Brand Avenue reviews Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.
Heath and Potter (listen to a radio interview here) spell out the relationship between the construction of “counterculture” and its broad and profound effects on consumer behavior. After all, what is the true value of “rebellion” and “avant-garde” ideas and actions? Could it be that these things, rather than fulfilling some nebulous concept of societal progress, are really just manifestations of capitalism’s cutting edge, defining new markets and identifying new needs?
Here’s a short excerpt from the book:
The concept of countercultural rebellion and its elusive twin—cool—have resulted in a status competition that has driven consumption to unprecedented heights. It’s not conformism that leads us to spend, spend, spend on the unnecessary and the ephemeral, but its opposite: the quest to distinguish ourselves from the masses through our enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences. And marketers of products ranging from cars (the Volkswagen Bug) to computers (the Mac) to shoes (Doc Martens) have been reaping huge harvests from the countercultural seeds that were sown in the 1960s. The point was never underlined more heavily than when Kalle Lassen, editor of the ragingly anti-capitalist Adbusters magazine, came out with the Black Spot sneaker: a “subversive” running shoe that Lassen hoped would “uncool Nike” and “set a precedent that [would] revolutionize capitalism.” As Heath and Potter point out, there is nothing “subversive” about trying to beat Nike. “That’s called marketplace competition. It’s the whole point of capitalism….”
