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Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World
If you have ever wondered why SUVs replaced minivans, how one rap song turned the cognac industry upside down, or what gives Levi's jeans their iconic allure, look no further―in Cool , Steven Quartz and Anette Asp finally explain the fascinating science behind unexpected trends and enduring successes. We live in a world of conspicuous consumption, where the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the food we eat lead double they don't merely satisfy our needs; they also communicate our values, identities, and aspirations. In Beverly Hills, tourists flock to the famous Rodeo Drive-not to shop, but simply to take photographs of themselves in front of luxury stores. And for one week in August, hundreds of thousands of HarleyDavidson fans from all over the world descend on the remote town of Sturgis, South Dakota, and engulf the otherwise sleepy hamlet in the deafening roar of motorcycle engines. Why do brands inspire such devotion? Quartz and Asp bring together groundbreaking findings in neuroscience, economics, and evolutionary biology to present a new understanding of why we consume and how our concepts of what is "cool"―be it designer jeans, smartphones, or craft beer―help drive the global economy. The authors highlight the underlying neurological and cultural processes that contribute to our often unconscious decision making, explaining how we're able to navigate the supermarket on autopilot for certain items and yet arrive at the checkout counter with a basket full of products picked up on the spur of the moment. And they explore the opposite side of the consumer equation―the "choice architects" who design store interiors and the "coolhunters" who scour Berlin and Tokyo on the lookout for the latest trends. Through a novel combination of cultural and economic history and in-depth studies of the brain, Cool puts forth a provocative theory of consumerism that reveals the crucial missing links in an understanding of our spending our brain's status-seeking "social calculator" and an instinct to rebel that fuels our dislike of being subordinated by others. Quartz and Asp show how these ancient motivations make us natural-born consumers and how they sparked the emergence of "cool consumption" in the middle of the twentieth century, creating new lifestyle choices and routes to happiness. Examining how cool was reshaped in the 1990s by a changing society and the Internet, they unpack the social motivations behind today's hip, ethical consumption, arguing that we should embrace, rather than deny, the power of consumerism. Taking us from Norman Mailer to normcore, Cool is surprising at every turn, and will forever change the way you think about money, status, desire, happiness, and choice.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2015
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January 11, 2016
Just like Socrates asked questions like “What is virtue?” and “What is knowledge?” in his times, today’s philosophers ask, “What is cool?” These two authors gave “cool” such a thorough analysis, they even placed people in MRI machines, showed them “cool” images, and measured their reactions. Epistemology is much more scientific than it used to be!
The book begins by taking issue with the anti-consumerist worldview, namely, that our modern capitalist society is built on convincing us to buy products we don’t really need so that we’ll gain social status. In this view, advertising is manipulative, and over-consumption is decadent. The best path to happiness is to stop trying to keep up with the Joneses.
I was raised by parents who did not try to keep up with the Joneses, so I’ve long subscribed to that point of view. At first, I didn’t think the authors of this book could possibly convince me otherwise, but they made me see that my Goodreads booklist is my social signal. I don’t wear designer clothes, and I don’t hang with any “in” crowds, but I’m dedicated to my booklist and showing the world, “This is me. I read, I think, and I write. Isn’t it cool?”
The book explains this phenomenon in Darwinian terms. Schools drill in the concepts of “adaptation” and “survival of the fittest,” but they underemphasize one of Darwin’s other principles: divergence. It’s not really correct that only the strongest survive. Evolution is not a zero sum game. If you’re not the strongest in the niche, you just have to find a different way to survive. Once upon a time, the only way a young man could reach the elite of his school was by being a star athlete, but then along came some non-athletic but musical types who founded rock ‘n roll and “rebel cool.” That left out the nerds, of course, but then came the Internet and the rise of “Dot cool.” Everyone can find their own niche to be cool on the Internet. Even a book nerd like me.
Another Goodreads reviewer suggested that if you read this book, just skip ahead to the last two chapters. Those are the ones with the cultural history of “rebel cool” and “dot cool,” and they are the most readable chapters in the book. The earlier parts are heavily scientific and much harder to get through. But in spite of the social signaling of other Goodreaders, which swayed me to give this book a 4 originally, I’m upgrading to a 5. The book may not appeal to a broad audience, but it’s perfect for an undergraduate philosophy class. It’s a genuine work of academic scholarship about an issue young adults already care a whole lot about. In other words, it makes philosophy relevant. As someone with a BA in Philosophy, I’ve got to say, that’s a rare achievement.
The book begins by taking issue with the anti-consumerist worldview, namely, that our modern capitalist society is built on convincing us to buy products we don’t really need so that we’ll gain social status. In this view, advertising is manipulative, and over-consumption is decadent. The best path to happiness is to stop trying to keep up with the Joneses.
I was raised by parents who did not try to keep up with the Joneses, so I’ve long subscribed to that point of view. At first, I didn’t think the authors of this book could possibly convince me otherwise, but they made me see that my Goodreads booklist is my social signal. I don’t wear designer clothes, and I don’t hang with any “in” crowds, but I’m dedicated to my booklist and showing the world, “This is me. I read, I think, and I write. Isn’t it cool?”
The book explains this phenomenon in Darwinian terms. Schools drill in the concepts of “adaptation” and “survival of the fittest,” but they underemphasize one of Darwin’s other principles: divergence. It’s not really correct that only the strongest survive. Evolution is not a zero sum game. If you’re not the strongest in the niche, you just have to find a different way to survive. Once upon a time, the only way a young man could reach the elite of his school was by being a star athlete, but then along came some non-athletic but musical types who founded rock ‘n roll and “rebel cool.” That left out the nerds, of course, but then came the Internet and the rise of “Dot cool.” Everyone can find their own niche to be cool on the Internet. Even a book nerd like me.
