First, a bit of consumer self-disclosure.

I sit, this Nashville morning, in the Freon cool of a Borders café, wearing a wrinkled oxford-cloth shirt, dingy cargo shorts, and flip-flops. My BlackBerry Pearl sits beside my MacBook. I wear a yellow-gold wedding band. I have no other jewelry, visible tattoos, or piercings.

In other words, I look just like a writer-activist, which is, unfortunately, pretty much the case. I say unfortunately because this means I am evidently complicit with the consumerism of which I have recently written a book-length critique.

There are only two immediately obvious pieces of cognitive dissonance to my public identity. First, I am drinking the house brew. This is not because I do not like lattes; it is because I cannot rationalize paying for coffee what bars charge for beer.

Second, I do not have a cool haircut. I have the haircut of a factory foreman from 1969 who grimaces every time he thinks about bell bottoms. I like going to my barber and saying what I want in seven words: “Short on top, shorter on the sides.” It makes me feel like a throwback. So my uncool haircut is cool to me the way some people dig Buddy Holly glasses. (You’d probably guess that if you watched me long enough.)

The point is this: You would know, with one passing glance, a great deal about who I am. In fact, if you or anyone in your youth group walked into the Nashville Borders this morning, you would be able to peg my social location, education, and economic class almost perfectly. If we talked, you would probably be surprised by very few of my likes and dislikes.

They would not surprise you because you can read me like the walking catalog of consumer choices that I am—despite the fact that I have made a habit of removing brand logos from everything I own.

I know this is true because, while I guarantee that I don’t have a fraction of your youth group’s consumer savvy, it takes me a nanosecond to read everyone else at Borders. Take the middle manager in the corner (Dell laptop, black golf shirt, nice chinos, good hair, muscular). Or the votes-Democratic community organizer next to him (big silver jewelry, brought her own travel mug, loads of keys on a carabiner keychain, sensible fleece jacket and umbrella with a playful print).

I don’t know them. But I know them. Thus, the definition of a consumerist society like ours: You are what you buy.

When my grandparents were growing up, there was no such thing as brand consciousness. It was the Great Depression, after all—nobody had any money to buy anything, let alone consumer goods that would let you “express yourself and your style” to the world. You knew who you were by where you came from and who your family was—not by the stuff that you bought to create your ever-changing self.