Karl Marx, the Lutheran whose family had converted from Judaism, was key to the “secularization” and deracinating of the age-old contempt and suspicion held toward money and merchantry.
Marx did not succeed completely in his mission: before him, and into the present day, class division has taken on distinctly ethnic overtones, simply because the merchants are usually from minority nationalities. Throughout Europe, it was the Ashkenazim, from which Marx himself descended, who were disproportionately involved in trade. In the Near East, it was the Christian Armenians that dominated money and markets, while descendants of Arab-Muslim conquerors were predominate in trade in the Far East. The “overseas” Chinese, based out of Pacific Asia, have been disproportionately numerous in business in that region, and latterly in the western coasts of Canada and the United States, which also hosts a business class where Muslims from the Middle East, Jews from Europe and Armenians from Africa and the Near East (as well as those from the Subcontinent) are again found in trade more frequently than the strict proportions of these minorities in the general population.
The apparent universality of “stranger” or minority populations involved disproportionately in trade, stems from several causes. For one, minorities may be forbidden outright from standard occupations, such as farming or handicrafts, as well as the law, medicine and so on. Trade has always been considered, by the high and low, as so disreputable that only despised minorities were left to it. However, simple discrimination in this fashion is not sufficient for a minority population to survive in business. There are many minorities who remain penniless, but for their possession of religious beliefs of a lesser or greater ascetic import, which is shared in common with all or most of the minority-trading populations cited above. It is true of the Ashkenazi Jews, as of the Armenian Christians; the Muslims of the Far-East and modern-day Europe and North America, as well as the Hindu and Islamic Subcontinentals who live in the Occident today. The Overseas Chinese are adherents of Confucianism, which alike with Buddhism, expresses the ascetic aspect of Asiatic religiosity. This is of course paradoxical. Why is trade, supposedly based on greed and chicanery, so associated with the ascetic faiths of inconvenience? It is precisely the self-discipline and energy of the ethical and ascetic, which makes them so right for business.
As a rule, too, minority-trader populations are “homeless”, possessing no proper place of origin, being neither from here or from there. This is literally the case with the Jews of Europe, as well as the Armenians, who each lost their homelands thousands or hundreds of years ago. The Muslim descendants of the Arab conquerors were, by the time of the collapse of the power of the Caliphate, so integrated into the societies of those whom they had conquered, that the Arab language itself was lost or had evolved completely into a new tongue, and the Muslims themselves had become Asiatic in appearance. This holds true, to a lesser extent, with the Overseas Chinese, especially in the Pacific Asia home-base. However, for racial, ethnic or religious reasons, the minority populations are not considered a part of the host society. They instead sought a base of power outside what was acceptable to most — in trade. And, for this reason, virtually all the trader-minority populations mentioned, have been subjected to varying degrees of assault and despisal, especially when times were bad.
Karl Marx, the convert who was so darkly-complected that his nickname was “The Moor”, and who moreover came from a milieu familiar with money and markets (his father was a lawyer, but his uncle founded in Holland what became Phillips Electronics, and of course his partner was Freddy Engels, the Manchester factory-owner), sought to channel the natural hostility of the masses toward the merchant class, entirely away from ethnic and racial conceptions. His dialectical philosophy taught that all human beings were defined essentially not by race, religion, ethnicity or sex, but by class: either bourgeois or proletarian. These groups formed, as it were, separate and antagonistic “nations” that were (or would become) global in reach.
It is obvious that this is not the case, that members of bourgeoisie and of the proletariat define themselves foremost by nationality, ethnicity, gender, and so on, before they see themselves as middle- or working-class (this is dismissed by Marxists as an aspect of “false consciousness”). However, it is true more generally that participation in trade and (especially) industry in modern times has been characterized less so by ethnic or religious minority-status. In virtually all industrialized countries, the nationality, ethnicity and religion of the bourgeoisie was broadly the same as the proletariat. But this general statement disguises the fact that, very often, religious or national minorities were more predominant in capitalist trade given their share of the total population.
During the industrial revolution in Britain, for example, Dissenters from the Church of England were far over-represented among the nascent capitalist class, compared to their overall population. Dissenters were Protestants, but belonged to other than the official denomination, which meant their full participation in civic life was curtailed or forbidden (no holding of elective office, for example). In Scotland, industrialization was carried out mainly by those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, as compared to the proletarian descendants of the Celtic Highlanders (including the minority Scots Catholic population). Calvinist Anglo-Scots have in turn, been predominant in modern business throughout England itself, and in Ulster, Canada and the United States. In Germany, Max Weber famously observed that “Protestants eat well, while Catholics sleep well,” indicating the predominance of the former in business and the professions, the latter among the working-classes. In Germany, too, secular or convert Jews were again over-represented in trade and merchantry, notoriously to fall victim to Nazism because of it.
The reality of the prevalence, or outright dominance, of ethnic and religious minorities in the ranks of the merchantry, is confounding to the respective views of human nature held by Marxists, on the one hand, and by monetarists, on the other. Far from being, by definition, rational benefit-maximisers, as argued by classical liberals, people only take to trade as a primary way of life, under extraordinary social circumstances. It is the ascetic value placed on “saving for another day”, which paradoxically makes capital accumulation possible. But this is upsetting, in turn, to the Marxian assumption that, in the first place, capital accumulation is not dependent upon ethno-cultural particularities, and that it is impossible for the dispossessed to get ahead by saving and risk-taking.
All the religious and ethnic minorities that were, ultimately, noted for their shrewdness in business, were originally in wretched straits. It was precisely their denial of full participation in the feudal-tributary economy, which forced the minorities into trade, and thus, subsequent wealth. Under capitalism, it is possible to get ahead; but success and sagacity in business requires a particular socio-cultural conditioning, and is not otherwise intuitive. In reality, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century occurred against a particular social and cultural background. Ascetic religion, the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, thrived especially in nordic Europe (essentially, Britain, the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, as well as Scandinavia) during the early-modern centuries. Protestantism was successfully transplanted from there to northern America, as well as other outports throughout the world (southern Africa as well as Australia and New Zealand). True asceticism was the province of but a minority of the pious, but the values of hard work and sobriety in conduct and manners, were broadly held throughout English-speaking and other nordic-European societies.
Anglophone society as well, had a tradition of free labour, extant since long before the advent of factory-employment. This together allowed Britain to pioneer a factory-based economy, a process repeated on a far more grandiose scale in the United States. In Britain and the United States, industrialization was hardly trouble-free, but not marked by the sort of social and class division that characterized the factory revolutions in France and elsewhere in Europe. Although even in the English-speaking world, trade and commerce was dominated by those of ascetic denominations and ethnicities, the general embrace of Protestantism allowed those of lower station to make something of themselves, as long as they were ready to adopt monastic habits themselves.
