As online retail hardens into a global liturgy of convenience, it consolidates algorithmic power, normalizes exploitation, and deepens ecological collapse, demanding a radical rethinking of consumption beyond the dogma of productivist capitalism.
Every morning, hundreds of millions of people reach for an online shopping app before fully entering the day, turning what was once an occasional practice into a normalized daily routine. In France, 41 million adults made at least one online purchase in 2024, representing nearly 73% of the population over the age of fifteen, with more than sixty transactions per year per buyer. At the global scale, more than 2.7 billion individuals shopped online regularly during the same year. Platforms actively cultivate such habits by reducing cognitive friction to a minimum through one-click payment, automatic card storage, streamlined pathways, and personalized recommendations. Micro-gestures—clicking “buy,” confirming a cart, mechanically scanning suggestions—accumulate into an invisible ritual, carefully engineered to produce immediate gratification and behavioral reinforcement. This algorithmic liturgy normalizes dependency, disciplines attention, and obscures the social, human, and ecological consequences embedded in every transaction, transforming consumption into an apparently free act that is structured by vast industrial and digital architecture operating beyond the user’s perception.
Behavioral automation lies at the core of contemporary e-commerce, where every click, search, scroll, or hesitation becomes a data point used to anticipate and steer decisions, frequently without conscious awareness. Gallin and Portes (2024) demonstrate that personalized recommendation systems significantly increase impulse purchases and transaction frequency, feeding an ever-expanding spiral of consumption. Amazon itself acknowledges that up to 35% of its online sales are generated directly through recommendations, underscoring the centrality of algorithmic mediation in shaping purchasing pathways. Ultra-fast fashion platforms go even further, constructing near-customized interfaces for each user and refreshing them hourly based on clicks, preferences, and visible disinterest (Yacoub and Plé, 2025). Purchasing thus becomes a tool of emotional regulation—used to reward, distract, or soothe—transforming economic behavior into a psychological ritual. As in religious liturgy, repetitive micro-gestures cultivate a state of receptiveness and continuous availability to suggestion, until buying ceases to be merely functional and becomes a structuring rhythm of everyday life, enacted under the quiet authority of algorithmic governance.
Digital Devotion
Behind the apparent simplicity of online shopping interfaces operates a highly sophisticated system of algorithmic prediction. Platforms combine browsing histories, past purchases, inferred preferences, and contextual signals to anticipate desires before they are consciously formulated. On Amazon, personalized recommendations account for an ever-growing share of sales, sustained by an illusion of benevolence in which users come to believe that the platform genuinely understands their tastes and needs (Raji et al., 2024). The algorithm functions as an invisible priest, interpreting behavioral traces and prescribing purchasing gestures. Chinese giants such as Alibaba, Shein, and Temu mobilize these data streams to push similar or complementary products, subtly narrowing trajectories of choice while reinforcing repetition. Each user inhabits a “filtered reality,” in which the sensation of autonomy is largely produced by the system that selects, ranks, and foregrounds options. Online retail thus converts choice into ritual: purchasing becomes almost automatic, generating a condition of permanent availability and quiet conformity to consumer logics. What appears frictionless and benign conceals an architecture of prediction and control that steadily standardizes habits and disciplines desire.
The consequences of this mediation are neither superficial nor accidental. Recommendation systems intensify reliance on past behavior and restrict exposure to unexpected alternatives (Baeza-Yates, 2018), producing a powerful self-reinforcing loop in which compliance generates ever greater algorithmic certainty. The more recommendations are followed, the more predictable and constrained the field of possibilities becomes. Recent research confirms that repeated exposure to algorithmic suggestions reshapes not only what is purchased but also the diversity of products explored, making marginal or less visible options increasingly difficult to encounter (Hazrati and Ricci, 2024). Consumption therefore shifts from an episodic act to a continuous condition, maintained through micro-messages, notifications, and contextual prompts that quietly steer attention and behavior. As in a religious order governed by tacit rules, users internalize standardized patterns of conduct. The algorithm, a genuine digital priest, interprets, guides, and normalizes desire, orchestrating each micro-gesture within a daily liturgy where apparent freedom conceals ongoing manipulation, habitual standardization, and the gradual alienation of individual preferences—what Joule and Beauvois (2017) describe as a form of freely consented submission.
Material Shadows
Behind the sleek and intuitive surface of online shopping interfolds an industrial apparatus of staggering complexity, mobilizing vast workforces and colossal logistical infrastructures. Every order activates an uninterrupted chain of production, storage, transport, and final delivery, within which speed and intensity are elevated to structural imperatives. Amazon’s warehouses, operating without pause, impose strict quotas and continuous algorithmic monitoring, converting human gestures into measurable and optimizable variables (Delfanti and Frey, 2021). In delivery services such as Deliveroo or Uber Eats, couriers endure relentless temporal and physical pressure, combined with unstable remuneration that deepens economic precarity (Cant, 2020). Investigations into Shein and Temu reveal comparable regimes: extended workdays, algorithmic supervision, quotas, and permanent control, frequently without adequate compensation. Isolated behind a minimalist screen, the user encounters only fluidity and immediacy, while each micro-gesture rests upon dense layers of human effort. The click becomes a daily ritual, whereas the global logistical machinery that sustains it remains almost entirely invisible.
