Consumer Culture and Post-Fordist Customization

Modern societies are characterized by ‘dialectic penury’ (Baudrillard, 1998), insatiable needs and a constant sense of differentiation and competition and feeling of never having enough. Thus, Baudrillard attributed the underlying problem to ? social relationships and social logic, reflecting on? affluence of symbolic exchange, rather than condemning ‘luxurious and spectacular penury’. According to his theory, the modern world represents a series of simulations, whereby nature is carefully managed, policed and tailored to the needs of humans, offering an abundance of signs with the false pretence of being real, i.e. in objects referred to as ‘sham objects’, that define our consumer society (Baudrillard, 1998).