Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Core77: Rob Walker’s Buying In carries the reader on a frenetically paced tour of senseless consumption spanning from Viking ranges to custom high-tops. Along the way he introduces the reader to a diverse cast of characters like Dietrich Mateschitz, the entrepreneur who brought the world Red Bull, the sponsor of both the Flugtag air races, and in the opposite direction, the late night drunken falls of people who’ve imbibed too much alcohol along with the cough syrup caffeinated punch of that narrow little can. Other characters include an assortment of white guys without any discernible street-cred who’ve managed to build clothing empires around hip-hop and urban culture, and even viral marketers who pretend to be customers, proselytizing to others about the merits of products (and apparently not always disclosing their affiliations).
Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma: Today it is the driving force behind a new generation of D.I.Y. entrepreneurs who are raising hell once again. Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.
08.04.19 / books, business, culture
The Ultimate Book of Band Logos
Band ID: From the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lips trademark to the Grateful Dead’s lightning bolt skull to Prince’s glyph, logos embody an identity and experience shared between musicians and their fans, who proudly display these graphics on T-shirts, posters, pins, stickers—even tattoos. Collecting more than 1,000 rock, hip hop, metal, pop, reggae, and country music logos from the 1960s to today, this catchy design survey captures the coolest and most powerful examples of music made visual. Including interviews with key logo artists and presenting the graphics large and over extended gatefolds, BAND ID will wow music fans and designers alike.
How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
Benjamin Barber’s Consumed: Consumerism has an aggressive, even totalizing face. It effectively colonizes the plural sectors that define culture’s diversity, replacing them with a homogenized environment of marketing, advertising, and shopping-faux feelings and simulated sentiments-as well as common pop-cultural commodities that constrict cultural pluralism. Nonetheless, anthropologists have argued for some time that colonized cultures often react to being colonized by shaping the forces that affect to shape them in ways that alter the cultural aggressor and modify its supposedly “dominant” cultural face. This countercolonizing logic may apply within a culture that is trying to brand and homogenize taste. The process has been called creolization, or sometimes hybridization, and is evident in America’s own cultural interaction with the postwar world beyond its shores.
Chris Anderson: The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare…
07.05.29 / books, business, culture
Thomas Frank: Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright “revolution” against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming.
07.01.24 / books, business, culture
