The simple fact is that mass standardization can only be profitable to the point that it can aggregate consumers into large blocs.
Hence, global markets must impose universal standardization upon products, for if this brand of economics is to survive as an exact deductive science to interpret markets, everything must be quantified. There is no room for nuance outside the barcode. Likewise, mass markets impose standardization upon consumers, who must also be quantified since marketing must identify the largest possible general and niche markets. Consumers are in this way reduced to sets of cold statistical categories, where “the individual is stripped of his qualities and then reconstituted in terms of quantities.”1
(Taken from Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here and Where We Need to Go, p. 40)
1 Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2001), 104.
