Adbusters are busily promoting Buy Nothing Day (November 28th) and they are asking web site owners to carry ads such as this to support the campaign
For consumers who are not observing Ramadan and don’t plan to fast during Lent, perhaps the small sacrifice of Buy Nothing Day will serve as a reminder that we cannot take our consumption for granted
But can you really advertise non-consumption? And with advertisers seriously considering techniques such as memory morphing, will it even make a dfference?
Can you advertise non-consumption?
by Lee Bryant2 Responses to Can you advertise non-consumption?
smarter, simpler, social
This sort of campaign undermines itself on its own terms because it isn’t able to step outside of the pervasive culture of consumption yet doesn’t manage to subvert it either. It becomes both an empty gesture and something with a highly ambivalent meaning. Is it supposed to be a kind of ‘thanksgiving’ for consumerist super-abundance? Or is is supposed to show how consumers can flex their ‘political’ power by choosing what they buy? I’m worried by the former because it has a cloying religious piety about it. The latter is arguably of even more concern because it reinforces the view that the only power people have is purchasing power. This strikes me both overly-consumerist (and hence undermining of Adbuster’s stance) and also as severely damaging to democracy in that it exludes many people from the exercise of a somewhat limited power whilst at the same time distracting a majority away from active democratic and political engagement with broader political issues or institutions. It’s absurd for Adbusters to narrowly define the human subject exclusively as a purchaser/non-purchaser and then to bemoan consumerism even as it participates in consumerist subjectification. Adbusters wants us to consume non-consumption as an escape, when really it is acting ideologically to circumscribe the entirety of human existence as consumed by consumerism. My concern that this disables people from serious political engagement with social and foreign policy or with the actions of supra-national non-commercial globalising institutions such as IMF, WTO, NATO etc.
Plus there are the more trivial point about this sort of campaign – the irony that Adbusters sell their own ‘non’-brand of sneaker and that it’s not very responsible to urge people not to buy things like essential medical supplies on any day of the week.
See http://www.1827consulting.com/2003_03_01_archive.htm#200029782 for more thoughts on Adbusters and their unbrand America campaign.
Good points. I agree we should not be defined exclusively by our consumption, but I think Adbusters is a welcome counterpoint to the mindless, patronising advertising that surrounds more and more of our lives.