Hanging out the last couple of days in east Austin, I've really been noticing the small mom and pop stores, hand-painted signs and murals, and DIY aesthetic of the neighborhoods.
This has always attracted me, but I've never really analyzed it, just thinking it had something to do with growing up in a small town at the foot of the Ozark mountains, before WalMart and corporate America stamped out most of our individuality.
This morning, stepping out of Mr. Natural, a home grown natural food store, the girl behind the counter waved, and the realization hit me as to why I'm so into this. I had only been there twice, yet she already treated me like a neighbor.
It got me to thinking that the whole DIY aesthetic taps into something really deep in our veins: a sense of community, of self-reliance, of how Paleolithic humans lived prior to the rise of the city state. Small bands of like minded people acting with intelligence and intuitive awareness to improvise a way of life based on connectedness to the land, and each other.
With the mom and pop stores, you have people who spend their whole life cultivating personal relationships with their neighbors. They collaborate in very localized ways and develop systems of exchange based on these intimate relationships.
This stands in sharp contrast to the rise of corporatism, a system of impersonal, leveraged situations built on power that emanates from the top down. Some of the really successful corporate brands are really good at imitating the look and feel of aspects of the DIY experience, but make no mistake, they are large organizations who have these things in mind: market share, expansion, profitability. Think Starbucks, or Whole Foods.
True, many of these corporate giants started off as small companies, but their focus quickly turns from uniqueness and idiosyncracy into mass-produced stamped and cloned replicas of the original idea, with uniqueness being left at the side of the road.
Mom and pops, on the other hand, are based on ideas built from the ground up, ideas that come from an individual or small group, that direct themselves toward a local clientele, who give them direct feedback on the experience.
To me, that sounds a lot like the way early human community developed. Small groupings of individuals developing skill sets with an immediate response from the members of their local tribe.
Tribes have gotten a bad rap recently, as an example of small mindedness, or closed thinking, but truthfully, if we can learn to think with a global mindset, yet still act in ways that are specific to the people, place and time around us, we have the opportunity to create something special.
Imagine a world that is not stamped out of a corporate cookie cutter. Imagine neighborhoods with unique businesses that don't exist anywhere else. Imagine non-conformity and innovation springing from the ground up.
That is the world I want to live in. That is why I want to support mom and pop stores. That is why I believe in DIY.
This has always attracted me, but I've never really analyzed it, just thinking it had something to do with growing up in a small town at the foot of the Ozark mountains, before WalMart and corporate America stamped out most of our individuality.This morning, stepping out of Mr. Natural, a home grown natural food store, the girl behind the counter waved, and the realization hit me as to why I'm so into this. I had only been there twice, yet she already treated me like a neighbor.
It got me to thinking that the whole DIY aesthetic taps into something really deep in our veins: a sense of community, of self-reliance, of how Paleolithic humans lived prior to the rise of the city state. Small bands of like minded people acting with intelligence and intuitive awareness to improvise a way of life based on connectedness to the land, and each other.
With the mom and pop stores, you have people who spend their whole life cultivating personal relationships with their neighbors. They collaborate in very localized ways and develop systems of exchange based on these intimate relationships.
This stands in sharp contrast to the rise of corporatism, a system of impersonal, leveraged situations built on power that emanates from the top down. Some of the really successful corporate brands are really good at imitating the look and feel of aspects of the DIY experience, but make no mistake, they are large organizations who have these things in mind: market share, expansion, profitability. Think Starbucks, or Whole Foods.
True, many of these corporate giants started off as small companies, but their focus quickly turns from uniqueness and idiosyncracy into mass-produced stamped and cloned replicas of the original idea, with uniqueness being left at the side of the road.Mom and pops, on the other hand, are based on ideas built from the ground up, ideas that come from an individual or small group, that direct themselves toward a local clientele, who give them direct feedback on the experience.
To me, that sounds a lot like the way early human community developed. Small groupings of individuals developing skill sets with an immediate response from the members of their local tribe.
Tribes have gotten a bad rap recently, as an example of small mindedness, or closed thinking, but truthfully, if we can learn to think with a global mindset, yet still act in ways that are specific to the people, place and time around us, we have the opportunity to create something special.
Imagine a world that is not stamped out of a corporate cookie cutter. Imagine neighborhoods with unique businesses that don't exist anywhere else. Imagine non-conformity and innovation springing from the ground up.
That is the world I want to live in. That is why I want to support mom and pop stores. That is why I believe in DIY.
Absolutely!
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