Showing posts with label Industrial Capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Industrial Capitalism. Show all posts
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Personal Computers, the Internet, and the "New Economy"
The history of the personal computer’s infiltration into almost every home is a quixotic one.
The Xerox corporation did, as early as 1971, develop a prototype personal computer, complete with a graphical-user interface, and a handheld device that later came to be known as the mouse. The company shelved any plan to sell it, judging the market to be too small. The first successful personal computer was marketed by a small startup, Apple computer. But the Apple II remained a boutique product, purchased only by those with an avid interest in computing.
The PC became attractive beyond this demographic, only when a relatively low-cost model was introduced by International Business Machines — the behemoth that was founded in 1888, long before the invention of the electronic computer itself. IBM originated the punched-card method of high-speed inventory in the nineteenth century, and the company (which was not renamed International Business Machines until 1924, taking its name from the Canadian subsidiary) successfully exploited the latest innovations in information technology, before and after the invention of the modern computer, to become one of the largest companies in the world (complete with its own company town).
From punched-cards, IBM moved on to the super-computers of the 1950s and ‘60s, with almost all of its business going to government or other large corporations. At the beginning of the 1980s, its executives sensed a great opportunity in shifting to the consumer marketplace. The company, with so much capital at its disposal, simply updated the old industrial method, going back long before Henry Ford, of manufacturing by assembly line on a scale great enough, to make the device affordable to the worker that manufactured it. The IBM personal computer — “The PC” as it came to be known — was judged inferior to its main competitor (the Apple, and later the “Mac” or Macintosh PC), but its relative cheapness could not be overcome in the mass market.
Moreover, the PC’s software was “open” to the degree that any startup firm could create programs for it (again unlike the Apple, which came with most common software pre-loaded). Apparently, however, IBM, a company with several hundred thousand employees, did not have the expertise on-hand to quickly create the necessary software (what came to be known as the disc-operating system) to make a personal computer functional. After they were unwisely turned down by Apple computer, IBM then turned to an obscure Washington state firm, Micro-Soft.
That company’s president, Bill Gates, was no computing genius, but had great business sense. His firm did not, however, actually have the necessary software, nor apparently, the expertise to write it. Micro-Soft discreetly purchased a different software firm’s “quick and dirty” operating system, patching it up as best they could before passing it off to IBM as their own work. The latter company was not able to purchase MS-DOS, however, instead licencing it from Micro-Soft. It was thus how Gates was able to leverage his very small firm into the biggest corporation in the world, ultimately dwarfing IBM. It was, again, old-fashioned business methods, instead of the superiority of the product on offer, which allowed Microsoft to become such a monstrosity, and Gates the world’s richest man.
Very different than the “new economy” described by some, Gates’ rise was almost a parody of the saga of the robber barons of the “gilded” age. Microsoft not only managed to become a monopoly interest in a key product, but Gates (like Carnegie and Rockefeller) ultimately turned to philanthropy in penance for his fifty-billion dollar fortune.
The Macintosh computer, the first successful graphical-user interface PC, is held in reverent esteem for it user-friendliness. The great costs of designing and manufacturing the GUI-PC nearly bankrupted Apple computer, however, such that its bohemian operatives were compelled to accept the leadership of an old business hand, someone heretofore uninvolved with the computing industry. Thereafter, its founder (Steve Jobs) was kicked out of the company. Again, however, the ultimate standard graphical-user PC was not the Mac, but the IBM model with its substandard Microsoft Windows operating system, which came out a couple of years after the Mac was first marketed in 1984. Mass-manufacturing won out over the boutique model, once again.
Given the plain facts of the development of the computer industry in the last few decades, it is hard to understand the credence given to the notion that computing will somehow overcome the difficulties associated with the “bricks and mortar” economy. The computer itself became a staple precisely through economies-of-scale and standardization-of-product, old-fashioned methods that information technology was supposedly going to supersede. For many years now, IBM has been but a minor player in the personal computer hardware market. Its place was taken by other manufacturers, such as Dell computer, which followed the IBM model by manufacturing on a mass scale (often in low-wage countries such as Mexico).
The new-economy utopians somehow convinced themselves that information-processing would, on it own, cause the lion to nestle up to the lamb, and the conflicts and stresses associated with the “industrial” age, would disappear. As to the value of software as opposed to hardware (ie. “bits and bites” as opposed to “bricks and mortar” — as though the latter were the most advanced material of industrial age), software only became valuable when the hardware on which it runs was mass-produced to be cheap enough to the common household. The biggest computer companies in the world — IBM, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell — are makers of hardware, not software. The exception is, of course, the biggest company in the world, Microsoft. But, as mentioned, Microsoft became so large because it had (and maintains) a proprietary hold on the computer operating system — essentially the interface between the hardware and software of the personal computer.
Besides, as the Economist noted in the 1990s, a good chunk of Microsoft’s profits has come from the sale of hardware, such as mice and other peripherals (which operated best, naturally, under the MS-Windows system). Initially, independent software producers such as WordPerfect and Lotus were able to make millions off their “killer” applications (in word-processing and spreadsheets, respectively). But inevitably, Microsoft itself introduced copycat software programs, which eventually marginalized both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 as the standard applications. Because Word and Excel (the MS spreadsheet program) were integrated into the Windows programming, they were easier to learn and manipulate than either WordPerfect or 1-2-3. However, after the introduction of the Windows Chicago system in 1995 (like the IBM PC fourteen years earlier, the initial sale of “Windows 95" was introduced by a massive advertising campaign which included the multimillion-dollar licencing of the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up), direct sales of operating-system software became relatively small.
Mostly, Windows 95 and its successors came pre-loaded on virtually all PC’s that were sold, anywhere in the world. The fee paid for this privileged was incorporated into the cost of the computer itself. In fact, software became less and less valuable, the more accessible computer hardware became during the 1990s. The number of people using any particular software program, was far greater than the number who actually purchased it, directly or through the purchase of a computer, due to software “piracy.” And courtesy other innovations in computer hardware, involving the digital recording (“ripping”) of writeable compact discs, which made not only software programs easily distributable, but also made commercially-sold compact discs subject to piracy.
