The disconnect between the physiological bases for sensations and our mental representations of these sensations creates a node in which socioeconomic conjunctions can be laid like so many bear traps, forging links between potential stimuli and implications desirable to various commercial interests. Carles explains it with reference to the invention of the Starbucks brand, and its burgeoning resonance across various demographics that it helps fashion, solidify and exploit:
It seems like the ‘Starbucks revolution’ really opened the doors for tweens and coffee. It seems like they branded ‘fun, sugary sweet drinks’ for ppl who didn’t ‘get’ coffee, or for ppl whose tastebuds weren’t developed enough for coffee
It is the nascent undeveloped state of the sensory organs that allows for their systematic development and exploitation. Starbucks and other lifestyle brands the purport to sell commodities are in fact in the business of strip-mining the senses of the young and building in the vacuum a perceptual machinery obedient to the triggers that the brands implant there. Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential.
Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another, both are platforms for experiential design: "Is the Gogurt design a ‘more innovative’ design than the iPod?" Carles asks, highlighting this problematic. Whether we are squeezing pap into our mouths or into our ears is immaterial. All the matters is the industrial design of the device to which we are connected, and the brand with which that device is marked. Then the brand is written our our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.
Carles suggests this transformation of the human into the digital processing device is the result of a conspiracy of the old against the young, implemented through the vector of celebrity: "Feel like tweens want to do what ‘famous people do’ and also appear to be ‘grown ups’ when they don’t realize that they already have the attention of grownups since it is so easy to resent them 4 having their whole lives’ ahead of them." By duping the young into emulating the famous, the worldweary convince youth to surrender its own perceptual faculties and have them replaced with a mimetic tendency, a duplicatability that mirrors the functionality of a copy machine. The youth don't realize the degree to which they are targeted, are under surveillance, precisely because of the way their perceptions slip through the social order's neural net. They have not yet been subsumed, subjected to the social order, fully socialized and absorbed. They still have a chance to escape. Thus the ideological cannons fire in their direction, and youth culture becomes an obsession for all -- and the poor fools, they think that youth culture is a celebration of youth rather than their imprisonment!
Carles, reasoning along these lines, mocks the young's innocence of marketing, how little they know about the strategems used to ensnare them: "I’ll nvr forget the time I stayed up all nite to study for marketing. Such a hard class, yall! Avoid it at all costs." They can't study marketing because they themselves are the subject of the course, the product that marketing has produced. They would be staring into the womb that contains them.
Please continue writing. This is what I need to hear. Other people do too in this culture on a desperate hunt for meaning amidst emptiness. I think it's my existentialist side that finds everything you write so intriguing. And I know you're commenting on Carles, but I get a whole other side of it from you. "I am Carles". You are Carles. They are Carles. We are Carles.
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