Welcome to D2C anti-capitalism, my friends, where nothing is what it seems. 

It’s a curious state where Levi’s beckons you to buy less (but buy them), Oatly makes a spectacle of not caring if you care, and Viking Cruises sells the feeling of climate contribution on none other than a cruise ship. 

It’s easy to mistake this for corporate social responsibility at new heights, where performative campaigns like Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi are replaced with performative products that promise salvation with purchase. But culture is never about the signals you can see.

In this week’s article, Concept Bureau senior strategist Zach Lamb reveals what lies just beneath the veil of D2C anti-capitalism: a lack of control that has led to nihilism, and an approaching tipping point that will force the question of personal agency.

You’ll never look at a carton of oat milk the same way again. Enjoy.

[Excerpt from D2C Anti-Capitalism: The Red Herring of Consumerism]

The green shoots of a new era are emerging as corporate social responsibility (CSR) is rapidly being productized and sold back to consumers as “D2C Anti-Capitalism.”

In D2C anti-capitalism, solutions to the societal and environmental problems generated by capitalism are being sold back to consumers as products for purchase. Levi’s, Oatly, and Viking Cruises are standout examples, each expressing a different aspect of D2C anti-capitalism.

D2C anti-capitalism is a natural outgrowth of major shifts in CSR. The Economist has called annual shareholder meetings the new frontline in the battle for corporate purpose. Together with D2C anti-capitalism, shareholder activism reveals a growing understanding of the power of business to produce social outcomes, desirable or otherwise. 

Clearly, this is a marked shift. In the 19th century, economists coined the term ‘externalities’ to describe how business imposes unpaid costs on society. Until recently, externalities tended mostly to be environmental pollutants. But the rise of an ever diversifying set of investor proposals reveals that shareholders (and society) are beginning to see racial injustice, economic inequality, and LGBTQ+ rights as externalities, as costs imposed on society by conducting business as usual. 

Consumers today are the most educated they have ever been. The average consumer increasingly understands the connections between capitalism, culture, society, and individual psychology. 

Let’s wade for a moment into the tensions the average college educated consumer reckons with these days.

They want to go to the grocery store and be guaranteed to find fresh scallops, avocados and tomatoes at any time of year, no matter the location, even though they know it’s not natural or very good for the planet. They want to deepen their engagement with the world through travel, even though they’re aware of the climate costs (unless you’re cruising Viking). They want an iPhone while also knowing Apple has questionable labor and environmental practices, and the jury is still out on the whole data privacy thing, too. And they’ve grown accustomed to cheap and immediate delivery from Amazon while knowing its workers are injured at a rate double that of other companies. 

D2C anti-capitalism offers a way out of our consumerist tensions through the assuaging salvation it promises. And shareholder activism tries to get business to account for its effect on society. Yet still, these are half-measures, and consumers are feeling stagnant and ineffectual. 

Generational nihilism has been proffered as a catchall descriptor of the malaise Americans feel today. It’s not exactly the classic “smoke em if you got em because we’re all going down so who really cares” brand of nihilism, though. It’s something else. 

In a fascinating 2021 article called “How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted” in the New York Times, Kyle Chayka asserts that “numbness beckons when life is difficult, when problems seem insurmountable, when there is so much to mourn.” Indeed, such widespread feelings of ineffectuality are exactly what D2C anti-capitalism is soothing. 

Our problems do seem insurmountable, like we can’t do anything to fix society. That no one can. And social inequalities, the isolation of Covid-19, rancorous racial tumult, inescapable gun violence, and the ever-present titillations of partisan outrage porn that drive the click economy have combined to give us a lot to mourn.

Lacking the ability to create real change, it makes sense that consumers are buying productized solutions to social problems. And it makes sense that activist investors continue to expand the horizons of corporate social responsibility. 

At Concept Bureau, we focus on outlying signals of change that provide clues about the possible direction of our cultural and social futures. A central notion of futurists is that the “future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” With that, the question then becomes, is the emergence of D2C anti-capitalism a signal of the future of CSR and branding? Or, will it be a passing fad, replaced by other, stronger signals of the future? 

If we agree that D2C anti-capitalism is a reaction to our current cultural malaise in which Americans feel ineffectual and lack the agency necessary to create change, it’s reasonable to assume that, so long as the current cultural climate remains, the appeal of anti-capitalist branding will remain as well. 

However, a growing chorus of cultural commentators are signaling that a vibe shift is underway... 

Words of Affirmation

Here's what we've been consuming.

Is Monogamy Over? Inside Love’s Sharing Economy (Vogue): “Along with the reconsideration of careers and jobs and a migration from cities to suburbs, the pandemic has occasioned a cultural shift in the bedroom: ‘Maybe I want to have sex with other people,’ Moors says. ‘Why am I just skipping along to these unwritten rules? Monogamy, and how people navigate their intimate life, is part of that.’”

Surrealism, World Saving Luxury + Fractional Work (Zine): “One of the principles of surrealism is an expression of the absurd in order to question power and I’ve similarly noticed Gen Z quietly raging against the madness of the world with content that is surreal, weird and oft-uncomfortable. [...] In today’s world – which is more and more complex and contradictory – surrealism seems to be resonating with Gen Z because it embraces all their contradictions instead of resolving them.”

How Political Language Is Engineered (Your Undivided Attention): “Democracy depends on our ability to choose our political views. But when the language we use to talk about political issues is designed to influence our beliefs, are we choosing our views, or is our language choosing them for us?”

The case for fewer friends (Vox): “The people you spend time with offline — and the care and support you give and receive tangibly — supersedes the curated version of your relationship. ‘Having 200 people say happy birthday to you online, that can create goodwill and a sense of belonging,’ Bonior says. ‘It doesn’t really match the sense of “Things have gone really bad right now and I need somebody to listen and I know that they truly care about me.” That’s something that’s very profound.’”

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2: Even More Beautiful Results 🤯 (Two Minute Papers): A jaw-dropping must-watch on just how far AI image creation has come. “If you don’t believe that it can combine several existing concepts into something that definitely does not exist, hold on to your papers, and have a look at this one. This is truly insane. If all this does not feel like humanlike intelligence, I don’t know what is.” 

How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? (The Pudding): “Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music.” 

How Harmful Is Social Media? (The New Yorker): “Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, ‘It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.’”

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.