Executive summary
“The will to consume and subsume everything” is not an established technical term or unified theory in philosophy or the social sciences. The closest explicit scholarly formulation I found is Ryan Gunderson’s “The Will to Consume,” a Schopenhauerian analysis of consumer society (Gunderson, 2016). citeturn20search3 The phrase is therefore most useful as a synthetic heuristic: a way of asking how heterogeneous motives for acquisition, mastery, classification, expansion, and control can become institutionalized in economic, political, cultural, and technological systems.
The key analytical distinction is between consumption and subsumption. In this report, consume means to appropriate something as an input to satisfaction, status, production, accumulation, or metabolism: food is eaten, ore is extracted, labor-power is expended, attention is monetized, data are processed. Subsume means to place something under a category, rule, organizational logic, or system so that it becomes a functional moment within that larger order. Consumption tends toward use, transformation, depletion, or appropriation; subsumption tends toward classification, standardization, coordination, dependence, and loss of autonomous terms of existence. An object may be consumed without being systemically subsumed; conversely, a worker, language, culture, user, or ecosystem may remain physically intact while becoming increasingly subsumed under an alien institutional logic.
This distinction clarifies the four philosophical traditions specified in the question. Nietzsche’s will to power supplies a vocabulary of expansion, overcoming resistance, interpretation, and augmentation of capacities, but equating it directly with acquisitive consumerism would be a distortion: in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche characterizes life through the discharge or exercise of strength, not simply possession accumulation (Nietzsche, 1886). citeturn13search0 Hegelian dialectic is even less reducible to consumption: Aufhebung simultaneously negates and preserves its terms, meaning that genuine dialectical incorporation transforms the encompassing universal as well as the incorporated particular (Hegel, 1812–1816). citeturn13search2 Marx provides the strongest literal theory of subsumption: formal subsumption places an existing labor process under capital, while real subsumption reorganizes production itself according to capital’s technological and valorization imperatives; commodity fetishism simultaneously obscures the social relations behind commodities (Marx, 1867; 1863–1864). citeturn13search23turn13search13 Heidegger’s enframing (Gestell) generalizes a related problem ontologically: technological modernity increasingly discloses beings as calculable “standing-reserve,” available for ordering and use (Heidegger, 1954). citeturn13search3turn13search7
Psychology does not support a single universal acquisitive instinct that straightforwardly explains capitalism, colonialism, or technological expansion. It instead identifies separable dispositions and mechanisms. Richins and Dawson conceptualize materialism as a value orientation organized around acquisition centrality, acquisition as a route to happiness, and possession-defined success (Richins & Dawson, 1992); a meta-analysis of 753 effect sizes from 259 samples found materialistic orientations reliably associated with lower personal well-being, while not establishing that every act of purchasing causes harm (Dittmar et al., 2014). citeturn14search0turn14search1turn14search21 Narcissism can orient consumption toward self-enhancement and symbolic distinction (Cisek et al., 2014), whereas social dominance orientation predicts preferences for group hierarchy and hierarchy-supporting institutions rather than acquisitiveness per se (Pratto et al., 1994). citeturn14search7turn14search6 Piagetian assimilation offers the cleanest psychological analogue to subsumption: novelty is interpreted through existing schemas, while accommodation provides the crucial countermechanism by changing the schema itself (Piaget; Block, 1982). citeturn15search1turn15search23
At the sociological and cultural level, consumer societies convert goods into status-bearing signs, not merely utilities: Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, Bourdieu’s distinction, and later theories of sign-value all illuminate this process. Veblen’s original Theory of the Leisure Class ties visible consumption and pecuniary emulation to status competition (Veblen, 1899). citeturn15search2turn15search6 Cultural appropriation illustrates the difference between borrowing and subsumption particularly well: Rogers distinguishes exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation, emphasizing that cultural movement is not inherently predatory and that power relations determine whether incorporation becomes domination (Rogers, 2006). citeturn15search22 Likewise, globalization cannot simply be equated with homogenization: Appadurai emphasizes disjunctive flows of people, capital, media, technology, and ideas, while Quijano’s “coloniality of power” emphasizes the persistence of racialized and epistemic hierarchies beyond formal colonial rule (Appadurai, 1990; Quijano, 2000). citeturn16search1turn16search0
Economically, attributing a literal “will” to markets is misleading. Expansion emerges through mechanisms rather than consciousness: profit seeking, competition, reinvestment, economies of scale, credit, shareholder incentives, network effects, and institutional rules. Marx’s circuit of expanding value captures one theoretical formulation; modern platform economics adds cross-side network effects, in which a platform becomes more valuable by bringing multiple constituencies into the same governed infrastructure (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). citeturn16search3 The resulting systems can subsume market participants by making access to customers, suppliers, information, or social visibility conditional on platform rules. This is an empirically observable but not inevitable tendency: the UK Competition and Markets Authority concluded in its major platform-advertising study that competition was not working well and was causing substantial societal and consumer harm, while interoperability, multihoming, portability, and regulation can counter concentration. citeturn20search2turn18search15
Technology intensifies the distinction. Datafication is paradigmatically subsumptive: qualitative life is rendered in machine-readable categories so that it can be stored, compared, predicted, priced, and governed. Couldry and Mejias call the systematic conversion of daily life into extractable data relations “data colonialism,” while Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as a distinctive logic of accumulation based on behavioral information (Couldry & Mejias, 2018/2019; Zuboff, 2015). citeturn20search13turn20search0 Foundation models extend the issue: broad upstream models can be adapted across many downstream applications, producing extraordinary leverage but also what Stanford researchers call a risk of homogenization, because defects in a shared foundation can propagate across many systems (Bommasani et al., 2021). citeturn18search9 Calling AI “all-consuming” is therefore metaphorical; its stronger subsumptive property is its capacity to make heterogeneous language, images, activities, and institutional decisions commensurable through standardized computational representations.