Beyond the exploitation of labor, the dematerialization of purchasing conceals deep and systemic ecological externalities that rarely enter the user’s field of perception. Every product mobilizes finite resources for extraction, manufacturing, assembly, packaging, and transport, while massive return flows—particularly on platforms such as Amazon or Shein—multiply plastic waste, fuel consumption, and overall carbon emissions. Road, maritime, and air transport networks compound this footprint, as do the digital infrastructures coordinating these movements: data centers, servers, cables, and transmission systems whose energy demand is estimated at between 1 and 1.5% of global electricity consumption. Such material and energetic density is systematically masked by minimalist design, reducing the user experience to apparent efficiency and comfort. Purchasing thus becomes an immaterial, repetitive, and abstract ritual, detached from tangible human and environmental costs, perfectly illustrating a productivist logic in which speed, accumulation, and flow optimization override any sustained awareness of social and ecological consequences.
Ritual Resistance
Online retail crystallizes the logic of productivist capitalism, fusing infinite expansion, acceleration, and maximal extraction of value into a single operational paradigm. Platforms such as Amazon, Shein, Temu, and Alibaba orchestrate every interaction and micro-gesture to monetize attention, behavioral data, and repetition. According to Sensor Tower, by 2025 consumers were spending the equivalent of 3.6 hours per day on mobile applications, underscoring the grip these systems maintain over everyday life. Each click, search, and cart confirmation feeds a quasi-autonomous flow of transactions, while gigantic warehouses materialize the intensive extraction of human labor that sustains this circulation. Detached from its concrete implications, buying becomes ritualized: the user witnesses only the surface of a process they neither see nor control, while algorithms fabricate the sensation of choice and quietly steer trajectories. This digital liturgy converts consumption into a standardized and repetitive mechanism in which speed, accumulation, and efficiency eclipse consciousness, reinforcing dependency, alienation, and the continuous capture of attention.
The human and environmental consequences of this regime are extensive and cumulative. Continuous cycles of production, transport, and returns impose punishing rhythms on workers, exposing them to stress, exhaustion, and permanent surveillance, while surrounding communities confront pollution, noise, and ecological degradation (Useche et al., 2025). The flood of short-lived and disposable goods generates ever-growing volumes of waste, much of it difficult or impossible to recycle, alongside indirect emissions at every stage of the supply chain. Expanding infrastructures—factories, warehouses, transport corridors, and processing facilities—exert structural pressure on natural resources, while digital platforms rely on energy-intensive systems powering data centers and global networks (Krajewska et al., 2025). A radical dissociation thus emerges between immediate gratification and material consequence: what is visible—speed, abundance, convenience—dominates, while social and ecological costs are externalized and rendered invisible, turning purchasing into an abstract ritual severed from its material foundations.
Yet counter-liturgies are taking shape, seeking to slow, politicize, and re-embed the act of purchasing within broader ethical horizons. Some platforms now display product-level ecological footprints and restrict certain forms of algorithmic optimization to encourage reflection before checkout (Zuboff, 2019). Other initiatives privilege short supply chains, repair, refurbishment, and reuse, reconnecting consumers with the concrete effects of their choices on labor, resources, and ecosystems. Each micro-decision can thus be reintegrated into a collective and sustainable trajectory, transforming buying from an automatic reflex into a deliberate act, and restoring visibility to the human energy embedded in production. Such critical reappropriation opens a breach within the algorithmic ritual, challenging the supremacy of speed and accumulation. More fundamentally, these counter-liturgies reaffirm an unavoidable truth: in a finite world, unlimited consumption is a structural impossibility. Learning to buy less, to buy differently, and to account for real costs is no longer a marginal ethical preference but a political necessity. The act of purchasing must cease to function as a productivist sacrament and become a conscious commitment to shared futures.
References
Baeza-Yates, R (2018). Bias on the web. Communications of the ACM 61(6): 54–61.
Cant, C (2020). Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the new economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Delfanti, A and Frey, B (2021). Humanly extended automation or the future of work seen through Amazon patents. Science, Technology, & Human Values 46(3): 655–682.
Gallin, S and Portes, A (2024). Online shopping: How can algorithm performance expectancy enhance impulse buying? Journal of Retailing & Consumer Services 81: 103988.
Gracia Victoria, A, Ruiz Mejia, C, Damade, A, Winter, R and Day, K (2024). Le commerce en ligne en France: Effet anti-inflation et vaste choix. Paris: Compass Lexecon.
Hazrati, N and Ricci, F (2024). Choice models and recommender systems effects on users’ choices. User Modeling & User-Adapted Interaction 34(1): 109–145.
Joule, RV and Beauvois, JL (2017). La soumission librement consentie: Comment amener les gens à faire librement ce qu’ils doivent faire? (7th ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Krajewska, R, Ferensztajn-Galardos, E and Wojciechowski, J (2025). Sustainable development in the E-commerce sector: Challenges and development directions. European Research Studies Journal 28(4), 1101–1121.
Raji, MA, Olodo, HB, Oke, TT, Addy, WA, Ofodile, OC and Oyewole, AT (2024). E-commerce and consumer behavior: A review of AI-powered personalization and market trends. GSC Advanced Research & Reviews 18(3): 66–77.
Useche, S, Traficante, S, Llamazares, F and Marin, C (2025). The human cost of fast deliveries: A systematic literature review of occupational risks and safety outcomes in last-mile delivery workers. Journal of Transport & Health, 44: 102133.
Yacoub, GP and Plé, L (2025). Shopping en ligne: Comment Shein, Temu et les autres utilisent l’IA pour vous rendre accro. The Conversation, July 12.
Zuboff, S (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: PublicAffairs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gilles A. Paché is Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at Aix-Marseille University, France, and a member of the CERGAM Lab (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche en Gestion d’Aix-Marseille). His research focuses on logistics strategy, distribution channel management, and sustainability. On these topics, Gilles has authored over 700 scholarly publications (articles, book chapters, and conference papers), as well as 24 academic books, including Heterodox Logistics (Aix-Marseille University Press, 2023).
|
|Back to Title|
LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE
LINK TO THE HOME PAGE
