by
The Baffler
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[...] As digital monopolies steadily enclose whatever still remains of a public sphere, an impressive array of PR professionals have worked overtime to make it all sound liberating and democratic. Press releases gush out of all available servers, print articles and op-eds consistently reminding us not of the use value of their products (useful products, it should be noted, are not a Silicon Valley specialty) but, just as Bernays taught us, of the value of the corporations themselves: the great services they provide, the glorious number of jobs they create, their moral and ethical right-mindedness, and their proper place as the cultural and social pillars of all things American and exceptional—which is to say all things Hayekian and free. Far from simply building brand stories and shaping images, modern public relations is a perverse spin on what Bernays originally imagined the profession to be: it seeks to enshrine a privatized technocracy, swathed in the shallow veneer of a rhetorical, and endlessly fungible, commitment to social justice. And if present trends continue, our digitally administered information state may indeed be poised to finally extinguish the irksome throwback legacy that Bernays and his milieu found so threatening: democracy itself.
this is terrific
The logic of the corporate enclosure of the public sphere is truly a neoliberal wonder to behold. As our power elite steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any broader responsibilities or demands than the mandate to continue amassing ever greater quarterly returns, the rest of us meekly pantomime an odd parody of consent of the governed by focusing inordinate attention on the ever-mythic specter of enlightened corporate political agency. At least, we’ll cry, Twitter and Facebook will de-platform that rabid lunatic Alex Jones—that’s accountability! Or, at a minimum, we’ll plead, Nike will cast Colin Kaepernick in their sneaker campaign—that’s solidarity! Or again, at the very least, we’ll point out, Amazon is bringing jobs to Long Island City—that’s leadership!
In our actually existing consensual reality, it of course matters not a whit that the culture-war sport of celebrating corporate censorship betrays any supposed democratic commitment to protecting the rights of all citizens on an equal basis, subtly charging both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey with the power to decide what is and is not free speech. (“If Trump supporters don’t care about my speech, I don’t care about theirs,” a typical liberal disputant will snort on any given social-media platform, in full Frank Rich dudgeon.) And no matter that Nike, a Hydra of exploitative global supply chains with dubious labor practices, degrades Kaepernick’s protest of racialized police brutality to the inert and content-free mantra “Believe in something”—a funny-except-it’s-not late capitalist parody of empty advertising slogans. (“Say what you will, but Nike is taking a risk and making a powerful statement,” the contented liberal online commentariat will predictably tweet.) Amazon might hold entire cities hostage, dangling jobs in front of desperate mayors in exchange for public cash, private development contracts, and access to municipal security apparatuses, but “only New Yorkers could complain about getting 25,000 jobs,” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost scoffs.
damn this whole piece is so well-written
[...] It’s a wonder that anybody manages to raise any money at all in the whole mad profession, let alone eke out a living.
Of course, management knows all this perfectly well. Gig economy jobs like this—designed to be temporary, ad hoc, offering little in the way of advancement, security, overtime pay, or health insurance—make up about 10 percent of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some places make you sign a contract informing you that you are an “at will” employee—meaning that you could be fired at any time, for any reason, at management’s sole discretion. Working at a job like this felt like a glimpse of the future; the gleaming gears of neoliberalism are grinding us further toward a working situation infinitely more precarious than the sturdy, family-supporting jobs of yesteryear.
In some cases, I’ve heard how new callers are recruited at addiction recovery groups. That can represent a welcome chance at a better life for the addicts in recovery or otherwise traumatized populations. But the strategic decision to target down-and-out souls as entry-level employees has a darker side: not unlike the recruitment of a workforce of undocumented immigrants, it likely ensures that your chosen stream of new workers will be extra pliable in any workplace disputes over their rights. This is far from an abstract problem. I’ve seen plenty of people abruptly booted off the shift because their numbers weren’t up to snuff. Getting the bum’s rush could come for a number of reasons: because they just weren’t great talkers that day, or they were reeling from a couple hours of bad luck, or were dealing with a family or health emergency, which was not at all a rare occurrence, especially given how broke everyone was.
And this is where the ruthless free-market logistics of the place collide with the façade of liberal idealism. At the end of the day, for all the uplifting rhetoric in the scripts about fighting the good fight against the fat cats and the bully Republicans, the motives of our own managers were scarcely any less avaricious. The call centers need to maintain an average of money-raised-per-person-called, under the terms of their contracts with client campaigns. The race-to-the-bottom logic of most campaign deals also means that, in order to be competitive, companies tend to undersell the competition. That means, among other things, they receive the least promising donor lists and call and recall them mercilessly [...]
