<nettime> Edge interviews Douglas Rushkoff [2/2]

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>]

JB: Toxic wealth?

RUSHKOFF: There are certain aspects of youth that are valuable to retain as
an adult. And there are other aspects of youth that are dangerous to retain
as an adult. When I look at our so-called adult society today it looks to me
a lot like a fetus that stayed in the womb too long and became toxic to its
mother and itself. There's a great deal of thumb-sucking going on in Silicon
Valley. We've done the opposite of what we should have. We live in a culture
that is obsessed with youth but has lost the ability to think with the
elasticity of youth ‹ so we've traded in the best and we've gotten the worst
as a result. We think like grumpy old men, and act out like two-year olds.

Look at Hollywood. Who are our movie stars today? Not men, but boys.
Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon, who look even younger than they are. Who
are the great adult men of Hollywood? Jack Nicholson, who's an adult baby.
His entire show-biz image is of an overgrown child going to Lakers games in
dark glasses. Or Robin Williams - however talented - still a version of the
adult child. Our president is a baby. He treats the nation as his scolding
parent, from whom he must hide his naughty deeds, and to whom he must
occasionally apologize.

Look at what a lot of our Internet heroes do with their money: they buy
planes, fighter jets for that matter, or build castles they can live in as
if they were wombs ‹ it's an extension of childhood.

JB: And how do you think we got this way?

RUSHKOFF: By design. In the late 40s after World War II, we needed a way for
the economy to expand, so what we did was create a consumer culture. Men
returned to the factories and worked, while women returned to the home to
take care of the children. Advertising and marketing catered to the needs of
women and children. When they couldn't cater to a need, they created one. By
the 1970s, when women went to work themselves, consumer culture became all
about kids ‹ rock music and records and toys and electronics - all items and
lifestyles that appealed to either children or the child in the man or
woman. We've succeeded at that. Now when a person becomes successful what
they want to do is buy into childhood and get some expensive toys in order
to fulfill those same, media-generated childhood urges. Our commercials make
this explicit.

We also live in a culture where we want to be infantilized. I was recently
in a State where people buy their liquor in "package stores" - from State
cops. Okay, why is that? Because in America we have laws to protect us from
our own vices. We feel we can be trusted to behave as adults. But what does
this really accomplish? When you buy your liquor from a cop, and you have
restrictions about how you're supposed to use it, then you are relieved of
all responsibility for how you behave. That's why we have a nation filled
with drunks. Watch "COPS" and you can see one result of infantilizing
policies.

We still yearn for parents as we always have. The movie "Elizabeth", about
Queen Elizabeth, reminded me about western civilization's transition from
looking at God and Virgin Mary and Jesus and as our parent figures, to
looking towards the monarchy for this same comfort. Elizabeth enacted this
transition. What we did in America was to enact a new transition, which was
from the monarchy, or the presidency, as our parental figure, to
corporations and brands. Our transference is now projected onto brands ‹ we
look to them and to companies to provide the reassurance we want.

The strained effort by America to mourn for Kennedy in the fashion that
England mourned for Diana looks like an effort to regain some of what felt
like a healthier form of transference than what we have now ‹ transference
to non-personified entities ‹ which I think is more frightening because we
suspect that these entities don't have our best interest at heart. They
don't even have hearts.

JB: And the non-personified entities are treated a lot better than people.

RUSHKOFF: If a corporation releases tons and tons of pollutants somewhere,
killing thousands of people, no human being is going to be held accountable,
and the corporation is going to pay fines that actually mean nothing to it
as an entity. Meanwhile kids are tattooing the Nike Swoosh onto their arms
because it gives them a feeling of kinship and identity. It gives them such
a sense of belonging.

JB: I have never met a corporate logo I liked. The "brand" is one of the
worst ideas of the 20th century.

RUSHKOFF: It's about metaphor. At every stage of the development of language
we create a metaphor. When that metaphor dies - when we forget its original
meaning - it becomes the component part of a new language system. Ancient
people developed little symbols, glyphs, like a picture of a bull, or a
picture of a house or a picture of water, and that's the way our written
languages developed. Eventually we stopped seeing glyphs as representational
pictures and saw them as symbols for noises.

So the aleph which is the picture of the bull becomes the letter A, or beta
which is the picture of a house, becomes a B, we use it for the sound b, and
then we create new words out of it. So our new words are really collections
of dead metaphors. I think our language and our symbol systems, end up
swallowing up the old ones so that we can conduct a denser style of
communication.

