Clarissa's Blog

Another big victory for neoliberalism was to get people to develop emotional attachment to brands instead of people or places.

Brands are words. They are verbal constructs. We abandon our rootedness in material reality and get attached to verbal tricks that exist solely to get money from you.

I found out today about “Black Rifle Coffee,” a coffee brand that people bought not because they liked the product but because they thought the brand was somehow linked to conservative values. Then the founders of the company went on record to trash conservative customers and call them really bad names. The customers are now very sad.

I understand attachment to a product. There are products I love that serve my purposes well. But this is still about being grounded in material reality. People need to do stuff every day to ground themselves in material reality – including something so basic as walking barefoot outside.

The only words to get attached to should be inside works of art.