Subject: [vallist] Just do it (#6)
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 23:00:53 -0800
From: Michele Vallisneri 
To: vallist@egroups.com

Dear friends,

just yesterday I stumbled upon an interview with media and technology
guru Douglass Rushkoff, who was a close witness to the birth of the
"internet revolution", and wrote a few very influential books about it.
I found it so interesting and intriguing that I thought I would pass it
on to you.

His basic thesis is that, far from making good on its promises of
empowering individuals to act on their own behalf and on the basis of
freely available information, the "internet revolution" was taken over
by the powers of commerce and advertising, which turned it to their
money-making purposes. Rushkoff has an interesting take on "brands" as
parental substitutes for an infantilized society where individuals are
made to funnel their personal expression into consumerism.

I felt that Rushkoff's most significant statements, and those with which
I agreed the most, were somewhat lost in a long and dispersive text.
That is why I condensed the interview into a much shorter essay,
rearranging the order of topics, interpolating and even suppressing some
parts. Hence I doubt that what follows will still represent Rushkoff's
thoughts very faithfully; his message might have become intertwined with
my reading. But that is OK by me!

If you wish, go back to the original document (http:
//www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge61.html). Otherwise, just read on,
if you wish. And please, feel free to comment (I will "publish" you!)

Love to you all,

Michele

--> A quick ride through "A Talk with Douglas Rushkoff" (The Edge 61)
    http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge61.html

Originally the Internet made me think the only thing we have to learn is
tolerance. If we can be tolerant of everything and everyone, we'll all
be okay. But I'm not tolerant of everything and everyone. And I
certainly see the value in realizing that we're starting to go in
directions that we've been before. We should learn from those
experiences rather than repeat them with new gadgets that we have even
less control over.

I wrote three loud books about the promise of new media. I honestly
believed I was writing them for what I conceived of as the "counter-
culture" ­ or at least for people who sought to use these technologies
for positive, thoughtful cultural evolution. I told the story of how our
tightly controlled media was giving way to a more organic, natural
mediaspace. I wrote "Media Virus" to announce that the time had come
where we could launch any idea we want — whether it's as a media virus,
or in a usenet group ­ the power is in our hands again, let's go for it.

However, one day I was invited to a convention sponsored by the American
Association of Advertising Agencies. They wanted me to talk to them
about media viruses and youth culture. I was thrilled. I prepared a talk
about how advertising is over, and that their tyranny over young people
had come to an end. They should give up their coercive ways. When I
arrived, there were signs and hand-outs: "How to use Media Viruses to
Capture New Audiences". I suddenly realized that the people who had put
my books on best seller lists were not the hackers and Internet
homesteaders I so admired, but rather the public relations and
advertising industries. I had been selling "cool" to corporate America.
My books were primers, required texts for young executives on how to
take advantage of new media to do the same old thing they were doing
before. That's when I realized that we were in an arms race, and that I
was just as caught up in it as everyone else.

So I decided to write a book about the war. I spent two years taking a
look at many different styles of coercion, their histories, and how
these techniques have been retooled for modern times. I concluded that
most of them are based on a simple phenomenon known as regression and
transference. It's used in a positive way by therapists, and a dangerous
way by salespeople and marketers. Basically, if people can be made to
feel disoriented or helpless, they will seek out someone to act as a
parent. When people are confused, they want parents who can tell them
what to do, and reassure them. Once you create a situation where people
feel that they can trust you, that you understand them, that you'll take
care of them, or that you'll lead them, they will submit.

The other main set of techniques that are being used in coercion today
are taken from neurolinguistic programming. They are really just simple
hypnosis techniques, like Milton Erickson's "pacing and leading". If
you're sitting in a room with someone, what you would do is subtly
assume the same position as your target, and adopt some of the same
breathing and speech patterns — that's pacing. Then, amazingly, you can
slowly lead the person by changing your posture, breathing rate, or
speech pattern. You're subject will change his posture too, to conform
to yours. Then you begin to work on his thinking, as well.

This same technique plays itself out in the sales world through the
sciences of demographics and target marketing. You pace your target
market ­ listen to the language of it, "target market" — it's a war
metaphor. If you're in the target market you are in the cross hairs of
marketer's rifle! To pace the target demographic, the marketer studies
buying motives and propensities through focus groups, then creates
messages that perfectly reflect their existing emotional states.
Marketers pace our behaviors and feelings in order to lead us where they
want us to go. Once the customer is properly paced, then you work on
leading the person towards a greater frequency of purchases, greater
allegiance, trying to create an inexorable pull on the user towards
greater and greater interaction with and loyalty to the particular brand
being offered.

When this process gets automated through a technology like the World
Wide Web, watch out. An e-commerce site watches and records each user's
interactions with it. What screens did the user look at and in what
order? Where did he click? When did he buy? Did he buy when the
background was red or blue? Did he buy when the offer was in the top
left or the top right? And the computer can then dynamically reconfigure
itself to make a Web site that identifies and then paces each individual
exactly. Meanwhile, the user thinks he's "just doing it".

