The arts and sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful than government, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh [people] down…causing them to love their own slavery.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau1
IN THE FIRST decade of the new millennium, consumers find themselves trapped in a cage of infantilization, reinforced by privatization and an identity politics—call it an identity antipolitics—of branding. It is not necessary to label them victims of what earlier leftist critics called a kind of soft totalitarianism to see that their freedom may be compromised. Nor need we insist that they suffer, in the consumer choices they make, from what Marxists once liked to call “false consciousness” in order to suggest they may not be getting the social outcomes they wish for. The history of the brutal realities the term totalitarian captured certainly argues strongly against using it metaphorically to dramatize the lesser forms of manipulation that characterize market relations today. Nor does “false consciousness,” calling up images of people who literally do not know what they are thinking, willing, or doing, apply to today’s focused and knowing shoppers.
Yet there is something disturbingly flattening—not totalitarian, but nonetheless both totalizing and homogenizing—about consumer society under the subtle shaping influences of the infantilist ethos. And there is something defective about consumer choice when it repeatedly entails collective outcomes that are neither willed nor intended by individual choosers. Consumers are not citizens, and when a system pretends that they are, peculiar and even perverse things happen to decision making and to democracy, as well as democracy’s commitment to diversity.
Critics of capitalism in the postwar period, especially those German neo-Marxists associated with the so-called Frankfurt School, were already worrying—a little hysterically if also rather presciently—about the ways in which the successes of late capitalism seemed to them to be cloaking new and subtle forms of repression in the marketplace. If the market, with its hidden monopolies and invisible coerciveness, was “free,” then maybe freedom had (as the French philosopher Michel Foucault suggested) become a smoke screen for repression.
The Enlightenment had created worlds of liberty, privacy, and tolerance unknown to earlier societies. The new liberal ideologies that helped emancipate eighteenth-century men and women were oppositional (their targets were absolute monarchy and an authoritarian church). Since their ambition was to overthrow entrenched forms of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, their rhetoric was negative—suspicious of power and distrustful of government, even when it became democratic. But though it was understandably seditious in its oppositional phase, liberalism offered at best an ambiguous foundation for affirmative governance. Its intrinsic political promise was shot through with contradictions which were in part a reflection of the Enlightenment’s own ambivalences about power. Reason ruled—after all, it was the Age of Reason—but reason had become predominately instrumental. David Hume had snatched it from its noble classical perch as the defining human faculty that gave men access to the laws of nature and God, and reconceived it as a faithful slave of the passions—an adjunct, as it were, to man’s animal nature and to the power required for the satisfaction of animal interests. Tied to impulse and hence to power, reason could be made to rationalize manipulation, legitimating and even concealing the sharp edges of the new forms of coercion it facilitated.
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ironic phrase, so-called liberal institutions of the modern cultural ethos might in truth do little more than fling “garlands of flowers over [our] chains,” causing men “to love their own slavery.” Similarly, in that famous commentary in which he at once praised and warned against the ambiguous potential of democracy in America, Tocqueville had proposed that, in the new dictatorship of public opinion, “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul.”2 In the same Rousseauist vein, Foucault would later argue that in modern times power had come to work “without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence.”3 Citing such liberal and liberating institutional devices as the prison “panopticon” propounded by liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham (a circular prison floor plan that allowed prisoners to come under the full-time surveillance of omnipresent guardians stationed at the circle’s center, without entailing any physical encroachment on prisoner space), Foucault discerned a new form of liberal coercion which “assures the automatic functioning of power…so the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.” The idea was to guarantee that prison inmates were “caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”4
The question raised here by these earlier suspicions about liberalism’s stealth coerciveness is whether the market itself, the driver of consumer capitalism’s ambitions, may not harbor soft forms of manipulation its liberal character conceals; whether the market’s vaunted pluralism is belied by an uncoerced uniformity in its actual offerings—in, for example, what these earlier critics called the “culture industry.” The so-called dialectic of Enlightenment that Frankfurt School critics thought they had uncovered in private liberty was something less than liberating in its modern cultural manifestations. For, in its incarnation as bourgeois culture, the liberal ideology that had once overthrown kings appeared to be corrosive to public if not to private freedom; it seemed to turn equality into a source of leveling mediocrity (a critique associated earlier with John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, and later Walter Lippmann); and it appeared to make choice a servant of constraint—not of false consciousness but of unintended consequences.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment) had identified a culture industry which no longer reflected the standards of “art” but generated instead a “monopoly” under which “all mass culture is identical.” Under these conditions, they argued,
the people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries.
The new culture industry, purveying the myth of what I have called consumer empowerment, claimed
that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs…[a] circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.5
In 1964, with this postwar leftist ambivalence about Enlightenment as backdrop, Herbert Marcuse proposed the controversial thesis that late capitalism was producing “one-dimensional men.” Nurtured by a society in which “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails,” one-dimensional men were being molded by a “productive apparatus [which] tends to become totalitarian,” especially inasmuch as it determines “individual needs and aspirations.”6 Marcuse resorted to the hyperbole of totalitarianism to portray what he called “a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” This new form of liberal coercion encourages what I have identified as infantilization’s defining civic schizophrenia inasmuch as it “obliterates the opposition between the private and the public existence, between individual and social needs.”7
In producing a totalizing environment for consumers, consumer capitalism rendered much of what passed as freedom as mere illusion. Marcuse’s critique was intentionally provocative, by conventional standards well over the top, especially in our postmodern era today after the fall of communism as a governing political system. After all, false consciousness had for a long time been the suspect term the far left used to delegitimize the desires and wants of workers and ordinary citizens when they failed to desire and want the things the far left thought workers and ordinary citizens were supposed to want.8 Thus it seems perfectly sensible to suggest that in using the potent concept “totalitarian” to portray market tendencies toward conformism that were nefarious but something less than toxic, Marcuse was confounding mildly manipulative forms of persuasion associated with marketing and advertising with the kind of virulent repression that defined and set apart fascist and communist regimes.9 When extremist groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigade in West Germany cast themselves (in Paul Berman’s description) as enemies not of liberalism but of “the real Nazism, the Nazism that had survived Nazism, the Nazism that was built into the foundations of Western life,” this was rhetorical overkill, a linguistic trick that betrayed both rationalism and liberalism, and rationalized violence and outlawry.10
Marcuse seemed to be treating what at worse was a commodification of values as a kind of stealth surrogate for oppression on the scale of the Holocaust. He was indulging in the kind of excess that permitted people to dismiss his underlying criticism. Calling markets totalitarian was like calling President Nixon or Charles de Gaulle back then fascists—a kind of sloganeering that let politicians off the hook for the much more modest but real and indictable sins they had actually committed.
Yet forty years after the publication of One-Dimensional Man, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the ubiquity of consumerism, the pervasiveness of advertising and marketing, and the homogenization of culture and values around an infantilizing commerce together have created a cultural ethos which, although not totalitarian, robs liberty of its civic meaning and threatens pluralism’s civic vitality. Combined with privatization and branding, this commercial homogenization has made us less free as citizens and less diverse as a society than traditional liberals conceive us to be or than traditional capitalist producers and consumers think we are.
In the 1950s a longshoreman named Eric Hoffer won a certain celebrity for writing about totalitarian “true believers” who threatened the free-market liberalism.11 Today free-market liberal marketers write about the need to make true believers out of consumers. In his book on how to cult brands, cited earlier, Douglas Atkin praises marketing that makes “customers become true believers.” His position as an enthusiast is worth citing at length, because it makes a far better case for calling consumerism totalistic than any critic could. Atkin writes:
We’ve reached a unique intersection in society that favors marketers. On one side, established institutions are proving to be increasingly inadequate sources of meaning and community. On the other, there has been a growth of a very sophisticated kind of consumerism. Marketing is reaching its maturity in terms of shrewdness and artfulness. Billions are being spent on gratifying a discriminating audience with complex and subtly crafted brands. The confluence of these two trends is leading to these commercial creations being embraced by a population disillusioned altogether by less satisfying, and often less trusted organizations. Alongside alternative religions, brands are now serious contenders for belief and community.12
Atkin is not alone. In the previous chapter, we cited Matthew W. Ragas bragging about the power of cult branding. Others, like Douglas B. Holt, talk about how brands have “become icons.”13
This new ethos of consumer totalism has developed not because there is a conspiracy among capitalists to undermine liberty or an invisible party of persuaders pushing for conformity. It has happened because, as with infantilization generally, the ethos of our times privatizes our lives and immerses us in an environment of total marketing and ubiquitous advertising where goods are marketed everywhere and available at all hours, quite literally in our faces all the time. The intended consequence of the new totalism is that consumers buy consumables and services they do not necessarily need or want than they would in a traditional town square or agora where shopping was but one of a cornucopia of human activities. In such an environment, consumers are more likely to think their citizenship begins and ends with how they spend their income in the marketplace, while corporations can believe that good deeds (or bragging about them) can turn them into “Citizen Brands, with aims of social responsibility as a core element of their corporate mission.”14 Such strategies privatize democracy itself.
