Countercultural rebellion was co-opted as a selling tool by advertisers

Evidence

Pottasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary, Marcuse, and others, Pottasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people, who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and—while this was still the early 1960s—giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order, Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader attention economy history this reader is building, and to the later platform-era framing of youth rebellion. — connects to: Consumer rebellion staged as shopping defuses actual political mobilization — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 394; Capitalism absorbed the 1960s counterculture as a marketing resource — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 593; Countercultural threats get defanged by commercial absorption — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 501 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Corporate capital co-opted the counterculture’s rebellion as marketing almost instantly. #corroborates (0.95) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1418
• Countercultural threats get defanged by commercial absorption #corroborates (0.92) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 501
• Cultural alienation became marketable and co-opted rather than disruptive #corroborates (0.92) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 71
• Open-source labor mirrors paid guerrilla marketing in converting faux rebellion into market value #exemplifies (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 397