I regularly wonder if the stance I have taken on Consumerism on this site is justified and constructive. I’m not immune to doubt. Then something like the UK riots comes along, and I decide that I definitely am.
There is certainly a case for incremental work within the ‘creative’ industries to use our powers of persuasion to shift behaviour within the frame of Consumerism. This work is useful and important, and I apologise if in the past I have suggested that is not the case.
But the simple fact is that it will not be enough. It is all very well to start from where we are, but we have also to recognise where we need to get to. Otherwise all we will actually achieve will be to further reinforce the frame with which we are tinkering, simply by the act of acceptance.
The riots in London and other UK cities are, in my mind and apparently in the minds of others (Zoe Williams in the Guardian for one) a wake-up call for our Consumer society. Urban young men are the single most targeted audience group in the country for advertisers, for their power in defining cool if not always in spending. These are the group who are told most often and most insistently that they are Consumers, that their primary means of participating in society is to consume. The sheer persistence of commercial messaging in their lives is so pervasive to them as to be invisible, as is increasingly the case for all of us. As such, what attitudes, behaviours and beliefs should we expect this to normalise? Is it any wonder that those who are our ultimate Consumers, when they can’t afford to do it legally, do it illegally instead? Why are we surprised that there is no apparent political motive behind their action? These may well be the world’s first Consumer riots.
I do not wish to over-simplify. I am well aware of the role of gangs in the violence, and the levels of orchestration. But the timber has to be dry for a fire to start, and the people who were taking part in this activity were not all gang members. And that’s before we go into the discussion of why gangs exist in the first place, arguably the drive for status that rules in Consumerist societies, and the resulting inevitability of the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor that comes from a zero-sum game society.
So what should we do? Cameron’s proposals to date seem at best superficial, targeted at the symptoms not the causes, and though time should be granted, several of his ideas seriously risk doing more harm than good. Take his reference to the planning system: he says current proposals to ‘free up’ UK planning applications through the introduction of a ‘default yes’ will mean shopkeepers will be more likely to be able to install shutters on their windows. Superb. That’ll solve it.
No matter that the same proposals also reduce the difficulties involved in establishing new billboard advertising sites; or that they fundamentally threaten the green spaces in and around our cities which ever-growing swathes of research show are vital to social cohesion. Like so many of us, good intentions notwithstanding, he is poisoning the roots of the very tree whose leaves he waters.
My starting point would be to draw some boundaries around advertising in society, a 180 degree cultural shift from the current world where applause goes to those continually finding new places to invade people’s lives and talk to them as Consumers. Advertising may not be the only guilty party, but it is the most controllable. We need to stop advertising to children, full stop. We need to reverse the opening up of commercial television to product placement. We need to find a way to police the internet effectively. We need, fundamentally, to ensure we have some social oxygen to be something other than Consumers.
Otherwise we will be here again sooner than we’d like to think. And it’ll take more than a police surge to make it go away.
