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THE COMMIES USED to deride Western modern art as decadent and elitist, a tool of imperial idologists.
Turns out they were right, at least partly, about the latter accusation.
Frances Stonor Saunders’s new book The Cultural Cold War relates the now-it-can-be-revealed tale of how the Central Intelligence Agency organized and funded a series of foundations that funnelled cash into museums, galleries, publications, and arts promoters.
The CIA’s purpose: to promote a vision of American arts and letters as a font of modern progressiveness, boldly looking forward into a future of vigor and abstract sophistication.
The intended audience: Not really Americans, but ’50s-early ’60s European intellectuals tempted by the egalitarian promises of Soviet Communism (and by the more practicable, less cruelty-laden realities of the milder Euro-socialism).
If Saunders is to be believed, not just the success of certain artistic styles but the careers of specific individuals, most notably Jackson Pollack, could be credited to the spy agency’s indirect and uncredited support.
It wanted to brand America as a land of free thinkers and big ideas, of clean lines and industrious energy–as contrasted to those clumsily censorous Soviets with their oh-so-passe heroic realism and their brutalist architecture.
Other U.S. agencies were doing similar jobs at the time, more overtly. The U.S. Information Agency, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe regularly promoted the U.S. in western and eastern Europe in just these ways. The aspects that made the CIA program different were its scope, its covertness, and its role as an cultural patron (not just as a publicist).
From the present-day viewpoint, it’s ironic-‘N’-odd to imagine the federal government (particularly one of its most reactionary, militaristic segments) as a friend and proponent of rebellious creative folk. Thirty-two years or so of anti-government and anti-authority attitudes in much of the arts world, plus twenty or so years of anti-modernist and kill-the-NEA attitudes among prominent politicians (some of whom seem to prefer a Soviet-realist style aesthetic!), have put many in the boho-world onto a permanent distrust of federal largesse.
Besides, the real money these days, for any and every nonmilitary endeavor, really comes from big business.
Warhol, you may remember, was a mostly un-ironic champion of logos, brand names, and guys with money. More recently, that oh-so-controversial shock-art show in Brooklyn, N.Y. may have been housed at a partly government-supported space, but it was organized and funded by a British ad agency.
While much has been made lately of the problems some arts funders are having in raising money from the dot-com nouveau riche, overall it’s still business that’s increasingly the main patron of bigtime contemporary arts iin the U.S.
Why’s business doing this? The same reason the CIA used to: Branding.
Global marketers have long relied on images of America as the land of the open road, rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, and self-styled “rebels.”
By funding and promoting brash, loud art, corporations are further promoting this image of America–or at least of the America corporations would currently like to help create.
Again, artists are being utilized as part of an ideological crusade.
But these days, the mythical warrior figure is the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Cultural Rebel–first cousin to the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Corporate Rebel.
MONDAY: American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
ELSEWHERE:
WAS IT JUST a little over a year ago that I expressed a longing in these virtual pages for a real Left in America (i.e., a serious political organizing movement, not just an exclusionary subculture of sanctimony)?
Now there is one, or at least enough of one to get syndicated columnists all a-flustered and annoyed.
Whether they’re getting annoyed for the right reasons is still debatable.
You see, the critical depiction of certain Dreaded Eugene Anarchists in a recent Harper’s, as described here last week, is indeed a reasonable enough interpretation of certain elements of today’s Way-New Left. Yes, some young radicals are hedonistic, self-righteous, and more concerned with proclaiming their personal moral superiority than with really changing anything. Many of their third-of-a-century-ago precursors were like that as well; though the boomer-centric U.S. news media will rarely admit it.
But can the Way-New Left learn from the old New Left’s mistakes?
A look at the broader movement (or movements) that converged at WTO last fall and at the IMF convention in Washington, D.C. last month offers a hopeful vision.
Beyond the loud and easy-to-stereotype bandana kids, there’s a whole gaggle of Greens, Net-connected “dot commies,” ideologues of assorted stripes, agitators, disciplined direct-action planners, limo-liberals, Utne Reader yups, bohemians, aestetics, labor advocates, minority advocates, queer advocates, hangers-on, and many, many others.
They’re not in agreement on everything.
That they don’t have to be is part of the whole point.
Part of what they’re arguing for is the right to disagree, to publicly express and sort out the messy cacophanies and contradictions of human social existence–as opposed to letting big business and its wholly-owned politicians decide everything via backroom deals and unelected tribunals.
