Mythologized Counter-Futures and Self-Protective Consumption: A Netnography of Doomsday Preppers

Abstract Despite recognizing several ways consumers respond to perceived systemic risk scenarios, prior research emphasizes a general trend toward the privatization of risk, in which individual consumers are responsibilized for managing systemic risk scenarios through their consumption. However, prior work in this area blurs the distinction between responsibilized consumption aimed at self-protection versus preventing or reducing the likelihood of risk scenarios. Moreover, it does not explain how many consumers come to prioritize the former over the latter. To explore how this occurs, this netnography investigates doomsday preppers, consumers preparing for perceived catastrophic and systemic risk scenarios by stockpiling consumer goods, acquiring prosumptive knowledge, and cultivating survival skills. Drawing from the marketplace myths literature, this article introduces the concept of mythologized counter-futures to illustrate how preppers mobilize marketplace myths to socially construct future risk scenarios. Through mythic prefiguration, many preppers’ mythologized counter-futures ameliorate anxiety associated with vulnerability-inducing systemic risk scenarios and pattern anticipatory consumption toward self-protective consumption rather than risk-scenario preventive consumption. The analysis makes novel contributions to the literature on the social construction of risk, consumer responsibilization, consumer vulnerability, consumer timework, and marketplace myths.