Consumer Cacophony by Justin Pack

Consumer Cacophony by Justin Pack

There is too much. Too much to read, too much to watch, too much to try, too much to buy. For the modern consumer, it’s hard to hear and hard to think amid all of this noise.

This book argues such that cacophony is a nihilistic abundance, threatening not only the physical environment that we live in, but also the coherence of our spiritual and cultural worlds. While we wrestle with the economic, political and environmental impact of too much, we do so in the midst of a crisis in the culture of thinking and feeling.

Understanding that contemporary philosophy often fail to engage with these challenges, Justin Pack turns to thinkers including Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Charles Taylor to explore the various threats of overproduction. Drawing together what are often seen as separate problems requiring different solutions – material abundance, environmental crisis, the decline of thoughtfulness – Consumer Cacophony’s case studies are drawn from across society and culture, but particularly the phenomena of academic overproduction and social media. This is a thoughtful, incisive account of that global overproduction and its devastating consequences.

In this exciting work, Justin Pack takes on a key problem of modern life: the problem of too muchDrawing on thinkers and social theorists as diverse as Nancy Fraser, Zygmunt Bauman, and José Ortega y Gasset, he presents a compelling case that “cacophonous capitalism” produces a “nova effect” with proliferating mountains of goods, information, perspectives, and worlds lacking any significant core meaning or organizing idea. Nonetheless, at the heart of the “supernova” of fragments, bits, and pieces there lies a logic: the meritocratic, money-driven ideal of homo economicus, in which a market theology sanctifies and moralizes production, accumulation, and consumption. At the core of our present environmental and social crisis, he suggests, is a culture in which the old God has given way to the new, a permissive market god willing to permit and promote experimentation, play, and even transgression so long as its fundamental logics of production, accumulation, and consumption are allowed to reign supreme and remain effectively unchallenged. What is needed, he argues, both politically and academically, is slow, patient narrative work that is able to exercise centripetal force, organizing and integrating the incoherent and exploding multiplicity of identities, perspectives, and worlds into an alternative culture able to overcome the destructive machinery of cacophonous capitalism. * Brandon Absher is Professor of Philosophy at D'Youville University in Buffalo, NY and author of The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy (2023) *
Justin Pack revives the problem of cacophony in an age that hides the exhaustion of overproduction in plain sight and repackages it as liberation. In response, Consumer Cacophony attunes us to the need to counter cacophony by engaging in cultural work that shapes our world around questions of value. * Dr Jeffrey Champlin, Director of the Learning Commons, Bard College Berlin, Germany *

Justin Pack is a Lecturer at California State University, Stanislaus, USA. He studies thoughtlessness and has written books on thoughtlessness in higher education, thoughtlessness and the environmental crisis, thoughtlessness and money, and meritocracy and conservative Christianity.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350500921
ISBN 10	1350500925
Title	Consumer Cacophony
Author	Justin Pack
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2026-03-19
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.