Another Goodreads reviewer suggested that if you read this book, just skip ahead to the last two chapters. Those are the ones with the cultural history of “rebel cool” and “dot cool,” and they are the most readable chapters in the book. The earlier parts are heavily scientific and much harder to get through. But in spite of the social signaling of other Goodreaders, which swayed me to give this book a 4 originally, I’m upgrading to a 5. The book may not appeal to a broad audience, but it’s perfect for an undergraduate philosophy class. It’s a genuine work of academic scholarship about an issue young adults already care a whole lot about. In other words, it makes philosophy relevant. As someone with a BA in Philosophy, I’ve got to say, that’s a rare achievement.
September 13, 2015
The original research presented in this book is pretty compelling, and some of the examples of how "cool" is constructed (as well as the social construction of "uncool") is certainly interesting. One complaint: endnotes. I'm a lazy reader - don't make me flip to the back of the book to see your notes and citations. I need footnotes, because I want to see the whole story, but I just can't rock the two-bookmark thing and it seriously busts up the flow. Another complaint: define your terms. I could have used a chapter on the etymology of the word "cool" and how it came to take on its current social meaning. Additionally, I take issue with the concept that "rebel cool" was born in the 50s; I have an idea that the "rebel" has always had a certain cool factor. Despite my apparent litany of gripes, I have to give these authors credit for presenting a thoughtful and very readable economic analysis of how cool comes to be and why we buy what we buy.
December 1, 2016
To be sure, there was some interesting information in this book. However, the author really loves outdated David Buss/ Richard Dawkins type hypotheses about good genes, evolutionary roots of behavior, etc. Making these types of arguments when trying to explain why we consume and why we deem things "cool," requires too big a leap in logic and too little critical thinking.
Regardless of the inclusion of old and tired evolutionary behavior hypotheses, which far too often amounts to the "just so stories" Gould wisely warned us all about, there were some interesting tidbits from this book that were quite enjoyable:
This author loves Alan Alda as much as I do. Alda is known for his love of all things neuro and constantly volunteers and seeks appointments with scientists to discuss the latest findings. Alda volunteered for the studies conducted by this author and the results are presented in the book.
There is a nice discussion of ingroup and outgroup thinking, tied to signaling and status.
The work on introvert and extrovert purchasing habits was fairly compelling and definitely intriguing.
How did the Gap get its longstanding status as cool? The coolest rebels of the day, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and James dean all sold out. "Ginsberg went from saying, "Fuck yourself with your atomic bomb" to "hey wear these jeans.""Thus, Gap became the symbol of cool rebellion.
How did loving your mom get so uncool? Experts at the university of Pennsylvania linked a boys attachment with his mom to terrible outcomes such as homosexuality, communism, and more. Loving your mom was a path to very bad things. It was much cooler, and well-adjusted (not a homo or a commie) to reject your mom as uncool, someone you have to put up with.
How did being bisexual become uncool? By pretending the coolest dudes of the day- Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Dean - were straight, even though they all had sexual relations with men.
Regardless of the inclusion of old and tired evolutionary behavior hypotheses, which far too often amounts to the "just so stories" Gould wisely warned us all about, there were some interesting tidbits from this book that were quite enjoyable:
This author loves Alan Alda as much as I do. Alda is known for his love of all things neuro and constantly volunteers and seeks appointments with scientists to discuss the latest findings. Alda volunteered for the studies conducted by this author and the results are presented in the book.
There is a nice discussion of ingroup and outgroup thinking, tied to signaling and status.
The work on introvert and extrovert purchasing habits was fairly compelling and definitely intriguing.
How did the Gap get its longstanding status as cool? The coolest rebels of the day, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and James dean all sold out. "Ginsberg went from saying, "Fuck yourself with your atomic bomb" to "hey wear these jeans.""Thus, Gap became the symbol of cool rebellion.
How did loving your mom get so uncool? Experts at the university of Pennsylvania linked a boys attachment with his mom to terrible outcomes such as homosexuality, communism, and more. Loving your mom was a path to very bad things. It was much cooler, and well-adjusted (not a homo or a commie) to reject your mom as uncool, someone you have to put up with.
How did being bisexual become uncool? By pretending the coolest dudes of the day- Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Dean - were straight, even though they all had sexual relations with men.
September 7, 2017
Quotes:
We are all consumers. And we all, more or less, live by consumerism's creed that our consuming is linked to our happiness (in a recent poll, only 6 percent of Americans said that money can't buy happiness).
According to some social critics, it is through the world of commodities that our social world reproduces the social categories that structure our personal identities and give form to the social order.
There is little or no avoiding this world of goods, symbols, and signals. Even the self-proclaimed "anti-consumers" among us typically end up being just alternative consumers. Consider, for example, movements like the Simple Living Network, an anti-consumption group (now defunct) that offered to provide resources for learning to do more with less. Without a hint of irony, its website peddled Simple Living bumper stickers, T-shirts, banners, books, posters, flags, buttons, magnets, note cards, and a veritable laundry list of other goods. And the anti-consumerist organization Adbusters is busy supplying its supporters with its own $125 in-house brand of sneakers, which are no longer clothing but—so the marketing proclaims—have been transformed into rebellious anti-corporatist "tools for activists".
Even consider the avowedly nonconsumer, off-the-grid Amish. Recent times have seen more and more Amish trading in the horse and plow for high-paying factory jobs and enjoying the fruits of their labor by dining out regularly and even vacationing in Florida.
all of the world's ten biggest malls are in Asia or the Middle East.
We learn how to associate products with our social identity and then how to use those products to signal what we're all about to other people.
We instinctively seek status.
A major barrier to understanding consumption is the idea that our status concerns are artificial, or worse yet, pathological. To our thinking, this is a historically monumental mistake, one that has resulted in decades of misleading consumerism critiques. Once we realize the biological reality of consumer motives—the status instinct and the rebel instinct—and understand the critical role they play in our lives, the prescription to deny them becomes about as feasible—and right-minded—as the Victorian demand for chastity. Indeed, once we recognize that these instincts are a legitimate element of being human, we'll see cool consumption in a new light, as a solution to the Status Dilemma.