I want to argue here that this has happened because the infantilist ethos envelops and penetrates each of what philosophers like Jürgen Habermas have called our “life worlds,” those spheres of activity and thought and purpose that define us as free beings. The evidence is everywhere: media salesmen who themselves speak glibly of “ubiqui-TV” and newspapers, not just television, crowded with infomercials, with the once sober New York Times Magazine carrying not only a regular shopping column by Rob Walker which, like this book, is labeled “Consumed,” but is itself consumed by extended “magazine article” infomercial-style layouts that cannot be clearly identified either as news or advertising—articles pushing teen, tween, girl, toddler, and pet fashions; that same magazine now supplementing its weekly fare of the forgettable with an extended section called “The Funny Pages” that patronizes readers without being particularly funny; an expanding global culture of McWorld that seems unstoppable even in Western civic cultures (e.g., France) pitted against it, even in Islamic religious cultures (e.g., Iran) or truly totalitarian political cultures deeply hostile to it. Shanghai is today more cluttered with advertising slogans and corporate logos than it was with communist propaganda slogans and one-party state propaganda banners a generation ago, though it remains a one-party communist state.
The infantilist ethos totalizes by affording commerce a universal access to every part of life and every sector of our “life world” in ways we can only experience as homogenizing and flattening. Were commerce not associated in neoliberal ideology with freedom, and were the content of commerce to be defined by politics or ideology or religion rather than consumer products and consumer brands, we might even forgive Marcuse for mistaking our condition for a kind of gentle market totalitarianism. After all, when religion colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result theocracy; and when politics colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result tyranny. So why, it might be asked, when the marketplace—with its insistent ideology of consumption and its dogged orthodoxy of spending—colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, do we call the result liberty?
The market consciously aims at exerting a firm and encompassing grip on time and on space, controlling each and every of our waking moments and infiltrating the psyche’s most remote and private geography. This is the necessary condition for capitalism’s success: an all-consuming people who shop or think about shopping, who conceive or exercise consumer wants, all the time. Consumerism is totalizing rather than pluralistic because pluralism offers space to something other than shopping, and diversity means periods of time when people are not shopping. Compare a modern suburban mall that is the only common space in those suburban deathscapes where more than half of America lives today with the traditional town square or the village commons. On the town square, mixed in among the shops and stores and commercial establishments, could once be found a schoolroom and courthouse, a post office and library, a village theater and churchyard, each mirroring the rich human variety that constituted a democratic community’s essential character. Now reimagine Thornton Wilder’s Our Town set in the video-game lobby of the local multiplex (Our Mall?). The mall of America has become the mall that is America; and that mall that is America threatens to colonize every other world in which people may aspire to live.
In the style of the countercultural 1960s, Herbert Marcuse’s rhetoric exuded hyperbole. But his instincts were acute. For as the infantilizing ethos has both produced and been produced by a spirit of capitalism that favors pervasive consumerism, it appears to have produced a parallel and reinforcing homogenization of taste. In reducing civic liberty to a whining and whimsical “I want” that trumps every other human sentiment, the infantilist ethos has declared war on variety. Although it cannot outlaw them, it has hurried to out-rush, outflank, and dominate every attitude and behavior that does not conduce to shopping. Unlike the state, which uses its monopoly over legitimate force to guarantee diversity, the market uses its suasion to enforce commercial monopoly. And when “I want” becomes “I want the brands and brand identities that marketers want me to want in accord with what marketers explain to us are what I really want,” consumers may indeed have arrived at a kind of consciousness that, if not precisely false, is inconsistent with their deepest wishes for the commonweal to which, as public citizens, they aspire to belong. It is not so much false consciousness as divided consciousness—that civic schizophrenia to which we have alluded earlier.
In a book with the telling title Preference Pollution: How Markets Create the Desires We Dislike, the economist David George has spelled out the ways in which the marketplace has used its capacity to satisfy “first-order desires” (as Harry Frankfurt calls them in a passage I cited in chapter 4) even as it ignores the “second-order desires” that constitute what we might understand as our genuine will. It gives us what “we want” (my earlier example of big gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing SUVs) but pays no attention at all to what we want to want (energy independence and clean air). By serving desire, it feels free to engage in “unrestricted persuasion” with respect to first-order desires, thinking in doing so it legitimizes free will.15
In the subtitle of her book The Overspent American, Juliet Schor proposes to tell us “why we want what we don’t need.”16 What needs explaining, however, is why so often we don’t want what we want. Why what we want is not really what we want to want (what our social selves want). If, as Harry Frankfurt insists, “to have a free will is to be moved by desires that one wishes to be moved by,” then market persuasion directed at first-order desires isn’t really freedom at all.17 This is not a matter of false consciousness, but of second consciousness (what we want to want) trumping first consciousness (what we want). I want another vodka…except on second thought I don’t want to be an addict or an alcoholic, so I don’t really want another vodka after all. Yes, I really want a drink, but I really don’t want to want a drink. Part of how market totalism works is to make the realm of first desires the only legitimate realm of choosing. In old-fashioned moral language, the empire of impulse is allowed to trump the empire of will, and then is rewarded with a crown called liberty. What is missing, however, both in the old moral language and in David George’s economist talk, is that first-order desires tend usually to be private, and second-order desires tend to be public. We speak first as “me” and only then consider the “we.”
In this chapter, I will try to show then that the infantilist ethos tends to homogenize taste and narrow rather than expand variety. With consumerism infiltrating and conditioning every nook and cranny of the larger society, the market takes over our lives. This totalizing impact on consumers is hardly comparable to the impact of political totalitarianism on its subjects. Privileging first-order desires is not the same thing as tyranny. And resisting consumer totalism is possible and possible at far less cost than resisting totalitarianism, although doing so, it turns out (see chapter 8), is difficult all the same. Why? Because consumerism’s totalizing tendencies unfold out of sight, and consumerism colonizes time and space under the banner of choice. Because homogenization emerges from market choices that are seen as competitive and pluralistic. Remember the African monkey trap: if all we need to do is “let go” of our chains, what need is there to break them?
Forms of Market Totalism
There are five forms of market domination that constitute the substance of my argument that consumer culture has a totalizing although not totalitarian impact on our lives. I will argue that the consumer market is ubiquitous (it is everywhere); that it is omnipresent (it is “all the time” and aspires to fill up all time); it is addictive (it creates its own forms of reinforcement); it is self-replicating (it spreads virally); and it is omnilegitimate (it engages in active self-rationalization and self-justification, eroding the moral bases for resisting it). Together, these five characteristics give markets a power over our lives and thoughts, bodies and souls, that rival but are not the equivalent of more traditional forms of totalitarianism. Yet although they are less toxic because they operate under the putative legitimacy of market freedom and depend on civic schizophrenia for their success, they are the more difficult to resist and overcome. Their dangers, above all the loss of genuine diversity in a marketplace which, although pluralistic, monopolizes consciousness, become apparent as these characteristics are elaborated and documented.