Historically, three transitions illuminate the pattern without implying moral equivalence. Colonial empires combined direct consumption of land, minerals, crops, and coerced labor with the subsumption of territories and peoples into imperial fiscal, legal, racial, and epistemic orders. Potosí became one of the great silver-production complexes of the early modern world, while research on slave trades finds persistent adverse developmental legacies (Nunn, 2008). citeturn17search4turn17search1 Industrial capitalism subsumed work more deeply through factories, machinery, clock discipline, and managerial control; E. P. Thompson famously analyzed the relationship between changing conceptions of time and industrial labor discipline (Thompson, 1967). citeturn17search33 Digital platforms increasingly organize markets, communication, identity, attention, and data through privately governed infrastructures. The analogy is analytically useful only if its limits are retained: platform dependence and data extraction are not morally equivalent to slavery, military conquest, or colonial forced labor.
The central normative finding is therefore conditional rather than absolute. Consumption becomes ethically dangerous when it is ecologically irreversible or when costs are externalized; subsumption becomes ethically dangerous when incorporation is asymmetrical, involuntary, noncontestable, and difference is allowed to survive only on the encompassing system’s terms. The crucial question is not simply “How much is being consumed?” but “Who gets to define the categories, rules, purposes, and terms under which persons, cultures, labor, nature, and information become inputs?”
Counterforces correspondingly operate on several levels. Degrowth seeks deliberate reductions of energy and material throughput, although its empirical and policy literature remains contested: one systematic review mapped 951 peer-reviewed studies around throughput reduction, whereas another review of 561 publications criticized the field’s prevalence of nonempirical argument and limited policy evaluation (Engler et al., 2024; Savin & van den Bergh, 2024). citeturn19search2turn19search17 Decolonization shifts authority rather than merely redistributing outputs; free, prior, and informed consent institutionalizes Indigenous peoples’ capacity to refuse externally imposed incorporation. citeturn19search1turn19search9 Indigenous data sovereignty similarly replaces default extraction with collective authority: the CARE principles foreground Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (Carroll et al., 2020). citeturn19search0turn19search14 In digital markets, interoperability and data portability can make subsumption less total by restoring exit and reducing infrastructural dependence; as of August 2026, these are active elements of European digital-market governance. citeturn18search3turn18search15
Conceptual frame: consume, subsume, and the problem of “will”
Scope note. The geographical scope, whether “will” is intended literally or metaphorically, and the normative standard against which totalization should be judged were unspecified. I therefore treat the phrase globally and heuristically. “Will” refers sometimes to individual motivation but more often to emergent directional pressure produced by institutions. The evaluative criteria used below are autonomy, consent, reversibility, distributive justice, ecological sustainability, pluralism, and the availability of meaningful exit and contestation.
A useful formal distinction is:
[
\textbf{Consume}(x):\quad x \rightarrow \text{input, satisfaction, energy, status, profit, output}
]
where the process typically alters, appropriates, exhausts, or transfers value from (x), versus:
[
\textbf{Subsume}(x,S):\quad x \rightarrow \text{element governed by the categories/rules of system }S.
]
The distinction has four consequences.
First, consumption is principally metabolic or appropriative; subsumption is principally organizational or semantic. Mining consumes an ore body. A colonial cadastral system subsumes a landscape by redefining it as parcels of administratively legible property. Buying a garment consumes purchasing power and material resources. Converting tastes, relationships, movements, and browsing behavior into standardized behavioral profiles subsumes heterogeneous activity within a computational taxonomy.
Second, consumption often ends with the object, whereas subsumption can perpetuate it. A forest consumed as fuel disappears; a forest subsumed into a carbon-credit, property, conservation, or resource-management regime remains a forest, but its meaning and permitted uses are partly reorganized by a larger abstraction. Heidegger’s “standing-reserve” is powerful precisely because the entity need not be destroyed: it is encountered principally as something ordered and available (Heidegger, 1954). citeturn13search3turn13search7
Third, subsumption is not intrinsically pathological. Classification is unavoidable for cognition, administration, science, and coordination. Piagetian assimilation is a normal mechanism of learning, and Hegelian sublation is explicitly preservation as well as negation. citeturn15search23turn13search2 The pathology appears when the universal cannot itself be altered by the particular—when assimilation systematically suppresses accommodation, standardization abolishes legitimate difference, or incorporation makes meaningful refusal impossible.
Fourth, “systemic appetite” need not imply a system has a psyche. Capital does not literally want, platforms do not literally desire, and bureaucracies do not possess biological drives. Treating aggregate systems anthropomorphically obscures the mechanisms that generate expansion. A firm may expand because its competitors expand; investors expect returns; fixed costs reward scale; a platform benefits from cross-side network effects; a bureaucracy seeks administratively legible populations; and AI developers benefit from broader data and deployment domains. Rochet and Tirole’s formal theory of two-sided markets exemplifies how expansion can emerge from market structure without requiring an omnivorous psychological subject (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). citeturn16search3
The most useful integrated mechanism is therefore not “greed causes everything,” but a cascade:
flowchart LR
A["Individual motives<br/>need, status, mastery, security"] --> B["Acquisition & classification"]
B --> C["Institutional mediation<br/>firms, states, markets, platforms"]
C --> D["Extraction & commodification"]
D --> E["Standardization & legibility"]
E --> F["Measurement, datafication & optimization"]
F --> G["Scale, accumulation & network effects"]
G --> H["Systemic subsumption<br/>labor, nature, culture, attention, data"]
H --> I["Externalities, inequality & resistance"]
H --> J["Feedback into norms,<br/>preferences and incentives"]
J --> A
I --> K["Counterforces:<br/>limits, rights, interoperability,<br/>decolonization, sovereignty"]
K --> CThis is an analytical model, not a deterministic causal law. Its importance is that it separates motivational, institutional, technological, and systemic levels. The same psychological motive can produce different outcomes under different institutions; conversely, the same institutional pressure can recruit people with very different motives.