According to Alain de Botton, for example, status concerns and social hierarchies are constructed by a consumerist culture. By creating aspirations based on false needs, he believes, society creates a painful "status anxiety" within us. This status anxiety is, he claims, entirely artificial. Yet once it has us in its grasp, it creates a desire to consume as a way to alleviate our pain. The result is that the apparent wealth of our society actually impoverishes us, as it creates unlimited expectations that leave us perennially unsatisfied.
ultimately the inability to satisfy the consumer demands of its citizens was a force behind the Soviet Union's collapse.
Consumption had long been a morally problematic notion: of the seven deadly sins, five are sins of consumption—pride, envy, gluttony, lust, and greed.
According to Bell, however, consumption-based capitalism is inherently unsustainable because hedonistic consumption rewards instant self-gratification, whereas production depends on hard work and delayed gratification.
Using data from 140 countries, economists concluded that richer countries are significantly happier overall than poorer countries. As countries get richer, their citizens get happier. Absolute income matters after all. Countries with the greatest economic growth have the highest levels of happiness.
When more income translated into more purchasing power, people's happiness, financial satisfaction, and optimism increased. And this wasn't a fleeting effect, contradicting the claim of anti-consumerists that consuming results in at best only a brief uptick in happiness. The happiness from rising income was an enduring one.
As the historian Arthur Herman chronicled in The Idea of Decline in Western History, the narrative itself isn't new. So-called declinism, especially prognostication of the inevitable decline of capitalism, has been a central theme in social thought for the last 150 years. Declinism—the belief that things were better in the past—has such a hold on us in part because our brains don't remember the past as it really was. We love to reminisce about the good old days, when movie and TV were still good, the country was on the right track, and so on [as if that's ever been true]. In poll after poll, people think just about everything was better in the past. But when researchers actually put it to the test, they discover that we remember things much more positively than we experienced them at the time. It's called rosy retrospection and the nostalgic bias, and it's built into our brain.
cool soon drove a new kind of consumption—oppositional consumption—by invoking the rebel instinct. We refer to this new kind of consumption as rebel cool.
Many theories of addiction describe the addict as blind to the future—someone who no longer cares for his future self. A self trapped in the present.
There is no coherent you behind your decisions and actions. The existence of a unified self as a central decision maker is an illusion, a convenient fiction, a largely unconscious rationalization.
Your creativity at work, for example, is just the redirected sexual energy of your id.
In an influential 1997 New Yorker article "The Coolhunt" about coolhunters, Malcolm Gladwell had said a law of cool was that only certain people knew it when they saw it—namely, cool people, who at the time were making a lot of money spotting the next cool thing for companies. To make matters even worse, he said, "not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them."
Adam Smith suggested that our economic life wasn't about just the bare necessities. If it were, we'd stop working as soon as we had food and shelter—just like every other animal. Smith said that what people really worked to obtain was recognition from others—to be observed favorably. Could it be that our economy runs on the currency of cool?
what's uncool for teenagers is pretty much whatever's cool for 50 year olds.
When the fashion world embraced heroin chic in the 90s, models looked emaciated, with dark circles under their eyes, ratty hair, protruding hipbones and collarbones.
Cool is so especially important among teenagers and 20somethings because they typically don't have a lot of economic power. But they do have the power to determine who's cool and who isn't. [Really, that's all real life's all about eh?]
[Coolhunter named Felicity looking only for teens/20somethings in urban areas mostly, tho this coolhunter is starting to go off the beaten track, to Hudson, Buffalo, Detroit, Caspar Wyoming, etc. Her exposes will likely be ridiculous, seeing something in everything. She's also very agist and fashion/product application based.]
75 percent of the population suffers from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.
Whereas only 14 percent of people agree to answer a survey when approached by a woman wearing a plain sweater or one with a non-luxury logo, a whopping 52 percent agree to answer the survey when an alligator logo is added to the sweater.
Our need for distinction, our need for self-affirmation, and our fear of death drives our consumption [for me it drives my art]
They consider the yearly Sturgis rally as a consumer subculture
They look at "Rebel Cool" as that designed by Mailer, Kerouac, James Dean which glorifies those at the bottom to offer an alternative route to status
sports was the only route to status in high schools before rock and roll came around
Today teenagers see music taste as the best way to show their identity [good luck kids]
We believe cool's greatest legacy was its transformation of emulation consumption into oppositional consumption. [of course you would, and I assume you include weed, speed, secondhand books, and stolen cars in that oppositional consumption model?]
They site the death of Cobain as the decline of the earnestness of the oppositional stance of rebel cool and the rise of the ironic posturing of Dotcool. [Here irony (ironically) implies being okay with being a consumer because you're making fun of yourself as you do it]
Mailer: "The White Negro"
Anatole Broyard: "A Portrait of a Hipster" [could potentially use this as a joke, read out old hipster but character says it's supposed to be about new ones]
Ginsberg said that "the social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang." [like a true homosexual, least he didn't say all women should be exterminated, leave that up to Burroughs, and at least Kerouac loved his mom—for the free rent and the cheap booze]
Did you know: Playboy manipulated Beat masculinity into a proconsumerist masculinity called "The Upbeat generation"? And those nudie photos were to assert heterosexual masculinity? Makes sense.
30 years after Ginsberg told America to go "fuck yourself with your atomic bomb", he was telling America to buy their khakis at Gap.
Perhaps the most incongruent use of 60s anti-consumerist anthems was the appearance of "All You Need is Love" in an ad for a Chase Bank credit card, appearing without a hint of irony. [Wait, I thought this type of marketing had to do with irony! oh wait, nevermind, that's Dotcool, right, like Job's 1984 ad, maybe. Or how Zuckerberg likes to wear hoodies, and it became so unprofessional in people's eyes they started calling it Hoodiegate, potentially ironically, or potentially without a hint of irony, depends on whether you were talking to a rich square, or to a rich dotcooler. Fuck you dad, I'm one of the 6 richest men in the world and I'll wear a fucking hoodie, take that! Just call me the new Johnny Rotten.]
Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn suggests that cool is nothing more today than "a heavily manipulative corporate ethos" [which they use to their advantage by selling adbuster shoes aforementioned, ironically?]
Being cool today doesn't require dropping out, in part because, as we'll argue, in a pluralist consumer culture there's really nowhere to drop out to [we never thought you would argue otherwise, but actually you never argue this point except for presenting it in this sentence...ironically?]
Once rebel cool had been co-opted, contemporary cool emerged as a commodified fake cool [out to commodify from the very beginning, starting with the word hipster, and working its way back up through history, consuming and rewriting everything under the guise of "ironic" consumption].
By the mid-90s sociologists [now getting paid handsomely by advertising firms] were heralding the dawning of a "postsubcultural era" [thank god we finally really got the brats under the whip, thanks Kurt for making it all possible]
Liberals typically want to live in racially and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods [or at least claim they do, when in reality they'll only move in once all the diversity's been drained out of the place and they can get a good real estate investment out of the place], while conservatives want to live in the suburbs among people who share their religious faith [and race].
The authors of this book would like you to think that oppressors, at least in the united states, or at least in their neighborhoods [Malibu and Stockholm respectively], no longer exist because consumerism has solved everything. Any sort of actual rebellion we think we are doing is just a game that works to the benefit of "cool" consumption—well I'm so glad we got that all cleared up, let me go buy some shit, oppositional, indie market shit of course.
Newsflash, nerds, geeks, computer people are now cool, dotcool that is, because they are rich, and they are creative because they are rich, and they are innovative because they are rich. That's so cool, that rich people, some of who are young, are so cool.
According to a social media poll of 30 thousand people in 15 countries, even countries can now be ranked as cool, the US the coolest, and Belgium the least cool [who the fuck are these people, and 15 countries, that's quite a control group]
Cultural interest in the hipster took off around 2008 and now has a global reach. They can be found around the globe, from Jakarta, Bangkok, Shanghai, to Dubai. In a recent survey, half of the respondents aged 18 to 29 identified as hipsters. In the same poll, only 16 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of hipsters. Since only 5 percent of respondents were in the 18-29 demographic, the disdain seems to be intergenerational. Indeed the disdain is also international. In Dubai, hipsters are mocked with faux news stories about how they have to be rescued when their skinny jeans tighten up in the desert heat. It's easy to satarize hipsters, just as every era has its stereotype, from hippies to yuppies to slackers.
Now if hippies killed the beats, and punk killed the hippies and yuppies killed them both and slackers and grunge killed the yuppies to be killed by britpop which was killed by indiepop and techkids and the hipsters are killing everything, who will kill the techkids and hipsters? Anti-tech and normcore? Hardly. The techkids and hipsters created those as viral media memes in the brains of gullible emo kids who were looking for a new identity.
As Rosalind Gill succinctly puts it: Life is a pitch.
"Be your own brand" is the mantra of the knowledge economy.
Thomas Frank hoped that normcore would cause a "complete collapse of the imperium of cool" but of course normcore's appeal depended on being inconspicuous [and easily manipulated by trend marketers]. "Hipsters, They're Just Like Us! Normcore, Sarah Palin and the GOP's Big Red State lie" Salon, 2014
Annalisa Merelli: "A brief history of normcore and other things that werent things before they became things" Quartz, 2014
Fiona Duncan: "Normcore: Fashion for those who realize they're one in 7 billion" Ny Magazine
Fashion moles, trendcrafters who send coolhunters on the hunt for fashion eastereggs
Today women are more likely to consider themselves hipsters than men by a large margin, 16 percent to 4 percent. Women also have a more favorable impression of hipsters than men, 21 to 11 percent. [their arguing is that they get to participate in the subculture more than the beat and punk subcultures before them]
There is a hipster parent baby name book called: Hello, My Name is Pabst: Baby Names for Nonconformist, Indie, Geeky, DIY, Hipster, and Alterna-Parents of Every Kind. [Because naming your kid after a corn-syrup made shitty beer brand is nonconforming "irony"]
2012, Christy Wampole, NYT, "How to Live Without Irony", they call her a cranky inter-generational spoiled sport who doesn't actually really get that her generation, likely X, also dealt in irony, just look at David Foster Wallace, in 93 he said the irony was the ethos and problem of his age, then he killed himself, ironically?
[And here's their big finale, the solution to all our ills of socioeconomic inequality, racism, climate change:] To go beyond the stock explanations of our consumption, we'll need to recognize its biological underpinnings in the affiliative logic of social selection and the human need for status. We'll need to recognize the capacity of consumerism to solve the Status Dilemma and increase happiness. Finally, we'll need to recognize that a new paradigm of consumption and production not only can be aligned with our long-term social and environmental goals, but also has the potential to accelerate our realization of those goals by creating status incentives that tap into some of our most basic affiliative impulses. That would be cool. [hmm...yeah good luck on that one, are you saying maybe if we all plugged into a perfect cool marketing algorithm a la bioenhanced minifeeds in our frontal neocortex the GDP of our country would double?]
We are all consumers. And we all, more or less, live by consumerism's creed that our consuming is linked to our happiness (in a recent poll, only 6 percent of Americans said that money can't buy happiness).
According to some social critics, it is through the world of commodities that our social world reproduces the social categories that structure our personal identities and give form to the social order.
There is little or no avoiding this world of goods, symbols, and signals. Even the self-proclaimed "anti-consumers" among us typically end up being just alternative consumers. Consider, for example, movements like the Simple Living Network, an anti-consumption group (now defunct) that offered to provide resources for learning to do more with less. Without a hint of irony, its website peddled Simple Living bumper stickers, T-shirts, banners, books, posters, flags, buttons, magnets, note cards, and a veritable laundry list of other goods. And the anti-consumerist organization Adbusters is busy supplying its supporters with its own $125 in-house brand of sneakers, which are no longer clothing but—so the marketing proclaims—have been transformed into rebellious anti-corporatist "tools for activists".
