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The Problem with Adbusters

  
  

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Querelle
04:55 / 13.10.03
I admire what Adbusters is trying to do in its fight to raise awareness about consumerism, etc., especially with younger people, but a I think they fall short in some important ways. Adbusters is cool design-wise and is often thought-provoking, but in my eyes often puts design/style above content.

Take their website.. it's full of cute/clever spoof ads and nifty things you can buy, but there is no practical information to be found. For example, their "Dirty Dozen" page, where they list the top 12 bad-guy corportations, has no information whatsoever about why these companies are bad for the environment, greedy, anti-worker, etc. Just the cute logos looking like they were drawn by some corporate brain-washed 5 year old. Maybe if I read every issue of Adbusters I would know the dirty history behind all these companies (and admittedly, I do know the story about a lot), but a lot of people don't, and it seems counterproductive at best to make claims without backing them up with some kind of factual information.

My other beef is with this new "black spot" sneaker deal.. Why would I pay $65 for what's basically a converse with a black-spot on it, when I could pay $30 at a local shoe store and draw my own black spot. Isn't that what the whole "take back America" campaign is all about? (Yes, Converse in now owned by Nike, but there are plenty of generic knock-off's I could find who presumably don't use child slave-labor to manufacture shoes). Also, what are they doing with the revenue generated by the sale of the shoe? No mention of it in the current issue, and their blackspotsneaker site is 404.

The impetus for this post was generated tonight, when a friend and I went to the only coffee shop that was still open at 9pm on a Sunday.. Starbucks. It was the 2nd time I've ever been in Starbucks in my entire life (because I'm the last person who wants to contribute to a greedy, globalized company). I didn't even buy anything, just sat down and studied for about an hour until they closed. Right before I left, they announced to the 6 people left that we could take home all of the pastries that were left in the cases, since they were just throwing them away anyway. I walked out of there with 3 muffins and a couple of scones. Not only that, but they pretty cool, friendly people. I received much better service there that I ever have from any snobby coffee-slinger in any of the local coffee shops in town. I was pretty surprised and kind of shocked that the image I had of this company was suddenly being questioned.

So am I missing something here? Am I just another ill-informed American citizen? Are there any other admirers of this magazine who would like to see a little more content with their (mostly right-on) propaganda?
 
 
Rage
09:10 / 13.10.03
It's a magazine for punk rockers who are starting to think for the first time. (and like shiny things) What were you expecting? I mean, your standards are way too high. If you want something intellectual you're looking in the wrong place.
 
 
illmatic
10:13 / 13.10.03
There's also the fundamental contradiction between using advertising as a medium to subvert itself. Surely this just feeds and attributes power to the medium it's supposed to be critquing? Or rather, isn't implying that it's it just the content of the ads that should be critqued, but the big authorative voice delievering a message is still okay? I'm sure the gus at Adbusters must be aware of this and have an answer to it. Any thoughts?
 
 
w1rebaby
13:30 / 13.10.03
Illmatic - subvertising (which I'm using to include entire fake ads as well as subverted real ones) as I understand tends to have two main goals:

(a) to challenge notions of what advertising is, how it affects us and its relationship to public space

(b) the more political goal of undermining consumerism and corporate propaganda and media control

I've never seen it as attacking the very idea of advertising; you then start to get into the "so what *is* advertising then? how it is different from any other form of expression?" problem, and it seems to me that most subvertisers take great joy in the form and wouldn't want to see it disappear.

Adbusters strikes me as a magazine where the contributors want to be working for ad companies in five years' time. It's a very good-looking publication but it spoils it when it opens its mouth. If it was just a collection of images it could actually be powerful, but the politics are facile and poorly expressed. The epitome of this is the letters section which is really, really funny and then a little depressing in a "laughing at teenagers" way.

Best read in Borders with a chai latte while MMSing from your Sony-Ericsson T616, I reckon. If you want to know more about anti-corporate or anti-capitalist issues don't read Adbusters. What would be good is a magazine with the visual sense and people who could actually, like, articulate stuff, y'know?

And yeah, all the staff in Starbuckses that I've met have been very nice (in the US at least). They also have good sofas and sell some decent travel mugs. Doesn't change the operating policies of the corporation though.
 
 
at the scarwash
18:19 / 13.10.03
Although I agree with the basic aticorporate stance taken by Adbusters, the smug, self satisfied attitude it presents in print makes me howl like a rabid spidermonkey and want to wear Nikes, eat at McD's, drink at Starbucks, and drive a Lexus, just so I can piss these people off. The visual nature of print advetising makes ad hominem attacks very easy. It does not, however, make them any more logically sound.
 