Philosophy: power, dialectic, fetishism, and enframing
Key theories and primary sources. Nietzsche is the most obvious starting point, but also the easiest to misread. In Beyond Good and Evil §13, he describes a living thing as seeking above all to discharge its strength and characterizes life in terms of “will to power” (Nietzsche, 1886). citeturn13search0 Nietzschean power is therefore closer to activity, expansion of capacity, interpretation, resistance-overcoming, and self-overcoming than to a simple appetite for possessions. A contemporary consumer can certainly seek status or mastery through objects, but a passive addiction to comfort and repetitive consumption might equally look, from a Nietzschean perspective, like diminished rather than heightened power.
The conceptual connection to “consume everything” is thus indirect. Nietzsche offers an account of why life might seek expansion rather than static equilibrium. The mistake would be to infer a sociological law: “capitalism expands because Nietzsche proved beings inherently want more.” Nietzsche’s doctrine is contested even within Nietzsche scholarship, and it should not be converted into an empirically established universal drive. His theory illuminates the phenomenology of overcoming; it does not replace institutional analysis.
Hegel supplies a much more precise model for incorporation. In the Science of Logic, Aufhebung—usually translated as “sublation”—carries the dual senses of canceling and preserving. Dialectical development is therefore not simple annihilation: determinate content is negated in one form but retained and transformed within another (Hegel, 1812–1816). citeturn13search2 Popular summaries of Hegel as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” flatten this structure. The important point for the present inquiry is that true dialectical subsumption is reciprocal: the encompassing form itself changes through its encounter with what it incorporates.
This creates a powerful normative contrast:
Domineering subsumption: “You may enter my system only by becoming intelligible in my terms.”
Dialectical incorporation: “Your difference changes the terms of the system that incorporates you.”
Postcolonial, feminist, and pluralist anxieties about totalizing systems can therefore be expressed as the fear of a false Hegelianism: universality that claims to preserve particularity while actually forcing the particular to conform. That critique should not be confused with Hegel’s own technical concept, whose preservation component is essential. citeturn13search2
Marx turns subsumption into a historically specific political-economic concept. Commodity fetishism in Capital is not a theory that consumers irrationally “love brands”; its deeper claim is that social relations among producers assume the appearance of relations among things under generalized commodity exchange (Marx, 1867). The commodity form therefore subsumes perception: historically specific social relations appear as natural properties of commodities and prices. Marx’s broader circulation analysis likewise describes capital not as money spent for final satisfaction but as value advanced in order to return expanded. That is the systemic foundation for a logic of “more,” independent of whether individual capitalists are personally greedy.
More literally, Marx distinguishes formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labor process comes under capitalist control while much of its technical form survives; in real subsumption, the labor process itself is reorganized—through cooperation, machinery, science, division of labor, and managerial techniques—to become specifically adapted to capital accumulation (Marx, 1863–1864). citeturn13search23turn13search13 This is perhaps the single most important theoretical bridge to the user’s phrase. Capital does not merely consume outputs and labor-power; it increasingly reconstitutes the conditions under which production occurs.
Heidegger radicalizes the diagnosis by shifting from political economy toward ontology. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” modern technology is not essentially a collection of machines. Its distinctive mode of revealing—Gestell, enframing—orders beings as available, calculable stock or “standing-reserve.” Modern technological reason thus tends to ask of river, forest, field, worker, and information: How can this be made reliably available for ordering? Heidegger’s diagnosis includes human beings, who themselves become caught within systems of ordering (Heidegger, 1954). citeturn13search7turn13search3
The four traditions therefore differ sharply:
Nietzsche: Why expansion, overcoming, and intensification?
Hegel: How does thought or social form incorporate contradiction and difference?
Marx: Under what historical relations does capital subordinate and transform labor and social relations?
Heidegger: How does a technological epoch disclose beings primarily as orderable resources?
Evidence and critiques. These are primarily conceptual and historical theories, so demanding laboratory “proof” misunderstands their epistemic status. They are evaluated through interpretive coherence, historical explanatory power, and their ability to illuminate social phenomena. Marx’s subsumption concepts have especially direct historical counterparts in industrial reorganization; Heidegger’s account resonates with contemporary quantification but can become too encompassing if every use of technology is labeled enframing. Nietzsche risks metaphysical overextension if “will to power” is treated as a literal force behind every phenomenon. Hegel risks—or is often accused of—allowing higher unity to overpower irreducible difference, although his explicit double meaning of Aufhebung complicates that criticism. citeturn13search2turn13search3
Contemporary relevance. Algorithmic labor management is Marxian when existing work becomes reorganized around measurable productivity; large-scale data infrastructures are Heideggerian insofar as entities are operationally disclosed as available variables; corporate or entrepreneurial ideologies sometimes resemble vulgarized Nietzschean expansion; and global standards exhibit a Hegelian question whenever particular practices are incorporated into universal regimes. But these are analogies, not identities.
The deepest philosophical conclusion is that consume and subsume imply different kinds of power. Consumption exercises power over the availability or use of a thing. Subsumption exercises power over the terms in which the thing can appear and act. The second can be less visible and more durable.
Psychology: acquisition, narcissism, hierarchy, and cognitive assimilation
Psychological evidence cautions strongly against reducing societal expansion to a single “acquisitive instinct.” Human beings exhibit needs for security, affiliation, competence, status, self-enhancement, novelty, and control under varying circumstances; consumer institutions can mobilize several of these simultaneously. The scientifically defensible question is therefore not “Do humans naturally want everything?” but which traits and circumstances increase acquisition, status consumption, hierarchy preference, or assimilation of novelty?
Acquisitive orientation and materialism. Richins and Dawson’s influential formulation treats materialism as a consumer value, not an irresistible biological drive. Its three dimensions are acquisition centrality, acquisition as a route to happiness, and possession-defined success (Richins & Dawson, 1992). citeturn14search0turn14search20 This matters conceptually: the “will to consume” can be culturally intensified because values are partly socially organized rather than fixed appetites.
