(Net)zero Consumption
2025-05-20 / 2 – 4 pm / C5.326 / CDC Colloquium
(Net)zero Consumption – Or the Consumption of Zero
Talk by Martin Friis Nielsen (Copenhagen Business School)
Abstract
ZERO has become a figure and symbol in commercial and public life. In the idea of a future sustainable society, as is the case with the vision of a net-zero 2050 European society, zero is the symbol of an ideal future, a condition being strived towards and in which society is imagined to be in a sort of equilibrium with its environment. Everyday products and practices of consumption are also articulated in terms of zero why we can easily interpret advertisement slogans such as Volkswagen’s ‘Way to Zero’, Sony’s ‘Road to Zero’ and in the field of home appliances LG’s ‘net-zero vision house’. It is not only in connection with a vision of a sustainable future and carbon-neutral forms of production and consumption that zero has become part of how consumption is imagined: we also ‘drink’ zero as in the case with Pepsi zero sugar, Coca-Cola Zero, etc., pointing to a semantic shift in the way things are offered for consumption. In this sense, zero has become a figure that is part of various forms of individualized practices of consumption and in the total (re)organization of society (e.g. net-zero).
In this presentation, I analyse ZERO as a contemporary cultural phenomenon of consumption, exploring the idea of zero (consumption) and how this organizes relations and experiences of consumption drawing on social theoretical notions of consumption (Baudrillard 1970) as well as anthropological theory of relations (Strathern 1999).
Bio
Martin Friis Nielsen has a background in social science and philosophy and earned his PhD from Copenhagen Business School with a thesis on social media consumption. Currently he is a postdoc in the project ‘The Data Driven Home’ funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. In the project, Nielsen studies commercial and public visions and perceptions of home as they appear in relation to the idea of the ‘smart home’. In his research, Nielsen draws on theory and concepts from sociology of consumption, philosophy of technology, anthropology, and organization theory as ways to understand the intersection between technology, culture, and consumption.