 
Jester
20:30 / 13.10.03
I can sympathise with the objections some of you have raised about Adbusters, (and perhaps subvertising in general). I'm not really a big fan of the magazine personally, but I get it sometimes. I think there are some very positive elements to it that can't really be denied: it's eyecatching and well produced. When I read it on the train, people are interested in what I'm looking at and have started up conversations with me off the back of it. Now, if people get interested, and start discussing the issues that it is highlighting because of this, how can that be a bad thing? And especially some of the photography is really beautiful and illuminating. When the Situationists put out their magazine they made it a tactile, aesthetic thing. Maybe Adbusters works in the same way?

Now, there are problems with it. It has a corporate glossiness that I find hard to equate with it's values (why spend so much money on the glossy finish: and I can't help thinking that isn't so good for the environment). Also, there is the issue of funding/how the money is spent. I get what fridgemagnet said about the people working on it wanting to work in ad agencies

Sometimes the message can be a bit facile to say the least. But more than anything Adbusters is propoganda, isn't it? I would prefer to be reading something more balanced, measured myself. But. Isn't propoganda necessary on some level? If you're interested in political change, I mean. I don't know.

There's also the fundamental contradiction between using advertising as a medium to subvert itself. Surely this just feeds and attributes power to the medium it's supposed to be critquing? Or rather, isn't implying that it's it just the content of the ads that should be critqued, but the big authorative voice delievering a message is still okay? I'm sure the gus at Adbusters must be aware of this and have an answer to it. Any thoughts?

That depends. I would say that the really unnerving and repellant thing about advertising is not the FORM as such, but the intention. The manipulation of consumerism. One of the worst things about it for me is seeing so much creativity channeled into making people buy shit. So to use the form to make people reject consumerism holds no problems for me. All art is polemic in one way or another.
 
 
at the scarwash
01:42 / 14.10.03
Isn't propoganda necessary on some level?

But wouldn't this count as (apart from the strangers that you talk to on the train) a beautiful example of preaching to the choir? Does the readership of Adbusters need to be subvertised to? It seems somehow self-congratulatory, somehow "Yeah man, right on!" Subvertising is a powerful tool when it actually subverts advertising. I'm certain that the magazine has inspired many people to take it to the streets. That's great. But that only takes one issue. I think that my biggest problem with Adbusters is ultimately that it ends up as a glossy humor mag for Whole-Foods lefties, and it's not that funny.
 
 
alas
02:25 / 14.10.03
I'm a magazine junkie. There, I've admitted it--now what are the next 11 steps?

So I've subscribed to Adbusters this year, probably just for the year. I have a couple of teenagers living with me who I'm gradually seducing into my nasty, magazine reading habit. My daughter at age 11 had a favorite New Yorker cartoonist. There's something amusing and terrifying about that, from a parental perspective.

Anyway, back to adbusters . . . I too like the visual/aesthetics of it. No titles on the articles. I like to give some of the articles to my suburbanite students, use the pics in class, especially since my univ just bought all these funky document cameras that are just too fun for words--I like seeing movies of my hands, pointing the camera at sleeping students and projecting them onto the screen in front of the class. . . . So I justify my habit that way.

Yet, I still feel a wee bit queasy about it all. Not enough to stop, mind you...
 
 
No star here laces
02:54 / 14.10.03
It's just so boring. Like, new ideas please. Been around for ten years, nothing much to say except "ads are a bit superficial". Listen up, fuckheads, nobody thinks advertising is profound!

Broken record mode, me, but guess what, advertising is a red herring. Go get annoyed about something else, like maybe the fact that instead of buying converse you could just send the money to a charity to help people who need it more. Instead of wasting time colouring in logos in black you could be doing volunteer work.

Do you? Does anyone else? Do I? No. And that is the problem, not advertising...
 
 
Querelle
03:14 / 14.10.03
Rage: It's a magazine for punk rockers who are starting to think for the first time. (and like shiny things) What were you expecting? I mean, your standards are way too high. If you want something intellectual you're looking in the wrong place.

I'd like to think that this magazine has the potential to achieve some serious goals, and that it's wasting the opportunity it has. Obviously the people writing it have intellegence and are on the right track. But I would agree with the other posters here who said they would like to see a little less teenage-wasteland self-congragulatory, self-aware ass-slapping and more meat.

WHERE'S THE BEEF?

