Generation Bubble
Consumerism
Distant Listening (1): The Laid-Back Labor of Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right”
Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right” encapsulates an entire generation staring down adulthood, waiting to see if it would blink, if it would reveal some gaps in which a sense of freedom could be retained in the face of its mounting sense of responsibility and disillusionment.
Affected Affinities: Facebook and the Transformation of Liking
Though Facebook’s “Like” button may be good news for big business, it’s dreary stuff for people who actually … well … like things, because watered-down liking has changed our relationship to the world in the way that marketing, a few decades earlier, changed our relationship to consumer items. With marketing’s advent, the world suddenly fell in love with the idea rather than the utility of things; with a stroke of the ad-man’s magic pen, an automobile, that greasy machine with four wheels intended to get man (or woman) from point A to B, turned into a means of orgiastic celebration, and a carton of orange juice, the sweet fluid of squashed citrus pulp, magically transmogrified into an elixir capable of curing everything from cancer to crabs.
Flea-Market Ideology: A Review of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
Botsman and Rogers’ championing business as the solution to the social problems business has created is certainly pragmatic, but it feels a bit like surrender, an admission that the institutions of consumerism and their motivational apparatus can’t be bettered, and that they will continue to constitute our lifeworld. The authors can’t be faulted for their unmistakable enthusiasm for mitigating the selfish individualism that consumerism inherited from capitalism’s early days. But their vision stops far short of the kind of transformation that could make “sharing” and “collaboration” into something other than marketing buzzwords again.
Great Leap Forward: Cultivating China’s Consumer Class
Unless China becomes more willing to outsource its ideology building to the West, and accept our expertise in fomenting the proper disregard for pragmatism and dismantling Confucianist anti-individualism, the global imbalances seem likely to persist, no matter how many shells are exploded in the currency war. The U.S. will continue to overconsume for the benefit of the world, until the world chooses to see that arrangement as less than beneficial in maintaining social control. At that point, exporting consumerism may no longer be an option for the West, and we’ll be forced to import authoritarianism instead.
Eco-calypse Now: The Green Movement and the New Dark Age
When someone utters words like “sustainability” and “sustainable,” I hear “intended to technologically progress no further.” Think about it: An orchestra cannot at the same time sustain one chord and strike another. The one sustained chord thus signals the entirety of the musical piece, its beginning and its end. So, if someone presents you with a piece of sustainable technology, you can be certain that you grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren will be using the same kind of device in the same kind of form.
Don’t Box Me In: On Belonging to Belongings
The burden of my belongings has never felt so heavy. But the powers that be say that this is the only way to save the United States. We must spend ourselves into the grave to keep the engines of commerce humming along and (supposedly) spreading wealth hither and yon. Only now do I see how mentally ill I’ve become as a result of this onerous ideology. It’s work, this buying and caring for things. And it’s work that makes me wish I was unemployed.
F–k Your Yankee Blue Jeans: The Politics of Consumption East and West
Americans learn that “real things” and “real selves” only exist as potentialities, though we are obligated to always pursue them. We are obligated to be discontented with what we are — to become someone else — and search for our true selves at the same time. Is this in effect any different from the communists’ insistence that the collective took precedence over the self, that the private self didn’t exist? We are never who we are in a consumer society; instead we have an identity defined negatively, by what we lack and what we yearn for and what we fear is being said about what we have and what we display to the world.
Appetite for Obstruction: Fattening Resistance to the Mortgage Crisis
Good ole American-style overeating might just prove the most effective mode of home-foreclosure resistance; because it’s one thing to throw someone out of his house, but to have to cut him out is another thing entirely.
Sartorial Tender: Fashion as Leveraged Social Capital
Fashion tells you that you are a fool to prefer the experiences to the range, and it applies “social pressure” to make you change your view. By following fashion and disseminating its dictates and by innovating on its terms, we create additional value for the retailers of fashion-oriented products — a description that is coming to embrace virtually everything that can be bought and sold.
The Safety of Objects: Design and "Inverted Totalitarianism"
A symptomatic reading of Objectified reveals an urge for impeccable order, an incurable desire to purge from public view the irregular, the odd, the heteroclite, and even the excessively ornate or strictly utilitarian, in order to place in their stead a whole array of everyday things boasting clean lines and soothing orbicularities — a regime of Platonic functionality, in other words, vouchsafed to an auxiliary of designers equipped with the latest drafting software and laser-guided precision instruments. Objectified comes across as a fever dream of the sort which brings the sufferer visions of the world to come: namely, the dictatorship of the creative class.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
© 2012 Generation Bubble. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 