The rebel sell

What Hacker News says

1. Barrin92Jul 2025
   >Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.

   "Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.

   Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.

   [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

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2. OddMerlinFeb 2025
   Also check out The Rebel sell by Joseph Health and Andrew Potter. Another great read in the same vein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell.
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3. chubotJul 2018
   I think this is an interesting way of framing things. I'm not someone who travels a lot, although I have the means and the time.

   Over the years, multiple people have wondered out loud to me why I don't "travel the world". I rented an apartment from someone recently, and this was one of the first things out of his mouth -- as if it were a given that anyone with the means should do it.

   I've always confused by this sentiment. Sometimes I pick up the implication that they think I'm incurious.

   I think it boils down to the fact that I care about ideas (and realizing ideas) more than experiences. I listen to (and play) plenty of music, eat all types of food, and I might even know a slightly more diverse set of people than most, but I don't particularly feel a need to travel to do these things.

   ----

   I had a similar conversation with someone here on HN a year or two ago. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it, but the idea was that "the only authentic mode of travel is work". There was actually a book that espoused this idea as far as I remember.

   There was an implicit criticism of those who spend a lot of money to go sightseeing and "get experiences". "Experiencing" is not the same of participating.

   I think this is what your quote means by "romanticism" (although I question the use of that word, since it has so many other meanings.)

   (BTW I'm in the queue for Sapiens at the library, so thanks for renewing my interest :) )

   -----

   I also carpooled with a stranger up the west coast (one of the few times I travelled). I told him about this idea -- that the only authentic mode of travel is work. He travelled the world to shoot documentaries and happened to agree with me (naturally). A lot of his friends seemed to be into Burning Man and he questioned the value of spending so much money for experiences that are divorced from the world.

   I don't necessarily endorse his viewpoint, but I think it's a perspective that might spark an interesting conversation.

   -----

   Anyway, I think you're right that there's a form of "experiencism" in modern culture that is akin to consumerism. I didn't directly connect the two before!

   I don't think there is anything wrong with acquiring possessions, or acquiring experiences... but there does seem to be clique-ishness involved. In my experience, as yours, people who value experiences do tend to look down on consumerism.

   -----

   EDIT: I found the comment, a good re-read :)

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725521

   In "The Rebel Sell," another one of those books that I continue to think about and reference many years later, the authors make the provoking claim that, contrary to the self-images of most tourists, backpackers, and lovers of foreign culture, the only authentic way to travel is on business trips. With a tangible reason to go abroad, a plausible desire for mutual exchange, instead of the usual leering and viewing and aimless wandering, the business traveller is authentically engaged and directed by a real project.

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4. mbrockDec 2015
   I'm always curious about how other people use books.

   I'm not a scholar or a student, but I read a lot of "non-fiction." Some of it is professional, but mostly it's because of an urge to understand the world and people. This fascination has a limitless quality that makes it almost painful. I feel massively ignorant, and that's reinforced every time I find a new subject of which I am clueless. The mass of knowledge and thought is so enormous.

   I recently learned about von Humboldt's late 1800s masterwork, the multi-volume "Kosmos," a guide to the known world of natural science, with a 1000-paged index. And now that knowledge is outdated, except that "Kosmos" dedicates itself to the history of science, and now that work itself is a part of that very history. And so it goes on and on.

   One of my Kindle reads at the moment is "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Miche de Certeau. It might be disappointing to announce up front that I haven't read much of it yet, but that itself is part of my point. Sensing a relevant connection, I looked at the Table of Contents and found that Chapter XII is "Reading as Poaching." I turn to it and skim a few pages of stuff about French politics and find a servicable quote:

   > In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This myth of Education inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of cultural politics.

   That goes along nicely with the book's theme of refuting an implicit "productivist" bias and highlighting the way "users" and "consumers" are always themselves creative, tactical, and in some sense subversive with regard to the stuff presented to them as "finished products."

   When reading the book, I sometimes feel aversion to the countercultural eagerness to demonize the systems of power, but I also don't disagree -- it's just a vague feeling of "yes, yes, sure, get on with it..." Still, I find the author's perspective very interesting and useful, and I'm enjoying "poaching" from the book.