How about incorporating culture jamming articles, spell out for the kids how to disrupt the capitalist system in many fun and varied ways. Direct people to online resources/communities. Move beyond the black spot. This magazine could be a real resource, AND harden our style-nipples at the same time, instead of being the punk-rock equivalent of Maxim. Instead of reducing important ideas into the next teenage uniform.

But whatever, it's not like this keeps me up at night, I guess it just underlines how hard it is to rail against the system from within the system.
 
 
Naked Flame
06:41 / 14.10.03
they still come up with some pretty slamming images, even if they are just a pretty face.

anyone see their take on the 'Got Milk' thing? *that* was nice.
 
 
No star here laces
07:41 / 14.10.03
I dispute the whole notion of culture jamming personally. All it does is make one brand seem less cool to one sub-section of society. If you want people to stop being so materialistic, it's going to take a bit more than a skull face drawn on a gap poster...
 
 
Jester
08:59 / 14.10.03
I dispute the whole notion of culture jamming personally. All it does is make one brand seem less cool to one sub-section of society. If you want people to stop being so materialistic, it's going to take a bit more than a skull face drawn on a gap poster...

Thinking about it some more: there's probabaly something serious to complain about in the fact that the glossiness of the magazine in no way disrupts the idea that some kind of aesthetic cool is something to aim for... But. I mean. That's a whole other question isn't it?

Do you? Does anyone else? Do I? No. And that is the problem, not advertising...

Completely true. BUT. Are the two things totally seperate? I mean: doesn't the more-bigger-faster-cooler culture that Adbusters is aiming to disrupt have something to do with the fact we've all got better things to do than volunteer?
 
 
rizla mission
14:46 / 14.10.03
I think many of the criticisms expressed here hold a lot of water, but I still like to pick up adbusters.
It seems to me it isn't designed to be a readable magazine that's about discussion of the issues it covers.. each issue is more like a collection of source material for people who are already clued up about their political stance and objectives.. the pages are designed (and damn well designed, imho) to be eye catching and thought provoking when, say, torn out and handed to people or photocopied and stuck on noticeboards or whatever..

And personally I think anything that aims to disrupt the general blandness of yr. average workplace or college corridor is a good thing.

Admittedly this leads to the accusation that they're just preaching to the converted, and 90% of their mags probably end up in the hands of committed leftie, media savy dudes whose main enjoyment of it comes from the minor thrill of thinking "hey wow, that juxtaposition of word and image really sticks it to the man, I bet that could really freak out some right-wing redneck guy!". Obviously I include myself in that group.

My other beef is with this new "black spot" sneaker deal.. Why would I pay $65 for what's basically a converse with a black-spot on it, when I could pay $30 at a local shoe store and draw my own black spot. Isn't that what the whole "take back America" campaign is all about? (Yes, Converse in now owned by Nike, but there are plenty of generic knock-off's I could find who presumably don't use child slave-labor to manufacture shoes). Also, what are they doing with the revenue generated by the sale of the shoe? No mention of it in the current issue, and their blackspotsneaker site is 404.

Yeah, I agree that that particular scheme seems a total non-starter. Which is sad, cos it's totally cool in theory, if only they could get it together properly.
Being a sad-ass indie boy, I'd climb to the moon for a pair of ethically sound converse, if I thought I had much of a chance of actually getting them.

Oh, and I agree with Jeffe on the 'culturejamming' thing.. it maybe has potential if it could be carried out on a massive scale, but, despite looking rilly cool, most of the schemes carried out by Adbusters readers fail to actually convey much of a coherent message and probably don't succeed in exciting anybody except other Adbusters readers.. I think the 'underground resistence' model of competing with mainstream advertising just doesn't work very well.. to make any impression I think you'd have to come up with a campaign that's far more STRAIGHTFORWARD and WELL-ORGANISED and more likely to mean something to mister middleaged banker "bloody kids drawing on the walls.. shouldn't be allowed" type person.

I mean something like - I'm sure if you made a poster with a bunch of unsavoury FACTS (I know facts are pretty relative in this day and age, but youknowwhatimean) about, say, sweatshop labour with a suitably shocking photo and stuck it (though legit means) on billboards, buses etc. - that would be far more successful in affecting people's perceptions of the issue than all of Adbusters fancy malarky.

But to return to Jeffe's point - who's gonna pay for that? Well, I'm not, you're not..
 
 
Jester
16:36 / 14.10.03
Being a sad-ass indie boy, I'd climb to the moon for a pair of ethically sound converse, if I thought I had much of a chance of actually getting them.

