Reddit reviews Rebel Sell

My favourite non-fiction book is:

The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture

It's a book I'd wish I'd read when I was 17. I highly recommend it.

I think in the US it was known as Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

You aren't buying movies to watch them. You are buying them for the purpose a marketer calls "an identity good."

> An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a group or category they belong to or would like to belong to. People buy The New Hacker's Dictionary because they are, or want to be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.

You have to give up identity goods altogether. It's a ruinous practice. Ruinous for the wallet indeed, but above all it's ruinous for the soul. There exist means of expressing your identity that don't require dependence on large corporations' marketing departments. Find them.

Some more reading:

• The Origins of Prestige Goods as Honest Signals of Skill
  and Knowledge
  
  
• Consuming Symbolic Goods: Identity and Commitment, Values and Economics
  
  
• The Rebel Sell

I have so many thoughts about this that I don't have time to go into right now, but have you read this book? It's not specifically about goth but it's about how the idea of rebellion itself became a commodified fashion statement. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebel-Sell-Counter-Culture-Consumer/dp/1841126551

For a lot of bored middle class kids, affecting punk's anti-authority, edgy grittiness is a form of escapism in itself, I think. A way to dissociate themselves from their comfortable upbringings that they're embarrassed about. And then they sneer at working class people for having "bourgeois values" if they want a bit of beauty or style or romance (yes, maybe of a kitschy sort) in their lives.