Black Friday Blues: When Will This Commercial End?

How much of our current national malaise is a product of our surrender of the culture to the siren song of advertising and technology?

Last week was Black Friday, the official beginning of the obscene consumer frenzy that defines American life more than any other thing. Indeed, the meaning of our “holidays” has been subsumed by the relentless logic of the market that has penetrated every aspect of our public, private, and intimate lives, and now has colonized our minds to such an extent that it is hard to tell where the commercials end and our lives begin.

If there is one thing you can learn about Americans from watching TV commercials, it is that we care more about things than people. If the average American is concerned about “life,” it is as a consumer rather than a citizen, no less a human being. More than Trump or any political ideology, this erosion of community, agency and authentic selfhood is the real existential threat to democracy and the value of our lives.

Our endless appetites for commodities of all sorts are constructed by the propaganda wing of capitalism, the advertising system, that exists not to fulfill our needs but to create a never-ending stream of new desires. The more cynical we become about advertisements, the more we try to tune them out, the earlier into our childhoods they encroach, and the further into every corner of the known world they expand.

We consume products that define our identities, communities, and notions about reality. We learn what is good and bad from advertising, what is possible and not possible, what love is, what life means, what is sacred, and where all our existing resources should be going.

We shop; therefore, we are.

We never ask whether a new technological tool or gadget is good or what context it is appropriate for, or which things ought to have limits. The only thing that matters is that the new toy is new and available for purchase. Only a fool or a curmudgeon would question the totalitarian blitzkrieg of AI sweeping into our schools, communication systems, arts, workplaces, and on and on. Elon Musk and a chorus of Silicon Valley geniuses told me so.

It's on my phone now, so it must be true. It can grade my papers for me, write better than me, and make the music I listen to. It’s better at just about everything I can do, perhaps even thinking. No, it’s definitely better at thinking than me.

Dystopian climate future? Authoritarian rule? Post-factual information landscape? Death on the installment plan? Sign me up.

America, is this true? It’s the impression I get from watching my devices and the old-fashioned TV set. America, are you serious? You must be much more serious than me, because it seems like we are strolling towards the shopping mall or scrolling through lists of goods on Amazon on our computers or cellphones like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

Don’t bother locking the doors, though, because the zombies are already in the house, sitting on your couch, doomscrolling on the iPhone right next to you. Don’t bother shooting them in the head like in the film either; there is no use. There will just be more of them, and more after that. They are everywhere; they are us. This is not an assault on the culture; it IS the culture.

Thus, we need not just an effective political answer but a kind of counterculture that addresses the confusion between wants and needs, the bewilderment that leads us to value inauthentic commodified identity and packaged “fun” over real community and human connection. And some kind of grassroots cultural response might just be more effective than creating better soundbites for a new tsunami of political ads since they tend to operate by the logic of advertising and are, in fact, part of the problem.

What could this possibly look like? Perhaps we might think of creating spaces in society where we are not miserable. Places where we don’t hate each other for fun or must find some external entity to grant us identity, authenticity, and love. Thoreau has never been more right about the mass of humans living lives of “quiet desperation.” I would hazard a guess that this is one of many plausible explanations for the fit of madness we just called “the election.”

Desperate people do desperate things. But as the old courage teacher told us, it is the better part of wisdom not to do desperate things. Somewhere, underneath the malaise, rage, and hyper alienation, we want life to be simple and good. The subterranean miner in us all needs to get to work and find a vein to tap that is not full of poison.