| Every
nation has its founding myths, and each myth contains a moist
kernel of nostalgia for a past whose actual existence is dubious.
It’s a Morning in America tableau in which our doors went
unlocked and we knew our neighbors’ names–when we were not
mere consumers or colleagues, but citizens and congregations.
There may be little value left in this cliché, and every
generation brings with it a longing for an unrecoverable past.
Still, we all share a very real fear that our sense of civic
belonging and community is being eroded by a cold-blooded
modernity. From Oliver Goldsmith’s "The Deserted
Village" to Babbitt to Robert Putnam’s new book Bowling
Alone, we have had our share of literary fretting over a
grasping materialism that threatens the less tangible qualities of
our lives.
Now,
two new books offer an unsettling and thorough analysis of two
recent socioeconomic forces–and the ethos behind them–that
have sapped our sense that there must be some space, any space,
that can be left to ourselves without the intervening clamour of
the free market and its loudmouthed cousin, advertising. In Naomi
Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, we are
subjected with a dismaying thoroughness to the last two decades of
evolution in the concept of the corporate brand, as well as the
ease with which it has come to penetrate sanctuaries once reserved
for education, public space, or nature. And in Paulina Borsook’s
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian
Culture of High-Tech, we will no doubt be aghast to learn that
it is our very own Bay Area, and the peculiar antagonism to
government and anything not wired, virtual, and dedicated to the
liquidity event that prevails in our signature industry, that will
set the tone of our nation’s future.
If techies have taken comfort in the oft-repeated notion that
Silicon Valley’s critics just don’t have the background to
appreciate it, they will not be happy to read Paulina Borsook’s
resume. As a high-tech writer with twenty years of experience and
one of Wired’s first contributors, Borsook has had a
close look at this boomtown for more years than some of its
residents have been potty trained. In Cyberselfish, she
examines the odd emergence of a semi-conscious but passionately
held libertarian disposition among the dot-com coffee achievers.
Rants are usually a headache, but Borsook’s entertaining prose
drives home a good point: although decades of government-funded
research developed the microchips and Internet that led to the New
Economy, and although copyright and bankruptcy laws–to say
nothing of more mundane tasks like paving the roads–are critical
to nurturing and developing this industry, these coder-monkeys and
Web designers are absurdly, irrationally convinced that everything
government touches turns foul.
This
almost exclusively male group devours Ayn Rand, fetishizes the
entrepreneur-as-rugged-individual, applies pop-science voodoo and
ecological metaphors to economic models in order to rationalize
its laissez-faire attitudes, and imagines that high-tech gizmos
are so nifty that no one but themselves should be overseeing them.
Workweeks are devastatingly long, families are considered
liabilities in the rush to the IPO, and if you haven’t made your
fortune by age forty, you’re through. "[H]omes, who needs
them, except as satellite offices," Borsook writes. "The
demographic sector (those in their twenties and thirties, who
aren’t necessarily much into nesting anyway) is part of the
culture of what in South Park/Multimedia Gulch are sardonically
called veal-fattening pens: places where the young are kept
immobilized indoors to be sacrificed for greater economic
productivity. And ooh, they have such tender white flesh because
they don’t get out at all!"
There
are countless social ills in the New Economy: the lack of
affordable housing for teachers or cops, the dismal state of
public education except as an adjunct to high-tech, and the
gradual elimination of public space and basic social skills, as
even shopping malls are replaced with glowing boxes, and the
cybergeek’s antisocial clumsiness is recklessly lionized. But
Borsook’s technolibertarians figure that all these problems will
be solved by the next generation of software. Borsook’s prose is
occasionally distracting, and her tendency to capitalize trends
like the Next Big Thing betrays her years spent rooting around
user groups. But she has displayed a remarkable courage in daring
to defend Big Government, in reminding us that we should never
lose sight of its indispensibility in our rush to go public.
"[M]y
memories of a time when public services seemed to work and people
felt some sort of connection with a commonweal that was more than
saving taxpayer dollars and NIMBY are probably … useless,"
Borsook concludes. "But … I don’t believe that a culture
that presents itself as being the One True Way of the future, but
which in so many ways embodies the worst of the past … is one
that is cause for rejoicing."