A major meta-analysis examined 753 effect sizes drawn from 259 independent samples and found materialistic orientation associated with significantly lower well-being. For broad multidimensional materialism measures, the average observed association was approximately (r=-.19), stronger after correction for measurement error; effects were smaller for measures focused narrowly on money (Dittmar et al., 2014). citeturn14search1turn14search21 This is substantial evidence against the simple proposition that ever-greater acquisition reliably produces ever-greater welfare. It is not proof that all material consumption decreases happiness, and causal pathways may run in both directions: insecurity can promote materialistic goals just as persistent materialistic orientation may crowd out other sources of well-being.
Narcissism. Narcissism adds a different mechanism. Cisek and colleagues’ review describes narcissistic consumer behavior in terms of self-enhancement, exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, and symbolic consumption (Cisek et al., 2014). citeturn14search7turn14search11 The relevant object is not necessarily valuable for use; it can function as an extension of self-image. Here consumption resembles a miniature subsumption: the commodity is recruited into the narrative architecture of the self.
But the relationship should not be inflated into “narcissists are insatiable consumers.” Consumer effects are domain-specific, and narcissism is heterogeneous. A recent systematic review of 147 consumer-research articles published between 2002 and 2023 found recurring clusters around luxury branding, social media, dark personality traits, and negative brand experiences—evidence for a substantial literature, not for one uniform behavioral law. citeturn14search19
Social dominance orientation. SDO is closer to the “subsume” side than the “consume” side. Pratto et al. introduced SDO as individual preference for inequality among social groups and reported associations with hierarchy-enhancing occupational preferences, ideologies, and policy attitudes (Pratto et al., 1994). citeturn14search6turn14search22 Subsequent research has refined its dimensional structure and tested its relationship with prejudice and hierarchy support. citeturn14search26
The conceptual mechanism is not acquisition but legitimation of unequal incorporation. Someone high in SDO need not buy more products; rather, they are more accepting of systems in which subordinate groups occupy structurally inferior positions. Colonial hierarchy, racialized labor systems, and some forms of extractive political economy can therefore recruit dominance orientations even though such institutions cannot be explained by individual SDO alone.
Cognitive assimilation. Piagetian assimilation is perhaps the cleanest psychological model of subsumption stripped of moral connotation. Assimilation interprets new experience through an existing cognitive schema; accommodation alters the schema when novelty cannot adequately be fitted into it. Equilibration involves the relationship between the two. citeturn15search23turn15search31 Block’s influential critique argued that Piagetian characterizations required refinement, underscoring that these are dynamic constructs rather than a crude binary (Block, 1982). citeturn15search1
This yields a striking interdisciplinary analogy:
[
\text{healthy learning} = \text{assimilation} + \text{accommodation}
]
whereas
[
\text{dominating subsumption} \approx \text{assimilation without sufficient accommodation}.
]
The colonial administrator who forces local kinship, land tenure, language, or identity into imported administrative categories performs something structurally analogous to institutional assimilation without accommodation. So does an algorithmic classification scheme that treats categories as fixed while systematically misrepresenting populations that do not fit them. The analogy is mine, rather than Piaget’s political claim, but it makes a general principle visible: systems become epistemically imperial when the world must change to fit the model while the model is insulated from the world’s resistance.
Major critique across psychology. The psychological evidence does not establish a transhistorical drive that scales automatically from person to empire. The ecological fallacy would be severe: aggregate capitalist expansion cannot be inferred from individual materialism scores, colonial domination cannot be reduced to narcissism, and platform concentration cannot be explained by personality. Psychological variables help explain who is attracted to particular practices and how cultural institutions recruit motives; political economy explains why certain patterns persist even when participants privately dislike them.
Society, culture, and economics: from status consumption to market expansion
Consumerism. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class makes a decisive move beyond utility-maximizing explanations: consumption can display position. Conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption become ways of communicating exemption from necessity and achieving status through pecuniary comparison (Veblen, 1899). citeturn15search2turn15search6 Bourdieu later expands the mechanism: cultural tastes and consumption practices participate in social distinction, making consumption a means by which class structure becomes embodied and reproduced. Baudrillard radicalizes the point by interpreting consumer goods as elements in systems of signs.
In this perspective, consumption is semiotically subsumptive. The object is consumed not only for what it does but for where it locates its possessor in a field of meanings. A watch tells time; a luxury watch can classify its wearer. A neighborhood provides housing; an address can signify class. Social systems thereby “consume” material goods while “subsuming” individuals into status taxonomies.
The ecological dimension puts hard constraints on treating consumption as merely symbolic. UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 reports that global resource-use trends have continued or accelerated and projects that, without major change, extraction could be about 60% higher in 2060 than in 2020. citeturn16search2 This gives the metaphor of “consuming everything” a literal planetary dimension: unlike digital signs, material extraction encounters biophysical stocks, regeneration rates, waste sinks, and irreversible ecological damage.
Cultural appropriation. Cultural borrowing is not inherently equivalent to domination. Rogers’s influential framework distinguishes cultural exchange, cultural dominance, cultural exploitation, and transculturation (Rogers, 2006). citeturn15search22turn15search14 This distinction is essential because a theory that labels all cultural movement “subsumption” would itself erase agency and hybridity.
The morally relevant variables include power asymmetry, attribution, consent, economic capture, context, and the ability of source communities to define meaning. Recent consumer research on the “consumption of cultural difference” likewise treats appropriation as embedded in moral self-authorization and asymmetric relations rather than mere contact between cultures. citeturn15search26
Here the consume/subsume distinction is precise. A corporation may consume a cultural symbol as design material. It subsumes that symbol when the commercial system becomes powerful enough to redefine its dominant public meaning, ownership expectations, or legitimate uses. A motif can remain materially visible while its historical relations are rendered invisible.
Colonialism and coloniality. Colonial empire represents the strongest historical convergence of consumption and subsumption. Colonial systems extracted land, minerals, crops, taxes, and labor while simultaneously establishing legal classifications, property systems, racial hierarchies, languages of administration, and epistemic rankings. Quijano’s “coloniality of power” is important precisely because it refers to forms of racialized, economic, and epistemic classification that can persist after juridical colonialism ends (Quijano, 2000). citeturn16search0
This perspective makes colonialism more than voracious resource consumption. Empire reorganized what and who counted: land could become imperial property; populations became races, tribes, labor pools, taxable subjects, or civilizational categories. The power to subsume was inseparable from the power to extract.