UBIQUITY
In the traditional liberal view of society, life offers many discrete spheres of activity for human beings whose values, cultures, and life purposes are historically plural and empirically diverse (pluralism is a fact rather than an aspiration). In surveying the spheres in which justice might play a role, for example, political theorist Michael Walzer gave us a representative typology which considered not only the marketplace defined by money and commodities, but other spheres, each with its own values and goods, defined by merit (office in the ancient sense), by work (workplace), by leisure (recreation), by education (school place), by kinship and love (family or home), by divine grace (religion), by respect and recognition (friendship), and by politics (public or civic space). Like other liberal “Lockean” thinkers upholding a fundamentally “pluralist conception of goods,” Walzer wished to describe and justify “a society where no social good serves or can serve as a means of domination.”18 That is to say, Walzer gave the fact of human pluralism a prescriptive thrust, arguing that “there is no single set of primary or basic goods conceivable across all moral and material worlds.”19
Now as a theory, private market philosophy shares this commitment to pluralism and variety. Those who propound the virtues of the market boast of its openness to pluralism (courtesy of competition), especially as compared to the state’s defining monopoly over force and law. Yet the liberal democratic state employs its monopoly over legitimate force to assure a pluralism of spheres and the sanctity of individual rights and of the domain of privacy rights, while the consumer marketplace tends to colonize every sphere and sector, even though it maintains the fiction of pluralism. Although it does not initially make a moral claim for its omnipresence, by aspiring to occupy every space and all spaces, it effectively precludes the possibility of coeval spheres of human activity. Commercializing capitalism mandates the infiltration and permeation of noncommercial spheres in order to maximize profitability. It is quite literally everywhere, colonizing every life sphere in which we live out our daily routines. On sidewalks and walls and buses and trains, in schoolrooms and bedrooms and restrooms and trams, on big screens and pod-screens and TVs and phones, carved into haircuts and written on skin, codified as trademarks and brandmarks and lovemarks—ciphers for human identity consumed by desire, a spirit perfectly captured by the New York Times in the title of a book review of a philosophical study of desire, “I Am, Therefore I Want.”20
Ubiquity is a powerful term, but as with so many ideas examined here, it is not my coinage but that of the marketers. A journalist surveying telecommunication conglomerates introduces a story on MTV networks under the title “I Want My Ubiquitous Conglomerate.”21 His ubiquitous conglomerate—which is itself a subsidiary of the still more elephantine Viacom—includes MTV, MTV2, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TV Land, and Spike in the United States, and 111 channels around the world, including 19 brand-new channels in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The question posed by this newsman’s story is “Once you are everywhere, where do you go next?” Meanwhile, Newsweek takes note of the new competition for small-screen television (on cell-phones and iPods) by shouting “Only one thing is clear: the race is on toward ubiqui-TV.”22
A recent advertising campaign slogan for Samsung’s new cell-phone television portrays ubiqui-TV as a privatization of public space: we watch a variety of people nominally “in public” turn their spaces into privatized viewing rooms for their handheld Samsung miniscreens, while a tagline urges us to “imagine the world as your living room.” The annihilation of public space, a feature of many of the new technologies, from cell-phones and BlackBerrys to video games and global positioning auto maps (no more turning to “the public” to ask directions), has become a virtue among privatized consumers for whom the presence of public others is a distraction from consuming private behavior. The only thing quasi-public that follows you into the privatized sanctuaries that the gadgets carve out of the public husk is commerce itself, since the wormholes through which you must travel in making your escape must always be purchased. What is public—trees, wind, architecture, sounds, other people—is free: commercially supported solitude must be bought, which is of course the point.
Those seeking the sanctuary of electronic screens and headphones may imagine themselves seeking out the diversity of what is offered in games, films, and music, and eluding the sameness of the outside world; yet, bought electronic content is far more homogenous and limiting than the actual pluralism of our natural life worlds, even if for some people it also feels more vivid and “real.” At their best, movies cannot be more heterogeneous and varied than the real worlds they aspire to capture. All of Hollywood at its best is not the equal in variety or originality of a single summer day’s walk in a public park.
Art originates its own varied worlds, of course, and this discussion of public diversity is not intended as a comment on the aesthetic. It is variety in the literal sense with which I am concerned, actual variations in experience and diversity of life spheres. Not pluralism within but pluralism among the many sectors in which we think, feel, work, and live. It is this kind of variety that public space guarantees and which markets shrink. For everyone ends up watching the same selection of programs offered them by the same “ubiquitous conglomerates” sponsored by the same consumer companies aiming at dominating the same economic markets.
In France, consumers have discovered, it is not the market that assures cultural variety in television programming or rescues the movie industry from the scourge of ubiqui-TV. It is instead the state telecommunications quasi-monopoly over television that does so. Though market-obsessed Americans will rush to call such state intervention Orwellian, the French recognize that a state-sponsored rule that prohibits the showing of films on public television on Wednesday and Saturday evenings (the primary movie-attendance nights) is what secures the balance between movie attendance and television watching and (yes, through coercion) generates greater variety in French cultural life. It is likewise the state in France that subjects American films to import quotas (as if they were vegetables, Hollywood complains), not to prevent French audiences from being exposed to American pop culture, but to salvage a little space for French culture—pop or otherwise—in the face of the American market onslaught which, if the market alone prevailed, would mean that French audiences would be exposed to nothing but American films, TV, and pop culture.
Alone among its allies other than Israel, the United States opposed the 2005 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity because it insisted and insists that the free market is a better vehicle for global cultural diversity than transnational regulation. Yet the global marketplace has facilitated an asymmetry in cultural power in which the United States (Hollywood) dominates. French cultural minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres defended the convention by noting that “Hollywood movies account for 85 percent of movie tickets sold around the world. In the United States only 1 percent of shown movies come from outside the United States.”23 Does the United States defend the market mechanism then because it assures diversity or because it assures American cultural dominion and the ubiquity of its commercial products?
Ubiquity means everywhere. Everywhere means anywhere, so that any space not yet occupied by the market can become a target for commercial takeover by specialists for whom an unbranded space is an unfulfilled potential. There is no such thing as a blank slate—a tabula rasa—in today’s ubiquitous marketplace. Every blank space invites a brand logo or an advertising slogan; every skin patch invites a commercial tattoo;24 every silence invites a noisy come-on. Marketers figure out how to hook products and brands to movies and songs; to make whole TV stations advertising boards (MTV, like VH1, is a shopping network for the music industry in which, we have seen, rock around the clock becomes shop around the clock on 111 channels [and counting] worldwide). They try to enlist the five senses in every campaign, recently seizing on the idea of “embedding aromas” in packaging, “hoping the way to the purse is through the nose…targeting as many of the five senses as possible.”25
The most unlikely places have recently been transformed into advertising venues. A production of the musical Stomp in the Orpheum Theater in New York offered a three-minute staged advertisement for a tourist organization called Visit London. Live commercials in live theaters? They can now be found in Dublin and Hamburg as well as Manhattan. Why? Because, according to one advertiser, “They’re a captive audience. They can’t switch channels or change over or walk out once the thing is started.”26 And if live theater works for marketers, why not live sheep? Hotels.nl, a Dutch on-line reservations firm, has been buying space on sheep at one euro per ewe, to spread its message around Holland. Despite fines levied by angry local municipalities, the practice—founded by an English firm called Easy Green Productions that puts ads on sheep blankets—is growing.27
As companies trade, merge, cobrand, and exchange, they try to create content monopolies over the multiple screens we nowadays watch from dawn to midnight. Those Samsung cell-phone screens, so seemingly plural, are conduits to common content, and the firms that control or sponsor content seek a monopoly on that commonality. The Disney Company (and its ABC broadcast subsidiary) is partnering with Steve Jobs’s Apple Computer company to put Disney content on Apple’s latest iPod video players. Their rivals, such as Google Video (which purchased YouTube at the end of 2006 for $1.6 billion) and RealNetworks, compete for the same eyeballs, every digital pipeline looking for its own monopoly over content—right around the world. And so Newsweek’s “race is on toward ubiqui-TV,” where virtual ad-driven watching never stops courtesy of multiplying media technologies—wristwatch, phone, iPod, computer screen, wi-fi connectivity, television sets large and small, and old-fashioned movie screens. Real-world advertising has been everywhere seemingly forever, of course: above public urinals, aloft on blimps and biplane banners, on school bus roofs and parking-meter poles, in school and college campus student centers, on sports arena billboards, all over “public” transportation, and still everywhere on those old-fashioned outdoor billboards.
There are more and more circuits, more wires, more “pipes” to deliver virtual content, but less and less pluralism of content. The internet has already entangled us in a World Wide Web that has become a surrogate reality. Futurologists in the mould of George Gilder have gone a step further in quest of ubiquity, imagining an electronic network built into and coterminous with the atmosphere, an “ethersphere” into which anyone can plug: presto! universal wi-fi absolutely anywhere. Using the nearly infinite bandwidth beyond what is commercially exploited today, no one will ever have to be off-line again; we can all be hooked together into a virtual “telecosmic” network through which, however, our actual connections to actual publics are obliterated.28
Web games target youth, but players abound in every generation—millions of kidult gamesters participating in “persistent” (permanently on and available to players who log on) on-line games. A fifty-four-year-old on-line player of Star Wars Galaxies complained when the manufacturer changed the format and rules that it had ruined the “wonderful second life together” she and fellow gamesters had developed—destroying in the words of the story’s reporter, “a camaraderie and friendship with other players that were far more important than the play itself—relationships that can be hard to replicate in ‘real life.’” Other distraught players complained of feeling “violated” by the format changes, one gamester saying “for them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving.”29 When a gamester’s virtual life takes precedence over an adult’s actual life, it is hard to imagine that our real civic or social communities are being benefited.