It’s this diversity-in-practice part that makes the Way-New Left more than just the latest generation of “lifestyle radicals” and square-bashers. Instead of just another “identity politics” (i.e., the continuation of target marketing by other means), it cuts across a lot of the age, race, gender, class, and tribal categories into which the marketers would prefer we remained set apart.
And that’s what might really be causing the corporate conservatives and the corporate liberals to fear it.
The Way-New Left has become influential enough for pro-corporate commentators to try really hard to discredit it. It’ll take a little longer (perhaps longer than the current U.S. election season) to see if it can become influential enough to really change things.
Nothing less than the survival of democracy is at stake.
TOMORROW: Dreaming a city into existence.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE still doesn’t have a full-content website, so I’ll have to tell you about its May issue, which has several items relating to topics we’ve been discussing here.
First up: The main article, “Notes From Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest,” in which writer David Samuels hangs out with some of those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
He essentially depicts them as well-meaning children of suburban affluence who’ve sadly but understandably gotten sidetracked from the complexities of the world, instead preferring oversimplified ideologies that allow them to imagine themselves as Totally Good and the culture of their upper- and upper-middle-class parents as Totally Evil (almost completely ignoring all other cultural and subcultural differentiations in late-modern society).
Anarchism, as Samuels interprets its young adherents, isn’t an ideology about empowering The People but an excuse for these girls and boys to imagine themselves as the world’s rightful would-be dictators, philosopher-kings who’d decide what’s best for the world on the basis of what feeds their own self-righteousness.
(Samuels’s depictions may have helped inspire P-I cartoonist David Horsey to recently depict young radicals as snot-faced idiots irresponsibly meddling in issues that should be left to the Real Experts.)
Samuels’s anarchist portrayals contrast with the memoir of oldtime radical Emma Goldman, excerpted elsewhere in the same issue. While Samuels essentially depicts anarchism as just another flavor of elitism, Goldman insists it’s a means toward the abolition of all elites. As an opponent of all centralized states, Goldman wound up seeing capitalism, socialism, and fascism as more or less equally repressive. She undoubtedly would have felt the same about philosopher-king fantasies.
Elsewhere in the issue are pieces that tellingly indict aspects of the current-day elitist regime, the rule of corporate power and money:
A reader who gets through the whole May Harper’s can easily conclude that Samuels’s Eugene anarchists, even if they’re really like his negative characterizations, might be more emotionally than rationally driven (like those now-fetishized ’60s radicals), still have a point. There’s got to be some way for society to seriously consider other priorities than just helping the rich get richer.
TOMORROW: Safeco Field, where the best seats are the worst.
JAMES TWITCHELL, a U. of Florida English prof, has written three books discussing, and generally praising, late-modern pop culture: Adcult (which I haven’t read), Carnival Culture (which I generally liked), and his newest, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (which I’ve mixed feelings about).
I had a chat the other night with one of Twitchell’s former students. This ex-student claims Twitchell loves to parade himself about as a Lone Wolf Conservative among all those pesky Marxist deconstructionists running amok within academe.
God, there are so many of these guys, and they all claim they’re the only one out there. Such double-faced smugness–to suck up to the real centers of power and money in this country, yet to still proclaim yourself a daring rebel of the “look at how un-PC I am” variety.
Twitchell at least acknowledges that he’s worked hard over many years to hone just such a self-image, and has used the acquisition and display of consumer goods for this purpose. In the last chapter of Temptation, he describes having bought a Mazda Miata (that favorite vehicle of 50-year-old boys) precisely to distinguish himself from all those other cult-studies profs with their identical ugly Volvos.
As for the book itself, it’s a mostly-defensive essay of praise, not necessarily for consumerism but for the impulses and desires upon which it feeds.
Twitchell’s main statement, which he keeps repeating throughout the volume: “Once adults are clothed, fed, and sexually functioning, their needs are cultural, not natural.”
So far, I’d agree. Give us bread but give us roses, as the old suffragette anthem said. Man does not live by bread alone, someone else said long before that. Various attempts at stern, utilitarian, no-fun cultural constructs (from the Puritans to Pol Pot to the utopian schemes of modern-day vegan prudes) have been short-lived precisely because (among other factors) they failed to address people’s needs for self-expression.
