Comment by insickness
2 years ago
The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.
It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate.
In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.
The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
Remember HN about 5-10 years ago and everyone here was saying how they're changing the world. Corporate hired that - spoke that language - convinced that - and even echo chambered some of it.
You see someone say something racist or sexist or homophobic and it's no longer the just a small voice that would blast the racist, sexist, homophobe but now it's everyone - including corporate America (and their twitter bot voices). And in the mean time since all those companies have "fallen in line" with the culture - it's OK to Buy Nike, Buy Starbucks, Buy Apple, Buy Microsoft because they all tow the line.
I mean it's good and bad. For one, it's good because now there's justice for the repressed. It's bad for it's cancellation culture. There are a lot of "cancelled" people that have done FAR less than say Harvey W. yet with a single tweet - mostly careless words - they're done. Even when they have that 15 second scramble after someone calls them out it just blows up. Apologies are meaningless after that. Being one person you can't defend against unlimited neural activity of millions of people digging into the background and lobbing as far as Twitter will let it go.
Haven't celebrities have always had to be careful of what they say and write? Seems like that's always been a risk to obtain mass-market status.
There _is_ a lot of genuine expression. It's just not very visible and/or you might not recognise it as such. The sausage machine might be involved in some way , but that doesn't necessarily make it a product of the sausage machine!
Can you provide some examples of what you feel is genuine expression in this context?
2 replies →
Like here we are expressing ourselves.
> The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves. Maybe I hang out with the wrong people, but I've never heard any of my friends 'expressing themselves' in those ways.
They obviously make statements about their take on fashion through their purchasing habits (as do I), but I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.
> I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves.
Well, if they're "expressing themselves" on mainstream social media, that's "corporate" and oligopolistic in a very real sense. It's puzzling to see so much knee-jerk anti-corporatism on sites like Twitter and even here at News.YC.
> I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.
How people signal to others what they are is by what they're wearing. Asking people not to - good luck with that.
What are your thoughts on government art? (Art funded by the government.)
> What are your thoughts on government art? (Art funded by the government.) Sometimes it could be good. Artists need funding too, and generally that funding is lacking. Being an artists is associated with poverty.
At least in the US, govt art is not art in any meaningful sense. Even the horrendous corporate art is better.
The closest thing to good govt art in the US is the tax-dodge stuff such as opera.
> to co-opt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
The people who genuinely care about problems don't fit the "dissenter" stereotype, by and large. They speak with authority about the limited domain they're familiar with, and don't try to have an opinion about everything in pursuit of shallow popularity. Overall, their attitude might register as "fringe" and "unusual" to most but it's not going to be seen as unambiguously "dissenting" or oppositional.
I just posted the same thing.
Did you read this?
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...