That the luxuries of one generation or class become the necessities of the next has been fundamental to the evolution of capitalism during the last five hundred years. Historians describe the “consumer boom” that ignited the first industrial revolution in late-eighteenth-century Britain, when, thanks to visionaries like Josiah Wedgewood and the innovations of the early modern factory, families new to the middle class began to buy the china, furniture, and textiles that only the rich had previously enjoyed. This new “propensity to consume” is considered “unprecedented in the depth to which it penetrated the lower reaches of society.…” In 1767 the political economist Nathaniel Forster worried that “fashionable luxury” was spreading “like a contagion,” and he complained of the “perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them.” Adam Smith wrote insightfully on this social process, noting that upper-class luxuries can in time be recast as “necessaries.” This occurs as “the established rules of decency” change to reflect new customs introduced by elites, triggering lower-cost production methods that transform what was once unattainable into newly affordable goods and services. Ford's Model T is the outstanding twentieth-century example of this progression.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 801