8 ms·

Why It's So Hard to Get Real

29 points by grellas 17y ago

plesn 17y ago
The "authenticity hoax" is an intersting one, but the analysis is particularly shallow and consensual. Basically he points out that the quest for "authenticity" is both opposed to progress ("consumer culture"...) and rather a quest of social markers. But he jumps to the conclusion that we should consequently "accept [modernity's] trade-offs". It seems like a typical example of paralogism: either your for us (our current implementation of progress, the powers in place) or you're against us. There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin? Nevertheless, what he points about "authenticity" is important as people who reject consumerism tend to throw the baby out with bath water and seek a return to an idealized past. The problem here is the lack of visible alternatives to our regimes (so, in some sense, the powerfull media and propanda industry). However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture! Yes. I agree. Moving away from old mistakes (e.g. suburbia and car culture) is not a departure from modernity. No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress. In any case, the old regime is going to die. It's unsustainable, and it's already showing its cracks. This is why I don't invest in the stock market. It was a great idea between 1930 and 2000, as American corporations managed to become increasingly dominant in modern life, but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.
  - plesn 17y ago
    My bet is we are transitioning from a society of cheep energy to a society of cheap information: we'll be consuming less and interacting more. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily imply less powerful corporations: they're already fighting for the control of what we are allowed to create, how we can interact (privacy), what we can do with our stuff, which crops we will eat, etc. I'm an optimist though: I hope they won't eventually succeed.
  - anamax 17y ago
    Summary: there is no "one size fits all". > No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, You're assuming that everyone in suburbia spends 80 minutes commuting. Some do, some don't. You're also assuming that commute times are uniform and that minimizing them is the only goal. In my household, commute time is 10 minutes by one person and 60 by the other. Moving closer to the 60 would move us farther from other things that are important to us. > and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress. You're assuming that people value living closer together. Some don't. They'll gladly pay extra commute time to avoid it. I write "extra" because that time on the train/bus is also commute time, and it isn't necessarily better time than car time. Yes, some people do prefer train time to driving, but not everyone thinks that 30 minutes on a train (or bus) is better than 80 minutes in a car. (If you need to run errands or do something, the car wins.) And even fewer like the train/bus if it's the same or more time. I think that people who don't like suburbia's tradeoffs shouldn't live there. The same is true of cities.... Not everyone is a DINK couple. Some people even drive because that makes it possible for them to quickly get to their kids in an emergency. (Parents value such things.)
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      I don't have a problem with driving. I like driving, but I wouldn't enjoy having to do it for an hour every day. It's car dependence that sucks about suburbia. When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.
- anamax 17y ago
  > There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin? There does seem to be correlation. Whether it's coincidence or causation (in either direction) is unclear. Why should we ignore this? FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it. > However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture! This "resilent" claim is interesting. The dependent systems haven't had the mass famines that are a staple of the decentralized ones. Yes, I agree that there are lots of potential failure points in centralized agriculture. However, experience matters too. Note that there actually isn't "a" centralized agriculture system, there are many, one or more for each common foodstuff. For example, Kansas grows lots of wheat, but so does Canada, so crop failures in Kansas don't have a huge effect in California, even though CA doesn't grow much wheat. (I'm guessing that CA doesn't produce much wheat, so substitute a state that doesn't produce wheat if CA does.) There is one counter-example - "gas from corn" in the US had a horrible effect on food prices in Mexico. (We'd be better off importing methanol from Brazil.)
  - plesn 17y ago
    First point ("consumerism vs. repressive cultures"): reread my post, don't do amalgams. I fail to see the correlation between proponents of "authenticity" and dictator regimes. First, in the article authenticity proponents are pictured as "anti-globalization" activists: I rarely see vegetarians as mostly concerned by marxism. Moreover it is questionnable to correlate dictator regimes with Marxism: many south-amercian or african regimes are/were backed by the US/France/etc... Finally, Marxism was mostly productivist (except Lafargue), non-decentralised (you don't have to go to Lenin and Trotsky taking over the Soviets, you already see it in the argument between Marx and Bakounin), and moreover its analysis did not insist on differentiating financial and industrial capital, which is important to understand the current crisis. All in all, as I was saying, the media industry frames all opposition as "repressive" and "brutal" and makes it diffult to find alternatives: hopefully people everywhere are creative in actions and thoughts. Second point: I was not formulating a binary centralized vs decentralized debate where transporting food is not allowed or we go back to the Middle-Age; I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008). It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.
- hugh3 17y ago
