Shopping Rebellion by Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead strikes again with Shopping Rebellion in this week’s New Yorker. Her description & analysis of Japan’s fashion culture reminds me generally of several other threads floating about in the popular ether: mp3 ripping/trading, the weblog circle jerk, Web-enabled hypercollection, DVRs, the idea of a creative commons, the death of scarcity. The mantra of the moment seems to be “rip, mix, burn, consume, repeat, faster!” It’s always been like this, but technology and our cultural evolution has shortened the lifecycle of the process so that the time from “rip” to “repeat” is a few minutes or hours instead of a few weeks or months, meaning that sometimes we can’t tell why we’re laughing at something anymore.