A VIRUS IS SPREADING
RED DOTS ARE POPPING UP ON
SNEAKERS EVERYWHERE
I WONDER WHAT THAT'S ALL ABOUT...Only a couple of generations ago, we the people sand the songs and told the stories and generated our culture from the bottom up.
But now, more and more of our culture is spoon-fed do us top-down by corporations, TV networks and ad agencies.We must reclaim our culture, start telling our own stories again singing our own songs, producing our own meaning, creating our own cool.
The Blackspot is one way to start doing that.
| Corporate Cool | People Cool |
|---|---|
|
At first, it seems to be working. Johnny shows up in his cleaming white Nikes, and while nobody really makes a big deal, the brand concious girls do stop giving him a hard time, Johnny feels a tiny bid of confidence washing over him, This might just be a good year, he thinks. Time passes. Now there's a funny feeling in Johnny's stomach, The Nike ads above the urinals have changed, he noticesm and some kits already have the newest shoes. That girl doesn't bother saying hi any more. Johny gets a job delivery junk mail after school, to buy new sneakers. He feels trappedm helplessm This cool is making him brokem he thinks. This cool is making him sick. This cool is toxic. |
Sally's been thinking. She's been thinking how stupid it is that celebrities get paidm like, a billion dollars to say whatever corporations want them to say. She's been thinking how boring it is that next month there will be new celebrities, in edgier ads, selling stuff that's "better" than the stuff you've just got. One day, at lunch, Sally meets a quiet, nervous boy named Johnny. He says that he needs new shoes. Sally shows him her pair of Blackspot sneakersm on which she's painted a bunch of neon pink skulls. Johnny thinks she looks pretty wicked in them. He likes that her shoes look like they're really hers, like she's been wearing them for a thousand years. Like the shoes weren't cool until she made them cool, That sounds nice, he decides. |
THE MOST EARTH-FRIENDLY SHOE IN THE WORLD BLACKSPOT V2
100% ORGANIC HEMP UPPERS
1 SHARE = 1 VOTE IN THE ANTI-CORPORATION
HAND-PAINTED RED SWEET SPOT (FOR KICKING CORPORATE ASS)
HAND DRAWN WHITE SYMBOL OF DEFIANCE AGAINST THE CORPORATE COOL
VEGETARIAN TOE AND HEEL
PORTUGESE UNION FACTORY - CONCHAS ET FRARES OR QUALISHOE
DESIGNED BY THE ONE-AND-ONLY JOHN FLUEVOG
RECYCLED TYRE SOLE
BLACKSPOT V1 THE ORIGINAL CLASSIC
For years the old pattern went on. People were jaded by megacorporate control of so much of their lives, but couldn't see how they could take some power back. We decided to launch the counterattack. The result is the world's first anti-brand - the Blackspot sneaker.
Made from organic material in a Pakistan fairtrade factory, everything about the Blackspot, from its red toe tip and hand-drawn anti-logo to its renegade billboards and TV adsm is designed to do only one thing: kick megacorporate ass. We're going to cut into Nike's market share, unswoosh that tured old swoosh and give some birth to a new kind if cool in the sneaker industry. Veganline.com buy another label of shoe from the same factory - the Ethletic trainer.
Buying a pair of Blackspots makes you a voting shareholder in The Blackspot Anticorporation.Log in to http://web.archive.org/web/20080420155720/adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotshoes/members.php / blackspotsneaker.org and use your sharehoder number as the password (your number is on the shareholder certificate inside the shoe box).
In the forums we'll brainstorm, discuss and vote on:
- What future Blackspots will look like
- Where and how they'll be made
- Which industries and which corporations we'll target with our revenue next
Just behind the ubiquitous swoosh lurks the uneasy knowledge that the Nike brand was built on sweatshop labor, obscene profit margins and highly-paid celebrities dispensing a bogus, top-down cool.
It's a dangerous game they've been playing and it shouldn't take much to make that corporate cool machine blow up in their faces.
The Black spot is an open-source brand. There's no copywrite so take it and use it. You'll be a completely new kind of entrepreneur - an antipreneur - part of a movement of business-minded social activists determined to create a more grassroots approach to capitalism and beat dysfunctional corporations at their own game.
If Blackspot Sneakers can bite into Nike's market share even by one percent then we will have set a precedent that will inspire antipreneurs in other industries - a virus at the hart of corporate capitalism.
