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London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

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Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#31

Between white America's appropriation of black American pop culture and the rise of yuppie hipsterdom, this applies just as much to the U.S., doesn't it?

That is what makes shows like Portlandia so popular. It satirizes exaggerated hipsterdom. It is a funny show if you have those people in your circle of acquaintances.

But at the same time it glorifies it.

That is of course interesting. I believe Slavoj Zizek (who's quote is at the top of the article) would have a lot to say about that. How the new mode for something to be accepted is for it to also contain satire about itself. It is in a way inoculating itself against other satire.

I recommend reading or listening to Zizek. Not sure how serious you can take him (maybe his philosophy works are more in depth and serious) but his talks are very engaging. It at least makes for good conversation topics.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#32
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, absolutely; perhaps the symbols might be different (say, PBR vs. Red Stripe), but the message can be the same.

See also: Mason Jars and faux-southern revivalism.

Or read some of Thomas Frank's books, which discuss this phenomenon in the American context in detail. There's a chapter in his excellent One Market Under God, (http://www.amazon.com/One-Market-Under-God-Capitalism/dp/038...) for instance, about a team of Nike marketers sent to mine inner cities for cultural authenticity.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#33
While I connect with and appreciate many of the points he has made, I have to say I'm getting pretty damn tired of the almost constant attack on the white middle class person from left-wing journalists.

You are damned if you do and damned if you don't with these journalists, many of whom are middle class or higher white people themselves who've simply developed somewhat of a hardon for self-loathing.

If rich young techies in San Francisco took their money and went and lived in areas already established as being the dwelling of the rich they would face criticism from these journalists for isolating themselves, not investing in the community, etc.

If rich young techies go and buy up property in previously poor areas, attract businesses to serve their needs, etc. they're damned for gentrifying the area and driving the culture out.

The only way it seems that these people would be satisfied is if the value creators simply went to work every day and created value and the output was distributed across the entirety of society, regardless of contribution...which in a very unfair way places all of society's burdens at the feet of the working current middle class even more than they currently are.

I'm a white, middle class software developer. I tend to go for these kind of things such exhibitions in warehouses, quirky restaurants and bars, etc. I don't do it to appropriate culture, I do it because it's more interesting to me than sterile, obviously very well financed restaurants and bars that charge you huge amounts of money to sit in a room packed with suits desperately trying to impress other people.

I'm not trying to take from below, I'm trying to find things of some substance that I'll enjoy and will likely find other people that I can connect with at.

Again, these hit pieces are pretty damn tiring. Who is it whose paying the bulk of the taxes to sustain the free schools the working and welfare classes send their kids to? Who is it that is making the finance available so that working class, welfare class, etc. can access third level education as those above them can? Who is it that is paying the bulk of the costs associated with those universities? Who is it that is covering the welfare that those in the welfare class are currently surviving on? And those in the working class whose manual jobs are quickly becoming redundant?

Who is it that is paying the vast bulk of the costs associated with providing the welfare and working classes with access to healthcare they absolutely otherwise would not be able to afford?

The middle class.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#34
post #21

The worst thing about this article is how hilariously smug and self-assured the tone is. Seriously, what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit? How does he not realize that he is projecting his own insecurity and outdated ideas about "authenticity" on to these people. Honestly, I've found that most people don't really…

> what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit?

Well, that's what modern life is under the TINA regime[1]. A whole society of people who've sold out every heroic ideal humans have ever conceived, in order to live as cells inside corporate organs of a hyper-capitalistic organism that would collapse if it stopped expanding. Money is god (it's about equal in power to law, at least), and money is created in a Ponzi between central banks and governments, and between private financial corporations and private enterprises/individuals, all on the promise that there will be even more money next year to pay back the debts of this year, and give "good enough or better" returns on large capital pools invested. We consume natural resources in an unsustainable way in exchange for this money, and for a cellular role in the organs and the organism, and it will last in this way until the last day comes, when we starve to death on our own planetary stripmine.

