Posts Tagged radical inclusion

Mr. Jalopy once wrote:

Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.

As if in response, Brian Shaw writes:

The way mainstream culture usually destroys a counter culture is to define it a recognizable and translatable way, copy it and then sell it.  If the counter or subculture can not be easily defined in a marketable way, by the clothes members wear or the music they listen to, then it is much harder to copy, translate and sell.  If you say that anyone who wants to be part of it is part of it and they can express themselves in whatever way they feel then it becomes for mainstream culture to copy and sell because you it defies definition.  Heterogeneity is our shield against the status quo.

If that last statement is true, then burners have nothing to worry about. We’re about as heterogeneous as it gets. But that heterogeneity is necessarily decreased when people start selling burner fashion to others instead of leaving them to make it themselves. So you know how to make awesome faux-fur boot covers and you decide to make a few bucks selling them on Etsy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but one effect will be that the number of people wearing faux-fur boot covers that look basically exactly like yours will increase and the number of people wearing whatever-the-heck else they would have come up with on their own will decrease.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m totally against the buying and selling of items that express burner culture. I own a PodBelt. I bought a playa coat at Junkman’s Daughter. I just think that there is a balance to be struck, and those who are buying and selling burner culture need to be aware that they are also watering it down, reducing its true value, and potentially opening it up to appropriation by Marketing/Mainstream Culture.

Here are some links to mad skillz for defending your culture: How to solder; How to solder EL wire; How to use a MiG welder; How to use a wood router.

Your assignment: Take an item of burner clothing that you purchased and modify or enhance it in such a way that it is unique to you, thereby contributing to the heterogeneity of burner culture and strengthening it against the encroaching tendrils of Marketing/Mainstream Culture.