If you live in england check out the Natural Shoe Company or whatever they're called. I don't know about BOYS shoes, but I got a pair of sort-of-like-converse-but-not-really vegan shoes from there. Worth a go. They're a bit pricey though, and I'm not 100% sure they arn't just non-animal harming shoes put together using slave-wage sweatshop labour
 
 
w1rebaby
17:44 / 14.10.03
there's probabaly something serious to complain about in the fact that the glossiness of the magazine in no way disrupts the idea that some kind of aesthetic cool is something to aim for

Isn't it something to aim for? I like aesthetic cool. I've always liked adverts and logos and branding and propaganda.

There would be nothing wrong with a good political magazine filled with eyecatching design and art terrorism, but Adbusters isn't going to be it. It's got too much history, it's too much of an institution and it's too keen on looking flash. The politics is mostly froth. These people clearly love advertising and the aesthetics of it, but I reckon motivations come from one or more of the following:

- don't care about politics but want to look cool by being against the man, yo;
- actually think that they can change society by producing things for adbusters, which is as other people have said a little naive;
- just enjoy expressing themselves by fiddling with other people's adverts, like ad sampling;
- feel apolitically violated by the ubiquity of advertising, but recognise that the images have become part of the common environment, and are trying to reclaim that environment by subverting the indented message

Only one of those is a political motivation and it's not a very effective one. I'm most sympathetic with the latter two (and indeed the last one pretty much sums up my interest in the area). Anti-corporatism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, they all need their propaganda but it's not going to achieve anything in isolation, it has to be part of a wider movement.

Sometimes I think they need more and better propaganda and less attempt at debate - if you want to stop people buying SUVs, for instance, you're facing a billion-dollar barrage of advertising backed up by cultural reference that appeals to consumers' emotive, irrational sides, and you need to address that - but that's more of a strategic issue.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
18:12 / 14.10.03
Not much to say on this that hasn't already been voiced except this: Adbusters is an opinion magazine. It may well be a very well thought out, well voiced, well presented and based on coherent and well researched fact, coming from a socialist/quasi-socialist stance, but it is just opinion. If you read Adbusters and want to understand a more complete picture then you may do well to take an interest in other publications. The Creative Review and Campaign Magazine are two that I could recommend.

No I don't wok for either of them.

I have, however, worked in advertising companies where publications like Adbusters are considered essential reading and like No Logo and Naomi Klein has been turned into something of a cultural meme. Ironic, probably not, but in a Sun Tzu kind of way.
 
 
diz
21:19 / 14.10.03
I have, however, worked in advertising companies where publications like Adbusters are considered essential reading and like No Logo and Naomi Klein has been turned into something of a cultural meme. Ironic, probably not, but in a Sun Tzu kind of way.

i remember reading an interview with the guys from Negativland where they said something similar. they said that there are a lot of really cool, left-leaning younger people who work at advertising firms who are really hip to what Negativland does who try to get them to let them use their music for ads all the time.
 
 
w1rebaby
21:43 / 14.10.03
That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. If I was thinking of going into a youngish, "trendy" advertising company, I'd love to have Adbusters on my CV. It shows you understand the concept well enough to subvert it. It's part of the reason I said that I thought a lot of them wanted careers in the industry.
 
 
Jester
08:57 / 20.10.03
Isn't it something to aim for? I like aesthetic cool. I've always liked adverts and logos and branding and propaganda.

Well: that's a tricky one. Can you really seperate cool from capitalism? Don't they have at least some kind of relationship? Exactly what that is... well...

Sometimes I think they need more and better propaganda and less attempt at debate - if you want to stop people buying SUVs, for instance, you're facing a billion-dollar barrage of advertising backed up by cultural reference that appeals to consumers' emotive, irrational sides, and you need to address that - but that's more of a strategic issue.

