I decided to do a commercialism/consumerism bit because in the United States of America it is Black Friday, which is a day when the bottom falls out of consumerism and people draw blood for 20% discounts on dishrags and various goods manufactured overseas. The obvious problem is that Black Friday is not patriotic. If you want to see how eager the average citizen of the world is to sell out their country, you just have to search YouTube for Black Friday videos. It seems most people would bum-rush the secret service for a $20 doohickey or polymer-based thingamajig.
What really sickens me is the subliminal vibes I get from the videos. There are literally herds of consumers. Yes, they are consumers at that point and, to the people advertising at them, not humans. They forget themselves in a strange orgy of incompetent and overloaded greed. I see that as degradation. There are a few news stories about it each year but no gigantic outcry.
Well, I think that Black Friday makes explicit the implicit degradation of consumerism, in which every bit of human potential is swept up in a subhuman madness to get the most for your money - from corporations to the individuals who mimic their behavior. There are no particular individuals to blame for a pathological, systematic problem. I don't hate consumerists. I don't even pity them. They are just bums with money, and in this era being a philistine is completely acceptable, so they work towards the next holiday, the next sale, the next iPhone, et cetera...
Despite facile attempts at being ethical and ecologically friendly, consumerism is more and more a bald lie that people chase because there's little else to do in the modern world but buy things, favourite things, attend things, unbox things, use them, show them off, and throw them out when they become outdated or broken. Oh and if you don't fit into this system there are labels for you: from communist to hobo to slob to snob. This goes beyond the differences between a pedestrian and a highbrow activist. I don't want my and my descendant's future sold to the highest bidder and sold at inflated prices to a mindless horde. I have to wonder if the bottom has fallen out of consumerism, but despite scenes of insane lemmingism I feel it will continue to be a powerful force in the world. Smug capitalism laughs, because this is all a useful distraction.
I find it sickening. Others might see it as fun or harmless, but consumerism guts economies and degrades not only the planet but the human spirit. For all that, spineless millions are unable or unwilling to give up the endless chase and (almost all) world leaders are curiously quiet on the matter. If commercial reform is going to happen, it will have to start with the literate consumer and work its way down the food-chain. Greed is a powerful and addictive drug, next to which cocaine looks like baby powder. This habit is going to leave our species on a truly heartbreaking comedown, and the more we snort the harder we will fall.
And I'm not innocent. Nobody is innocent, and I admit that we need things. However there are currently too many things and not enough reasons for them to exist. Production quotas could be fairer to natural resources and manufacturing does not have to be concentrated in coastal China. There are a lot of things that could be done, and our deluded quality of life might have to change, but if it doesn't, it's only a matter of time before herds of North American Consumers are fighting not for deals, but for livelihoods, to say nothing of consumers, producers, and bums across the world. So in the end I have to give it to Black Friday: thanks for showing how disgraceful we really are at our cores, and hopefully we notice this and do something about it.
Showing posts with label materialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label materialism. Show all posts
11/26/11
10/20/11
Notes on the Not-so-Recent Fad of 1980's Revivalism and Nostalgia
The 1980's are roundly praised for absolutely no reason. Everywhere you looked six months ago people were going on about the 80's without actually knowing much about the 80's. This 'retro-movement' is by all means a strange thing. People who haven't seen Gremlins in theaters walk around citing Ghostbusters and E.T. as if they've never seen a fluorescent windbreaker. The 70's had better everything and the 60's were strange enough to win any contest for oddball decade. So what does the 1980's have left that its sound, its appearance, and its (utter lack of) soul are praised by clueless jags?
The first point is that the people who grew up in the 80's are becoming adults, and by extension tastemakers. Some of these people are making music and film, or TV and literature, or whatever, and consumerism needs its 'movements' even if such things don't have meaning. The generations that were born in the 80's are clueless and willing to attach themselves to any movement to gain friendship and acceptance, because they are not quite yet adults. Folks born in the 90's are sort of alienated but since they don't have even faint memories of the 80's it is far easier for them to look upon the time with rose-tinted glasses.
Finally, a crowd of people as far removed from popular tastemakers as anything, American Republicans, praise the 80's for Reagan and Bush. Anyone who has followed American politics from Nixon to Obama knows that there has been little reason for public trust and acceptance. Anyone who is willfully ignorant of this will praise Reagan for gutting the economy and being a tool of special interests. This set a pattern that is more or less still followed today, and more knowledgeable places than PUBLICATO can tell you all about it. So even people who are not hip, and who consider hip people to be a crowd of fornicating, godless sinners praise the 80's.
Operation Just Cause, the Iran/Iraq thing, Contras, Noriega and lasers in Panama... the list of strange and shadowy 80's events goes on. That's not even including domestic issues, global music, fashion trends, computer games, and the incredible spread of corporatism and globalism during that time. You'd have to be insane to look to the 80's and enjoy anything about the aesthetic (except for Robo-Cop, Blade Runner, John Carpenter's The Thing [NOTE THE RECENT REMAKE], Prefab Sprout, American Psycho, Michael Jackson, but I digress and contradict myself). If you're still willing to try, and think the list of 80's saviors is indestructible, I have a stinging rebuff for you to swallow.