Twitchell’s right when he says advertisers don’t “manufacture needs” so much as they exploit (or at least try very hard to exploit) any and every impulse and urge; the more basic and visceral the better. Sexual attractiveness? There’s a product for that. Excitement? Relaxation? There’s stuff that’ll give it to ya. Want to speed up or slow down, to simplify or complicate your life? You can buy something to help. Want to rebel, to fit in, or (more likely) fit in with other rebels? Just wear the right look, eat the right food, listen to the right music, and (yes) read the right websites.
Twitchell’s also right when he notes that anti-materialism, as commonly practiced among North American “alternative” types, is really just another flavor of materialism. If you define youself with organic foods and grey sweaters and acoustic guitars and non-animal-tested soap, you’re still defining yourself by what you buy.
Where I essentially disagree with Twitchell is where he says it’s basically good that our urges and impulses have so largely become corporate assets. Just as there’s more behind the Quest for Stuff than just the satisfaction of primitive needs, so should there be more to human life than simply servitude to Sacred Business.
TOMORROW: The continuing story of CNBC.
YOU KNOW I LOVE JIM HIGHTOWER, that Texas tornado of progressive commentatin’.
So you can expect I’d recommend his latest book-length screed, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They’d Have Given Us Candidates.
Alternately angry, cynical, skeptical, alarmist, and hopeful, Hightower wittily offers detail after sordid detail on just how politics in the U.S. of A. has gotten so pathetic.
The short version of his argument is just as you might expect: All the past primary season’s main presidential candidates and both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate money, managed by slick consultants, and completely out of touch with the non-wealthy.
The nation’s fastest-rising political bloc, Hightower continues, is that of disgruntled non-voters. But the parties don’t mind this; because, like so many other corporate enterprises, they no longer care about “the masses” and only wish to persue niche markets (i.e., identifiable “likely voters” who can be easily manipulated by target marketing, attack ads, and loud speeches on non-issues such as flag burning).
So far, so good (or rather, so bad).
But then Hightower introduces one of his frequent radio topics: Two-Party-System Nostalgia.
He repeatedly insists that there was once a time when the Democrats stood for something more than just winning elections and building party bureaucracy at any cost.
As a Texan, living all his life on the edge of what used to be the territory of segregationist Dixiecrats, he oughta know better.
Through most of the past century, the Republican party has had three traditional constituencies, which sometimes have had contradictory goals but which have more or less stuck together in the party fold: Big business, rural churchgoers, and the Rabid Right.
The Democrats’ history is a lot more complicated.
It’s been the party of FDR and JFK, of George Wallace and the senior Richard Daley, of the AFL-CIO and AOL-Time Warner, of Tammany Hall grafters in New York and pious reformers in Minnesota.
Its chief organizational imperitave, through all these factions and eras, has been to amass whatever combinations of voting blocs, no matter how transient or fluid, could be cobbled together to win elections.
Many individual Democrats and groups within the party over the years have, of course, sincerely sought to improve the environment, help the poor and the working class, end bigotry, and/or promote world peace.
But the party’s also had plenty of cold-war hawks, Chamber of Commerce toadies, corrupt ward-heelers, Military-Industrial Complex lackeys, panderers to racism, and funnelers of public subsidies into private retail projects.
Currently, the party’s national bureaucracy’s thoroughly run by corporate butt-kissers. If you ask any of them why they’re such money-stooges (and I have), they’ll tell you the only way to hope to beat the Republicans is to play by the Republicans’ rules–to raise big money, spend it on ads and consultants, and upon election to do whatever the big money wants.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way.
And it might not stay this way anyway.
Ultra-big-money campaigning games, as currently constructed, are predicated on Reagan-era presumptions about the social and media landscapes.
In particular, they’re built on the dichotomy of the corporate Mainstream Media (three TV networks, monopoly daily newspapers) and the parallel Conservative Media (talk radio, televangelists, “action alert” newsletters), with no true liberal-advocacy counterpart.
In the Cyber-Age, this doesn’t have to last. Over the next few years, no matter who’s President, we’ll see a flowering of thousands of local and national niche-movements. Many of them will be progressive. Many others will comprise ideological conservatives who don’t want to feed money and votes to corporate Republicans anymore. The WTO protests included a loose coalition of dozens of niche movements and sub-movements, which may or may not agree on any other issue besides the power of global companies.
