Creatures of the mall.

• Author: Rimensnyder, Sara
• Position: Soundbite - Cultural writer Thomas Hine - Interview

Anti-consumerist critics don't merely have billion-dollar ad campaigns working against them, argues cultural writer Thomas Hine, author of the witty and informative I Want That: How We All Became Shoppers (HarperCollins). Such shopping nags are going head to head with the entire recorded history of man.

"As far back as you can go in the fossil record, we've always been acquirers of things, not just for their practical value, but for their symbolic and political value," says Hine. "Shopping is the manifestation of that in the last 500 years."

Also the author of Populuxe (1987) and The Total Package (1997), Hine is a monthly columnist for Philadelphia magazine. Previously, he was The Philadelphia Inquirer's longtime architecture and design critic. Assistant Editor Sara Rimensnyder spoke to Hine in January (via a brand new, pocketsized, Alpine silver cell phone).

Q: Can we really trust your positive history of consumerism? After all, you are hawking a book.

A: Well, one of the reasons I wrote it was the amazingly robust anti-consumption market. Being against consuming things is the best-established market niche out there. It's far better than my own niche, that of explaining and even celebrating consumption.

Q: Why is our urge to shop worth defending?

A: One way we define individual freedom is by the ability to invent ourselves: how we want to look, what kind of values we want to express. Shopping and the idea of personal freedom grow up side by...