Aja Barber

A call to action for consumers everywhere, Consumed asks us to look at how and why we buy what we buy, how it's created, who it benefits, and how we can solve the problems created by a wasteful system.


We live in a world of stuff. We dispose of most of it in as little as six months after we receive it. The byproducts of our quest to consume are creating an environmental crisis. Aja Barber wants to change this--and you can, too.

In Consumed, Barber calls for change within an industry that regularly overreaches with abandon, creating real imbalances in the environment and the lives of those who do the work--often in unsafe conditions for very low pay--and the billionaires who receive the most profit. A story told in two parts, Barber exposes the endemic injustices in our consumer industries and the uncomfortable history of the textile industry, one which brokered slavery, racism, and today's wealth inequality. Once the layers are peeled back, Barber invites you to participate in unlearning, to understand the truth behind why we consume in the way that we do, to confront the uncomfortable feeling that we are never quite enough and why we fill that void with consumption rather than compassion. Barber challenges us to challenge the system and our role in it. The less you buy into the consumer culture, the more power you have. Consumed will teach you how to be a citizen and not a consumer. 

The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism

Consumed

Karolina

Big corporations love to refer to their workforce and employees as family'. Because it makes it easier to get away with workplace abuse and to place guilt on employees to work harder in a job which often offers little to no upwards movement whatsoever. Whenever a bigger company refers to their employees as 'family', I always shudder. If it's so much of a family, why not make wages more evenly distributed throughout the entire business, instead of having a bunch of millionaires and billionaires in upper management and minimum-wage workers (and less if we're counting garment workers) at the bottom?

If we do not discontinue the practice of unpaid internships, we will continue to have industries where only upper- and middle-class people can hold jobs and have opportunities. Humans are not consumables. Pay your workers.

Someone once said, ‘Comparison is the thief of joy.’ And social media runs off that fuel, as it drives you to consume in ways which you don't need to.

Those at the top profit from those at the bottom's lack of wealth. And those at the bottom are reliant on those at the top. It is a sort of feudal system whereby the colonizers have taken people's lands and rented them back to them for the service of their work on their own lands.

We consume and we consume and we consume, while not giving much thought to the lifespan of our clothes, or othe people on our planet, or our planet itself.

The system isn't broken at all. This is exactly how it was built to work- exploitation and destruction of the world's most marginalized people for the benefit of others.

Integrity actually costs everything if you stick to your guns on the things you care about (and make it very public that these are the things you do INDEED care about).

Integrity often requires missing out on pay cheques, and sometimes doing that publicly, because that's how you use your power—by refusing to be bought.

Consumed quotes

Join the club