I've been a fan of culture jamming for a long time, but finally reading Culture Jam (the book), it's underwhelming.

It critiques commercialism rather than capitalism, and hurls cliched accusations at "today's postmodern family" that sound like they came out of an anti-millennial thinkpiece & that probably never really applied to anybody. It uses rhetoric that feels geared toward insulting & alienating whoever doesn't already agree, rather than convincing, & as somebody who DOES, I feel let-down

@enkiv2 Have you ever read Heath and Potter's "The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed" (2004) ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

It's a pretty good takedown of the "adbusters / culture jamming" subculture of the late-90s / early 2000s, pointing out that the problem with capitalism is that it's *designed* for constant meaningless rebellion. It's not that the rebellion somehow gets subverted by a corporate elite, it's that the very essence of capitalism is to CREATE new exploitable social fads.

@natecull @enkiv2 The very essence? That’s overselling it, I’d say.

@wrenpile @enkiv2 Depends on your perspective, perhaps, but the thrust of this book was that "creative destruction" is fundamental to how capitalism works, and that therefore trying to attack or tear down any part of capitalism is just "doing capitalism as usual" because it's a system that feeds off chaos and conflict.

It's a rather bleak perspective and I'm not convinced they're totally correct. But I found it a useful counterpoint to the "omg culture jamming will change everything" fad.

@enkiv2 @wrenpile eg

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/04/highereducation.news1

<<The US cultural critic Thomas Frank (whom the authors acknowledge as a big influence) wrote extensively in the 90s about the links between modern bohemianism and business. But Heath and Potter go further by suggesting that there has never even been any tension between the two sides: their interests have always been compatible. >>

@wrenpile @enkiv2

<<To demonstrate this, they supply an ambitiously brief version of the history of capitalism. In the beginning, it was a system concerned with selling people things they needed. But once those needs had been largely satisfied, in rich countries at least, capitalism became about selling things that would make people feel distinctive.>>

@enkiv2 @wrenpile

<<Anti-capitalists, in Heath and Potter's view, have long failed to understand this development. They have mistakenly seen capitalism as a system that sells conformity rather than individualism. And so they have failed to spot something important: that the counterculture of the 60s and its successors have simply been examples of prosperous westerners seeking social distinctiveness.>>

@wrenpile @enkiv2

Personally, I feel there's some truth to this view and some falsehood.

@natecull @wrenpile @enkiv2 Whats the falsehood? :/

@Angle @wrenpile @enkiv2

The falsehood, to me, lies in reducing *all* dissent and anti-capitalism to a mere need for 'social distinctiveness'.

Some people actually have sincerely held ideals that they'd still hold to even if they were mainstream, and aren't just trying to be conspicuous consumers trying to be ostentatiously non-mainstream; this book's authors don't really have much room in their view of politics for such people.

@enkiv2 @wrenpile @Angle

This book is probably actually more a critique of the early-2000s 'No Logo' moment - the sort of politics that argued that 'Republicans and Democrats are just the same', and felt it could afford to because the 1990s boom looked like it would last forever - rather than the post-GWB, post-2008, post-housing-bubble, Trump-era disaster we find ourselves in now where left-wing politics is a lot more about naked survival than social posing.

@Angle @wrenpile @enkiv2

Still, the rather cynical 'Rebel Sell' idea *does* explain the otherwise baffling question: 'Why did so many 60s hippies become 80s Yuppies?'

and the answer is they didn't, not really. The Hippies just briefly captured the late-60s zeitgeist and lots of young people with no particularly deep value system sort of 'performed' hippie-ness when it was popular, and then dropped it like a change of clothes just as easily when the winds of social fashion changed.

@natecull @enkiv2 @wrenpile @Angle

Important to this also was the complete lack of solidarity in many hippie movements. Self-actualisation does not connect one with others. And their rejection of hierarchy was more a rejection of ~recognising~ hierarchy, so that individuals could benefit from it while being immune to criticisms for this.

@celesteh @Angle @wrenpile @enkiv2 @natecull I think there was a also a religious takeover there too.

I also posit that the children growing up under the hangover from Ww2 and in the shadow of the USSR were fated to reject heiearchy.