The clutter of the middle-to-lowbrow and youth consumerisms of the 1980s is at the heart of our times. The spread of American consumerism across the classes and more importantly across the erstwhile Third World formed networks of flow of goods and capital that would be formalised in globalisation-in-digitisation.
Third World Americanism might have been bootleg jeans, sex and food, but without the young embracing Americana at the scale they did, our todays would have been impossible.
The electronic lo-tech of global cassettes, video and audio, would become bespoke digital. What was loose and messy would assume a proper commodity form in the hardening textures of life in high-end consumerist aspirations in the digital.
The middle-classisation of the world around formulaic consumption of standardised global goods networked to the uniform beat of the global digital clock was founded on the American imperium, 1980 to 1995.
Theorisation of thought
The growing consumerist prosperity of the world has brought together elements of society that were separated until the 1970s. The postmodern decade of the 1980s saw not only a mixing of cultural registers — high and low but also class mixing. Academe and the political Left came together in the increasing overall theorisation of thought. At the other end of the class spectrum, a lowbrow consumerist working class increasingly merged with the political Right. In between, the Left adopted the ‘popular’.
Today, classes far apart in the past travel together in the same aircraft to same holiday destinations and are gridded into corporate capitalism via the ubiquitous laptop. Where these worlds meet culturally is in the cult of the media celebrity. Celebrity culture today draws everything into its maws. Invented by figures such as Oprah Winfrey who mixed the TV chat show with evangelical ministry, celebrity media insists on a populism where everyone has to behave as an ordinary consumerist citizen of the religion called humanity if they are to be seen in public.
Intellectual worth is measured by legibility for the consuming masses. There is a total takeover of public relevance by media that insists on a certain homogeneous global consumerism, which is coeval with a homogeneity of belief in the important things of our times — ecology, terrorism or First World gender norms.
Crucially, though, media populism finds its power in celebrity culture being centralised into a global opinion machine in the digital world, especially via social media. Today, ‘public figure’ means one with a huge social media following. The totality of this takeover has given rise to a corresponding self-reflexive invisibility of what used to be the cultural and political avant-garde. If celebrity culture insists on the irrelevant invisibility of those who refuse to participate, then today’s avant-garde insists on invisibilty as the sole way to maintain perceptual rigour.
The counterculture of the 1960s has been diverted into a number of anonymous collectives
Thus, the counterculture of the 1960s has been diverted into a number of anonymous collectives such as Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. The spirit of Robert Smithson is taken forward in the arts by the until-recently invisible graffiti artist Banksy. In music, we find experiments with invisibility in phenomenon such as the Gorillaz who were initially represented by anonymous onine animated figures. Vaporwave, a Web 2.0 avant-garde music-on-glitch graphics movement, insists on a total blankout of any communication with the world.
We are living in times of extremes. Digitisation of life means that increasingly everything comes under the control of corporate capitalism that produces the machines and the software we use daily. All is imbued with a touch of sin. To escape this, going underground becomes the only manner of politics.
Conquest of the local
The consumerist clutter of the 1980s has come home to roost in the coded life of digital networks that encompasses everything in the lives of billions of people at once. Indeed, the globalisation of consumerism was made possible by the conquest of the local during the economic recovery of the 1980s. The consumerist gilding of David Lynch’s dystopic hick ‘local’ America and many such ‘locals’ across the world paved the way for an all-encompassing regime of centralised gluttony of the senses.
On the other hand, globalisation of knowledge too follows the increasing digital networking of the ‘local’ into data centralisation. This creates a sort of polar inertia of the will — excess information followed by apocalyptic paranoia of immediate environmental Armageddon. Earth is leaking at too many points at once. There is nowhere left to run.
However, the paranoia of the end of the world is as much fact as it is a parallax of the centralisation of environmental data that is as obsessed with predictability as Wall Street bankers are of consumerist behaviour or the U.S. State Department is of terror from centralised ‘global networks’ of baddies. The cosmos is not as centralised as our data is and its workings are random and unpredictable in non-algorithmic ways.
Thus, centralisation of all human experience in data is at the heart of the crisis of consumerism, the invisible, radical avant-garde politics and the Anthropocene (the ecological apocalypticism of our times). Surveillance rises as it purports to protect us against cyber-theft while claiming to resist the many apocalypses our paranoia senses in a centralised experience.
The author is Associate Professor in cinema studies at JNU. When not ordering food on various apps, he is writing about cinema and art.