Gilder’s vision of a ubiquitous telecosm is no futurologist’s fantasy. In October 2005, Philadelphia chose EarthLink “to build and manage a wireless network spanning the entire city.” Chicago, Miami Beach, Milwaukee, and Portland, Oregon, are also exploring municipal wireless networks, and Google recently offered to “make all of San Francisco wireless for free” (well, not exactly free, but to be paid for by advertisements targeting users).30 Around the world, where many countries including South Korea, Canada, Israel, and Japan already have a greater percentage of their population with access to broadband than the United States (which now ranks sixteenth in broadband access), public wireless networks are likely to prove even more seductive. Consumers will deem this progress, since it will appear to enhance their capacity to communicate, buy and sell, and access entertainment. But so will marketers, who will understand that the telecosm offers them ubiquitous access to customers and endless possibilities for marketing. Here and there, an artist or a dissident will use universal access to call out crowds into the streets to make a happening or foment a demonstration, but the dominant use of and economic purpose behind the telecosm are necessarily commercial. The aim of those who finance and establish it is to use the customers who think they are using it. The new media advertise their “pull” capacities—tell us what you want, we are here to empower you—but their viability depends on their “push” capabilities, their success at selling products, services, entertainment, knowledge, and other stuff.
Born of competition and rooted in entrepreneurship, consumer markets today have become monsters of monomania. With “everything for sale” (the title of a book by Robert Kuttner on markets), rival spheres come under attack, and “Government stands impeached and impoverished, along with democratic politics itself.”31 There is only one paradigm—“Unfettered markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty, and the most expedient route to prosperity”—and hence but one value (profit), one activity (shopping), one identity (the consumer), one paradigm of behavior (market exchange), one life world (commerce) that qualify as legitimate.32
Unsuspecting subscribers to what probably is America’s most prestigious magazine, The New Yorker, must have read their August 22, 2005 issue with growing puzzlement; for there were hundreds of red-and-white peppermint targets everywhere: on the cover, in the reading matter, among the ads, and threaded into the layout and design right to the back cover. The New Yorker had discovered cobranding: the wealthy wannabe-up-market discount firm Target (facetiously pronounced in the French fashion as Tar-zhay) had purchased this issue of the actually up-market New Yorker from cover to cover (for $1.1 million), a singular monopoly on advertising that intruded on layout and design of the magazine and obscured the traditional boundary between advertising and editorial content. Well-known illustrators such as Milton Glaser, Ruben Toledo, and Robert Risko offered drawings as part of what The New Yorker called its “project.”33 For that week at least, Target was The New Yorker and The New Yorker was Target, their brands merged, their logos married, their content intertwined. For one moment in time, under cover of design ingenuity and creative advertising, in a single magazine at least, a retail company had achieved advertising ubiquity. Only Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in its Soviet heyday, could boast such total penetration—except that its relationship to the party was always fully acknowledged.34
OMNIPRESENCE
The consumer market aspires to be everywhere, but it also wishes to be ever present, occupying time with the same fierceness that it conquers space. In modern consumer societies, the store is never closed, the pitchman is never silent, and the opportunity to engage in market exchange is never suspended. This is a kind of reverse Sharia in which the rules of every competing social sector, whether religious or political, are overwritten by the rules governing shopping. Islamic Sharia, like Puritanism with its Sunday blue laws, might decree “no shopping on the Sabbath,” or “no acohol or dancing permitted, ever!” Market “Sharia” decrees “no no-shopping days permitted, stores permanently open!” and “alcohol and dancing and everything else that can be bought permitted, encouraged, ordained, everywhere and always!” Shops and malls that once were open five or six days a week now are open seven days a week, with added hours on selected evenings and holidays, and early openings (five or six in the morning, even one minute past midnight) on those special shopping days like Black Friday (as in “profitable” or “in the black”) right after Thanksgiving on a day when nearly ten percent of all holiday purchases are now made in the United States, many at predawn morning sales. (Electronics Monday—get your gadgets, on sale!—has recently followed Black Friday as the season’s second most rewarding shopping day.) “Religious” holidays from Christmas and Easter to Passover and Ramadan have joined other holidays like Halloween and Kwanza and Valentine’s Day as occasions for commerce that spread across ethnic and national boundaries, their “holiness” an excuse only to stop working (producing) in order to ramp up consuming.
In a front-page post-Thanksgiving story, in language mimicking the hysteria that accompanied reports on Hurricane Katrina, the New York Times recently reported: “Across the country, millions of Americans mobbed discount stores, raced into suburban malls and swarmed down-town shopping districts in a retail ritual that appeared to set a record for sleep deprivation.” As if he foresaw the actual breakdown of civilization in the antics of his marauding customers, a lonely early morning Black Friday store clerk featured in the story is seen trying to control a mob of shoppers clutching for cut-rate computer hardware, shouting “Civilized! Civilized!” over and over again, even as customers continuously “lunged at one another” for a share of the booty.35 The aim of this frenzied all-night market “doorbusting” is commercial omnipresence, an environment of total shopping.
To measure commercialism’s contemporary omnipresence is to chart the actual minutes and hours spent each day by Americans or Germans or Japanese during which they are exposed to commercial media messaging and invited to identify themselves in terms of what they buy and eat and drink and wear. The numbers, as they impact on the young, are particularly daunting. Measured by the time allotted to them, commercialism’s pedagogical competitors—education, parenting, socialization by church or civic group—come out on the short side. Teachers struggle for the attention of their students for at most twenty or thirty hours a week, perhaps thirty weeks a year, in settings they do not fully control and in institutions that are often ridiculed in the popular media. (Animal House has become a more popular emblem of the modern university than the ivory tower.) Pastors, rabbis, imams, and priests get an hour or two a week with that ever smaller minority of their congregations that actually attend services. Parents are embattled “gatekeepers” at best, who year by year watch their hold on their children compromised, eroded, out-flanked, and eventually wholly loosened by their rivals in the marketplace who often target them as impediments standing in the way of access to children, or try to exploit them as conduits to children. The true tutors of late consumer capitalist society as measured by time are those who control the media monopolies, the aggressive content purveyors, shameless lords of the omnipresent pixels, who capture sixty or seventy hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, of children’s time and attention.
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2005 survey of eight-to eighteen-year-old American youngsters found that “the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has risen to eight and a half hours.”36 In an attention-deficit modern society, this is as oppressive a temporal totalism as can be imagined, one in which commercial branders and lovemark propagandists control our civilization’s commercial ethos by controlling time itself. With “direct and indirect spending by young people 18 and under in the U.S. account[ing] for roughly $1 trillion a year,” marketers necessarily become subversive adversaries of adulthood who inculcate puerility in the young, from tots to teens to dumbed-down adults, in the name of maintaining market viability.37 The culture of puerility legitimates it all in part simply by owning the clock.
To own the clock is not always to display it. Malls are stubborn in their disdain for clocks, and manage to own time by operating outside its discipline. If shoppers do not know what time it is, they can never spend too much of it on shopping. A mall with a public clock is as rare as a train station without one. The now notorious 24/7 news cycle that puts “all news all the time” on dozens of cable channels, internet stations, and satellite radio and television transmissions announces that news time is all the time. “All the time” is another way to achieve no time at all. The original meaning of the “news” was to convey a sense that from time to time something “new” happens that merits a “news” report. All news all the time is no longer news at all, but commercial infotainment geared to commerce rather than to information. The then executive vice president of scheduling at CBS acknowledged the obvious, that “in a hyperactive society with so many choices, viewers are used to being entertained every minute.”38 To maximize content, while using up more and more of the day and still retaining the focus of attention-deficit kids, content providers must dumb down, speed up, fast cut, and jump cut—putting a premium on speed (see chapter 3) and a preference for repetition. For these purposes, 24/7 is inadequate. There are literally not enough hours in the day for a totalizing consumer culture that needs to fill every available second of psychological time to overspill capacity.
In responding to multiple technologies, young people are developing multitrack minds that accommodate multitrack media, adding hours to the clock. A successful marketing strategy must think bigger than twenty-four hours a day. A study commissioned by Yahoo! from OMD Worldwide found that by exploiting the multitasking typical of fast-moving young people, it is possible to get “members of the My Media generation [to] fit up to 44 hours of activities in just one day.”39 In an infantilist culture, time itself is elastic, for electronic gadgetry like TiVo and iPods allow consumers to “time shift” their consumption of content. Hence, young people can respond to advertisements about gear on their television screens (the Home Shopping Network), even as they research comparative pricing on another channel (Googling stuff), and “buzz market” stuff to friends on still another (i-messaging them)—a three-for-one multitasking that lets them do an hour’s consumer labor in twenty minutes. This is not some trick of Einstein’s special relativity theory: in the cyclotron of marketing, desires can be propelled to speeds that exceed the speed of light, after which anything is possible.