   A few pages later:

   > To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one's own mark on it, without remaking it. In that regard, the reading of the catechism or of the Scriptures that the clergy used to recommend to girls and mothers, by forbidding these vestals of an untouchable sacred text to write continues today in the "reading" of the television programs offered to "consumers" who cannot trace their own writing on the screen where the production of the Other -- of "culture" -- appears.

   Yes, yes... I agree! The vague feeling is still present, and I start to understand that it's related to a rather uncharitable tiredness with "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," references to "the death of the author," and so on. I can't identify anything specifically wrong with any of this. There is a looming sense that if I were forced to explain to someone in this restaurant what I am reading and writing about, I might come across as some kind of flakey weirdo. They don't even know the other book I'm working on is about Heidegger... But I digress.

   I'm not interested in all this because of a moral preference for the downtrodden over the elite and powerful, though I do have some of that. What interests me more is just simply what it is to be reading; what to actually do with books; how they function and circulate and affect people; and why they are, despite often being too long and dreary and just boring, irresistible.

   In "The Rebel Sell," another one of those books that I continue to think about and reference many years later, the authors make the provoking claim that, contrary to the self-images of most tourists, backpackers, and lovers of foreign culture, the only authentic way to travel is on business trips. With a tangible reason to go abroad, a plausible desire for mutual exchange, instead of the usual leering and viewing and aimless wandering, the business traveller is authentically engaged and directed by a real project.

   I would propose some other equally authentic modes. Someone who loves to take photos is also guided on their travels by a skillful project, a context of self-actualization and learning, and so on. Likewise someone who is researching for a story, or just someone who likes to get laid. It strikes me that "The Rebel Sell" might be attacking a straw-man idea of a person who travels only to gaze, to enjoy consumptively, to "appreciate." In fact we all seem to make up projects even if only as surrogate activities. Taking a front-lit snapshot of every single attraction one finds listed in the Lonely Planet might not be very sophisticated, but mostly we just need something, anything, to do.

   Of course I am metaphorically equating books with places to make a point about the activities involved in reading. A scholar researching the literature to find a good reference is on a kind of business trip. Chapters that fail to support her argument she walks past like trinkets on a market promenade when searching for a particular kind of hat. She doesn't demand that the text be superbly beautiful or worthy of an appreciative gaze. She's not enjoying the book like you enjoy the wine on a countryside vineyard vacation; she's critical, practical, and absorbed in an activity for the sake of a project.

   That seems to be to be the reason why she can study large amounts of literature without becoming "bored" or "distracted" or being very concerned about "attention span." She's working; she doesn't get paid to merely enjoy; she might often enter states of flow even while hopping wildly from book to book, scribbling furiously, underlining, making mental connections. She may use various tactics, including skimming, only reading a preface, or going straight to the index. If she is studying a work of fiction to comment on its narrative structure, she might want to read it cover to cover to get the usual effect, but she might also want to obtain a gist of the plot and then engage in some other ways of reading, even ways as far removed from conventional reading as plotting word frequencies.

   As for me, writing bloated comments on internet forums is, perhaps unfortunately, a driving force in my whole practice of reading. I submit these ramblings because I need a question and an audience in order to write anything; otherwise I just sit and stare at the empty screen, pondering my own useless vacuity, feeling not just bored but confused in a metaphysical sense: why ever do anything, really? What is "thinking"? Who am I? If I desire to discuss, though, that gives me real motivation, and reading too acquires a new role.

   That all said, I remain curious about other peoples' "practice of everyday life" and their ways of engaging with books. Also about how we could make books more fun. A new kind of book club? Come up with something, please.

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5. PIMay 2008
   If you're talking business books try The Rebel Sell "How the counter culture became the consumer culture". and I book I love for it's story telling is Boo Hoo "$135 million. 18 months... a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe".
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6. Barrin92Aug 2026
   it didn't recede, this kind of rebellion was what made it thrive (see the book The Rebel Sell, Why Culture can't be Jammed) or Deleuze:

   “The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself [...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.

   It wasn't a coicindence or betrayal that punk bands 'sold out', the punk part is exactly what made them sell out. Demand for authenticity, difference and individualism is what drives consumerism. The heart of consumerism is counter-culture.

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