Hightower, I’m glad to say, does recognize at least some of this stirring-O-discontent, and sees how it might be put to effective use in organizing for a post-corporate politics.
His book’s last line insists it’s a great time to be an American. I couldn’t agree more.
MONDAY: Remembering when downtown retail wasn’t just for the gold-carders.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT TEASED HERE YESTERDAY: I didn’t get the final random phone call from that TV quiz show on Tuesday, after having made it thru the prior qualifying rounds. Therefore, I won’t be out of town any week soon, and will be right by the ol’ computer dutifully uploading your daily doses of popcult ennui.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about how so many of the folks moving into gentrified artist spaces are info-biz professionals who want to live amid an “artistic” community without the insecurities of personally trying to depend upon an artistic career.
There are some things these movers-in could do to help the painters, performers, writers, et al. they’re displacing.
The first thing they could do to help save the local arts community: Buy some art.
Specifically, buy some works by local street-level artists, not just from out-of-town big-name gallery stars.
The superficial response to this superficial suggestion is that too many alternative-contemporary artist types don’t want to make the kinds of slick, pleasant room decor rich folks like to have in their homes.
But that response neglects that a lot of the ladies ‘n’ gents moving into former artist spaces aren’t the bankers and lawyers who used to have all the money in this town, and who never cared much for non-glass Seattle artists.
A lot of the loft and condo folks are info-biz and software-biz studs. Folk with the inclination, or at least the potential inclination, to see themselves as outre “rebels” and connisseurs of the odd and wonderful.
To a large extent, the Seattle galleries aren’t tapping into this. They probably have wanted to, but haven’t yet figured out how.
Seattle’s Old Money never cared all that much for the contemporary arts. Seattle’s New Money could probably be trained to care; but a lot of it’s in the hands of former middle-class kids who didn’t grow up learning about the wonderful world of patronage.
I recently talked about this with my ol’ pal Matt Richter, who now co-runs the Consolidated Works performance/exhibition space, for a piece I wrote in Washington Law and Politics.
Richter said arts administrators he knew had been having some success getting new-money folks to chip in for one-shot or emergency donations; but that the nouveaus don’t yet “understand the meaning of an annual gift. They’ll be the hero once; but people in the arts have to train these people in the basics of giving. I don’t think that’s as big a problem as some make it out to be.”
I’m thinking an education campaign (what the heck, let’s go ahead and call it advertising) is in order.
Instead of nice, safe ads cajoling nice, safe people to “Support the Arts,” this campaign would run loud, brash ads inviting loud, brash people to, say, “Join the Party.”
The ads would emphasize the beauty, the vicarious emotions, the stories, the alternate lives, the points-O-view, and the experiences you can get from the visual, aural, literary, and performance milieus. The ads would beckon and/or seduce New Money folks into first becoming arts consumers, then into getting more deeply immersed and involved.
You may have already guessed the potential slogan for these ads:
“Art. The Original Virtual Reality.”
TOMORROW: A drink to free trade.
THERE’S A BOX somewhere near the lower-right corner of this page. Click it and you get invited to take a demographic survey about this site.
Actually, I already know more than a few things about the sorts of folks who read this site and its associated print magazine:
MONDAY: The savior of daily newspapers?
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
I’VE TALKED HERE BEFORE of the uncomfortable similarities between what left-wing academic types call “Identity Politics” and what the media business calls target marketing.
The evidence is everywhere you look.
Earlier this week, we wrote about punk rock getting turned into soundtrack music for skateboarding exhibitions designed to sell athletic shoes and soda pop.
Then there was that bizarre Super Bowl commercial with a hospital nursery full of newborn girls throwing off their little pink caps.
It was for Oxygen, a commercial website and cable TV channel billed as being “For Women, By Women.” It’s really owned by some big media-conglomerate backing; but it’s run by Geraldine Layborne, the former Nickelodeon executive who infamously fired creator John Kricfakusi from The Ren and Stimpy Show.
The TV component of Oxygen is not yet available locally. But a Salon review of its initial offerings (mostly talk shows) claims it’s about as bad as one can imagine.
Essentially, according to the review and similar slams by other critics, the channel’s message is “Don’t obey those old corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. Obey our new corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. And now that we’ve established your material and psychological desires for you, buy these products.”
