Shiny Happy People

Shanti Mathias | She/Her

I’m opening Facebook. I can’t remember why. Maybe I needed to find a Zoom link sent on Messenger. Maybe I wanted to post a Tweet I’ve screenshotted in a meme group. Maybe I wanted to check the details of an assignment on a class page. I’ve forgotten the reason, because I’ve seen an advertisement for a novelty sock company. They claim to be going out of business due to COVID-19 and everything is on sale.

I add enough items to my cart to get free shipping, then I think about the environmental costs of international packages and if I really need novelty socks. I conclude that I do not, so I close the tab. In the days since, I’ve gotten increasingly needy emails from the website, promising discounts on further purchases, begging for my credit card details, shilling some environmental initiative that involves planting trees. Each email is addressed to me, but I don’t respond, feeling a little smug about withholding satisfaction from an advertising company trying to be creative.

I was in Hong Kong with my sister and we emerged blinking into the central streets. We had passed through five airports and train and metro stations to get to the Central part of Hong Kong Island. I was overwhelmed with the glossy marble, everywhere so much the same that I was convinced we hadn’t arrived anywhere at all.

Everything in Hong Kong was grey: slatey sky reflected in mirrored buildings, dark concrete pavements. The only colour was the advertisements. Shimmering ads for Givenchy, pastel dreamworlds sprayed over rattling double decker trams that sold chocolate. Massive billboards offered the latest luxury car, looping videos of high heels told women to live the love stories they longed for.

“Money is its own country,” the characters of Emily St. John Mandel novel The Glass Hotel repeat to each other as the shores of their wealth erode. In Hong Kong, the advertisements were nowhere. The same ones were also displayed in Times Square and Milan and Dubai, everything shiny and substanceless. The people who purchase perfume and cars are the same people in the same places, although the people and places have different names. 

In No Logo, Naomi Klein writes about the shiny resilience of brands, how the logos of multinational corporations are able to conceal exploitative labour, water pollution, and dead animals. In a foreword to the 10th anniversary of the book, Klein said that the dominance of brands is such that her polemic against them became a brand of its own: she had people asking her to capitalise on the No Logo logo.
She, too, was constructed as the image of her ideas. A picture of her drinking a Diet Coke at a restaurant was printed in newspapers with accusations of hypocrisy. How easily we ask others to live lives of the image; how we let the image be enough, when it gives us permission not to think about the systems it represents. 

In Hong Kong, my sister grabbed my arm when she saw two people—white men—in superhero suits, Thor and Captain America, posing for photos. She sidled up next to them, while I grabbed her phone and took the picture. Then the suited men asked her for twenty Hong Kong dollars. At their feet was a cardboard sign in Cantonese where these terms of exchange were presumably spelled out, but we couldn’t read Cantonese. Seeing our panicked eyes—twenty Hong Kong dollars was most of our money for dinner—they relented, beckoning the next person forward.

We were on a covered walkway. It was Sunday, the day off for Filipina domestic workers. Beneath us, the clamour of women crouching on their own bits of cardboard; living often in small cupboards above the kitchen in the apartments of their employers, on their day off there was nowhere to go but out. Little tents were selling prepaid SIM cards with minutes for calling home. Women huddled against their friends, eating food from home in plastic lunch boxes. 

But the women got in the way, so it was easier to go between metro stations on the walkways, not having to engage. Unlike the superhero men, no-one was interested in the image of poor brown women far from home. Around them, shiny happy people lived glossy on billboards far above the ground. 

I don’t feel like an object or an image. Maybe this is only because as a woman under capitalism, I am privileged enough to be able to avoid interacting with domestic workers living between hard choices. I assure myself that I’m a good person because I read two and a half New York Times articles about their plight. I don’t need to sell images of my body, or have them taken from me: I can use words, and feel like that makes me different or better.

