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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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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?
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.
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