Marketers, of course, have exploited feminist identity politics at least as far back as the launch of Virginia Slims cigarettes in 1968. (When the cigarette’s makers bought the controlling sponsorship of pro women’s tennis in the ’70s, critics used lines like “I am woman, hear me cough.”)
Even before that, appliance makers used to tout such newfnagled contraptions as home freezers and electric clothes dryers as tools to help housewives cut down on household drudgery–not, like later ads for such items did, to make women feel such duties comprised the central definition of their lives.
Any “political” or “radical” ideology based not on action but on mere identity just plays into the norms and priorities of the Regime of Marketing.
Some “identity” subcultures will be more ripe for advertiser exploitation (say, college-educated white women) than others (say, homeless people).
But the principle’s still the same.
As long as you define yourself by marketer-exploitable definitions (age group, income level, gender, race, or “psychographics”), you identify yourself as a market, not as a soul.
And as long as you identify yourself by your perceived differences from (or your perceived moral superiority to) other market segments (subcultures), you’re doing nothing to build the human-to-human coalitions any real change will need.
MONDAY: One group’s attempt at defining a way out of the tyranny of marketing.
NOT TOO LONG BACK, we discussed the rise of a monoculture of global marketing.
But, sometimes hidden behind that trend, another trend lies–the accellerating decline of some of the companies that used to define American mass marketing and merchandising.
Late last month, Barron’s had a piece about stagnant times at J.C. Penney. The article suggested that unless the old-line chain retailer got its act together, it could go the way of Woolworth’s.
Shortly after that piece (not available online except to paid subscribers) appeared, a Newhouse wire-service article told of similar woes befalling Penney’s longtime arch rival, Sears Roebuck & Co.
Sears and Penney are trapped by their value-and-service heritage as much as by their squaresville reputations. Like Woolworth and its onetime variety-store brethern such as Kress had been, Sears and Penney are known for selling moderately-priced goods in full-service stores. They made working-stiff families feel like part of the great American consumer dream by treating these consumers with dignity and respect.
Also, their one-style-fits-all fashion sense helped forge a nation of immigrants into a single American mass market.
But these days, the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, with their ruthlessly efficient distribution systems and few-frills store layouts, are able to undersell full-service stores on many types of items.
These big-box chains are not only drawing customers away from independent retailers but also from the malls where Sears and Penney have most of their current outlets.
Many mall operators, meanwhile, are trying to reposition their properties around the all-powerful upscale demographic, that 20 percent of the population that now controls over half the spending power. They’re pushing Sears and Penney to either change their merchandising strategies (i.e., ditch the cheap stuff and those who buy it) or risk getting kicked out at the next lease-renewal time.
Seattle used to have Penney’s biggest store, and still has the oldest extant Sears store. This used to be a prodly middlebrow, work-ethic kind of place, and it supported these purveyors of middlebrow, work-ethic clothes, home furnishings, etc.
That’s changed, as you’ve likely noticed.
Everybody here’s supposed to be rich and at least a little trendy. Those who can’t afford, or don’t like, the costly wares sold at Nordstrom or Pacific Place are banished to the long checkout lines at Ross or the suburban purgatories of Target.
The days when Sears could correctly advertise itself as “Where America Shops” are gone, likely for good. The onetime mass market has evolved into scores of niche markets; and the current Sears/Penney niche (cheaper than other department stores, but nicer than big-box stores) is a precarious one at best.
Can these institutions move to a more reliable niche without losing everything they’re known for?
If I knew the answer to that, I’d be in the stock-advice business.
TOMORROW: Identity politics, target marketing–what’s the difference?
HAD A LOVELY CHAT a few weeks ago with some other local web-writers. Among the afternoon’s hypertextual topics: Our first modems.
Ahh, the good old days. Three-hundred-baud telephone modems that attached directly to telephone headsets via “acoustic couplers.” Text-only bulletin board systems that were run with such now-forgotten software as Minibin and Polaris, on TRS-80s, Apple IIs and kit-built CP/M computers. Real floppy discs, up to eight inches in diameter, holding as much as 400k.
The online world was a much smaller, though not always civil, place. (“Flame wars” and other breaches of sociability were rampant.)
And, like the worlds of science-fiction fandom and computer hobbyists (the real “hackers”) from which it sprung, it was a place teeming with fat guys.
Today’s more corporate online world doesn’t have many fat guys in charge. It has tall guys in charge instead. Lots of tall guys.
