MISCmedia for 5/24/00
Why Sweatshoppers (Heart) Hipsters

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

YESTERDAY, we talked a little about the irony some clueless big-media outlets continue to find in the fact that symbols of Bohemian hipness have become the driving forces of so many marketing campaigns.

Today, a little more about why hip (or rather, a highly specific image of hip) fits so well with corporate agendas.

What marketers like to show off as hip is an updated version of the old Rugged Individualist archtype from an earlier age of corporate largess. The corporate hipster is faster, spryer, sexier, more fashionable, more energetic, and more athletic than ordinary people. He or she (and, yes, it's often a she, at least in ads) has no use for limits, boundaries, rules, or regulations. He or she either sneers or patronizes with kitsch anything old-fashioned, such as thrift, moderation, caution, humility, or cooperation.

He or she is unjustly scorned by all those pathetic squares--not because he or she's a weirdo but because he or she's just so darned superior.

It's exactly the image admired by certain Wall St. corporate raiders and tech-biz bullies and sweatshop moguls.

Our Oregon neighbors at Nike are continuing to lose invaluable PR goodwill by their insistence on doing as little as absolutely possible for the workers at overseas subcontractors they get their merchandise from. It's gotten, or will eventually get, to the point that the company will lose more money from its intransigent stance than it will save by treating its manufacturing as something to be done as cheaply as possible, so as to put more money into advertising.

Justice for subcontract workers is antithetical to the whole Nike corporate culture. It brings to mind square '50s-esque mental images like security, stability, teamwork, providing for family, and industry. It sees itself as a hyper-aggressive design and marketing company for the globalized, post-industrial era. It doesn't actually make anything and doesn't want to. Making things, having visible factories or directly employing manufacturing workers in North America, is too Organization-Man '50s.

By contrast, everything Nike's associated its name and logo with involves images of individual hustlers, strivers, and go-getters. Even Nike endorsers who play team sports are always depicted individually, as lone-wolf superheroes, forever young, never shown with spouses or other adult encumbrances.

Many in the Way-New Left get this.

As described in a recent Nation cover story, politically-minded students across many U.S. campuses are moving beyond the smug self-aggrandizement of "identity politics" and are actively embracing such old-Left ideals as social justice and working-class solidarity.

They're pushing for their colleges to enact fair-employment policies for their own workers and for the workers of the colleges' suppliers, including the suppliers of athletic equipment.

Nike, natch, has been decidedly less than cooperative.

But then, being known for cooperation is like getting the "Plays Well With Others" line check-marked on your report card.

It's just so square.

TOMORROW: The coolest product fad of the year, those hi-tech scooters.

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