; Zanescu et al., 2021; Perks, 2020). Once the distinguishing features of each industry are considered and contextualized within the broader operations of platform capitalism, it becomes easier to contend with the corporate aims of each industry (Srnicek, 2017). That is however a starting point for scholars and regulators who must contend with corporations that have a decades-long head start in collecting data and regimenting consumer behaviours.

In the end, Reith remarks that “rather than a troublesome aberration, excess now starts to appear as an inherent feature of the system of consumer capitalism itself […] obese bodies, pathological gamblers, binge drinkers and unrepentant smokers, amongst others, emerge as culture figures that are formed in the shadow of ideas about reason and productivity” (Reith, 2018: 153). Addiction is not a glitch in the system; it is one of two straightforward outcomes framed by social systems of productivity, responsibility, citizenship, and rationality. Everyone is either a good citizen or an addict. Once that socio-political structure is evident, the fact remains that today’s addicts may become tomorrow’s rational, productive citizens, given there is enough profit to be made.