Tag Archives for Douglas Rushkoff

CROWDSOURCING THE BANK RECOVERY by Douglas Rushkoff

Crowdsourcing the Bank Recovery
by Douglas Rushkoff

March 27, 2009

I don’t believe Tim Geithner’s toxic asset auction plan will work to change the basic problem of bank insolvency, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the sheer brilliance and post-partisan nature of the approach.

Most commentators and economists are focusing on the way the plan distributes risk, perhaps unfairly—with the government guaranteeing most losses while giving hedge funds and investors half of the gains. But that misses the point of the whole thing.

The underlying problem with the toxic assets currently on the books of most banks is that no one knows quite how to value them. (Their market value is very low right now—lower than most believe it should be. This is what is meant by “mark to market.” In time, when things are better and the world is generally less risk-averse, they should be worth more. Most banks need their balance sheets to look better now, and they can’t while they have these—perhaps artificially—deflated securities on their books).

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LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy (Arthur online, 2009)

Originally published online March 15, 2009

“Final Bell” by Arik Roper

(UPDATE: “Hack Money, Hack Banking” by Douglas Rushkoff, the March 20 follow-up to “Let It Die,” is available here.)

LET IT DIE
by Douglas Rushkoff

March 15, 2009

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

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NO MONEY DOWN: Rushkoff on the rigged credit system (Arthur, 2008)

NO MONEY DOWN
by Douglas Rushkoff

Illustration by Arik Roper

from Arthur Magazine No. 31, Oct 2008

I poked my head up from writing my book a couple of months ago to engage with Arthur readers about the subject I was working on: the credit crunch and what to do about it [see “Riding Out the Credit Crisis” in Arthur No. 29/May 2008]. I got more email about that piece than anything I have written since a column threatening to defect from the Mac community back in the Quadra days.

Many readers thought I was hinting at something under the surface—a conspiracy, of sorts, to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. It sounded to many like I was describing an economic system actually designed—planned—to redistribute income in the worst possible ways.

I guess I’d have to agree with that premise. Only it’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s an overt one, and playing out in full view of anyone who has time (time is money, after all) to observe it.

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

keynote_ban.jpg

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year—a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom.

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IT BEARS REPEATING: Rushkoff on the credit crisis (Arthur Magazine, May 2008)

“Riding Out the Credit Crisis” by Douglas Rushkoff

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

There’s two kinds of people asking me about the economy lately: people with money wanting to know how to keep it “safe,” and people without money, wanting to know how to keep safe, themselves.

Maybe it’s the difference between those two concerns that best explains the underlying nature of today’s fiscal crisis.

Is what’s going on in the economy right now really worse than anything that’s happened in the past few decades? Are we heading towards a bank collapse like what happened in 1929? Or something even worse?

On a certain level, none of these questions really matter. Not as they’re being phrased, anyway. What we think of as “the economy” today isn’t real, it’s virtual. It’s a speculative marketplace that has very little to do with getting real things to the people who need them, and much more to do with providing ways for passive investors to grow their capital.

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"Net Loss" by Douglas Rushkoff

(intended for publication in the cancelled Arthur Vol. 1, No. 26 [March 2007])

NET LOSS
by Douglas Rushkoff

I’m a bit down on the Internet these days.

Sure, a lot of it has to do with that obsequiously pandering Time magazine cover—the one with the little mirror on it telling us all that each of us is the “person of the year.” That is, each of us connected to the Internet and throwing our photos and personal consumer histories up on the web for everyone to see. We’re supposedly undergoing a revolution because now, instead of paying for movie tickets, we can pay for computers, hard drives and access time—often to the very same media conglomerate we think we’re ripping off.

And some of my misgivings have to do with a recent mistake I made myself, posting to my weblog the fact that I had gotten mugged, and how that had caused me to reflect on my own participation in the gentrification of my part of Brooklyn. Diehard Brooklynites (no doubt harboring mixed feelings about whoever they may have displaced in order to live here and make it “cool” instead) went on something of a rampage against me, posting all sorts of nonsense on bulletin boards about how Rushkoff was leaving Park Slope because he’d got mugged. A few real-world newspapers even quoted fake postings in the comments section of my blog, mistakenly attributing those posts to me.

Adding insult to injury, some Zionist extremists (or their paid online shills) who don’t like me took the opportunity to create a “sock mob” effect —a term I coined to describe how one or two people can post dozens or even hundreds of comments online under different pseudonyms to make it look like there’s a mob of people agreeing to hate a particular person or idea. (Think Swift Boat Veterans, on a much smaller scale.)

