Normalizing the Toxic Consumer Subject: Sustaining Neoliberal Logics Within Online Gaming

Abstract

Toxic practices are anti-social interactions that result in a breakdown of communication between consumers. We draw on in-depth interviews, netnography, and insider experience in the context of online gaming to describe the technological configurations that embed the neoliberal logics of competitiveness, individual responsibilization, and entrepreneurialism. Taken together, these embedded logics craft the toxic consumer subject as the dominant way of inhabiting online spaces. Overall, this study illustrates how technocultures align consumer subjectivity to market logics that erode consumer wellbeing.