I feel barely human after the killer deadline (hence my short posts of late). All the madness, just for this: the silly Lee Jeans website. Hours and hours of late night digital photography, DV camerawork, endless Photoshopping, video editing, Flash crises... I guess the best thing about the site is that you can abuse it by sending naughty graffiti postcards of defaced photos from the catalogue to all your friends. I started doing this as soon as we sent it live. Picture of a boy and girl humping on top of a fridge = "FUCK THE WAR, LET'S FUCK". Picture of a boy with gold chains = "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS". Etcetera.
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Am absolutely furious with the latest issue of Adbusters. I've said this elsewhere before, but while I'm obviously sympathetic to the whole anti-corporate culture-jamming mission, I'm somewhat dubious about the tendency for anti-consumerist types to fetishise "brands" as being the ultimate evil -- a move which I think is a tragic misattribution of the way power operates in culture and the wider material world, which leads to an impotent politics of product boycotts and the like. This kind of phobic disavowal of mass culture is actually quite reactionary, I find, and is a covert form of commodity fetishism, deflecting analysis away from how society is actually organised.
But nothing prepared me for the amount of self-righteous, moralistic bile in this current issue. So much smug, self-satisfied sneering at people too ordinary to be enlightened, bicycle-riding vegetarians. An almost religious (and certainly feudal) mythology of "Nature" being the antidote to all that is "artificial". The branding of anyone who wears products with logos on them as corporate zombies and whores who love to exploit people in the Third World. Hell, I'm a corporate whore with the best of them -- I even work at a company that does PR work for Nike, ferchrissakes -- and even I can tell, from a revolutionary perspective, that this is moralistic nonsense.
Don't get me wrong, Adbustery types: I think any revolt against alienation must include some enjoyable smashing of the commodities that often dull us, and which certainly paper over the material relations of production. Just be prepared for the idea that the people who most often do this kind of thing in everyday life are the unenlightened, Nike wearing zombies you so despise.
