Today the revelation seems quaint; a first grader can tell you about spin. But that’s largely because so much of Packard’s language entered the vernacular, and so many of his warnings were prescient: he wrote of “status seekers,” “planned obsolescence,” the ethics of genetic engineering, the loss of community. His writing wasn’t elegant, and he relied heavily on the work of scholars such as William Whyte or David Reisman. But for years, he had the power to inspire activists like Ralph Nader and Betty Friedan and to enrage conventional wisdom. “Our premier… liberal worrywart,” one critic called him. But that was just the status he sought.
