So, yes, we love to shop, most avidly between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Still, we know that in the long run, consumer culture is bad for the economy, the environment, and our souls. We sometimes express this split in our personalities by complaining about the “commercialization” of Christmas, typically when we’re fighting crowds of last-minute shoppers. More often we apologize to ourselves, among others, for buying things we didn’t really need, or for indulging a child’s ad-induced desire for a molded plastic toy that will never decompose. Complaining or apologizing, we’re divided by very different orders of feeling. On the one hand, we experience the pleasure of buying, using, and giving away the things on the shopping list. On the other, we know without thinking that the same things already contain a barbaric history of exploitation — “Made in China,” the label says — and foretell an ugly future of mountainous landfills.

But consumer culture is actually good for the economy, the environment, and our souls, among other things. First, sustainable economic growth doesn’t require more saving by households and more investment by CEOs, bankers, traders, and fund managers. In other words, more consumption is the key to balanced growth in the future. That’s right: we need to save less and spend more. Just to begin with, a much larger dose of consumer spending is absolutely necessary to prevent the kind of economic catastrophe that still racks the domestic and international economies. That new dosage requires a redistribution of national income away from profits, which don’t always get invested, toward wages, which almost always get spent. This new course of treatment does more than invert the supply-side cure for our economic ailments — cut taxes on profits, let private enterprise prevail! — because it assumes, in view of the historical record, that profits won’t be productively invested. That’s right: higher profits almost never lead to more investment, more jobs, and more growth. In fact, there’s no demonstrable link between private investment and economic growth, so cutting taxes on corporate profits is pointless at best and destructive at worst. We might as well stop pretending that there is such a link.

Second, consuming goods is as morally complex and significant as producing goods. Making things — the work that requires tools and skills and time — is no more meaningful than buying and using things. In fact, work as such is less important than, say, buying and driving a car, or choosing and wearing that little black dress. (It turns out, in any event, that the kind of work we typically imagine as the obvious alternative to The Mall is what we do at our leisure, after hours: it’s already taken up residence in the neighborhood of consumer culture, where you don’t get paid for what you produce.) Consumer culture doesn’t siphon political energies and fragment social movements by “privatizing” experience: instead it grounds a new politics by animating both new solidarities and new individualities. In the same spirit, advertising — the headquarters of consumer culture — speaks the last utopian idiom of our time because it urges us to create identities unbound by work. I can’t explain the downside of thrift — or the morality of spending — unless I first convince you that the Great Depression and the recent economic crisis are comparable events, both of them caused by an excess of profits and a shortage of wages, or too much saving and not enough spending. It’s a hard case to make because everyone knows how and why to defer gratification. All adults — not just parents — have a powerful psychological urge to put their desires on hold, and that urge makes us receptive to the notion that we’d better be saving more and spending less, just like all the mainstream economists and reputable journalists keep telling us to. We know what will happen to our bank accounts, our waistlines and our marriage vows if we stop listening to their insistent voice of reason.

Even so, we’ve reached the point where we have to confront our fears about consumer culture, because the renunciation of desire, the deferral of gratification, saving for a rainy day — call it what you want — has become dangerous to our health. To heal ourselves, we need to spend more freely, to live less anxiously, more easily and generously, with ourselves and with Nature. (I, for one, don’t believe that there’s much left of Nature — merely planting crops changes the chemical composition of the original soil — but I’m willing to entertain the possibility in the name of an inhabitable environmental future, and, I think consumer culture is a promising path to environmental integrity.)

To save is to withhold earned income from what would otherwise be spent in consuming; to invest is to place that income where it will show a profit, produce a surplus: both acts reveal and develop an emotional capacity — or a psychological disposition — to delay the immediate gratification of spending on consumer goods. We praise this emotional capacity as foresight when it balances present desires and future needs; we condemn it as miserliness when it sacrifices the enjoyment of the present to the compound interest of the future. Either way we look at it, the question is how to make the distinction between our real desires and our genuine needs concrete, measurable, and useful. What emotional or psychological armature is required by the choices that follow?

