Well timed to sound a warning before the consumer frenzy of Black Friday, here’s a film whose title says it all: Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy. Nic Stacey’s documentary is partly about the dark arts of marketing that manipulate us into buying ever more products. “You’re being 100 per cent played, and it’s a science,” says Maren Costa, formerly a “user experience designer” at Amazon, who herself helped develop the site’s technologies of subliminal persuasion (even the colours of “click to buy” buttons were researched to the hilt).
Costa is one of several industry insiders turned whistleblowers who proffer mea culpas and trade secrets here — others include an ex-Unilever CEO and a former Adidas executive. But Buy Now! is not just about the mechanisms of modern hucksterism. It also examines the results of the addictive consumption and excessive production that drive each other in an ecologically catastrophic vicious circle. The film includes nightmarishly evocative CGI images — cities engulfed by ever-swelling mountains of junk — but even more immediate is actual footage of a Ghanaian beach swamped in a tide of discarded clothing.
Among other witnesses are a repair expert who explains how corporations conspire to make their products unmendable, and self-styled “trash walker” Anna Sacks, a specialist sleuth of consumer detritus.
There are arguably few outright revelations here, but this handy primer covering familiar topics such as planned obsolescence and greenwashing is given a brisk, jazzy presentation. The narrator is Sasha, an Alexa-like “personal assistant” who numbly intones the key lessons of the age: waste more, lie more, control more . . .
This entertaining, unsettling piece is released on Netflix, which may strike you as ironic: there is probably another film to be made on the effects, environmental and cultural, of the sheer amount of visual product constantly being created to fill this and other streaming platforms.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix now
