Faith in the Feed: A Netnography of Delusional Consumption Ideology

This paper adopts a consumer culture lens to investigate the Delulu phenomenon across social media platforms. Addressing the underexplored entanglement between delusional imaginaries and digital platforms, we conduct a netnography of Delulu content across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. Drawing on Kozinets’ theorization of digital utopianism we analyze visual, discursive, and ritualized manifestations of delusional consumption. We unveil Delulu as a utopian apparatus of self-actualization, marketplace formation, and ritualized consumption fostering a delusional consumption ideology. This ideology frames fantasy and desires as actionable reality through aesthetic routines, witchcraft practices, marketized symbolism, and algorithmically-reinforced hope, blurring boundaries between aspiration and illusion. Conceptually, we advance the debate on consumption ideology for the digital age, by unpacking the notions of delusional consumption ideology and technosocial realities. Methodologically, we contribute by discussing how netnography foregrounds ideological entanglements that result from researchers’ immersive, reflexive engagements, thus highlighting netnography as a method for studying consumption ideologies.