Cyberspace-prompted consumption: Surrendering to technology in a ubiquitous digital era

In this paper, we explore digital overconsumption as a lived experience of modern consumers and a vicious circle in which consumption excesses are constantly produced and reproduced within the contemporary digital environment. Drawing on Franco Berardi’s critical writings on market-capitalist cyberspace and its intensive interactions with individuals, we theorise digital overconsumption as a cyberspace-prompted consumption practice. We reject the individualised conceptualisation of digital overconsumption and argue that this phenomenon is increasingly fostered and perpetuated by ubiquitous, desirous, and invasive cyberspace, from which many ordinary consumers find themselves unable to break free. Using 32 in-depth interviews with consumers who self-identified as engaging in excessive digital use, and netnographic data on digital overconsumption, we trace the three main contours through which consumers’ entanglement in cyberspace manifests itself: (1) cyberspace’s inescapability and networked attachment; (2) cyberspace’s modulation and automated attachment; and (3) cyberspace’s seduction and escapist attachment. In tracing these contours, we highlight the lived reality of digital (over)consumers as increasingly underpinned by perpetual tension, struggle, and entrapment. We call for further exploration of the widespread phenomenon of digital overconsumption, which deserves more attention from marketing theorists.