The Commodification of Surfing Has Produced a Consumer Market That Surfers Simultaneously Need and Resent
When the Thing You Love Is Also a Marketing Demographic, Something About the Love Changes
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Commodification of Surf Culture: What Happens When the Counterculture Becomes a Market Segment
CALIFORNIA — Surf culture has been commercially significant since the early 1960s, when surfboard manufacturers, wetsuit companies, and surf media first organized the community into a market. The six decades since have produced a surfing consumer market worth billions of dollars globally — wetsuits, boards, apparel, hardware, travel, media, instruction, technology — and a surf culture that is simultaneously a genuine community with its own values and aesthetics and a market demographic that Patagonia, Rip Curl, Billabong, and their competitors have spent enormous resources understanding and reaching.
The resentment that some surfers feel toward the commercialization of their culture is understandable and also, from a libertarian perspective, somewhat confused. The market did not impose itself on surf culture. Surfers participated in the market as buyers, as employees, as entrepreneurs. The surf industry exists because surfers wanted wetsuits and boards and apparel and were willing to pay for them. The market that developed around those choices is the voluntary exchange system functioning as it functions everywhere else. What the market produced — the commodification of aesthetic identity, the co-optation of anti-commercial values as marketing content — is what markets do when they reach communities organized around cultural identity.
The Authentic Resolution
The authentic surf experience — dawn patrol before crowds, uncrowded peaks in remote locations, the unsponsored free surf that has nothing to do with the consumer economy — is available to anyone willing to pursue it. The market cannot take the wave. It can take the image of the wave and sell it back to you, but the wave itself remains. FEE’s analysis of cultural markets addresses the commodification paradox; managing the relationship between community identity and commercial exploitation requires the surfer’s own discipline about which parts of their culture they sell and which they protect. The wave is not for sale. The wetsuit is. The distinction is the surfer’s to maintain.
