PigLick on 23/11/2011 at 01:46

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if I see tl;dr one more time Im gonna scream, just write less, how easy is that?

Sulphur on 23/11/2011 at 04:43

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Oh, that post wasn't an awkward attempt at an insult. It was calling you out on being a pretentious oversensitive shitwank over things that don't necessarily require it.* Just without, you know, the insult.


*Like your general attitude towards most everything.

heywood on 23/11/2011 at 11:17

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I'll buck the trend by offering a serious reply.



Yeah, counter-culture does morph into pop culture. But I'm not convinced it's a PR phenomenon.

For example, I'm pretty sure the filmmakers behind The Motorcycle Diaries didn't set out to turn Che Guevara into a pop culture icon. That happened afterward when people started selling t-shirts of his face in parking lots at concerts. And soon enough there's posters and t-shirts of Che at suburban mall stores, selling to people who have no desire to be marxist guerilla fighters and probably don't even know he was Castro's right hand man.

I think symbols of protest and counter-culture turn into pop culture when youth adopt them for self-branding purposes. It's natural to be attracted to images of counter-culture when you're young and trying to establish your own independent identity, often without knowing much about their origins.

I can't explain Ramones t-shirts for toddlers, but it seems like a harmless source of amusement for their parents. Besides, the Ramones were never a protest band with a message.



What is a protest but a marketing exercise? Think about it. Isn't the main point of a protest to attract attention to an issue or cause in order to raise awareness and get your message out to a wider audience? That's marketing, by definition. I don't understand the point of putting all the effort into attracting an audience if you don't have a message prepared for them.

Kolya on 23/11/2011 at 21:33

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PR is certainly not the only thing that turns a meaningful symbol into a meaningless one. But it's the most pervasive and the most perverting.

When a teenager wears a Che shirt who doesn't know much about Guevara and just uses it to express his vaguely leftwing/liberal attitude, then he's far from becoming a revolutionary. But he's also far from trying to sell you the next "revolution" in kitchen appliances.

Of course symbols change as they are being used, that's their natural evolution. But that's different to a deliberate misuse of cultural symbols for profit, which is so ubiquitous, it has managed to completely invalidate pop culture, replaced it and made us nihilistic towards anything.

If that's only your favourite song being used in a commercial by the company that just spilled a few million litres mineral oil at the shore, and everyone suddenly loves it to death, that may not be so bad. At least you can get over that. But when you notice that the ship you're on has hit an iceberg and there's no way to get people notified because they're all chatting on facebook and yell "Pics or it didn't happen!" from their nihilistic bubble of media-overload, then you may realise that the means of communication have been rewritten and waving your arms and screaming "Danger!" will only get you another picture from fail-blog.



That's what it looks like, huh? Protesters are just another group of people who try to sell you their message and make you buy into their world view. And if they cannot do it professionally like the multi million dollar company why should you pay them any attention? They sure don't look very convincing, a disparate crowd of freaks who probably have too much time on their hands.

Here's the difference:

A marketing exercise means a bunch of people are trying to sell you something, because that's what they are getting paid for. It may be useful or useless or even very harmful to you. In any case they definitely aren't doing it for your own good, although they will say so.
Of course they have a catchy slogan and a jingle and catalogue of awesome features, because they have single unifying purpose: To get your money.

A protest is a bunch of people who feel there is a cause that deserves your attention and that may affect you and your life, whether you pay attention to it or not. If you look at it and decide that it doesn't make any sense to you, that's cool, not every protest does make sense of course.

But since these are normal people who are giving up their freetime to come together and endure whatever shit they may have to endure, solely out of conviction, with no intent to sell you anything, you should at least take a look and not measure them by the same scale you measure the marketing exercise. Because it's not the same. It's the difference between skin and plastic. That's how obvious it is.
I'm still not sure I'm getting the point across to you, but this has become yet another very long post and given the afore mentioned attention deficit, I shall just hope so.

Sulphur on 23/11/2011 at 22:33

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It's tragic how easily people today put their rose-tinted glasses on, mount their philanthropic high-horse, and choose to forget that 'pop culture' is a contradiction in terms.

Good effort to turn nihilism in on itself there, champ, but if that's what you think the guiding force is, as your amazoing refutation of it with the iceberg analogy goes, you're more out of touch with the roots of guerrilla marketing and people in general than I thought would be possible.

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