The Work of Wanting
Part 1: Consumption is not passive.
The price is never just the price. A seller posts a price, but only a buyer can make it true.
Obvious in one sense, but completely hidden to us most of the time. (I got AT&T to knock a ton off my cell phone bill this weekend by threatening to leave, so I’m feeling my oats today.) Markets don’t work without buyers, and a thing no one wants ceases to be valuable at the rate no one wants it. So the obvious version of this (consumer demand sets prices) buries a more interesting claim. A store can stack weed whackers to the ceiling and invent any price it likes; until one of us stands there comparing models, checking reviews, wondering whether the battery system will also work with the leaf blower, the price remains a proposal.
And yet our ordinary moral vocabulary keeps putting activity on only one side of the transaction. Producers make. Consumers use up. Producers are disciplined, useful, adult. Consumers are hungry, passive, vaguely embarrassing. Production builds the world. Consumption depletes it.
This is one of those folk pictures that survives because it flatters almost everyone: the right, the left, the moral majority that fancies itself the center. It dignifies owners and managers as builders. It dignifies workers as makers. It lets us scold appetite without asking what appetite is doing.
This is ideology, not operations. Capitalism’s public vocabulary flatters producers. Its machinery knows better. Nobody studies appetite more carefully than the firms trying to capture it.
Capitalism sees wanting better than almost any system ever built, but it cannot see wanting without wanting to capture it.
Because appetite does a lot.
The algorithm that tells you what other people bought when they searched for “weed whacker” is not merely trying to get you to spend more money. It doesn’t succeed or fail on the basis of your next purchase. Instead, it is recruiting you into a vast machinery designed to make wanting legible. Everything is data, and data is valuable: your search, your click, your pause, your return, your abandonment of the cart, your eventual purchase, your review, your indifference to the follow-up email. Normally, I hate talking about “the System” like a monolith, because there are lots of systems. But in this case, there aren’t very many systems and they’re all becoming increasingly interoperable, and that system is learning what kind of wanting you have.
That system does not need to know you in any rich human sense. It needs to make you usable: an income band, a likelihood score, a household type, a taste cluster, a next-best offer. It decides what kind of person you are in that stripped down sense, and it learns what kind of wanting people like you have. It learns what to stock, what to bundle, what to recommend, what to discount, what to stop showing, what to make more expensive, what to make seem inevitable. (It’s a run-on sentence because there’s no stopping it.)
But this is the inversion I’m here to offer: wanting is work. Consumption is not merely the moment after production, when useful things are finally used up. Nor is it the passive zombie thing we become when the system has had its way with us and we can no longer act. Consumption produces information, prices, rankings, genres, identities, reputations, and markets. It produces the conditions under which production knows what it is producing for. The consumer is not a spongy organic maw at the end of the mechanistic production process. The consumer is one of the machines.
If wanting is work, then a great deal of contemporary economic life depends on labor that nobody recognizes as such, including ourselves when we are the ones doing it. And perhaps this is dumb, but… I want to believe that recognizing this could change our politics.
Trickle Up
Mainstream economists have been here for a while, even if they don’t usually frame the point this way. F. A. Hayek’s argument that prices coordinate dispersed knowledge assumes consumers are doing the work of revealing what things are worth to them. Again, the entire price system functions because buyers participate in it! The left has tended to underweight this because conceding demand-side productivity sounded like marginalist apologetics. It isn’t: it’s just true. (Hail Rawlsekians.)
A seller can ask twenty dollars for their very shiny widget. A buyer can pay it, refuse it, counter it, search for another seller, or decide the thing isn’t worth having. Or they can be desperate, willing to pay any price… and thereby reveal how much they can pay. In that ordinary sequence, the buyer isn’t merely receiving the market’s judgment, right? The buyer is helping make the judgment.
Of course, we shouldn’t pretend this is equally true for every buyer. Aggregate demand hides distributions. The wealthy buyer’s wanting makes prices differently from the poor buyer’s. Amazon makes prices differently than a household buying groceries. A hospital system, a company town, a monopsony employer, or a platform with choke-point control can bend the relation until the buyer’s refusal becomes an impolite fiction. Every buyer is not equally sovereign. Agency is not sovereignty. A person can help make a market without being free inside it. Prices are social artifacts, and even the artifacts we attribute to sellers require demand to become real.