You can see them at any gathering of the dot-com hustlers and the Microsoft elite. They’re the movers and the shakers. The fast-talking, hard-handshaking, success-minded gents. The IPO success stories or wannabes. Many of them are tall enough to be Presidential candidates or even late-night talk show hosts.
They know their way around a business plan, or at least can fake it well. They can network and schmooze with the venture-capital gang like all get out.
But the fat guys were a helluva lot more fun to hang out with.
The fat guys knew how to drink and eat and make lovable fools of themselves. The tall guys are usually too self-conscious for that; too obsessed with making the right impression toward someone (often another tall guy) who has, or might one day have, money.
In the March Harper’s, Greg Critser has a cover essay (not available online) concerning “The Heavy Truths About American Obesity.”
“In upscale corporate America,” Critser writes, “being fat is taboo, a surefire career killer. If you can’t control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.”
Critser’s piece depicts the oft-reported “obesity epidemic” as a potential conspiracy by the corporate elite, so big food companies can get rich off of lower-caste people’s addictions–and also so that the elites can easily stereotype and demonize those supposedly lazy couch potatoes who’ll never amount to anything.
He also has nasty things to say against the fat-pride movement and anyone who doesn’t hate obesity as much as he does. (Last year, Critser wrote for the business magazine Worth about his own experience with a new prescription diet drug. Perhaps he thinks if he could go through the ordeal, everyone should be able to and want to.)
Anyhoo, Critser may indeed have a point about why the fat guys who did so much to invent online communication aren’t reaping more of the material rewards from the medium they pioneered. They were great programmers and tinkerers, totally devoted to their projects, and enthusiastic builders of some of the first electronic communities.
They just didn’t have the look of the Lean-‘n’-Mean. (Or the schmoozing or bossing-around skills, or the aura of invincibility.)
But with the old-media monopolists and the stock-bubble hustlers grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of Net “mindshare,” it’s way past time we recaptured more of the BBS era’s homespun, DIY spirit.
Bring back the fat guys.
MONDAY: Benetton, death row inmates, and the Monoculture.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remembering one of the old guard, master computer-journalist Don Crabb.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
Microsoul, Part 2:
A Commodity In Six Pages
by guest columnist Weirdo U. Wanago-Toady
( our guest columnist began a resignation letter to Microsoft she never got around to sending. Today, she continues, with a discussion of the company’s periodic employee “Reviews.”)
Areas I need work on as a human being are elaborated upon by wealthy morons who think a game of hackysack and wearing shorts at work is a form of intellectual social rebellion. I’m given a number between one and five. Apparently five is unattainable. So much so, that there are rumors Bill Gates himself presents you with a bonus check if you get it. (Amounts of the check varied from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on who told me.)
If your parents didn’t give you a structure, rewards, allowances, or punishments, don’t worry. You can get them all from Microsoft. Microsoft is full of bonuses at work, penalties, reviews and latte cards doled out by condescending older-brother-like bosses who will play darts and get drunk with you on those lonely weekend nights. You don’t ever have to grow up.
A coddled adolescense is part of the Microsoft persona. You’ll fit right in, especially if you are one of those non-conforming conformists who likes to defiantly wear a button that says “fuck authority” while blindly obeying it.
The difference between this and high school is that in high school the kids KNOW the report cards, detention, pep rallies, and idiotic structures are bullcrap. Teenagers know they aren’t commodities, but human beings. Microsoft employees accept that they are a commodity, while deluding themselves to think they’re software “rebels” of some sort. They’re in a revolutionary company at a revolutionary time (in the best of all possible worlds).
And if you don’t buy it, you won’t be hired. No wonder most Microsofties are under 30.
My “Team Leader” reviewed me (not my “boss,” that would be too realistic a term for a company which feeds on illusions).
I hardly worked for him. I don’t know where he got all his wordy comments. He said I didn’t know the product thoroughly enough, which was bullshit. I lamely decided that to confront my boss would be to acknowlege the whole gullible corporate acceptance of The Review. But it changed me. Deep down, I accepted that I was an inferior “product” in some way. I think that was when I started working weekends.
The full-time employees get to review themselves first; then they give their scores to their team leader, who gives the final score. It’s all such incredible horse manure. It’s a highly intense, six-page summary evaluating everything from personal flaws to five-year goals. All the full-timers have their door closed. On that day there is a group email: “Do not disturb the full-timers; time for the yearly reviews.”