Talk to teachers about the way kids are doing math now in school. Instead of
doing arithmetic, they use a calculator for doing arithmetic and then,
hopefully, do a more complex set of equations over it. But arithmetic as
something they relate to directly disappears. Arithmetic is this thing the
calculator does while they work with a larger system. Or look at the way
young people watch television or listen to music. Songs become "samples" in
new compositions, and scenes become "cuts" in an MTV video. The
juxtaposition of images or sounds tells what we can call a kind of a
meta-story on top of the original component parts.

In today's culture, brands become iconic ways of representing an entire set
of metaphors. Through its corporate communications, a company like Nike will
represent, or broadcast, an entire range of images which are then signified
by that single Swoosh. And because we're looking for anchors in this
relativistic haze that we were talking about before ‹ because we're looking
for symbols to represent what are now really immense thought structures, we
grab onto the icons of Airwalk and Nike. That's why it's so satisfying ‹ but
it's also why it's so dangerous.

JB: Can an individual become a brand?

RUSHKOFF: John, you are a brand.

JB: It's interesting that AOL distributes millions of AOL floppy disks it's
called "marketing"; and Amazon runs a multi-million dollar ad campaign it's
called "branding.". And Steve Case and Jeff Bezos are proclaimed geniuses.
But if creative individuals take responsibility for their own work and ideas
and let the world know what they've done, it's called "self promotion." Can
an individual ever enjoy the same authority and status in the culture that a
brand attains?

RUSHKOFF: Do individuals really want to? Human beings, for the time being,
anyway, exist in a different space than brands. I suppose those of us who
are trying to establish a "name" for ourselves in an industry or in the
media - like you or I have, to some extent, or Madonna has to a much greater
extent - have franchises independent of our real-life identities. There's
cross-over, to be sure, but it's probably healthy to realize these are
separate things. But living as a human being and a brand in the same
mediaspace is a dangerous game.

As far as a strategy for becoming a person-brand, I'd suggest steering clear
of any particular institution or company because the minute you go to work
for Microsoft or Oracle or NBC or any company at all, you're spending your
energy on someone else's brand rather than your own. The only thing you have
to do to be a brand is to function as an independent ‹ and sign your work,
taking both the credit and the blame for what you're doing. That, and make
sure you've got a great sense of humor, because the inevitable attacks will
feel like they're directed at you, personally.

A lot of people talk about the Internet as this great place to be anonymous
Why the hell do you want to be anonymous? One, if it's an idea that you had,
then put your name on it, let people know it's yours. If it's worth saying,
it's worth standing up for. I've never done an anonymous piece of e-mail or
bbs posting ‹ not because I want to self-promote, but because I don't want
to get in the habit of being afraid to say what I believe. That's a
dangerous precedent, especially if we fear that our society might become
more repressive at some point in the future.

So signing your work as an artist would is the first step. Second, it's
realizing that the image that other people have of you has nothing to do
with who you really are. It took me a while to get used to that one. You
know, that this thing out there called Douglas Rushkoff ‹ the thing that you
call Doug ‹ the thing that The New York Times calls Doug. It really hurt me
for a long time that people believed reports that I make $7500 an hour, that
I'm selling out the counterculture, or I've singlehandedly killed the grunge
or rave movements. It really bothered me until I realized that they're not
relating to me or my work at all, they're relating to the Douglas Rushkoff
brand, and how it was mishandled by me or misrepresented by some journalist
And I have no right to complain because that thing called Douglas is what
pays my bills.

But the bigger the person-brand gets, the more tempting the offers to
surrender it to someone else. My franchise - the way it's perceived -
becomes valuable to others. I'm on the Doug Rushkoff bus, and I'm going
along, and the better my bus is doing, the bigger and flashier and more
attractive the offers are for me to pull over, stop the bus and get on
someone else's. And I've tried that a few times for a short stint. But the
minute I do that is when I feel like I'm dying. That I'm gone. And not just
from a business perspective, I mean literally dying - becoming separated
from my own sense of purpose.

JB: Aren't you a bit young to have such war stories? You sound almost
cynical.

RUSHKOFF: I've gotten my first dose of life experience. My first run around
the block. Over the past decade of new media, I've got to witness one cycle
of something you've probably seen iterate 3 or 4 times by now. In 1985, 86,
I watched the emergence of computer technologies, personal computers,
networking, fidonet, bulletin boards, and I thought, "wow, the world is
going to change." And people who had lived through the '60s were saying,
"look, we've been through one of these before, and it looks bright from the
beginning, but there's all these things to watch out for."

Howard Rheingold told me, essentially, "your optimism is really sweet, but
we've watched this happen before, and we have to be careful and thoughtful
if we want it to work out." My response was "Nonsense! This is it!
Renaissance is upon us! We're off and running!"

And then I watched the process by which those ten rules of the networked
economy really function. And I watched the way the Internet was turned into
an electronic strip mall, and communities were turned into markets. And I
watched the way the law of network externalities, which I thought was just
going to get everyone on line and communicating with each other, actually
made things worse.

