The Revolution Will Be Televised

This year marks the 16^th internationally celebrated Buy Nothing Day. On 24^th November, millions of people around the world stand together and refuse to spend. Refuse to participate. Refuse, for just 24 hours, to feed into a self-perpetuating system that exploits, oppresses and depresses. Everywhere around the world – except in South Africa, that is.

In a recent interview, the U.K. performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah said that he wants to start a revolution but all his friends are too busy having sex or shopping.

I know exactly what he means.

Corporate branding has devoured counter culture, re-packaged it and sold it right back to us. What began in the early 1990’s on the international front has recently taken root at home. Corporate captains and hunters of cool are targeting the most lucrative generation of consumers, us. For the so-called ‘born-free’ youth, the struggle is over. We are a generation more pre-occupied with getting a good job and joining the ranks of the middle-class than social activism. We are a generation that has seen our freedom fighters turn into martyrs, politicians or managing directors. It hasn’t taken long for the marketing guys to figure out that we are too clued up to be taken in by the empty promises of politicians or outdated anti-establishment rhetoric, but we still, like every generation that came before us, yearn for a revolution.

Taking advantage of this political vacuum, the boardroom has gone underground to create brands that have resonance with youth (sub)cultures. Tobacco companies throw ‘underground’ parties, trance-heads knock back tequilas at the bar that ‘gives you wings’, and skaters are mobile billboards. Nothing has been left un-branded, not even our social conscience. Corporate sponsors are quickly realising the potential of associating themselves with causes that bring together a cross-section of youth subcultures from Punks to Heads. Hijacking issues such as H.I.V. and poverty, the executives of cool sponsor events which, probably cost a fraction of their marketing budget and, as a charitable events, are most likely even tax-deductible. The danger of this kind of branding is that young people are duped into associating certain brands with social resistance and are lulled into a sense of complacency that wearing brands that merely symbolise your politics is enough.

Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was wrong, it looks like the revolution will be televised.