After poring over the kilos of newsprint lugged into the house over the weekend, I think I could draw a graph that proves the equation that the number of newspapers you buy is inversely proportional to the articles you actually want to read. At first glance, most of the supplements’ pages seem like unashamed celebrations of the fruits of capitalism, with the “features” on new gadgets and outlets difficult to distinguish from paid advertisements for the same items. But I’m starting to wonder whether the consumerist porn that is, say, The Sunday Times’ Style supplement is not actually unintentionally subversive. For what better way of recruiting a new wave of blood-thirsty Jacobins than to ask them to read about 21st-century party etiquette among the new aristos?This cosy mood � let�s call it the Big Love-in � reigned at the recent Amfar ball in Venice, when Sienna Miller, Joseph Fiennes and Jeremy Irons, dressed to the nines, spent the evening sprawled on beanbags. It is also the prevailing spirit at dinner parties thrown this month by Damon Dash for friends including Jade Jagger, Kate Moss, Kevin Bacon and Mick Jones of the Clash. Held at his London home, they drank Dom Perignon, played pool and chewed the fat. They were low-key, but they were fun.Load all of them onto the tumbrils, our new Robespierres will hiss. Yet sometimes you need to be wary, to withhold credulity because you suspect that something so outlandishly stupid has to be a hoax. And maybe my sensitivities have been temporarily heightened by recently reading David Mitchell’s hugely entertaining novel “Cloud Atlas.” One of Mitchell’s interlocking narratives is about a clone who escapes his fate as a fast-food drone and travels across a landscape destroyed by hyper-consumerism. So after being locked into Mitchell’s nightmarish vision of �ber-mall culture, I flip through a magazine and see an ad for this–seemingly straight out of fiction. Perhaps I’m over-reacting to this ingenious innovation, but doesn’t planting a TV screen in a fridge door seem like a tipping point in the culture? Doesn’t it acknowledge a fear that we might have an autonomous thought between seeing a commercial for a snack food and opening the fridge door to retrieve the suddenly desired product? And while you can go purple in the face from denouncing the kitchen’s answer to the SUV, you can’t help thinking (like one of Mitchell’s brainwashed “purebloods”) that its Stainless Steel Finish with Aluminium Door Trim is really quite slick.