Journal of the mental environment
Photo: Joe Szabo
From its roots in Africa through to the youth cultures of the present day, cool has always been an attitude of resistance to subjugation, an expression of rebellion and a posture of defiance.
During the ’60s, in the midst of one of the biggest cultural revolutions of our time, corporations discovered that cool could be incredibly profitable. While young people spontaneously took to the streets and organized festivals and anti-war protests, corporations started raiding their counterculture for eye-catching signifiers and stylistic expressions to incorporate into their marketing campaigns.
Thus began a two-step dance of authentic cool and fake, commercialized cool. As Thomas Frank explains in his 1997 book, The Conquest of Cool, bit by bit cool “became central to the way capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” In one of the most stunning cultural coups d’état ever, ad agency gurus figured out “how to construct cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.”
Forty years after the corporate takeover of cool, we find ourselves again in an era of extraordinary cultural and political upheaval. Global warming has us running scared, an epidemic of mood disorders is eroding our confidence, and as the War on Terror morphs into an open-ended World War IV, we are feeling more insecure than ever.
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Comments
I think its cool to be anticool lol. thats stupid
Cool, hot, dope all this little words we use to define things or ourselves should just be that words nothing more because cool is in the eye of the beholder much like beauty.
Great Post! I recently just watched Douglas Rushkoff's The Merchants of Cool, and was amazed at the lengths that companies will go to sell cool. I wonder what can we start doing today to distance ourselves from these practices?
i always love to read what Kalle has to say:
Wow. This article captures the mentality of the new revolution. Very well done. Kudos, Adbusters. You've inspired me once again to keep on pushing media and to stick it to the social norms. Fuck you, corporations. You can't bank on THIS kind of cool.
I don't want to be told what's cool, even if it's coming from the left.
Like a breath of fresh air. So much that I have an example.
I happen to wear attire that may not fit into the mainstream comercialized gustapo. Bright colors mostly. One day I was drinking coffee, and a man, in what seemed to be an armani suit, came walking up to me in a disapproving look. 'Why are you wearing that?' In which my response was 'Do your clothes inspire you?' He walked away mystified.
My challenge to the mainstream is to stand up to those that oppose. As Einstein once said, great minds often fierce great opposition.
Good article Kalle. Advertisers and their corporate bosses have been fighting for decades to claim every last inch of our mind's landscape, much like buying up prime real estate.
Except instead of building houses, they're planting seeds akin to evil in our minds: envy of celebrities, pride for driving a Hummer because nothing says higher status like driving something so large and ugly, never ending greed and gluttony, loathing of ourselves because we aren't thin enough, strong enough, rich enough, sexy enough, cool enough. I could go on, but I'm sure that anyone with half a mind can take this ball and run with it.
It's time for independent thought to return, and be cool again. That anyone mindlessly moving their way through life like so many do be ignored, because if no one compliments them on a $1000 bag which took 3 cents of material and 4 Chinese kids to make, and that they be ridiculed for falling prey to an ad campaign You actually thought the iPod with video would make you happier? Poor fool. Prehaps they may think again, maybe even for themselves this time around.
Or if worse comes to worse and people who've been sucked in by the hype of consumerism are lost cause, we can only hope to pass on independent thought and put in perspective what really matters in life to all of our future children. I guess only time will tell.
Apathy. The most practiced virtue of our youth. Not only is apathy cool, our whole definition of cool is distorted. Now we're 12 feet under.
I've come to despise the very word cool or, more often, kewl!. It seems to have become shorthand for anything anyone under 27 likes and recently discovered, even if it happened before they were born. The concept of cool has become so mainstream now that everyone thinks they're cool, even if they're not. Mike Huckabee is cool, and so is Chuck Norris. I bet even Bush thinks he's cool. Probably everyone reading this website thinks they're cool. Probably I think I am, too. And, of course, Obama is cool, and you better not suggest otherwise if you know what's good for you. I'd be happy to ban the word and the concept if I could, then we could move forward and be really human, and come out from under the thrall of living up to anyone's hype, and buying the trademarked products to go with it.
Don't people read Adbusters to be cool, defiant, and associated with a niche of hippie neoluddites finishing eachothers sentences? I like it, but it's all the same.
Taylor I agree. The article was nice but when you think of cool in terms of how uncapitalist or
unconformist it is you defeat the point of being either. Just life your life well. Live your life humanely and don't worry about the rest.
I dug the article as well. Anything that is ever cool, you can never call cool. The majority have it so backwards it is ecocide. Love that word, but it's scary. Most of us do not know how to actually survive. You take away our Coca Puffs and Laptop and we're fucked. We know how to do all the things the system wants us to do. This system will break and holy cow. Wait for it. We'll see how cool that is. Go to a third world country to find cool, trust me.
