We’re Not Buying It

It’s hard to notice when you’re in the middle of it, but if you step back it becomes pretty clear that our corporate-controlled economy has managed to transform just about every aspect of modern life into a commodity. It’s a process that insidiously seeps into our daily experience. The COVID crisis has forced this situation into sharp relief. For many of us, paying for prefab commercialized “experiences” has become the primary way we meet our non-material needs. This alienates us, not just from each other but even from ourselves. It keeps us occupied and distracted but does exactly nothing to add meaning or connection to our lives. The hollowness of this way of living seems especially clear when you consider the experiences offered for sale by large chain corporations, but sadly it now applies to most independent and small businesses as well. When you walk into a restaurant or a clothing store (well, when you used to do that, before Everything Completely Changed Forever), even though you’re theoretically paying for goods and services, you’re also paying for the experience: the aesthetic, the jargon the staff uses, the music playing in the background…all of it. Some frequent travelers have started to notice that wherever you go in the developed world — New York, or Berlin, or Melbourne, it doesn’t really matter — you increasingly seem to find the exact same type of hipster bar with the exact same aesthetic. Without realizing it, we can get sucked into the search for the ultimate “authentic” experience, whether it’s the authentic taco, the authentic whiskey, or the authentic meditation retreat. The thing is, it’s an aimless and empty quest. There is no authentic thing. Our lives are totally dominated by these ravenous multinational corporations with a thousand tentacles, grasping hungrily for every last bit of our time, and our money, and our attention. They’re constantly trying to package and sell a feeling, a mindset, a way of being. This actually renders the pursuit of “authenticity” meaningless, or more precisely, unsatisfiable, because the whole economy is based on promoting an unremitting lack of satisfaction. If there ever was such a thing as the “authentic burrito,” you can bet Chipotle wouldn’t sell it to you, and neither would anyone else. They couldn’t. There is no “one true burrito,” and more importantly, what they’re really trying to sell you is a feeling, an aesthetic, a sense of meaning and connection. You can’t buy any of that stuff. Truly authentic experiences only exist outside of the sphere of commercial exchange. Making a burrito for yourself, or someone else, and giving it to them — that’s an authentic experience, even if the burrito itself is mediocre. Making that burrito, and sharing it, and eating it, that’s a set of physical actions, using material goods, but it’s also a set of emotional actions driven by our basic need to take care of ourselves and other people, and to connect.

A silver lining of the COVID-19 “subpocalypse,” as I like to call it, and its smackdown of both the economy and social life is that our hand has been forced. With our purchase options whittled down to online entertainment and product deliveries, it’s become a lot more obvious just how empty and fruitless the whole process of paying for experiences actually is. At a certain point, for a lot of us, it’s become so frustrating that we’ve had no choice but to create and share our own experiences, which are, by definition, authentic. Cooking (and even growing) your own food, sharing it with neighbors, that is an authentic experience that occurs completely outside the frame of buying and selling. It’s an experience centered around connection and meaning. It’s about self-sufficiency and mutual support. If you can’t pay someone to do it for you, do it yourself. Better yet, freely offer up your services to your neighbors, and be amazed at how readily they do the same for you. We’ve been given, or honestly, we’ve had thrust upon us, the chance to engage in activities that bypass the machinery of global corporate commerce. We’re sharing direct, immediate connections, taking care of our own needs and those of our fellow humans without the mediation of a multinational corporation driven by a relentless need to increase shareholder value, or even a local business driven by the need to survive at any cost in a dog-eat-dog world. Direct action. Mutual aid. The gift economy. DIY. The commons. These phenomena point to a possible new and healthy direction for social and political life. While it is foolish to say at this point “we don’t need the state,” the state has not done, and probably will never do, nearly enough to sustain us. In all likelihood we really don’t have a choice. If we want to survive, and even thrive, we need to stop waiting for Big Daddy, let alone Big Brother, to take care of us. This is not to buy into the libertarian fantasy that big government is evil and tyrannical. No, that would be big business. The worst oppression by far comes from massive corporations. Government often serves as their proxy, but government, which at least on paper still represents us, can offer some degree of protection from the unchecked rule of market forces. But we need to stop thinking that government is what’s going to save us. We are going to save us. We have each other and we need each other. We can, we must, build a new world “in the shell of the old” as the well-known activist refrain goes.