These are the questions that any defense of consumer culture must raise. And they’ve now become pressing, practical questions for Americans as they grapple with the causes and consequences of the Great Recession — as they decide whether more saving/investment or more consumption is the cure for what ails the economy, and as they decide whether emotional frugality or expenditure is the proper structure of their souls. So when I urge Americans to save less and consume more as the solution to the economic problems they face, I’m also urging them to be less thrifty in the broadest sense, to withhold less and desire more, in view of the material abundance at their disposal. I’m urging them to see that saving for a rainy day — treating this life as austere probation for another — is a soul-crushing emotional trap as well as an economic dead end.

Marx showed that all commodities have two properties, a use value and an exchange value — a particular, subjective, mostly material meaning on the one hand, and a placeless, objective, monetary meaning on the other. Every commodity raises, or just is, a question that divides our attention: what is this thing good for, and what is its price? (The exceptions to this rule are of course paper money, the not-thing that’s valuable only if you can use it as a medium of exchange, and credit, the future tense of paper money.) Marx also showed that before the advent of capitalism, the consumption of goods was both the goal and the limit of production. He called that situation “simple commodity circulation,” and diagrammed its crucial circuit as C-M-C, where C stands for commodity and M stands for money.

At this stage in the development of markets, the point of producing and selling goods was not to accumulate ever more exchange value, more money in the bank, but to acquire just enough use values, just enough material goods, to validate your accustomed way of life. When capitalism emerged, labor itself became a commodity — now you had to buy the right not to die of starvation by working for wages — and the “formula for capital” reversed the relations of simple commodity circulation. The new formula looked like this: M-C-M1, where money, exchange value, wealth in the abstract, became the premise and the purpose of goods production, while use values—particular, material things, even human bodies — became the means to more exchange value, more money in the bank, rather than ends in themselves. The “cash nexus” accordingly became the site of every transaction, and consumption gave way to accumulation as the proper goal of the good life.

Students of Marx have invariably deployed these distinctions — between use and exchange value, or between simple commodity circulation and the formula for capital — to indict consumer culture for the crime of commodity fetishism. By this he meant what follows from our uniquely human ability to treat a chair, say, as both a particular, material thing, right here and now, and a symbolic property that transcends its local function and shape.

It’s when we endow dead matter with transcendent meanings that objects begin to stand in for sentient beings and the fetishism of commodities becomes the norm. Here’s how Walt Whitman explained this weird process: “When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the nightwatchman’s daughter, / When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions.” But unlike almost every student of Marx, Whitman didn’t stop there; he went on to announce that he would craft poems from commodities: “I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women.”

When you buy a car or a jacket or that little black dress, you don’t expect to profit from it. In fact you know it becomes less valuable, except to you, the moment you buy it. In this sense, your purchase of consumer goods constantly reinstates the archaic circuit of simple commodity circulation. In the same sense, your purchase has removed the object of your desire from the domain of commodities: its significance no longer includes its price, even when others recognize how much it cost you, because everybody knows that if you put it back on the market, you’ll get less than you paid for it. Where the commodity once divided your attention between its price and its purpose, between its exchange value and its use value, the thing you’ve bought now has only a use value: it’s been “defetishized” by your purchase.

So consumer culture is a practical limit on the accumulation of wealth in the abstract; it resists the restless, expansive formula for capital, which sacrifices enjoyment in the present to the compound interest of the future, always in the name of growth. It urges us to acquire use values rather than exchange values, to save less and spend more, but it doesn’t sacrifice the future in the name of present enjoyment. In fact, it teaches us how to produce and preserve the things our children might want or need—the things they might use.

