Renegade Consumer is a new effort to change our world by reshaping the economic landscape—not the landscape of business, industry and government, but the landscape of individuals, families and communities.
We're not seeking to reshape our world from the outside, by changing laws and institutions, but from the inside, from the ground up, by giving consumers a better understanding of their own economic world.
We have two initial aims:
To Arm Consumers
...with knowledge no one
else will tell them.
To Disarm Marketing
...by showing consumers how to use that knowledge
to deflect the endless efforts to sell us our own lives.
Renegade Consumer is much more than another “rebel consumer,” anti-advertising or ’culture jamming‘ movement. It’s a philosophy and a community discussion about the role of the consumer in the modern world… and the discussion is about how to change our world for the better. We seek a world of genuine economic freedom and self-determination, where we decide what makes life worth living... not those who sell to us for selling's sake. Those two simple aims are only a beginning. The Renegade Consumer movement has its sights on greater goals.
Renegade Consumer is based on three simple propositions that are contrary to conventional social and economic thinking:
- That conventional economic theory values our consumption-driven economy more than individual lives—and that it’s time for an economic system that puts the well-being of individuals and families first, with communities and nations close behind, and those who profit only from maximized consumption last.
- That through influence of our lifetime choices, we have become mere economic resources to be exploited in propping up this consumption economy—and that it’s time for us to reclaim the value of our lives and individuality for better things and a better future for all of us.
- That we allow ourselves to be endlessly directed in the economic purpose of our lives—and that we should be allowed to make our own economic decisions, free from ceaseless pressure to make choices that benefit only the system.
The Renegade Consumer view is that we have been conditioned, over generations, to spend our lives consuming to the limits of our ability—not to improve our own lives, but to feed and further a broken economic cycle. We have been coerced into limiting our life choices to those that best sustain this predatory cycle, and the consequences are piling up around us: climate change, wealth and income inequity, rising poverty, shrinking employment options, crushing educational debt and loss of individual potential on a vast scale… to name but a few. The individual human consequences may be even greater.
The Renegade Consumer position is that our gross fostered overconsumption is the cause of many of these problems, or at least the engine driving their destructive force. If we blunt consumption for its own sake, we end these problems… or at least take a huge step towards making them manageable. The benefits go beyond crisis management, though, and hold out promise of a truly better life for each and all of us.
The Renegade Consumer plan is that it’s time to break this cycle, end the destruction, and regain the purpose and value of our individual and family lives… and beyond that, the value of our lives as communities and nations. We can do better than destroying our world by “existing to work to earn to consume”—and the mounting evidence is that we must. We can live better lives than those a torrent of marketing tells us are worthwhile.
Renegade Consumer is about that better path, and it begins with you, the individual, saying, “I don’t buy it any more.”
Welcome to the battle for your economic freedom.