When the resulting digital-encoding of songs was made available through the peer-to-peer networks of the Internet, it ultimately caused the collapse of the value of the software of the music and movie industries in the general marketplace. Software producers have gone to great lengths to guard against software piracy, often causing problems with programs themselves. The failure of Microsoft’s ballyhooed Windows Millennium operating system, was largely due to problems caused by excessive security safeguards.
A publicly-accessible Internet became possible only after computing was made a household appliance via traditional methods of manufacturing and marketing. As mentioned, the Internet resulted from the needs of the U.S. defence department to build a computer network that was (relatively) safe from enemy nuclear attack. The Internet is, at its base, a triumph of hardware, not software, with its revolutionary method of simultaneously fragmenting, replicating, and then reassembling data between any two nodes on a network.
Again, without the subsidy provided by the government and universities, this hardware would not have been developed at all. Moreover, it took twenty-five years following its invention, before the Internet was made available, by commercial means, to the general public. At first, commercial network service providers, such as CompuServe and America On-Line, resisted the adoption of Internet technology and protocols. Even Microsoft had, at first, planned to construct its own network while setting up its online service.
As for the tiny, mostly local Internet service providers that sprang up in major centres in North
America and Europe around 1994 (when the development of the World Wide Web made going online a graphic experience), were remarkable for not being very profitable at all. Eventually, these startups went belly-up, or merged into ever-bigger regional and national companies. Eventually, long-established telecoms and cable-TV firms swallowed up most of the independent Internet service providers. As for the hardware side, the market for Internet equipment was for a long period held by one company, Cisco Systems, which continues to hold the lion’s share even now. This dominance of a single entity, whether Cisco, Microsoft and Intel, of each niche in the computer industry, is of course more similar to nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism than the vision of the twenty-first, as offered by the new-economy prophets.
There is, in fact, good reason why virtual-monopoly concerns would come to predominate the computer industry, on the hardware and software ends. As the Economist also noted at the beginning of the tech boom, widespread networked computing depends upon the adoption of an operating standard. Thus, either all players had to agree to the hardware and software standards in the beginning (which, as we know, they did not), or a single commercial provider would come to dominate a market so completely, as to shut out all other players (which is what in fact occurred).
During the nineteenth century, the cutthroat practices of Gould, Rockefeller, Edison and other robber barons, made available to the common lot thousands of goods and services. Would the oil, railway, electrical, telephone and other industries have been better served by a situation of perfect or ruinous competition? This is what in fact prevailed in the early years of most machine-technological industries from the nineteenth century on. Engineered technology, on the other hand, seems to promote oligopoly, and even monopoly. This was even more true of computer-engineering than the “industrial era” technologies of railway and motorcar. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, as advances in computer-engineering led to always-fresh opportunities for commercial exploitation, hundreds of thousands of startup firms have come and gone, with a relative handful, such as Micro-Soft, becoming behemoths. Monopolists such as Bill Gates and Andy Grove made computing available to the masses, for better or worse.
The Xerox corporation did, as early as 1971, develop a prototype personal computer, complete with a graphical-user interface, and a handheld device that later came to be known as the mouse. The company shelved any plan to sell it, judging the market to be too small. The first successful personal computer was marketed by a small startup, Apple computer. But the Apple II remained a boutique product, purchased only by those with an avid interest in computing.
The PC became attractive beyond this demographic, only when a relatively low-cost model was introduced by International Business Machines — the behemoth that was founded in 1888, long before the invention of the electronic computer itself. IBM originated the punched-card method of high-speed inventory in the nineteenth century, and the company (which was not renamed International Business Machines until 1924, taking its name from the Canadian subsidiary) successfully exploited the latest innovations in information technology, before and after the invention of the modern computer, to become one of the largest companies in the world (complete with its own company town).
From punched-cards, IBM moved on to the super-computers of the 1950s and ‘60s, with almost all of its business going to government or other large corporations. At the beginning of the 1980s, its executives sensed a great opportunity in shifting to the consumer marketplace. The company, with so much capital at its disposal, simply updated the old industrial method, going back long before Henry Ford, of manufacturing by assembly line on a scale great enough, to make the device affordable to the worker that manufactured it. The IBM personal computer — “The PC” as it came to be known — was judged inferior to its main competitor (the Apple, and later the “Mac” or Macintosh PC), but its relative cheapness could not be overcome in the mass market.
Moreover, the PC’s software was “open” to the degree that any startup firm could create programs for it (again unlike the Apple, which came with most common software pre-loaded). Apparently, however, IBM, a company with several hundred thousand employees, did not have the expertise on-hand to quickly create the necessary software (what came to be known as the disc-operating system) to make a personal computer functional. After they were unwisely turned down by Apple computer, IBM then turned to an obscure Washington state firm, Micro-Soft.
That company’s president, Bill Gates, was no computing genius, but had great business sense. His firm did not, however, actually have the necessary software, nor apparently, the expertise to write it. Micro-Soft discreetly purchased a different software firm’s “quick and dirty” operating system, patching it up as best they could before passing it off to IBM as their own work. The latter company was not able to purchase MS-DOS, however, instead licencing it from Micro-Soft. It was thus how Gates was able to leverage his very small firm into the biggest corporation in the world, ultimately dwarfing IBM. It was, again, old-fashioned business methods, instead of the superiority of the product on offer, which allowed Microsoft to become such a monstrosity, and Gates the world’s richest man.
Very different than the “new economy” described by some, Gates’ rise was almost a parody of the saga of the robber barons of the “gilded” age. Microsoft not only managed to become a monopoly interest in a key product, but Gates (like Carnegie and Rockefeller) ultimately turned to philanthropy in penance for his fifty-billion dollar fortune.
The Macintosh computer, the first successful graphical-user interface PC, is held in reverent esteem for it user-friendliness. The great costs of designing and manufacturing the GUI-PC nearly bankrupted Apple computer, however, such that its bohemian operatives were compelled to accept the leadership of an old business hand, someone heretofore uninvolved with the computing industry. Thereafter, its founder (Steve Jobs) was kicked out of the company. Again, however, the ultimate standard graphical-user PC was not the Mac, but the IBM model with its substandard Microsoft Windows operating system, which came out a couple of years after the Mac was first marketed in 1984. Mass-manufacturing won out over the boutique model, once again.
Given the plain facts of the development of the computer industry in the last few decades, it is hard to understand the credence given to the notion that computing will somehow overcome the difficulties associated with the “bricks and mortar” economy. The computer itself became a staple precisely through economies-of-scale and standardization-of-product, old-fashioned methods that information technology was supposedly going to supersede. For many years now, IBM has been but a minor player in the personal computer hardware market. Its place was taken by other manufacturers, such as Dell computer, which followed the IBM model by manufacturing on a mass scale (often in low-wage countries such as Mexico).
