Category Archives for Douglas Rushkoff

Acceptance (doesn't equal) Acquiescence: DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF COLUMN FROM ARTHUR 24.

Acceptance (doesn’t equal) Acquiescence
by Douglas Rushkoff
from Arthur No. 24 / Oct 02006:

I’ve been debating for a while about whether to do this. Whether to come right out and say it. On a certain level, it’s like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. What good is it to announce a problem if I don’t have a ready solution at hand? Furthermore, what if sharing this information – this perspective on our predicament – simply exacerbates our paralysis to do anything about it. I mean, fascism breeds best in populations that have been stunned into complacency, cynicism, or despair.

(That’s called a “buried lede” – a publishing term for hiding the main idea of a story deep within a paragraph. Editors don’t like it because it makes it hard for the reader to figure out what an article is about. But I felt it necessary because, well, I’m not quite comfortable talking about it too directly, just yet. This fascism stuff.)

It all became blindingly clear to me the morning I found out Ken Lay was dead. I was listening to the radio – to a friend of mine, actually, reading the news report on NPR. He was explaining how the dishonored corporate elite criminal, the former CEO of Enron, had a fatal heart attack before he had the chance to spend the rest of his life in jail. Because of certain technicalities in the law, this also meant Lay’s family would in all likelihood be able to keep the millions of dollars that would have otherwise been paid back to Enron employees and shareholders in court fines.

The newsreader opined that Lay’s death might have been suicide, and not just for the money. Lay was in on those early secret energy industry meetings with Dick Cheney – the ones where they figured out oil prices and the Iraq War and other matters of state – and, facing prison, the fallen corporate superstar could have posed a security risk if he had leaked information about what had transpired to other prisoners or, worse, the FBI in trade for better living quarters.

But, given all that, I couldn’t bring myself to believe Lay was dead at all. If you’re that rich and powerful, why die? Why not just get a hold of some corpse, pay-off a coroner, move to an island and call it a day? This is no grassy knoll feat. It’s not even CSI, but early 90’s Law & Order. No big deal for a guy intimately connected with one of the most actively clandestine administrations in US history.

That same July morning, when news of North Korea’s failed nuclear test launches were broadcast, I didn’t feel sure I was being told what was happening, either. Not that news agencies can really know, either. Did they launch? Were they thwarted by a US counterstrike, or by their own ineptitude? Do they even know? Do we?

I’m not saying one thing or the other happened – just that I stare at the news and don’t believe anything they’re saying. I’ve got no idea. And it feels really weird.

I find I can trace this sense of uncertainty to the 2004 election. The 2000 election was crooked, but the fraud was rather out in the open. We watched hired thugs stop the Florida recount by trying to break into the room where the counting was happening – and thus delay the process long enough for the Supreme Court to choose Bush as the President. But the 2004 voter fraud in Ohio, fully documented by Robert Kennedy Jr., among others, was an entirely more hidden affair. Diebold voting machines, teams of fraud squads, and election officials too afraid that disclosure of what happened will turn people off voting forever.

Those of us who try to stay even remotely connected to what is going on in the world around us have enough hard evidence to conclude with certainty that voting in America has been systematically and effectively undermined by the party currently in power. In an increasing number of precincts, how people vote – if they are even allowed in – no longer has a direct influence on how their votes are tallied.

It’s sad and confusing not to live in a democracy, anymore. And while it’s quite plainly true, it’s a bit too unthinkable for most sane people to accept. It goes in the same mental basket as more outlandish (if not unthinkable) thoughts — such as dynamite on the WTC or no airplane crashing into the Pentagon — even though, in this case, it’s not conjecture, it’s just plain real.

So what I’m coming to grips with is accepting that I don’t live in a democratic nation, and that the propaganda state attempted in 1930’s Europe did finally reach fruition here in the U.S., just as Henry Ford and those of his ilk predicted.

Maybe I’m just old, and have a very idealistic view of democracy. When I was a kid, we were all told that this is a government of the people, and that our votes provided a check on the power of our leaders. That’s why we called them “elected.” Or maybe it’s just naïve to think that representative democracy could have worked the way it was presented to us.

The other side – the fascist side – does have an argument to make, and they’ve been making it since Woodrow Wilson was president. Having run on a “peace” campaign, Wilson later decided that America needed to get involved in World War I. So, with the help of one of the great Public Relations masters of all time, Edward Bernays, he created the Creel Commission, whose job was to change America’s mind.

Bernays, like the many political propagandists who followed, honestly believed that the masses are just too stupid to make decisions for themselves – particularly when it involved global affairs or economics. Instead, an enlightened and informed elite (corporate America) needs to make the decisions, and then “sell” them to the public in the form of faux populist media campaigns. This way, the masses feel they are coming up with these opinions, themselves.

