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If “freedom of religion” means anything, it means a market for religion. In our financialized world, we have seen that being subjected to market forces causes everything to lose its shape, and to be remolded, like plastic, into the shape of a commodity.
An object is a commodity when any one instance of the object is as good as anothoer; objects that are members of a commodity class are at least somewhat fungible.
Market pressures commodify objects because the actors who participate in a market must compete with each other, and because competitors copy successful strategies from their rivals. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1191774362220691456
If someone learns how to sell widgets, then we say the market has discovered a demand for widgets, and soon many market actors will imitate the product and the methods of the original widget seller.
Inevitably, there will be variance among the imitators, both deliberate and accidental. Variance among sellers acts as a search function in the preference-space of the buyers. Over time, the sellers converge to sell a product that most matches the aggregate demand of the buyers
(This assumes a fairly classic model of the buyers’ psychology, where they can know their own preferences and pursue them rationally. For modeling the sellers, this is an acceptable approximation, but it fails to capture some important edge cases in buyer behavior)
Commodification—the process of making the unique into the fungible—deracinates all that it touches. Why? Because the distinctiveness of the original object is manipulated and duplicated unto oblivion, until rarity becomes ubiquity.
Those attributes of the object that satisfy the original demand are held constant or amplified, and those attributes which were merely incidental are polished away. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1212034852041699331
For example, the diversity industrial complex, which hands out cash and prizes to anyone who can make a spectacle out of ostensible victimhood, creates markets in oppression https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1111279414484983808
For example, online dating sites and lax marriage norms create markets in sex and love https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1040236861023641601
Marketing professionals understand that it’s possible to dampen the effects of commodification upon the psyche of the buyer by building what is called “brand identity”. This is an essentially priestly undertaking, except the object of worship is a commodity instead of a deity
Fabricating a brand identity consists of producing icons and language that associate moral values with a product. This can catalyze “customer loyalty”, wherein buyers desire the product of a particular seller despite the interchangeability of the material object being sold
In the end, the iconography, moral values, and social meaning of the commodity become just another product feature, no more significant than its weight, or its physical dimensions, or its interoperability with one of its complements. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1100427645324423169
Religification, intended as strategy to overcome the flattening effects of commodification, ultimately succumbs to commodification itself.
