this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
1056 points (99.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
6325 readers
4628 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn't a bad thing.
But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of "traditions" that are basically fake, invented by marketers:
Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says "one can of X" or "one box of Y" instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there's something deeply cynical about that.
I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we've created since then.
It's something I'm sure the internet can't possibly relate to: brilliant and amazing, life changing innovations that by any metric should make life better in every way made into their worst selves as a means to maximize profits.
Like canned goods are amazing. In the same way advanced grain stores are the difference between starvation and survival in bad years, canning is the difference between a rough year of crap food and malnutrition. And in some contexts canned food introduces a level of convenience that's worth the cost to nutrition and flavor. Canned beans are awesome. My wife and I consider "cream of x" soups to be Midwestern roux and see them as useful tools in our kitchen.
Then there's the microwave and refrigerator that had genuinely huge benefits to everyday life and convenience.
But also everything you said is true. It permeated and destroyed our culture and communities. And our culture needed drastic changes, some of which they got. But it's just like how women did need to enter the workforce for our safety and equality, but it should've been in such a way that each parent splits the professional and domestic labor rather than wages plummeting and now both parents need to work full time.
Just as I dream of a socialism in which the trains aren't billboards but are instead a public good, I too dream of a world in which my casseroles can be made with cream of mushroom soup, not because Campbell's taught my family to cook with their ingredients but because it's a recipe where that's the ingredient that works best. And because I'm very Midwestern, and casseroles are how we show love.
Oh, you are absolutely right. The whole concept of advertising as an industry happened during this period.
There is a pretty great documentary by Adam Curtis on this titled The Century of the Self, which focuses heavily on the influence of Edward Bernays. We are still dealing with the fallout of his impact on society:
There were real concerted efforts not just to get people to buy things, but to change the way people thought about things, and they were surprisingly effective.
And as far as the gilded-age cyberpunk distopia goes, I think All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a good follow-up. Curtis shows the overlap and collision of Randian philosophy (which influenced Alan Greenspan), the new field of ecology, and the growing digital computer revolution.
Taken together, I think these documentaries explain a lot of how we got where we are today.