Archive for August, 2011
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
Annals of Greenwash: Recyclebank
Recycling is the capitalist’s favorite (and only) green idea. It obliterates the question of what gets produced in the first place and points the finger at the end, rather than the beginning, of the product life cycle. It makes the behavior of “consumers,” not capitalists, the topic of concern. It implies that mere gestures are enough.
Hence, it was probably inevitable that some jerk would invent the idea of Recyclebank, the Philadelphia-based Trojan Horse for corporate ecocide.
Here’s how it works: Customers who sign-up with RecycleBank receive a special container embedded with a computer chip. Every time the recycling truck comes for a pickup, it records the weight of the bin and transmits it wirelessly to an online account. Homeowners accrue up to $35 worth of credits a month based on the amount of recycling they do.
The credits, in turn, can be turned into coupons that can be redeemed at more than 300 retailers, including Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Rite Aid. [Source: Forbes]
How green is what Recyclebank does?
First of all, its system pays people more “points” for more mass in the recycling bin, meaning higher overall product-usage rates are encouraged, not discouraged, by Recyclebank.
Of course, how else would its corporate partners — Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Dow Chemical, Target, Home Depot, etc. — have it?
Moreover, despite its condescending and cynical prattle about being “a group of passionate people who’ve made it our mission to inspire others to take action – small to big – that will have a positive impact on our planet,” Recyclebank is also a double shill: It pre-empts both pay-as-you-throw trash programs and bottle bills, the latter undoubtedly one of the reasons why Coca-Cola is a Recyclebank “partner.”
All the while, what do the entrepreneurs running Recyclebank really, truly think about the “consumers” they profess to care so deeply about? The usual:
In fact, advertising is a big piece of [CEO] Gonen’s strategy. As RecycleBank rolls out nationally in the next couple of years – look for a debut in some Manhattan apartment buildings this winter – he’ll have collected the names, addresses and buying habits of hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of people.
At that point, Recycle Bank will have a database of loyal customers who manage accounts online and can be targeted by advertisers. If nothing else, it should become a place where companies can sell to “green” consumers, says Gonen.
“The core of this company is the ability to target and market to a captive audience that feels good about what they are doing,” he said.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Brixton’s Fuel: Politics Not “Consumerism”
I mentioned that Billy Bragg has attributed the ongoing British riots in part to “exclusion from consumerist society.” As TCTer Justin points out, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this ridiculous diagnosis much farther, attributing the riots to the “non-shopping” of “defective consumers.”
Here is Bauman’s underlying claim about the nature of contemporary social life and social structure:
It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops.
This confirms what I said in a comment on the prior Billy Bragg post: Those who swallow the “consumer” vocabulary have a license to make up the wildest bullshit. If you doubt that, consider the utter silliness of each of the bolded phrases from this supposedly emininent supposed sociologist. Not one of them is even a half-truth, yet Bauman presents them as if he were revealing the motor of history. Empirical evidence about what actually motivates people? No need for that! We have “consumerist society” incantations, which are true in and of themselves, by mere recitation.
The spread of such gibberish speaks volumes about the sorry state of what passes for a left/realist/progressive survivalist movement these days. As the mainstream media amplify the usual interpretation — verbalized by David Cameron, who attributes the events to “pockets of our society that are not just broken, but are frankly sick” [ed: Cameron is not thinking of capitalists here, despite the rather plain fit of his diagnosis to them] — Bauman simply papers over reality in the name of rote pseudo-explanation.
The fact is that these are not frustrated shoppers who have somehow had their Harrod’s charge plates retracted. These are young and poor and often non-white UK residents who are being forced to pay for the implosion of the Thatcherite supply-side capitalist orgy that is now meeting its own logical end in Britain and around the world, and which has always pissed on the poor and the average. The situation is well understood on the ground:
The welfare state is under a sustained assault. Each day brings news of ever more drastic government plans – privatisation of the health service, destruction of the benefit system, public services cut to pieces.
The politicians say it is because we’re in a financial mess. This is nonsense – public debt is no worse than at many times in the past. The rich are getting richer, the bankers once again paying themselves massive bonuses. Yet the rest of us are expected to give up our essential public services to pay their gambling debts.
The bankers’ crisis continues to cause mass job losses. But while numbers on welfare increase, the government is slashing benefits for the unemployed, sick and disabled, single parents and those on low wages. Anyone out of work is threatened with sanctions and workfare.
To justify this, the government paints benefit claimants as useless scroungers who have to be bullied to get a job.
The Manchester Guardian reports:
The biggest losers, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) said, are likely to be single people without children, those working more than 30 hours, those not in receipt of housing benefit, and households with savings of more than £16,000.
In other words: mostly young, working class people.
And, as Billy Bragg does note, the slashes are far deeper than mere dole reductions.
