Monday, November 26th, 2007
If there’s one thing the US does better than anyone it’s shopping (and being fat, ). Black Friday was a big hit this year, and now it looks like there’s some sort of online shopping equivalent today. So if you want a flying alarm clock or a Saint Joseph figurine (Patron Saint of Real Estate, only $4.95) go ahead and find it in the states.
10:59 pm on November 26th, 2007 1
I was watching some interesting footage of Buffalo news on Black Friday Night. They were literally “thanking God” for Canadian consumers their purple money.
They had footage of the usual consumer orgy and pandemonium and then I thought of those earnest “Buy Nothing Day” activists and understood they have it all wrong. Not that consumerism isn’t necessarily rampant and destructive and that there isn’t a sound principle behind consuming less, but rather their “protest” or “politics of refusal” stance misses the mark. In other words, as it stands all the atempts to “raise awareness” of Buy Nothing Day and its message is proving quite inffective.
We live now in an age of simulation and spectacle; of mimicry, excess and slippage. Protest and activism are too readily co-opted, absorbed and deployed as part of a more general narrative or discourse of capital. When I see images of the mad rush of Black Friday shopping I see in it what so many concocted protests themselves strive for: disruption, ecstacy, apparent chaos, and a frenetic displacement of the everyday world. In other words, on Black Friday all across America and in every Best Buy, Walmat and Target store there is the potentiality of a good, old fashoined riot. All it needs is a little ‘push’.
So, now imagine that instead of preaching consumer abstinence from the margins, these same activists instead simply don the personas of mad shoppers and join the fray. If the “ignorant and greedy masses” are pushing, frothing, stampeding, clutching and grabbing then the actvist performer must take these actions to their logical extreme. Activism becomes “dissimulated” in favour of simulating the expression of the dormat violence of the “hyperconsumer”.
Of course, such a tactic has no gauruntees, none do. However, if attention from the spectacle is what one desires, I’d imagine the media coverage of the “Walmart Riots” is likely to greatly exceed any display of sombre “activism”.
3:50 pm on November 27th, 2007 2
Those people are probably all on edge to. I imagine it as normal Christmas shopping x5. Just think of the chaos if the registers went down, or the power went off.