Shopping
Everything You Got Wrong About ‘Buy Now!The Shopping Conspiracy’
Twelve tons of plastic are produced each second. One hundred ninety thousand garments are made each minute. Four hundred million tons of plastic waste are generated annually.
These are some of the stats meant to overwhelm viewers of Netflix’s documentary, “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy.” Released on Nov. 20—just a few days before Black Friday—director Nic Stacey highlights the tactics corporations use to maximize rampant displays of consumerism.
“The lies you’ve been sold will cost you,” Netflix warns potential watchers of the film.
“This unpredictable and revelatory documentary special from a two-time Oscar-winning team pulls back the curtain on the secretive world of the most influential brands, as insiders and whistleblowers expose the covert manipulation tricks to keep you buying, no matter the cost,” the streaming titan said. “This is the story big business doesn’t want you to know.”
It was good marketing, considering the doc on overconsumption reached 7.1 million views in its first five days, becoming 2024’s top non-true crime documentary launch.
So good, in fact, it became a viral TikTok topic—though most of the movie’s intent was lost in tech-translation. At some point, the documentary’s press tour got caught in a game of telephone, resulting in multiple publications—including but not limited to the Daily Mail, The Review Geek, Decider—reporting that “Buy Now!” was created with artificial intelligence.
“I kept watching this documentary about an important topic, waiting for a meaningful, moving moment and it never came,” one reviewer posted on IMDb. “There’s something ironic about the fact they used AI generated images to show pollution instead of real ones. Whole lot of fluff, never got the good stuff.”
This cognitive dissonance was a common theme in reviews; why is a documentary about the environmental consequences of the fashion industry using AI-generated visuals that would have generated massive emissions? The sentiment of one now-deleted Reddit post voiced that if a documentary is about making environmentally intelligent choices, it was certainly a choice to use AI-generated content.
“I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding around the whole thing,” Stacey, the Emmy-nominated director, told Sourcing Journal. “We didn’t actually use any AI.”
Grain Media, the two-time Academy Award-winning British documentary house behind the subversive film, was visually responsible for “exposing the tricks” big brands use to keep consumers buying.
“To galvanize viewers around the problem of overconsumption, we crafted visuals that invite them in rather than pushing them away,” Compost Creative, the Emmy-award-winning studio responsible for the doc’s visual effects, shared. “We wanted our work in the film to be beautiful, bold and funny, turning the tools of advertising back on the advertisers.”
It may have worked too well, considering many mistook the menage of VFX, cel animation and motion graphics painstakingly created by artists for artificial, carbon-guzzling creations. Tangentially, one of those artists was so inspired by the project that she left the VFX industry to become an activist.
“Every visual element we created was part of a cohesive aesthetic, which began with the film’s Siri-like narrator, Sasha,” per Compost. “From datamoshing on cheesy stock videos, to hidden messages composited onto billboards, the aesthetic of the film feels directed by Sasha.”
“The only AI used in it at all was the actual generation of the voice,” Stacey said. “And I wrote the script for the voice, right? And then we use an AI to just say the words. So that bit is AI—everything else is artists. Very good, very hard-working, artists.”
The resulting, surrealist VFX set pieces conjured masses of trash tumbling through cities, influenced by real data on real waste quantities provided, which, in turn, led to an approach that “conveyed the truth while ensuring that the visuals were comprehensible.”
“Meanwhile, our 2D department was busy creating dazzling cel animation to tell the contributors’ stories,” Compost continued. “These whistleblowers were going out on a limb in the film and deserved a sympathetic animation style.”
Those whistleblowers included Chloe Asaam of the Or Foundation; Roger Lee, a clothing manufacturer; Jim Puckett, the “James Bond of waste; Anna Sacks, a trash-centric TikTok influencer; Kyle Wiens, founder and CEO of iFixit; Jan Dell, a chemical engineer; Nirav Patel, a former member of the founding team behind Oculus and FaceTime at Apple; Mara Einstein, a former MTV marketing executive; Eric Liedtke, the former president of Adidas and founder of Unless Collective; and Maren Costa, a principal user experience designer who spent 15 years at Amazon.
“The initial pitch to Netflix was to try and make something that’s kind of more popular and speaks to everyone,” Stacey said. The idea was to create visceral visuals (aka no conventional tropes like random waste sites) of real-time issues (like how many cellphones are tossed a year) in a way that would “punch through,” he said, to the viewers at home.
“Marlen was so eloquent about what this film essentially tells us,” Stacey continued. “Which is the rise of the internet and online shopping and driving consumption, which is huge, but there’s an equally big thing coming, which we’re not really prepared for.”