Truly populist positions, on the other hand – such as workers’ rights or minority representation – must be recontextualized as the corruption of the public by elite “special interests” or decadent social deviants. Throughout most of history, these scapegoats were the Jews, but now it’s mostly gays and liberals. By distracting the masses with highly emotionally charged issues like flag-burning or gay marriage, those in power consolidate their base of support while developing a new mythology of state as religion.

As long as they do all this, they don’t have to worry about how people vote, or what might be happening on the ground. “Unregulating” the mediaspace turns the fourth estate (the news agencies) into just another arm of the corporate conglomerates that fascism was invented to serve. (Mussolini called it “corporatism,” don’t forget.)

The last and most crucial step in creating a truly seamless fascist order, though, is to frighten the intellectuals, students, and artists from seeing the world as it is and sharing their sensibilities with one another. Hell, calling America’s leaders “a fascist regime” can’t be good for business. The only place I’m allowed to write this way is on my blog or here in Arthur – and neither pays the bills.

Besides: why rock the boat? I may not have the right to vote, anymore, but I’m being kept comfortable enough. Like others of my class, I have a roof over my head. I’m crafty enough to get paid now and again for a book or talk or comic series. And the state is functioning well enough that I can afford a tuna sandwich and walk around my neighborhood eating it without getting whacked with a rock or a grenade. As far as history goes, that’s pretty good.

So was democracy a failed experiment? Should we just let these guys run the country as long as they let us eat? Clearly, they’re not scared of us or what we might be saying about them. In fact, their best argument that we haven’t descended into fascism is the fact that we’re allowed to distribute columns like this one. How could we be living in a totalitarian propaganda state if there are articles pronouncing the same? Because fascism looks different every time around. 1930’s fascism failed because it was too obviously repressive. Today’s fascism works because it has turned the mediaspace into a house of mirrors where nothing is true and everything is permissible. The fact that there are plenty of blogs and even major books saying what’s happening and still it doesn’t matter is proof that it has worked.

But there is hope. It’s not just the radicals and militias who are alarmed, but mainstream congresspeople and government wonks. I, myself, have been approached by two separate government intelligence agencies and three members of congress (of both parties) for help understanding what they already deem to be actionable offenses against the American people by some of our leaders. They are disturbed by the disinformation campaign leading up to the Gulf War, voter fraud, and the way Americans have been frightened into supporting the curtailment of civil rights.

Surprisingly, most of my conversations with these patriotic people involve two main concerns. First, they have been ostracized by their peers for their views. This has created some urgency, for they fear they will not get enough party support for re-election if they don’t succeed in their efforts in the next few months. Second, and more troublingly, they are afraid to disillusion America’s youth. Isn’t there a way to fix this problem, they wonder, without raising an entire generation of Americans in environment of acknowledged voter nullification? And what of our reputation in the world? Which is more damaging to democracy: voter fraud, or the public awareness of voter fraud?

To this, we simply must conclude that the reality of voter fraud is more dangerous than any associated disillusionment. To worry about the impact on public consciousness is to get mired in the logic of public relations – and that’s what got us into this mess to begin with.

It’s time to get real, and either fight (through the courts, if possible) to reinstate the rule of law as established by the Constitution, or accept that Enlightenment-era democracy simply doesn’t work and move into a new phase of government by decree or market forces or whatever it is that comes next.

In any case, it serves no one to have a “pretend democracy” that’s actually something else. I’m going to stop denying what’s going on here, and use what influence I have with lawmakers, government workers, and activists to get them to do the same. Instead of trying to feel better about all this, I’m going to allow myself and everyone around me to feel worse.

Indeed, the bad news is the good news. Total disillusionment, though momentarily painful, is utterly liberating and probably required. Acceptance isn’t acquiescence at all; it’s the first step towards reconnecting with a reality that can and must be changed. If we’re going to get back on the horse, we’ve got to acknowledge that we’ve fallen off.

On neuromarketing.

From PBs’ Frontline/Douglas Rushkoff “The Persuaders” website:

For an ad campaign that started a revolution in marketing, the Pepsi Challenge TV spots of the 1970s and ’80s were almost absurdly simple. Little more than a series of blind taste tests, these ads showed people being asked to choose between Pepsi and Coke without knowing which one they were consuming. Not surprisingly, given the sponsor, Pepsi was usually the winner.

But 30 years after the commercials debuted, neuroscientist Read Montague was still thinking about them. Something didn’t make sense. If people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn’t. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn’t particularly like.

What he found was the first data from an entirely new field: neuromarketing, the study of the brain’s responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape. Montague had his subjects take the Pepsi Challenge while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too. Coke “lit up” the medial prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain that controls higher thinking. Montague’s hunch was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers’ choices. Now, there appeared to be solid neurological proof. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a cottage industry was born.

