Coinciding with the Black Friday commercial campaigns, Netflix has released Buy now. The shopping conspiracy (Buy now. The consumerist conspiracy). It is a ninety-minute documentary that highlights marketing strategies in online shopping to stimulate consumption beyond the actual needs of users. The narrative voice has been designed as if it were an artificial intelligence assistant that interacts with the viewers. This betrays the need to depersonalize the critical position and, at the same time, try to cover the discourse of a higher authority. The robotic voice develops a tutorial in five steps to discover the main rules for increasing profits and achieving business success.
The witnesses who give their version of the whole process are, on the other hand, quite human. Even more, they are people who come from the darker side of the consumer world to reveal the hidden truth to us. They are former managers of Amazon, Adidas, Apple and Unilever. All have in common a past in the executive bodies, and an important role in the decisions and design of the respective consumption platforms. And all of them, moreover, folded after experiencing ethical dilemmas that had to do with the good of humanity. Now they appear in the documentary to redeem their sins and reveal the manipulation strategies to which we are subjected as consumers, such as the distribution of information on web pages, the stimuli to interact with them, the messages, the colors and the ‘exposure of the alternatives. A Buy now they explain, for example, the creation and effectiveness of the “Buy in one click” button from Amazon. “It’s about reducing as little as possible the time that passes between thinking we want something and buying it, and this is done by conditioning our behavior in such a subtle way that we can’t even imagine it”, says a former worker from ‘Amazon who was responsible for the user experience.
The documentary reveals shocking data, as thirteen million mobile phones are thrown away every day in the world and two and a half million shoes are bought on Amazon.
Buy now it doesn’t explain anything you haven’t heard before about programmed obsolescence, eco-posturing, the greenwashingthe fast-fashion and the farce around product recycling, including aberrations. The documentary goes overboard in the inclusion of dystopian images of a catastrophic world drowning in waste. They show many alarming scenes, such as the city of Paris drowned in mountains of shit where only the tip of the Eiffel Tower pokes its nose out of the surface. Perhaps he is more adept at explaining the art of distraction and the sarcastic euphemism of “creative interpretations of the truth”. Between videos of kittens and pleasant music they manipulate our behavior. But Buy now it is a sin of divulgative elementality, a visual simplification and a theatrical alarmism that detract from the impact of the great truths about the degradation of the planet, with the risk of achieving the opposite effect to the desired when it comes to influencing the viewers.
Source: www.ara.cat
