Every idea that starts as radical will turn into a marketing gimmick.
Our culture digests potential threats into something innocuous and profitable. The rainbow flag, the hippie movement, the green movement, and even most traditional religions started as protest. But they are now products: safe, profitable, organic, ethical, and sometimes slapped on t-shirts or bottles of vodka.
It's the market's digestive system.
It wants everything to be predictable to fuel the status quo. The best way to do that? Embrace to neutralize. What begins as protest gets sanitized into profit.
That's marketing's job: being the market's propaganda.
After marketing gets into action for some profiteering, we end up with the illusion of a new idea being incorporated into culture. But celebrating Pride Month doesn't equal having genuine inclusivity and opportunities across society.
This digestive system is subtle and impressive. It acts like a culture-wide spell-checker. Not only does it detect errors, but it also pushes corrections.
Look at how Pride parades now happen in police pens.
In most big US cities, marchers are herded into designated areas under the watchful eye of police. Once a fierce protest against oppression, Pride is now reduced to a corporate-sponsored event. Raw energy turned into a celebration of glittery credit cards and rainbow hard seltzers.
These are counterfeit rights. Like the right to deserve rainbow goods, but not the same treatment, opportunities, or job promotions in everyday life.
The same happened to the counterculture revolution in the '60s, ingested by the market and pooped out as Whole Foods.
Radical ideas of peace, love, and organic living are now packaged and sold at a premium. Want to protest against specific, approved wars? That's okay! Here's a blue and yellow sticker for your car and home windows. Worried about other genocides? Sorry, that's touchy.
Or the green movement: once challenging corporate greed and destruction, it is now another marketing tool.
The market's ability to absorb and repurpose ecology is both fascinating and infuriating. Eco-friendly products fill the shelves of the same corporations they once opposed. Notice how Apple removed chargers from their phones' boxes to be more 'green.' It's a mere coincidence that they earn more by opening up the market for premium chargers packaged in more polluting boxes.
These paradoxes are features, not errors, of our engineered world. Spell-checking itself to maintain the illusion of safety and control. The point, to be clear, is not that you should despise ecology, pacifism, and social rights.
The point is that you should look for value outside the narratives repackaged for you, in the everyday actions you commit to.
While this digestive system neutralizes discomfort by commodifying it, we foster individual change and share it with the communities surrounding us. While good ideas may be co-opted and stripped of their potential, the power of personal transformation is untouchable.
You want to stay the cause, not just the effect, of change and inclusivity.
