“Conflict Market” Research Article
Here you can read my first introduction of the ‘Conflict Market’ as a notion published in Journal of Consumer Culture 2022. The abstract reads:
“At the beginning of the millennium, consumer culture researchers predicted that people
would increasingly demand that marketplace actors subscribe to contemporary ethics of
liberal democracy. Although their prediction indeed came true, they did not foresee that
an algorithm-powered media ecosystem in combination with growing authoritarian
movements would soon come to fuel an increasingly polarized political landscape and
challenge the very fundament of liberal democracy per se. In this macroscopic, conceptual
article, I discuss three assumption-challenging logics—counter-democratic consumer
culture, de-dialectical algorithmic manipulation, and growing illiberal consumer
resistance—according to which the market increasingly monetizes the conflicts accompanying
this polarization and, thereby, reinforces it. I call this new logic a conflict
market and illustrate it through three, historically situated and currently conflicting,
consumer ideoscapes—the neoblue, the neogreen, and the neobrown—between which
consumers engage in marketized conflicts, not in a de-politicizing way, but in an increasingly
un-politicizing, de-dialectical, and polarizing way. At the technologically manipulated
conflict market, the role of marketers is to monetize politically sensitive topics
by creating conflict, knowingly renouncing large groups of consumers, and giving fodder
to the political extremes.”