Just as Borsook argues that the technolibertarian sensibility of
high tech threatens to undermine civic life and public space,
Naomi Klein’s book No Logo contends that a much more
ravenous phenomenon has infected what little public space we have
left. Klein’s premise is fascinating–indeed, it should be an
indispensible plank in anyone’s understanding of contemporary
culture. Tracing the evolution of the corporate brand over the
last twenty years, she argues that where once a brand name served
as a signifier for a quality product –and perhaps one or two
community values that the company hoped would spring to mind–now
brands serve to embody a wide-ranging set of values, ideals, and
meanings, until it no longer matters what the brand is selling.
Taking
Nike as the pioneer in this trend, Klein traces the process by
which the trademark swoosh swelled: Once a mere insignia for a
scientifically developed jogging shoe, it came to signify in the
public mind all forms of athletic endeavor and prowess, the
discipline and amibition it takes to become the master of your
sport, and even the ideal of urban black empowerment. In the
process, Nike no longer merely sells shoes–it sells community
space in venues such as Niketown, or sports drinks or clothing
lines. It even sells athletes; Nike has gone into the sports
agency business and counts many famous athletes as its clients
and–in a seamless transition–as its spokespeople. The physical
product that Nike hawks is no longer important; what it sells is
the swoosh, and anything blessed by the logo’s imprimatur. And
its main rivals aren’t other shoe companies, but Disney, Intel,
and any other contender for space in the public consciousness.
At
a time in which traditional public institutions have become
starved for both money and credibility, Klein argues that this
universalization of brands has encroached upon our everyday lives,
until there is no public space left unbranded. Countless
super-branded corporations are attempting to make inroads into
public schools. This is considerably more than a company
sponsoring a sporting event; in the new scheme of things, the
company and its logo are the main attraction, and the football
game or science fair merely sideshows. Textbook covers are
cluttered with advertisements, school cafeterias are festooned
with fast-food kiosks, and collegiate research departments are
simply doing R&D for pharmaceutical companies, and any
information they unearth that may have unflattering results for
the company can be suppressed by gag clauses in the contracts. As
long as kids are learning how to read, these companies ask while
dangling money before bankrupt school boards, why can’t they
learn how to read about how wonderful our company is? Or if
they’re doing arts and crafts anyway, why not assemble new
designs for Old Navy shirts? Because the youth market, aesthetic,
and street cred is so critical to maintaining the supremacy of
these super-brands, public schools are transformed into focus
groups and consumer experiments.
"Many
parents and educators could not see anything to be gained by
resistance [to this trend]; kids today are so bombarded by brand
names that it seemed as if protecting educational spaces from
commercialization was less important than the immediate benefits
of finding new funding sources," Klein writes. "Thus it
became possible for many parents and teachers to rationalize their
failure to protect yet another public space by telling themselves
that what ads students don’t see in class or on campus, they
will certainly catch on the subway, on the Net, or on TV when they
get home. What’s one more ad in the life of these marked-up and
marked-down kids?"
But
this phenomenon has nonetheless spawned its own form of
resistance. As the fluidity of boundaries and trade agreements
renders governments less capable of action to preserve justice,
grassroots groups such as the Seattle anti-WTO activists have
targeted the corporations themselves, as well as the logos and
brands that are the key to their stock values. If the key to
Nike’s success has been its attachment of a mythic set of values
to the swoosh, then the key to undermining the company and forcing
it to act responsibly is making the swoosh synonymous not with
black empowerment and the "Just Do It"
anything-is-possible promise, but with human rights abuses and
sweatshop outrages in Indonesia. These super-brands are now
beginning to worry that their companies’ fortunes may actually
be at the mercy of college kids and grassroots organizers who
could stain the meaning of the symbols they have pushed for
decades. Klein offers something approaching hope at the end of her
book, and when the Oakland School Board backs away from yet
another Pepsi deal, as just happened, that hope is perhaps not
unfounded
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