All your Hip are Belong to Us

With leisure-time activities of consuming redefined as “rebellion,” two of late-capitalism’s great problems could easily be met: obsolescence found a new and more convincing language, and citizens could symbolically resolve the contradiction between their role as consumers and their role as producers. The countercult style has become a permanent fixture on the American scene, impervious to the angriest assaults of cultural and political cons., because it so conveniently and efficiently transforms the myriad petty tyrannies of econ. Life—all the complaints about conformity, oppression, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and the disappearance of individualism that became virtually a natl obsession during the ‘50s—into rationales for consuming. No longer would Americans buy to fit in or to impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulstion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The enthusiastic discovery of the countercult by the branches of Amer. Business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of hip consumerism, a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accellerating wheels of consumption.”

-Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool