opens an optimistic new door onto the exciting future of global cultural ..... In her
2005 bestseller on sociopathy, The Sociopath Next Door, the American.
SLIGHTLY SOCIOPATHIC SOFTWARE™ CULTURAL PROSPECTUS
V A C I L L O G I X™
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© VacilLogix™ Inc., 2009. All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be reproduced without expressed written consent from VacilLogix, Inc.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 01: THE VACILLOGIX™ CULTURAL BRIEF
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Chapter 01: Initial Conditions
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Capital, Power, Cool and Bourdieu’s “Forms of Capital” Salvaging sociopathy Revisiting Renaissance Florence Conversion machines
Chapter 02: Incorporating Sociopathy
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Capitalism starts body-building Sociopathic elitism and creative destruction
Chapter 03: Sociopathy Comes to the People
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Critiquing corporate conformity The avant-garde goes public The creative revolution Under new management
Chapter 04: Virtual Convergence
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Wired sociopathy Virtuality, flatness, and other grand unification theories From society to free agency Good business is the best art
Chapter 05: Beyond Asymptotes
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Corporations-of-one Trust-busting Being derivative Beyond good and evil Killer apps
PART 02: THE VACILLOGIX™ BRAND STRATEGY BIBLIOGRAPHY
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY "The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality." 1 — Lewis H. Lapham (1985)
Every great business movement requires a foundation myth. Yet the success of such a myth hinges on the degree to which it resonates across a wider cultural plane. The purpose of this document is to provide just such a populist mandate for the truly singular business entity of VacilLogix™. As such, it will operate primarily as an extensive economic, cultural, and historical analysis, demonstrating the unprecedented opportunity presented by the VacilLogix™ Slightly Sociopathic Software™ line. As it will make overwhelmingly clear, our global networked culture is perched at the brink of a massive cultural transformation. The possibility for the most radical reconfiguration of social, technical, and economic power since the advent of the Enlightenment is imminent. All that is needed is the right technology, philosophy, and attitude. This document delineates precisely how VacilLogix™ will be that technology, that philosophy, that attitude. If there is any irony to our current globalized moment, it is that the celebrated cultural collapse of the world via networked digital technologies has not simplified it but rather made things more complex. By contrast, the social and cultural phenomena of previous centuries now seem simple and sluggish. Harnessing and profiting from such vast semiotic complexity requires an equally discriminating and expansive mode of analysis. The Devil is in the details, and, given that the Devil is squarely of interest to our analysis, we must fully engage the messiest of details. As a result, the first part of this document, “The VacilLogix™ Cultural Brief,” offers this resource. Its unique, innovative, and rigorously nuanced cultural reading presents a compelling approach that will not only provide extensive interpretive support for the VacilLogix™ brand but will also undoubtedly become the new paradigm for forward-gazing market analyses. Its central tenet is that the successful brand must better understand the cultural past—not so that we can avoid repeating it or even to necessarily learn from it or predict the future, but rather to better eviscerate it, mine it, strategically liquidate its meaning for presently optimized profit. As we shall see at the end of part one, no corporation is better positioned to leverage this knowledge and move our global culture forward than VacilLogix™. Whereas part one establishes the critical analysis and poses demands, part two, “The VacilLogix™ Brand Strategy,” provides an exciting sneak-peek of the concrete ways in which VacilLogix™ is rushing to meet these challenges. As the first corporation committed to the creation of social value derivatives and the universal democratization of sociopathic strategies, VacilLogix™ will forever transform the social field as we know it. By providing internal details such as the VacilLogix™ corporate identity, mission statement, business plan, and marketing strategy, part two opens an optimistic new door onto the exciting future of global cultural capitalism. VacilLogix™. It’s not just a company, a brand, or a vision. It is a collective art action, political movement, and humanity’s boldest experiment to date—a software startup that is the logical conclusion to the centuries-old Enlightenment Project. As the prescient poet of the digital age, William Gibson has apocryphally stated: “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” This document corrects that distribution error.
