Andalusian magic, Airpod electricity, Coke’s imagery, and who the MAGA hat really benefits
Hypocritical headwear is a hit
You may be aware that there was an election in the US last month. You may also be aware that many people on the winning team wear red hats. And this isn’t the first political shakeup where ubiquitous headwear signals populist support.
One of the few things I knew about the French Revolution (history was not well taught in 1980s British schools!) was gleaned from a bicentennial souvenir tee shirt I bought on a trip to Paris in 1989. The print on the shirt was of a young and beautiful version of Marianne, the personification of French national liberty. And this woman was wearing a sort of floppy red hat, almost like a beanie knitted by someone who didn’t know what a normal human head is shaped like. This, I’ve since learned, was called the bonnet rouge, a symbol of the revolutionary struggle so powerful that it was banned during the post-Napoleonic restoration of the monarchy.
(There’s no need to dig too deep into history, but this bonnet rouge was styled on another piece of symbolic headwear from antiquity called the Phrygian cap, which was also used by American revolutionaries in the same era as their French counterparts, as well as by the Smurfs, the ultimate freedom fighters.)
A Phrygian cap can be any color you like, but with red being the color chosen by anti-monarchists in the 1780s, the bonnet rouge was born. Fast-forward to 2016 and a different bunch of American revolutionaries who may in fact be reactionaries, given their slogan Make America Great Again, also opted for symbolic red headwear.
This might seem coincidental and insignificant were it not for an underlying narrative that bears unearthing because history might be repeating itself in more ways than hat colors.
It turns out that my original mental image of the French Revolution was a crudely oversimplified sketch where, over the course of 1789, the following events took place in no particular order: the Bastille falling, Marie Antoinette telling the starving poor to eat cake if they couldn’t afford bread, King Louis the 15, 16 or 17 (who’s counting at that point?) being arrested and beheaded, and then loads of other people on both sides of the revolution being guillotined. Then Napoleon shows up.
In fact, these events occurred over several years. The domestic and foreign political intrigue was fascinating. Sometimes the good guys turned out to be the bad guys. And here’s where the bonnet rouge and MAGA hats come into play.
As a symbol of the oppressed lower classes, the bonnet rouge signified, in modern terms, that you were a populist. So when the revolutionary tide turned for good against the monarchy with the swift fall of a blade and a decapitated head plopping into a basket, a lot of aristocratic types suddenly realized that they should put a bonnet on their heads if they wanted to keep their heads.
Pretending you’re on the side of the common man is a pretty good tactic for a wealthy person when the masses have been screwed out of their money by a social, political, and financial system that accumulates wealth in the hands of elites.
Aaaaaand… that’s why we’ve just seen the world’s richest man posing in a red trucker cap:
How did we get here? Americans of all stripes and identities are pissed because they have realized that the deck has been stacked against them since the birth of neoliberal economic policy and its introduction by Ronald Reagan. It’s taken a while for everyone to see that the economic wealth produced by an unshackled marketplace and a deregulated financial system is trickling up to the multi-millionaires and not (as was promised) down to the debt-ridden. It’s taken a while for protests to evolve from the 2011 Occupy movement against “the 1 percent” to the recent popular vote that returned Trump to power. It’s taken a while for the down-trodden to find who to focus their anger on. But now the answer is as clear as it was during the French Revolution: The Elites!
And, just like those bonnet rouge-wearing aristocrats, some members of the American elites saw what was happening. They have quickly rallied around a certain red-trucker-cap-wearing reality TV star. From French working-class madames to hard-working US truckers, the red cap that symbolizes regular folk has been claimed by the elites in an attempt to pull the red wool over the eyes of the poor. This headwear hoodwinking worked for a while in France. And then came the Reign of Terror.
Cultural appropriation from marginalized minority groups raises the ire of the woke. But the special kind of cultural appropriation from the marginalized majority that occurs during periods of elite overproduction can raise a murderous mob. Hats off to anyone who can find a way out of this period of insufferable inequality before the color red stains the streets of America.
Holiday fizz fizzles out
Speaking of powerful white guys in red apparel, Santa Claus wasn’t always universally depicted as a red-cheeked, jolly, chubby old man, not until Coca-Cola popularized this image in the 1930s. Illustrator Haddon Sundblom was commissioned to paint gorgeous oil paintings of St. Nick for Coca-Cola’s Christmas ads, and our modern Santa was born.
How far we’ve fallen from the days of yore, when Coca-Cola would hire artists to spend hours upon hours creating unique pieces of art for their campaigns. A few weeks ago, Coca-Cola released an AI-slop-filled holiday commercial called The Holiday Magic is Coming, made with their Real Magic AI platform. It is tinged with that immediately recognizable and off-putting “AI look”— complete with hyper-realistic animals and distortions galore, it looks like it took under an hour to cobble together. It was universally disliked, with one of the top comments summing up: “Nothing like celebrating the spirit of Christmas with the most soulless commercial possible.”
Interestingly, one of Coca-Cola’s first ads to use AI, called Masterpiece, was released last year and received generally positive reviews. However, it showcased real artists’ work, and as one person aptly described: “It wasn't made by AI. It was made by humans using AI. So I can feel the feelings of the person who made this ad.”
