2.18.2008

adbusters, authenticity, and the inherent insult.

Kalle Lasn thinks everyone is a moron.

Reading his most recent editorial, where he states "Suddenly, people are waking up in droves from the dreamland of corporate cool. We’re realizing that ever since we were little babies crawling around the TV sets in our living rooms, we’ve been lied to, propagandized, and told incessantly, day after day, that we can find happiness through consumption. That’s why, like rats in a Skinner box, we’ve kept on pressing that BUY button – millions of us marching in lockstep, all dreaming the same consumerist dream." it becomes clear that he thinks we're all morons. Lasn, and the entire ethos behind Adbusters, buys into the idea that 'authenticity' is something that the chosen few counterculture warriors can understand and identify, and that the rest of us are so worn down by advertising that we cannot possibly understand it.

If you've been reading for a minute, you know that I think the concept of authenticity, as it applies to consumerism, is really code for 'continues-to-represent-consumer-identity-over-time'. The same concept can be applied to music, as bands 'sell out' when they stop being a signifier for the kind of identity that the fan wants to project.

I would submit that the assumption that authenticity is like taste, and only a certain, dashing, revolutionary few can locate it, is a bigger endorsement of the capitalist mindset than anything else. Adbusters advocates consumer action, a lifestyle, and more or less a uniform (blackspot sneakers, a no blood for oil pin, and a keffiyeh) in it's fan base. And it tells you to do this because it is supposed to suggest you are better than other people. This is the core of the suggestion that everyone else (who isn't buying the magazine) is being duped.

The idea that consumers don't realize the separation between the corporately created and the 'authentic' offends me. Because it's the companies that lose touch with consumer needs that fail, and it's the ones that identify a niche and change with it that succeed. But anyone who assumes that the consumer, that the society is composed of mindless sheep should, and will eventually fail hard.

But Kalle Lasn thinks that everyone who doesn't agree with his interpretation of capitalist culture is an idiot. And people keep looking to him for ideas on how to kill this dominant culture that only tricks the unlucky morons who don't see the truth available to his chosen few.

1 comment:

Randeep Katari said...

Well said sir, well said.
It's interesting to see how you've applied his own theory to Lasn himself.

R.