Issue 29: A Black Friday Reverie
Soft Labor, is a newsletter about visual culture written by Sarah Hromack and published by her consultancy, Soft Labor, which provides digital and cultural strategy to organizations, artists, and designers. Please share this newsletter and subscribe.
It was in early-aughts San Francisco that a dear professor of mine — in a rather new and pedagogically experimental program called “Visual and Critical Studies,” no less — advised me to use Amazon.com to perform graduate-level research. “The website’s related book recommendations are often better than those of academic databases” she, a UC Berkeley sociologist whose research focused on feminist protest during the Argentine “Dirty War,” confided somewhat guiltily, as I recall our exchange. Back then, I compiled shopping lists on Amazon before ordering IRL, mostly through City Lights, Modern Times (RIP!), and Moe’s (extra-sad-face RIP!). While I thought about the Internet then much as I do now — as a platform with radical potential for creative expression through independent publishing — I wasn’t self-aware enough in the moment to realize that by using Amazon’s recommendation algorithm as a research hack, I was essentially conditioning myself (while allowing myself to be conditioned) to behave accordingly in the years to come as user interfaces were gradually designed to align with and capitalize upon consumer desire.
Just a few weeks before Black Friday — that is, today — Amazon released its latest product, a digital storefront called Amazon Hauls. (I won’t even link to it.) You know the drill by now: More stuff, delivered faster, at cheaper prices — under $20, to be precise. New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman published a decently introspective piece about the platform, tying its moniker to a social phenomenon — the so-called haul video — that also emerged on the early-aughts Internet alongside Vlogging as a media form. In her critique, Friedman quotes Lucie Greene, founder of the trend forecasting firm Light Years: “It became almost a human right to participate in consumer culture.”
Not to be outdone for the holiday, Netflix also recently released Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, a documentary by director Nic Stacey and producer Flora Bagenal whose ostensible goal is to make viewers consider the more global, longer-range implications — particularly in terms of environmental impact — of their consumer choices.
After ordering two board games and a bottle of shampoo from my phone earlier this morning, I settled in to watch Buy Now with my husband. “This is a greenwashed ‘virtue signal,’” he declared around the halfway mark, gesticulating wildly with air quotes. Indeed, the film is a Reader’s Digest version of what many of us — especially those of us who operate in and around the design and culture industries — have known from the outset: Online shopping is some toxic shit.
I have many production notes on this piece — namely that it wants to have deep Naomi Klein No Logo-era vibes, but simply doesn’t — which employs stereotypically dystopic, AI-generated interstitial imagery cut with confessionals by former shills for Amazon, Apple, Unilever, and others who atone for their professional sins against Mother Earth and her children. The responsibility, the film implies, lies squarely with corporations who dump, bury, and burn the glut of goods produced by never-ending cycles of production and consumption.
What Buy Now sorely and glaringly lacks is deep insight (or really any insight whatsoever) into consumer culture — the why behind the buy — along with a push for personal accountability. Even in the throes of addiction, we have agency.
At the risk of being trolled by my entire readership, I, too, confess: I recently purchased a lip balm — yes, a blue lip balm that color-adjusts to pink upon application — from Prada’s online store. Its silver case is impeccably designed, a throwback to every ounce of 90s Minimalist cool that I aspired to as a young, broke art student at the turn of the millennium.
This is your trend report, people.
Related:
Comrades and recent collaborators Other Means, the Brooklyn graphic design studio, just launched a web shop, buy.othermeans.us, which you should indeed visit right now. (As you may or may not know, Other Means designed the Brooklyn Museum’s recent rebrand, which also features some tremendous swag.)
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.