Just occurred to me as I was making some coffee at noon -- I got up at noon this Monday, and why not? -- that not so long ago sugar was a major part of the commercial engine driving Western expansion into the rest of the world. Now it's so common you can buy five pounds of white sugar (once the most prized variety) for the same price as a loaf of moderately-expensive bread, and we have a national epidemic of childhood obesity because high-calorie sweeteners are added to so many things that remain so cheap, many of which are sold in our schools.
In the heyday of colonialism, people were enslaved to plant, harvest, process sugar. Now we have a different kind of economically-driven domination. People ruin their physical lives in order to consume.
This is part of a general trend in the post-industrial era, the transition from production to service and consumption. We really don't need 6 billion people making things with the most advanced machinery possible. It would be thousands of times more than the world needs. I mean, the industry of fashion had to be invented from whole cloth to keep the textile industry alive. Fashion is an information industry, mostly design and marketing, which informs the masses that old clothing (the last style, the last year, the last season) should be thrown out and new attire purchased on a semi-regular basis.
I'm not opposed to fashion as a concept, but it's interesting how it's been put to work by the profit cartel to harness the Westernized human being's desire for identity in the service of consumption. The supreme irony is that because this consumption is meant to justify the output of our mighty engines of mass production, people's hunger for identity-bolstering products, things one would think would set the individual apart from the mass, tends to be sated in a rather uniform manner.
This has been generally true across the cultural board for some time -- "I'm going to be alternative, just like everyone else" -- and there are fascinating questions to be investigated about the nature of identity vis-a-vis individualism. It's coming to many people's attention that there is no such thing as an individual; neither man nor woman can exist as an island. So you need a tribe, people you belong to, etc. But still, the way in which the corporate market has been able to co-opt the notion of rebellion against the corporate market is really quite something.
This phenomena feels prescient to me because I went through adolesence at the onset of Grunge (soon followed by Punk) as a marketed culture. I can recall watching "Smells Like Teen Spirit" debut on MTV at the age of 12 and being vaguely afraid of what I was seeing, similarly to how I felt when my friend Ramen made me a tape-copy of Ice Cube's seminal Predator. Now I recognize it as the tipping point where a cultural style went from being an indigenous set of rituals and products to the primary product of a massive marketing engine.
No matter how personal that feels to me as someone who had it wrapped up in their early adolesence, it's not a new phenomena. The story of Alternative/Grunge and Hip Hop are just semi-recent examples of a cultural cycle that's gone round several times in the late 20th Century. It's the story of Rock and Roll, a fact which not even Elvis or The Beatles or either of their cunning management teams fully understood at the time. It's the story of the "Hippies", a cultural term which started as semi-derogatory, not something the denizens of 1960s counter-culture created or owned.
Today I think something new is emerging. Due to the democratization of information, the ability of centralized and established power centers to influence the development of culture is decreasing. There's a growing amount of factionalization within the cultural sphere. One need only look at the array of musical genres which are bandied about seriously (at least by their practitioners) to see the movement. Everywhere that culture has slipped out from under the corporate thumb, an explosion of innovation has occurred.
The critical change is that the democratization of information allows for a much different kind of power relationship between cultural producers and audiences, and in fact eliminates the need for people to be permanently tied to one class or another. One night I may be a producer or a performer, the next night I may be an appreciative member of an audeince or even just another mindless consumer. You can play a bunch of roles in life; it's the cosmopolitan way, and it's more fun than being a starving artists or a couch potato.
More and more and more of this to come.