“Why don’t you just give yourself all fives?” I nonchalantly asked a co-worker, obviously absorbed in self-loathing at his desk. He looked up from his six-page summary of his own personal flaws and said, “I could NEVER do that!” This is a guy who works 60 hours a week and most weekends. He’s 25. He invented some brilliant program which saved the company some money; so it’s not like I’m asking him to vainly toot his own horn.
That’s cool, I thought, Microsoft gets him to sacrifice his youth, and then convinces him though a series of “Microsoft Lifestyle” seminars that he’ll never really be worthy.
I walk away from his office, closing his door as per his request. I’m walking away, and I’m wondering how bad he feels about himself.
I’m wondering how he’s going to try and make it up to the company next year–maybe by working 80-hour weeks this time. Maybe he’ll work every weekend next year.
I walk, and I keep walking. He’ll be a millionaire when he’s 35. A million isn’t good enough, he says; he’ll retire when he has 3 million (today’s economy, you know).
I’ve past my own door now. It’s really easy to keep walking.
He views himself as a product now, a commodity in six pages. At 35, sex will be a long-lost dream to him. It is for me, and I’ve only been here a year.
My free latte card falls from my hand, a two-dollar piece of my soul.
Now I’m outside, in the Redmond “Campus” (“office park” in regular English). The “Three Flags” fly overhead–that’s the United States flag, the Washington State flag, and the Microsoft flag.
“Where do you want to go today?” It asks.
Don’t know where I’m going today. Never did.
I only know where I’m not going.
TOMORROW: Requiem for an afternoon newspaper.
IN OTHER NEWS: The one sports team what was supposed to never threaten to move has just threatened to move (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room).
Microsoul, Part One:
A Former Permatemp Speaks
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein that but to be seen is to dispise yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” -Alexander Pope Moral Essays on Man
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein
that but to be seen is to dispise
yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
-Alexander Pope
Moral Essays on Man
I HAVE TO CONCENTRATE on decommodification of the human soul.
I quit my permatemp job at Microsoft after one year of self-commodification.That’s when you view yourself as a commodity, something to be bought and sold. (I got it from Walter Benjamin, a Frankfurt School member who had to flee Nazi Germany).
Through a series of bizarre events I just left Microsoft one day. I just walked out and kept on walking.
Here is what I wrote when I finished my walk that fateful day:
Dear Microsoft,
I have been here one year now, gotten a raise, gained 40 completely unnecessary pounds, and stopped having sex, strangely enough.
I have become a slave to my work; neglecting myself, my loves, my passions, all for the shallow victory of releasing a product.
I have sacrificed my soul for a latte card (you know, the ones that you hand us when we work a 60-hour week, that are only redeemable at Microsoft cafes).
No matter how ridiculously funny that sounds, it is happening to everyone here.
Selling out is the modis operandi of this company. People brag about 90-hour work weeks.
It’s A Christmas Carol gone awry. Scrooge, instead of insisting Bob Cratchet work Christmas Day, brainwashes him into wanting to work Christmas Day.
It’s the “Microsoft Lifestyle”(TM). Overtime is not compulsory (that would be illegal); but work overtime or else.
I worked 60-hour weeks during the last phases of our product release. It didn’t even show up in my “Review.” Why would it? It’s the norm. I’m supposed to brag about it, be proud of it, like everyone else.
Let me tell you why I’m not proud. I have sacrificed myself for a company that won’t even offer its temps sick pay. And this is something the temps themselves agree with!
How do I explain the temps’ feeling this way? How can I explain the my slow descent into the catatonic agreement of a Microsoftie?
I can give the example of the latte cards: At first when you get one, you look at your boss like he’s an idiot. “Um, oh, thanks,” you might say, just to be polite. (I would have to work five minutes to pay for this latte down in the cafeteria).
Then you start noticing some people get more latte cards than others. Some would even hoard them; a stack of unused latte cards on a desk–now THAT was status.
Then, when I could, I started keeping a noticable pile of two latte cards on my desk. Envious co-workers’ eyes would dart from them to my computer screen as I performed yet another show-stopping feat.
Then the day came when I didn’t get a latte card: I bust my butt, I worked overtime, I gained the standard two extra pounds that week. and I didn’t get a latte card! I was thrown into a deep dark impenetrable depression.
Then I awoke.
“What?” I thought. “This had been a driving force in my life?”
