You can't rage against the machine through rebellious consumption.

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again.
You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.
You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make—those are only details.

I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Celestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the 'Living' sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Celestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.

We reach for the same brand not because we trust its quality but because we want to reassure ourselves that we made a smart choice the last time we bought it.

You want to believe that those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status...Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consummerism...It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.