The new-economy utopians somehow convinced themselves that information-processing would, on it own, cause the lion to nestle up to the lamb, and the conflicts and stresses associated with the “industrial” age, would disappear. As to the value of software as opposed to hardware (ie. “bits and bites” as opposed to “bricks and mortar” — as though the latter were the most advanced material of industrial age), software only became valuable when the hardware on which it runs was mass-produced to be cheap enough to the common household. The biggest computer companies in the world — IBM, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell — are makers of hardware, not software. The exception is, of course, the biggest company in the world, Microsoft. But, as mentioned, Microsoft became so large because it had (and maintains) a proprietary hold on the computer operating system — essentially the interface between the hardware and software of the personal computer.
Besides, as the Economist noted in the 1990s, a good chunk of Microsoft’s profits has come from the sale of hardware, such as mice and other peripherals (which operated best, naturally, under the MS-Windows system). Initially, independent software producers such as WordPerfect and Lotus were able to make millions off their “killer” applications (in word-processing and spreadsheets, respectively). But inevitably, Microsoft itself introduced copycat software programs, which eventually marginalized both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 as the standard applications. Because Word and Excel (the MS spreadsheet program) were integrated into the Windows programming, they were easier to learn and manipulate than either WordPerfect or 1-2-3. However, after the introduction of the Windows Chicago system in 1995 (like the IBM PC fourteen years earlier, the initial sale of “Windows 95" was introduced by a massive advertising campaign which included the multimillion-dollar licencing of the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up), direct sales of operating-system software became relatively small.
Mostly, Windows 95 and its successors came pre-loaded on virtually all PC’s that were sold, anywhere in the world. The fee paid for this privileged was incorporated into the cost of the computer itself. In fact, software became less and less valuable, the more accessible computer hardware became during the 1990s. The number of people using any particular software program, was far greater than the number who actually purchased it, directly or through the purchase of a computer, due to software “piracy.” And courtesy other innovations in computer hardware, involving the digital recording (“ripping”) of writeable compact discs, which made not only software programs easily distributable, but also made commercially-sold compact discs subject to piracy.
When the resulting digital-encoding of songs was made available through the peer-to-peer networks of the Internet, it ultimately caused the collapse of the value of the software of the music and movie industries in the general marketplace. Software producers have gone to great lengths to guard against software piracy, often causing problems with programs themselves. The failure of Microsoft’s ballyhooed Windows Millennium operating system, was largely due to problems caused by excessive security safeguards.
A publicly-accessible Internet became possible only after computing was made a household appliance via traditional methods of manufacturing and marketing. As mentioned, the Internet resulted from the needs of the U.S. defence department to build a computer network that was (relatively) safe from enemy nuclear attack. The Internet is, at its base, a triumph of hardware, not software, with its revolutionary method of simultaneously fragmenting, replicating, and then reassembling data between any two nodes on a network.
Again, without the subsidy provided by the government and universities, this hardware would not have been developed at all. Moreover, it took twenty-five years following its invention, before the Internet was made available, by commercial means, to the general public. At first, commercial network service providers, such as CompuServe and America On-Line, resisted the adoption of Internet technology and protocols. Even Microsoft had, at first, planned to construct its own network while setting up its online service.
As for the tiny, mostly local Internet service providers that sprang up in major centres in North
America and Europe around 1994 (when the development of the World Wide Web made going online a graphic experience), were remarkable for not being very profitable at all. Eventually, these startups went belly-up, or merged into ever-bigger regional and national companies. Eventually, long-established telecoms and cable-TV firms swallowed up most of the independent Internet service providers. As for the hardware side, the market for Internet equipment was for a long period held by one company, Cisco Systems, which continues to hold the lion’s share even now. This dominance of a single entity, whether Cisco, Microsoft and Intel, of each niche in the computer industry, is of course more similar to nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism than the vision of the twenty-first, as offered by the new-economy prophets.
There is, in fact, good reason why virtual-monopoly concerns would come to predominate the computer industry, on the hardware and software ends. As the Economist also noted at the beginning of the tech boom, widespread networked computing depends upon the adoption of an operating standard. Thus, either all players had to agree to the hardware and software standards in the beginning (which, as we know, they did not), or a single commercial provider would come to dominate a market so completely, as to shut out all other players (which is what in fact occurred).
During the nineteenth century, the cutthroat practices of Gould, Rockefeller, Edison and other robber barons, made available to the common lot thousands of goods and services. Would the oil, railway, electrical, telephone and other industries have been better served by a situation of perfect or ruinous competition? This is what in fact prevailed in the early years of most machine-technological industries from the nineteenth century on. Engineered technology, on the other hand, seems to promote oligopoly, and even monopoly. This was even more true of computer-engineering than the “industrial era” technologies of railway and motorcar. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, as advances in computer-engineering led to always-fresh opportunities for commercial exploitation, hundreds of thousands of startup firms have come and gone, with a relative handful, such as Micro-Soft, becoming behemoths. Monopolists such as Bill Gates and Andy Grove made computing available to the masses, for better or worse.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Engineering and Freedom, Part 6
click here to read part 1
click here to read part 2
click here to read part 3
click here to read part 4
click here to read part 5
Formerly, the word “communication” conveyed the idea of what terms such as “transport” or “transportation infrastructure” mean to people today.
“Communication” means literally to “bring people together,” and this is precisely what technologies such as the rail train, the automobile and the airplane carry out.
However, all of these automated forms of communication require expensive and elaborate infrastructure in order to be functional. This infrastructure, in order to be realized, had to rely on subsidies provided by the state. In the past, transportation of people and goods was synonymous with the “communication” (in the contemporary sense) of news and information from elsewhere because news could travel only as fast as people.
The shipping of goods en masse by turnpike, canal and railroad communications went together with the advertisement of these goods in periodical media.
With the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, communication of information transcended the communication of goods and people. Just as the railroad resolved the problems inherent in the communication of goods over long distance, the telegraph resolved the problem of the communication of “news” over distance.
The railroad and the telegraph newspaper together created the abstract “market,” as opposed to the situated marketplace. General-interest newspapers, subsidized by advertising dollars and fed with information by the telegraph, were the only medium with enough reach to create mass interest in the goods on promotion.
