Pepsi commercialized Marcuse’s vision of unrepressed liberated life

Evidence

What Pepsi pictured (or co-opted) was essentially Marcuse’s imagined earthly paradise—unrepressed joy, activity, and love, a life altogether free of anxiety or oppression. There are no technologies, only Frisbees and flowers; love, both familial and romantic, is experienced without hindrance or implied hierarchies. In essence, Pepsi advertised liberation. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 560

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno/Horkheimer’s culture industry thesis — the commodification of critique. Also echoes the deeper claim about how capitalism absorbs subversion. — connects to: Pepsi’s innovation was implying consumption transforms the buyer’s identity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 554; Pepsi packaged counterculture values to sell soda to mainstream America — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 555
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘co-optation’ of counterculture concretely looks like: a commercial enactment of Marcuse’s prefigurative utopia.