Consumer society is the target here, built almost entirely out of images and music rather than talking heads or narration. Swedish director Erik Gandini and editor Johan Söderberg assemble footage of factories, shopping, and industrial excess into an essay film arguing that capitalism's old promises, greater efficiency, more leisure, less work, have not materialized and were never going to. Instead of interviews explaining the thesis, the film lets juxtaposition do the arguing: scenes of overproduction and waste set against the sales pitch that technology would free people from labor. The point of view leans anarcho-primitivist, treating modern civilization as a machine that consumes more than it needs and proposing a simpler, less mediated way of living as the alternative. There is little spoken information by design; the film trusts pictures and sound to carry the critique of globalization and consumer culture. It won awards on the festival circuit for that approach, betting that mood and montage make the argument more persuasively than a voiceover would.