"We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls." -- Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There.

Yesterday was Buy Nothing Day, a moratorium on capitalism sponsored by Vancouver's anti-consumer magazine Adbusters, and if you're like most people (i.e., the fallible variety), you bought something. Perhaps The Globe (thank you) or coffee or an adorable red Mini Cooper or anything, really. Restraint is difficult in a society of conspicuous consumers exposed to an estimated 3,000 marketing messages daily; where 49 acres of West Edmonton Mall are attractively arrayed to pick our pockets; where George Bush proclaims that shopping is every American's patriotic duty and Ad Age recently named the glorified grocery flyer Lucky magazine of the year.

Permanently silencing the methodical beep of the UPC checkout scanner in such an economic ecosystem appears an impossibility when keeping the wallet or purse zipped tight for 24 hours of consumer celibacy makes us itchy. But that, of course, is the point of Buy Nothing Day -- to force us to confront the possibility that we are no longer citizens but consumers. It's a question of identity that Adbusters has been asking annually since 1992.

Adbusters is hardly the lone, rogue voice bullhorning unpleasant truths about consumer culture. Authors with influences as varied as anthropology, activism and science fiction have explored the plastic hassle, each see-sawing over the issue of agency. Are we hapless dupes, manipulated like drooling Pavlovian dogs into buying whatever our bell-ringing masters flash on the TV? Or homo economicus, the empowered, rational agents that free marketers claim us to be, a mob of fierce caveat emptors making informed decisions about late-night infomercials. That we act illogically in the rarified air of the mall is clear to any shopaholic who has entombed her MasterCard in a block of ice, but the following shopping list of literature proves that the dialogue between consumer and corporation is a complex argot of needs, wants and desires.

In assessing blame, we most often finger advertising, which, like hotdogs, is filled with stuff best not contemplated -- snouts and entrails. Those wishing to have their suspicions converted into purest paranoia should begin by skimming the 1957 salvo The Hidden Persuaders. Author Vance Packard explains how psychologists in the employ of advertising firms are probing our irrational nature and calculating how to best trick us into buying more stuff.

Exposing the sinister subtext of The Man reached its apogee in 1972 when Freudian (and veritable lunatic) Wilson Bryan Key published Subliminal Seduction, a sex-filled romp through magazine advertisements, complete with an opaque intro by Marshall McLuhan. Key claims to see the outlines of wolves, polar bears, skulls and scorpions embedded in ice cubes; believes cigarette ads are rife with phallic overtones and concludes with a warning about "the fascinating perversities of the subliminally loaded Sears catalogue."

Contemporary fretters will find succour in Paco Underhill, a retail-anthropologist and founder of Envirosell. His smart, funny book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Simon &Schuster, 1999) explains the butt-brush effect (woman will move away from merchandise they're interested in if accidentally jostled from behind), looks at how men shop (quite quickly and badly, it turns out) and provides conclusive proof that we get squirrelly waiting in line for more than 90 seconds.

Many will feel uncomfortable to learn of Underhill's underhanded research methods -- he studies hours of retail surveillance camera footage as if it were the Zapruder film, his observations bolstered by the notes of in-store trackers who, unbeknownst, stand beside mall rats and observe them in situ. But take a little comfort knowing that we are fickle beasts, and according to Underhill, "Shopping, for all we know about it, remains a mystery."

Underhill ignores the machinations of the branding insanitarium (populated by corporate chaperones who ensure the Pillsbury Doughboy is never caught in a compromising position), focusing instead on the actual killing floor, so to speak. No Logo (Knopf Canada, 1999), meanwhile, deals almost entirely with "the brand bullies," a kind of Steal This Book for the new millennium. "Once you get into shoplifting in supermarkets, you'll really dig it," yippie author Abbie Hoffman enthused back in 1970. "You'll be surprised to learn that the food tastes better." Naomi Klein, meanwhile, offers a reasoned, impeccably researched appeal to the middle class, with a tone that strikes a comfortable balance between the barricades and the ivory tower.

No Logo managed to capture the public imagination in a way that Kalle Lasn's screed Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America did not. Klein distills the essence of anti-globalization activism, explaining how aggressive marketing, demographic profiling and corporate commodification of cool helped provoke billboard liberation, Reclaim the Streets, Critical Mass, hacktivism and the WTO protests. And despite her distaste for the advertised life, Klein reserves some measure of respect for engineered brand palaces like Nike Town, the Roots Lodge and even Celebration, Florida (the suburbs that Disney built): "Yes, these creations can be vaguely spooky and sci-fi, but they should not be dismissed as just more crass commercialism for the unthinking masses: for better or for worse, these are privatized public utopias."

Science fiction (also known by its rebranded genre label "speculative fiction") has dealt with consumer culture for eons, but prefers flirting with dystopia. As of late, a pack of men have been fighting the good fight. They include Maxx Barry, author of Jennifer Government, a novel where kids wearing Nike's new $2,500 sneakers are assassinated by admen to stimulate demand. See also William Gibson, whose latest novel, Pattern Recognition, is about a cool-hunter, an archetype that also appears in Everyone in Silico, by fellow Canadian Jim Munroe.

But for the ur-text of anti-corporate, science-fiction satire, a work that handily survives translation into the present, read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (1952, Ballantine Books). With overtones of Brave New World and predating the overpopulation parables of the cult-film Soylent Green, Pohl (then a New York adman) and Kornbluth offer the twisty tale of Mitch Courtenay (a Copywriter Star-Class for Fowler Schocken Associates) who is in charge of selling the colonization of a very uninhabitable Venus. As Mitch notes, "The highest form of our art is to convince the customer without letting him know he's being convinced."

Occasionally pulpy but always punchy, The Space Merchants offers a Congress populated by CEOs, a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit of Maidenform bras and the Consies, an underground group dedicated to reversing the "reckless exploitation of natural resources." All this plus a redemptive ending, as Mitch ultimately abandons Mad Avenue for the woman he loves.

Unfortunately for many SF hacks, the future isn't what it used to be. Spambots. Urinal ads. Ads projected onto the moon. As fiction morphs into reality, consider spending the next 364 days contemplating a Tyler Durden (nee Brad Pitt) koan from the film Fight Club: "The things you own, end up owning you."

Ryan Bigge is a Toronto-based freelance writer and former managing editor of Adbusters.