Decolonial theory nevertheless receives important critiques. “Coloniality” can become so broad that nearly every unequal modern relationship is described as colonial, blunting historical specificity. The concepts are strongest when they identify traceable institutional continuities rather than treating resemblance as identity. Contemporary data extraction may echo colonial appropriation structurally, for example, but it should not be treated as equivalent in violence or coercion to conquest, slavery, dispossession, and forced labor.
Globalization. Appadurai supplies a counterweight to totalization theories. His influential analysis describes global flows of people, technologies, finance, media, and ideas as disjunctive rather than synchronized (Appadurai, 1990). citeturn16search1turn16search17 Globalization can certainly produce standardization—global brands, technical protocols, accounting rules, dominant languages—but it also produces appropriation from below, hybridization, localization, and unexpected recombination.
Thus globalization is better modeled as a struggle between subsumption and translation. A transnational system seeks interoperability; local actors reinterpret it. A global product standard reduces variation; communities adapt or repurpose it. “McDonaldization”-type accounts capture one tendency but not the entire field.
Consumer behavior and market expansion. Mainstream economics normally represents consumers through preferences, constraints, prices, and expectations rather than a metaphysical “will to consume.” Critical political economy asks a different question: why do production systems need continuously renewed demand and expanding outlets? Marx locates expansion in the reproduction of capital itself, while Veblen shows that social comparison can make wants positional rather than satiable.
Contemporary platform economics adds a new mechanism. Rochet and Tirole show that many digital and payment markets are two-sided: a platform must coordinate distinct participant groups, and the value of participation can depend on participation on the other side (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). citeturn16search3turn16search23 Once scale, network effects, switching costs, data advantages, or ecosystem complementarities become strong, market expansion turns into infrastructural subsumption: sellers, advertisers, developers, creators, and users increasingly need the platform in order to reach one another.
That tendency is empirically contingent, not a theorem that every platform monopolizes. The UK CMA’s major inquiry into online platforms and digital advertising concluded in 2020 that competition was “not working well” in the markets studied and recommended a new pro-competition regime. citeturn20search2 The appropriate inference is not “platform capitalism necessarily consumes every market,” but that certain configurations of network effects, data, defaults, vertical integration, and switching costs can produce durable gatekeeping power.
The economic synthesis can therefore be represented as:
[
\text{individual desire}
\neq
\text{market expansion}
]
Rather,
[
\text{market expansion}
f(\text{profit incentives, competition, credit, scale economies, network effects, institutions})
]
while consumer desires are themselves partly shaped by the market environments into which they are embedded.
Technology: datafication, AI, surveillance, and computational subsumption
Digital technology makes subsumption unusually visible because computation requires formalization. Software cannot operate directly on infinitely rich social reality: it needs variables, labels, interfaces, permissions, databases, metrics, ontologies, and objective functions. Datafication is therefore not merely data collection; it is an act of translation into a space in which computation can act.
Couldry and Mejias define “data relations” as social arrangements that normalize the conversion of everyday life into data streams and theorize this as “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018). citeturn20search13 Their later work describes datafication as large-scale appropriation of social life, explicitly connecting quantification with extractive social relations. citeturn20search1 The colonial analogy is intentionally provocative and should be bounded: it highlights asymmetrical appropriation and the construction of new extractable “territories,” not an equivalence between data collection and historical colonial violence.
Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism identifies a related but distinct mechanism: networked corporations can develop accumulation strategies around extensive behavioral information, prediction, and behavioral influence (Zuboff, 2015). citeturn20search0turn20search4 In her theory, human experience becomes a source of behavioral data that can support commercial prediction and intervention.
The consume/subsume distinction is especially valuable here. Firms consume computing power, energy, capital, and data-processing inputs. They subsume behavior when increasingly many actions become intelligible through a platform’s categories: “engagement,” “conversion,” “risk,” “relevance,” “propensity,” “friend,” “follower,” “driver,” “seller,” “buyer,” “creator.”
Surveillance pricing offers a concrete contemporary example. In January 2025, an FTC staff study reported that intermediaries could use information such as location, browsing behavior, shopping history, and other consumer characteristics in individualized pricing systems; importantly, the FTC noted that its published examples were hypothetical because underlying company information was aggregated or anonymized. citeturn18search0 The rigorous conclusion is therefore that such capabilities and practices exist—not that every retailer secretly assigns every consumer a personalized price.
Artificial intelligence changes the scale of subsumption. Stanford’s 2021 foundation-model report defined a technological paradigm in which models trained broadly at scale serve as foundations for many downstream applications. The report emphasizes a “homogenization” effect: concentrating many applications on a small number of upstream models creates leverage, but defects and biases can propagate into downstream systems (Bommasani et al., 2021). citeturn18search9
This is more accurately described as computational subsumption than literal consumption. Training does not physically consume text or images in the way a furnace consumes coal. It transforms statistical regularities derived from data into model parameters. When a small set of representational architectures mediates writing, search, coding, ranking, education, administration, or customer service, heterogeneous domains can become partially subsumed beneath common technical abstractions.
Three distinct “totalizing” pressures should nevertheless be kept separate.
Data expansion: incentive to collect more observations, modalities, interactions, and feedback.
Model scaling/generalization: incentive to build systems useful across more tasks.
Deployment expansion: incentive to insert successful models into more institutional processes.
These mechanisms can reinforce each other, but none establishes that AI must “subsume everything.” Technical specialization, local models, privacy-preserving architectures, human governance, regulatory limits, and domains where computation performs poorly all constrain the tendency.
The ethical risk is strongest where classification changes opportunities while becoming difficult to contest. A recommender merely categorizing movies is different from a scoring system governing employment, credit, policing, education, healthcare access, or political visibility. The move from description to allocation turns computational subsumption into institutional power.
