How to Save the World

September 2003 marked a turning point in the development of Western civilization. It was the month that Adbusters magazine started accepting orders for the Black Spot Sneaker, its own signature brand of "subversive" running shoes. After that day, no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between "mainstream" and "alternative" culture. After that day, it became obvious to everyone that cultural rebellion, of the type epitomized by Adbusters magazine, is not a threat to the system -- it is the system.

Founded in 1989, Adbusters is the flagship publication of the culture-jamming movement. In their view, society has become so thoroughly permeated with propaganda and lies, largely as a consequence of advertising, that the culture as a whole has become an enormous system of ideology -- all designed to reproduce faith in "the system." The goal of the culture jammers is quite literally to "jam" the culture, by subverting the messages used to reproduce this faith and blocking the channels through which it is propagated. This in turn is thought to have radical political consequences. In 1999, Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn argued that culture jamming "will become to our era what civil rights was to the '60s, what feminism was to the '70s, what environmental activism was to the '80s." Five years later, he's using the Adbusters brand to flog his own trademark line of running shoes. What happened? Did Adbusters sell out?

Absolutely not. It is essential that we all see and understand this. Adbusters did not sell out, because there was nothing to sell out in the first place. Adbusters never had a revolutionary doctrine. What they had was simply a warmed-over version of the countercultural thinking that has dominated leftist politics since the '60s. And this type of countercultural politics, far from being a revolutionary doctrine, has been one of the primary forces driving consumer capitalism for the past forty years. In other words, what we see on display in Adbusters magazine is, and always has been, the true spirit of capitalism. The episode with the running shoes just serves to prove the point.

What countercultural rebels call cooptation is in fact just competitive consumption, instigated and exacerbated by the rebels themselves. This is why rebellion of this sort has become one of the major forces driving consumer capitalism in the past 40 years. The reason the system never changes is that cultural radicalism is not genuinely radical. Mass production does not require conformity, and the capitalist system is fundamentally indifferent to grey flannel suits and biker jackets. Countercultural thinking has created a massive diversion of progressive energies into politically and economically irrelevant pursuits.

Practices such as downshifting, energy conservation, eating organic produce, and engaging in local environmental activities are pretty much useless. Countercultural thinking has reduced much of the political agenda of the left to individual consumer activism. When someone mentions "environmentalism," most people think of recycling, conserving energy, or riding a bike. Yet these sorts of strategies just promote "the exploitation of the moral by the immoral," by making it easier for the majority of the population to keep throwing away whatever they like, leaving their air conditioner on all summer, and driving their SUVs. The only real solutions to environmental problems are ones that are compulsory for the entire population. And that necessarily requires using the power of the state to punish those who fail to comply. Yet the left has become unduly cautious of this sort of strategy, precisely because so many feel that there is something suspicious or unhealthy about the use of state power.

Ultimately, the counterculture sees politics as a real-life version of The Matrix: it is a great winner-take-all battle between the totalizing forces of mass conformity and the revolutionary individualism of the enlightened rebels. This individualistic utopianism relies quite heavily on the idea of spontaneous harmony, which holds that social problems will all magically disappear once we achieve the necessary global transformation of consciousness. [heh, like One World, the Unconquerable World and the Support Economy - my editorial comment]. Joe and I think that, in addition to being impossible, this would be entirely unwelcome. We both agree with the argument familiar to readers of Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls that human values are irreducibly diverse, and that this pluralism with respect to conceptions of the good life is, on the whole, a positive thing.