I call it the MovieFone syndrome. When MovieFone started, you could find out
when movies were playing. You listened to an ad and they'd give you movie
times, and then you hang up. A little later they added feature through which
you could order your tickets, for a buck fifty service charge. No one's
twisting our arm, though; we don't have to buy our tickets over the phone.
But once the law of network externalities comes into play and enough people
are using the service, MovieFone changes from a convenience into something
you have to do. If you have a date on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night
in New York City and you're going to see a movie, you'd damn well better use
MovieFone and pay that dollar fifty extra per ticket, or you're not going to
get into that movie. So is MovieFone still a convenience? Or is simply a way
to charge an extra $1.50 for each movie? To reign in another "externality?"

JB: What about people that don't have the eleven dollars, or don't have the
touch tone phone?

RUSHKOFF: Well, they lose out, don't they? People who want free email or ISP
service have to submit to advertising. It's as if they are required to get
remedial education in marketing. Only the poor must submit to the ads until
they figure out how to participate in the market.

When new networking technologies become ubiquitous to the wealthy, those who
aren't hooked up end up being at a disadvantage. The irony is we all end up
paying more, not less, for the very same thing. Once a service like
Amazon.milk.com is around, the milk companies will save a lot of money
because they're only going to have to ship as much milk as is ordered. And
maybe we'll even pay a little extra service charge to have that milk ready
for us, or delivered in refrigerated kegs. It all looks like a harmless
luxury until everyone's doing it. Then if you want to get your milk at the
corner bodega and you haven't planned in advance, you're going to pay $4.00
a quart instead of $1.50. You'll pay a premium for the added convenience of
simply buying milk the old fashioned way! And who's going to have to pay
that premium? The people who don't have newest Microsoft Internet Explorer
7.5 and the chip that can run it.

I started looking at all these downsides. I've lived through 15 years of one
brief cycle. And the Internet cycle happened faster than most. But gosh,
look at the difference between Cyberia and Coercion as books. Cyberia
announced a utopian vision. And while Coercion is not pessimism or
conspiracy theory, it does contain a few warnings. It calls for us to employ
a certain ethical restraint, and to develop our innate ability to evaluate
our actions against our sense of purpose.

In the book I propose that we all have clear moments of buyer's remorse -
and sometimes they happen before we even make the purchase, or take whatever
action we'll later regret. Sometimes it happens when you walk into a mall,
or when you go to an on-line site, or when you're thinking about getting the
new browser, or the new computer, or taking that job, or worse, coercing
someone else. If you're an employee at the Gap, you experience that same
moment of hesitation, of fear, that the customer does. Do I want to use a
coercive sales technique that I learned watching the Gap's instructional
videos? I'll win a bonus or a T-shirt if I can make this person buy a belt
along with his jeans, and I'll get in trouble if I don't make enough 3-item
sales... but I can tell he doesn't have that much money. We all experience
these moments of doubt, these moments of hesitation when our true
sensibility emerges. And then we all try to squash it because we want to
make the extra buck, get that MIG jet, get the sale, buy the item, or
promote our brand.

JB: What do you tell companies that hire you? What do they want to know?

RUSHKOFF: Well, actually, I've sworn off all consulting. I started doing it
as research for my Coercion book, and then got a bit carried away by the
income. I stopped "cold turkey" a few months ago, in favor of teaching at
NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and am lot happier as a
result.

When I did consult, I tried to use my "guru" position as a leverage point to
subvert the more ruthless marketing techniques. Most companies simply want
to know how to sell more stuff in less time ‹ either by selling the same
goods to more people, or more goods to the people they're already selling
to. I argued that customer loyalty begins with genuinely good treatment, and
not simply more camouflaged sales pitches. Some companies want to know how
to sell online, and I usually showed them how to get out of the way. Don't
try to create a sticky site that sucks people in; people don't want to be on
fly paper. They don't want sticky experiences. Stickiness may be working in
the short run ‹ companies are having success with sites that you can only go
in one way and that throw up windows all over the place and then send you
lots of email and ask your permission to send you more email, infect you
with cookies, and so on. But in the end people will react against these
intrusions, and they'll react against the companies who did it to them.

I tried to give companies what I consider to be a more long-term strategy,
which is give customers the most direct access to the thing they want, at
the best price, with information about what it does, how much it costs, how
much is it going to cost to ship it Ð and get out of the way. Create tools
that make it easier to figure out what computer or product or upgrade is
best for the individual user. Let the customer upsell himself in good time.
The best competitive advantage is going to be to offer either the best item,
the best price, or the best service. Become transparent.