This is sort of an example of what I mean, above.
 
 
bjacques
14:59 / 20.10.03
Tom Frank's "The Conquest of Cool" might be worth a read. He's the editor of The Baffler, a Chicago-based review of manufactured fashions and opinions. Conquest of Cool is pretty much distilled from the magazine. Reviews are generally favorable, though a few think it could have been a shorter book. Available online and at most decent bookstores.
 
 
schnudle
20:06 / 23.12.03
in the past four years or so that i've been reading adbusters, i've been surprised by the amount of backlash it has generated, particularly because it is the magazine that first opened my eyes to the way modern commercial communication has contributed to the demise of social responsibility and the promotion of the individual over the community.

it seems to me that the biggest gripe about the magazine is the fact that it focuses more on visuals and graphics than written content. i'm not sure why this means it should be written off as a publication that is not dedicated to serious social justice work. i think that in a world mediated by commercial image inundation, it is particularly jarring to see visuals that are incongruous with the usual profit motivations. sometimes visuals depict social issues much more poignantly than words. art and design require reflection, a collaboration between the author and the viewer as an accomplice. i think it is the tendency of our over-rationalized, quantification-obsessed society to discard the role of art as a communication device. some people are simply more responsive to visuals than to words - is it wrong to try to effect social change through all viable media?

i believe the magazine is designed to target the artists and graphic designers who whore their skills and talents out to commercial rather than social interests for the sake of a fat paycheck and industry respect. i think it is also a magazine designed to demonstrate that as much as we are concerned with our physical environments and/or the potential damage to our physical health, we must also be concerned with our mental environments... to look at how advertising and commercial communication has changed our priorities as a society, imposed new narratives to guide our purposes, and assigned us new social roles- as homogenized consumers rather than dynamic citizens.

and as far as the articles... i'm not sure what all the critique is about. the articles have much up-to-date information about how our mental environments are changing, ranging in subject from new advertising technologies to changes in fcc policy to the ways in which corporations are invading our schools, etc. in addition to these informational articles, adbusters also provides personal narratives that provoke the questioning of our daily habits, of our methods of communication, and of our society's chronic dissatisfaction with life.

wow, i sound like such an adbusters spokesperson... but, really, if adbusters has changed SO many people's minds, has made SO many question their blind consumerism and the commercial domination of public discourse, is it really that bad? i know it changed my life incredibly - by planting the seed that motivated me from wanting to work in commercial advertising to realizing that i want to devote my life instead to challenging the way that our society is dominated by one dimensional thought.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
20:29 / 23.12.03
to the way modern commercial communication has contributed to the demise of social responsibility

Would you please unload that a bit? I'm not sure if I'm buying the concept of social responsibility is dead (or even dying), or that advertising is (or could be) a direct factor that would lead to that result. What exactly do you mean by social responsibility?

i think that in a world mediated by commercial image inundation, it is particularly jarring to see visuals that are incongruous with the usual profit motivations.

This assumes a whole LOT about art and the intentions and desires of a wide range of artists. It's these big obnoxious assumptions that make Adbusters and its acolytes so easy to dismiss - all of this clinging to ideas about art and culture that fetishize the poor/underclass/outsider artist and trash the culture of the middle class. That's what it always comes down to - this disdain for the middle class consumer, who aren't poor enough to be "authentic" and aren't rich enough to opt out and embrace costly alternatives, and do not bellyache about "mental environments" which only really matter to those who have the time and inclination to worry about it.

As far as contributing factors to cultural decay go, advertising is pretty small potatoes and vastly overrated.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
02:19 / 24.12.03
My only problem with Adbusters is that they have been going for 10 or more years, and all they do is preach to the converted. No one who needs to be shown the pervasive influence marketing and advertising has on our lives would pick up the magazine, or see any of their campaigns.

It becomes like so much protest, people circling around each other saying how wise they are, and not figuring out how to spead the message to people who need it.
 
 
No star here laces
22:36 / 26.12.03
Artbusters, now that'd be worth reading. A magazine in which a bunch of artists lampoon their own work in order to demonstrate what a waste of time art is and shake the hypnotised masses out of their sheeplike adoration of manufactured beauty.
 
 
Jester
15:59 / 27.12.03
all of this clinging to ideas about art and culture that fetishize the poor/underclass/outsider artist and trash the culture of the middle class. That's what it always comes down to - this disdain for the middle class consumer, who aren't poor enough to be "authentic" and aren't rich enough to opt out and embrace costly alternatives, and do not bellyache about "mental environments" which only really matter to those who have the time and inclination to worry about it.

I would disagree with that more or less completely. Mostly because there is something dreadfully middle class about it all: did you read the issue about embracing organic vegetables? In fact, I think Adbusters embraces a certain kind of middle class culture. In fact, I would say that it's critique is largely directed against the 'fetishization of the underclass' by corporations. It seems to me that the art it features is only distinguished from the main stream of advertising culture because of it's message. I don't see how that 'fetishizes the poor/underclass/outsider artist'.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:02 / 27.12.03
In fact, I think Adbusters embraces a certain kind of middle class culture.