The younger the target consumer, the more effective the assault on time. While adults can mute, filter, or otherwise elude or ignore advertising, “the first survey of American children by Mediamark Research Inc. has found that children differ from adults in one way that should interest advertisers: most of them aren’t skipping TV ads.” They do not mute their sets during ads, and they do not time shift out of commercial space as adults do. Nearly 60 percent of 5,400 six-to eleven-year-olds said they watched ads the same way they watched programs.40 Commercials themselves have a timeless quality, merging with television, web-based, and video-game content, to digest more and more of a typical child’s daily schedule. American television ads today “eat up eight minutes of a sitcom and 16 minutes of a drama.”41 Executives are dropping song-themed lead-ins and credits to make still more time for commercials. Since the younger demographic may not even recognize the difference between commercials and content, the two become commingled in children’s programming—something, we have already observed, the Target campaign in The New Yorker achieved for adults.
Singular content such as a Nike swoosh can appear on marathon runner sweats in a race being watched by a kid with a Nike swoosh knit yarmulke while he downloads a clever Nike commercial onto his iPod. The commercial time-space continuum is expandable. Its eyes are those glowing diodes that stare at us day and night, green or red peering optics that are always on even when the gadgets they sign for are off, reminders that the commercial time-space continuum is never “off,” only hibernating or paused or, if you try to turn it off, like your computer, recycling into the “restart” mode, waiting, ever ready for you to log on again and get on with the consumers’ virtual life. Like all the other systems of the market economy, the selling system default mode is set permanently to “opt in.” There is no opt-in switch, you are in until you opt out. Except there is no opt-out switch either, so you are forever in. This is a kind of “passive consuming,” a system mode which, like car restraints and safety cushions, works without the will or input of the user. The market economy is in user mode all the time, and deploys wares and marketing without the consumer having to do anything at all. A perfect selling machine.
When new technologies are introduced, they are introduced to replicate in new media the same old commercial messages and the same old message monopolies. “With each new medium,” writes family finance expert Nathan Dungan, “there is one more outlet for advertisers to reach people—especially impressionable young people.”42 An illusion of diversity based on technological variety covers up the actual homogeneity of content, whether commercial or merely commercially sponsored. In 1996 a new deregulatory Federal Communications Act was passed, supplanting the 1934 act. It was precisely the logic of technical “spectrum abundance” that motivated deregulation and rationalized the emphasis on market activity, though the reality was that control of content was narrowing in a world of vertical integration and global media monopolies. More and more time and more and more space for a less and less varied content.
Broadband originally held out the promise of greater variety. Every television channel yielded increased transmission time capacity by a factor of six. But digitalizing broadcast spectra so that one old analog station can yield six digital channels does little to increase the variety or cultural diversity of content. Changing the format for the mechanical and electronic reproduction of music from roller tubes to player piano to 78, 45, and LP vinyl records, and then to tape and disc and iPod download, has done little to increase the variety of music consumed (there may be more variety, but format change has not been the spur). Likewise, digitalization has done little for diversifying content. Cable television and satellite radio offer dozens of different varieties of music, but the economics of recording and the monopoly ownership of telecommunications companies continue to shrink musical taste. What can be heard (an extraordinary variety) has little impact on what people actually listen to (a narrow spectrum) so that the potential pluralism of the technological architecture is unrepresented in the public’s listening habits. Likewise, showing movies on cell-phone or iPod screens does not release viewers from Hollywood’s comic-book blockbuster approach to films, but secures it over viewers 24/7. Whereas, according to media critic Jodi Kantor, traditional large-screen television “is meant to cut a neat hole in your day” during the time you watch a movie or a game or the news at day’s end, “small-screen television fills the ragged holes that already exist in your routine: the 37-minute train to work, the 6-minute line at Starbucks…the stretches spent in the bathroom.”43 What she does not notice is that the moments of time occupied by these ragged holes represents what up until now have been the moments that have eluded commercial media omnipresence. Filling the ragged holes secures the media’s temporal monopoly. There is no longer anywhere to hide: iPod and cell-phone, wireless network and telecosm, are everywhere with you; there is no longer any moment in which to take sanctuary, time belongs to the market.
ADDICTIVENESS
Another indicator of the totalizing and homogenizing character of consumer culture is its apparent addictiveness. Addictive behavior places the addictive object in the forefront of both consciousness and subconsciousness in a manner that can obliterate rival interests. In the first instance, it is a medical and psychological issue. But in a hyperconsumer society, it has a cultural and economic dimension, as is apparent in this technology expert’s comment on a four-year-old playing a video game, “who was so excited about finding words in the maze that she got addicted, in an arcade-ish way” to the game.44 My use of the term addiction is not metaphoric: addiction is ubiquity’s core psychology and hence an ideal means to securing market omnipresence. For addiction leads to repetitive behavior in which the addicted subject returns to the same obsession over and over again, so that it encompasses time as well. The consumer society prospers on addictive behavior, selling tobacco, alcohol, medications (legal drugs), and of course state-sponsored and casino as well as on-line gambling (estimated to be a $10-billion-a-year business), in theory because consumers “want” these “goods,” but in fact because it is profitable to do so.
Much the same is true for the selling of sugar-saturated sodas and candies and grease-laden fast foods to the young. By helping to create desires and habits which, if not actually addictive, turn consumer desire into adreinforced craving, consumer capitalism gets consumers to want the very things, become addicted to the very things, it needs to sell. Do eleven-month-old babies “need” electronic learning toys like the V. Smile video-game console or the handheld Leapster game system? Do babies “want” “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” videos? Or BabyFirstTV programming to while away the hours when they turn six months old? What is clear is that the firms that make these “learning toys” and “educational” programs need to sell them, and want parents to believe that unless they buy the educational cartridges the marketers call “smartridges” that “turn game time into brain time” their kids will fail in life. The V. Smile was named Best Toy of the Year by the 2005 toy industry trade show, and is marketed under ad copy reading “You’ll never get into college if you don’t play your video games!”45
Business spends over $11 billion a year in its “advertising assault” on “children, teens, and young adults.” Some of this is to sell about $20 billion a year in toys, and alarmingly, marketers are now introducing digital music players and digital cameras for three-year-olds—“Mommy, Help Me Download ‘Farmer in the Dell’ to My MP3 Player” proclaims a New York Times “news” headline!46 The greater proportion of the sum continues to be spent by the food, beverage, candy, and restaurant industry whose aim, if not quite addiction, is not only brand loyalty, but sugar, salt, and grease dependency. Fast-food chains vie for the superburger record, with Hardee’s 1,400-calorie Monster Thick-burger and Wendy’s 1,000-calorie triple cheeseburger trumped by Ruby Tuesday’s 1,780-calorie Ultimate Colossal Burger. Meanwhile, Pizza Hut boasts a Full House XL pizza with 2,240 calories.47 Schools are equipped with vending machines that sell sugar-rich sodas, with cola companies offering some percentage of the take as a bribe to school systems to overcome resistance based on the health of children. It is not exactly addiction that is at stake, but “the American Beverage Association knows it has hard-wired America to drown the salt and grease with sugar.”48 The food and beverage industries continue to introduce new products aimed at children. In 1994, only fifty new food products were developed for kids; ten years later, in 2004, 470 new products were introduced, “a rate far greater than that for the increase of new products in the total market.”49
Alcohol, naturally addictive, is also heavily marketed to the young. Binge drinking has become a peril on university campuses across the world, and in the United States it finds commercial sponsorship in extensive television beer advertising geared to teen taste (girls, gags, and geeks mixed in with talking turtles) as well as in the new fashion of collegiate drinking games like Beer Pong, in which contestants try to throw Ping-Pong balls into beer cups with the “losers” being “compelled” to guzzle beer. Anheuser-Busch introduced a “Bud Pong” game in 2005, “promoting Bud Pong tournaments and providing Bud Pong tables, balls and glasses to distributors in 47 markets, including college towns like Oswego, N.Y., and Clemson, S.C.”50 Outrageous websites (not beer-company sponsored, however) with names such as www.collegedrunkfest.com “feature rules, merchandise and pictures of wild parties, with some students naked and others hugging the toilet.”51 The site is a kind of unending virtual spring break venue made up in equal parts of porn and foolishness, all explicitly linked to heavy drinking. Breweries and distributors are themselves more prudent, offering a “responsible drinking” text for their marketing, but the irresponsible subtext is teen consumption, binge drinking, passive athletic spectatorship, and alcohol-induced sex (featured in dozens of on-line porn sites, portraying putatively drunk women engaging in “forced” sex and simulated rape).