However, the subsidy of postal communications was key to the newspaper boom in the period after the founding of the United States. Paul Starr, in the Creation of the Media, observes that
[The U.S. postal] network far exceeded the postal systems of any other country. As of 1828 ... the number of post offices per 100,000 inhabitants had grown to 74 in the United States, compared to 17 in Great Britain and 4 in France. In fact, the per capita volume of mail was about the same in the United States as in France, but the American postal network was more comprehensive. The French authorized a new post office only where it could generate $200 in revenue, a principle that would have closed 90 percent of the post offices in the United States. A radical new conception of postal communication emerged in the earliest years of the republic. ... the postal service as a medium of civic communication and nation‑building was embodied in the legislation that became the new system's charter, the Post Office Act of 1792. The law ... had three key elements: It made Congress itself responsible for designating postal routes, gave newspapers special discount rates and privileges, and categorically barred government officials from violating the privacy of letters. By assuming direct control of postal routes, Congress opened a direct political channel for local demands that would spur the development of a broader network. The clamor from localities for new post offices and post roads was incessant, but Congress was not merely acceding to local interests; it wanted to tie the western territories to the union, and postal service helped to achieve that purpose. From 1792 to 1828, Congress established 2,476 new postal routes, abandoning the principle that every route had to be self‑supporting. In 1825, it authorized the postmaster general to designate a post road to the courthouse of any new county seat. As the Post Office did not run a deficit in this period, the federal government was, in effect, using surpluses from the older states to subsidize service into newer ones; almost half of every dollar in revenue from the mid Atlantic states went to support routes in the South and West. (Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, New York, Basic Books, 2004, p. 88.)
“In contrast,” Starr continues, “British North America as of the 1830s had a far more limited postal system. From Quebec east to New Brunswick, there were more than 100,000 people but only seven post offices. While the Canadian Post Office returned a surplus annually to the British Treasury, it was unable to respond to continual pleas for service from new settlements. Rates were high, and the volume of postal communication was low. In 1846, an assembly petitioned the queen for more adequate postal service so Canadians might be on an equal footing with the citizens of the United States .... In the United States, the subsidies to newspapers adopted in 1792 were critical to the emergence of the first national news network.” (Starr, The Creation of the Media, p. 89).
The situation in Europe was quite different. Not only did the state provide no subsidies to newspapers sent through the post, all nations (Britain included, until 1855) imposed “stamp” taxes on newsprint and advertisements. This had the effect, Starr writes, of inhibiting the emergence of “publics”, as existed in the United States.
Private capital accumulation was not adequate enough to finance nationwide postal networks, in the U.S. or anywhere else. The costs of transporting printed information over the long distances, even of the original 13 states, would have been too high in order to sustain a large enough reading public, to support in turn mass-market publications.
State-run postal systems operate by having short-distance mail subsidize the costs of long-distance routes, which is why a postage stamp costs the same, whether mailed across town or across the country. The subsidized postal system in the early United States gave publishers the opportunity to have regional and national audiences.
These rates were, moreover, the same for big players as well as the smaller ones. “Infrastructure” means, literally, “between structure,” and historically, the state has established the ground, or network, by which communication throughout the polity takes place.
Later on, after the first Great War, industrialists took to the new medium of radio to broadcast to an even larger audience — more numerous because it included even those who could not or didn’t like to read newspapers or other periodicals. Both radio and then television were developed not through the direct sale of entertainment product to viewers, but rather, through the purchasing of air-time to advertisers, and the industries that underwrite them.
Broadcast media, like mechanized transport, would not have become generalized network systems if they relied for their financing market demand based on price. Just as no ordinary motorist could really afford to bear solely the costs of automobile transport, no average viewer could afford to shoulder the direct cost of the entertainment programmes she enjoys watching or listening to.
Where private industry did not finance through advertising the construction of broadcast media networks (ie. everywhere except the United States), it was the state that did so.
The “new” media such as the Internet and wireless telephony, which are seen popularly as manifestations of the capitalist ethos at its anarchical best (or worst), in fact are the products of government/military research and development.
What might be called “the problem of communication” has been throughout history both the end and the cause of much government intervention and regulation of the civil society. In ancient times, only the most centralized of governments were able to build sophisticated road communications to bring far-flung, diverse populations together. Some states were able to achieve a high degree of centralization through the control of a natural waterway, such as the ancient Egyptians did with the Nile.
In modern times, governments have solved the problem of industrial overproduction by building canals and railways between markets. Governments also stepped in to build highways to accommodate automobile traffic, as well as airport facilities.
Advanced transport facilities serve to liberate people from “journey”, travel as ponderous and even dangerous travail. At the same time, they come under the regulation of state, which subsidizes some or all of the costs of sophisticated media of communication. Of all means of transport, sailing has always been the least dependent on state subsidy in order to prosper.
Governments have been involved in the construction of naval fleets and port facilities, but nautical communication can function very well without a centralized authority for financial support.
The great commercial city-states of ancient and modern times were nearly all sea-bound traders. The cities of the Hansea league of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became a powerful confederation through the mastery of the North Sea trade, until their independence was swallowed up by the land-based feudal monarchies of Europe.
Empires arise from the meeting of land and sea, when those dependent on the commodities-wealth of territory bump up against the shipping-based wealth of the cities. The former usually subjugates the latter, using the conquered city as a capital by which to control both land and sea communications.
The financing of sophisticated communications technologies such as the rail train, the car, the airplane, radio, television, wireless and the Internet, contradicts the classical-liberal idea of capital accumulation.
Where production is regulated by prices only, a firm can increase profits by improving productivity, or introducing some innovation — the proverbial “building the better mousetrap.” With these profits, the business would re-invest some (or ideally all) of the profits into further improvements in production, with the aim of increasing profits even more, which can again be re-invested for a better profit margin, and so on.
This is a gradual process, though, where technology progresses by increments. It is a valid description of certain, relatively simple (but still important) technologies. The sophisticated, networked technologies under discussion here required great outlays of capital at the initial stages, in order to be functional at all.
Private business was often involved in the development of these media from the beginning, or became involved subsequently. But it was the state which provided the impetus for them. The cash economy is self-regulatory, because demand and production are determined by prices. The market price to consumers of modern technologies would have been too much for any but a wealthy minority to bear.
However, these same media depended upon mass demand to function, as well. Accordingly, the state subsidized the cost of their infrastructure, in order to inspire such a level of demand. Investment in transportation and communication was a form of socialism, but practised by all modern and modernizing governments, no matter what their political persuasion.
