“Cool is one of the major factors driving the modern economy. Cool has become the central ideology of consumer capitalism . . . Malcolm Gladwell enumerated what he took to be the three cardinal rules of cool. First, the quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. That is, as soon as we thing we’ve discovered cool, it slips away. Second, cool can’t be manufactured out of thin air. While companies may be able to intervene in the cycle of cool, they cannot initiate it themselves. When we add to these the last rule—that you have to be cool to know cool—cool becomes a closed loop, a hermetic circle in which not only is it impossible to either make or catch cool, but it is impossible to know what it is. Unless, that is, one is already cool, in which case you have no reason to look for it in the first place”
Nation of Rebels, pp. 188-189