1 Lewis H. Lapham, "Moral Dandyism," Harper's, July 1985.
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PART 01: THE VACILLOGIX™ CULTURAL BRIEF
V A C I L L O G I X™ CULTURAL BRIEF
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Chapter 01: Initial Conditions What would it mean to write a genealogy of sociopathy? To undertake an archaeological expedition to exhume the artifacts of such an ardently maligned concept? What creature would emerge as we dutifully knit together its sundered articulations, coaxed its scattered corpus back into fertile conjugation? What unseen beast would rise from clay to stand exposed before us? A gigantic, twitching, swiftly lubricated reptilian machine, razor-scaled and rabid enough to best even the stately Tyrannosaurus Rex? Or, perhaps a darkly meningitic, cleft-hoofed angel with blunted wings, barbed tongue, and slick acidic whispers? Or, would we find something far more familiar, closer, almost comforting: our own long-forgotten Missing Link, bloodied flint in fist, stooped and smiling up at us with hollow, Promethean eyes of flame? Ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment, we in the West have almost universally operated under the assumption of one specific constant: progress. Progress is the very raison d’être of the Enlightenment; it is simultaneously both its means and its ends. Progress is our metric for the ultimate success of our ever-unfinished “Enlightenment Project.” But what is progress? As a term in itself, it is practically meaningless. Progress requires a material substrate for detecting change over time. Throughout the ages, commentators have posited many different means for measuring progress, such as greater material wealth, increased individual freedom, higher education, more stable social conditions, less human suffering, more refined culture, to name but a few. But which is correct? Which is the most telling indicator of change, and are the different benchmarks in any way commensurate? For example, is a certain amount of individual freedom more valuable than a comparable amount of material wealth? Is there a general increase in all areas, or is it more of a zero-sum game in which one area increases at the expense of others? How would one know? The majority of methodologies for assessing such questions tend to privilege specific interpretive dimensions. Historical assessments often reduce all change to political social movements while sacrificing the importance of economics. Economic analyses often reduce everything to economic fundamentals at the expense of all other variables. Art history and cultural studies typically obsess over cultural transformations while ignoring salient questions of economic and social factors. In order to gain an accurate picture of our current condition, a more holistic, balanced, and rigorous mode of analysis is necessary. Given our interest in exploring the connections between art, capitalism, and sociopathy, we have created just such a methodology, one that simultaneously encompasses the three most significant domains of contemporary value: Capital, Power, and Cool. It is through the application of this methodology that we reach the central conclusion of this brief: Sociopathy is the single most productive force driving progress since the Enlightenment and that the current historical moment provides an unprecedented profit opportunity for applying this knowledge. In short, sociopathy is progress. VacilLogix™ has emerged as the first corporation dedicated to the profitable application of our research on sociopathic strategies. The remainder of this chapter will explore our Capital-Power-Cool methodology in detail as a means for assessing its immense diagnostic value. We will employ both theoretical discussions and a practical application of our methodology to a case study of one of the earliest periods of modern progress, the Florentine Renaissance. Through this combination of theory and application, we will establish an effective framework for analyzing more recent historical trends.
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Capital, Power, Cool and Bourdieu’s “Forms of Capital” “To know the world one must construct it.” 1 — Cesare Pavese
In his 1984 essay entitled “The Forms of Capital,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu sought to defend sociology against the reductionism of economic analyses by proposing a new system that was more representative of multiple “forms of capital.” In establishing the need for such a system, Bourdieu argued that It is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory. Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices that is the historical invention of capitalism; and by reducing the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange, which is objectively and subjectively oriented toward maximization of profit, that is (economically) self-interested, it has implicitly defined the other forms of exchange as noneconomic, and therefore disinterested. In particular, it defines as disinterested those forms of exchange that ensure the transubstantiation whereby the most material types of capital—those that are economic in the restricted sense—can present themselves in the immaterial form of cultural or social capital and vice versa.
Thus, for Bourdieu, the problem with traditional economic analyses is their tendency to disregard the existence of and relations among two equally important forms of capital other than economic capital: social capital and cultural capital. Bourdieu further elaborated on the distinctions between these three forms of capital: capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations ('connections'), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.
Additionally, as both passages suggest, Bourdieu contends that it is possible for capital to be “converted” or “transubstantiated” according to “a law of conservation” from one field to another, “but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.” 2 Yet, despite the fact that Bourdieu’s system offers a more nuanced set of distinctions than other systems, it nevertheless smacks of an overtly economic bias in its insistence that each of the three domains are ultimately variations of capital. Thus, we have opted to offset this bias by interchanging more domain-neutral terms with each of Bourdieu’s categories. Given its already economic orientation, we will retain Bourdieu’s concept of economic capital or refer to it simply as Capital. Echoing the terminology of Michel Foucault, we will alternately designate Bourdieu’s concept of social capital as Power. As for his concept of cultural capital, what Bourdieu has elsewhere called distinction or taste, we have chosen the more recent term Cool as most appropriate for our analysis. 