Even consider the avowedly nonconsumer, off-the-grid Amish. Recent times have seen more and more Amish trading in the horse and plow for high-paying factory jobs and enjoying the fruits of their labor by dining out regularly and even vacationing in Florida.
all of the world's ten biggest malls are in Asia or the Middle East.
We learn how to associate products with our social identity and then how to use those products to signal what we're all about to other people.
We instinctively seek status.
A major barrier to understanding consumption is the idea that our status concerns are artificial, or worse yet, pathological. To our thinking, this is a historically monumental mistake, one that has resulted in decades of misleading consumerism critiques. Once we realize the biological reality of consumer motives—the status instinct and the rebel instinct—and understand the critical role they play in our lives, the prescription to deny them becomes about as feasible—and right-minded—as the Victorian demand for chastity. Indeed, once we recognize that these instincts are a legitimate element of being human, we'll see cool consumption in a new light, as a solution to the Status Dilemma.
According to Alain de Botton, for example, status concerns and social hierarchies are constructed by a consumerist culture. By creating aspirations based on false needs, he believes, society creates a painful "status anxiety" within us. This status anxiety is, he claims, entirely artificial. Yet once it has us in its grasp, it creates a desire to consume as a way to alleviate our pain. The result is that the apparent wealth of our society actually impoverishes us, as it creates unlimited expectations that leave us perennially unsatisfied.
ultimately the inability to satisfy the consumer demands of its citizens was a force behind the Soviet Union's collapse.
Consumption had long been a morally problematic notion: of the seven deadly sins, five are sins of consumption—pride, envy, gluttony, lust, and greed.
According to Bell, however, consumption-based capitalism is inherently unsustainable because hedonistic consumption rewards instant self-gratification, whereas production depends on hard work and delayed gratification.
Using data from 140 countries, economists concluded that richer countries are significantly happier overall than poorer countries. As countries get richer, their citizens get happier. Absolute income matters after all. Countries with the greatest economic growth have the highest levels of happiness.
When more income translated into more purchasing power, people's happiness, financial satisfaction, and optimism increased. And this wasn't a fleeting effect, contradicting the claim of anti-consumerists that consuming results in at best only a brief uptick in happiness. The happiness from rising income was an enduring one.
As the historian Arthur Herman chronicled in The Idea of Decline in Western History, the narrative itself isn't new. So-called declinism, especially prognostication of the inevitable decline of capitalism, has been a central theme in social thought for the last 150 years. Declinism—the belief that things were better in the past—has such a hold on us in part because our brains don't remember the past as it really was. We love to reminisce about the good old days, when movie and TV were still good, the country was on the right track, and so on [as if that's ever been true]. In poll after poll, people think just about everything was better in the past. But when researchers actually put it to the test, they discover that we remember things much more positively than we experienced them at the time. It's called rosy retrospection and the nostalgic bias, and it's built into our brain.
cool soon drove a new kind of consumption—oppositional consumption—by invoking the rebel instinct. We refer to this new kind of consumption as rebel cool.
Many theories of addiction describe the addict as blind to the future—someone who no longer cares for his future self. A self trapped in the present.
There is no coherent you behind your decisions and actions. The existence of a unified self as a central decision maker is an illusion, a convenient fiction, a largely unconscious rationalization.
Your creativity at work, for example, is just the redirected sexual energy of your id.
In an influential 1997 New Yorker article "The Coolhunt" about coolhunters, Malcolm Gladwell had said a law of cool was that only certain people knew it when they saw it—namely, cool people, who at the time were making a lot of money spotting the next cool thing for companies. To make matters even worse, he said, "not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them."
Adam Smith suggested that our economic life wasn't about just the bare necessities. If it were, we'd stop working as soon as we had food and shelter—just like every other animal. Smith said that what people really worked to obtain was recognition from others—to be observed favorably. Could it be that our economy runs on the currency of cool?
what's uncool for teenagers is pretty much whatever's cool for 50 year olds.
When the fashion world embraced heroin chic in the 90s, models looked emaciated, with dark circles under their eyes, ratty hair, protruding hipbones and collarbones.
Cool is so especially important among teenagers and 20somethings because they typically don't have a lot of economic power. But they do have the power to determine who's cool and who isn't. [Really, that's all real life's all about eh?]
[Coolhunter named Felicity looking only for teens/20somethings in urban areas mostly, tho this coolhunter is starting to go off the beaten track, to Hudson, Buffalo, Detroit, Caspar Wyoming, etc. Her exposes will likely be ridiculous, seeing something in everything. She's also very agist and fashion/product application based.]
75 percent of the population suffers from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.
Whereas only 14 percent of people agree to answer a survey when approached by a woman wearing a plain sweater or one with a non-luxury logo, a whopping 52 percent agree to answer the survey when an alligator logo is added to the sweater.
Our need for distinction, our need for self-affirmation, and our fear of death drives our consumption [for me it drives my art]
They consider the yearly Sturgis rally as a consumer subculture
They look at "Rebel Cool" as that designed by Mailer, Kerouac, James Dean which glorifies those at the bottom to offer an alternative route to status
sports was the only route to status in high schools before rock and roll came around
Today teenagers see music taste as the best way to show their identity [good luck kids]
We believe cool's greatest legacy was its transformation of emulation consumption into oppositional consumption. [of course you would, and I assume you include weed, speed, secondhand books, and stolen cars in that oppositional consumption model?]
They site the death of Cobain as the decline of the earnestness of the oppositional stance of rebel cool and the rise of the ironic posturing of Dotcool. [Here irony (ironically) implies being okay with being a consumer because you're making fun of yourself as you do it]
Mailer: "The White Negro"
Anatole Broyard: "A Portrait of a Hipster" [could potentially use this as a joke, read out old hipster but character says it's supposed to be about new ones]
Ginsberg said that "the social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang." [like a true homosexual, least he didn't say all women should be exterminated, leave that up to Burroughs, and at least Kerouac loved his mom—for the free rent and the cheap booze]
Did you know: Playboy manipulated Beat masculinity into a proconsumerist masculinity called "The Upbeat generation"? And those nudie photos were to assert heterosexual masculinity? Makes sense.
