Jay-Z, Adbusters, and the selling of rebellion

Mogul (Jay-Z Occupies Occupy Wall Street), by Daniel Edwards

When it comes to profiting off anti-capitalist sentiment, it is hard to see what distinguishes the Blackspot sneaker from Jay-Z’s “Occupy All Streets” T-shirt. For that matter, it is hard to see what distinguishes either of these from other successful businesses that arose out of a desire to “do capitalism differently,” from The Gap and Starbucks to the Body Shop and Whole Foods...

That's from my latest column for the Ottawa Citizen...

The End of Authenticity

All of a sudden, the authentic is on the outs. The first intimations came last summer, when a major marketing magazine declared that authenticity has lost its cachet. Then USA Today ran a piece pointing out that if Starbucks can call its breakfast sandwich “artisanal,” and if Tostitos can say the same thing about its corn chips, then maybe artisanal is just a synonym for mass-produced. But the last hand-forged nail was driven into the reclaimed-wood coffin recently when the New York Times published a long feature under the title, “All that authenticity might be getting old”...

That's from my latest column for The Ottawa Citizen.



Death of a Counterculturalist

Theodore Roszak, the sociologist who coined the term counterculture, has died at 77. His book “The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society” was extraordinarily influentional. Or should I say, is extraordinarily influential: the book was published in 1969, but it remains the definitive critique of the alienating effects of techno-capitalism, and his proferred solution -- youthful dissent -- is the air that every self-styled political non-conformist breathes.

More than any other book (including No Logo), Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture was the chief foil for the argument that Joe Heath and I advanced in The Rebel Sell. In his last work, Roszak argued that "the idealistic values of the 1960s would inspire millions of baby boomers in their last years"; the sad truth is that he was right. The hippies didn't sell out when they became yuppies, they simply traded their VWs for SUVs. And now that they are heading into retirement, they are looking for authenticity. The hoax, unfortunately, remains the same.