Current law increasingly recognizes this problem. As of August 11, 2026, the EU AI Act entered into force on August 1, 2024 and became broadly applicable on August 2, 2026, with general-purpose AI obligations having applied since August 2, 2025 and some high-risk-system deadlines extending into 2027 and 2028 after the 2026 AI Omnibus amendments. citeturn18search2turn18search6 Article 50 transparency obligations for relevant AI interactions and generated or manipulated content also began applying on August 2, 2026. citeturn18search18turn18search36
Digital-market regulation similarly targets infrastructural subsumption. The EU’s 2026 review of the Digital Markets Act highlights data portability, choices concerning cross-service data combination, alternative defaults, and interoperability; in July 2026 the Commission also issued measures concerning Google’s Android interoperability and search-data sharing obligations. citeturn18search15turn18search11 These policies are philosophically interesting because they do not abolish platforms. They attempt to make incorporation less total by preserving exit, transferability, and third-party access.
Historical cases and cross-domain comparison
The long historical arc is not one uniform process, but the mechanisms recur: extract → classify → standardize → reorganize → scale. The timeline below summarizes representative moments; it draws on the historical and theoretical sources discussed throughout this report, including UNESCO on Potosí, Thompson on industrial time discipline, Marx on capitalist subsumption, Zuboff on surveillance capitalism, and contemporary AI and digital-market governance. citeturn17search4turn17search33turn20search0turn18search9turn18search2
timeline
title Historical transformations of consumption and subsumption
1545 : Potosí silver exploitation expands after discovery of Cerro Rico deposits
1570s : Imperial administration deepens Andean mining and labor organization
1760s-1840s : Industrial Revolution intensifies mechanization and factory discipline
1867 : Marx publishes Capital Volume I and analyzes commodity fetishism
1899 : Veblen publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class
1954 : Heidegger publishes The Question Concerning Technology
1967 : E. P. Thompson analyzes industrial time-discipline
1990 : Appadurai theorizes disjunctive global cultural flows
1990s-2000s : Commercial Internet and multisided digital platforms expand
2015 : Zuboff formulates surveillance capitalism as a logic of accumulation
2021 : Foundation-model paradigm foregrounds scale and homogenization
2024-2026 : EU AI Act and DMA develop countervailing digital governanceColonial empire: Potosí and Atlantic extraction. UNESCO describes Potosí as an extraordinary early-modern silver-production complex that grew into an “Imperial City” around Cerro Rico. citeturn17search4 The case exemplifies both poles: silver ore, ecological capacity, and coerced labor were consumed in imperial production; Indigenous communities, land, taxation, and labor were subsumed into imperial administrative and monetary systems.
The larger Atlantic system makes the distinction even harsher. Nunn’s cross-country analysis finds a robust negative relationship between historical slave exports and later African economic performance and presents evidence supporting an adverse causal legacy (Nunn, 2008). citeturn17search1turn17search8 Such work does not imply that one historical variable explains all contemporary development; institutional persistence, geography, postcolonial policy, global markets, conflict, and many other processes matter. Its importance is empirical confirmation that large-scale extractive systems can generate long path-dependent effects after the immediate extraction ends.
Industrial Revolution. Industrial capitalism consumed coal, metals, raw materials, and labor at unprecedented scales, but its more subtle transformation was the reorganization of labor itself. Thompson’s classic essay charts the relationship between changes in time consciousness and patterns of work discipline during industrialization (Thompson, 1967). citeturn17search33 Marx’s “real subsumption” captures the complementary structural transformation: machinery and organizational innovation increasingly redesign production around capital’s requirements rather than merely placing an owner over an unchanged craft process.
The Thompson thesis has been revised: subsequent scholarship argues that preindustrial time practices were more structured and varied than a simple “natural time → capitalist clock time” narrative suggests. citeturn17search9 This is an important methodological warning: theories of subsumption can overstate rupture because they are attracted to totalizing stories.
Contemporary automation shows that the question remains live. Acemoglu and Restrepo find robust negative local effects of industrial-robot exposure on employment and wages in U.S. commuting zones, while emphasizing the task-allocation mechanisms through which automation can displace labor (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2020). citeturn17search3turn17search34 This does not mean technology necessarily harms employment overall; it shows that the organization of technological change determines distributional consequences.
Digital platforms. Platforms extend subsumption beyond the factory gate. A successful platform may establish rules for discovery, ranking, payment, identity, advertising, developer access, dispute resolution, and data collection simultaneously. Whereas industrial real subsumption transformed how workers produced, platform subsumption can transform how heterogeneous actors encounter one another at all.
The difference from colonial and industrial coercion is crucial. A social-media user accepting contractual terms is not in the same position as an enslaved person or a forced-laborer. Historical comparison is useful only at the level of mechanisms—appropriation, legibility, dependence, standardization, asymmetrical rule-setting—not as an equivalence of suffering or moral severity.
The following table integrates the major theories.