30 years after Ginsberg told America to go "fuck yourself with your atomic bomb", he was telling America to buy their khakis at Gap.
Perhaps the most incongruent use of 60s anti-consumerist anthems was the appearance of "All You Need is Love" in an ad for a Chase Bank credit card, appearing without a hint of irony. [Wait, I thought this type of marketing had to do with irony! oh wait, nevermind, that's Dotcool, right, like Job's 1984 ad, maybe. Or how Zuckerberg likes to wear hoodies, and it became so unprofessional in people's eyes they started calling it Hoodiegate, potentially ironically, or potentially without a hint of irony, depends on whether you were talking to a rich square, or to a rich dotcooler. Fuck you dad, I'm one of the 6 richest men in the world and I'll wear a fucking hoodie, take that! Just call me the new Johnny Rotten.]
Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn suggests that cool is nothing more today than "a heavily manipulative corporate ethos" [which they use to their advantage by selling adbuster shoes aforementioned, ironically?]
Being cool today doesn't require dropping out, in part because, as we'll argue, in a pluralist consumer culture there's really nowhere to drop out to [we never thought you would argue otherwise, but actually you never argue this point except for presenting it in this sentence...ironically?]
Once rebel cool had been co-opted, contemporary cool emerged as a commodified fake cool [out to commodify from the very beginning, starting with the word hipster, and working its way back up through history, consuming and rewriting everything under the guise of "ironic" consumption].
By the mid-90s sociologists [now getting paid handsomely by advertising firms] were heralding the dawning of a "postsubcultural era" [thank god we finally really got the brats under the whip, thanks Kurt for making it all possible]
Liberals typically want to live in racially and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods [or at least claim they do, when in reality they'll only move in once all the diversity's been drained out of the place and they can get a good real estate investment out of the place], while conservatives want to live in the suburbs among people who share their religious faith [and race].
The authors of this book would like you to think that oppressors, at least in the united states, or at least in their neighborhoods [Malibu and Stockholm respectively], no longer exist because consumerism has solved everything. Any sort of actual rebellion we think we are doing is just a game that works to the benefit of "cool" consumption—well I'm so glad we got that all cleared up, let me go buy some shit, oppositional, indie market shit of course.
Newsflash, nerds, geeks, computer people are now cool, dotcool that is, because they are rich, and they are creative because they are rich, and they are innovative because they are rich. That's so cool, that rich people, some of who are young, are so cool.
According to a social media poll of 30 thousand people in 15 countries, even countries can now be ranked as cool, the US the coolest, and Belgium the least cool [who the fuck are these people, and 15 countries, that's quite a control group]
Cultural interest in the hipster took off around 2008 and now has a global reach. They can be found around the globe, from Jakarta, Bangkok, Shanghai, to Dubai. In a recent survey, half of the respondents aged 18 to 29 identified as hipsters. In the same poll, only 16 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of hipsters. Since only 5 percent of respondents were in the 18-29 demographic, the disdain seems to be intergenerational. Indeed the disdain is also international. In Dubai, hipsters are mocked with faux news stories about how they have to be rescued when their skinny jeans tighten up in the desert heat. It's easy to satarize hipsters, just as every era has its stereotype, from hippies to yuppies to slackers.
Now if hippies killed the beats, and punk killed the hippies and yuppies killed them both and slackers and grunge killed the yuppies to be killed by britpop which was killed by indiepop and techkids and the hipsters are killing everything, who will kill the techkids and hipsters? Anti-tech and normcore? Hardly. The techkids and hipsters created those as viral media memes in the brains of gullible emo kids who were looking for a new identity.
As Rosalind Gill succinctly puts it: Life is a pitch.
"Be your own brand" is the mantra of the knowledge economy.
Thomas Frank hoped that normcore would cause a "complete collapse of the imperium of cool" but of course normcore's appeal depended on being inconspicuous [and easily manipulated by trend marketers]. "Hipsters, They're Just Like Us! Normcore, Sarah Palin and the GOP's Big Red State lie" Salon, 2014
Annalisa Merelli: "A brief history of normcore and other things that werent things before they became things" Quartz, 2014
Fiona Duncan: "Normcore: Fashion for those who realize they're one in 7 billion" Ny Magazine
Fashion moles, trendcrafters who send coolhunters on the hunt for fashion eastereggs
Today women are more likely to consider themselves hipsters than men by a large margin, 16 percent to 4 percent. Women also have a more favorable impression of hipsters than men, 21 to 11 percent. [their arguing is that they get to participate in the subculture more than the beat and punk subcultures before them]
There is a hipster parent baby name book called: Hello, My Name is Pabst: Baby Names for Nonconformist, Indie, Geeky, DIY, Hipster, and Alterna-Parents of Every Kind. [Because naming your kid after a corn-syrup made shitty beer brand is nonconforming "irony"]
2012, Christy Wampole, NYT, "How to Live Without Irony", they call her a cranky inter-generational spoiled sport who doesn't actually really get that her generation, likely X, also dealt in irony, just look at David Foster Wallace, in 93 he said the irony was the ethos and problem of his age, then he killed himself, ironically?
[And here's their big finale, the solution to all our ills of socioeconomic inequality, racism, climate change:] To go beyond the stock explanations of our consumption, we'll need to recognize its biological underpinnings in the affiliative logic of social selection and the human need for status. We'll need to recognize the capacity of consumerism to solve the Status Dilemma and increase happiness. Finally, we'll need to recognize that a new paradigm of consumption and production not only can be aligned with our long-term social and environmental goals, but also has the potential to accelerate our realization of those goals by creating status incentives that tap into some of our most basic affiliative impulses. That would be cool. [hmm...yeah good luck on that one, are you saying maybe if we all plugged into a perfect cool marketing algorithm a la bioenhanced minifeeds in our frontal neocortex the GDP of our country would double?]