So the Internet—the place where I actually grew up as a thinker and writer—was no longer a safe place for me to engage with others about the ideas that are most personally important to me. Even the “discussion” in the unmoderated comments section of my blog could at a moment’s notice turn as mean, vitriolic and ultimately fake as any conversation taking place anywhere online. The Internet didn’t elevate our discourse—it left us in the same pit we were in to begin with. In fact, the ability to conceal one’s identity, combined with the ability to attack others without ever looking them in the eye, has made discourse on the Internet even more prone to cruelty than in real life.

Meanwhile, on a daily basis, my inbox fills with messages from people I know and people I don’t. Everyone expects an answer from me the same way they expect an answer from the customer service department of the Gap. At least from me they get one. But am I making the most considered response I can? Of course not— for the most part, I’m simply trying to get through the stack of email and respond as sufficiently as necessary. But that’s not the way I want to interact with anyone—even if they’re treating me like the complaints desk. And it undermines the quality of the remaining exchanges with people whose queries really do merit consideration and response.

And all this keyboard activity has become quite draining. Back in the ’90s, I would log off the Well or a Usenet board feeling exhilarated by what I had learned and who I had “met.” Today I can’t get off the Internet fast enough. It’s as if my very chi is being absorbed by this pulsing datastructure—an avatar of the combined will of both humanity and the marketplace on each one of us.

We can’t help but want to respond when people reach out to us by email or on a discussion board—after all, there’s a real person on the other end of each transmission. But for me, anyway, it feels as if the transmissions themselves have been stripped of all prana—of all the nutrients otherwise associated with organic exchange. Think of the difference between teaching a person in a real bar how to play pool, and describing to someone in an email “how to play pool.” Almost the same information can be exchanged, but without any contact. Now, it’s not the lechery of live pool instruction I miss. Not exactly. What I miss is what one gets back during an exchange in person. The joy, the contact, the full range of subtle communication, is gone.

I’d argue that the data we’re exchanging —from pool lessons to political theories—are themselves just media for our social interactions. Yes, it’s great to have a cause to rally around, but for the most part these causes are excuses to rally. In our highly rational, highly time-pressured schedules, we need excuses to be with each other, from the woman taking a French class in the hopes of finding a husband to the guy taking yoga to check out girls in tight sweats. Somehow, the Internet convinces us that the content we’re exchanging is the end in itself—when it’s actually just a means to an end. And that end will never be found online.

I’ve been saying since the late ’80s—before the Internet really existed—that our networks are not a thing in themselves. They are a trial run, a social experiment: a way of practicing collective social engagement so that we might see whether or not such a thing is possible in real life. The Internet of the early to mid-’90s really was such a collaborative space, and a few of the projects that remain from those days, from Wikipedia to Craig’s List, still bear some resemblance to that earliest ethos of provisional collectivism.

But Wikipedia has now fallen victim, to some extent, to politicians and others with agendas, who change entries about their opposition to make them look bad. And Craig’s List has become increasingly difficult to patrol for scams and ruthless profiteers. Each organization has to spend more time and resources preventing abuse than it does doing the thing it originally set out to do. And that’s pretty much the definition of the “point of diminishing returns.”

I’m not signing off the Internet just yet. I need it for all the same reasons all of us do. But I no longer assume as much about the experiences I’m going to have online as I used to. I don’t take for granted the existence of a community on the other side the screen. I don’t read my email before my morning coffee—I wait until I’ve got my best psychological defense mechanisms in place. I don’t socialize online; I make appointments to socialize (as time allows these days) offline in some real place. Or even on the phone, which feels intimate compared to the asynchronous communication via computer screen.

I still refuse to believe the experiment in developing a virtual culture has failed. Even if the Internet doesn’t foster the gentle, compassionate, and open-minded society we might like to see in the real world, its descent into heated polarities, exhibitionism and profiteering should serve as an example of how even our best intentions can be undone. It makes us aware of how easily manipulated we are, how prone we are to excitation of the basest kind and how desperately we want attention from others. That is, each of the things we may dislike about the Internet—from its extreme forms of marketing to the cruelty and humiliation that pass as entertainment—are merely exaggerations of our tendencies in real life. But the Internet allows those tendencies to be rebroadcast and absorbed by us as if they were real—and they go on to influence the actions of individuals, organizations, corporations and governments in the real world.

People see an erroneous, venomous post somewhere, and can’t help but take in some part of that sentiment as justified or factual. Hell, I’m still getting emails from friends asking why I’m moving to Long Island, or why I denied the Holocaust—both completely fictitious constructions of anonymous Internet users that nevertheless trickle back out from the virtual world into the real one. A music reviewer I know became the recipient of death threats by phone and email after a band whose album she panned invited its fans—via their website—to go on the rampage. And we writers are a hell of a lot less victimized by these sorts of fabrications than the artists, scholars and activists who really stick their necks out, from Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky to Tony Kushner and Al Gore.