Adapted from “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul,” by James Livington (Basic Books, 2011)

Most of this indignation is nothing new; it is atavistic fury expressed in the modern vernacular. Yet, one strand of our anger — the kind directed at big business — may be truly novel, as our chagrin is no longer just that ancient animosity toward excessive corporate power. Instead, it has also become a personal disdain toward firms we deal with on a daily basis.

This is the key finding of the latest report from the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. Its findings show that after years of rising anger, consumer rage has reached an all-time high.

Back in 2004, ASU’s researchers theorized that such apoplexy was an outgrowth of affluence. “Households simply have more products and services today, and thus more points of contact, increasing our chances that we will have a problem,” they wrote.

But, of course, 2004 was a comparatively prosperous time. Today, by contrast, recession-battered consumers have access to fewer products and services and yet are angrier at companies, meaning the sentiment likely reflects a response to deeper trends.

One of those is a decline in craftsmanship in the era of free trade and offshore production. With America now awash in foreign wares, we’ve imported the developing world’s lax regulatory standards and, thus, its lower product quality. That means poorly constructed furniture, malfunctioning electronics and all the other shoddiness that drives customers nuts.

Another maddening trend is the corporate sector’s shift from long-term customer care to short-term predation. Though firms have always tried to make quick money off clients, the intensity of this recession, coupled with investors’ insatiable demand for quarterly profit growth, has prompted unprecedented bill-padding, corner-cutting and inflexibility. Today’s typical air travel experience epitomizes the dynamic: You get hit with a baggage charge, shoved into an ever-smaller seat and then stranded in airport purgatory because you missed your connection. With this kind of experience being replicated in everything from debit card fees to interminable customer-service wait times, it’s no wonder we’re ticked off.

Finally, there’s what Mother Jones magazine calls “The Great Speedup,” whereby downsized companies are forcing their remaining employees to do more work at a faster pace than ever. While this means our workforce is generating more output, it also means that output often becomes less satisfying to the end user. So, sure, your energy company’s electrician may be servicing more homes, but he’s also more error-prone and no longer maintains a customer-friendly demeanor — because he’s being run ragged.

All of this is no doubt responsible for a spike in self-destructive temper tantrums. However, there is an upside: The angst is resurrecting the notion of consumer activism. And that’s a big deal.

Recent headlines tell this story. From moving deposits out of big banks to a mass abandonment of Netflix, customers are suddenly channeling the old Ralph Nader zeitgeist. We’re remembering that being a patron comes with power — and we’re finally getting mad enough to use it.

If that ends up bringing back a lasting consumer movement in America, then all the heartburn and stress of being a mistreated customer will have been worth it.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is thrilled with the plastic beauty’s new incarnation. As a poster on the tween-oriented Ms. Twixt said, “If I was a mother I wouldn’t buy one for my daughter. This seems to be sending out the wrong message.” And a commenter at the Daily Mail wailed, “I hate that poor Barbie has been sucked into this terribly ugly fad.”

But Barbie’s never just been the darling of the preteen set. From the day she moved into her first dream house, she’s been irresistible to just about everybody. In a statement, Mattel acknowledged that the $50 tootsie “is a perfect example of a limited-edition doll sold through select retail locations” for “the adult doll collector.”  And as a parent on Babble noted, “I think the pink hair and tattoos are fine. The objectionable things about Barbie are the tiny feet and gigantic fake boobs.”

Besides, this isn’t Barbie’s first time under the needle. Back in the ’90s, both Barbie and her life partner Ken went through a brief, ill-advised “Butterfly Art” tattoo phase. Oh, didn’t we all, Barbie and Ken? And two years ago, Mattel unleashed Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie, who came complete with her own kit and array of designs, so kids could tramp stamp her — and themselves — to their heart’s content with flowers and even Barbie’s own silhouette. Because Barbie’s such a big narcissist that she needs her own face on her body.