April 6, 2019
By blending a study heavy in neurology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, Steven Quartz and Annette Asp have given us a truly intriguing and ground-breaking work on the study of consumerism. I am surprised that this book did not garner more traction. It is a fascinating read.
Quartz and Asp begin by slowly laying their assertions that the idea of “cool”, a concept inextricably linked to consumerism, is ingrained in humanity’s evolutionary make-up. Though I was skeptical of such a claim (Hipsters, the counter-Culture movement, even the French Revolution all came to mind as those who reject social norms), the authors carefully lay the groundwork for their thesis with a variety of findings. For instance, in one study, “researchers discovered that college students value boost to their self-esteem, such as being praised receiving a good grade, more than eating a favorite food, receiving a paycheck, seeing a best friend, or engaging in a favorite sexual activity.” This research was interesting, but I somehow doubted that this could be true across all groups. College students tend to be achievers and thus such external validation makes sense.
However, the authors set out to prove that this does happen across subgroups and demographics. Consider embarrassment. The authors spent a great deal of time diving into the evolutionary and psychological reasons that such a negative emotion exists They state that “there is now evidence that social awards and avoidance of punishment solicit similar brain responses.” This means not doing something can give the mind pleasure just as much as the act of actually doing something can.
In a different study involving mice and a reward system, it was found that the dopamine centers of the creatures reacted positively to an award before the award itself was issued. This means that the anticipation of a positive reward (i.e. being seen as cool) could be enough of an award without the expected follow through.
While all their research is well and good (and I’ve barely brushed the surface of what they presented), Quartz and Asp’s ultimate goal is to believe that consumerism can save the world. If people turn responsible consumerism into “cool”, then human beings will grow a social conscience. It’s a bit of a stretch, yes, but the authors show study after study where a product, ideal, or ethics was radically changed within a relatively short amount of time.
As a side note, some of the more interesting bits of personal intrigue to me concerned the Beats or Counter-Culture (Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, etc.) I fell in love with the movement at a relatively young age (think misguided teenager). I lamented back then that women were not apart of the movement, but at the time believed that this is because women were uninterested in such things (crazy, I know)t. However, something I had never considered is that the Counter-Culture movement was distinctly anti-women. While many people in my life and otherwise have argued that the authors of this time were at best sexist, I continued to make excuses for them. However, Quartz and Asp have finally brung me around. For one, they talk about how the Beat culture and Playboy magazine worked together to project their image of counter-culture to the world. I had never before considered this economical edge. Additionally, the authors state that “Almost instantly after the publication of [Jack Kerouac’s] On The Road magazines started focusing on its portrayal of the Beat lifestyle at the way to reclaim masculinity”.
Additionally, the authors briefly touch on monogamy following a superb chapter about the social structures of other primates. It has long been thought that monogamy was the result of higher moral thinking; however, it appears that the reverse may have been the case. It is stated that “Monogamous marriage is one human Innovation that diffuses human status competition”. If human beings are not focused on climbing through the social ranks within their family structures, then they are forced to focus on other measures with which to compare themselves. It is an interesting theory for certain.
The final note piece of interest for me involved Aristotle, who “suggested that the ultimate End Of Human Action was happiness. Everything we do is ultimately in pursuit of it. Happiness is desired for its own sake. It is essential purpose of human life.” This is not a new idea. However, consumerism is part of this search for happiness. Consumerism, then, isn’t inherently evil. It is instead part of the human experience.
Though I do not accept everything in the book as gospel truth, I was inspired and challenged in ways that I have not been for a very long time. It is accessible enough for the everyman to understand, and yet challenging enough to inspire academics to change. I pray and hope that Quartz and Asp get the recognition they deserve for a truly phenomenal work.
Quartz and Asp begin by slowly laying their assertions that the idea of “cool”, a concept inextricably linked to consumerism, is ingrained in humanity’s evolutionary make-up. Though I was skeptical of such a claim (Hipsters, the counter-Culture movement, even the French Revolution all came to mind as those who reject social norms), the authors carefully lay the groundwork for their thesis with a variety of findings. For instance, in one study, “researchers discovered that college students value boost to their self-esteem, such as being praised receiving a good grade, more than eating a favorite food, receiving a paycheck, seeing a best friend, or engaging in a favorite sexual activity.” This research was interesting, but I somehow doubted that this could be true across all groups. College students tend to be achievers and thus such external validation makes sense.
However, the authors set out to prove that this does happen across subgroups and demographics. Consider embarrassment. The authors spent a great deal of time diving into the evolutionary and psychological reasons that such a negative emotion exists They state that “there is now evidence that social awards and avoidance of punishment solicit similar brain responses.” This means not doing something can give the mind pleasure just as much as the act of actually doing something can.
In a different study involving mice and a reward system, it was found that the dopamine centers of the creatures reacted positively to an award before the award itself was issued. This means that the anticipation of a positive reward (i.e. being seen as cool) could be enough of an award without the expected follow through.
While all their research is well and good (and I’ve barely brushed the surface of what they presented), Quartz and Asp’s ultimate goal is to believe that consumerism can save the world. If people turn responsible consumerism into “cool”, then human beings will grow a social conscience. It’s a bit of a stretch, yes, but the authors show study after study where a product, ideal, or ethics was radically changed within a relatively short amount of time.
As a side note, some of the more interesting bits of personal intrigue to me concerned the Beats or Counter-Culture (Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, etc.) I fell in love with the movement at a relatively young age (think misguided teenager). I lamented back then that women were not apart of the movement, but at the time believed that this is because women were uninterested in such things (crazy, I know)t. However, something I had never considered is that the Counter-Culture movement was distinctly anti-women. While many people in my life and otherwise have argued that the authors of this time were at best sexist, I continued to make excuses for them. However, Quartz and Asp have finally brung me around. For one, they talk about how the Beat culture and Playboy magazine worked together to project their image of counter-culture to the world. I had never before considered this economical edge. Additionally, the authors state that “Almost instantly after the publication of [Jack Kerouac’s] On The Road magazines started focusing on its portrayal of the Beat lifestyle at the way to reclaim masculinity”.