Occasionally, on Twitter—my only public social media—I am followed by accounts with display pictures of girls with their boobs out and bios promising private messages. I block these accounts, uneasy with either reality: whether these are images of real girls who have learned to sell themselves, or stolen images used by the profiteerers of the sex industry. It is so easy to become an image, and to be sold an image. Everywhere, the dealers of images are looking for eyes to grab. 

The logic of capitalism tells me that I should try to earn money for writing. Consequently, I’ve dabbled uneasily in writing SEO copy for travel websites: heartless writing that leaves me sick. I’ve written blog posts and stories and articles, even Tweets, for years without being paid for it, and the quality of that writing has nothing to do with whether or not it manifests in my bank account. I fall easily for the cultural narratives which say that money determines value.

I have an Oxford t-shirt given to me by my cousin, who studied there. I wear it, filling out the logo with my body. The image of the Oxford crest helps me file ‘ultra-prestigious university for a postgraduate degree’ in the too large part of my brain that holds maybe somedays. I like being that image, the world of education and power that I am connected to simply by the logo that I wear.

One way to understand the way that branding narratives structure our lives is to consider the institution of university. Universities hawk a narrative where learning is valuable because it will help you to earn more money, and wearing the brand of a university I’ve never attended makes me complicit in that story. My degree means I pay to write: according to capitalism, the debt I accumulate for education is worthwhile for a  piece of paper that will supposedly mean I can earn more.  

At present, New Zealand’s universities are owned and subsidised by the government; in return, they are expected to milk international students and hall residents for every last dollar. Thus the universities engage in expensive branding exercises to attract the students who will pay the most. However, another story can be told by universities, a story where knowledge is valuable against all
circumstances, rather than a byproduct of delivering profit to the government.

C. S. Lewis tells that story, when he writes of learning during a war with all of its attendant futility, that “Human life has always had to be lived at the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist in the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were completely secure, the search would never have begun.” The university, all the debt that will give me a degree, is also a home for this search for meaning, which makes me glad.

Stories are built by systems. The years C. S. Lewis spent as an Oxford don were the product of a system of oppression, where the elite of society were allowed to dream and ask questions while the empire that fed that particular stony walled institution continued to appropriate the ways of life of millions of people around the world. This is often at the hands of the erudite powerful people that Oxford itself
spat out.

I know which images and narratives hook me. I listen to YouTubers talking about the products they use to stay shiny. I look up the book my friend recommends and place it in my cart. I follow the promoted account about Indians in New Zealand and I laugh at the advertisement for home loans in the article I’m reading but I’d still quite like to own a house. I pay attention to the images and what they sell because I’m human. It is in my nature to listen to other people, and turn the systems I exist within into stories.

During the coronavirus crisis, delineations have been made between essential and non-essential activities: what we need, and what we don’t. Food is essential. University, it turns out, is not. Banking is essential, so I open the ASB app and see that my rent has disappeared, automatic payments waiting for no virus. 

I think I know what I need. I need to care for my mind, body, and spirit, and the minds, bodies and spirits of others, and trust that they will do the same. I need to build a world where these actions of care are more possible.

Some of the things I need are not essential, according to the government—seeing my family, being held by people I love—and this denial is only tenable because it is supposed to be temporary. I tell myself that my need to have the warmth of other people’s bodies close to mine is less important than a world where fewer people succumb to the random cruelty of a virus, which knows only how to fill cells and nothing else. I can deny my needs for the greater good. 

In this time of coronavirus, my wants are the same as ever, thoroughly entangled with the advertising I consume. I am part of a society, a system, where I can only want things when I am told to want them, and feel like these wants come from myself. The slick spiel of capitalism says that in all circumstances images must be made, pointing to a story where purchase is allievation for every indiscriminate kind of yearning. 

And so I’m opening Facebook again. I can’t remember if I’m opening it to find a Zoom link, post a meme, check an assignment, or contact a friend who is out of reach. Every gap in the jumble of ideas and images that is my newsfeed is filled with an advertisement, things I am foolish enough to want.