The war on shopping is over
ANTI-CONSUMERISM WITHERS AS THE FIGHT FOR IDENTITY SHIFTS FROM SHOPS TO SOCIAL MEDIA
It’s Christmastime, but something’s missing from the holiday tradition — namely, the familiar complaints about Christmas becoming too commercialized. They used to be as much a part of the season as egg nog, but if anything, the problem with Christmas these days is figuring out what to buy for your loved ones, not worrying about an orgy of overspending.
The anti-consumerist rhetoric around Christmas used to be merely the culmination of an extended jihad against shopping that started around Halloween and peaked right after American Thanksgiving — this thanks to the creation of Black Friday, promoted as the busiest shopping day of the year. Retailers used the day after Thanksgiving as an occasion to offer enormous bargains, and shoppers dutifully lined up overnight, desperate to get their hands on the hottest toys of the year. The media always treated Black Friday with a mixture of fascination and contempt, feeding the frenzy with breathless reports on what bargains could be had, then tracking the mortifying scene of department stores transformed into suburban mosh pits.
It wasn’t so long ago that Black Friday was also one of the biggest days on the culture jammer’s calendar, because of Adbusters magazine’s successful counterbranding of it as Buy Nothing Day — a day when anti-consumerism activists try to “jam” the shoppers by cutting up credit cards, engaging in shopping mall sit-ins, participating in zombie walks or critical mass rides, and so on. Their point was to not buy anything, while drawing attention to the grossness of those who were.
This went on for the better part of the first decade of the new century, and then ... it just went away. Buy Nothing Day is so completely off the radar that even Adbusters barely promotes it any more. There’s currently a “Buy Nothing Xmas” subvertisement ( geddit?) on the magazine’s homepage, but it’s just a thirty-second video clip showing Santa and his reindeer flying over a pile of garbage. Subtlety was never Adbusters’ strong suit, but this is barely even trying.
It isn’t just Adbusters though. The entire anticonsumerism agenda against advertising and branding, and the fun little counterculture that surrounded it, is as dead as disco. What happened? After all, it isn’t like we’ve stopped shopping: a new report out of the United States shows a healthy jump in retail spending, while U.K. retailers saw a similar boost from Black Friday sales.
THE ENTIRE ANTI-CONSUMERISM AGENDA AGAINST ADVERTISING AND BRANDING, AND THE FUN LITTLE COUNTERCULTURE THAT SURROUNDED IT, IS AS DEAD AS DISCO.
A big part of it is that a lot of the Christmas-gift sort of stuff we used to spend a lot of money on, especially clothing and consumer electronics, is now very inexpensive. Other major consumption categories — including music, movies, television, video games, magazines and books — have switched to a subscriptionand-streaming model, so even when we are actually paying for this stuff, we’re not really participating in the cultural activity that used to be called consumerism. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, brand-loyalty amongst consumers is at an alltime low, and once-powerful brands such as Nike, J. Crew, The Gap and even Lululemon are suffering as shoppers increasingly turn towards private labels. “Millennials don’t care as much about logos,” said one retail consultant in the story.
Okay, but the question is, why is this happening? To see what’s really going on it’s worth keeping in mind that the fight over consumerism was never really about shopping. Instead, it was always a proxy for other fights people wanted to have. As Naomi Klein made clear in her anti- consumerist manifesto No Logo, the real struggle wasn’t about branding, it was about globalization, the environment, or sweatshops. It was no real surprise to see that in later works she just dealt with those issues directly in her books on “shock” capitalism and on climate change.
But mostly, what people wanted to fight over was taste, as filtered through class prejudices. That is, the fight over consumerism was largely about identity, which you signalled through which brands you wore, what music you listened to, what movies you watched, what slang you adopted. Back in the golden age of identity-driven consumerism, you could tell pretty much anything you needed to know about someone, especially which tribe they belonged to, by giving their record collection a quick scan.
These tribal differences weren’t neutral though, since no signalling of taste is ever totally innocent. Instead, all of these competing styles and identities were shot through with status claims, largely having to do with who is richer and/or cooler. The 1985 movie The Breakfast Club set the template for an entire generation of teenagers by riffing off the status dynamic between the archetypal princess, nerd, jock, burnout and freakazoid, all of whom could be instantly identified by their haircuts. And that is where things seemed destined to sit, as North America reached the end of history, which Francis Fukuyama famously characterized as the comfortable life of “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.”
But something happened on the way to the end of history — namely, the birth of the internet and the rise of social media. The reason there is no brand-consciousness any more, and the reason why there is no corresponding anti-consumerist backlash, isn’t because no one is buying things — it is because the whole fight over status and identity that consumerism represented has migrated online, lock, stock and Bumble.
Where once it was possible to think of the analog world of meatspace as “real life” and the online world as something a bit fake or at least unimportant, that has long since ceased to be the case. Everything important in the culture now happens online, including — even especially — the fights over identity and status.
But now the battle for status is fought directly through social media: Instead of being mediated through our consumption habits, the indirect proxy war of status- seeking that drove consumerism from the post-war period until the turn of the millennium is now hand- to- hand combat, in the form of Facebook likes, Twitter RTs, Instagram followers. Why worry about getting the latest hoodie from Dreamville when your clever meme-heckle of Donald Trump goes viral and gets you namechecked on Buzzfeed? This alone makes status-seeking seem far more exhausting, and certainly less fun, than it once was. But there is a darker side to it that feeds into the one of the most destructive and dangerous phenomena of our time.
One underappreciated aspect of the old consumption-based status-signalling was the way it took the form of conspicuous virtue. In its milder forms, it consists of relatively harmless things like voluntourism or an excessive fondness for all things local or organic. In contrast, the chief impact of social media, especially open and anonymous platforms such as Twitter, has been to turn individual virtue-signalling into a tyranny of the mob. From the left, the one-upmanship embedded in all identity politics has turned into a mass of hysterical thought-control. From the right, the traditional animosity toward the “cultural elite” has turned into an unhinged rejection of everything unpleasant as “fake news.” It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the great age of anti-consumerism, when getting into the Christmas spirit meant fighting for your right to go shopping.