Addiction is a clinical term, and many observers use it in speaking of consumer behavior. But even without invoking it, we can task the consumer market with an ambition to attach every natural human need to an artificial commercial product, so that for the need to be fulfilled the product must be purchased. The aim is commodity-based addiction, day and night (omnipresence is a synonym for addiction): no sleep without Ambien and no wakefulness without No-Doz; no passive evening spectatorship without TV and no midday athletic prowess without all the right gear; no nighttime colds without NyQuil and no daytime sniffles without DayQuil. Every mental and emotional state demands a commercial facilitator, ideally one on which a dependency can be bred. Think of a typical young man’s evening out at the local mall’s sports bar: no cool without Ralph Lauren, no hook-up without Nokia, no fun without Bud, no buzz without nicotine, no pickup without Heineken, no chat without the overhead bar TV screen, no getaway without the Miata, no Muzak without Bose, no high-thread-count sheets without Martha Stewart, no intercourse without Viagra, and no see-ya without the trumped up buddy call on Verizon. Even big-ticket items in the Third World call for big-ticket commercial facilitators: no war without Blackwater, no democratization without Halliburton, no reconstruction without Bechtel. Eventually, the generics become indistinguishable from the brands so that it becomes redundant to mention both: Pepsi means youth, Kodak means memories, Hummer means macho, Sony means games, iPod means music, Microsoft means computers, Google means knowledge, and Nike means sports.
Children once skipped rope, played house, hopped scotch, said Simon, sticked ball, and otherwise entertained themselves with more or less whatever the living environment conditioned by their imaginations could offer up. Today, play is commodity facilitated and consumer sponsored, a question of expensive gear, electronic video games, internet entertainment—all the right equipment regularly reengineered in new and improved versions that demand constant repurchase and have the potential to induce addiction. Youthful consumers get hooked on the gear and the peripherals if not the games.
Addiction itself is commodity based: no addiction therapy without web-based health sites and self-help books and novel medications aimed at depression or bipolarity or anorexia or the latest illness of the week that can be associated with addiction. To need and to shop become synonyms: “I Shop, Therefore I Am,” wails April Lane Benson, editor of the self-consciously Cartesian takeoff subtitled “Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self.”52 Apple computers are thus being sold under the slogan “What G4 are you?” And even Porsche is blurring the boundaries between consumer choice and what sounds like addiction: “Suddenly the line between want and need seems so arbitrary” runs the tag line for Porsche’s new Cayman S (a car also featured in the television series The Sopranos), followed by this afterthought: “Priorities give way to pure desire.”
What this means is that for every discretionary want converted into a pure desire need, a dollar is somewhere earned; and for every need converted into an addiction identified, two dollars are earned over and over again—one for the addictive purchase and the second for the addiction treatment. The idea is a market economy that dominates every other human sector by making other sectors dependent on consumption for their enjoyment: recreational gear, workplace gear, arts gear, educational gear, even religious gear, define an all-encompassing marketplace. An iPod costs what an inexpensive guitar does, but the guitar is a one-time expense that can lead to a lifetime of music making, whereas the iPod is a one-time expenditure that can lead to a lifetime of shopping—iPod upgrades, music downloads, headset enhancements, and so on. Since consumerism aspires to a world in which people are consumers all the time, addiction is commerce-friendly. Addiction to consumer products, to gear and peripherals and to games and goods, is good, but addiction to consumerism itself—to shopping—is better.
Compulsive shopping is certainly more today than a rhetorical phrase or a tired shopper’s joke. A Stanford University study reports that “up to 8 percent of Americans, 23.6 million people, suffer from compulsive shopping disorder,” an affliction associated with “out-of-control spending” that “rips apart relationships and plunges consumers into overwhelming debt and bankruptcy.”53 Googling terms such as shopping addiction and shopoholism turns up hundreds of help sites, dozens of books (mostly of the self-help variety), and a growing medical literature that extends all the way to Russia and China.54 The figure of twenty-four million compulsive shoppers in America suggests something approaching a pandemic. Except that in the medical lexicon of consumerism, the addict is not an aberration but a product of the marketing industry. Addiction is not a pathology in need of therapy, but an industry ambition calling for reinforcement. The infantilist ethos is itself at least in some part an ethos of addiction, and the twenty-four-million-strong American compulsive shopping vanguard suggests that the ambition has succeeded, not just metaphorically but clinically.
The Illinois-based Proctor Hospital runs an addiction recovery program (the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery) that, among more traditional varieties of addiction such as drug dependency and alcoholism, for example, also treats compulsive shopping. “Compulsive shopping or spending,” the IIAR at Proctor counsels on its website, “may result in interpersonal, occupational, family and financial problems in one’s life. In many ways the consequences of this behavior are similar to that of any other addiction. Impairment in relationships may occur as a result of excessive spending and efforts to cover up debt or purchases. Persons who engage in compulsive shopping or spending may become pre-occupied with that behavior and spend less and less time with important people in their lives. They may experience anxiety or depression as a result of the spending or shopping which may interfere with work or school performance.”55 This is a lucid definition of how a totalizing consumer economy can come to dominate consciousness.
Most therapy programs naturally treat shopping addiction as a psychological illness. The IIAR Proctor Hospital is unusual in that it acknowledges there are “social and cultural factors” at work that “tend to increase the addictive potential of shopping and spending,” which include the “easy availability of credit and the material focus of society in general.” These factors “encourage people to accumulate possessions now and worry about financial responsibility later.” Highlighting the branded identity theme raised in earlier chapters of this book, the IIAR also notes that “society places a strong emphasis on one’s outer appearance and many media personalities promote spending money to achieve a certain look that will bring about happiness.” The IIAR at Proctor website also cites online shopping and cable shopping shows which allow items to be “purchased and ordered by express delivery to arrive quickly without the buyer having to leave home or personally interact with anyone else.”
Other web-based therapy groups (Prioryhealthcare.com, Medscape’s WebMD.com, and HypnosisDownloads.com, for example) also see shopping addiction as psychological. Thus, the Yahoo! Health website for shopping addiction offers a typical self-help support group rooted in webchat that eschews any discussion of the culture of commerce. An indication of the daunting challenge of distinguishing addiction from normal shopping behavior, even to well-meaning health groups like the one on Yahoo!, is the site’s “note” reminding visitors that “this group is NOT for people who like to shop and want to chat about purchases, this is for people who have a problem.”56 Perhaps the difference is not so obvious. Robert D. Manning, a serious and scholarly critic of the place of credit in the United States, has even suggested that dependency on credit has itself become addictive, as is evident from the subtitle of his book Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit.57
If the web is a source of therapy, it also creates its own addictive pathology. In Redmond, Washington, the home of Microsoft, a company called Internet/Computer Addiction Services “is a pioneer in a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery.”58 Skeptics may believe that “obsessive Internet use does not exact the same toll on health or family life as conventionally recognized addictions.” However, there are mental health professionals who “support the diagnosis of Internet addiction” and who argue that “a majority of obsessive users are online to further addictions to gambling or pornography or have become much more dependent on those vices because of their prevalence on the Internet.”59
Addiction is not just an American phenomenon, a by-product of American hyperbole and the American penchant for medicalizing cultural problems and dealing with them through self-help programs. In the United Kingdom, the website www.addictions.co.uk cites a 1998 Mintel marketing study that reports “almost one in four Britons admits being addicted to shopping,” with “twice as many women as men” saying that they “frequently set off on a shopping expedition even though they had nothing specific in mind to buy.”60 This help site says shopping addiction is more than just a kind of “retail therapy” in which people treat other disorders and “unpleasant realities” with the buzz that shopping can bring. Real shopping addiction, however, results in an “overwhelming sense of shame, remorse and guilt accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness,” and leads not only “to despair” but often to still “more addictive behaviour resulting in more self destructive feelings.” These in turn generate “high levels of debt, fear of discovery and retribution leading to more denial and desperate acts to cover up the behaviour. For those closely connected to the sufferer life becomes frightening and unpredictable with a growing sense of uselessness and the belief that the sufferer is deliberately causing chaos and a feeling of desperation sets in.”61
In Russia, which has shivered through a fifteen-year consumer capitalism cold shower (all consumerism all the time), and has established little in the way of mitigating democracy, shopoholism has also become a well-publicized problem. An essay in the Russian on-line magazine Pravda reports that shopping addiction is a “mental and spiritual disorder” that is now common “mostly with women,” one that has recently “been shaping up as an epidemic.” The piece cites “researchers” who include the psychologist Nadezhda Yugrina who have “found out that about twenty percent of German women acknowledge their insuperable desire to buy something all the time.” The piece offers undocumented claims suggesting that “the addiction has conquered 40 percent of American women, whereas 52 percent of British females said they found shopping a lot more enjoyable than sex.” The author is more prudent about Russia itself, writing that “there is no such statistic data as far as Russian women are concerned, although the passion for shopping has been developing in Russia steadily.”62
Unsurprisingly then, shopping addiction appears to be as global as shopping itself. For while it is widely recognized as a pathology of advanced market society, it may be that it is in fact simply market society itself writ large, the perfect image of its defining ethos, hiding behind a rather flimsy screen of self-deprecation (to the degree “addiction” still counts as a pejorative). The infantilizing aspects of shopoholism seem clear enough. Therapists report that they are “seeing a growing number of teenagers and young adults as patients, who grew up spending hours on the computer, playing games and sending instant messages. These patients appear to have significant developmental problems, including attention deficit disorder and a lack of social skills.”63
Addiction to video games and to on-line multiplayer games is not only growing, but is an implicit goal of game manufacturers. I earlier referenced Sony and LucasArts’ on-line game Star Wars Galaxies, citing reports that changes in format and rules had led to a kind of “virtual despair” among the virtual players affected. The other part of this story is that the controversial changes were made expressly in order to dumb down a game thought to be too complex and text-based for younger players. Nancy MacIntyre, then LucasArts’ senior game director, complained about the original game that “there was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was lots of wandering around learning about different abilities…. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat.”64 A perfect recipe for dumbing down consumers and underwriting addiction: kill, get treasure, repeat. Kill, get treasure, repeat. Instant gratification that is ever less gratifying, and that enjoins repetition that is both endless and joyless, as well as murderous and addictive.
