Hi, interested. I’m drunk. So the basic premise of Paretti’s paper is this. We form identities based on desire. Capitalism inserts itself into the process of identity creation in order to get us to desire capitalist commodities. Not only that, but this process of adopting and discarding identities is being accelerated by capitalist forces. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis jargon involved in describing how this works.

Paretti argues that countercultures have the potential to avoid recuperation by capital when they offer a positive form of desire rather than a desire based on lacking something. If all your counterculture wants to do is watch pirated media, there’s not a good way to monetize that. But if that counterculture can get bogged down in minutia about the implications of Blu-ray sales, for example, capitalism can and will step in and insert itself into the identity creation process of the subculture. He also cites women’s rights and queer activism as a counterculture which could resist recuperation while outlining how rainbow capitalism would work. And he did this in 1996 and with seemingly minimal background in feminist theory compared to his peers with a focus on it.