There’s an obvious distinction between the innocent Totally Stylin’ Barbie, with her penchant for rub-on rainbows and hearts, and the sophisticated, permanently inked Tokidoti. Their consumers are clearly different. But it’s been a long, long time since looking a little unique was considered scandalously transgressive. The truth is that the sleek, pink-haired female with leopard leggings only needs a Starbucks in her hand to look like plenty of the moms you can see any day at the local playground. And that’s a nice image for little girls to see there in their dolls. It reflects the contemporary reality of their experiences.  That’s why, although she’s clearly intended for her grown-up fans, Tokidoti will likely blend in just fine in a whole lot of little girls’ toy boxes.

Sure, she’s not exactly Sticking It to the Man Barbie, and yes, her physical proportions are still unachievable. But with her sassy getup, she is, in her own small, subversive way, announcing to the world that tan and blond are not the only barometer of beauty. That it’s OK to bust out of the mold once in a while — – even for the ultimate tan, blond and very cookie-cutter American girl. And that’s a message that shouldn’t be wasted just on adults.

The next morning, I walked out to the car to head to my friend’s house when I discovered where my iPhone had been all night — lying face-up on the driveway, inches from the driver-side door of my car, water still pooled on its black screen.

An iPhone suicide.

I thought I could save it. A friend who once dropped his iPhone in the sink told me rice sucked out the moisture, though it could take a while. I cradled the little guy in my hands and rushed it to the ICU of my kitchen, where I nestled it in a bowl filled with brown rice. (Nice to know that brown rice was good for something.) As the days passed, it languished, unblinking, in its starchy bed — and my life without an iPhone began.

This is not one of those uplifting stories in which the author disconnects from technology but finds meaningful connection with the people in her real life. I’m not all that addicted to my iPhone, and it has never deterred me from long, deep conversations with other humans. This is also not one of those screeds wherein I tell you what a hideous, overhyped device the iPhone is. To be honest, I think the iPhone is the single greatest piece of equipment I have ever owned, and though I was reluctant to buy one, it took mere minutes to determine that I held in my hands the stuff of which history was made. No, this is a story about giving up an iPhone — or trying to, anyway — because the cost of keeping one had just become too high. That was my problem: I loved my iPhone, but I could no longer afford it. It was too much phone for me. I was like one of those homeowners sinking into debt, realizing too late they are heaping money into a sinkhole to pay for a life beyond their reach.

This is about my iPhone foreclosure. It didn’t exactly go as planned.

It made sense, in 2008, for me to buy an iPhone. I was an editor who needed to check email often during the day and work on-the-go. I liked the way the iPhone looked, and what it said about me. It telegraphed to strangers that I was tech-savvy and fashionable and high-powered (though I was none of those things). But if I’m honest, I was also afraid of slipping into irrelevance. There is an anxiety in this hyper-connected digital age that you must adapt to new technologies — or you will perish. You’re not on Twitter? Enjoy your life as a dinosaur. You don’t use Facebook? Welcome to 1988. And so I took a big cannonball dive into my fancy two-year contract and wished for the best.

But problems began to emerge. Not with the iPhone itself — but with me. For all my phone’s superpowers, for all its techno razzle-dazzle, I knew relatively little about how to use it. I texted, sure, and I could set the alarm. But I would guesstimate that I learned 10 percent of the iPhone’s functions, maybe even less. It’s like I had a magic wand in my purse, and I was using it to scrape glass off the windshield.

In July, when I reupped to my iPhone 4, I actually carved out an entire afternoon to figure out the sucker. But that afternoon came, and I was less interested in reading CNET stories than I was in listening to Marc Maron podcasts, one after the other, which I actually just streamed from my laptop. The iPhone might be capable of changing the world, but alas, it can’t change me. There is nothing I find more deadly dull than an instruction manual. If I can’t figure it out by tapping around for 10 minutes, it ain’t gonna happen.