The automobile, the airplane, the other internal-combustion technologies, as well as the mass media, effectively formed the engineered environment of modern times. Material culture is fed by the mass production, that so depends on regulation and subsidy of transportation in order to be a going concern. Commercial enterprise and exploitation has taken place within the engineered civilization, on a scale not witnessed in the past, but it did not come about as a result of market demand, nor could the price-driven marketplace accommodate its development. Internal combustion, and the earlier types of engines, objectified the body’s digestive system, and thus automated the action of the hands and legs in production and transport. It gave rise to the industrial engineering of the nineteenth century, and the automobile and airplane in the twentieth.
During the course of the last century, engineering advanced from the automation of physical actions and processes, to objectifying the nerves and senses in electric communications media such as the phonograph, radio, the movies, television, and most recently, the Internet.
The mass media, all of which present a counterfeit of direct experience, are really the objectified and extended voices and countenances of they who own and control them. These technologies, and particularly the broadcast media, have been used to engineer markets and society for decades, to the detriment of reason and individual freedom.
In the early industrial era, capitalism was synonymous with heavy manufacturing and resource extraction, and the proletariat were alienated from work through the limited use of their skills in the mass production process.
The face of big business, which was the big businessman’s face and name, was a very ugly one indeed. Business during the nineteenth century had learned how to automate many of the physical actions, and even some of the gross mental aspects (the telegraph’s imitation of the electric charge of nerves) of the human body.
It yet had no means, however, to bring together mentally the fragmentation of talent and skill that raw industrialism represents. Broadcasting, first with radio and then with television, was developed as an instrument of propaganda, initially for commercial purposes during the 1920s, and then increasingly for political ones during the ‘30s and ‘40s, by totalitarian regimes and by Western governments that fought the totalitarians.
After the war, though, broadcasting became exclusively the domain of commercial propaganda, as the more overt political boosterism of state broadcasting was toned down for purposes of “neutrality” (socio-political propaganda was left to the state school system).
Axiomatically, advertising spreads the gospel of its sponsor, presenting the product only with “the best face.” Early on, business hired stars of stage and screen to personify their products. Hosts of TV news, sports and chat programmes are unlike movie stars in that they are not supposed to provoke the audience. An even, calm disposition must be kept by TV hosts at all times. In so far as the faces that appeared on commercial television had to be acceptable to its customers — big business — TV personalities have become, too, the acceptable face of the business-financiers of electronic media.
Television was a godsend to the public relations side of business, at least, because unlike other forms of mass media, it can actually present a face, an actual person’s face, communicated immediately to millions of people.
The ubiquity of corporate spokespersons since the beginning of commercial television, reflects the desire of businesses to create icons — “icon” in the sense of representative, rather than celebrity hero — to stand in for themselves and their entire organization.
The spokesperson usually has absolutely no input in the decisions which he is to convince millions of people are wise or good for them. In so far as they are simply faces and voices for the decisions of others, for all intents and purposes they are nothing more than the masquerades or imposters, for the collective decision-making of corporate or bureaucratic management. In essence, television allowed business corporations to become “incorporated” in the symbolic, as opposed to legal, sense.
Businessmen had extended the mechanical powers of the human body through their possession and management of capital property. The electronic image allowed them to extend also their own powers to appear and to speak to the masses, through the hiring of media spokespersons.
Spokespersons were the idols, the living fetishes, representing concerns whose actions and decisions were suitably obscured by the attention that the many paid to the fetishes. Broadcast advertising employs the tactic of the medicine man or spiritual healer the world over, who distracts his trusting crowd with the one hand, in order to do a sleight with the other hand, to achieve his seemingly miraculous feat.
This is the technique of professional magicians, too, and advertising has always had a subliminal association with evil, the devil in the older sense of a trickster rather than as a bloodthirsty man-wolf. It is the corporate spokesperson himself who is the idol, the fetish is the product itself, and the advertisement the sleight-of-sight-and-sound which distracts the audience from the merits or lack thereof of the product itself.
The corporation itself fulfills its legal wish to be an artificial person by becoming, through its spokespersons and public relations representatives, an actual symbolic person, its reality maintained by constant doses of media exposure.
Corporations and bureaucracies, in putting their best face forward through media marketing, are doing no more than what any individual person does when in public, but on a massive, global scale.
They take the same risks as any person who assumes an appropriate face for the public, only to find that image betrayed by word of her behaviour outside the eyes of the public.
On the model of the corporate spokespersons, politicians and celebrities have learned to use electronic media to sell themselves to the public, thereby taking the risk that this image will be undermined by their behaviour when outside the sight of the cameras.
Nevertheless, the growing expense of marketing through electronic media has meant that only larger concerns can shoulder the cost of it. When this principle is applied to the electronic media itself, it means that the total number of information sources available to people in any particular medium is limited. Media which are financed by the monies of corporate and government advertising are considered “mainstream.”
Those media which are not so subsidized are called “fringe,” “underground” or more recently, “alternative.” Corporations, through broadcast advertising, seek to inspire behaviour that is the very opposite of what they require of their own personnel in order maintain themselves as an on-going concern.
Work life, particularly at the junior and senior executive levels, requires a high degree of commitment, planning, organization and hard work. Yet the consumer ethic, as expressed in advertising, seeks to undermine all of these values in favour of spontaneity, leisure and profligate expenditure (See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York, Basic Books, 1976).
Moreover, advertising wants to foment not judicious and individualistic decision-making in purchases, but instead, the type of herd behaviour generally associated with “fads” or “crazes,” where people buy something just because everyone else is buying it. This is social behaviour in its most basic form, where the logic and correctness of any action is simply that others around you are doing it, too.
Encouraging pack behaviour is in keeping, on the other hand, with what might be termed the “communistic” nature of modern business organizations. Virtually any ladder-climber today knows that to get ahead in the business game, work comes first, and family, friends, romance and everything else non-work comes second. This is only a symptom of a more general trend, where work and work-life itself has become the primary social unit for many people. Increasingly, corporate management seeks to control not only the skills of its workforce, but their minds, too, with racial and gender sensitivity training and cult-like “motivational training.”
Part 7 of Engineering and Freedom
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Formerly, the word “communication” conveyed the idea of what terms such as “transport” or “transportation infrastructure” mean to people today.
“Communication” means literally to “bring people together,” and this is precisely what technologies such as the rail train, the automobile and the airplane carry out.
However, all of these automated forms of communication require expensive and elaborate infrastructure in order to be functional. This infrastructure, in order to be realized, had to rely on subsidies provided by the state. In the past, transportation of people and goods was synonymous with the “communication” (in the contemporary sense) of news and information from elsewhere because news could travel only as fast as people.
The shipping of goods en masse by turnpike, canal and railroad communications went together with the advertisement of these goods in periodical media.
