In a silent moment a blackspot sprouted as a scribble upon the wall – the remainder of a black crayon circling, blotting out what lay beneath. As pure possibility, the blackspot grew through negation, composting decaying culture to fertilize seedlings of renewal. Taking an ad bloated with pestilential desires, swirling its mark until nothing remained but tilled field, the blackspot prepares the fecund ground, dark with becoming, for our new beginning.

Not a product, a brand nor a marketing campaign, the blackspot is a call to shake off the chains of resignation. Feel the most powerful tremble when faced with our challenge. Slipped into their hands, thrown into their faces, the blackspot signals our ongoing mutiny against consumerism. But our rebellion is of a different kind, where not only the captain of the vessel walks the plank but also the course and even the maps are destroyed. We are not sailing for a distant shore, nor seeking the middle passage. Instead, our destination is here, where we stand. We will retake this ground with the blackspot as guide, pointing toward an alternative present, a viable vision for transforming our communities into lush forests of homegrown culture, unhomogenized by corporate toxins.

Like all untimely ones, the blackspot remained a potentiality yearning toward actuality – waiting for necessity to pollinate its delicate flowers until, weathering storms of cynicism and resignation, the blackspot bore first fruit: we emerged, a tenacious people inspired, prepared to remake the world. Our initial offering, a simple sneaker destined to unswoosh souls by kicking corporate ass, was a fast success. But the shoe was mere beginning, symptom of the coming upheaval, a small taste of the envisioned world to come: castrated capitalism, blackspotted.

See the world freshly made. There’s no need to raze it all, we can embrace what is good and compost the bad. It takes only the courage to daydream, to gaze with intolerance for corporate blight. Our aspirations may be bold but our strategy is sound: dig in for the fight, prepare for the struggle and recruit allies who’ll await the decision moment.

From a scribble on the wall to the incubator of a people, the blackspot’s design unfolds with time – the destined catalyst of cultural rebirth.

Speaking of PBR and all the love it receives from hipsters, here is an interesting excerpt from New York Times Columnist Rob Walker’s new book, Buying In:

“The Blackspot sneaker that I mentioned earlier-the creation of the antibrander, Kalle Lasn, and his Adbusters crew-is premised on the belief that a logo (or antilogo) product can have real meaning for people who are sick of logos; it is premised on the belief that the marketplace of goods is a marketplace of ideas. The “hijacking” of PBR [Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer] shows how this really can happen, although its different from the Blackspot idea in two important ways.

The first is that while the meaning of the Blackspot as a sort of protest brand was created by Adbusters and announced to potential consumers, the meaning of PBR as a kind of protest brand did not come from its owners; it came from the grass roots, from consumers, from the bottom up.

And here is a second difference: On the side of every can of Pabst Blue Ribbon is a P.O box in Milwaukee. Pabst does trace its roots to a brewery foundered there in 1844. These days, however, Pabst Brewing Company is based in San Antonio. In 1985, the brewery was bought by Paul Kalmanovitz’s idea, a self-made beer and real estate baron. While other big brewers were spending to build national, image based brands, Kalmanovitz’s idea, apparently, was to buy up ailing ales, slash all associated costs, and let them “decline profitably.” Kalmanovitz died in 1987 (Pabst is owned by the charitable foundation he left behind), and his lieutenants ran the show for the next dozen or so years along the same lines. The current Pabst Brewing portfolio includes Schlitz, Carling Black Label, Falstaff, Olympia, and Stroh’s. It also owns a few regional stalwarts (Lone Star, Rainier, Old Style) and malt liquors (Colt 45, St. Ides). Its top seller, with about 1 percent of the U.S. beer market, is Old Milwaukee.

Along the way, Pabst shuttered its Milwaukee brewery, eliminating nearly 250 jobs and touching off a legal battle over pension obligations to former workers. This might explain another quirk of the Pabst resurgence-that it has radiated out from a part of the country that had no particular historic tie to the brand. “They really aliented people in Milwaukee,” Dennis E. Garrett, a marketing professor at Marquette University in that city, told me. In 2001, Pabst finalized an outsourcing deal with Miller, becoming a “virtual brewer”, as one executive put it at the time. Having virtually wiped out its blue-collar workforce, Pabst employed just 166 people, about half of them selling beer in the field and the rest in the home office. This, in other words, is exactly the kind of scenario that people like Lasn and books like No Logo were complaining about.

That is to say, PBR’s blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anticapitalist image-image attached to it by consumers-is a sham. You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding.”

From reading the hundreds of comments on the hipster article, I expect many people would say, "I drink PBR because it is cheap, not because it is cool". But if you were in the liquor store, staring at a fridge that had Budweiser and PBR next to each other for exactly the same price, which would you choose? Some would probably choose PBR because its image is grassroots and blue collar. But this image is false. What do you do when you find out that PBR is owned by an American company, but that the production of all its twenty-nine beers is outsourced to SABMiller, based in South Africa? What do you do when you find out your rebellious Converse are now made by Nike in China? In a time when image is cleverly manipulated, we need to become increasingly aware of where our products come from and what our brands stand for so we can hold them up to the standards we expect.