In the wake of the Occupy movement’s first big taste of serious police action in New York City (and in a lot of other cities), it’s worth recalling the context of where the Occupy movement came from: Adbusters. Like Occupy, Adbusters is a kind of loose agglomeration of generally left wing people who see too many things wrong with the world to not do something, even if something is a small a thing as reading a magazine. It’s also concerned, as its name indicates, with what its current about statement refers to as “the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.” It continues:
Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.
What makes this different from what mainstream discourse thinks of when words like “environment”, “pollutes”, and “ecology” are invoked is the specific and repeated discussion of the “cultural” and “mental” aspects of the environment. For Adbusters, it isn’t enough to keep old growth forests from being knocked down or to address climate change, a truly healthy “economy and ecology” also require us to examine the mental effects our culture of consumption has on us.
It’s not just about lusting after the car with the designer interior or your neighbor’s vibrator that plays “O Come, All Ye Faithful”; it’s about the ancillary effects – externalities, if you will – of that desire. Advertising has always been designed to blast a small hole of inadequacy in you if it’ll make you slightly more likely to purchase a given item in an attempt to repair the breach. The great George Meyer described advertising like this back in 2000:
“I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”
That is precisely what the Adbusters people are talking about when discussing the cultural and mental aspects of the environment and the commercial forces that influence them. Advertising spews enormous amounts of the finest bullshit money can hone, and the effects of it radiate into our relationships, thoughts and feelings long after the campaign has ended and the products have been recalled or discontinued.
The result of that damage is, not to be overly dramatic, human misery. People who might never have felt bad about some topic suddenly feel self conscious or stressed that the wrong brand of X in the cabinet or Y on their clothing means that other people think less of them. Not being able to afford enough or the right kind of something becomes, even if just in a tiny way, an indictment of one’s entire life. Nor can it be alleviated by purchase of the product, because the vast majority of them don’t live up to their promises.
And while there’s a case to be made that advertising in general keeps the economy from grinding to a halt and all of us from living in ditches, on an individual level advertising is almost exclusively a negative. It isn’t often that you hear someone say, “I’m really glad I saw that ad”. It happens, not everything for sale is crappy, but it’s rare.
Worse, an individual’s exposure to advertising has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Once upon a time advertising was limited to relatively confined spaces: television and radio broadcasts, billboards, newspapers and magazines. But the last twenty years or so have seen advertising creep into ever more corners of modern life. The ads are on buses and benches, before and during the movies, written into the names of stadiums and charities, even on the products that the other advertising already got you to purchase. And that was before internet ads took off.
Remember, ads are extremely crafty messages that have been rigorously designed and scientifically refined to catch your eye, make your ears perk up, and rattle around in your brain. And the space people are allowed to be safe from those assaults is shrinking all the time. To be sure, there’s no guarantee that mental energy and time expended in the absence of ads would be “better” spent, but it does represent a profound shift in the way people think. And that shift has been foisted on them with essentially no public debate or examination into whether or not such a thing is harmful.
Adbusters and Occupy object to that passive acceptance, and while the levels of rejection will vary depending on the individual, they have a point. The immediate aftermath of the Occupy crackdown has focused on whether or not the occupation in Lower Manhattan is over, whether or not the political energy will dissipate, and whether or not Occupy can or will be folded into the existing political left the way the Tea Party was folded into the political right. But perhaps the more lasting question is whether or not ideas like “Buy Nothing Day” can spread beyond the activist fringe.
It seems very unlikely that large scale rejection of consumerism is coming to a prosperous suburb near you. But even a little bit of pushback from non-activists in that direction would be something new; which is why, despite this morning’s four column headline, the New York Times story most relevant to the Occupy movement’s goals may have ran last Friday. The Occupy Wall Street movement is only mentioned in passing, but “Thanksgiving as Day to Shop Meets Rejection” is about a general repudiation of the post-Thanksgiving shopping madness by its most ardent practitioners.
Much like regular pollution, the kind of mental and cultural pollution Adbusters objections to doesn’t affect people equally. But if people like those in the Thanksgiving article, who’ll admit to spending thousands of dollars on Black Fridays past, are starting to feel saturated in it, then a turning point may have been reached. We’ll see.