Neuromarketing, in one form or another, is now one of the hottest new tools of its trade. At the most basic levels, companies are starting to sift through the piles of psychological literature that have been steadily growing since the 1990s’ boom in brain-imaging technology. Surprisingly few businesses have kept tabs on the studies – until now. “Most marketers don’t take a single class in psychology. A lot of the current communications projects we see are based on research from the ’70s,” says Justine Meaux, a scientist at Atlanta’s BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group, one of the first and largest neurosciences consulting firms. “Especially in these early years, it’s about teaching people the basics. What we end up doing is educating people about some false assumptions about how the brain works.”

Getting an update on research is one thing; for decades, marketers have relied on behavioral studies for guidance. But some companies are taking the practice several steps further, commissioning their own fMRI studies ?� la Montague’s test. In a study of men’s reactions to cars, Daimler-Chrysler has found that sportier models activate the brain’s reward centers — the same areas that light up in response to alcohol and drugs — as well as activating the area in the brain that recognizes faces, which may explain people’s tendency to anthropomorphize their cars. Steven Quartz, a scientist at Stanford University, is currently conducting similar research on movie trailers. And in the age of poll-taking and smear campaigns, political advertising is also getting in on the game. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have found that Republicans and Democrats react differently to campaign ads showing images of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Those ads cause the part of the brain associated with fear to light up more vividly in Democrats than in Republicans.

That last piece of research is particularly worrisome to anti-marketing activists, some of whom are already mobilizing against the nascent field of neuromarketing. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a non-profit that argues for strict regulations on advertising, says that “a year ago almost nobody had heard of neuromarketing except for Forbes readers.” Now, he says, it’s everywhere, and over the past year he has waged a campaign against the practice, lobbying Congress and the American Psychological Association (APA) and threatening lawsuits against BrightHouse and other practitioners. Even though he admits the research is still “in the very preliminary stages,” he says it could eventually lead to complete corporate manipulation of consumers — or citizens, with governments using brain scans to create more effective propaganda.

Ruskin might be consoled by the fact that many neuromarketers still don’t know how to apply their findings. Increased activity in the brain doesn’t necessarily mean increased preference for a product. And, says Meaux, no amount of neuromarketing research can transform otherwise rational people into consumption-driven zombies. “Of course we’re all influenced by the messages around us,” she says. “That doesn’t take away free choice.” As for Ruskin, she says tersely, “there is no grounds for what he is accusing.” So far, the regulatory boards agree with her: the government has decided not to investigate BrightHouse and the APA’s most recent ethics statement said nothing about neuromarketing. Says Ruskin: “It was a total defeat for us.”

With Commercial Alert’s campaign thwarted for now, BrightHouse is moving forward. In January, the company plans to start publishing a neuroscience newsletter aimed at businesses. And although it “doesn’t conduct fMRI studies except in the rarest of cases,” it is getting ready to publish the results of a particularly tantalizing set of tests. While neuroscientist Montague’s ‘Pepsi Challenge’ suggests that branding appears to make a difference in consumer preference, BrightHouse’s research promises to show exactly how much emotional impact that branding can have. Marketers have long known that some brands have a seemingly magic appeal; they can elicit strong devotion, with buyers saying they identify with the brand as an extension of their personalities. The BrightHouse research is expected to show exactly which products those are. “This is really just the first step,” says Meaux, who points out that no one has discovered a “buy button” in the brain. But with more and more companies peering into the minds of their consumers, could that be far off?

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"THREE MORE HAMBURGERS UNTIL YOU CAN GO HOME AND WATCH TV."

http://conceptlab.com/simulator/

And, continuing on the theme, here’s something from our
friend Douglas Rushkoff:

A bunch of you have asked, so here’s a copy of something
close to the script that was used for the narration for the CBS Sunday
Morning piece I did that ran last week. As you can see, TV makes for a
more skeletal analysis. But the pictures do help.

Will this year�s buying season be big enough to bail us
out of a recession? Can we somehow get ourselves to consume our way to
economic salvation? Is there a light at the end of this dark night?

    Christmas, like the pagan solstice
holidays that came before it, was put at the end of the year for a reason.
It brings good cheer and some rays of hope to the darkest days of winter.
And now Christmas is being asked to revive not only our spirit, but our
sadly depressed moving averages, daily yields, and GNP.

    We might have days off for Christmas,
but they�re not days off work, at all. In fact, the moment we leave the
office, our real employment as Americans begins: the hard, grueling work
of SHOPPING. It�s time to save the national economy, folks; desperate measures
must be taken.

    Which brings us here. This may look
like an average suburban shopping mall to you — but today�s retail environments
are selling machines engineered to extract the most money per second from
your wallet.

