Today, we bear witness to a post-industrial, consumerist wasteland, under whose all-encompassing totality is subsumed the autonomy of the willing subject, who becomes but an interchangeable gear-wheel in a global machine of production, distribution, and consumption. Individuality is paradoxically mass manufactured, as personal identity is increasingly governed in the public and private spheres by the accumulation, consumption of, and aggregation of preferences relative to commodities. Possessions become both indicators of social standing, and pieces of the psychological anatomy of the individual. Advertising lends itself handily to these ends, playing on the insecurities of the consumer. Products are often advertised as embodying desirable qualities, supposedly lacking in the target buyer: "If you want to be more feminine, wear this perfume;" "If you want to be more masculine, drink this beer;" "If you want  to be more elegant, wear these clothes," etc. Perhaps more troubling, however, is the rate of success of these tactics. In light of this, the questions emerge: are our lives a fabrication? Beneath these tangled webs of associations, who are we really, and if we weren't told who to be from such an early age, who might we become?