Meanwhile, the usual Tory mendacity has been gratuitously throwing salt into these wounds. PM Cameron’s depiction of the rioters as sick residents of mere social “pockets” is hardly a new phenomenon. As Britain’s economy has tanked and structural unemployment climbed, Cameron has all along portrayed the unemployed as shirkers. This, despite the well-known-in-Brixton fact that Cameron himself is about as thoroughly ensconced in inherited British upper class privilege as it is possible to be. As such, he has, of course, never himself done anything but “work” as a Conservative “researcher” and politician, with the usual in-between “gap years” and club outings.
Finally, a socio-political observer I trust deeply is actually in England at this very moment. His report:
I have probably less information than anybody else here about the exciting events elsewhere in Albion — haven’t been following the news reports closely at all. TV is as useless and mendacious here as it is in the States, and overheard conversations equally censorious, wrong-headed, and petty-bourgeois.
In other words, the stiff-lipped British overclass is roughly the same as our Yankee-Confederate one — just as deluded and ideologically high on its own fumes; just as powerful in the realm of communications; just as uninterested in, and thoroughly out of, answers.
Hence, it seems to me that the oppressed youth of Britain are merely taking the rather obvious next step. They are engaging in straightforward politics under the conditions they’ve been placed in.*
If only the youth of America could start making similar attempts to save themselves, and perhaps the rest of us in the bargain.
*Speaking of evidence:
Speaking to Reuters late on Tuesday, looters and other local people in east London pointed to the wealth gap as the underlying cause, also blaming what they saw as police prejudice and a host of recent scandals.
Spending cuts were now hitting the poorest hardest, they said, and after tales of politicians claiming excessive expenses, alleged police corruption and bankers getting rich it was their turn to take what they wanted.
“They set the example,” said one youth after riots in the London district of Hackney. “It’s time to loot.”
Monday, August 8th, 2011
Nothing to Bragg About
Very sad to say it, but in his pathetic analysis of the steet rebellion in the UK, my idol Billy Bragg actually attributes it in part to “exclusion from consumerist society.”
Billy, my friend, what in hell are you doing using that word “consumerist?”
It’s a rather obvious euphemism for “capitalist,” mate.
Pull your head out, and stop growing old in the brain.
Monday, August 8th, 2011
The TCT Diagnosis
What’s happening? The unacknowledged but totally real, labor-theory-of-value vindicating end of the Reagan Experiment. That’s what.
All sponsored by the vicious, genocidal, ultra-stupid American ruling class and managed by both wings of its purchased two-partied duopoly, in this market-totalitarian society, all formally presided over by a whored-out fool who makes Stepin Fetchit look like an amateur at the trade. Not a pretty picture…not a happy future.
Monday, August 8th, 2011
Another Fish in the Barrel
It begins to trigger one’s pity, despite the topic. There really is an endless supply of pathetically deranged little auto-bots personing the marketing trade, offering up the next little link in the endless chain of Orwellian “insights.”
This gent is one Jeff Greenfield, not of any known relation to the long-running hateful sycophantic journalist and pseudo-intellectual of the same name.
While that Mr. Greenfield has switched from pimping wars and such to polishing the brass of the golden-parachuted scions of Fred Taylor, our Mr. Greenfield has quite a similar passion — space-age Coke machines!
Ad Age reports the basic story:
Coca-Cola Freestyle has been generating buzz, sales boosts and foot traffic since tests for the futuristic machine were first launched three years ago. Now, as the next-generation soda fountain reaches a critical mass — it will be in 80 markets by year’s end — execs are readying Freestyle’s first marketing campaign.
The fountain serves up 125 different flavors of soft drinks, flavored waters, sports drinks and lemonades and sends usage data, such as what flavors are most popular at what times of the day, to Coca-Cola HQ. Already the beverage giant is analyzing data pouring in from more than 1,500 machines in restaurants including Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Mac and Five Guys.
Our Jeff, in a comment on the Ad Age story, finds this machine to be a wonder in the making, a veritable harbinger of the impending arrival of paradise:
This is a beautiful piece of innovation, because it’s a 3-way win. The end consumer wins by getting expanded choices [ed: among sugar-water flavors]. The food-service customer wins by being able to offer the consumer that benefit, and Coca-Cola wins by getting massive amounts of real-time data without adding the burden of documentation or reporting to either of the other parties.
It’s interesting to think about where this type of real-world, instantly personalized product experience could pop up next. Candy bars? Inventory-less bookstores? Fashion?
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see data from these machines lead to new products hitting store shelves. Remember the runaway success of the “limited time only” Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper? The next flavor combination could be spawned from Freestyle data.
If the piggy-backing effort weren’t so pathetic — Mr. Greenfield reports himself as the “CEO, CMO, COO, [and] CFO” of his own internet marketing agency — I’d be ROFLMFAO.
Friday, August 5th, 2011
Comedy in Greenwash
Pretty hilarious “Eyesore of the Month” over at kunstler.com. Apparently, mega-retailer Target has taken to presenting miniscule cement-bordered weed islands in its parking lots as “Conservation Areas.” Can you imagine the chutzpah and cynicism behind this little piece of marketing? ROFLMFAO.