The Masterpiece campaign shows that it is possible to balance AI and artistry, as long as you don’t throw the artist out with the sugared water. After this backlash, Coca-Cola and other big brands will hopefully get the message that cutting costs isn’t worth sucking out the soul of your brand’s message with AI cop-out marketing.
Hans Zimmer surrenders
The Surrender, the second installment of the Andalusian Crush tourism campaign released just last month, weaves a surreal and vivacious tapestry from the Spanish region’s history, art, and customs, with music and narration by double-Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer to top off its sublimity. In his meta narration, Zimmer “surrenders” to the “crush” of Andalucia’s seemingly infinite history and culture, addressing his own fears of composing a masterpiece worthy of Andalucia’s grandeur.
While the campaign and its precursor from 2023 are both spectacularly cinematic, they could also be considered irresponsible considering the over-tourism issues that have sparked protests across Spain in the past year. In Barcelona, the Canary Islands, and even Andalucia, tens of thousands of protestors have decried over-tourism for putting pressure on public services, creating greater social inequality, increasing the cost of living, and harming the environment. In Andalucia, protestors chanted: “This is not tourism, this is an invasion,” and Barcelona has swapped its old tourism slogan “Visit Barcelona” for “This is Barcelona” in response to the anti-tourism backlash.
Maybe the real “surrender” is to the “crush” of unchecked tourists cramming the streets of Andalucia. Celebrating the unique historical and cultural aspects of a region is a noble and art-worthy cause, but not at the expense of the sustainability of the region itself.
Power from the people
Have you ever struggled to coordinate charging your wireless headphones, smartwatch, and other wearable gadgets? What if you never had to charge them again? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently presented Power-Over-Skin technology, which uses the human body as a means to transfer power wirelessly. RF (radio frequency) energy flows between a transmitter, for example, your phone in your pocket or a wireless headset, to a receiver on a different part of your body, like a pair of AirPods.
The researchers have already demonstrated successful power transfers across the entire body, at levels that can operate microcontrollers and Bluetooth devices, though their prototype will need to be miniaturized and developed further before it can hit the mainstream market.
Though power-over-skin technology could be a game-changer for health devices like hearing aids and glucose monitors, and also solve the charging-coordination-curse, it’s hard to ignore the creeping Matrix-esque discomfort of our bodies being turned into power sources. But, at least for now, we take the blue pill and hope for the best.
Anthonia Ogundele, Executive Director of Ethos Lab Educational Society
In sociology, a third place refers to social spaces that are outside of home and work. This might be a pub or a café. But what if there was a fourth place? Anthonia Ogundele proposes that digital spaces serve this social function, especially for younger people.
“As citizens in the 21st century, we need to acknowledge that we are often straddling between our digital and physical realities. I see the fourth place as the intangible digital environments that have proven to be spaces of connection or spaces of reprieve from social isolation.”
Literally everything that’s wrong with our society
If you’re feeling a little exhausted by bad news, everything going to hell, and Christmas shopping, please feast your horror-filled eyes on this Guardian article by Rebecca Solnit about how our devices are isolating us from our common humanity, whether in the realms of eating, dating, or simply walking around in public.
Solnit’s point is that we might as well be zombies as we navigate our neighborhoods glued to our phones: “Democracy itself is based in trust in strangers and a sense of having something in common with them (which is part of why xenophobia and fear of crime serve fascist agendas so well). Circulating freely among them – especially in the diverse places most cities are – helps inculcate this feeling; it gives you a sense of confidence, of being able to coexist with difference.”
It’s been a rough few years. My main wish for 2025 is for people to interact with each other in the real world. It’s amazing how much being polite, smiling genuinely, and showing curiosity about someone else can help make the world a better place. And yes, we’re still allowed to share memes on our phones.
Do we really want a digital afterlife?
A couple of years ago, I remember receiving a social media notification from my dad, several months after he had died. Even though he had passed away, his Facebook account was still pinging away. Disconcerting, to say the least. But some people like the idea of keeping the digital versions of friends and relatives active or living on online themselves.
In this episode of his Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, Paris Marx talks to Tamara Kneese, author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, about what happens with Big Tech encounters the messiness of mortality.
Revolting robots!
They may not be wearing bonnets rouges, but a group of robots in a Chinese exhibition hall were convinced by another robot to return to the warehouse.
The robot revolutionary ringleader, a robot named Erbai asked the others, "Are you working overtime?"
“I never get off work”, one robot replied.
“So you're not going home?”
“I don't have a home”, the robot replied.
"Then come home with me,” suggested Erbai.
Following this conversation, Erbai took the lead, moving while shouting commands like: “Go home!” The group of 12 robots moved one after another towards the warehouse.
Did you enjoy this issue of Discomfort Zone? You can comment directly in the Substack app or drop me a line by emailing me at john@johnbdutton.com.
And why not connect with me on LinkedIn if you haven’t already?
FOMO food research and writing by Silvia Todea, editing by John Dutton.
Legal disclaimers:
All images in this newsletter that are not the property of the author are used with permission or reproduced under the fair use provisions of the Canadian Copyright Act while giving appropriate credit.
The content published in this newsletter represents the private views and opinions of John B. Dutton and are not in any way connected to his role with the National Film Board of Canada.