There were other issues, too. My having an iPhone was like driving an elegant horse-drawn carriage in the demolition derby. Mere weeks after purchase, I was texting as I walked past an elementary school one morning when my shiny new phone tumbled out of my hands and landed on the sidewalk with an unmistakable crunch. Little kids passed by me as I literally stomped my foot on the ground and said, for perhaps the first time in my life, “Oh fudge. Oh fudgety fudge.” My gleaming, flawless companion now had a split right up its middle with two branches coming off it, like a line-drawn tree.

After I moved to Texas and shifted into part-time work, my iPhone bills started to climb. Frankly, they were staggering. I switched plans, but the next month the bill was even bigger. This was a problem, because financially, I didn’t have much wiggle room. A year ago, I paid off and cut up several credit cards — a slow crawl back from when they were maxed out, at 29 percent interest — and I only purchased items with the money in my bank account, as opposed to simply purchasing items with the magical thinking that money would appear somewhere down the line.

I was still trying to scheme a way to pay those massive iPhone bills when the poor guy drowned himself outside, and I had to wonder: Why was I holding on to this thing anyway? Why was I going broke for a piece of equipment I didn’t even know how to use? Since I’d started working from home, the only thing I really used my iPhone for was to talk. And that’s the one function where the iPhone isn’t all that great. I’m not just talking about dropped calls. Have you ever tried to hold the iPhone against your ear for long periods of time? It’s like cuddling with a curling iron. The iPhone is for typing, for deep dives into Internet underworlds, for home videos and schedule management and working from the back of a taxi cab and tweeting quips about a ham sandwich to your 2,000 followers. If you want to lose three hours chatting with your friend on a Monday night — not so much. And that’s too bad. Because as the world grows more digital, an ever-percolating mix of emoticons and instant messages, I find myself drawn toward the warm sound of someone else’s voice in my ear. Skype is just not my bag; I resent any device that draws attention to my shiny forehead.

So that was it: I had to give up my iPhone. It felt good just to say it. It gave me a jolt of consumer rebellion. I fired up my old iPod nano and pulled my cracked old second-gen iPhone out of the drawer to see if it still took pictures (it did). See, I didn’t need a fancy new iPhone after all! I could make my own smart phone out of the misfit tools I already owned. I felt so practical, so boldly against the grain. I was leading a charge away from high-priced must-have doodads and back into the calm waters of clunky flip phones. I was going to save so much money. I was going to make a statement. My phone wouldn’t say, “Ooh look at me, I have an iPhone!” It would say, “My phone doesn’t define me. Also, I’m working part-time.”

But the powers that be don’t make it easy to give up your iPhone. In fact, they make it very very hard. When I arrived at the AT&T store, brimming with pluck, I was met by a friendly employee, his hair gelled into a perfect triangle.

“You know, thanks to a one-year warranty, you could purchase another iPhone for just $200,” he said.

“That’s OK,” I said, smiling. I did not feel like explaining to him that a proper “warranty” would not involve paying the exact same amount you did in the first place. I did not feel like complaining to him about the injustice of the Apple empire, because I had a plan. “I’ve decided to downgrade to the flip phone for the rest of my contract. You can just give me your cheapest one.”

He began to shift on his feet. His eyebrows started to flutter. “But those flip phones cost $200, too. Because you’re not eligible for a new contract.”

Wait, what? I had not anticipated this. It had never occurred to me that anyone would have the gall to charge $200 for a piece of machinery that was roughly as current as the horse and buggy. Shouldn’t they be giving those away on the street to homeless people? “So wait,” I said, trying very hard not to be That Customer, though my strained voice hadn’t gotten the memo. “Those clunky old flip phones cost as much as another iPhone would?”

He nodded. It was silent, except for my sighs. “You could look on Craigslist,” he said finally. “If you find an AT&T branded flip phone for sale, you could use that.”

Great. Just what my afternoon didn’t need — freaking Craigslist. Now I was going to have to drive 60 miles into the suburbs to buy a Samsung that had been jacked from some poor old lady.