AI intermezzos aside, the internet kept tallying the film’s perceived paradoxes.
It’s a valid concern.
Costa spent 15 years at Amazon, becoming the behemoth’s first-ever principal user experience designer before ultimately becoming the principal UX designer of multiple projects. Per Amazon’s job listing, the base salary for this position, specifically on Amazon’s global talent management and compensation (GTMC) team, ranges from $147,600-$244,000.
Adidas granted Liedtke a severance payment of 5,428,572 euros (a little over $5,650,000) upon terminating his tenure at the end of 2019, per the brand’s annual report. That was in addition to the overall compensation set out.
It’s hard to understand what straw broke the camel’s back with a piggy bank like that, commenters claimed.
“I can’t hide from what I did, and I have to reconcile that with who I am today,” Liedtke told SJ. “For good or bad, I was an employee of Adidas for 26 years. And I loved every minute of it.”
He recalled meeting Cyril Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans, who introduced Liedtke to fashion’s best-kept secret: plastic. Upon “opening his eyes” to the industry’s (allegedly incapacitating) underbelly, Liedtke left the K-leather lover to build Unless Collective, a label that is free of fossil fuel.
“I didn’t do this to make more money; I did it because I had made enough money,” Liedtke said. “I want to try and scale the solution so I can look my kids—and my grandkids—in the eye and feel like I tried to do something to solve the issue that I helped create. That’s it.”
Mara Einstein, the former entertainment exec turned PhD-educated professor and author, shared a similar sentiment. For context, Einstein left NBC in 1999—during what she called the height of on-air sitcoms, including Seinfeld and Friends—to become a professor. In doing so, she cut her salary by two-thirds.
“I didn’t think it was a good use of my time,” she said, “to get people to watch more television and buy more stuff.”
That was 25 years ago. Teaching has been Einstein’s self-proclaimed North Star ever since.
“The hardest part of my job is that because we engage with marketing every day, people think they understand how it works,” she said. “It’s like a fish in a fish tank; you think that’s what the whole world is like. The reality is that the whole world doesn’t live immersed in this 24/7 marketing fishbowl.”
On the topic of the third-person effect, the line in the sand for what to and (perhaps more importantly) what not to cover within the doc’s scope was another common thread unraveled.
“They wanted this to be used in schools, so it does have that younger-person friendly appeal to it,” Einstein said, noting an impact agency was on retainer as well. “So, they are looking for this to be used by organizations, to help further their causes.”
Other critics, meanwhile, were concerned with the lack of new information shared in the film.
“The thing that I feel really strongly about is that advertisers, every single day, think of a better, more interesting way to sell you something. And it’s no good just saying the same thing every time; it needs different voices and lots of people saying it in different ways,” Stacey said. “So that’s my sort of justification for why the film is the way it is. This is personal to me, and we’ve been lucky enough to have it expressed on Netflix, but it needs lots of different voices saying it in different ways to gather momentum.”
The documentary ends on what some deemed a mediocre note, one not quite calling anything to action. Redditers expressed feelings of restlessness as a result. That was the point. Partially, at least.
“I’m not convinced the regular consumer understood that we, as individuals, can only make a difference on the margins,” Einstein said. “The blame and the changes are systemic; they have to happen at the source. This is about corporations.”
TikToker Anna Sacks also noted the doc’s subtly.
“When you see corporations destroying usable products, I think there’s, like, an immediate, visceral reaction that’s very human,” Sacks said to SJ. “I think that makes sense, [so] people can, like, understand it. And from what I have experienced, I think it’s, it transcends politics.”
Unilever’s former CEO Paul Polman’s cameo during the doc’s fourth act drove this idea home.
“As long as we define success as producing more stuff, more profits, I think, unfortunately, we are in trouble,” the CEO-turned-climate activist said around the 60-minute mark.
Polman, who went on to build the Fashion Pact with François-Henri Pinault, might be referencing the concept of planned obsolescence. Journalist Vance Packard covered the idea in his 1960 novel,” The Waste Makers,” which he described as an “exposé on how businesses try to make people wasteful and discontent.”
Packard explored two principal methods used to create these feelings: obsolescence of desirability—prey on emotions—and obsolescence of function—prey on need.
“Manufacturers have downgraded quality and upgraded complexity,” Packard wrote in the bestselling book, quoting industrial designer Gordon Lippincott’s 1958 sentiment. “The poor consumer is going crazy.”
In the 1960s, this looked like the paper dresses fad (obsolescence of desirability) and the coal-burning furnaces ban (obsolescence of function). Today, it looks like Shein hauls and iPhone chargers.
“We would say, use your outrage,” Costa said in the film. “Because outrage will create action, and then action creates hope.”
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