Menacing Plagues

"Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them," reported an advertising trade journal in the late forties. "Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones." (Heller)

I find it amazing that in the late forties advertisers realized that insecurity-marketing would prevail. By turning body odor, bad breath and acne into plague like issues, they convinced the masses that it was imperative to deal with these common nuisances.

This is still the case over sixty years later and it seems like things are getting worse. In addition to hygiene, we all must have expensive clothes, clear skin, a perfect body and of course the latest in electronics. I realize that technology has significantly advanced my field and I am very grateful that I am not using tech pens and illustration boards, but at the same time I, along with my parents generation, wonder if technology is taking things in the wrong direction. We now have to be insecure about having the right phone, computer and tablet, not to mention maintaining cars and houses.

The costs are adding up and sometimes I think I would have preferred to have been born 50 years earlier when there weren't so many things to buy to keep up with the Joneses.

Missing the Movement

For the past month I have been hearing a lot about the Occupy WallStreet movement online, especially through social media. I didn't realize that the idea was first brought up by Adbusters mid-July or that it was gaining such momentum until I looked into it further this weekend.

The Occupy Wall Street website states that, "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."

One of the most recent speakers was Slavoj Zizek, he spoke about North America's lack of dreaming, the issues with the system and the need for patience. Below I have summarized what I found most interesting from his visit.

In China the government prohibited all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel, this shows that citizens still dream about alternatives and that there is a need for prohibition. In the United States there is no need to prohibit such things as the ruling system has suppressed the capacity to dream. It seems that we have all the freedoms we want but are missing the language to articulate the extent of the current non-freedom.

The biggest threat to the movement is that when everyone goes back to normal life there will be no changes. That down the road, protesters will meet up yearly to remember the nice time they had, not the changes they have experienced.

It is imperative to think about alternatives, we know we are not living in the best possible world, but after understanding what we don't want, we need to figure out what we do want. One of Zizek's final points was that people often desire something but do not really want it. Citizens need to really want what they desire to make a significant change.

"We don't want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living."