What is the cultural temperament of this era?

Well, I think it’s got a good two-word summary: “Dark Euphoria.” Dark Euphoria is what the twenty-teens feels like. Things are just falling apart, you can’t believe the possibilities, it’s like anything is possible, but you never realized you’re going to have to dread it so much. It’s like a leap into the unknown. You’re falling toward earth at nine hundred kilometres an hour and then you realize there’s no earth there.

That’s a dark euphoria feeling. It’s the cultural temperament of the coming decade.

It comes in two flavours. Top end and low end. Everybody in this room is sort of schismed between top end and low end. Because that’s the nature of your particular demographic.

The top end we can describe as “Gothic High-Tech” […]

These are Gothic High-Tech figures, people who position themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure. That’s what you’ve been telling each other to do all day. That’s why you love these guys. They’re positioning themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure. They’re cheerleaders, they’re not leaders. They’re cheerleaders.

And if the narrative happens to be poverty, floods, air-crashes, drug addiction, infidelity, whatever, they’re going to be good to go.

[…] What is the downside, what’s the other side of this? The flip-side of Gothic High-Tech? The flip-side of Gothic High-Tech is downmarket, and it’s called “Favela Chic.” Favela Chic.

What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That’s Favela Chic

Contrary to some of the rioters’ intentions, even the political grotesque of looting and chaos finds use in the work of Recreational Data, a group that – depending on who is asking or what reward is at stake – is either a trend forecasting agency offering brand optimization for the digital era or an art project staging ironic criticism of such initiatives. The fact that the group’s identificatory position is unclear is perfectly suited to the moment, making them both good trend forecasters and good artists. Whichever way, they are exemplars of entrepreneurial capitalistic practice, asking all the right questions:

“When currency collapses, what will take its place? How do you build brand equity when the markets are freewheeling? How do you turn the vague evidence of a meme into solid wealth creation? How can you make mass civil disobedience work for your brand? And how do you even begin to assess your cultural equity when fear and uncertainty are the order of the day?”
[Recreational Data, Currency Zones of the Future, LuckyPDF, London, 2011]

Addressing such urgent concerns in the promotional document Currency Zones of the Future – distributed via USB – the group proposes to recuperate the riots as consumer data-generation, replacing the pejorative designation ‘feral youth’ with the shoplifter as market indicator. Despite the proposed domestication of wild behavior the document’s rhetoric is unsurprisingly centred around the issue of power play:

Dominating the market means dominating the psychological landscape of the crisis. The State may be forced to interact with the looter and rioter as ‘criminal’, but we may see the looter in terms of potential: as market-modifier and as trend broadcaster.
[Ibid. pp.47-48]

This advice can’t be reduced to the status of mere provocation, as comments by at least one corporate boss confirm. Rioters stole £700,000 worth of stock from JD Sports Fashion outlets during the unrest and yet this news was welcomed by the company’s director who stated that it indicated ‘a strong demand for our products on the high street’

Relational Data also discerns commodifiable authenticity in the political grotesque, outlining ever more radical marketing opportunities:

The looter holds a golden opportunity for any brand, an uncommodified, unsculpted form of ‘realness’ that fills the credibility deficit of the saturated market. The young looter offers a human form for pushing a brand on a level of reach and depth unseen since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans. It will take a daring marketeer to ride the wave, but taking advantage of this “rupture of the real” in the total social conscience will touch a nerve to a real-world social identity that is both neglected and far more vital than constructed social identities favoured by marketeers.
[Ibid. pp.49-50]

As suggested, the cooption of an ‘unsculpted’ form of real world identity in the guise of street disorder by the purveyors of yesterday’s youth culture – ‘rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans’ – should amount to a daring future strategy. However, this apparently novel prescription it is not so far from being realized. Levi Strauss’s Legacy commercial, part of its Go Forth series, was being aired across the UK while parts of London, Manchester and Birmingham went up in flames. The clip features scenes of couples kissing and live rock bands, beach sunsets and city streets thick with tear gas and riot police facing down good looking youths clad in skinny jeans. The collision of marketing fiction and protest, in all of its grotesque permutations, is the new rule. Levi’s pulled the ad but if Relational Data is correct next time they won’t.