The more monstrous thought-forms constructed online needn’t be allowed to feed back into the real world any more than the monsters of our nightmares need to invade our waking lives. They only lead to equally artificial extremes of thought and behavior — dangerously divorced from local, organic and social moderation. They grow into false polarities like the red-state/blue-state divide; they foment antagonism over religion and race; and they give license to the most ruthless marketers and profiteers.

Rather, we must remember that the expressions thriving in the online universe have been divorced of their connection to the flesh, the heart, and the neo-cortex.

Consumed in their raw form, many of them are toxic.

"The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel" by Douglas Rushkoff, from Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006

“The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel”
by columnist Douglas Rushkoff

(Originally published in Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006)

This has been a very bizarre couple of weeks for me. I changed literary agents, did a bookstore discussion/debate with former Arthur columnist Daniel Pinchbeck, learned of Robert Anton Wilson’s dire end-of-life financial predicament, and then left my wife and 21-month-old daughter to fly to Germany (where I am right now, stuck in an airport thanks to a canceled flight) to give a talk to a big magazine conglomerate about what makes their publications relevant in a mediaspace fast migrating online.

And I’ve found myself alternatively inspired and unnerved, about each and every one of these events. I feel their connection on an emotional level —as if the microcosm in which I’m participating reflects a greater theme. Like an archipelago, this seemingly disconnected string of islands is all connected beneath the surface. And that connection is about how we make value—for ourselves and one another.

Take the Pinchbeck event. Now it’s no secret to Arthur readers that he and I come from different ends of the spiritual spectrum. When he was writing columns in these pages about channeling the wisdom of Quetzalcoatl, I was warning the same readers not to take any prophecy too seriously—and certainly not literally. Then, I ran into Daniel in a coffeeshop just a week after a particularly critical screed on him and the “psychedelic elite” came out in Rolling Stone—an article in which I was quoted on the value of communities over heroes.

We concluded that a face-to-face discussion was in order, and figured we might as well do it in public. So Daniel asked a bookstore where he was scheduled to speak if we could turn it into a two-man show. Almost as soon as the discussion was announced, email started coming in, asking how I was going to “take him on” or “take him out”—the assumption being that we’d have a take-no-prisoners debate. And while I’m certain we’ve pissed each other off over the years, I thought the point of mixing it up a bit would be to learn something from one another. Find common ground. Meanwhile, we’d end up bringing together a rather unlikely audience of media students, recent Burning Man returnees, psychedelics enthusiasts and comics readers. In business terms, we were “creating value” for one another and our separate readerships by introducing them to each other.

I’ll admit, the event both inspired and disturbed me. Sure, the assembled crowd was varied and eager. But the conversation itself was too competitive, no matter how I intended otherwise. All I meant to show was that we each have our own reality tunnels – and that no matter how spectacularly “real” something may appear, especially on super-strong shamanic entheogens, it’s just one metaphor for whatever it is that might really be going on. None of us knows what happens when we die, whether there’s anything or anyone else “out there,” or whether the connections we seem to perceive all around us are conspiring or coincidental.

Daniel tended to dismiss my points he disagreed with as “thoughts,” to which I finally snapped that “everything we’re saying is just thoughts, buddy.” I leave it to you to choose who of us is more Zen, but my lasting impression of the conversation was that we didn’t quite transcend the zero-sum game as I had imagined we would. It was still just two white guys with microphones, competing for mindshare and the marketshare that goes along with it. Had I been used simply to get more people to show up at his book signing? Was I seeing in him the qualities I dislike in myself? Why should such misgivings even arise?

Then came word from a truer pioneer of mind and cosmos than either of us, Robert Anton Wilson: his post-polio syndrome had gotten worse, and the attendant medical bills combined with some trouble with the IRS had tapped him out. He was three days away from not being able to make his rent.

Say what? Robert Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising, the guy who put the number 23 on the map, and delightfully upgraded the minds of thousands if not millions, forever, could no longer support himself? For those who may be unfamiliar with his work, Wilson is the man who put the many insights of Sixties into perspective. By approaching the seeming interconnectedness of everything with a grain of salt and two grains of humor, he’s helped to demonstrate the value of seeing one’s own reality tunnel for what it is: a limited take on a much greater whole. Rather than getting lost in any particular tunnel (or, worse, pushing it on other people) the object of the game was to learn to move between them.

On learning of his predicament, I felt an anger welling up. I refused to be a member of a generation that could allow an author and philosopher of his caliber to die penniless in a state hospital, so I dashed out a blog post (http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/10/robert-anton-wilson-needs-our-help.php) alerting the “community,” along with Bob’s Paypal address (olgaceline@gmail.com). Thanks to a link from BoingBoing.net, we raised over $68,000 dollars in just the first couple of days, along with a few hundred heartfelt testimonials in the comments section.

