“We want you to not only stop buying for 24 hours, but to shut off your lights, televisions and other non-essential appliances. We want you to park you car, turn off your phones and log off of your computers for the day.”
This is the message from Adbusters, an anti-consumerist magazine that organized the first Buy Nothing Day back in 1992. Its aim hasn’t changed, and that is to get as many people as possible to participate by buying nothing for an entire day, in order to take aim at consumer culture and to challenge people in the developed countries to curb their unsustainable levels of consumption throughout the year.
With the help of the internet, Buy Nothing Day has now become an international day of protest, and this year, on November 27th (and 28th outside of North America) many people will once again participate by not buying anything. In the past, some people have taken their actions further by going on “zombie walks,” (in an effort to provoke consumers to “wake up”) and others have driven empty shopping carts in stores while refusing to buy anything as a form of protest. However, does Buy Nothing Day actually succeed in reaching a wider audience beyond the privileged and well educated who can afford to “buy nothing” for a day? I interviewed Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, for his views on this.
“We don’t actually think in terms of target audiences,” he says, and adds, “We are very passionate about this… [and we are] just trying to make the rich 1 billion people on the planet think about reducing consumption.” However, wouldn’t buying nothing hurt retailers, and therefore, how would the average retail worker understand or sympathize with Buy Nothing Day? Kalle Lasn admits that “maybe they can’t [understand this].” However, this doesn’t faze his enthusiasm for Buy Nothing Day and he stresses that if people do not reduce their carbon footprints, then “there is going to be hell to pay, [because] the temperature of our planet could tip over into catastrophe.”
However, could the issue of sustainability be solved by developing new technologies? In fact, it is not immediately clear why “unplugging” has anything to do with Buy Nothing Day at all. If anything, it seems that advances in technology have made our lives better, and thus Buy Nothing Day’s message can cause confusion. Kalle Lasn’s view is that “technology is fine, as long as we the people control it and it isn’t rammed down our throats by corporations.” He claims that at the moment, technology is used to turn people’s attentions away from the “real root cause of the crisis we’re in.” He says that for example, we are told that we can make a difference if “we buy a hybrid car, or change to energy saving light-bulbs, and also if we can learn to create energy from hydrogen then we could stop using oil.” He adds that, “they all talk as if technology is this magic bullet that is going to solve our problems, but the real problem is that our consumer culture has gone amuck…[with] one billion people living five planet lifestyles.” Therefore, in his view, what is really required is for people in developed countries to change their lifestyles and culture, and this is also why organizers are asking people to “unplug” on Buy Nothing Day.
He recalls that in the early days when he and other fellow activists were still trying to come up with a campaign, they had already decided that “culture was going to be the new battleground.” This is because they felt that “culture was being stolen from [them] and that more and more culture was being spoon-fed to them top-down by advertising agencies and corporations, [and that people] weren’t generating their own culture from the bottom up anymore.” Therefore, the issue of culture pervades the whole Buy Nothing Day campaign.
This may be why Buy Nothing Day’s message of anti-consumption has difficulties reaching a wider audience. This is because its message is so painful for those who live rather comfortably in their own consumer culture: that is, the need for people to take responsibility for their own lifestyles, and to think about the ecological consequences of what they purchase. So maybe the main obstacle in getting people to participate in Buy Nothing Day is not the difficulty of getting the message out, but getting those who do understand its message to actually participate in it. So for those who “get it,” why not give Buy Nothing Day a try this Friday?
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