an interesting example of competition provoking a race to the bottom, where the people who come up with the terms (who make the offer) are not the same people who will have to bear the consequences
A function of this marketable cultural obsession with microcelebrity is classism, which Teen Boss doled out in large supply. It’s fair to say that young people from a range of backgrounds need to find work in order to support themselves, their families, their futures—often as a means of survival. Clearly, however, this publication was not for them; there is a reason it was titled Teen Boss and not Teen Worker, or Teen Paper Route, or even Teen Business: the term “boss” signals power, authority, and elite status. If this appears obvious, just imagine the number of alternative approaches Teen Boss might have taken: a more consciously useful text could have taught preteens about financial literacy, or placed greater emphasis on the kind of off-the-books work that fits into an after-school or weekend schedule. Rather than, say, indoctrinating them into an influencer economy.
lol
“It’s too bad because girls at the ages [Teen Boss] is targeted to, ages eight to eleven, are going through a really tricky developmental moment where they become more withdrawn,” said Melissa Campbell of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) when we spoke by phone in February. Campbell explains that a girl’s self-esteem often plummets around age nine. “A lot of that has to do with whether or not you see yourself as a fully embodied person who is creating something in the world [or] whether you are something to be consumed.”
It’s here—beyond its meme-like absurdity—that Teen Boss reveals its particular strain of parasitic nefariousness: it fed on the developmental vulnerabilities of its young readers. “A magazine like this is really insidious,” Campbell added, “because it makes you think that you’re building your power, because you have a vision, you want to carry it out, you want to make something of yourself—but really what you’re doing is monetizing your experiences [and] setting yourself up to be consumed, literally, through your videos and your content and your personality.” The turn represented by Teen Boss, Campbell concluded, is that it was “being sold to you [as if] you’re embodied and in charge.”
It’s easy to laugh about Teen Boss; to see it as just a passing meme or a joke. But what it represents about the way young people are failed by platform capitalism is a serious concern. The problems with Teen Boss will outlive Teen Boss, and they speak to a society-wide dereliction of responsibility with regard to the effects of predatory tech products on our culture, on our ability to meaningfully hear ourselves and others, and on our willingness to communicate in a way determined by social need and not the profit motive. Vulnerable populations are made more vulnerable under these conditions, including kids and tweens especially.
Capitalism has always exploited and deadened the imagination. Platform capitalism takes this a step further by repackaging this exploitation and selling it as empowerment. By encouraging young people and teenagers to become influencers, these companies push them into a commodified space filled with negative forces that run counter to their interests.
i like the phrasing
“It is just so clear, marketing is terrible for children. It limits their imaginations. It makes them sick,” Campbell told me. “As a kid, you figure out who you are by being around other people. . . . It’s challenging enough to be developing your social relationships on these disembodied platforms. But when all of those platforms are also tracing out the contours of your relationships and trying to figure out who you are and what you want so they can sell more stuff to you,” she continued, “it creates new norms where young people just expect all of their relationships to be commercialized.”
yikes
[...] You are walking through your own dreams, and realizing they are all copyrighted.
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us: we want so badly for what it tells us to be true. Of course we do. Its logic, if real, would describe a world simple enough for us to comfortably believe in. The good will succeed, and the bad will suffer—justly. It’s a beautiful fairy tale, no more complex, and no less seductive, than any of the stories that animate Disney World. And as with Disney World itself, it is easy for us to accept the story that capitalism, when it is working for us, pressures us to buy: the story where it is an effortlessly self-regulating system, and where all of this simply happens, and happens the way it should, because we asked for it, because we paid for it, and because we earned the right to be here in the castle.
ooof
Is it really much of a scam to lie with transparent childishness to the grown-ups around you? The way Moonee and Scooty and eventually Jancy go about getting their ice creams is by telling fibs that reveal the simple truth of their lives: they don’t have any money. And what is the alternative, exactly? Where are these six-year-olds supposed to get the money for an ice cream cone? By going out, getting a job, and earning it, like good kids would do? Or is the only alternative—the only thing that could make them good kids—to have been born to mothers who can give them the money they need?
In America, we are raised to believe that there is something intrinsically sick about criminal behavior. It is always wrong to steal, because what we own makes us who we are, because—the logic goes—we have earned it. To steal what belongs to someone else is to steal their virtue, to defraud them of their very identity. But the logic of this belief system begins to fall apart in a world where money makes more money, where how much wealth you amass has very little to do with how hard you work, and where there are few things more expensive than being poor.
And when so much money is all around you—just outside Idlewild, where Henry Hill came of age; just beyond the frayed strip malls and cracked highways that make up the entrance wound surrounding Disney World—you can also see it as passive to the point of insanity to not reach out and take some of the wealth that passes you by. And if just a little of the money that is flowing and surging and leaping its banks all around you is money that could save you and your child from hunger, from homelessness, from danger you cannot imagine and danger you know all too well—it is difficult to see the immorality in reaching out and taking what you need. Respecting ownership and property the way you were taught to, as a good American, may mean allowing your child to suffer. There are millions of Americans who seem to see no contradiction in this. There are millions more who are wondering, now, how we got to be this way, and beginning also to wonder if we were ever anything else.
i love this