    The science of retail design � what
the industry calls �atmospherics� � was born by accident in 1956, with
the very first shopping mall, �the southdale center� in Minnesota. This
realization of an �indoor main street� provided laboratory conditions for
the study and influence of shopping behavior.

    Psychologists observed that the overwhelming
size and scope of an entirely self-contained universe has a strange effect
on shoppers. It�s called �Gruen Transfer,� named for the designer of the
first shopping mall, Victor Gruen. Gruen Transfer is the moment a person
senses the size the mall � their jaws may open, their eyes may glaze over
for a just a second. And they are transformed from a person who came to
the mall for a purpose, into a shopping drone. Ripe for the next battery
of psychological assaults.

    The first tactic is to keep people
inside the mall � the longer they stay, the more they buy. The key is to
disorient them. At least three turns from parking lot to mall entrance
prevents shoppers from remembering where they�ve put the car. There�s no
way out. Inside, malls are timeless and bland � a strict monotonous palette
throughout.  Early malls were sealed from daylight, like casinos designed
to keep gamblers from realizing how long they�ve been playing. But more
recent testing showed shoppers felt claustrophobic � and stay inside longer
if they are allowed to catch just a glimpse of sky.  Careful lighting
still keeps them from perceiving the passage of time. As the sun goes down,
these lightbulbs slowly fade up. Complex floor plans help keep patrons
from knowing exactly where they are. They�re not supposed to.

    �We want you to get lost,� explained
one leading mall designer.

    You can�t turn right at the ATRIUM
� you have to veer right, each turn disorienting you further. The more
lost you are, the more impulsive purchases you make. What did I come here
for, anyway? So you forgot � it doesn�t matter. As long as you ring up
more total purchases, everyone will be happy.

    Once disorientation is achieved, the
retailers begin their attacks on the senses:

    Start with Sight: Because they�re
lost, patrons use the only images they recognize as anchors: the big-name
department stores. You don�t go �north� � you move towards Macy�s. These
�Anchor� stores are always placed at angles to each other, so that you
can�t see one from the entrance of another. Each anchor presides over its
own section of the mall, like a reigning emperor � and a visual landmark. 
Besides, studies show that a shopper won�t voluntarily travel more than
600 feet, so the hallway has to bend before then.

    Then there�s the sense of Touch: Designers
often use hard floor surfaces in the halls and softer ones inside the store
� gently coaxing customers to come inside if they want their feet to feel
good. Other studies show that women feel more powerful � and buy more �
if they can feel and hear their heels clicking on polished hard wood.

    Which brings us to Sound: We all joke
about �elevator� Muzak � but it works. Dozens of different soundtracks
scientifically engineered to increase the rate at which we purchase products
at any moment of the day � is pumped into the mall and the stores. There�s
a special and tested melody, rhythm and sequence to maximize the efficiency
of any shopping behavior you can imagine.

    Don�t forget taste: Free food lures
strollers into shops. It�s always visible from the corridor.  Eating
food turns customers, quite literally, into consumers.

    They even use Smell: Cookie shops
spread scents throughout the mall, attracting customers from hundreds of
feet away. One study showed that people act nicer � and buy more � when
they can smell baking cookies. More advanced scientists, like those in
the �chemo-reception industry,� test flowers, spices, and synthetics for
their effects on human behavior. Williams Sonoma uses a special holiday
scent. Vanilla helps make people feel sexy � perfect to lower inhibitions
in the lingerie store. But even beyond the fives senses, the most advanced
attacks are on the emotions � and the subconscious.

    Each store has its own carefully researched
theme. They are total environments–stage sets where the brand values become
OUR values. It�s a self-contained world, where retail psychologists can
overwhelm us with the culture of their products. The only way to fit in,
is to buy.

    The stores also hire their own battalions
of behavioral researchers � many of whom use the security cameras to study
consumer behaviors, like an anthropologist studying a tribe in its native
habitat.

    Ever wonder why certain store aisles
are so wide? Chalk it up to the butt-brush. If a woman is brushed up against
while she inspects a product, she�ll get up and move. Items that require
close inspection by women � like scarves and underwear – are put in wider
aisles.

    Want to know why the counters have
gotten so big? Because consumers feel obliged to fill it up with more products
when they�re at the register.

    And that funny way salespeople have
of speaking? It�s all scripted at corporate headquarters. This young man
is doing a technique called GAP-ACT: Greet, Approach, Provide, Add-on,
Close and Thank.

    We�re all just cogs in the machine
�- the shopper, the salesperson, the merchandiser, and even the stockholder
depending on them.  So much for passively earned income. Sorry, friends,
there ain�t no Santa Claus.  We all end up working for it, in the
end. (After all, if people only bought what they actually needed, the entire
American economy would collapse.) I�m Douglas Rushkoff. Happy Holidays.