In the best light, I suppose "Just Do It" is renaissance of a sort,
isn't it? A great credo, reasserting the power of individual will. But I
think "Just Do It" is a reductive and dangerous substitute for a
philosophy of life. As far as Nike is concerned, "Just Do It" means just
pressing the "Buy" button. "No, kid, you don't have to think. For God's
sake, don't think about it. Just do it!"

The most dangerous thing about a "Just Do It" society is that it compels
us to act on reflex ­ not intention. We are led to believe we are acting
from the gut. That we are somehow connecting with our emotions and
bypassing our neuroses. But this isn't true at all. We are merely moving
impulsively. It's not from the gut. And the more impulsively we act, the
more easily we can be led where we might not truly want to go. People
who act automatically are the easiest to control ­ by marketers, by
anyone. There's less intention and thus less life involvement.

I used to think, this acceleration of human action was a great thing. I
thought we'd simply bypass our restricting editorial voices, get our
superegos out of the way, and behave in that purely spontaneous,
wonderful fashion that all human beings would behave in if uncorrupted
by social and institutional biases. But something kept nagging at me. I
couldn't help thinking that when you eliminate fear and simply follow
your bliss, you don't always get the best results.

Take youth, for instance. There are certain aspects of youth that are
valuable to retain as an adult. And there are other aspects of youth
that are dangerous to retain as an adult. When I look at our so-called
adult society today it looks to me a lot like a fetus that stayed in the
womb too long and became toxic to its mother and itself. We live in a
culture that is obsessed with youth but has lost the ability to think
with the elasticity of youth — so we've traded in the best and we've
gotten the worst as a result. We think like grumpy old men, and act out
like two-year olds.

Look at Hollywood. Who are our movie stars today? Not men, but boys.
Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon, who look even younger than they are.
Who are the great adult men of Hollywood? Jack Nicholson, who's an adult
baby. His entire show-biz image is of an overgrown child going to Lakers
games in dark glasses. Or Robin Williams ­ however talented ­ still a
version of the adult child. Our president is a baby. He treats the
nation as his scolding parent, from whom he must hide his naughty deeds,
and to whom he must occasionally apologize.

We got this way by design. In the late 40s after World War II, we needed
a way for the economy to expand, so what we did was create a consumer
culture. Men returned to the factories and worked, while women returned
to the home to take care of the children. Advertising and marketing
catered to the needs of women and children. When they couldn't cater to
a need, they created one. By the 1970s, when women went to work
themselves, consumer culture became all about kids — rock music and
records and toys and electronics ­ all items and lifestyles that
appealed to either children or the child in the man or woman. We've
succeeded at that. Now when a person becomes successful what they want
to do is buy into childhood and get some expensive toys in order to
fulfill those same, media-generated childhood urges. Our commercials
make this explicit.

We still yearn for parents as we always have. The movie "Elizabeth",
about Queen Elizabeth, reminded me about western civilization's
transition from looking at God and Virgin Mary and Jesus and as our
parent figures, to looking towards the monarchy for this same comfort.
Elizabeth enacted this transition. What we did in America was to enact a
new transition, which was from the monarchy, or the presidency, as our
parental figure, to corporations and brands. Our transference is now
projected onto brands — we look to them and to companies to provide the
reassurance we want.

The strained effort by America to mourn for Kennedy in the fashion that
England mourned for Diana looks like an effort to regain some of what
felt like a healthier form of transference than what we have now —
transference to non-personified entities — which I think is more
frightening because we suspect that these entities don't have our best
interest at heart. They don't even have hearts.

The non-personified entities are treated a lot better than people. If a
corporation releases tons and tons of pollutants somewhere, killing
thousands of people, no human being is going to be held accountable, and
the corporation is going to pay fines that actually mean nothing to it
as an entity. Meanwhile kids are tattooing the Nike Swoosh onto their
arms because it gives them a feeling of kinship and identity. It gives
them such a sense of belonging.

The "brand" is about metaphor. At every stage of the development of
language we create a metaphor. When that metaphor dies ­ when we forget
its original meaning ­ it becomes the component part of a new language
system. In today's culture, brands become iconic ways of representing an
entire set of metaphors. Through its corporate communications, a company
like Nike will represent, or broadcast, an entire range of images which
are then signified by that single Swoosh. And because we're looking for
symbols to represent what are now really immense thought structures, we
grab onto the icons of Airwalk and Nike. That's why it's so satisfying —
but it's also why it's so dangerous.

In a sense nothing has changed: the same kinds of techniques that have
been used for centuries by emperors, kings, popes and priests, are now
being used in service of the corporation. Where it's different is that
we have technologies in place that make these coercive techniques
automatic. There are machines doing this now — machines are doing the
research, machines are adjusting the commercials and configuring the Web
sites.

The way kids express who they are today, and the way we are supposed to
vote in a libertarian universe, is with our dollars, right? But we can
never really express who we are through consumption. It's a pity that
it's the main option left to us. It's not empowerment at all. It's the
power to be a consumer.

                    --------------------------------

            ("The Vallist" #6; Pasadena, November 10, 1999)