“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
Chasing Butterfly Ghosts
“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
Making Conservatism Deeply Subversive
“Rebellion is not a threat to the system, it is the system.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 175
Obvious When You Think About It
“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
Let Them Eat Carob Cake
“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
Rebellion as Spark in the Pistons of Capitalism
“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
Which Was Perhaps a Bit Self-Serving
“If countercultural thinking has led to a certain naiveté when it comes to crime, it has encouraged an almost unconscionable glamorization of mental illness”
Nation of Rebels, p. 143
The Counterculture Has No Bouncers
“While countercultural rebellion probably attracts no more kooks than any other movement, it is peculiarly ill equipped to deal with them once they arrive.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 137
As That Would Be Bad
“Extreme sports are just sports for people who don’t want to be mistaken for jocks”
Nation of Rebels, p. 132
How Our Markets Are Full of What No One Can See
“Ever since the 1960s, hip has been the nature tongue of advertising, ‘antiestablishment’ the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year. And over the years the rebel has naturally become the central image of this culture of consumption, symbolizing endless directionless change, and eternal restlessness with ‘the establishment’—or, more correctly, with the stuff ‘the establishment’ convinced him to buy last year”
Nation of Rebels, p. 130