With the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, communication of information transcended the communication of goods and people. Just as the railroad resolved the problems inherent in the communication of goods over long distance, the telegraph resolved the problem of the communication of “news” over distance.
The railroad and the telegraph newspaper together created the abstract “market,” as opposed to the situated marketplace. General-interest newspapers, subsidized by advertising dollars and fed with information by the telegraph, were the only medium with enough reach to create mass interest in the goods on promotion.
However, the subsidy of postal communications was key to the newspaper boom in the period after the founding of the United States. Paul Starr, in the Creation of the Media, observes that
[The U.S. postal] network far exceeded the postal systems of any other country. As of 1828 ... the number of post offices per 100,000 inhabitants had grown to 74 in the United States, compared to 17 in Great Britain and 4 in France. In fact, the per capita volume of mail was about the same in the United States as in France, but the American postal network was more comprehensive. The French authorized a new post office only where it could generate $200 in revenue, a principle that would have closed 90 percent of the post offices in the United States. A radical new conception of postal communication emerged in the earliest years of the republic. ... the postal service as a medium of civic communication and nation‑building was embodied in the legislation that became the new system's charter, the Post Office Act of 1792. The law ... had three key elements: It made Congress itself responsible for designating postal routes, gave newspapers special discount rates and privileges, and categorically barred government officials from violating the privacy of letters. By assuming direct control of postal routes, Congress opened a direct political channel for local demands that would spur the development of a broader network. The clamor from localities for new post offices and post roads was incessant, but Congress was not merely acceding to local interests; it wanted to tie the western territories to the union, and postal service helped to achieve that purpose. From 1792 to 1828, Congress established 2,476 new postal routes, abandoning the principle that every route had to be self‑supporting. In 1825, it authorized the postmaster general to designate a post road to the courthouse of any new county seat. As the Post Office did not run a deficit in this period, the federal government was, in effect, using surpluses from the older states to subsidize service into newer ones; almost half of every dollar in revenue from the mid Atlantic states went to support routes in the South and West. (Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, New York, Basic Books, 2004, p. 88.)
“In contrast,” Starr continues, “British North America as of the 1830s had a far more limited postal system. From Quebec east to New Brunswick, there were more than 100,000 people but only seven post offices. While the Canadian Post Office returned a surplus annually to the British Treasury, it was unable to respond to continual pleas for service from new settlements. Rates were high, and the volume of postal communication was low. In 1846, an assembly petitioned the queen for more adequate postal service so Canadians might be on an equal footing with the citizens of the United States .... In the United States, the subsidies to newspapers adopted in 1792 were critical to the emergence of the first national news network.” (Starr, The Creation of the Media, p. 89).
The situation in Europe was quite different. Not only did the state provide no subsidies to newspapers sent through the post, all nations (Britain included, until 1855) imposed “stamp” taxes on newsprint and advertisements. This had the effect, Starr writes, of inhibiting the emergence of “publics”, as existed in the United States.
Private capital accumulation was not adequate enough to finance nationwide postal networks, in the U.S. or anywhere else. The costs of transporting printed information over the long distances, even of the original 13 states, would have been too high in order to sustain a large enough reading public, to support in turn mass-market publications.
State-run postal systems operate by having short-distance mail subsidize the costs of long-distance routes, which is why a postage stamp costs the same, whether mailed across town or across the country. The subsidized postal system in the early United States gave publishers the opportunity to have regional and national audiences.
These rates were, moreover, the same for big players as well as the smaller ones. “Infrastructure” means, literally, “between structure,” and historically, the state has established the ground, or network, by which communication throughout the polity takes place.
Later on, after the first Great War, industrialists took to the new medium of radio to broadcast to an even larger audience — more numerous because it included even those who could not or didn’t like to read newspapers or other periodicals. Both radio and then television were developed not through the direct sale of entertainment product to viewers, but rather, through the purchasing of air-time to advertisers, and the industries that underwrite them.
Broadcast media, like mechanized transport, would not have become generalized network systems if they relied for their financing market demand based on price. Just as no ordinary motorist could really afford to bear solely the costs of automobile transport, no average viewer could afford to shoulder the direct cost of the entertainment programmes she enjoys watching or listening to.
Where private industry did not finance through advertising the construction of broadcast media networks (ie. everywhere except the United States), it was the state that did so.
The “new” media such as the Internet and wireless telephony, which are seen popularly as manifestations of the capitalist ethos at its anarchical best (or worst), in fact are the products of government/military research and development.
What might be called “the problem of communication” has been throughout history both the end and the cause of much government intervention and regulation of the civil society. In ancient times, only the most centralized of governments were able to build sophisticated road communications to bring far-flung, diverse populations together. Some states were able to achieve a high degree of centralization through the control of a natural waterway, such as the ancient Egyptians did with the Nile.
In modern times, governments have solved the problem of industrial overproduction by building canals and railways between markets. Governments also stepped in to build highways to accommodate automobile traffic, as well as airport facilities.
Advanced transport facilities serve to liberate people from “journey”, travel as ponderous and even dangerous travail. At the same time, they come under the regulation of state, which subsidizes some or all of the costs of sophisticated media of communication. Of all means of transport, sailing has always been the least dependent on state subsidy in order to prosper.
Governments have been involved in the construction of naval fleets and port facilities, but nautical communication can function very well without a centralized authority for financial support.
The great commercial city-states of ancient and modern times were nearly all sea-bound traders. The cities of the Hansea league of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became a powerful confederation through the mastery of the North Sea trade, until their independence was swallowed up by the land-based feudal monarchies of Europe.
Empires arise from the meeting of land and sea, when those dependent on the commodities-wealth of territory bump up against the shipping-based wealth of the cities. The former usually subjugates the latter, using the conquered city as a capital by which to control both land and sea communications.
The financing of sophisticated communications technologies such as the rail train, the car, the airplane, radio, television, wireless and the Internet, contradicts the classical-liberal idea of capital accumulation.
Where production is regulated by prices only, a firm can increase profits by improving productivity, or introducing some innovation — the proverbial “building the better mousetrap.” With these profits, the business would re-invest some (or ideally all) of the profits into further improvements in production, with the aim of increasing profits even more, which can again be re-invested for a better profit margin, and so on.
This is a gradual process, though, where technology progresses by increments. It is a valid description of certain, relatively simple (but still important) technologies. The sophisticated, networked technologies under discussion here required great outlays of capital at the initial stages, in order to be functional at all.
