ZA/UM gets away with $165 plastic bags because its execs know hypocritical moaners are the same ‘ones ordering the expensive items’ anyway, says former Disco Elysium writer

Not two days ago I came to you with the befuddling news that ZA/UM—the studio whose name is still on Disco Elysium even though the game’s chief creative talent have all left—was selling a $165 carrier bag based on the one you can get in the game.

This was confusing to me, conceptually.

I wasn’t exactly angry that the rights-holders of Disco Elysium were selling a $165 shopping bag made of a trademarked stronger-than-Kevlar material. That’s just the world we live in now. But I was a bit baffled. Isn’t this kind of hip poverty-chic stuff—the kind of thing very well-to-do students dress up in for a bourgeois jape—exactly what Disco Elysium spends a lot of time making fun of? Is a $165 carrier bag not kind of contrary to its anti-capitalist themes?

The answer, it turns out, is yes on all counts. Also, it doesn’t matter at all because the people upset about it will probably just buy it anyway. So says former ZA/UM dev and Disco Elysium writer Dora Klindžić in a chat with YouTuber The 41st Precinct (via RPS): “This is an incredibly successful business for [ZA/UM], incredibly successful” said Klindžić. “The darkest thing I ever heard was—I don’t remember who it was from that circle—but they told me it doesn’t matter at all what people are saying on Twitter because you can see those same names, of people who say on Twitter that they’re never gonna support ZA/UM, they’re the ones ordering the expensive items from ZA/UM.”

Will that extend to a pricey shopping bag? I think it might. “This loud minority doesn’t matter because people covet these items more than they care about these, kind of, morals and integrity,” continued Klindžić. “So people are buying this stuff, and it seems like even the people who are outwardly critical, they cannot help their consumerist impulse.”

Which is a bit sobering. Ultimately, of course, whether or not you buy an expensive shopping bag isn’t really a great moral question. There are far bigger problems in the world, and even in the fashion industry, than whether you own a thing that can carry your groceries and also save you from an assassin’s bullet. Still, the fact that, according to Klindžić, people’s hypocrisy was reliable enough for ZA/UM execs to build a whole merchandising strategy around it doesn’t make me feel awesome about the world.

The same goes for Klindžić: “This is one of those things that just makes me very sad about the world, or lose hope. Because if that’s the case, I don’t know, a lot of people have a lot of explaining to do.”