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I'm in my usual coffee shop, watching the kids come and go. The Chinese students. The fashionistas. The revolving brands.
Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Naomi Klein, but the logo is a uniquely insane idea, don’t you think?
Like, I want to buy a shirt. With sleeves, a collar, maybe a nice pattern. This is what I’m paying for. I don’t want to pay for the burden of advertising your shirt for you. To carry the emblem of your company around with me and show it to people. To be a walking billboard for you. Mother. Fuck. that.
And yet the brands have us so brainwashed that not only are we willing to do this, we’ll actually pay astronomical amounts for the opportunity to do so. Trainers with a Nike Swoosh on the side are in far greater demand than trainers with no Swoosh. The price of a Gucci bag is not predominantly informed by the quality of that sack in which you put stuff.
Because we do not only want the thing. The material. The craftsmanship. The use. We want a shorthand indicator of status. This is a Barbour jacket and that means I belong to this set of people. I scroll meaninglessly down Apple phones, and so the hijacking by social media companies of my ill-equipped dopaminergic system is not pathetic but effortlessly cool. I shade UV radiation from my eyes with Ray-Ban sunglasses, so know that I am Someone Who Matters, affluent and desirable and important.
I’m not saying we are aware of this choice, not up here in the leafy tips of our cerebral pathways, in the realm of conscious thought. But it’s what’s happening in us, down under the shaded canopy of the subconscious.
You’ve maybe never considered this. Or if you have, there’s a high likelihood you’ve created a complex set of ex post facto rationalisations to cover your cognitive dissonance, to lie to yourself that you decided to be this way, rather than admit to having your subconscious needs manipulated by large companies who want your money for themselves. “I just buy Nike trainers because they’re the best," perhaps you say.
I understand. No one likes being someone’s bitch.
But it’s bullshit. You’re bullshitting yourself. You had the seeds of aspirational desire planted in you long before you could make rational decisions, and these seeds are watered, nurtured, doused in Miracle Grow every day by the continuous bombardment of marketing to which we are subjected in our modern world.
Nike pay spies to ingratiate themselves within underprivileged yet exciting youth communities - with black kids on the streets of New York ghettos, for example - and to listen to and report back on what these youths find hip and worthwhile. They then fill their marketing with these messages, and affluent yet boring middle-class shoppers buy Nike products to steal some of the excitement from those lifestyles of the New York streets. Minus the heroin addiction, gang violence, lack of education, and life expectancy in the 30s, of course.
Being a banker is boring, yet easy. Being Omar from The Wire is thrilling, yet impossibly hard. So what the major brands have done is find a way to sell the romanticised notion of street life to the bankers, who get to do drive-bys on their downtown Pret a Mangers and hang with their crew at LAN parties, then fall asleep soundly ensconced in John Lewis sheets, all for the reasonable price of double or triple or quadruple what the trainers are worth before you put the Swoosh on them.
And for the street kids? Well, you market their style right back at them, which now becomes self-mythologising, and they cling to these totems as the one thing in their life that makes them feel important. Or you sell them Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, the WASPy Ivy League yachting brands that to these inner-city kids seem so alien and out of reach. Then you get pictures of the black guys wearing Tommy Hilfiger, and sell /that/ image back to the preppy suburban children. One big circle of manipulation, everyone thinking they’re getting to be someone they’re not, all the money from them all being channelled upwards into the pockets of Phil Knight and the other company heads.
And there’s the infantilisation aspect, as well. Remember how stressful buying trainers was when you were twelve?
Adolescents are the group most concerned with how they’re viewed by their peers, life-threatening as it feels, and truly is, to fit in with their social group, before they've found what makes them valuable that is natural and unique about themselves. They spend a great deal of time editing their self-image, planning and preening, and a lot of their sense of worth comes from the validation they receive when they get this right.
But it’s a stage of development. A stop-off on the journey towards becoming. Yet it’s one that our culture does everything it can to keep us suspended within, because it is at this stage that we are most susceptible to brand marketing, the stage at which we can have the most revenue extracted from us.
So, like domestic cats that remain in a perpetual state of kittenhood, kept cute and helpless by the human parents they never leave, we are a society of teenagers, spending our wages on toys, on fashion, on easy entertainment.
I understand. No one likes being someone’s bitch.