Private business was often involved in the development of these media from the beginning, or became involved subsequently. But it was the state which provided the impetus for them. The cash economy is self-regulatory, because demand and production are determined by prices. The market price to consumers of modern technologies would have been too much for any but a wealthy minority to bear.
However, these same media depended upon mass demand to function, as well. Accordingly, the state subsidized the cost of their infrastructure, in order to inspire such a level of demand. Investment in transportation and communication was a form of socialism, but practised by all modern and modernizing governments, no matter what their political persuasion.
The automobile, the airplane, the other internal-combustion technologies, as well as the mass media, effectively formed the engineered environment of modern times. Material culture is fed by the mass production, that so depends on regulation and subsidy of transportation in order to be a going concern. Commercial enterprise and exploitation has taken place within the engineered civilization, on a scale not witnessed in the past, but it did not come about as a result of market demand, nor could the price-driven marketplace accommodate its development. Internal combustion, and the earlier types of engines, objectified the body’s digestive system, and thus automated the action of the hands and legs in production and transport. It gave rise to the industrial engineering of the nineteenth century, and the automobile and airplane in the twentieth.
During the course of the last century, engineering advanced from the automation of physical actions and processes, to objectifying the nerves and senses in electric communications media such as the phonograph, radio, the movies, television, and most recently, the Internet.
The mass media, all of which present a counterfeit of direct experience, are really the objectified and extended voices and countenances of they who own and control them. These technologies, and particularly the broadcast media, have been used to engineer markets and society for decades, to the detriment of reason and individual freedom.
In the early industrial era, capitalism was synonymous with heavy manufacturing and resource extraction, and the proletariat were alienated from work through the limited use of their skills in the mass production process.
The face of big business, which was the big businessman’s face and name, was a very ugly one indeed. Business during the nineteenth century had learned how to automate many of the physical actions, and even some of the gross mental aspects (the telegraph’s imitation of the electric charge of nerves) of the human body.
It yet had no means, however, to bring together mentally the fragmentation of talent and skill that raw industrialism represents. Broadcasting, first with radio and then with television, was developed as an instrument of propaganda, initially for commercial purposes during the 1920s, and then increasingly for political ones during the ‘30s and ‘40s, by totalitarian regimes and by Western governments that fought the totalitarians.
After the war, though, broadcasting became exclusively the domain of commercial propaganda, as the more overt political boosterism of state broadcasting was toned down for purposes of “neutrality” (socio-political propaganda was left to the state school system).
Axiomatically, advertising spreads the gospel of its sponsor, presenting the product only with “the best face.” Early on, business hired stars of stage and screen to personify their products. Hosts of TV news, sports and chat programmes are unlike movie stars in that they are not supposed to provoke the audience. An even, calm disposition must be kept by TV hosts at all times. In so far as the faces that appeared on commercial television had to be acceptable to its customers — big business — TV personalities have become, too, the acceptable face of the business-financiers of electronic media.
Television was a godsend to the public relations side of business, at least, because unlike other forms of mass media, it can actually present a face, an actual person’s face, communicated immediately to millions of people.
The ubiquity of corporate spokespersons since the beginning of commercial television, reflects the desire of businesses to create icons — “icon” in the sense of representative, rather than celebrity hero — to stand in for themselves and their entire organization.
The spokesperson usually has absolutely no input in the decisions which he is to convince millions of people are wise or good for them. In so far as they are simply faces and voices for the decisions of others, for all intents and purposes they are nothing more than the masquerades or imposters, for the collective decision-making of corporate or bureaucratic management. In essence, television allowed business corporations to become “incorporated” in the symbolic, as opposed to legal, sense.
Businessmen had extended the mechanical powers of the human body through their possession and management of capital property. The electronic image allowed them to extend also their own powers to appear and to speak to the masses, through the hiring of media spokespersons.
Spokespersons were the idols, the living fetishes, representing concerns whose actions and decisions were suitably obscured by the attention that the many paid to the fetishes. Broadcast advertising employs the tactic of the medicine man or spiritual healer the world over, who distracts his trusting crowd with the one hand, in order to do a sleight with the other hand, to achieve his seemingly miraculous feat.
This is the technique of professional magicians, too, and advertising has always had a subliminal association with evil, the devil in the older sense of a trickster rather than as a bloodthirsty man-wolf. It is the corporate spokesperson himself who is the idol, the fetish is the product itself, and the advertisement the sleight-of-sight-and-sound which distracts the audience from the merits or lack thereof of the product itself.
The corporation itself fulfills its legal wish to be an artificial person by becoming, through its spokespersons and public relations representatives, an actual symbolic person, its reality maintained by constant doses of media exposure.
Corporations and bureaucracies, in putting their best face forward through media marketing, are doing no more than what any individual person does when in public, but on a massive, global scale.
They take the same risks as any person who assumes an appropriate face for the public, only to find that image betrayed by word of her behaviour outside the eyes of the public.
On the model of the corporate spokespersons, politicians and celebrities have learned to use electronic media to sell themselves to the public, thereby taking the risk that this image will be undermined by their behaviour when outside the sight of the cameras.
Nevertheless, the growing expense of marketing through electronic media has meant that only larger concerns can shoulder the cost of it. When this principle is applied to the electronic media itself, it means that the total number of information sources available to people in any particular medium is limited. Media which are financed by the monies of corporate and government advertising are considered “mainstream.”
Those media which are not so subsidized are called “fringe,” “underground” or more recently, “alternative.” Corporations, through broadcast advertising, seek to inspire behaviour that is the very opposite of what they require of their own personnel in order maintain themselves as an on-going concern.
Work life, particularly at the junior and senior executive levels, requires a high degree of commitment, planning, organization and hard work. Yet the consumer ethic, as expressed in advertising, seeks to undermine all of these values in favour of spontaneity, leisure and profligate expenditure (See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York, Basic Books, 1976).
Moreover, advertising wants to foment not judicious and individualistic decision-making in purchases, but instead, the type of herd behaviour generally associated with “fads” or “crazes,” where people buy something just because everyone else is buying it. This is social behaviour in its most basic form, where the logic and correctness of any action is simply that others around you are doing it, too.
Encouraging pack behaviour is in keeping, on the other hand, with what might be termed the “communistic” nature of modern business organizations. Virtually any ladder-climber today knows that to get ahead in the business game, work comes first, and family, friends, romance and everything else non-work comes second. This is only a symptom of a more general trend, where work and work-life itself has become the primary social unit for many people. Increasingly, corporate management seeks to control not only the skills of its workforce, but their minds, too, with racial and gender sensitivity training and cult-like “motivational training.”
Part 7 of Engineering and Freedom
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