Students of addiction agree that addicts can often be “multiaddicted,” say to alcohol or drugs as well as to shopping. Thus, shopoholics are often addicted not only to shopping generically, but to the media that facilitate or manifest the fruits of their shopping and that are the primary venues for the commercial ethos of infantilization—video games, television shopping networks, and the internet itself (as well as pornography on the internet). New York Times reporter Sarah Kershaw has attributed to unnamed specialists the “estimate that 6 to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction.” The problem has purportedly created “a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery” under the diagnostic rubric “Internet addiction disorder.”65
Therapists query fifteen or more discrete symptoms for the disorder, while firms advertising therapies offer twelve-step programs designed specifically to treat it. At places such as the Sierra Tucson psychiatric hospital in Arizona, the Center for Online Addiction in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery at Proctor Hospital in Peoria, Illinois, computer addicts mix in with more traditional populations of cocaine and alcohol abusers. McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, one of America’s oldest and most distinguished residential treatment centers for mental illness, now has a Computer Addiction Study Center in conjunction with the clinic established there in 1996.66
On-line video games played in competition with others across the world (EverQuest, Doom 3, and World of Warcraft, as well as the Star Wars Galaxies game described above, for example) are apparently especially addictive—perhaps because in a game like World of Warcraft it can take up to six hundred hours of play just to rise up out of the game’s first levels of play and become capable of slaying the more challenging demons and monsters whose demise players aspire to. An estimated 100 million people worldwide log on each month to interactive computer games, generating subscription revenues of $3.6 billion a year.67 Time spent on-line, especially by the young, is increasing rapidly, thanks to the games’ “persistent” ever-readiness to serve players. The 2005 Internet and American Life Project of Pew “found that teenagers did spend an increasing amount of time online: 51 percent of teenage Internet users are online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000,” although the Pew study added that most teenagers “maintain robust networks of friends.”68 Internet addiction converges potently with pornography addiction, since pornography has traditionally always been potentially addictive, whatever its medium, and on the internet it is pervasive. Conjoined with a medium that offers its own addictive solitude, pornography is thus especially troublesome. Some estimate that up to one-third of all internet traffic is around pornography, and addiction here has been associated with the collapse of marriages, the loss of jobs, and self-destructive behavior including suicide.
At the treatment end of addiction, therapies are offered not only for addiction but for those whose addictions have led to crippling debt, for which groups such as Debtors Anonymous offer traditional “healing and health” twelve-step remedial programs.69 Therapy can work as long as “‘compulsive shopping and spending are defined as inappropriate, excessive, and out of control,’ says Donald Black, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. ‘Like other addictions, it basically has to do with impulsiveness and lack of control over one’s impulses.’”70 In other words, the medical approach seems to argue, if we are confronted with a pathology of the individual, addictive spending can be treated. But what if we face a pathology of the culture itself? What if the consumer culture that generates a response to pathological compulsive disorders and the consequences they bring (indebtedness and bankruptcy) is itself organized around and even defined by the very pathologies its therapies affect to address? Is not addiction under such circumstances consumption-sustaining rather than shopper-pathological? To the extent that, in Dr. Black’s own phrase, “shopping is embedded in our culture,” the culture is unlikely to be able effectively to treat it. For the culture is directly complicit in breeding the pathologies that putatively threaten it. It is its pathologies, which cannot then be truly regarded as aberrational with respect to its ends. It is the culture itself that becomes aberrational.
Carolyn Wesson wants to help women who shop too much to overcome the “urge to splurge.” And in her self-help tome for compulsive shoppers, Olivia Mellan hopes to offer a “winning plan for overspenders and their partners.”71 But if compulsive buying is really only the mirror image of consumer capitalism’s compulsive selling, and if debt is less a disease of than a desirable condition for a profitable consumer economy, then authors like Wesson and Mellan, and institutions like Debtors Anonymous or the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery at Proctor, are unlikely to have much success—not until the infantilist ethos itself is brought under scrutiny. The Pravda article cited earlier calls it “an open secret that shopping addiction is common in the countries with stable economies” since “stable economies generate more shoppers.” Behind this open secret is the dirty little not-so-hidden secret that the cultural ethos of consumerism mandates compulsive shopping to satisfy its need for compulsive selling.
SELF-REPLICATION
Addiction is an effective instrument of totalizing commercialism; so is self-replication, that capacity of market entities to reproduce themselves, both virally and in other ways, in the absence of public oversight and regulation. Global corporations that depend on franchising (fast food or coffee chains) aim first to establish a beachhead, then to dominate, in time to suffuse, and finally to monopolize the market in which they compete. A Starbucks wherever coffee is consumed, no rivals; a Café Einstein (once a unique Berlin coffee shop) reproduced as often as possible, across Berlin and then Germany; McDonald’s wherever burgers (beef, lamb, tofu, no matter) are to be eaten in a hurry. When there was a single McDonald’s in Beijing, variety was served: an alternative to Chinese cuisine had established an entrepreneurial, diversifying foothold. With ten McDonald’s in the city, different neighborhoods could partake in the new variety. But with 100 outlets, now nearly 350 across China and still proliferating, diversity is diminished and franchise monopoly at the expense of pluralism becomes a growing danger. There may be natural market limits on franchising (some fast-food chains have, at least for the time being, hit a wall), but there are no natural limits on the ambition to franchise until every sandwich consumed anywhere in Beijing or China or Asia or the world is a quick-eat Big Mac.
Franchising not only aspires to a market monopoly (Coke leaves no room for Pepsi or, for that matter, for tea),72 but produces homogenization and conformity. Fast food not only replicates itself through franchising, it encourages competitors in the food-service business to pursue fast food, leaving less and less room for rival “slow food” services. Consumer malls worldwide still offer all manner of fare from ethnically inflected fast-food chains such as Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, KFC, Taco Bell, and Sbarro as well as the local Chinese and Thai chains, but finding an alternative to fast food (finger food served in a hurry to customers who stand in line to buy, and stand or perch on chairs to eat fast) in general is difficult. Traditional restaurants, barring the occasional sports bar, are rarely found in the big-box malls, since eating in such venues is meant to supplement shopping (a fuel stop) rather than borrow serious time from it. The point of fast food after all is its speed, not its recipes. The same is true for the sports shoes sector, where there is competition among brands, but little competition by alternative modes of footwear.
Nearly two-thirds of the shoes sold in the world today are sports shoes, so that there is less variety around the world than ever before. T-shirts and baseball caps as well as blue jeans and athletic shoes are sold under a number of competing (if monopoly-aspiring) global companies, but the overall result is an emerging global “youth uniform” that pinches dress tastes as effectively as MTV and VH1 constrict musical taste.