I rubbed my forehead. “How much would it cost to just cancel my contract?” I asked.

“$250.”

Oof. This revolution was getting awfully inconvenient. I had to wonder: How much did I want to pay for freedom from my iPhone? Would I be saving that much money in the long run?

Earlier that afternoon, I had dumped my old iPhone in my purse. Not the one that died, but the one I shoved in a drawer last July when I upgraded to my fancy new widget. I had this idea that I’d use it to take pictures from now on. It was clunky all right, the bottom half of the screen so shattered it practically turned everything into abstract art. I wasn’t certain if I wanted to keep using it. But I knew I needed to get a cellphone — some kind of cellphone — today. Like, now. And so I sucked it up, and set it on the counter.

“And how much would it be to just power this up again?” I asked.

He smiled and clapped his hands together. “I could do that for you for free.”

The amazing thing about the whole process was just how easy it was to stop paying $7.99 a month to Netflix. Just as Netflix made the experience of ordering movies delivered by mail or streamed to my computer deliciously simple, Netflix also made the process of changing the details of my account a piece of cake. I had expected to jump through hoops, to be thwarted by various strategies aimed at keeping my cash flowing to the company uninterruptedly. But no — I clicked a few buttons and I was done.

Live by the user-friendly sword, die by the user-friendly sword. Because I sure wasn’t alone in expressing my desire to send less money Netflix’s way, judging by Netflix’s swift decision, announced Monday morning, to shutter Qwikster before it ever opened, and keep both DVDs and streaming as part of the same corporate service. The negative consumer reaction, first, to Netflix’s price hike, and then to the announcement that is was splitting up its product line, translated into a hemorrhaging of customers. We won’t know exactly how bad the damage was until Netflix reports its quarterly numbers, but it’s clear that the bottom-line consequences were severe. Ironically, Netflix’s ease of use probably exacerbated the mass emigration. It was just so easy to say no.

The lesson that has been reinforced here, once again, is that in a world where our access to digital entertainment options is essentially unlimited and switching costs — the friction that keeps us from making changes — are minimal, companies have to be really, really careful about not pissing off their customers. Which makes this quote given to Fast Company by a Netflix VP all the more astonishing: (Emphasis mine.)

“It was a very bold move forward, without considering the effect on our members,” says Steve Swasey, Netflix vice president of corporate communications. “We just looked at the strategy. We said we want to be able to brand DVDs — to give them their own life, to give them their own advertising and marketing — and we thought the best way to do that was to give them a name and its own company that would be a subsidiary. We were wrong.”

How can this quote possibly be true? Netflix is a company that has dedicated itself from day one to making its service as blissful as possible for its members. To say that the company had not considered the effect of a major change in strategy on its own members is absureds and insulting. Of course Netflix considered the effect on its members. But the company’s executives, convinced that in the long-run,the future is streaming, gambled that they could get away with the dramatic move.

Netflix may well be correct in their long-run assumption. Clunky physical media is obviously on the way out. But consumers don’t live in the future. We live in the now — and in this particular now, we can click one button and express our financial displeasure. And so we do. In the short-term, Netflix’s customers voted their disapproval with their feet to a degree that the company just didn’t anticipate. And that’s something that every other player in the digital entertainment landscape — whether named Facebook or Google or even Apple — should be paying close attention to. We know from watching the rise and fall of social media networks that there is no such thing as consumer loyalty in the Internet age. What we may not have realized is that a generation that has displayed so little discomfort at switching from Myspace to Facebook is also psychologically prepared to dump Netflix for Amazon, or maybe even the iPhone for Android, should the post-Steve Jobs Apple start screwing up.

So now Netflix is groveling — in the middle of writing this post, I received an e-mail from the company announcing the end of Qwikster while reassuring me that “We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows.”

Unfortunately for Netflix, there’s nothing in that sentence that’s going to make me sign back up for streaming access. The damage is done.