Check out the experiment that was at http://web.archive.org/web/20061206070916/adbusters.org/metas/politico/antipreneur/forum/ and others like it that are happening now.
As city streets around the world are choked with every more Starbucks locations unlucky neighbourhoods suffer a gut-wrenching, local-culture coffee enema.
To hell with Starbucks. Try a Blackspot Culture Shop selling fair-trade, organic coffee with revolution in every cup. More than just a coffee shop with books, it'll be an info shop with coffee - part library, part meeting place, and part alter of caffeine. Coffee shops have a proud tradition of hosting revolutionary thought. Lets revive that tradition. Look for the first Culture Shop in Vancouver Canada, then use our template to start one in your town
antipreneur [at] adbusters [dot] org
McDonald's pays big bucks to make damned sure that every lamp-heated patty, in every corner of the world, tastes wearily the same. So here's a radical idea: a chain of Blackspot Restaurants, serving only fresh, nutritious, locally sourced food.
You want a burger? Sure we'll make you a burger. But it won't be with tasteless, factory-farmed agri-business sludge. It'll be with local, organic produce grown in your city's backyard. So instead of a global brand spreading global homogeneity, we'll have a global anti-brand championing local variety with a slow surprise in every bite.
It's not as hard as you think to beat large monolithic corporations like Nike, McDonald's and Starbucks in shop-to-shop combat. Most megacorporations are slow, bureaucratic dinosaurs, easily outmanouvered by nimble, fleet-footed entrepreneurs.
In capitalism's next evolutionary phasem small will trump big, local will beat globalm and sharedm open-source brands like the blackspot will triumph over jealously guarded copywrites.
All it takes is for a few of us to start living spontanious lives of playful resistance-to living without dead time.
Bit by bit, industry by industry
The Blackspot Anticorporation, 1243 West 7th Avenuem Vancouver, BC V6H 1B7 Phone (604) 736-9401 blackspot [at] adbusters [dot] orgwill change the ugly face of corporate capitalism
While giant corporations run roughshod over our lives, we whine and complain, protest and boycott. But the one thing we've never done is fight the corporations head on.
For too long we've ignored the market, written it off as enemy territory. Yet, what do mega-corps like Walmart and Coke fear most? Competition.
We're talking about a new breed of bottom-up enterprise that does things differently: promotes ethics over profit, values over image, idealism over hype. A brand of grassroots capitalism that deals in products we actually need -- and believe in. No sweatshops. No mindfucking ads. Just sustainable, accountable companies. Run by us.
Imagine a chain of restaurants serving only locally-sourced food. Or an artist-controlled radio network. Instead of Nikes? Blackspot Sneakers. Instead of McDonald's, Warner Music and Microsoft? Tell us in the forum.
There is a lot of enthusiasm for the invigorating effect of an anti-corporate fashion in the leaflet above, but it's a statement of enthusiasm for what might come next rather than specifics about what's already worked, which was to advertise a lot of shoes in adbusters magazine that reflect its editorial line and were sold on a low margin with a chance for indie retailers to join-in. Abdusters even commissioned a style with very different instructions to those given by Nike. Unfortunately, the saving on advertising is balanced by the extra spending on any kind of supply chain that many people would want, so dispite the efficiency of the logistics company and the Portugese factory, the shoes still look expensive to the Johnny in the leaflet just as Nike trainers do. There's no equivalent product to compare - maybe Nike cost more - but the shoes still cost and there are sweatshop trainers cheap at Payless and Wallmart for those who don't want the advertised brands. It's not so clear cut that "it's a dangerous game they've been playing", just that there is some way of taking say 1% or 0.01% or 0.001% of the market back.
The leaflet is an enthusiastic inspiration rant so it is rightly sketchy about what might happen next. It depends on people doing things. And there is no great logic to what they might do other than the hoped-for liberating combination of fashionable black spots and small business with an ethical touch. As the logo is not linked to anything but good will, there's no specific reason why one indy business should lend cheaply to another or sell good veggieburgers or why Nike shouldn't sell sweat-shop trainers with black spots on them.