Commodification is the mode by which a consumer society reproduces itself, working overtime to create uniform monopolies of taste and behavior. To commodify an object is to transform multiple meanings into a singular market meaning, namely the potential of a good or service to be bought and sold. To commodify is thus to colonize, to impose singular meanings on multidimensional goods: “Things never before considered commodities—things that were free, unlimited, or beyond the pale of human commerce—have become commodities today,” writes James Ridgeway. “The oceans are being commodified [oil drilling]…offshore fishing rights are being auctioned…. [T]he sky—the earth’s inner andouter atmosphere—is fast becoming a commodity and sold in bits and pieces.”73 Commodification’s process is progressive, and progressively corrupting to heterogeneity and the autonomy of other sectors. “Companies can participate in federal programs to buy and sell air pollution rights—in effect purchasing space in the atmosphere…. Now, parts of human bodies are commodities as well, from blood to eyes, kidneys, and hair….[E]fforts are being made to commodify not only living things, but…life itself, with biotech companies making ownership claims to genetically engineered life forms.”74
The new electronic and digital technologies permit the ongoing commodification of communication and of knowledge itself. The vehicles that carry knowledge and entertainment and the “pipes” through which communication must pass are themselves commodified goods. The image is free, but the pixels by which it is reconstructed and transmitted are commodities that must be purchased. Thoughts are autonomous—“Die Gedanken sind frei” proclaimed the old German student drinking (freedom) song—but when packaged, reproduced, and marketed they are but one more kind of commodity. The internet is a particularly powerful reproducer of consumerism because of its technical capacity to reproduce digital information, and both spread and preserve such information permanently. Try to “erase” an email and its many ghostly shadows or eradicate all traces of a website visit on your computer, and it becomes clear that decommodification and decolonization are far more daunting than the colonizing processes to which they respond.
The computer virus is a useful metaphor for at least one powerful characteristic of commodification: the way in which it not only puts its character at the center, but removes characteristics and identities that were in place prior to infection. Like those multiplying pop ads that efface other underlying images on your computer screen, commodified goods dominate our landscape. Like a virus that may reproduce what is a quite innocent message over and over again until it erases all other message content, and become something other than innocent, commodification works to transform many kinds of goods and services into saleable commodities whose core meaning is their consumability—they can be bought for a price. Marcuse tried to capture the meaning of commodities in the cultural sector this way: “If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form.” Like a cancer, commodification does not so much kill as crowd out other meanings and values, so that “exchange value, not truth value [or any other kind] counts.”75 What is the tumor but the single mutating cell run amok, reproducing itself over and over again, oblivious to what it may be destroying on the way to a successful reproduction? Television takes over our entertainment sector, crowding out theater and movies. The internet and broadband crowd out television. “Normal” use becomes abnormal, and then obsessive and finally addictive. All the while, consumer capitalism triumphs, seemingly a benign engine of the market sector. Yet its endless capacity for self-replication ultimately destroys alternative sectors and thus erodes variety.76
OMNILEGITIMACY77
I have wrestled with the terms totalitarian and totalizing because they are freighted with history’s heaviest baggage. Yet the more straightforward terms I have used to depict consumer totalism—ubiquity, omnipresence, addiction, and viral self-replication—suggest a reality that is perilous enough. What the infantilist ethos succeeds in doing is to rationalize and justify these terms, turning them into acceptable conditions for consumer capitalism’s flourishing. Commerce everywhere and all the time enhances our freedom! Addiction is merely a sign of how fervently we want something to which, after all, we surely have a right! Franchising and self-replication manifest and prove the success of a product.
The real purpose of an ethos now becomes apparent: to legitimate the structural features and behaviors capitalism depends upon that might otherwise be thwarted or rejected, if other value systems were pursued (religious, political, civic, artistic). To be compelling, a market society that boasts a theory of pluralism must in practice either obscure its bottom-up forms of coercion or try to legitimate the actual absence of diversity. Legitimation, to lean again on Horkheimer and Adorno’s more abstract formulation, often takes the form of a “circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.”78
The ubiquity of commerce must be made to seem a good thing, a widening of our realm of discretion. Addiction must be renamed, authorized, made to seem benign—associated with “need satisfaction,” for example. Homogeneity must be reformulated—as healthy value consensus, for example. A cultural ethos that successfully places consuming at its core and shuts out rival spheres must seem to be justified in doing so—and not just in purely economic or instrumental terms. It must be “OK,” as the fatuous title of an earlier rationalization of a certain kind of commercial ethos put it: “I’m OK, You’re OK.”79
This is of course precisely the goal of marketing: to impose an omnilegitimacy of good feeling and appropriate sentiment not only on the products and brands it services, but on the marketing process by which it achieves its goal. Marketing itself needs branded legitimacy, the legitimacy of branding, to succeed. The logic described in chapter 5, where loyalty and love are attributed to goods and services in order to endow mere material products with the virtues of a higher spirit, becomes a legitimizing logic when applied to marketing itself and to the consumer culture marketing rationalizes.
When Marcuse wrote about one-dimensional men, he was getting at the character of a society that constrained freedom through “voluntary compliance,” where an economic order could prevail in “the absence of terror” courtesy of a “pre-established harmony between individual needs and socially-required desires, goals, and aspirations.”80 And when he identified “today’s novel feature” as “the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture,” he was portraying the workings of a cultural ethos which does not so much reject oppositional values as work toward “their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.”81 Marcuse’s analysis, preoccupied with libido, explained the Mao jackets which, at the height of the anti-Western cultural revolution in China, became fashion accessories in the couture houses of Paris and Rome; it made sense out of the Che Guevara and Black Panther radical chic that fascinated up-market matrons in Beverly Hills and Manhattan’s East Side, matrons whose fortunes successful revolution would obviously obliterate.82
Thirty to forty years later, the cultural ethos treats with oppositional values (whether aesthetic, religious, moral, or civic), by turning them into play; and by turning adults into grasping children with aggressively trivialized tastes. Holding market culture together through branded wants and manufactured desires allows consumer marketing to separate us from one another through privatization even as its forges a faux commonality and consensus through common branding. The passive, quasi-addicted children who emerge as archetypical consumers are less one-dimensional than no-dimensional, because such identity as they possess is entirely heteronomous, a product of what is bought, eaten, worn, and imbibed. This is not really identity at all, but merely a coat worn to cover nakedness. I am my Mercedes. I am my Apple. I am my Big Mac. I am my Nikes. I am my MTV. We are our cars, we are our computers, we are what we eat and wear and watch. The end effect of the ethos is the eradication of significant differences among consumers, people who inasmuch as they are consumers are clones.
Diversity? Sure, says the market, “whatever.” As the hold of consumerism grows, what Horkheimer and Adorno used to call “mass culture” becomes even less diverse. “Under monopoly all mass culture is identical,” they wrote long ago, “and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries.”83 Marxism has long since gone under as a socioeconomic system and (for most people) even as a critical perspective. But Horkheimer and Adorno were less Marxists than they were astute sociologists portraying mass culture. Non-Marxists and anti-Marxists reached their conclusions by different roads.
Cultural critic Neil Postman contrasts George Orwell and Aldous Huxley on the way to trying to depict the real danger of the kind of mass conformity manufactured by the culture industries: “No Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As [Aldous Huxley] saw it, people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”84 The infantilist ethos generates nightmares more attuned to Huxley than to Orwell: “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”85
Fortunately, we are not yet fully propelled into Huxley’s nightmare. Other powerful forms of identity continue to rival consumer identity. Unfortunately, many of those identities arise out of antimodern ascriptive identities drawn from religious fundamentalism and ethnic extremism, Jihadic identities of the kind that were the subject of my Jihad vs. McWorld. Totalization generates its own contraries, just as conformity spawns rebellion. Nonetheless, consumer capitalism in the grip of marketing continues to risk totalization and homogeneity. The question is whether it is possible to prevent the infantilist ethos from succeeding, to impede its course toward further totalism and privatization, to loosen the hold of marketing and branding on identity, to overcome the civic schizophrenia that has made it so difficult for constructive citizens to work together to overcome the destructive impulses of consumers when acting alone.
For those seeking resistance to totalism, conformity, and privatization, and trying to stimulate opposition to the infantilist ethos itself, it does not help that what were once the most important systemic alternatives to consumer capitalism have self-destructed. As real-world societies and as cultural paradigms, socialism, social democracy, communism, and anarchism have gained little historical traction. Although these paradigms, because they were wedded in theory to equality and justice, are cousins to liberalism, the practices they founded in revolutions, movements, and actual regimes were mostly disastrous. The revolutions ended in failure or tyranny, the movements and parties in hypocrisy and dictatorship, and the regimes in one-party, totalitarian dictatorships. These failures, above all the collapse of Soviet Communism, while good for those who had to live under them and better yet for the history of liberty, have been bad for capitalism in one crucial sense: in the absence of alternatives, capitalism’s successes have bred triumphalism and eroded meaningful self-criticism. They have blinded neoliberals and liberals alike to the subtle perils inherent in markets and led them to try to remedy the vices of big government by attacking the virtues of the democratic public. The failure of communism has been mistaken for proof of capitalism’s merit, even its invincibility.
Is resistance to the infantilist ethos possible? Are there significant forms of rebellion and opposition already in place despite the infantilist ethos? Can they be made effective? Is there a civic therapy that can treat the civic schizophrenia that afflicts liberty in market societies? The power of dialectic, opposites arising out of the very contradictions against which they rebel, suggests that there might be.