The old media are dead or dying. Display advertising in newspapers will soon disappear. Maybe newspapers themselves will disappear first. Shops may soon also become things of the past, as e-commerce makes the park-and-ride, pay-and-display, out-of-town superstore look as quaint as the high street once did. Certainly, we no longer have a single producer-consumer axis, but many.
Producer-consumer axes may change, multiply, mutate, morph and evolve, but people are still motivated by desire and magic, by the promises that brands offer, the stories they tell, the secrets they share and the ambitions they excite. Your smartphone tells the time with GPS accuracy, yet you still want an Audemars Piguet, Hublot, Richard Mille, Patek Philippe or a Rolex. Don’t you?
Nietzsche said all of life is a question of taste. And he was right: the choices we make define us. Our possessions define us and sometimes they betray us. Even refusing to make a choice is an irrefragable statement of intent.