Everyone worth a damn knows about Leonard Cohen and his minimal songs with masterful lyrics... most people know that he released a decent album in '88 called "I'm Your Man" which, despite being made in the 80's, was pretty decent and almost managed to overcome its production, which is synthy and generally aged a lot worse than The Cohen himself. Then there's this which is probably the one and only time Cohen is unable to overcome production. When you think of the 80's, set this song to the bombing of Panama, the crack epidemic, or anyone wearing a bright pink jacket in an acid rainstorm and cry, because the world ended in the 80's and all that misguided nostalgia is people burying their heads instead of dealing with the present.
It's easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses if you were too fucked up to realize what was happening, or too young to understand it, or you were simply born in a later time and it is a mythical place for you, but the 80's aesthetic was roundly panned as soulless and shitty for a lot of reasons. M83's newest release is probably the final bit of sub-popular 80's worship before the inevitable backlash and death of this rather unbelievable fad. M83 is years past its prime itself, so this final affectation is rather ironic and fitting. By 2013 only clueless people will "OMG I loooove the 80's baby!" mindlessly. Goodbye, 1980's, until the 2030s. You will not be missed and you have not been missed and your best achievements will still be safeguarded and the fact they took place in the 80's will be a footnote.
I can't exactly trace when 80's revivalism began, but judging by the attitudes of some of the hip girls I know I'd say it began, in the underground, between three and six years ago and hit sub-mainstream maybe a year and a half ago, and maybe a few months ago it became a thing that even the most culturally retarded person could indulge. People are going to be tired of it in a few months, because true hipsters are already making fun of the 80's again and have moved into the 90's where they will literally starve to death or the 70's where the drugs will kill them.
The first point is that the people who grew up in the 80's are becoming adults, and by extension tastemakers. Some of these people are making music and film, or TV and literature, or whatever, and consumerism needs its 'movements' even if such things don't have meaning. The generations that were born in the 80's are clueless and willing to attach themselves to any movement to gain friendship and acceptance, because they are not quite yet adults. Folks born in the 90's are sort of alienated but since they don't have even faint memories of the 80's it is far easier for them to look upon the time with rose-tinted glasses.
Finally, a crowd of people as far removed from popular tastemakers as anything, American Republicans, praise the 80's for Reagan and Bush. Anyone who has followed American politics from Nixon to Obama knows that there has been little reason for public trust and acceptance. Anyone who is willfully ignorant of this will praise Reagan for gutting the economy and being a tool of special interests. This set a pattern that is more or less still followed today, and more knowledgeable places than PUBLICATO can tell you all about it. So even people who are not hip, and who consider hip people to be a crowd of fornicating, godless sinners praise the 80's.
Operation Just Cause, the Iran/Iraq thing, Contras, Noriega and lasers in Panama... the list of strange and shadowy 80's events goes on. That's not even including domestic issues, global music, fashion trends, computer games, and the incredible spread of corporatism and globalism during that time. You'd have to be insane to look to the 80's and enjoy anything about the aesthetic (except for Robo-Cop, Blade Runner, John Carpenter's The Thing [NOTE THE RECENT REMAKE], Prefab Sprout, American Psycho, Michael Jackson, but I digress and contradict myself). If you're still willing to try, and think the list of 80's saviors is indestructible, I have a stinging rebuff for you to swallow.
Everyone worth a damn knows about Leonard Cohen and his minimal songs with masterful lyrics... most people know that he released a decent album in '88 called "I'm Your Man" which, despite being made in the 80's, was pretty decent and almost managed to overcome its production, which is synthy and generally aged a lot worse than The Cohen himself. Then there's this which is probably the one and only time Cohen is unable to overcome production. When you think of the 80's, set this song to the bombing of Panama, the crack epidemic, or anyone wearing a bright pink jacket in an acid rainstorm and cry, because the world ended in the 80's and all that misguided nostalgia is people burying their heads instead of dealing with the present.
It's easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses if you were too fucked up to realize what was happening, or too young to understand it, or you were simply born in a later time and it is a mythical place for you, but the 80's aesthetic was roundly panned as soulless and shitty for a lot of reasons. M83's newest release is probably the final bit of sub-popular 80's worship before the inevitable backlash and death of this rather unbelievable fad. M83 is years past its prime itself, so this final affectation is rather ironic and fitting. By 2013 only clueless people will "OMG I loooove the 80's baby!" mindlessly. Goodbye, 1980's, until the 2030s. You will not be missed and you have not been missed and your best achievements will still be safeguarded and the fact they took place in the 80's will be a footnote.
I can't exactly trace when 80's revivalism began, but judging by the attitudes of some of the hip girls I know I'd say it began, in the underground, between three and six years ago and hit sub-mainstream maybe a year and a half ago, and maybe a few months ago it became a thing that even the most culturally retarded person could indulge. People are going to be tired of it in a few months, because true hipsters are already making fun of the 80's again and have moved into the 90's where they will literally starve to death or the 70's where the drugs will kill them.
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