But it’s bullshit. You’re bullshitting yourself. You had the seeds of aspirational desire planted in you long before you could make rational decisions, and these seeds are watered, nurtured, doused in Miracle Grow every day by the continuous bombardment of marketing to which we are subjected in our modern world.
Nike pay spies to ingratiate themselves within underprivileged yet exciting youth communities - with black kids on the streets of New York ghettos, for example - and to listen to and report back on what these youths find hip and worthwhile. They then fill their marketing with these messages, and affluent yet boring middle-class shoppers buy Nike products to steal some of the excitement from those lifestyles of the New York streets. Minus the heroin addiction, gang violence, lack of education, and life expectancy in the 30s, of course.
Being a banker is boring, yet easy. Being Omar from The Wire is thrilling, yet impossibly hard. So what the major brands have done is find a way to sell the romanticised notion of street life to the bankers, who get to do drive-bys on their downtown Pret a Mangers and hang with their crew at LAN parties, then fall asleep soundly ensconced in John Lewis sheets, all for the reasonable price of double or triple or quadruple what the trainers are worth before you put the Swoosh on them.
And for the street kids? Well, you market their style right back at them, which now becomes self-mythologising, and they cling to these totems as the one thing in their life that makes them feel important. Or you sell them Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, the WASPy Ivy League yachting brands that to these inner-city kids seem so alien and out of reach. Then you get pictures of the black guys wearing Tommy Hilfiger, and sell /that/ image back to the preppy suburban children. One big circle of manipulation, everyone thinking they’re getting to be someone they’re not, all the money from them all being channelled upwards into the pockets of Phil Knight and the other company heads.
And there’s the infantilisation aspect, as well. Remember how stressful buying trainers was when you were twelve?
Adolescents are the group most concerned with how they’re viewed by their peers, life-threatening as it feels, and truly is, to fit in with their social group, before they've found what makes them valuable that is natural and unique about themselves. They spend a great deal of time editing their self-image, planning and preening, and a lot of their sense of worth comes from the validation they receive when they get this right.
But it’s a stage of development. A stop-off on the journey towards becoming. Yet it’s one that our culture does everything it can to keep us suspended within, because it is at this stage that we are most susceptible to brand marketing, the stage at which we can have the most revenue extracted from us.
So, like domestic cats that remain in a perpetual state of kittenhood, kept cute and helpless by the human parents they never leave, we are a society of teenagers, spending our wages on toys, on fashion, on easy entertainment.
No one is going to tell you off for this. No one is going to suggest you move on. You’re going to be encouraged to be this way at every turn. Expensive adverts on television, the force of culture pressing from the top down, is designed to persuade you that everything is as it should be, that you’re doing great. They want your money. They do not love you, they simply want your money.
Which all is fine. The forces of the world are the forces of the world. But it’s your job, as a being in the world, to truly face these forces, to act appropriately against them. If you want to stay thirteen, with your hi-tops and your Beats by Dre buds and your iPhone, then go right ahead. You’ll get the warm feelings that you associate with these brands, with displaying these logos, and you’ll pay the price. You’ll pay monetarily, and you’ll pay through the hollowness of worshipping false idols of corporate deities. Fallen gods that take your prayers, take your offerings of gold, and give you back only things. Cold, loveless things.
Which all is fine. The forces of the world are the forces of the world. But it’s your job, as a being in the world, to truly face these forces, to act appropriately against them. If you want to stay thirteen, with your hi-tops and your Beats by Dre buds and your iPhone, then go right ahead. You’ll get the warm feelings that you associate with these brands, with displaying these logos, and you’ll pay the price. You’ll pay monetarily, and you’ll pay through the hollowness of worshipping false idols of corporate deities. Fallen gods that take your prayers, take your offerings of gold, and give you back only things. Cold, loveless things.
Worshipping the true gods, commitment, creativity, civic duty, charity - this is harder, it’s not sexy, no luxuriously filmed adverts are going to put the idea in your head. But the more you do it, the more reward there will be. And you get to fall asleep at night feeling honest, alive, a full and adult human being facing the unvarnished reality of this world.
And that’s the kind of authenticity that no Swooshed trainers I’ve yet seen can bring you near.
Bear it in mind.
And that’s the kind of authenticity that no Swooshed trainers I’ve yet seen can bring you near.
Bear it in mind.
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