Table of Contents
Part One
1 The Birth of Counterculture
Who killed Kurt Cobain? Commodity fetishism and cultural hegemony. Fascism and the rise of mass society. Echoes of Auschwitz . Brainwashing. The Milgram experiments. Conformity as social ill. Dispatches from Pleasantville. Technocracy. Co-optation theory. Culture as a system of total control.
2 Freud Goes to California
Pop psychology and the irrepressible id. Authoritarian personality disorder. The “pressure-cooker” model of the mind. Civilization and its discontents. The history of manners. Herbert Marcuse’s grand synthesis. American Beauty. Cultural determinism. Expanded consciousness and drug culture.
3 Being Normal
Why do we need rules? Anarchism as a political platform. The prisoner’s dilemma. Deviance and dissent. Freud vs. Hobbes. Violence as deep problem or superficial problem. Dr. Strangelove and the nuclear arms race. Rules and everyday life. The enforcement of norms, and the cardinal sin of the counterculture.
4 I Hate Myself and Want to Buy
Money can’t buy happiness. Baudrillard, consumerism and the “problem” of overproduction. Advertising as inculcation of desire. Say’s law. Competitive consumption. Thorstein Veblen gets it right. Positional goods. Bourdieu on distinction and aesthetic judgment. Rebellion as a source of distinction. Birth of the rebel consumer.
5 Extreme Rebellion
The Unabomber Manifesto. The romanticization of crime. Columbine High and “the culture of fear.” The myth of mental illness. The attack on rationality. The Disinformation Company. A style so extreme, it will never be mainstream. Downshifting. Simple living and the paradox of antimaterialism.
Part Two
6 Uniforms and Uniformity
Our Star Trek future. The language of clothes. The total uniform. The vanity of belonging. The gray flannel suit. Fashion and countercultural entrepreneurship. Deschooling society, and school uniforms. Misunderstanding brands.
7 From Status-Seeking to Coolhunting
Cool essentialism and cool fascismo. Hip vs. square. Class and social status. Bourgeois and bohemian values in conflict. The decline of prestige and the rise of “cool jobs.” The new economics of space. The Manchurian consumer. The uneasy persuasion. Branding. Individuality at risk. Viral marketing. A few practical recommendations.
8 Coca-Colonization
Levittown and the modern suburb. The benefits of standardization. Winner-take-all markets. Economies of scale and consumer preference. Franchising and McDonaldization. “Random man” as countercultural ideal. Americanization. Globalization and the emergence of uniform diversity. Empire.
9 Thank You, India
The search for the Other. Fantasy and exoticism. Voluntary simplicity. Zen and the East-West synthesis. Goldfish and shark-fin soup. Postmodern Native. Travelers and tourists. Searching for the “back.” Competitive escapism. The Beach. Alternative medicine.
10 Spaceship Earth
The Critical Mass ride. The rule of technique. Small is beautiful, and appropriate technology. Cyberlibertarianism and spam. Paper or plastic? Slow food. Shallow and deep ecology. Matrix redux. Shallow environmentalism and negative externalities.