The Rebel Sell - Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter - **

The "rebel sell" is the idea that the masses are bad, and by doing things that distinguish yourself from them (such as buying "alternatives"), you become rebellious and cool.

The book opens with a recount of Kurt Cobain's suicide, framing him as a casualty of the myth of counterculture.

The great philosophers of the Enlightment (1688-1804) railed against 'obedience' and saw the masses as an ally in their struggle. Later radicals viewed the masses with suspicion, seeing them as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Between conformity and obedience, conformity became the greater sin; it is here from which the myth of counterculture draws its roots.

Counterculture has a tendency to reject perfectly rational solutions to problems in favor of ones that will never work, claiming that the rational solution is "not radical enough".

The crabs in a bucket story:
The crabs don't want to stay in the bucket, but once one makes any progress towards the rim, the others try to crawl over it, using its progress as a way of furthering their own escape. As a result, they all wind up back where they started.

The initial reluctance to give workers the vote was based on the assumption that the first thing they'd do is eat the rich. This is not what happened. The workers voted for reform, not revolution.

The first-generation hippies demonstrated their nonconformity by violating the dress code of the 1950s. It wasn't long before the clothing they wore started showing up in advertisements and on mannequins. Department stores took to selling peace medallions and love beads. "The system" regards nonconformists as a marketing opportunity, not a threat to the established order.

The concept of co-option, that the failure of a revolutionary idea stems from the successes "the system" achieves in consciously negating the idea's effects, is a cornerstone of countercultural theory that renders it unfalsifiable.

The goal of revolutionary thought should be to effect an improvement on society, not provide entertainment for intellectuals.

People learned you can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based on the assumption that people will behave like saints.

Having fun is not a subversive act.

Perfectly free and equal individuals often have an incentive to adopt coercively enforced rules of conduct to govern their interactions.
-- the idea is to stack the deck towards cooperation and away from exploitation

Dissent vs. deviance: dissent is legitimate protest from people theoretically willing to play by the rules, deviance is the behavior of people interested in breaking the rules for selfish reasons
The dissent vs. deviance litmus test: would the world be a better place to live if this behavior became mainstream?

A normal, well-adjusted adult follows the rules that promote the general interest and conscientiously objects to those that are unjust. This option is one the countercultural critique has studiously ignored.
-- Jon Stewart outlined the tendency of rationality to be trumped by rhetoric in his speech about how people don't take to the streets and shout, "Be reasonable!"

All the dumb little rules we are supposed to follow serve as cues that allow others to infer what is likely to follow.
The idea that people who play by the rules in small things will play by the rules in big things has an intuitive, but false, appeal; con artists and psychopaths are able to exploit this phenomenon to their advantage.

Nonconformists drive consumer spending in a big way by purchasing items that "set them apart" from the crowd.
-- when the crowd gets wind of the trend, the hipster must move on. He is trapped by his nature in an endless search for frontiers untouched by plebeian hands, the masses always nipping at his heels.

The question of whether or not you are engaged in competitive consumption has nothing to do with your thoughts on the subject. As an example, you may not think that driving an SUV or truck is a good idea, but there's an 80% chance you'll be the one who dies if you wind up in a fatality involving someone who does.

One way or another, the income of a society is going to be spent. People who don't buy things put their money in the bank, where it's spent by someone else. Reduced demand in one sector is met with increases in demand experienced among other sectors.

The hippies didn't need to sell out in order to become yuppies, because they were never really dissenting. Rejecting materialist values or mass society doesn't force you to reject consumer capitalism. "Dropping out", from a consumer standpoint, is manifested as an expressed willingness to pay a premium for goods that distinguish oneself from the masses. If you really want out of the system, you have to go off and live in the woods somewhere -- without commuting back and forth in a Range Rover.

The lower one's status one is, the more they're willing to pay to improve it.

Material goods: goods that are scarce because they require effort to produce
Positional goods: goods that are scarce because their production cannot be increased
Most goods have both material and positional qualities.

We can think of the positional aspect of a good as its "competitive premium": a premium paid by the good's purchaser that keeps other people out

Good taste is a positional good. One person can have it only if many others do not.
-- I referenced this earlier in my hipster comment

When people complain about threats to their individuality or their identity, they're really complaining about threats to their status. Distinction is a zero-sum game: you can only have it if others do not.