But there was a second thread in the comments section that disturbed me. “How do we know this is not a hoax?” some people were asking. Indeed, I wondered. How do I prove I’m not a scam artist of some kind, putting up my own Paypal address? This is the Internet, after all. Further down in the comments, someone had posted the response I might have been embarrassed to make for myself: “just look at Rushkoff’s site and his work.”

And that’s when the value of “reputation”—what business folks call “brand”—actually made sense to me as a good thing rather than just some ego trip. The fact that I’ve been writing books for 15 years and have been hosting an online community of one sort or another for nearly as long has earned me the trust required to communicate an urgent fact and have it believed. At least by enough people to make a difference.

While by far the majority of comments and email since then have been very positive both towards Bob and about the effort to keep him solvent and cared for, there’s plenty of cynicism out there, too. “Why should he get cared for over some other sick and poor person?” one egalitarian asked. “He should have managed his money better,” another complained to me (like I have time to read emails from people who have decided not to help Bob when I can barely process the ones from people looking to help). “I already paid him when I bought his book,” explained another, who best exemplified the trend. It’s the logic of a perverted sort of libertarianism —one that can’t see beyond its own very limited notion of the competitive marketplace.

For even if we use the raw logic of the market, Bob is simply being paid back for the value he created. Those of us who are contributing to Robert Anton Wilson now are still, in effect, paying residuals on what we got from him. We’ve all bought plenty of twenty-dollar books—but few have been worth as much to us as Bob’s. The works generated value for us over time, and we see fit to share this wealth in the form of cash energy with the person who created it for us. This is not the order of a free market economy, but of what might better be called a free market ecology.

“Economics” is based on the assumption that people act in ways that maximize their wealth as individuals. It holds true for many situations. All else being equal, we’ll buy products at the best price we can get them and take the highest wage we can find. The assumption is that we act out of selfishness—and economics is just its rational application. Under the laws of economics, we wouldn’t pay for the same book twice.

An ecology, on the other hand, though wildly competitive and occasionally just as cruel as any economy, is based on interdependency. The members of a coral reef or slime mold know how to take coordinated action when it’s called for. The shit of one organism is fertilizer for another. An ecology still operates under the assumption of maximizing wealth, but of the whole collective organism —and over time.

By refusing to let Robert Anton Wilson die penniless, we—as a culture, or at least part of a culture—are caring for a certain kind of thinking and activity, even if this is after the fact. By doing so, we not only acknowledge to Robert Anton Wilson the tremendous contributions he made to our lives, but we have the opportunity to reaffirm the same thing to ourselves. Like college alumni who reinforce their own positive feelings about their alma maters when they make donations to keep the institution going, we publicly affirm the value of Bob’s legacy —thus making it more valuable or at least less dismissible for a society bent on recontextualizing the Sixties, psychedelia and mental adventurousness as an embarrassing phase.

Just look at the recent spate of articles accompanying the tenth anniversary of Timothy Leary’s death, as well as Bob Greenfield’s recent biography. These writers are all-too ready to condemn Leary for his undeniably self-centered personality, but all-too reluctant to acknowledge his even more powerfully compassionate, activist nature that spurred him to sacrifice pretty much everything for his vision of an intelligent human species that needn’t destroy itself. It’s as if embracing our inner “hope fiend” is as uncool today as, I dunno, believing that anyone who sets pen to paper or text to a blog is doing it for an ulterior, profit-based motive.

And all this is what I attempted to explain to the magazine executives in Germany yesterday. At their best, magazines —like any cultural product—serve their audiences not merely through their own value, but by allowing their readers to create value for themselves and one another. Sure, this means understanding that a magazine’s true customers are the readers, not the advertisers—a lesson that quality pay-TV is fast teaching their ad-based broadcast counterparts.

It’s also why I changed agents. Not because the first one was bad in any way, but because I met one who challenged me to consider what I thought was the most significant contribution to the world, rather than what might be expected to sell the most out of the gate. This is not the way most people who call themselves “literary agents” speak. It’s economics in reverse; not “how can I get the most value from my efforts,” but “how can I create the most value for everyone through them?”

Those of us dedicated to keeping Robert Anton Wilson’s flesh and finale as dignified as possible are rewarding a great writer for never selling out. But this ethos must not end with the passage of this individual, however heroic—not when he’s given us so many of the tools required to turn this society’s notion of value inside-out. If we’ve learned anything through all this, it’s that the universe we’re creating together needn’t be one where no good deed is left unpunished.

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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