Additionally, the authors briefly touch on monogamy following a superb chapter about the social structures of other primates. It has long been thought that monogamy was the result of higher moral thinking; however, it appears that the reverse may have been the case. It is stated that “Monogamous marriage is one human Innovation that diffuses human status competition”. If human beings are not focused on climbing through the social ranks within their family structures, then they are forced to focus on other measures with which to compare themselves. It is an interesting theory for certain.
The final note piece of interest for me involved Aristotle, who “suggested that the ultimate End Of Human Action was happiness. Everything we do is ultimately in pursuit of it. Happiness is desired for its own sake. It is essential purpose of human life.” This is not a new idea. However, consumerism is part of this search for happiness. Consumerism, then, isn’t inherently evil. It is instead part of the human experience.
Though I do not accept everything in the book as gospel truth, I was inspired and challenged in ways that I have not been for a very long time. It is accessible enough for the everyman to understand, and yet challenging enough to inspire academics to change. I pray and hope that Quartz and Asp get the recognition they deserve for a truly phenomenal work.
June 18, 2017
If you read this book (and I don't recommend it), do yourself a favor and skip to the last two chapters. That's where the authors finally discuss in any depth the notion of how that intangible quality of coolness drives economic choices. Even then, it's not particularly clear what their driving at. Suspicious of classical, rationalist economics, I enjoy the insights of behavioral economists. Rather than telling us how people ought to make economic choices, they focus on how we actually do, pointing out how irrational and unconscious forces often guide our decision making far more than most are comfortable admitting. But this book, steeped in evolutionary biology and the study of chimpanzee society, seems to posit that we don't really have any choices at all. We are prisoners of biologically predestined patterns of behavior that it's senseless to fight against; it's just hard coded into our DNA. So, skip all that and jump to the last two chapters that explore the rise of cool, primarily focusing on the Beats, Norman Mailer, and James Dean. Their influence on culture, and the rise of rebel cool and the subsequent commodification of cool is far more interesting. I would also recommend the Frontline episode The Merchants of Cool.
March 3, 2017
This book started incredibly slow, and I didn't have high hopes for it, based on the first few chapters, which are a rather dry blend of psychology experiments and economics. I stuck with it, though, and it eventually broadened its scope into history, where it became a great deal more interesting, since it could deal with actual examples that didn't seem one sided. I found very few of the initial examples of experiments and ideas about status fit for me, but that changed when the narrative introduced the oppositional ideas, which suited me a lot better, and made this book feel a bit more on the mark. While I enjoyed hearing the author's ideas, though, this book didn't really fulfill the promise of the title, dealing with economics a bit at the beginning, and then talking about the concept of "Cool," but not really bringing them together in any meaningful way.
March 3, 2019
Maybe its just me. This is just one of those books that try so desperately hard to sell an idea. It tries to present this "cool" phenomenon as the next best thing since slice bread. Very weak in terms of a storytelling point of view.
March 30, 2017
It goes on a lot. Reads more like a textbook then fun.
July 21, 2015
Not a paradigm shift but what it does it does very well in it's research and analysis
February 1, 2018
i fundamentally disagreed with this book's position of consumerism as status qualifier that i went out and bought a pair of New Balance just to be ironic.
June 12, 2018
Consumerism, status symbol. B
December 7, 2018
Cool concept, but very boring book.
June 4, 2021
In fact, we purchase items we think of as cool to seek recognition from other humans and gain acceptance in society.
Read
May 27, 2023Started for the book club but didn't attend the second session so I never got around to finishing it.1
Read
January 2, 2026bratz-dylan
October 31, 2015
While interesting, this was a rather uneven book that actually reads like two books. The first part really hits on more of the neuroscience, and is a bit lengthy albeit informative. The last few chapters are a bit more of a rushed cultural history which feels a bit unsatisfying. Perhaps I had hoped for more of a comprehensive look at the correspondence of products and culture and the complex interplay between them.
They do a fair bit of tilting at the political assumptions that underlie earlier theories of advertising and commerce. One of the more intriguing aspects of their theory is that the marketplace now has a far more diverse set of subcultures that allow for different cultural/group signifiers including some that require a fair bit of in-group knowledge. That said, I would question whether that is a truly modern condition. I'd reckon that a good historian could likely find plenty of examples of earlier societies in which there was also a wide range of goods, markings, or styles of dress, clothing etc. that serve that very purpose- and not simply as part of a hierarchical competition within a limited social structure.
An interesting book, but I think they overreach themselves a bit in trying to reach conclusions.
They do a fair bit of tilting at the political assumptions that underlie earlier theories of advertising and commerce. One of the more intriguing aspects of their theory is that the marketplace now has a far more diverse set of subcultures that allow for different cultural/group signifiers including some that require a fair bit of in-group knowledge. That said, I would question whether that is a truly modern condition. I'd reckon that a good historian could likely find plenty of examples of earlier societies in which there was also a wide range of goods, markings, or styles of dress, clothing etc. that serve that very purpose- and not simply as part of a hierarchical competition within a limited social structure.
An interesting book, but I think they overreach themselves a bit in trying to reach conclusions.
February 14, 2017
will update.
3.5 stars
3.5 stars
December 27, 2015
This new concept seems to be a hot topic nowadays. The basic premise is that humans are indeed driven to consume cooler stuff which makes them appear better socially. The super ordinate goals come to the fore. The brain actually takes decisions to satisfy these needs. Well written.
April 24, 2015
I didn't like the first 2 chapters of this book. Too unfocused. I wanted to tell the author to "get to the point." I thought the rest of the book was interesting.
June 16, 2015
Excellent book on behavioural economics of consumption backed by good research evidence and sound arguments. Good discussion and critique on the existing consumption literature.
Read
July 16, 2015Location: PTI IRC
Accession No: DL027261
Accession No: DL027261
September 15, 2015
Interesting insight into why status has become a need in the 21st century
March 10, 2016
Arguably the most important book to have been written about marketing.
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