Tripod: Media: Thomas Frank: Liberation Marketing

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These days, it seems, virtually everyone believes there's some sort of world-historical change on the way. Those who are optimistic about the change focus quite narrowly on the remarkably counter-intuitive position that once we all own expensive office machines, then culture will become radically decentralized, the nightmare of the mass society, along with the age-old curse of elitism, will be ended for good.<br><br> But those of us who are concerned about the concentration of the media, see the big change as essentially a negative one: the sky really is falling, civilization is wandering into a cultural catastrophe. Partially, of course, this is a very predictable end-of-the-century sentiment, common to every year cursed with a nine as its third digit. But it's also a very real constellation of fears. We're "dumbing down." We've become incapable of judging. And nothing brings it home more concretely than the rise of the culture trust, the group of culture-moguls like Time Warner, Geffen, Disney, and Westinghouse who have built an economic monopoly on American tastes. In formal terms what's happened looks like an almost literal realization of C. Wright Mills' classic definition of a mass society: ever fewer voices talking to an ever-larger and an ever-more passive audience.<br><br> I want to point out that both doomsayers and cyber-ecstatics are talking about the same larger phenomenon, of which the rise of the "culture trust" is an element. The defining fact of American life in the 1990s is its reorganization around the needs of the corporations, not just that we all work for them, and not just culturally, and not just in the sense that the only redemption anyone's hoping for is to come through personal computers. The world of business, it seems, is becoming the world, period. Business is politics, the office is society, the brand is equivalent to human identity. Fast Company, one of the most prominent magazine start-ups of recent years, calls this "the business revolution" and trumpets itself as the "handbook."<br><br> <font size="+1" face="VERDANA, ARIEL, HELVETICA" color="#000000"><b><p align="RIGHT">what's happened looks like an almost literal realization of C. Wright Mills' classic definition of a mass society: ever fewer voices talking to an ever-larger and an ever-more passive audience.</b></font></p> <font size="-1" face="VERDANA, ARIEL, HELVETICA"> According to Fast Company, business culture is replacing civil society. "Work is personal" and "Computing is social" are points one and two in its manifesto for the corporate revolution. In a recent issue it proclaimed that the division of American business leaders into "cyber libertarians" and "techno-communitarians" is "the real election," far overshadowing the idiotic and obsolete battlings of Democrats and Republicans. If there's going to be any social justice in the world, the magazine argues, it will be because the market has decreed that there be social justice. One of the magazine's writers takes the argument all the way: "Corporations have become the dominant institution of our time," he writes, "occupying the position of the church of the Middle Ages and the nation-state of the past two centuries." A similar note is sounded in a recent Newsday article discussing the dramatic rise in popularity of management books. "The line between business and life has been blurred."<br><br> The words and images that describe what many of us believe to be happening are surprisingly easy to summon. It's going to be the triumph of gray, of hierarchy, of homogeneity, of spirit-killing order. Right? We're all going to be robots, automaton organization men. We'll have to listen to Muzak all the time. It's going to be like "1984," the most abused source of metaphors in metaphor history. It's going to be corporate feudalism like in Rollerball or one of those dystopic Schwarzenegger films. Right?<br><br> Wrong. The corporate takeover is coming; in fact it's already happened. But what makes the culture of the businessman's republic so interesting is not that it demands order, conformity, gray clothes, and muzak, but that it presents itself as an opponent to those very conceptions of corporate life. Those who speak for the new order aren't puritanical; they're hip, they're fully in tuned to youth culture, they listen to alternative rock while they work, they fantasize about smashing convention. Business theory today is about revolution, not about stasis or hierarchy; it's about liberation, not order.<br><br> <center><a href="/"></a><a href="../../../../www_subdomain/media/columns/frank/971216liberationb.html"></a><a href="/"></a></center> <br><br> <form method="POST" action="../../../../www_subdomain/bin/search/pursuit.html"> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" align="RIGHT"> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="MIDDLE"> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/media.html" target="_top"></a></td> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="MIDDLE"> <a href="../../../../www_subdomain/media/index-html/anchor_toc.html" target="_top"></a></td> <td valign="TOP" align="RIGHT"> <select name="pod_name" onchange="self.top.podRedirect(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)"> <option value="">Related Pods</option> <option value="Alt.music">Alt.Music</option> <option value="Animation%20Central">Animation Central</option> <option value="BookTalk">BookTalk</option> <option value="Film%20Buffs">Film Buffs</option> <option value="Photography">Photography</option> <option value="Musicology">Musicology</option> <option value="Science%20Fiction">Science Fiction</option> <option value="TV%20Lounge">TV Lounge</option> <option value="Writers'%20Block">Writers' Block</option> <option value="Zine">Zine</option> </select></td> </tr> </table> <br clear="ALL"><br> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" align="RIGHT"> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="RIGHT"> <nobr><img src="../../../../img/www_subdomain/lycos_power.gif" border="0" alt="Lycos Powered" height="15" width="91"> <select name="cat"> <option value="tripod_www" selected>Search the Tripod Web Site <option value="tripod">Search Tripod Member Pages <option value="lycos">Search the Web</select></nobr></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="MIDDLE" align="RIGHT"> <nobr><input type="text" size="20" name="query"> <input type="submit" value="Search"></nobr></td> </tr> </table> </form> <br clear="ALL"> </td> </tr> </table> </body>