Anyone with a Consumer Reports subscription knows a version of this is in their hearts.
Unfortunately, the deeper point is that wanting is comparative, and comparative wanting produces value. Recent experimental work by Alex Imas and Kristóf Madarász in The Review of Economic Studies gives this old intuition a sharp empirical form. They call the mechanism imitative superiority-seeking: people are willing to pay more when others are excluded from acquiring the same good.
What’s interesting about their experimental design is what it rules out. The exclusion is random rather than earned, so the premium can’t be attributed to signaling superior taste or skill. The conditions are constructed to strip away the ordinary economic explanations: status display, scarcity-as-quality, signaling worth to onlookers. Veblen has empirical confirmation. What’s left, when those motives are removed, is the bare fact of wanting what others can’t have. In their auction setting, that bare fact raised willingness to pay by roughly 50 percent among those who retained the opportunity to bid. Pure preference for being on the having side of the haves and the have-nots, quantified.
Economics hasn’t gone Girardian overnight. But even inside the marginalist apparatus, consumer wanting now shows up as productive. Preferences aren’t sealed marbles inside private souls. They form in circulation, produce value there, and line up to do their work.
It sees you when you’re shopping
The platform era took the productivity of wanting to new heights by measuring every single available element of it.
Search, click, skip, rate, hover, abandon, return: these are traces of what we want. What has changed is that they became machine-readable inputs. It’s no longer a shopkeeper eyeing his customers, it’s an algorithm looking at browsing data. The recommender doesn’t simply ask what you want. It watches wanting happen in fragments. You finish a show, stop an episode, pause over a thumbnail, or skip a song after a few seconds and it catalogs this. It catalogs the song you play on repeat, too, though it can’t yet tell whether it’s playing to an empty room or in an effort to keep your baby calm. It sees us as we comparison shop for vacuum cleaners for twenty minutes and then select the one that Wirecutter recommended three weeks later.
The user thinks they are browsing. The system has put them to work.
Dallas Smythe saw the prehistory of this in 1977. His “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism” opened with a complaint: the Marxist tradition had spent decades on the ideological content of mass media (what shows mean, how they shape consciousness) and almost none on what mass media did economically. So: bracket the content. Look at the form. Commercial broadcasters aren’t primarily selling programs to audiences. They are selling audiences to advertisers. The audience is the commodity, the product being sold to another set of product-sellers who are buying your eyeballs and earholes. Watching is work, listening is labor. (There’s a reason you pay attention, isn’t there?)
Nielsen ratings will pay to get good data on this. It’s 8pm: broadcast television has to be able to sell the rough probability that a demographic is watching. But platforms take Smythe’s commodified audience and add measurement at a resolution his broadcasters could only dream of. Netflix, TikTok, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and Instagram measure the fine structure of appetite itself. They know not simply that someone watched, but where attention thickened, where it frayed, where the thumb hesitated, where boredom lost to compulsion… where compulsion became addiction.
There is a trap here. Attention isn’t the same as preference, and revealed preference (which normal people just call behavior) isn’t the same as wanting. A platform optimized for retention isn’t measuring what you want in any innocent sense. It’s measuring what holds you. It monetizes your stillness, in the hopes that it can shape the form your desire takes. The fantasy is always to reverse the flow: not to discover desire but to manufacture it. Advertising people love this story, and Mad Men made it beautiful. (What was that show selling?) But much of the ad business is more banal, salesmen squabbling over who’ll get the good leads. It figures out what you already want and tries to get in front of you before you buy it somewhere else. In both cases, it makes some wanting legible and other wanting invisible, writing the menu from which revealed preference will later be inferred.
So the right question isn’t whether user labor pre-exists the platform or whether the platform manufactures it. Both are true. The apparatus shapes which wanting counts. Desire was already relational before the recommendation system arrived. The platform intervenes in that relational structure, measures it, feeds it back, and calls the result personalization.
Platforms metabolize each want into an infrastructure that shapes the next round of wanting. The system you trained yesterday writes the choices you face today.
Taste becomes logistics.
Part 2 will pick up here. The case of a Coast Guard veteran who made a living selling drawings of cats.