Similar ideas that are more specific are crowd-funding of bands in which potential buyers of the record invest before the record is made, crowd funding of charities and crowd commitments to turn-up at a flashmob event or protest. Where money is involved, this does take-on large companies at their own game: supermarkets for example are often able to strike such good deals with suppliers that they only pay for products if and after the products have been sold. I'm not too sure of specifics and what happens in each trade and each country, but these kinds of deals exist and give monopolists a huge advantage. Likewise, a bunch of enthusiasts can fund a batch of 500 Canadian hemp canvas jeans made in Canada at a very high factory cost that still competes with a highly advertised pair of Levis bought in a shop. Nobody has tried this but it was a suggestion on the Antipreneur site: "black spot 501s anyone?" - if the minimum order is 500 pairs and you want a sample, that's just exactly the number of deposits you need. You also need very good software for lining-up different options until 501 people agree what cut of cloth they want and what size they are.
Abdusters magazine continues to run campaigns such as buy nothing day and still distributes shoes as a sideline. Open source software foundations continue to grow. Zopa allows the most credit-worthy to borrow privately in some countries, in a way that can be used for enthusiasts to make a loan to an individual who's project isn't on a stock market and without the hassle of chasing payments if the loan isn't repaid. Less developed are ways for people to pool expertise, time and technical knowledge to do something like make shoes or braze bicycle frames to order for a willing audience of buyers, but some video upload sites show shared ideas for making things and online collaboration software is available.
If an existing factory is to make the product, I don't know of any online collaboration software for collecting together 501 people and their deposits for a certain product and a certain set of ethical criteria..
If the shoes, bikes, or jeans are to be bought as a batch from an existing factory there seems to be less consensus about which factory - is it a Canadian factory, or one with equivalent working conditions, welfare and democratic rights for its staff, or one that makes good jeans, or what else brings a crowd of customers together? The same question applies at each stage of the supply chain. If it is "equivalent", how is that defined and how do the shipping costs and tariffs effect the equation? Say an idea is hatched in Canada and 80% of the subscribers are in Canada, the other 20% are various other countries and the UK has a tariff on goods priced over £18 - there may be other countries with similar traps. Someone in Canada has to inform subscribers from everywhere from which subscribers are accepted about the shipping handling and tariff charges from the place where the product is made to the place where the customer lives. So in practice the scheme might be saying "Canada and US only" for batch one, reducing demand by say 20%.
Confusingly in the UK there is state funding for publicity of green products and fairtrade products being "ethical" in contrast to UK-made products or such. Even a staff co-op making shoes in the constituency of the MP who was minister for business while she subsidised Terra Plana's Chinese shoes to be shown at London Fashion Week. The staff co-op went bust shedding 200 jobs over a few years in a constituency with unemployment around 30%. Generally, ethical claims will be about people, planet and animals but the "people" claims are filtered through governments and companies with a big interest in shipping things in from autocracies and any other idea of "ethical" doesn't get mentioned in the papers so much.Confusingly in north Amercia, people often use the word "manufacturer" for the risk-taker & initiator of a deal rather than the person who manufactures the product, so they'd say that a Canadian publisher manufactures a book in Hong Kong but it's a Canadian book and there's nothing to say about consequences for printers in Hong Kong or Canada.
Confusingly people tend use the word "co-op" for a range of different things - consumer co-op, staff-owned company with or without various rules, or even "shareholder co-op" in the case of the Morning Star newspaper. The first two are common meanings, and both meanings could be used on one deal if a crowd of consumers co-operated to buy from a staff owned company. So a better linking of enthusiasms and adjectives would be good.
Confusingly the idea of good customer service tends to be different in North America and even sometimes the UK to what was normal a few decades ago. Customers assume that there is such a big profit margin on goods that they can change their mind about a product at the suppliers' cost, or get customer service on the phone at the suppliers' cost, and when the goods are bought at proper prices on minimal margins, this means that indecisive or timewasting customers cost the other customers money.
Nevetheless a crowd pledge to find 501 pairs of jeans made of Canadian hemp from a Canadian factory sounds plausible if a web site in Canada can assemble peoples'
- deposit (say $10 returnable if no jeans are posted, full price maybe minus an amount if the jeans are returned)
- belly (eg 36")
- taste in jeans (harder to describe)
- taste in ethics matching the available offer or vica versa in 501 cases
- large tail of non-standard facts about something like shipping to me in the UK with its tariffs on parcels over £18
- agreement about what happens if the things go wrong and the returned pairs of jeans do not cancel each other out - what kind of refund is fair?
- what if 250 people make deposits but no 501: is there any interest paid on the deposit?
Maybe someone will work out how to do it over a large number of coffees. Maybe it's already been done.