Has anyone else noticed how the ideas of love and peace have recently been co-opted by the corporate world? Or how about “going green”? Anything to turn a buck, I guess. It is amazing, though, how finely-tuned the ears of consumer-capitalism advertising are to movements that have potential to be used (and misused and abused) for a profit. Clothing companies are in on it – look at all the peace signs and the word “love” plastered across shirts, hats, jewelry, bags, etc etc. Or the car companies who advertise their cars with this weird psuedo-hippie feel to their commercials, even though consumerism, name-brands, and the establishment with a capital E isn’t exactly the idea that was driving the hippie movement of the sixties. And of course all the corporations that are suddenly “green” –- oil companies, large-scale developers and warehouse-size shopping centers, to name a few. Pretty much everyone. I’m beginning to think it’s all a big scam (wow this is the second blog in a row I’ve used the word “scam”…I swear I’m not a conspiracy theorist).
We are the first generation to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope. They measure, size-up, break down, reconstruct, research, and learn what makes us tick, what clicks, and how they can make us buy that. And they are amazing at what they do. They co-opt what we want (or already have, or are in the process of forming for ourselves) and re-sell it back to us at a profit. Anything that is a disruption to the normal status quo is successfully absorbed by the market and turned into mainstream. You want a prime example? Hip-hop music. “Hip-hop in the 1980s and early 1990s was a key disruption to traditional norms, values, racial prejudices, ways of hearing, etc; but it became central to American culture only after it was successfully absorbed by the market.” It used to be a real form of protest in poetry. It was political, cultural, dynamic, challenging, and unconventional. But now it’s been mainstreamed and has lost that edge. It was absorbed, co-opted, and we lost a beautiful and fresh form of social protest.
Advertisers appropriate every revolutionary idea and use them against us. Even taking care of the environment. There was this wonderful comment left on an article I was reading that said “These are the same products as before just sold to us with a new spin. Advertisers aren’t dumb, when counter culture becomes culture you kind of have to say damn, they get us again. Activism spread the message and corporations sold it.”
Yup. And now it’s love. And peace. And green.
“We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.”
Articles I pulled a tremendous amount of ideas (and the quotes) from…
