Sprouting Wings in the Hyper-Colonial: High-Octane Desire and Youth-Targeted Market Predation

In this article, the author utilizes a novel action research approach to developing an interpretation of a colonial discourse that reproduces an otherness that is consistent with traditional views of history and ideology. Through this unique educational—for both author and client—approach, further analysis reveals a colonial discourse that has become unhinged from its historical roots and taken flight into supermolecular space where its origins and impact have been thoroughly dissociated from its cultural impact. When our identities are thoroughly absorbed into and taken over by consumer products, we enter a corporately induced, mass-media augmented hyper-colonial in which our minds, bodies, and senses of self become defined by those products. A primary research question is: how can we intervene in colonialism when the colonized is an inferior/lacking version of our own self ? The ways in which this hyper-colonial state captures and makes use of desire and is then marked—marketed—by/through a society-level drive is explored throughout this article. The author "takes a walk"—that is, he uses a week-long organizational consultation that was conducted for a marketing research organization to analyze the ways that the dynamics of a hyper-colonialized consumer culture were at play in the consulteeʹs marketing strategies that target American youth.