Yes, and the name for that "certain kind of middle class" is Upper Middle Class.
 
 
Jester
17:28 / 27.12.03
Yes, and the name for that "certain kind of middle class" is Upper Middle Class.

I don't know, it's hard to deliniate what the distinctions between classes within classes within classes actually entail, isn't it?
 
 
Jack Fear
17:47 / 27.12.03
I think we may be having a translation problem here, with the differing British and American meanings of "middle class."

Here in America, nearly everyone thinks of hirself as "middle class," from a school janitor living in a trailer home to Bill Gates in his many mansions.

The point here is that Adbusters's brand of activism entails making choices, and many of those choices are only available to people with prerequisites of free time, mobility, and disposable income.

Adbusters loves poor people when they're producers, but hates 'em when they're consumers. There's great sympathy for unskilled urban workers who are force to take jobs at McDonald's, but only contempt for those who eat at McDonald's: what's missing is the realization that these are not two distinct groups.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:58 / 27.12.03
I'm not sure where you're from, but trust me, if you exist within the American middle class, the distinctions between lower, middle, and upper middle class can be quite obvious. So, no, I don't think it is hard to delineate at all, though there is crossover between the former and latter ends of the spectrum. I'd argue that the differences between lower and upper middle class can be very stark.

I'm just not convinced that class envy/class hatred/class guilt is not part of the motivation of something like Adbusters - the ad culture and brands that they target invariably primarily target middle class culture. It's mainstream American middle class lifestyle which is made to be the enemy by this magazine - let's not kid ourselves. There are very justifiable reasons to be wary of consumption and the economy built around these brands and corporations, but more often than not, Adbusters is concerned with advertising and how that effects culture, which seems very shallow to me, and misunderstands the larger economic problem. It's just a lot of misdirected anger.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:02 / 27.12.03
Jester's profile says s/he's from London.

English "middle class" = American white-collar professional UMC.

So we may be more in agreement than it would appear at first blush.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
18:11 / 27.12.03
Adbusters loves poor people when they're producers, but hates 'em when they're consumers

Exactly. The Adbusters Left embraces social/economic empathy, but is informed by effete cultural snobbishness. It's the reverse of popular American Conservatism, which is lacking in that empathy, but appeals to populist mainstream cultural values. I think that this is the single greatest flaw of the Left in American culture - it does genuinely care about how well off the common person is, but it generally looks down on the culture of the "masses," which is tremendously alienating. For good reason, a lot of people resent people who seem as though they think they are superior, which is just as much the problem of Adbusters as it was for Al Gore.
 
 
Jester
17:29 / 28.12.03
Yes, I think it's a bit different in the UK: it seems we both meant about the same thing, afterall...
It's kind of interesting culturally, by the way. Do people not want to identify themselves as working class?

Now, as for the attitude of the left in general and adbusters in particular to 'middle class' (or what we in the uk would probably call working class) culture. It is fair to say that there is an element of snobbery in this attitude. BUT. For example, the Adbuster's critique is not necessarily directed at the general population who, as someone said, might eat at McDonalds, but at the larger culture that means that unhealthy, nasty food, sold at a massive corporation with all kinds of insideous business practices is so ubiquitous. I think there is a level of compassion (albeit, perhaps, a little patronising...) for being a consumer as well as a producer. All of this is loosly based on the anti-corporate, anti-consumerism of the New Left. My favourite is Guy Debord, I think everyone should read him
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
17:57 / 28.12.03
I like Guy Debord too, but I'm not really sure how useful his writing is now that we exist in the world that he had predicted. It's useful in recognizing how the spectacular world works, but it offers very little in the way of coping with it or learning to operate in and appreciate that condition. I'm not totally convinced that the world we live in now is as unnatural and wrong as some people would like to believe - I think there is a continuity with our past which many of us choose to ignore. I think human technology and culture has evolved this way for a reason, and that reason may not be clear to us mostly because it is just very hard to have perspective on the present. I think Guy Debord was mostly just terrified of the future and what it would mean, but was keenly aware of the process of technological and cultural change mostly because he was attracted to those processes.
 
 
Jester
23:24 / 30.12.03
Hmm, I suppose that depends on your view point of the world we live in... I think his writing is still pretty useful (as useful as anything written 30ish years ago can be) as a way of explaining what's wrong with the modern, Western world. As far as being continous with the development of western history, I thought that was his thesis... He seems to locate the problem starting around the time when human societies stopped being migratory... Still, I'd love to discuss it What do you think?
 
  

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