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The rise of surplus culture: Guy Rundle considers how consumption's 'soft boom' will meet its limits.

Article Excerpt
American sports stars now routinely have the name of their sponsor tattooed on their arm or back ... McDonald's and other corporations are now paying rap and R&B groups to mention their products in the middle of songs ... parents are naming their children 'Lexus' and 'Pepsi' ... levels of obesity in the developed world threaten to lower life expectancy across the board for the first time in centuries ... casino gaming is now an essential part of the economy, and tax gathering, of many states ... teenagers now require credit management plans to get out of debts incurred overwhelmingly by mobile phone use ... the belief that global oil supplies has been more than half used up is now current not merely among environmentalists but among oil industry analysts ... the Global Millennium Project estimates that two thirds of the world's ecosystem resources have been 'bitten into' ... and forty per cent of school leavers believe they will end up in the top ten per cent of incomes.

For a decade now, the Western world has been enjoying an economic boom, organised largely around an expansion of consumer spending by a section of the population. Quantitatively, the boom does not compare in magnitude to the expansion of the western economy in the two and a half decades following the Second World War, nor is it of the same nature qualitatively, yet it has been sufficiently ample to mark the 90s and 00s as different in character to the recession- prone 70s and 80s. Whatever the source of the boom, one factor has been key, either as effect or cause or both, and that has been the degree to which economic activity in the West has been diverted into consumer spending, and the self-reinforcing cultural system that...

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