Theology That Bites Back
“The most plausible explanation for the fact that everyone’s eating Yukon Gold potatoes is that they are really good potatoes and people like them. If the overall result is homogeneity, how can we complain? After all, in order to avoid this outcome, someone would have to get stuck eating potatoes that they don’t like.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 232
“There are often significant benefits associated with acting like everybody else. Expressing your individuality by wearing a funny tie to work is not the same thing as expressing your individuality by using file formats on your computer that are incompatible with those of your co-workers.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 230
“Consumers are extremely savvy, and are fully aware that there are no relevant differences between brands across a vast range of products.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 212
“The assumption that advertising is able to increase the sales of goods has just not been proved, and corporations themselves make little effort to track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In fact, the most reliable studies don’t show that sales follow ads, but just the opposite; ads follow sales”
Nation of Rebels, p. 207
“At some point, somehow, a tremendous cultural shift occurred. Bohemian values—that is, cool—usurped class as the dominant status system in America.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 196
“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
“Rebellion is not a threat to the system, it is the system.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 175
“This is why the hippies didn’t need to sell out in order to become yuppies. It’s not that the system ‘co-opted’ their dissent, it’s that they were never really dissenting.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 158
“Organic food is simply the latest category of ‘premium’ consumer goods . . . Organic food is one of the major forces driving the return to an almost aristocratic class structure in the United States, in which the wealthy no longer eat the same food as the poor.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 154
“Thus the decline of white bread coincided with a boom in so-called artisan bakeries, along with the growth of powerful franchises like the Great Harvest Bread Company. And because these bakeries were not using mass production techniques, their loaves cost significantly more than Wonder bread. But there was no shortage of consumers willing to pay premium rates in order to avoid being victims of consumerism and mass society. Again the counterculture proved to be the vital spark driving consumer trends. It is not an accident that San Francisco is the home of both the $3 latte and the $4 sourdough.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 153
