Bear in mind that the following is not a facile critique of consumerism. It cuts to a deeper level, i.e. inclusiveness as the parent of consumerism.
- Public spaces. When I was young, I used to ride my bike several
miles out of town to a little park, nestled in a valley by a tiny
redneck village, because it was my favorite park. It was my favorite
park because you could walk around without seeing depressing things,
like used condoms and beer bottles. It was my favorite park because when
I went there, I was often the only one around, so I didn't have to deal
with suspicious people asking what a long-haired teenage boy in a Black
Sabbath shirt was doing in an ostensibly public park. It was my
favorite park because there were no well-worn jogging trails or people
in shorts and Underarmor shirts jogging around with iPods complaining
about the mosquitos biting them on their intentionally exposed skin. It was my favorite park because its unpopularity
meant it was not landscaped or manicured, so you occasionally saw
"unacceptable" things like fallen trees, and even (gasp!) dangerous things like snakes or steep hills. It was my favorite park because it was sanitary in the right way (no cigarette butts or Budweiser cans), and also unsanitary in the right way; snakes, animal crap, and rotting tree-trunks that you had to climb over to continue. Ever try climbing over a rotting tree-trunk? You learn to test it with your foot first to see if it will hold your weight. Navigating a place like that is a skill, which makes it inconvenient for people who want to lose weight by riding around the place on an expensive name-brand mountain bike.
This touches on another problem of inclusion; including everyone leads to a kind of entropy. Once the general public has claimed a space as its own, it becomes homogenized. How many manicured suburban parks have been created by indignant suburbanites complaining about the bugs and fallen trees? There are millions of places like that - and any place that isn't like that quickly homogenizes into another milquetoast outdoor rec-center, as soon as the hordes of respectable people find it.
Saddest of all is this: that little park I went to wasn't even that wild! It was just a park that the really important people had forgotten about, and thus served as a mildly out-of-line little retreat. At the borders of our all-inclusive paradise, one occasionally finds something that is, optimistically speaking, mildly interesting compared to the stuff you find in the center.
- Popular music. How often do you hear the phrase, "Top 40s shit"? Too often. Much (though not all) popular music is designed to appeal to the greatest number of people, and, in doing so, lacks any interesting qualities besides surface-level novelty. Occasionally, you get a "sad" song in minor key (novelty) or a song with a sitar in the background or something. But strip away that single embellishment and you see the same skeleton as you do in every popular song. I don't mean this in a strictly music-theoretic sense (e.g. chord progressions), but in the sense that what you always find, at bottom, is a cheap trick designed to stick in your head long enough to make you buy an album or a concert ticket.
Of course, there are rock bands with interesting musical ideas, and hip-hop artists with interesting lyrics, and so on. But these are inevitably niche artists; King Crimson can't approach the popularity of Miley Cyrus, precisely because bands like King Crimson insist on making music that won't appeal to everyone who hears it.
It's true that the classical music of yesteryear was popular music in some sense. Mozart composed background muzak for rich people's parties. But even that did not bear the burden of appealing to tens of millions of people within ten seconds of coming on the radio. The speed of transmission granted by modern technology, especially radio, made it possible to accumulate enormous profits from including anybody who could afford a radio, or had a friend who could afford one.
As said earlier, though, consumerism is a symptom, not the disease. The Soviet Union forced even talented composers like Shostakovich to create shallow tripe designed to appeal to huge numbers of people. In fact, an aspect of Soviet musical doctrine was the vilification of "formalism", or music that was considered too complex to appeal to the proletariat. The prevalence of this phenomenon outside of a capitalist society points to a deeper root for the problem than capitalism or consumerism. - Subcultures. One reason that hipsters are so widely reviled is that they tend to suck the life out of authentic ideas by wearing them ironically, thus reducing them to yet another empty fashion statement. Fashion, taken in a broad sense (not just clothing but fashions in general) is what most of us use for distraction. By the time you realize it's a farce, another fashion has arisen to distract you a while longer. But in order to be effective, fashion has to be completely exoteric; anyone who can afford to buy the New Thing is admitted, and those who do so have nothing in common besides having the New Thing.
We are accustomed to rolling our eyes at the youth who abandon a subculture as soon as it becomes popular. But the reason that people do this is not just to be rebellious and contrarian and cool, although that is certainly part of it. Being contrarian is part of the deal, but a bigger part of it is identity. The identity that one acquires from participating in a subculture is only worthwhile because that subculture is not an all-inclusive carnival that accepts anyone with the twenty-two-fiddy needed for admission. The identity of a subculture only means something when the subculture is a group for only a few people with very specific interests. Once the general public stampedes in, it just becomes another idle distraction.
Again, we are accustomed to rolling our eyes and dismissing such things as "Cool Kids' Clubs" for people who desperately need an identity to cling to. What we never ask is, "Why do adults feel the need for a Cool Kids' Club?". It's not just immaturity on the part of the people who do it (although it is also that). It is, in large part, because those of us born into an age of inclusion are desperate for anything that we can authentically call our own. We didn't rebel as teenagers solely because of a hormonal imbalance or bitterness toward our parents. We rebelled because the teenage years were when we first began to sense that something was amis.
Entities - from a physical object like a tennis ball to an abstract thing like a musical subculture - are defined by their boundaries. A boundary delineates what is and is not included in that entity. Boundaries can be vague, like the question of where blue ends and yellow begins, but the existence of borderline cases does not mean that everything is the same. We can argue over whether or not a dis-assembled chair is still a chair, but the thing I'm sitting on right now is definitely a chair, and a blue whale swimming around somewhere in the Pacific right now is definitely not a chair. You can have borderline cases, and you can quibble over how "real" the categories are, but the fact remains that, if you remove all of the boundaries of an entity, you remove the entity.
The preceding paragraph is, no doubt, enough to set off the "non-socially-acceptable idea" alarm bells in the heads of many educated people. The first response will be calculated disdain, but as this idea gains more traction - and it will - it will have to be confronted. The next step will be quibbling over whether or not we should care about categories, and that resistance will quickly be swept aside by the simple pragmatic fact that people want meaning, and modernity can't provide it. No amount of Sophistical obfuscation can quiet the psychic scream born of regimented egalitarian nihilism. Of course, the academics will not take note of this fact, to their great disadvantage.
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