Put simply, it’s imbuing commodities with human, or superhuman/divine qualities, where humans are subordinate to the objects created by their own hands.

This is called fetishism, or reification in economics. The value in these objects seems to come from something beyond the workers who made them.

Prime examples would be soft drinks, health care products, beauty products, any commodity that, usually through advertising, attains seemingly divine powers.

Commodity fetishism’s main purpose is to subordinate people to profit, by ultimately placing commodities above themselves, in the same way a their own needs would be subordinated to a king or gods.

Watch a vaporwave music video on youtube, like from saint pepsi, which splices together a lot of clips from TV ads of products from the late 1980s if you want to experience pure, distilled commodity fetishism.