  There was a really good article linked here a few days ago called "Create More, Consume Less". (Unfortunately since the article was on the bog Art of Manliness the discussion centered more around sexism than anything else.) Anyway, it talked about consumerism as being all about defining yourself by what you consume, and how this makes you a dull person who never does anything worthwhile or interesting. By this definition the obsessive "organic" or "local food" types are just as boringly consumerist as any Manolo-obsessed bar skank or the douchebag driving the BMW he can't really afford. Anti-consumerism is a form of consumerism just as mind-dulling as consumerism itself. I am forced by geography to shop at a rather hippieish supermarket in Berkeley (the Berkeley Bowl) where I always pity those fellow shoppers who have nothing more interesting to think about than how to optimise the organicness of their purchases in order to increase their own self-image. Personally I try not to buy anything labelled "organic" and to always choose plastic over paper, just to cancel some of them out.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
I like tropical fruits too much to eschew anything that comes from more than 100 miles, but the "authenticity" movement has a point. Modernity is mostly a good thing, but it has its pitfalls. For example, eating 150 pounds per year of added sugars-- mostly high-fructose corn syrup-- is not healthy. Nor are hydrogenated oils good for the body, at all. Suburbia has been mostly a mistake (intended to be the "best of both worlds" between rural and urban life, but closer to the worst of both for the poorer 90%). Wal-Marts are generally bad for communities, as they eviscerate their business-owning middle classes. Finally, although I don't foresee "peak oil" in the immediate future, it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. When the chips are down, almost no one wants to get rid of modernity. The anti-vaccine morons and the creationist loons and the Tea Party slobs are out there, but they're on the fringe. On the other hand, the concerns being voiced in the "authenticity" movement are legitimate; is it really good for us, as a nation, to have an economy that relies on an environmentally costly fuel that we have to import from religiously bigoted and psychopathic despots?
- Qwe679 17y ago
  You do realize that those Walmarts not only create thousands of new jobs for their communities, but also several more from anchoring other multi-national stores that come because of Walmart?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  >Finally, although I don't foresee "peak oil" in the immediate future, it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. Peak oil precisely means that it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. We've used up most of the cheap, easy-to-reach oil and now we're paying more (and producing more pollution) to get at the expensive, hard-to-reach oil.
- iskander 17y ago
  Walmart and suburbia have leveled American living standards. Now any old slob can own a house and fill it with the same sorts of things as their richer compatriots (though it will be made in China rather than Germany). Things didn't used to be this way-- and people complaining about the change are often rich enough to not need Walmart to maintain their lifestyle.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Potter was co-author (with Joseph Heath) of The Rebel Sell, in which they argued that the hip counter-culture rejection of competitive mass consumer culture is itself a primary driver of that culture, setting up fashion and lifestyle as positional goods and enforcing a fast turnover of consumer products in a futile collective attempt to stay ahead of the curve. I'm a pretty left-wing liberal, and for me Rebel Sell was a powerful antidote to the sometimes-ridiculous conceits and dogmas of the left - including the belief that mainstream culture is phony (think The Matrix or, more recently, Wall-E), the sheeple are all brainwashed, and the best thing the Hipster Elect can do for them is to try and wake them up.
balding_n_tired 17y ago
Authenticity: buy it by the bag. My problem with many rejections of consumerism is that in fact they are rejections of the consumerism of people with fewer dollars and perhaps degrees. I hoped the peak of absurdity was reached when the NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the Reverend Billy, who does anti-Starbucks stunts. It did not seem to bother those who wrote in the following week that the magazine routinely features outfits in the fashion section that would cover the monthly mortgage on a pretty good house in much of the country.
mcgyver5 17y ago
A. the authenticity movement don't like America's consumer culture B. brutal third world dictators don't like America Therefore, the authenticity movement likes brutal third world dictators
billybob 17y ago
You heard it here first: authenticity is fake! Fakeness is the new authenticity!
tbgvi 17y ago
I get this feeling every time I'm in Whole Foods. It seems like everyone there looks exactly the same. Then I look at my girlfriend and think to myself "Damn, now I'm part of the stereotype". Also reminds me of the Chicago term "Trixie". The Wikipedia entry nails the definition: "a "blond, late-twenties woman with a ponytail who works in PR or marketing, drives a black Jetta, gets manicures and no-foam skim lattes."[5] Trixies typically also have a small dog (a pug, puggle or shiba inu) and know all of the other neighborhood dog owners by their dogs name." I'm sure that nowadays Trixie only buys local organic produce.
tremendo 17y ago
It hadn't occurred to me that caring for the quality of what my family and I ingest had anything to do with "authenticity", I thought it was all about trying to take care of ourselves and hopefully minimize the possibility of having to fix things after they are broken. I for one, love modernity, buy some food from local sources, some others even from the "hippie" stores, other from the local cheapie chain supermarkets. It's always balancing quality, convenience, budget and our health. We all have a different sense for what is a good balance between those criteria. Surely the author has a different perspective than mine, and may be right for even a majority of cases, there are definitely those that seek validation and some sense of self worth with their behaviour. Others, and this is my perspective, just want to be pragmatic and maybe not too stupid.