The Naomi Klein story:
In the beginning of No Logo, Naomi Klein complained about how companies are converting old factories into a series of faux factory-loft apartments. She lived in a real factory-loft apartment and was bothered by this. Any reader with a feel for how social class in Canada worked at the time would have known that real factory-loft apartments in Klein's area were possibly the most desirable pieces of property in the country, obtainable only by people with superior social connections. The arrival of the yuppies, presumably people who would not have been able to "properly appreciate" the district's revolutionary heritage, aggravated her and threatened an erosion of her social status. People were buying these lofts because they wanted to be cool like her. When faced with the prospect of losing the distinction of having a REAL factory-loft apartment, the idea that her landlord might decide to convert her building to condominiums, she did the only thing she could to keep her social status intact: threatened to move out.
In this story, we see the forces driving competitive consumption in their starkest form. The extraordinary thing is that they passed unnoticed, even though they occur in the introduction of a book that has been adopted as the bible of the anticonsumerism movement.

No Logo provides a stinging indictment of every aspect of the modern advertising-driven economy, and yet anyone who reads it through to the end will be startled to discover that it contains not one positive proposal for fixing any of these problems.
-- yeah what the fuck
-- this may be cognitive dissonance kicking in, but I'm glad she didn't waste my time by having me read a proposal I couldn't implement or influence. No Logo was a good book for promoting personal awareness of the topics she covered, which was about all I expected to get out of it when I picked it up

Supporters of school uniforms see them as a form of arms control that minimizes class differences between students.

The Branded story:
In her book Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, journalist Alissa Quart takes a hard look at contemporary youth culture and is shocked by what she finds. Preteens wearing makeup, teens working as "trendspotters" for corporations, high schoolers doing steroids or getting costmetic surgery - all of them treading in a sea of brands, brands everywhere. Quart places the blame on marketers and advertisers, and because she is convinced that the enemy is conformity, not competition, she rejects school uniforms as a solution to the problem she has diagnosed. According to Quart, what students need to do is rebel. She celebrates the 60's scene, with its cultural creativity; she actually suggests that kids should become more like she was, back in the days when all she needed in the way of style was a pair of Converse trainers and a Ramones T-shirt.
The fact that she actually names the brand of shoes she wore during her adolescent rebellion is staggering. For some reason, she thinks there is a difference between the Converse trainers she wore (basketball shoes made famous by Julius Erving) and the Nikes that kids wear today (basketball shoes made famous by Michael Jordan), to the point where she was a 'rebel' and today's teenagers are 'victims'.

Advertising is less like brainwashing than it is like seduction. Just like you can't seduce someone who doesn't have an interest in sex, you can't sell teeth whitener to someone who is not concerned about his appearance.

Coolhunters and viral marketers provide a valuable service to low-status (uncool) groups by giving them more rapid access to what is cool, making it more difficult for high-status people to treat them with contempt.
-- that's an awesome perspective
-- one problem, though, is that these people can be wrong (to put it kindly) at which point you have uncool people being manipulated into picking up uncool things and thinking they're cool when they're not

If mass production allows individuals access to goods that they would otherwise not have been able to afford, it would be obnoxious to deny them the opportunity on the grounds that we don't like the aesthetic consequences.

Whenever you feel that society is forcing you to conform or treating you like a number, not a person, ask yourself, "Would my individuality create more work for other people?" If the answer is yes, your individualism is a luxury, and you should be adequately prepared to compensate those you impose upon for your exercise of it.


In an ideal world, no one would need to conserve anything, because economic conditions would be such that they could not afford to purchase much more than the optimal level of the goods and services they would have formerly been asked to conserve.
-- this makes sense from the perspective of scarcity economics, but my version of an ideal world is one in which production conditions are such that the need for conservation never arises - no one needs to conserve salt

The tragedy of the commons: when an individual who draws from a public pool is given incentives to exploit that pool at the expense of the other pool members and the knowledge that if he doesn't, others will. The result, naturally, is a race to the bottom.

Counterculture concocts explanations -- often empirically false -- as to how features of modern mass society that none of us could ever reasonably hope to change are creating social problems.
-- I'm looking at you, Michael Moore
-- the fact that counterculture is a cry for change directed at people unable to effect change is what turned me off of it. You can read books like No Logo, watch documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, but in the end all you wind up with are opinions, not solutions. What makes counterculture media counterculture is its message that the system is corrupt, something to be worked outside, and as you can imagine, this doesn't go a long way towards effecting meaningful change in objectionable industries. Could No Logo have been able to change Nike or any of the corporations it indicted if its message was directed at industry insiders, not the plebes? Maybe not, but maybe there's no need for them to change. These books aren't exactly Silent Spring [Rachel Carson's expose on pesticides that prompted the banning of DDT and saved the bald eagles] - the message they send is polemecist, not reformist, composed of an uncritical moral indictment against organizations whose practices the authors detest. We read these and wind up overeducated and opinionated, with half the facts and none of the answers.
-- I'm done here.