We could be taking a new course right now, to live in idealistic ways, in sustainable ways, in heroic ways. But we all just quit that notion before we start, because it's just too hard, and we distract ourselves with the greatest media spectacle of entertaining diversions and political issues every conceived.

Welcome to life in hell. You can get defensive and self-righteous when people point out the mass hypocrisy and delusion and error in all our lives, but it doesn't change the truth that we are all living in an awful state, as cowards and lapdogs of the hyper-capitalist system that gives us life today, even as it guarantees death in the future.

I figure that a not-yet born post-human super-predator will take the best of human intelligence and anti-entropic principles and incorporate them, and destroy the rest. Or some already-existing higher powers will swoop in at some point in the future to harvest the best of our anti-entropic principles, and destroy the rest of us.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#35
post #11

The middle class are damned if they do, damned if they don't by the author's argument. They are at once chastised for "inoculating" themselves from working class culture, and for embracing it.

>The middle class are damned if they do, damned if they don't by the author's argument.

And yet if the middle class ask their representatives to scale back the very same social programs that provide the uber cool, uber cultural working and welfare classes that the author is idolizing here they are demonized in the extreme.

Sure, the middle class give the working and welfare class schools, access to universities, free healthcare, lots of cash welfare, houses to live in cost free and lots more, but don't you know that they're literally the devil incarnate? Who do they think they are to have parties in warehouses? That's what we do when we've claimed our welfare for the week! Those damned culture vultures!

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#36
post #21

The worst thing about this article is how hilariously smug and self-assured the tone is. Seriously, what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit? How does he not realize that he is projecting his own insecurity and outdated ideas about "authenticity" on to these people. Honestly, I've found that most people don't really…

> what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit? Well, that's what modern life is under the TINA regime[1]. A whole society of people who've sold out every heroic ideal humans have ever conceived, in order to live as cells inside corporate organs of a hyper-capitalistic organism that would collapse if it stopped expandin…

You've hit the nail on the head, brainpan.

>But we all just quit that notion before we start

Don't forget we also denounce and ridicule anyone who tries to live outside the system we have constructed and rely on.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#37
post #21

The worst thing about this article is how hilariously smug and self-assured the tone is. Seriously, what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit? How does he not realize that he is projecting his own insecurity and outdated ideas about "authenticity" on to these people. Honestly, I've found that most people don't really…

that's what an op ed should be about... it's not an academic white paper.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#38
post #28
post #11

The middle class are damned if they do, damned if they don't by the author's argument. They are at once chastised for "inoculating" themselves from working class culture, and for embracing it.

British "middle" class and american "middle class" are really distinct concepts. I wonder how many people commenting on this thread are confusing / conflating them?

I'd be interested in a treatment of those differences. As far as I know, a middle class is simply the class of people that earns enough money to be able to buy a house, save for retirement, and generally shield themselves from the chaos of lower class struggle.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#39
post #11

The middle class are damned if they do, damned if they don't by the author's argument. They are at once chastised for "inoculating" themselves from working class culture, and for embracing it.

They're not embracing it, they're consuming it. Embracing another culture is altruistic. Narcissism is looking at another culture and considering whether to "inoculate against" or "experience" it as a feature of your own life. The twenty-somethings are filled with a sense of meaninglessness because their lives are meaningless. They allowed their careers to define who they were, and are now surprised when the market c…

I love this comment. Most people don't change the world, and apart from the few that do, it is completely natural to get stuck between meaningless things. At least until you have kids. That's what most people derive meaning from.

Re: London's poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

#40
Let's consider how the author's description of London contrasts with San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

As the poster child of gentrification in action, the city certainly has no shortage of artsy hipsters culturally appropriating both the trappings of the poor, as well as their actual dwelling spaces (adding insult to injury, one could say).

But unlike the article's description of London, the Californian hipsters aren't underpaid, underemployed youth who aren't able to make it to affluence in a finance-dominated economy. They're those working in software, supposedly the most meaningful of professions in the area, for companies that "change the world." They're well-paid, even if it's not because of equity, as the last vestige of the middle class here (https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...)

So where are the similarities?

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