29 points by grellas 17y ago

plesn 17y ago

The "authenticity hoax" is an intersting one, but the analysis is particularly shallow and consensual. Basically he points out that the quest for "authenticity" is both opposed to progress ("consumer culture"...) and rather a quest of social markers. But he jumps to the conclusion that we should consequently "accept [modernity's] trade-offs". It seems like a typical example of paralogism: either your for us (our current implementation of progress, the powers in place) or you're against us. There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin? Nevertheless, what he points about "authenticity" is important as people who reject consumerism tend to throw the baby out with bath water and seek a return to an idealized past. The problem here is the lack of visible alternatives to our regimes (so, in some sense, the powerfull media and propanda industry). However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!

pw0ncakes 17y ago
However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture! Yes. I agree. Moving away from old mistakes (e.g. suburbia and car culture) is not a departure from modernity. No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress. In any case, the old regime is going to die. It's unsustainable, and it's already showing its cracks. This is why I don't invest in the stock market. It was a great idea between 1930 and 2000, as American corporations managed to become increasingly dominant in modern life, but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.
- plesn 17y ago
  My bet is we are transitioning from a society of cheep energy to a society of cheap information: we'll be consuming less and interacting more. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily imply less powerful corporations: they're already fighting for the control of what we are allowed to create, how we can interact (privacy), what we can do with our stuff, which crops we will eat, etc. I'm an optimist though: I hope they won't eventually succeed.
- anamax 17y ago
  Summary: there is no "one size fits all". > No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, You're assuming that everyone in suburbia spends 80 minutes commuting. Some do, some don't. You're also assuming that commute times are uniform and that minimizing them is the only goal. In my household, commute time is 10 minutes by one person and 60 by the other. Moving closer to the 60 would move us farther from other things that are important to us. > and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress. You're assuming that people value living closer together. Some don't. They'll gladly pay extra commute time to avoid it. I write "extra" because that time on the train/bus is also commute time, and it isn't necessarily better time than car time. Yes, some people do prefer train time to driving, but not everyone thinks that 30 minutes on a train (or bus) is better than 80 minutes in a car. (If you need to run errands or do something, the car wins.) And even fewer like the train/bus if it's the same or more time. I think that people who don't like suburbia's tradeoffs shouldn't live there. The same is true of cities.... Not everyone is a DINK couple. Some people even drive because that makes it possible for them to quickly get to their kids in an emergency. (Parents value such things.)
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    I don't have a problem with driving. I like driving, but I wouldn't enjoy having to do it for an hour every day. It's car dependence that sucks about suburbia. When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.
anamax 17y ago
> There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin? There does seem to be correlation. Whether it's coincidence or causation (in either direction) is unclear. Why should we ignore this? FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it. > However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture! This "resilent" claim is interesting. The dependent systems haven't had the mass famines that are a staple of the decentralized ones. Yes, I agree that there are lots of potential failure points in centralized agriculture. However, experience matters too. Note that there actually isn't "a" centralized agriculture system, there are many, one or more for each common foodstuff. For example, Kansas grows lots of wheat, but so does Canada, so crop failures in Kansas don't have a huge effect in California, even though CA doesn't grow much wheat. (I'm guessing that CA doesn't produce much wheat, so substitute a state that doesn't produce wheat if CA does.) There is one counter-example - "gas from corn" in the US had a horrible effect on food prices in Mexico. (We'd be better off importing methanol from Brazil.)
- plesn 17y ago
  First point ("consumerism vs. repressive cultures"): reread my post, don't do amalgams. I fail to see the correlation between proponents of "authenticity" and dictator regimes. First, in the article authenticity proponents are pictured as "anti-globalization" activists: I rarely see vegetarians as mostly concerned by marxism. Moreover it is questionnable to correlate dictator regimes with Marxism: many south-amercian or african regimes are/were backed by the US/France/etc... Finally, Marxism was mostly productivist (except Lafargue), non-decentralised (you don't have to go to Lenin and Trotsky taking over the Soviets, you already see it in the argument between Marx and Bakounin), and moreover its analysis did not insist on differentiating financial and industrial capital, which is important to understand the current crisis. All in all, as I was saying, the media industry frames all opposition as "repressive" and "brutal" and makes it diffult to find alternatives: hopefully people everywhere are creative in actions and thoughts. Second point: I was not formulating a binary centralized vs decentralized debate where transporting food is not allowed or we go back to the Middle-Age; I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008). It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.
hugh3 17y ago
There was a really good article linked here a few days ago called "Create More, Consume Less". (Unfortunately since the article was on the bog Art of Manliness the discussion centered more around sexism than anything else.) Anyway, it talked about consumerism as being all about defining yourself by what you consume, and how this makes you a dull person who never does anything worthwhile or interesting. By this definition the obsessive "organic" or "local food" types are just as boringly consumerist as any Manolo-obsessed bar skank or the douchebag driving the BMW he can't really afford. Anti-consumerism is a form of consumerism just as mind-dulling as consumerism itself. I am forced by geography to shop at a rather hippieish supermarket in Berkeley (the Berkeley Bowl) where I always pity those fellow shoppers who have nothing more interesting to think about than how to optimise the organicness of their purchases in order to increase their own self-image. Personally I try not to buy anything labelled "organic" and to always choose plastic over paper, just to cancel some of them out.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

