(actually diz now, not diz's girlfriend)
Let me come at this another way - if there's any hope for real change to happen in our lifetime, it will have to come with popular political support.
i don't know if i believe this. in fact, i'm pretty sure i don't believe this. at least, not in the way you mean. more on this below.
This will never happen if activists are fixated on advertising, because it's a symptom and not the real problem,
i will mostly agree that advertising is a symptom, and not the problem. but it's also an opportunity, which is why i basically like Adbusters.
and more often than not the critique centers on an elitist dismissal of mainstream culture and lifestyles. This is TREMENDOUSLY alienating.
well, to a certain extent, this is understandable. there's a lot of romantic nostalgia and sentimental fondness on the Left for the basic virtue of Joe Sixpack, but, to be frank, that doesn't really bear out in real life too often. Joe Sixpack voted for Nixon, and Reagan, and probably will vote for Dubya in the fall. in general, Joe Sixpack has historically been lukewarm to hostile towards racial integration, and is currently no big fan of gay rights, either. in general, the working class has opposed environmental regulation and increasingly opposes any sort of social spending.
on a more personal level, and i know that a lot of people who are on the left are in my boat here, Joe Sixpack's kids were the ones kicking the crap out of us in the parking lot for having weird-looking hair when we were growing up. when i was in high school, and people in my little blue-collar town in Jersey threw shit at me from passing pickup trucks and screamed "FAGGOT!", it wasn't the country club set driving the truck. on some intellectual level, i feel a sense of solidarity with the working class, but in real life? come on.
in any case, it doesn't really matter, anyway, sorry to say.
You need that mainstream culture on your side to get the machine of change moving.
i don't believe that this is true. at least, not anymore. there may (and it's a big may) have been a brief period where direct mass populism was practical as a tool of political change in America and Europe, say from the mid 18th century to the mid-20th. that moment, if it ever really existed, is pretty much over.
more importantly, i don't believe that political change is something that is done, but rather something that happens, or, if you will, something that evolves. a society is nto a collection of rational individuals making decisions, it's an organism, and individual people are basically only cells. we are created by our society to a greater degree than we create it, and because we are created by the society we're raised into our ability to consciously reshape that society is drastically limited.
what we can do, and, really, this is all we can do in terms of political action, IMHO, is to nudge the environment in which the social organism evolves in the hopes that it will grow into the shape we've tried to lay out for it. probably the biggest way we do this is through technology (and i mean this in the broad sense), which creates needs, niches, and demands to which the host society reacts and into which the society shapes itself. a second way that we do this, intimately linked to the first, is by shaping the memetic environment, through the manipulation of language/symbols/media/ideas/whatever.
that's really about it as far as potential for social change goes, but both aspects are really powerful. however, neither really require the active consent of the majority of the people. shape the environment into which people grow, through manipulation of technology and memes, and those who don't fit into the world you shape will simply be selected out, and their children will have evolved to fit the niches molded for them.
you want to change society? develop technologies that force changes, dump friendly memes in the memepool whenever you can, and cross your fingers and wait for evolution. "the will of the people" is an illusion that there's no point chasing down. |
)