this neutralization of difference is crucial to capitalism, a flattening that allows otherwise-diverse objects to be brought into the realm of exchange value.
The glamor and vibe some branding company worked so hard to imbue is dulled by the cardboard and tape and shredded packing paper. How am I supposed to fetishize this wrinkled blouse torn only moments ago from a recalcitrant plastic pouch?
This is where the aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking comes in. It’s a piece of theater that allows consumer goods to regain the appeal and shiny product-ness that wore off them in transit. Without the department store, we must stage our own closets. Without the supermarket to enable the child’s formative encounter with the object of desire (the cereal aisle, where Captain Crunch and Count Chocula call out like sirens from child-height shelves), it’s up to mom to reanimate the dead bulk Froot Loops by decanting and displaying them and bringing some spectacle back. When the warehouse is your house, you have to revive the commodity yourself, spank its cheeks a little and turn it back into a product.
I can imagine a world where this newer, more intimate connection with the abstraction and depraved randomness of contemporary supply chains would lead somewhere different. Experiencing the crappy banality of the drop-shipped Insta-purchase might lead to a disenchantment with the commodity, and even an empathy with the other poor schmucks further up the chain to whom you’re inextricably linked via some godforsaken tank top or tub of cookies.
Per Adorno and Bishop, the logistics play of the Home Edit pantry could be seen as a reaction to and a reflection of a world already swallowed whole by managerial logic and inscrutable supply webs. It’s a coping mechanism, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not art.
At one point during the tour I saw a box of Cholula hot sauce come down the line. Khloé has Cholula in her pantry. I suppose it could have been the very same sauce. Those bottles stowed into a caddie at the warehouse, then retrieved weeks later by a picker responding to the computer ping of an order that was placed by Khloé’s assistant. Into the box they went, box taped closed, along a conveyor belt, onto a truck, eventually delivered to a mansion in the Santa Monica Mountains. The box received, cut open. The bottles removed, held in the pristinely manicured hand of an entirely different kind of worker performing an entirely similar task. Cholula stowed into a new cubby grid, shiny long acrylics tap tapping on the bottle’s glass sides, as they plunk down on the lazy susan one by one. “I’m not crazy, I’m just organized.”
📼 Yesterday’s Concepts for Today’s Lifestyles.
via Flashbak
📼 Is the #1 fiction bestseller AI slop?
📼 The Vergecast What’s behind the Google AI shakeup (also available in your podcatchers)
I think that it is going to be fundamentally dangerous that a company like Google that does not have any top-down product strategy.