A consumer cannot be a rebel!

We are immerse in a culture where businesses are based in consumer needs. But if we take in consideration our need twenty years go, or perhaps more, when this consumer culture began, we would realize one thing, needs and people change.

Nowadays needs are not the same, people are evolving and so are the characteristics of our society. As highways invade our lands, and shopping malls display newer kinds of food and cleaning supplies we use them, and most importantly need those things on a daily basis.

We create new needs according to the reality in which we live. As people surrounded by highways we believe that having a car -and a fast one- is a must in order to move around. Also we believe that new kinds of exotic food sold by huge supermarket chains are a basic need; sadly we convince ourselves that exotic -.therefore unconventional and more expensive- products are the same as regular ones, and we add them to our list of basic needs as “regular” -simple- products.

It is impossible today to be rebel against consumer culture because it is everywhere you go. Our culture is all about consuming, we live around it and as a part of it. Consumerism is not buying designer clothes and spending money in the highest technology; it is also buying the music that makes you a rebel, the clothes that makes you different from everybody else, and depending on props to be who you are.

We are consumers, and every single need transforms itself in a certain kind of consume. As rebels there is a need to prove everybody else wrong in order to intensify your point; but as a person trying to differentiate itself from the rest, there is still a need to use certain resorts. John Lennon and Yoko Ono used their bed in order to be rebellious, Curt Cobain used T-Shirts, and so many figures that have tried to be defiant ended up buying like the rest of us and also selling themselves to the media. Curt Cobain sold himself to Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV Unplugged; Ono and Lennon invited the press to cover their “Bed Peace” movement.

All of them fall in the web of consumerism either buying or selling to be rebellious, trying to cover up that tendency with needs and rebelliousness. But in the end, when naked -with no props, no money and no media- they are nothing else but a peon in the game of capitalism, consumerism and media. They sold their souls to this culture and it is impossible for them to be outsiders. At the same time they are also trying to sell a new way of life, with new needs, new accessories and tendencies, nowadays it is all about selling and buying, and being rebel means consuming nothing.