Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone: approaching the centenary of Huxley’s Brave New World and the eclipse of consumers

As Brave New World approaches its centenary, this paper re-reads Huxley’s dystopia not merely as a critique of commodified pleasure and technocratic control, but as a speculative mirror of the endgame of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and the eclipse of the consumer as a viable subject. We argue that the novel prefigures a post-consumer horizon in which subjectivity is displaced by data, desire by prediction, and agency by code. Taking seriously recent diagnoses of platform power and surveillance capitalism, we contend that like Huxley’s vision of consumer culture, CCT’s ontological commitments to the consumer are increasingly anachronistic. Re-reading the novel a century on provides the impetus to rethink consumer research beyond the consumer as its “hero in history”.