As far as marketing to youth culture, I tried to make companies aware of the
destructive power of coercive marketing, and to see how expensive the arms
race is getting for everyone. Young people eventually get wise to a company
that offers nothing more than a brand strategy. Then the company has to
spend millions retooling. I told them to "play nice."

I still like speaking to organizations who are nervous about the rapid
development of the Internet ‹ and executives who can't understand the market
valuations of all these new Internet ventures. I've been telling them that
the Internet is really just a Ponzie scheme. It's being driven by the needs
of the investment community. The money needs a place to go. That's why the
only companies actually making anything resembling earnings are online
trading companies. They're simply conduits for more people at lower levels
of the pyramid to buy in. I mean, what other industry besides a Ponzie
scheme requires businesses to demonstrate an "exit strategy?" When they ask
me what the ultimate Internet experience will look like, I tell them that
they're already engaged in it: the frantic search for the next big Internet
company to invest in is the ultimate Internet experience. The investors are
the customers.

But the most interesting work was helping advertising agencies figure out
what comes after advertising. They know their industry is almost obsolete. I
think what will replace ads are sponsored media and applications. Rather
than using advertisements to create brand images for products, we're going
to have brands sponsoring media that is the entertainment or utility that
reflects the brand attributes. I've helped an airline develop a Palm Pilot
application for the global traveler, and a global phone company develop a
world clock map on the Web. Instead of paying for advertisements, they can
give things directly to their customers.

JB: Are you talking about things like corporate baseball parks?

RUSHKOFF: Right, and if it's a Nike ballpark, and you go there, and make
that one concession to corporate America, then maybe you don't have to have
marketing blasting at you through the loudspeakers during every break. "This
touchdown brought to you by bla bla airlines." They actually pay for the
touchdowns, you know. It would make for a better game. And it would separate
the emotional vulnerability we experience at a sporting event from the
coercive techniques of marketers.

A sports spectacle is a great engine for generating the sort of unbridled
optimism and enthusiasm we were talking about earlier. The Roman games were
so good at generating support for politicians that it was illegal to have a
gladiatorial contest within three months of an election. They were aware of
just how much that dictator's thumb, up or down, could affect the entire
crowd and its relationship to the leader. Hitler used the spectacle to
similar effect.

The role of any coercive technique is to suspend someone's ability to think
rationally, so that they can be made to act on their emotions. It's a simple
formula used by demagogues as well as many multi-level marketers at their
rallies. Exploit the anonymity of the mob so that everyone expresses
long-repressed emotions. Label the oppressive force as a common enemy, stoke
the crowd's rage and, once it's reached a peak, entreat the assembled mass
to take an oath. They all must promise to sustain this righteous rage after
they've left the rally. It's locked in, like a post hypnotic suggestion.

Sports spectacles today are rallies designed to promote our allegiance to
corporations. I went to a Jets game where a chain of steak houses handed out
small signs to every fan. When the Jets sacked the opposing team's
quarterback we were supposed to hold up the sign, which read "Sack Attack."
On the back of the sign, however, facing each fan was the name of the
restaurant chain. They took the most aggressive, most carnivorous moment of
a football game, where we sack the opposing quarterback, and used it as an
opportunity to program us with their name and logo, So now we're going to
associate the steakhouse with "Ah, we killed them!"

Meanwhile, everything else going on at a sports game is still based on
Ancient Roman techniques. The Roman games were intended to demonstrate class
mobility by showing that slaves could become regular citizens. If a slave
really won enough gladiatorial contests, he would be elevated to the status
of citizen. What's happening in sports today is very similar, except it is
an inner-city kid who gets out of the ghetto because he has talent, and has
chosen to spend his energy on entertaining, rather than mugging us.
Successful gladiators were permitted to commit terrible crimes, even rape,
without fear of being punished - and without damaging their images among the
fans. Same way here. No matter how many times a sports hero is arrested,
we'll still forgive him. He has license to do these terrible things so that
we can vicariously experience his outrage and pain - as well as our own
safety and control.

And in the end, who's paying for it all? Look at the scoreboard. It's not
the emperor, anymore; it's whatever corporation has paid for that scoreboard
to be there. It's name is right on top.

In a sense nothing has changed: the same kinds of techniques that have been
used for centuries by emperors, kings, popes and priests, are now being used
in service of the corporation. Where it's different is that we have
technologies in place that make these coercive techniques automatic. There
are machines doing this now ‹ machines are doing the research, machines are
adjusting the commercials and configuring the Web sites. What I'm trying to
do is to insert some human control, some human thought, and some real human
intention back into what we're doing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher | Kip Parent, Founding Webmaster

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Copyright ©1999 by Edge Foundation, Inc.



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