Capitalism creates new needs continuously. The need to buy the latest iPhone, for example, or to fly from one city to another. These needs are not only alienating to the individual, they are ecologically damaging; their proliferation underpins consumerism, which in turn aggravates the depletion of natural resources and pollution.

In the age of Amazon, consumerism has reached its most intense stage. This illuminating essay asks us a crucial question: how can we stop this proliferation of artificial needs? How to get out of capitalist consumerism? From the effects of light pollution to programmed obsolescence, passing through the psychiatry of compulsive consumerism, this book analyzes the horizon of a battle – political and cultural – that we cannot lose; makes "authentic" needs, collectively defined in rupture with artificial needs, the core of a politics of emancipation in the 21st century.