A beguiling short cartoon about a solar-punk, eco-techno paradise. Should it matter it comes from a commercial yoghurt company?

Some tantalising material above. It’s a luscious, inspiring vision of a eco-techno food future—where the energy is sustainable and generated by dirigibles, where advanced AI manages the growing process, where robotics makes microclouds on order to rain on crops. And where a woman of colour guides her family, close and extended, though education and celebration, with a gleaming city in the distance. The cartoon style references the great animation traditions of Japan, particularly the style of Studio Ghibli.

You may find the soundtrack a little lacking in dialogue, just the sounds of nature and light industry. That’s because it’s been hacked on. The original of this animation is an advert for the American yoghurt company Chobani - see and hear it below. It’s in the form of a letter from the mother to her daughter, Alice, handing on the techno-farm.

To us, this is a fascinating example of how activists could creatively use the dream-machines of advertising for progressive ends.

Chobani is a progressive company in many ways - they run an incubator for small ethical food companies, they achieved a fair trade mark recently (though still don’t recognise unions properly).

So it’s no surprise that they might line-up behind a solar-punk image of the future in an ad campaign. What the ‘decommodifiers’ have done in the opening video is to remove the voiceover storyline (and sadly, the luscious soundtrack), and to digitally erase Chobani products and their labelling from the screen (the script doesn’t mentioned the product once).

Look carefully, and you’ll see some other cute changes… The skytruck that descends to the farm has the name on the side changed from “donations” to “commons”.

The point is one we’ve regularly made in these pages - which is that our politics and business is at its best when it serves fundamental aspirations of wellbeing and flourishing, using all the readily available skills and resources. Advertising and brand values often set targets for ideal living - and then we rightly arraign the companies that raise them for falling short, in their own behaviour.

Chobani is generally regarded as a “high-road” company - and it’s obvious they haven’t issued a take-down to the “decommodified” video. Is there a fertile space between the brand aspirations of a company, and the need for moving, persuasive and mobilising visions of the future from activists?

More explanation of these possibilities in this blog.