Dec 9, 09:07 AM
I bought nothing; is the world now a better place?
Shortly after I got home after celebrating Thanksgiving with my wife’s family in West Virginia, it occurred to me that I had unwittingly participated in Buy Nothing Day.
The basic idea behind Buy Nothing Day—BND, as the cool kids call it—is that while everyone else in America is up at 5 a.m. to hit the stores, you make it a point to buy nothing at all for the entire day.
For me it was easy. I just played about 20 games of Clue with my nephew, watched some football, went on some walks, drank a bunch of wine, played guitar, ate a ton—it didn’t even feel like work.
In fact, I actually participated in the previously unheralded Buy Nothing Three Day, because my wallet stayed firmly in my pants’ pocket on Thanksgiving, the day after, and the day after that.
But to hear Kelle Lasn, founder of BND and also Adbusters tell it, this 24-hour “consumer fast” is not only challenging but also life-changing. This from Wired.com:
I have talked to hundreds if not thousands of people over the years about how they have negotiated this consumer fast for 24 hours, and it’s amazing how many people, a huge percentage, who go on this personal experiment, how they have a very profound day. Some who do make it through, by the end of the day they say, “Wow, what an incredible experience that was.”
Boy, glad I “made it through.” Who would have thought it could be so hard to not buy stuff?
Maybe I need to challenge myself a bit and participate in some of the more involved BND activities, like setting up a credit card cut-up station at Wal-Mart, or buying and returning the same thing over and over again all day just to piss people off?
No, I think that my real problem is that BND and other countercultural hipster fests meant to be political statements just seem like bullshit to me.
While I can’t imagine a more loathsome way to spend a free day off from work than to go to a mall or a “big box” retailer, I generally don’t buy much of anything ever, and I do actually find much of mass culture (including everything from reality TV to TGI Friday’s) to be rather depressing, I’ve given up pretending that my consumer choices have some kind of great political meaning.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t make personal choices based on their impact on society. One of the reasons I’m a vegetarian, for example, is that I’ve been convinced by the evidence that meat production contributes to environmental problems.
But what bugs me about Lasn and the whole BND crowd is the implication that they’ve got all the world’s problems figured out, but they don’t need to explain their conclusions or solutions rationally. Consumerism, they feel, is such a deeply rooted problem, one so insidious and all encompassing, that it is the ultimate cause of all social ills. At the same time, it infects us deep in our psyches so that we can’t simply make different choices about the way we as individuals will behave and the way our society will be ordered; no, we need hipsters to come along and rebrand buying stuff as not cool anymore.
I’d say instead that Lasn and his global posse of culture jammers exhibit some pretty confused thinking (as a review of his book makes quite clear) and it may be that they just get off on being contrarian.
An interview with one of the authors of a book that takes on Adbusters and the whole idea of counterculture as political statement pretty well sums up the way my thinking on these matters has changed since college:
I don’t remember having a particular moment of enlightenment. Countercultural thinking is the sort of thing you just need to grow out of. At a certain point, you wake up and realize that everything you railed against as a student – The System, The Man, The Masses – doesn’t really exist. And all the people you had contempt for – yuppies and all the other sellouts—are just a bunch of people more or less like yourself, trying to make their way in the world. Also, after a while it occurs to you that all the culture jamming in the world hasn’t made a bit of difference, and you start to think that maybe there’s something else going on. You grow a little less contemptuous, and start to have a little more faith in the institutions we use to navigate our way around one other. It helps to just keep reading, and it also helps to quit reading the same people over and over. I don’t think there’s much to be gained by spending your days reading the latest pamphlet from Chomsky, since you already know what he’s going to say.
And I guess I could be content to just let the culture jammers and BNDers and the members of Rev. Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping continue to get a little thrill from yelling at people in Starbucks (I don’t really like Starbucks either, after all), but it drives me nuts that this is what passes for young lefty political involvement in this country.
The young idealistic types who should be in the streets screaming and yelling that our government is sponsoring torture, who should be demanding an end to genocide in Darfur, are too busy concentrating really hard on not buying stuff and working out ever more convoluted theories about how the non-act of not buying things is somehow important and subversive.
So here’s what I say (with no small degree of sympathy, as I once counted myself one of them) to all the fans of culture jamming, adbusting, and countercultural “actions”:
Look, there’s no doubt our landfills are clogged with junk that wasn’t needed to begin with. But if you want to do something about it, you’re better off making rational arguments in favor of recycling, for example, or reducing packaging, or finding safer ways to dispose of batteries and electronics. Learn about the issues, speak intelligently about them, write letters to Congress, use methods that will garner the support of people who (rightly) see piling stuff up in shopping carts and then leaving it in the middle of the store as nothing but silly—and a pain the ass for the poor schmoes working at the store.
Don’t always assume a vast conspiracy that can only be overturned with “radical” action—which all too often means “harebrained.” Don’t assume that your fellow citizens are mindless drones who can’t respond to anything except for pre-rational clues about what’s cool or hip; that leads you to employing the same brainless tactics as the corporations you’re trying to subvert.
Yelling at people in the mall may feel good to you, but that’s about all that it accomplishes.
And, in general, while George Bush and his cronies were stupid to say (or at least strongly imply) that the best thing Americans could do to fight the “war on terror” was to go out and keep shopping, the idea that anything positive will be accomplished by simply not shopping is probably just as dumb.
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