I will—generally—root for the underdog. Having endured many years at many schools I know what it’s like to have none of your peers cheer for you, notice you’re there or not, or be generally interested in your success or failure—aside from how it perhaps might impact their experience.
Popular things don’t need my support or interest. They’re already popular. But something challenging sometimes happens in my support of the underdog. Sometimes the underdog becomes popular. And that’s where it all goes wrong, because now the underdog isn’t anymore—now it’s part of popular culture, and now a part of me isn’t interested anymore, a growing part of me is waiting for the inevitable fade into the background of mass mediocrity, and the rest of me is quietly pleased because I know it always happens—it’s just a matter of when and how.
Remember Lady Gaga? She was good—I thought she was clever and smart, with a fantastic voice, and a good sense of the industry. Then she got swept away in borrowed iconography and insidery lyrics. She got hugely popular, and the lines between her playing the industry and the industry playing her blurred. Her latest single is terrible—a simplistic decry of a love being nothing but a perfect illusion. It’s trite and obvious. But it’s mass‐marketable. And I’m sure there will be no giant hats, Beyoncé, or fun in the video. Best of luck, Stefani. I’ll always enjoy what you were.
What I actually wanted to write about today—
You’re writing about something! See… You do have things to say. I’m pleased.
—was printer ink.
…What?
Popular culture is a lot like printer ink. The more pages you churn out, the more ink you use, which means you buy more ink, and more ink gets sold. With popular culture the consumption is of the culture itself—whatever it is or where ever it’s from—the faster you empty it the more often it needs to be replaced.
I see now.
It’s celebrated and rewarded because it sells stuff, and if you’re the one generating the culture and selling the stuff, you’re no different than a printer company under‐charging you for the printer you’re buying today so they can over‐charge you for ink you’ll be needing tomorrow.
Or a defence contractor who also sells televisions and soap?
Ain’t it grand?
What’s this got to do with pop culture?
Well—like pop culture itself—it’s a marketing thing. If you want access to the biggest market, then you’re looking at popular culture, at mass appeal. Statistically that’s where the money will be, even though for the most part we’re all broke—it becomes a chilling economy of scale: A bunch of people who can’t afford something all still manage to buy it anyway and then you end up with a bunch of people who have more of what they’ve been told they what than what they’ve ever been told they need. But it’s okay—just build and fill another container ship and…
I feel this is the part where I knock you back on point. Printer ink, remember?
There are two radio stations work will bounce back and forth between listening to throughout the day. One station plays a variety of new and old alt, indie, retro, and retro‐retro music. It’s the only station I know where I might hear David Bowie, Radiohead, The Weeknd, and Grimes all in the same hour along with a bunch of other one‐off stuff. I quite like it. The other station is Top 40, and I cannot begin to describe how much I don’t like it, but I will just a little. Most of the music is what I’d consider junk food for my ears anyway, with the odd good track snuck in there somehow amidst the repetitive ear‐worm buffet—but it’s the advertising I don’t like the most, and the commercial I don’t like the most is for printer ink.
Everyone is sort of aware of how printer ink is a rip‐off, but we also all sort of begrudgingly participate in the scam because life’s either too short or too long depending on what you tell yourself in the presence of bullshit. But you still need the ink. And if you’re listening to the Top 40 radio station, you’re going to hear about a new service from HP where they will automatically send you ink as instructed by your printer for a monthly fee ranging from $4 to $11. Sounds good, right? Too bad it teaches the wrong lesson—provided you’ve got the cash, resources will just appear at your door without you having to think, know, or care about the process behind it all. Keep calm and consume along… And try not to think about how you’ll buy that cheap printer 1 to 2 times a year in monthly ink fees.
How many defence contractors also make printers?
At least three: IBM, Mitsubishi, and LG. There’s probably more—just look at the war countries. Lots of money in war. Lots of printing to be done, I imagine.
Did you lose your thread?
I don’t like the culture of consumption being instilled in popular culture. It offends me. It’s serving a few in the short‐term at the expense of the many in the long‐term. It’s disrespectful. I’d previously thought environmentalism was something we did for the planet—but I know now it’s something we are trying to do for ourselves. As Dylan Moran so eloquently puts it: “…’Cause the planet’s not gonna miss us, you know, when we’ve finished fucking it up and killing each other.”
Earth, my current home, will always be fine. It always is. Life is nearly wiped out and then returns to it often, from a planetary perspective. Our time here amounts to a tiny fraction of the planet’s being, yet in this short time we’ve been able to conclusively damage not only our living environment time and time again, but that of the countless other inhabitants of our planet who’ve had even less say than the little most of us have had. And for what? …No I’m actually asking—What is taking our planet to the brink actually getting us other than printer ink delivered to our door? Or is it cellphones with curved screens we’re all supposed to be falling to our knees in gratitude for?
This hurts you—doesn’t it?
Of course it does. It’s like watching someone else slowly destroy, piece by piece, something beautiful and having everyone else do nothing, say that’s just how it is, or try to buy tickets to it. The only hope I have is it’s just a fad—and this current, and to my perspective, alien cultural obsession with consumption will turn into something more sustainable, that something more beautiful might emerge from this desire to pave the planet with garbage generated by disposable everything.
Do you think you’ll ever see it?
Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got the time. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
And the underdog?
Well—turnabout is fair play. Now we’ll consume them.