I had been commodified.
I also found myself ignoring the total inequality that pervades the entire system. There is no such thing as equal pay for equal work in this illusionary world. And where are the black people? Where are the women? Where are the people over 40? Where is the ability to organize?
Ask anyone these questions at Microsoft and they’ll talk to you for an hour about how Microsoft is, well, different… special, you know.
No, I don’t know. Why is everyone here a young white male, Bill?
I realize I am leaving a church of some sorts. Microsoft is a religion to its workers. The blind loyalty to an obviously inferior product, the “rebellion” the workers seem to find in absolute conformity, fits a born-again Christian ideology. Redemption through Christ Gates. Bill is the infallible one.
I found, when I worked at Microsoft, it was pretty simple to figure out which side people where on before they even opened their mouths.
It’s a never-never land of agreement about how wonderful Bill is, and how horrible the government is for trying to interfere with something as sacred as capital gains. How could the creation of more millionaires be wrong?
And if you take this to its full conclusion, it’s eventually going to lead you to the idea that money really is a justification in itself. Money is salvation. Money is your reputation. If you’re a millionaire; who can put you down?
No one looks beyond the money, or asks question about how the money was made. Were products copied from other companies? Were unfair labor practices involved? Why is the government suing us again?
Since money is redemption, then all else is silly, idle chatter. At least it is to a Microsoftie.
These people take Microsoft’s side in EVERY court case.
Doesn’t anyone read the paper, you ask? Ask around and you’ll see the workers feel freedom of the press has gone a little too far. The papers are just full of anti-capitalist propoganda. The government is jealous of Microsoft’s wealth.
I ask, “What is so horrible about giving temps benefits?” and I find that even the temps here are on Microsoft’s side. “No, I won’t talk about my salary, the corporation doesn’t like it.” In fact, a huge amount of temps decided not to file for their retroactive stock benefits after a big court case win in 1999. It would be like losing their religion.
Then there is The Review, where aspects of my personality are scrutinized by people who don’t even know what personality is.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Providence hospitals in Seattle are merging with the Swedish Hospital circuit; ending the nun-managed Providence’s status as the largest women-owned company in Washington.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”
They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.
A sociocultural movement based on the principles of DIY culture (real indie music, real indie filmmaking, real indie publishing) would probably never lead to any singular mass uprising that would seriously threaten the United States government or the World Trade Organization.
But consider the legacy of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution.”
Having seen the 1968 “Prague Spring” reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks, some underground musicians, writers, and thinkers set about, in spite of heavy censorship and repressions, to form a permanent alternative culture. A culture in which the very premises of authoritarian, top-down thinking would be replaced by notions of self-expression and voluntary association.
When the Soviets’ grip on eastern Europe finally loosened in the late ’80s, it was these folks who filled the void in both political and cultural leadership. The result: A country that made one of the smoothest post-Soviet transitions, that has a relatively healthy economy and political system, that even allowed the Slovaks’ bloodless secession.
The situation here’s much different than in the old Eastern Bloc, for sure.
Back there, back then, all non-official cultural expressions were tracked down and stomped on. Here, indie culture’s treated as corporate culture’s minor leagues (film festivals are promoted as showcasing “tomorrow’s Spielbergs;” indie rock scenes used to be hyped as “the Next Seattle”). If something shows no prospect for being “mainstreamed,” such as difficult-listening music, it’s ignored, left to wither in the shadows.
But the situation’s changing, at a speed faster than so-called “Internet Time.”
As this online column’s oft mentioned, the Net’s one-to-one and one-to-few modes of expression make standard U.S. notions of mass entertainment and mass marketing seem woefully outdated. The oldline TV networks, daily papers, movie studios, and record labels are only keeping their stock value up by consolidating with one another. The record giants in particular are losing market share worldwide, especially in places where local acts are taking back local audiences, away from the Anglophone superstars.
Folks everywhere are hungering for something more immediate, more personal, more “tribal” if you will, than the Time Warners and the Wal-Marts are equipped to provide.
This means an opportunity for avant-improv music (as well as other ground-level genres, from bluegrass to straight-edge) to form new audiences and alliances. And because I believe politics leads from culture and not the other way around, I also believe this is our best hope for forging a decentralized, bottom-up political movement the likes of which America’s never really had.
TOMORROW: Results of the latest MISCmedia questionnaire.