| Theory | Domain | Mechanism | Evidence | Critique | Contemporary example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Will to power (Nietzsche) | Philosophy | Expansion of capacity; overcoming resistance; interpretation | Primarily textual/philosophical; Beyond Good and Evil frames life through exercise of strength (Nietzsche, 1886). citeturn13search0 | Not an empirical acquisitive-drive theory; “power” ≠ possession | Optimization, competitive self-expansion, entrepreneurship as loose analogies |
| Aufhebung / dialectic (Hegel) | Philosophy | Negate, preserve, and transform particularity within a developing whole | Conceptual argument in Hegel’s logic; dual meaning of sublation. citeturn13search2 | Higher unity can be read as totalizing; “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” caricatures Hegel | Global standards that incorporate but also must adapt to local difference |
| Commodity fetishism (Marx) | Philosophy / political economy | Social relations appear as relations among commodities/things | Historical analysis of commodity production | Marxian value theory contested; fetishism can be applied too broadly | Price/market metrics obscuring production relations |
| Formal/real subsumption (Marx) | Political economy | Capital first controls an existing labor process, then technologically reorganizes it | Industrial history; Marx’s primary analysis. citeturn13search23turn13search13 | Periodization is debated; not every transformation follows a linear sequence | Algorithmic management, logistics, automated production |
| Enframing (Heidegger) | Philosophy of technology | Beings disclosed as calculable, orderable standing-reserve | Phenomenological/historical diagnosis. citeturn13search3turn13search7 | Can under-specify institutions, ownership, and technical diversity | Data centers, resource optimization, quantified environments |
| Materialism (Richins & Dawson) | Psychology / consumer research | Acquisition becomes central to happiness and status | Validated measures; 753-effect-size meta-analysis links materialism with lower well-being. citeturn14search1turn14search21 | Associations do not prove simple causation; culturally variable | Status goods, repeated upgrading, possession-based self-evaluation |
| Narcissistic consumption | Psychology | Products support self-enhancement, exhibition, symbolic superiority | Consumer-behavior review literature. citeturn14search7turn14search19 | Narcissism heterogeneous; effects context-dependent | Luxury branding and social-media self-presentation |
| Social dominance orientation | Psychology / politics | Preference for group hierarchy legitimates unequal incorporation | SDO predicts hierarchy-supporting attitudes and roles. citeturn14search6turn14search26 | Not a theory of consumption; individual attitudes do not explain entire institutions | Support for hierarchy-enhancing political arrangements |
| Assimilation/accommodation (Piaget) | Cognitive psychology | New information fitted to schemas versus schemas altered by novelty | Developmental theory and extensive subsequent debate. citeturn15search1turn15search23 | Assimilation is normally adaptive, not domination | Institutional categories that either learn from exceptions or erase them |
| Conspicuous consumption (Veblen) | Sociology / economics | Consumption signals status through pecuniary emulation | Historical-institutional analysis; extensive later consumer research. citeturn15search2turn15search6 | Not all demand is positional; status signals vary culturally | Luxury brands, scarce collectibles, visible lifestyle goods |
| Cultural appropriation / transculturation (Rogers) | Cultural studies | Cultural elements circulate through exchange, domination, exploitation, or hybridization | Comparative conceptual and case literature. citeturn15search22 | Boundaries and “ownership” of culture can be difficult to specify | Fashion, music, branding, tourism |
| Coloniality of power (Quijano) | Sociology / decolonial theory | Racial, economic, and epistemic classifications outlive formal colonialism | Historical-comparative theory. citeturn16search0 | Risk of making “coloniality” too universal | Persistent global hierarchies of knowledge, labor, and development |
| Two-sided platform markets (Rochet & Tirole) | Economics | Cross-side network effects generate scale and interdependence | Formal economic modeling plus competition cases. citeturn16search3turn20search2 | Network effects vary; multihoming and regulation can prevent tipping | App stores, marketplaces, search and advertising |
| Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff) | Technology / political economy | Behavioral data become resources for prediction and monetization | Organizational analysis of digital firms. citeturn20search0 | May over-unify diverse data business models and state/private surveillance | Behavioral advertising, personalization, surveillance pricing |
| Data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias) | Technology / cultural sociology | Social life converted continuously into extractable data relations | Theory grounded in contemporary data infrastructures. citeturn20search13turn20search1 | Colonial analogy must not erase differences from historical conquest | Connected devices, platform telemetry, behavioral tracking |
| Foundation-model homogenization | AI / technology | Common upstream models mediate many downstream tasks; errors propagate | Technical/societal foundation-model research. citeturn18search9 | Shared models can also lower costs and broaden access | General-purpose AI embedded across education, work, search, software |
Across the table, one recurrent difference appears:
Consumption asks: What can this yield to me or my system?
Subsumption asks: Under what schema or infrastructure will this be allowed to exist?
The second question often reveals the deeper power relation.
Ethics, counterforces, and alternatives
The ethical problem is not infinity of appetite in the abstract; it is asymmetric incorporation under conditions of finite ecology and unequal power.
A rigorous ethical test can be organized around five questions.
Consent and exit: Can the affected person or community meaningfully refuse incorporation? A nominal click-through choice within an unavoidable infrastructural monopoly is ethically weaker than genuine alternatives.
Reciprocity: Does the encompassing system adapt to what it incorporates, or must the incorporated party do all the adapting? This is the political analogue of the assimilation/accommodation distinction.
Distribution: Who captures benefits and who absorbs costs? Resource extraction can enrich distant consumers while concentrating pollution locally; data extraction can generate corporate assets without symmetric bargaining power for data subjects.
Reversibility: Can incorporation be undone? Switching a software standard is easier than recovering an extinct species, restoring destroyed sacred land, or undoing decades of path-dependent institutional damage.
Epistemic authority: Who defines what counts as value, risk, ownership, productivity, intelligence, identity, or legitimate knowledge? Subsumption is most powerful when the rule-maker’s categories become invisible as categories and appear simply as reality.
These criteria clarify why the possible counterforces named in the question address different layers of the problem.
Degrowth and sufficiency target the consumption side: material and energy throughput. The strongest version is not indiscriminate economic contraction but deliberate reduction of environmentally intensive production and consumption, especially where material throughput is already high, combined with provisioning systems oriented toward human needs. A 2024 systematic review of 951 peer-reviewed studies identifies reduction of resource and energy throughput as a unifying theme of degrowth scholarship (Engler et al., 2024). citeturn19search2turn19search6
Its critics correctly demand stronger evidence. Savin and van den Bergh’s review of 561 publications found that the great majority of their sample consisted of opinion rather than empirical analysis and criticized limited formal modeling, policy evaluation, representative evidence, and attention to political feasibility (Savin & van den Bergh, 2024). citeturn19search17 The critique itself has been disputed on sampling grounds because restricting searches to papers explicitly titled “degrowth” or “post-growth” may omit relevant empirical literatures. citeturn19search21 The defensible conclusion is neither “degrowth is scientifically proven” nor “degrowth has been disproven”; it is that biophysical limits are well substantiated, while the institutional pathways grouped under degrowth remain an active and uneven evidence base. UNEP’s projected resource pressures strengthen the problem diagnosis independently of any particular degrowth program. citeturn16search2
Decolonization targets subsumption more directly because it contests who has authority to define land, knowledge, identity, institutions, and development. The principle of free, prior, and informed consent institutionalizes a right not merely to receive compensation but to participate in—or withhold consent from—decisions affecting Indigenous peoples. OHCHR continues to treat FPIC as a central Indigenous-rights framework, including in its 2026 guidance on business activities. citeturn19search1turn19search9 This matters because a system that offers better terms for extraction without conceding authority can remain subsumptive.
