Is Prosumer Capitalism on the Rise?

George Ritzer's current TSQ piece adds to his distinguished record of innovative work on consumption and rationalization, providing new twists to his analyses of prosumption, especially its significance for capitalism. Although building on Alvin Toffler's groundbreaking ideas about prosumption, Ritzer breaks sharply from his predecessor's highly optimistic vision of the process. Toffler held that prosumption would stall or reverse post-World War II era industrial capitalism's ever-increasing differentiation of production and consumption, and diminish the need for more intensive and extensive mass markets to mediate contradictory demands of the two relatively independent spheres. He contended that rapidly spreading prosumer practices were generating a relative 'de-marketization' of society, increasing autonomy, self-reliance, and free-time, reducing bureaucracy and alienation, and fashioning a much more felicitous, sustainable ecology, culture, and democracy. Toffler (1981:270-3) considered market-oriented types of prosumption (e.g., self-service gas stations, ATMs) to be updated methods of capitalist externalization of labor costs. Ritzer implies the same. However, Toffler (1981:481, passim) argued that an expanding decommodified 'prosumer sector,' stressing 'production for use,' rather than 'production for exchange,' was the driver of nascent 'Third Wave Civilization.' Turning Toffler's new age vision on its head, Ritzer asserts that dawning 'prosumer capitalism' is intensifying and extending sharply commodification and its contradictions--accelerated exploitation, job loss, underemployment, debt, frenetic hyperconsumption, and euphoric alienation (a la Marcuse--blithe unawareness and even enjoyment of what besets us). Ritzer's (2015a:1415) latest argument about an emergent 'vast web' of seamlessly integrated 'smart prosuming machines,' absent human agents, suggests a Ritzerian version of The Matrix on the rise. Ritzer mentions passingly and dubiously empowering possibilities of nonprofit Internet sites (e.g., Wikipedia, blogs) and of other supposedly self-regulated facets of prosumption. Semi-qualifications aside, Ritzer contends that capitalists have all the necessary means to continue to 'capture prosumption' and far too much at stake to let this control slip away. Heralding mounting exploitation and domination, his declinist 'grand narrative' of 'producer>consumer>prosumer capitalism' theorizes possible unexplored dynamics and structures contributing