Ahhhh

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

When you start to dabble in counterculture thought, one of the first questions you tend to ask is, "Why doesn't counterculture work?" That is, if people are turned into soulless automatons by society, why haven't people figured it out by now? Heath and Potter do an excellent job of tracing counterculturalist critique back to its roots in Marxist thought, yet another member of the, "why didn't it work?" club, and in doing so, expose the fundamental issue counterculturalist thinkers often refuse to face, and the reason why their prescriptions for change are frequently lacking.

Counterculturalist thought, like Marxist thought, depends on a basic adversarial society; that is, society is divided into those who have power and those who do not. The powerless masses are then manipulated by the powerful; in Marxism, for their labor, in countercultural critiques, for their purchasing power. This, of course, is not a situtation any rational individual would wish to remain in, hence the Marxist and counterculturalist beliefs that society will eventually unite and throw off the shackles of oppression. The fact that no such uprising has occurred leads both groups to posit a cycle propagated by those in power; for counterculturalist thinkers, this is the barrage of advertisements and institutions which create artificial needs and desires, keeping people locked into the neverending consumer cycle.

Heath and Potter start with a relatively simple question: what if they're wrong? What if the decision to remain in consumer society is not irrational, but is, in fact, completely rational? "Ah," I hear you cry, "But, pray, how can an irrational outcome derive from rational actions?" The answer: collective action problems, situations where a collective group finds an outcome desirable, but, in the end a less satisfactory outcome is reached because none of the individuals have an incentive to make the optimal outcome reality. The prototype collective action problem is the prisoner's dilemma, where two criminals are caught, separated into different interrogation rooms, and given a choice: testify against their partner or remain silent. Should both remain silent, they each get a year (there's a bit of an involved setup to the problem, in which it is assumed that the two of you committed a crime, but are actually being brought in for a lesser infraction). Should one testify about the greater crime and the other remain silent, the rat goes free and the silent partner gets 6 years. Should both testify against one another, both will receive 5 years.

Obviously the best outcome for both individuals is for both to remain silent. However, in practice, when the two criminals are unable to co-ordinate or otherwise communicate, they will tend to choose the last option: both will testify, and both will receive 5 years. This is because there is no incentive for the prisoners to act out of anything other than self-interest, and is why petty crime quickly becomes organized crime; you need rules to govern such situations, you need a rule of omerta which has real consequences for those who break it, who attempt to become "free riders."

The prisoner's dilemma is, of course, a relatively static situation. However, it can be extended to a perpetual one, as in the case of an arms race: two countries choosing their defense expenditures. Ideally, if both chose low or minimal levels, both would be safest; fewer bombs, tanks and such to go about killing each other with. However, if one chose low and the other chose high, the higher spender would be relatively more secure, due to their position of military dominance. If both choose high, they will be safer than if they had chosen low and their rival high, but less safe than if both had spent less - more bombs, tanks and such, with the attendant pressures to use them before they become obsolete. The fear of this, and of falling to a relatively lower level of expenditure than your rival (and thus a relatively lower level of security) is what makes arms races escalate and perpetuate themselves, maintaining an irrational outcome through rational decisions.

So, now it's been demonstrated how consumers could remain locked into buying cycles; but how do they get into them in the first place? Here is where counterculture gets its rudest shock. Counterculturalists theorize that mass culture is a culture of faceless oppression; mindless drones wearing the same styles, the same colors, the same brands. How else could one explain the (seemingly irrational) decision of consumers to buy new styles of clothing every year, when the previous year's clothing remains perfectly functional? It must be because of a desire to "fit in," right?

Again, Heath and Potter disagree. It is, in fact, the search for cool, the search for individuality, which drives consumers. Cool items are positional goods; that is, they confer a position above and beyond the mere functionality of an item. Coolness is also a zero-sum game; that is, it is only possible to be cool if someone or something else is uncool (this leads to the most awesome quote ever used in a quasi-intellectual book: "As Butthead put it, 'If nothing sucked, and like, everything was cool all the time, then it's like, how would you know what was cool? ...It's like, you need stuff that sucks to have stuff that's cool.'") Therefore, cool-seeking consumers are always pushing, always looking for the newest, coolest item to set themselves apart from their peers, but as soon as they find it, their peers rush to buy it as well, forcing the trend-setters to move on to the new, cool thing - an arms race of coolness.

This perspective also explains the process of "co-optation" which counterculturalist thinkers bemoan, the process by which their "independent" styles and arts are processed, sanitized and then vomited onto the mass market. Counterculturalists see this as a betrayal of their values, and accuse those who participate in the process of "selling out," but it's not selling out because modern counterculturalist critics and institutions are not revolutionary; they're merely reframing the same counterculturalist thought that has dominated the left since the '60s, a pattern of thought that has been driving consumer culture since then.

Kudos to you for reading this far down! This is massive, and probably really boring, so I suppose I'll stop...for now.