I like tropical fruits too much to eschew anything that comes from more than 100 miles, but the "authenticity" movement has a point. Modernity is mostly a good thing, but it has its pitfalls. For example, eating 150 pounds per year of added sugars-- mostly high-fructose corn syrup-- is not healthy. Nor are hydrogenated oils good for the body, at all. Suburbia has been mostly a mistake (intended to be the "best of both worlds" between rural and urban life, but closer to the worst of both for the poorer 90%). Wal-Marts are generally bad for communities, as they eviscerate their business-owning middle classes. Finally, although I don't foresee "peak oil" in the immediate future, it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. When the chips are down, almost no one wants to get rid of modernity. The anti-vaccine morons and the creationist loons and the Tea Party slobs are out there, but they're on the fringe. On the other hand, the concerns being voiced in the "authenticity" movement are legitimate; is it really good for us, as a nation, to have an economy that relies on an environmentally costly fuel that we have to import from religiously bigoted and psychopathic despots?

Qwe679 17y ago
You do realize that those Walmarts not only create thousands of new jobs for their communities, but also several more from anchoring other multi-national stores that come because of Walmart?
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
>Finally, although I don't foresee "peak oil" in the immediate future, it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. Peak oil precisely means that it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. We've used up most of the cheap, easy-to-reach oil and now we're paying more (and producing more pollution) to get at the expensive, hard-to-reach oil.
iskander 17y ago
Walmart and suburbia have leveled American living standards. Now any old slob can own a house and fill it with the same sorts of things as their richer compatriots (though it will be made in China rather than Germany). Things didn't used to be this way-- and people complaining about the change are often rich enough to not need Walmart to maintain their lifestyle.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

Potter was co-author (with Joseph Heath) of The Rebel Sell, in which they argued that the hip counter-culture rejection of competitive mass consumer culture is itself a primary driver of that culture, setting up fashion and lifestyle as positional goods and enforcing a fast turnover of consumer products in a futile collective attempt to stay ahead of the curve. I'm a pretty left-wing liberal, and for me Rebel Sell was a powerful antidote to the sometimes-ridiculous conceits and dogmas of the left - including the belief that mainstream culture is phony (think The Matrix or, more recently, Wall-E), the sheeple are all brainwashed, and the best thing the Hipster Elect can do for them is to try and wake them up.

balding_n_tired 17y ago

Authenticity: buy it by the bag. My problem with many rejections of consumerism is that in fact they are rejections of the consumerism of people with fewer dollars and perhaps degrees. I hoped the peak of absurdity was reached when the NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the Reverend Billy, who does anti-Starbucks stunts. It did not seem to bother those who wrote in the following week that the magazine routinely features outfits in the fashion section that would cover the monthly mortgage on a pretty good house in much of the country.

mcgyver5 17y ago

A. the authenticity movement don't like America's consumer culture B. brutal third world dictators don't like America Therefore, the authenticity movement likes brutal third world dictators

billybob 17y ago

You heard it here first: authenticity is fake! Fakeness is the new authenticity!

tbgvi 17y ago

I get this feeling every time I'm in Whole Foods. It seems like everyone there looks exactly the same. Then I look at my girlfriend and think to myself "Damn, now I'm part of the stereotype". Also reminds me of the Chicago term "Trixie". The Wikipedia entry nails the definition: "a "blond, late-twenties woman with a ponytail who works in PR or marketing, drives a black Jetta, gets manicures and no-foam skim lattes."[5] Trixies typically also have a small dog (a pug, puggle or shiba inu) and know all of the other neighborhood dog owners by their dogs name." I'm sure that nowadays Trixie only buys local organic produce.

tremendo 17y ago

It hadn't occurred to me that caring for the quality of what my family and I ingest had anything to do with "authenticity", I thought it was all about trying to take care of ourselves and hopefully minimize the possibility of having to fix things after they are broken. I for one, love modernity, buy some food from local sources, some others even from the "hippie" stores, other from the local cheapie chain supermarkets. It's always balancing quality, convenience, budget and our health. We all have a different sense for what is a good balance between those criteria. Surely the author has a different perspective than mine, and may be right for even a majority of cases, there are definitely those that seek validation and some sense of self worth with their behaviour. Others, and this is my perspective, just want to be pragmatic and maybe not too stupid.