Data sovereignty applies this insight to digital systems. Carroll and colleagues’ CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance place Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics alongside the more technically oriented FAIR data principles (Carroll et al., 2020). citeturn19search0turn19search4turn19search14 This is a major conceptual reversal: data are not simply free-floating resources awaiting maximal reuse; they can remain embedded in relationships, collective rights, histories, and obligations.
Competition, interoperability, and portability address platform subsumption without necessarily dismantling digital infrastructure. Interoperability permits actors to participate across boundaries; portability makes exit less costly; restrictions on data combination can prevent a gatekeeper from turning activity in one domain into leverage across another. The European Commission’s 2026 DMA review explicitly points to these mechanisms, and its current enforcement work includes smartphone interoperability and search-data-access measures. citeturn18search3turn18search15turn18search11 Their philosophical significance is that they replace closed incorporation with more reversible participation.
Institutional pluralism is the broader alternative. The aim need not be a world without standards, markets, technology, categories, or large organizations—a virtually incoherent objective. A more realistic principle is non-totalizing coordination: federated rather than obligatorily centralized institutions; reversible standards; public and cooperative options alongside private platforms; meaningful appeals against algorithmic classifications; multiple epistemic authorities; rights of exit and refusal; and governance structures in which those incorporated have power to alter the incorporating system.
This brings the analysis back to Hegel and Piaget. The opposite of destructive subsumption is not pure separation. It is incorporation with accommodation: forms of universality that remain revisable by what they encounter.
The deepest alternative to “the will to consume and subsume everything” is therefore not simply ascetic refusal. It is a politics and ethics of limits, reciprocity, plurality, and self-determination.
Concise annotated bibliography and further reading. The following twelve works give the strongest route into the problem, prioritizing primary texts, peer-reviewed research, and official frameworks.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), especially §13 and related passages on will to power. Essential primary text for distinguishing power as activity and overcoming from mere acquisitive possession. citeturn13search0
- Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic (1812–1816), sections on Aufhebung. The crucial primary philosophical source for understanding incorporation as simultaneous negation and preservation rather than simple elimination. The Stanford account provides a useful scholarly guide to the technical meaning. citeturn13search2
- Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I (1867), especially commodity fetishism; and the 1863–1864 manuscripts on formal and real subsumption. The central source for understanding how capitalist systems do not merely acquire labor but transform the labor process itself. citeturn13search23turn13search13
- Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). Primary source for Gestell or enframing and the technological disclosure of beings as standing-reserve; best read alongside careful secondary commentary to avoid treating every technology as identical. citeturn13search3turn13search7
- Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Foundational primary analysis of conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, status signaling, and pecuniary emulation. citeturn15search2turn15search6
- Richins, Marsha L., & Scott Dawson. “A Consumer Values Orientation for Materialism and Its Measurement” (1992), Journal of Consumer Research. Foundational empirical operationalization of materialism as acquisition centrality, happiness through acquisition, and possession-defined success. citeturn14search20turn14search28
- Dittmar, Helga, Rod Bond, Megan Hurst, & Tim Kasser. “The Relationship Between Materialism and Personal Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis” (2014). The strongest concise empirical synthesis for the psychological costs correlated with materialistic orientation: 753 effect sizes from 259 samples. citeturn14search1turn14search21
- Pratto, Felicia, Jim Sidanius, Lisa Stallworth, & Bertram Malle. “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes” (1994). Foundational empirical paper for distinguishing acquisitive motives from preferences for intergroup hierarchy. citeturn14search6turn14search22
- Rogers, Richard A. “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation” (2006). Particularly valuable because it refuses the simplistic equation of all cultural borrowing with exploitation, distinguishing exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. citeturn15search14turn15search22
- Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America” (2000). A foundational decolonial account of how colonial classifications and power relations can remain embedded in modern institutions after formal empire. citeturn16search0
- Rochet, Jean-Charles, & Jean Tirole. “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets” (2003), Journal of the European Economic Association. Essential formal-economic complement to critical theories of platform capitalism: it explains cross-side network effects without anthropomorphizing markets as possessing a “will.” citeturn16search3turn16search15
- Carroll, Stephanie Russo et al. “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance” (2020), Data Science Journal. One of the clearest constructive alternatives to extractive datafication, shifting the question from mere accessibility toward collective benefit, authority, responsibility, ethics, and self-determination. citeturn19search0turn19search14
For the specific bridge from the report’s organizing phrase to consumer theory, Gunderson’s “The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society” is a useful supplementary essay: it analyzes consumer society through recurring desire and dissatisfaction rather than presenting “the will to consume and subsume everything” as an established doctrine (Gunderson, 2016). citeturn20search3 For digital expansion specifically, Zuboff’s “Big Other” (2015), Couldry and Mejias’s “Data Colonialism” (2018), and the Stanford foundation-model report (Bommasani et al., 2021) form a productive three-way comparison between economic extraction, social datafication, and technological homogenization. citeturn20search0turn20search13turn18search9
Taken as a whole, the literature does not reveal one hidden appetite driving history. It reveals something more analytically useful: a recurrent transition from wanting things, to making things available, to making them legible, to reorganizing them so that their continued existence depends on the system that has incorporated them. Consumption is the acquisition of inputs; subsumption is the acquisition of terms. The most consequential forms of power often do both.