This whole series of events is very well documented in Naomi Klein's No Logo
Definitely worth the read. check'it
that's really ignorant to say that you don't want to be told what's cool. you probably don't want to be told that vegetables are good for you either. WELL THEY ARE! and now you know. great article. sometimes we need a little reminder.
And don't forget: our preoccupation with 'cool' not only distorts our own reality and chains us to consumerism, it also diverts our attention away from the majority of the world where poverty and rights or a lack thereof take precedence over such egoladen concepts.
I hate how how it seems like everything has to be cool now.
The only person who was ever 'cool' is the first person to use the word 'cool' to describe their state of being. Everyone since has simply been a poseur.
What is it about the search of the so called cool? Why the obsession? The word cool stinks of stereotypical and manipulative. Why do we feel that need to try to group people so they can conform to established parameters, established by Corporate America or anyone for that matter. What about the search for self instead? What about the search for the meaning of true individuality? An individuality that fosters love and respect for other. That tolerates, even embraces differences among us. Why don't we stop looking out and start looking into ourselves?
I read adbusters because I hate commercials of every kind.
As Danny gets at, the very act of naming 'cool' makes the name uncool. Corporate hegemony functions and flourishes by naming. Naming and thereby colonizing each and every insurrection is inherent to linguistics itself. Perhaps, like much of what Adbusters does, renaming and coopting through parody and ironic selfawareness is one of the best ways to refresh 'cool' without playing the into the logic of the corporate name game.
I don't mind being cool if the new cool is being ecominded and socially resposible. If the new fad is like this, is it so bad that emerging companies sell us this lifestyle as a product?
This article reminded me of the book chasing cool. It has a similar concept that 'cool' has to be grassroots and true hence cool cannot be chased, but should rather be developed.
What is it about the search of the so called cool? Why the obsession? The word cool stinks of stereotypical and manipulative. Why do we feel that need to try to group people so they can conform to established parameters, established by Corporate America or anyone for that matter. What about the search for self instead? What about the search for the meaning of true individuality? An individuality that fosters love and respect for other. That tolerates, even embraces differences among us. Why don't we stop looking out and start looking into ourselves?
I don't think people are waking up to it at all; I think they're waking up to the idea that uncool is cool, and the marketers are right on their heels with that one. It's all very well to recommend we generate cool from the bottom up, but how many people are going to pay any attention whatsoever? They have the benefit of a mass audience on their side; if you have a different idea of what's cool, the person next to you may also have a different idea that in no way tallies with your own. I'm not saying it's hopeless, I simply think that redefining the parameters of cool isn't going to do much good. Marketers will simply catch up with the new ideals and start using them instead.
Cool is dropping your waiter a tip in Liberty Dollars made of silver and explaining, 'Don't want the bankers to steal part of your tip with inflation.'
Cool is taking out ads in your local paper that read: join the 300 million person march on our local City Halls during which we will demand the Constitution be respected, the Patriot Act will be revised, the war will be ended, and the dollar will stop being printed in mass by the Fed, OR ELSE heads are gonna roll. WE ARE THE PEOPLE.
Cool is passing out enlightening documentaries and saying, Knowledge is power.
Cool is figuring out what issues will create a tipping point where even the sleeping zombies will wake up and put the government back in its place.
Cool is an idea. If that's the sugar that goes on the medicine, so be it.
Great article Kalle! It seems many people have become so engrossed with being cool, not realizing that when the thing they labeled cool hits the mainstream, it becomes the start of the death of its coolness.
Sometimes you have to sit back and take a bigger look at the picture. These little distractions are just part of the hegelian dialectic. Once you start to understand that our lives are planned by the rich elite, and the only way to stop them is to not show up to work. All of these small problems will continue to happen.
Why do the two pictures above contain cigarettes? Is this the authentic cool? Aren't smokes merely the product of the same multinational corporations we're discussing here? The tobacco industry has long used Hollywood for their shameless guerrilla marketing tactics and these pics seem to be complicit in this effort. Let us not to forget tobacco's modern day exploitation of nonwestern countries having left America's stringent advertising laws for the more freemarket of Asia, South America, and Africa. If this is the
real cool you're talking about, I want no part in it.
Sermon over. :
The only cool left is anticool; it has become so ubiquitous to be a rebel it seems those who are do not try to portray themselves as rebels are the real rebels. How many more tattoos, nose rings, dreadlocks, Harley riders and Mohawks will it take before the image of the rebel is so the norm that the whole idea just collapses in on itself. Can we just all get over ourselves and are tiny little insular worlds and just fucking get on with it!!
Cool seems to be a universal positive notion. Anything positive is cool, even those badass rebels who are just looking for a place to fit in. The idea Cool is important, because it makes the mainstream want to accept and accomodate the fringe. Rather than reject it. Cool is the antithesis of orthodoxy, it's positive toleration.