Why Counterculture became Consumer Culture — some quotes
I just finished reading a great book called Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
“The idea of a counterculture is ultimately based on a a mistake. At best, countercultural rebellion is pseudo-rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economic consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else. At worst, countercultural rebellion actively promotes unhappiness, by undermining or discrediting social norms and institutions that actually serve a valuable function. In particular, the idea of counterculture has produced a level of contempt for democratic politics that has consigned most of the progressive left to the political wilderness for over three decades” (65).
On ’60s communal living projects: “The central mistake they made was to assume that because a particular group of people have a collective interest in securing a certain outcome, each individual in that group will also have an individual interest in doing what is necessary to achieve that outcome” (75). Basically, they ignored the existence of freeriders.
“Whenever you look at the list of consumer goods that (according to the critic) people don’t really need, what you invariably see is a list of consumer goods that _middle-aged intellectuals_ don’t need” (105).
“[I]mmigration does not create unemployment. The new immigrant’s willingness to supply labor represents an increase in demand for other goods in the economy of precisely the same magnitude. So while immigration can create too much supply of one particular _type_ of labor, it cannot produce too much labor _in general_” (110).
“Critics of consumerism insist on treating consumption and production as though the two processes were completely independent of one another…. [Buy Nothing Day] ignores the fact that, one way or another, your total income gets spent. If you don’t spend it, you put it in the bank and someone else spends it. The only way you can reduce consumption is by reducing your contribution to production. Yet somehow an annual Earn Nothing Day doesn’t have the same ring to it” (112).
“In Veblen’s view, consumerism is essentially a collective action problem—a prisoner’s dilemna” (114).
The “automotive arms race”: “When there is a fatality in a collision between an SUV and a car, 80 percent of the time it is the person in the car who dies” (118).
“Ever since the 1960s, hip has been the native tongue of advertising, ‘antiestablishment’ the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year” (130).
“Organic food is one of the major forces driving the return to an almost aristocratic class structure in the United States, in which the wealthy no longer eat the same food as the poor” (154).
“Outdoor enthusiasts, being such individualists, inevitably buy all their own gear. This is why the market for outdoor leisure activities is so much richer. Engaging in ‘virtuous’ activities is one fo the major psychological devices that consumers use to grant themselves permission to overspend” (154).
“Cool people like to see themselves as radicals, subversives who refuse to conform to accepted ways of doing things. And this is exactly what drives capitalism” (205).
“bottled water sells for more than gasoline” (211).
Practical suggestions for curbing advertising: “Just as bribing foreign officials can be made illegal, so advertising aimed at young people can be prohibited. When corporate entertainment expenditures started to get out of hand, the Canadian government responded by reducing the tax deduction that businesses get for these expenses…. One simple change of the tax code would do more to curb advertising than all of the culture jamming in the world. Yet these small, workable proposals are consistently ignored in favor of cultural politics, world revolution and other more glamorous pursuits” (220).
lol: “There are often significant benefits associated with acting like everyone else. Expressing your individuality by wearing a funny tie to work is not the same thing as expressing your individuality by using file formats on your computer that are incompatible with those of your co-workers” (230).
“The idea of ‘free-range’ is simply a projection of our own desires onto our food” (235).
“Consumer spending seems to be governed by a principle of waste homeostasis” (297).
lol: “If this fairly reeks of bongwater, it is not surprising” (302).
On a pollution tax: “This may be shallow environmentalism, but it is also _effective_ environmentalism. Scratch any environmental problem and you will find a collective action problem under the surface. The prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons simply tell you everything you need to know about why we’re destroying the planet. Yet you would never know it from listening to environmentalists. Instead of focusing upon the efficiency effects of environmental regulation, what we hear is just a warmed-over countercultural mythology—the critique of mass culture in ecological disguise” (317-8).
“The exaggerated fear of conformity has made it all but impossible for many progressive groups to make effective use of these building blocks as tools, for fear of provoking anxiety about either co-optation or creeping fascism. As a result, the left has found itself mired in insuperable collective action problems, and unwilling to use some of the basic organizational methods that all human beings must employ in order to overcome these difficulties. The preference for individual consumer activism in response to environmental degradation, rather than state regulation of externalities, provides the most clear-cut example” (319-20).
“No individual corporation has any interest in reducing its output of greenhouse gases, because the costs of global warming are spread across every person on the planet. At the same time, no individual country has any incentive to regulate its own energy industries in the absence of any guarantee that other countries will do likewise. Global warming can be solved only by a general agreement that is binding on every producer of greenhouse gases on earth. What we need is not a local foreign policy, but a global domestic policy on greenhouse gas emissions” (332-3).
“[S]ince correcting market failure involves eliminating free-rider strategies that individuals have been unable to correct through voluntary contracting, more serious powers of compulsion than those available to the private citizen will often be required” (335).
