Send not to know for whom the “Add To Cart” clicks, it clicks for thee.
It likely won’t come as a surprise to you that the shiny gadgets in your hand, the trainers on your feet, and even the greenwashing slogans plastered across your packaging are all part of a carefully orchestrated system designed to keep you buying. Or maybe it will. If so, grab your reusable popcorn tub and settle in as Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy dives deep into the soulless, profit-hungry machine behind modern consumer culture.
In format, it’s a curious mix of sleek, corporate aesthetic exposé and a parade of repentant insiders—including a former Amazon designer, an ex-Adidas president, and even an Apple engineer—each lamenting their part in the great capitalist shell game. Their confessions are spliced with CGI renderings of the systems they helped build, vivid enough to make you wonder if you’ve accidentally queued up a dystopian sci-fi.
Where The Social Dilemma exposed how algorithms profit from our divided attention, Buy Now takes a look at the mercantile mendacity as it applies to our physical purchases. From planned obsolescence—designing products to fail just outside their warranty periods—to the horrifying afterlife of discarded electronics in developing nations, it’s a damning indictment of a system designed to profit from perpetual dissatisfaction. As with social media, the motive isn’t some shadowy conspiracy to corrupt or destroy. It’s simply money.
The film’s most scathing moments are reserved for the environmental toll of our consumer habits. Watching mounds of e-waste being improperly recycled in developing countries hits harder than any marketing exposé could. It’s a sharp reminder that our purchasing decisions don’t just harm us—they come with devastating consequences for others who will never even own the things they’re being poisoned by. Alongside the expected excoriation of our obsession with electronica, the documentary also has some pointed things to say about the world of fast fashion. Its diatribe of designer disposability is the perfect riposte that Andy was desperately groping for as Miranda Priestley gave her a dressing down about dressing up in The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion, beauty and technology, all in their own way vampirically feeding on our sense of incompleteness and offering snake oil solutions that do nothing but bring us back for more.
Of course, Buy Now isn’t without its quirks. Its AI narrator, Sasha, delivers the commentary with a sardonic edge that occasionally feels more snide than insightful and while it’s a bold choice, it’s also one that might alienate viewers looking for a more straightforward presentation or those who view the proliferation of AI as part of the problems being explored in the documentary.
And that’s where Buy Now most closely resembles The Social Dilemma: it’s great at outlining the problem, but maddeningly short on realistic solutions. The advice it does offer is relegated to the background of its closing credits—assuming Netflix hasn’t already auto-played you into your next binge by then. Like its predecessor, this documentary’s strength lies in starting a conversation, not finishing one.
What makes Buy Now so compelling, though, is the way it frames our complicity. While we may be victims of clever advertising and insidiously manipulative sales tactics, we’re willingly complicit in the whole process too. Every impulse buy, every unnecessary upgrade, every fleeting thrill of retail therapy is another cog in the system’s machinery. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but one worth facing if there’s ever going to be a change, although as the documentary itself points out, it’s way past time the blame for consumerism and the implied responsibility to address its destructive effects is shifted from the individual consumers themselves and onto to the megalithic corporations that are force feeding us our own destruction.
Much like The Social Dilemma, this documentary is likely to resonate most with those who already suspect that something’s rotten in the state of their online basket. But for those who haven’t stopped to think about why their perfectly functional phone suddenly feels urgently replaceable or why their latest outfit seems to disintegrate just as a new season arrives, it might just spark a moment of reflection. Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy serves as a sobering reminder that the promises of choice and convenience come at a steep price—and not just for us. It’s less a rallying cry than an uncomfortable nudge, but if it makes you think twice about your next impulse purchase, it might just be worth it.