3 Given these distinctions among different types of capital, we can also generate descriptive statements about fundamental units of composition, sites of operation, and kinds of forces that are currently inherent to each. For example, economic Capital is an indication of material wealth and is most commonly reducible to national monetary currencies. Its site of operation is financial markets, whether as formal and regulated as a national stock exchange or as informal and unregulated as a small-town residential real estate market. Capital’s main method of force is its ability to influence the economic value of other types of Capital within a market. Social Power is akin to the the Chinese concept of guanxi, as control of others’ embodied behaviors, whether through normative social pressures or physical force. Social Power often manifests itself either formally in political positions or less formally through one’s position in private social networks, such as religious organizations, professional connections, disciplinary affiliations, or favor-gift communities. Power is most fundamentally reducible and 1 Quoted in Alan Kay, “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer,” Scientific American 237, no. 3 (September 1977): 9. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," The Sociology of Economic Life, ed. Mark S. Granovetter and Richard Swedberg (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 97. Emphasis in original. Originally published as "Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital," in Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt, Sonderheft 2), ed. Reinhard Kreckel (Goettingen: Otto Schartz & Co., 1983), 183-198. Published for the first time in English, translated by Richard Nice in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 241-258. Bourdieu, 98, 105-6. 3 Ibid, 106. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
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measurable in numbers of human bodies, as in election counts, protest attendance or petition signatures. The physical body is also its most basic site of operation, and force may be exercised either non-physically through techniques for normative group social coercion, such as shame or ostracism, or through the physical application of force to individual bodies, such as police or military action. Cool is an individual performative measure of collective desirability, which is most fundamentally reducible to units of human attention and may be quantitatively approximated by different metrics, such as number of imitators, television viewership ratings, or website views. Cool’s site of operation is communication networks, which may include informal word-of-mouth networks, academic texts, or more formalized mainstream media channels. Cool is enforced via the creation of culturally coded access rituals which function as performative proof of one’s sufficient Cool before gaining access to other objects of desire, such as displaying a certain level of fashion sense to gain admittance to an exclusive nightclub or knowing which cultural references will impress people at high-society dinner parties. As a few other qualitative generalizations regarding these three modes of capital, Capital is the most convertible, quantitative, nondiscriminatory, and abstractable. Power is the most persistent (durable/historical), innate, coercive, spatialized, and physical. Cool is the most performative, exclusive, interpretable, transient, and radical. Some quick examples help demonstrate how the system functions. A businessperson may accumulate significant Capital (economic capital) but will also often want to manipulate social factors, such as tax laws or industry regulations, to help ensure her continued accumulation of Capital. It may therefore be in her interest to convert some of her economic Capital into Power (social capital) by contributing to the campaign of a sympathetic politician in exchange for greater attention to her specific issues or by joining an exclusive country club as a means for building valuable social connections with other influential figures. Or, in another scenario, the same businessperson has accumulated a great degree of Capital but, because she is a self-made parvenu who never attended college, she might lack the cultural sophistication required to successfully interact with certain upperclass elites of similar economic standing. Thus, it may be to her advantage to convert a certain amount of economic Capital into Cool (cultural capital), such as buying culturally impressive works of art, donating a new wing of a university library in her name, or commissioning a popular fashion designer to create a distinctive clothing line for her. As a rule, conversions always require three elements: a decoding of the originating type of capital, an exchange of value, and a coding of the exchanged value into the new form of capital. Exchange rates must always be dynamically negotiated by the parties prior to or during the exchange and will vary depending on the specific terms of the exchange. The names of decoding and coding processes are specific to the types of capital being decoded and coded. Of most interest to us throughout this analysis will be the decoding of social capital (Power) which we will call sociopathy. We will designate the reverse procedure, the coding of other forms of capital (Capital or Cool) into social capital (Power), as institutionalization. We will designate the decoding of economic capital (Capital) as liquidation and the reverse procedure of coding either Power or Cool into Capital as capitalization. Finally, we will designate the decoding of cultural capital (Cool) as selling-out and the reverse process of coding Capital or Power into cultural capital (Cool) as branding. Although some of these terms may initially seem unusual or arbitrary descriptors for these processes, the value of our nomenclature will be become more obvious throughout the analysis. As a result, every type of conversion can be represented by a descriptive name signifying the specific decoding and coding processes of the conversion by listing the name of the decoding process first, followed by a forward slash mark signifying the transaction gap that must be negotiated, and concluding with the name of the final coding process. For example, a conversion from Cool to Capital would be selling-out/capitalization, whereas a conversion from Cool to Power would be selling-out/institutionalization. We have also adopted the typographic convention of writing conversion terms in italics as an indication of their dynamic nature as displayed in the following diagram of all possible conversion types:
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CAPITAL (economic capital)
liq uid ati se on llin /br g-o an ut/ din ca g pit ali za tio n
n tio za n ali tio pit za /ca ali thy ion pa tut cio sti so /in on ati uid liq
COOL (cultural capital)
sociopathy/branding selling-out/institutionalization
POWER (social capital)
Finally, given this system of exchange, we can identity several important tendencies regarding the nature of conversions: 1. Most conversions are radical, or non-reversible, meaning that they do not allow lossless or recoverable reconversion. For example, if someone engages in a selling-out/capitalization conversion from Cool to Capital, he or she may not ever be able to regain the original value or specific configuration of the decoded Cool, regardless of the amount of Capital he or she is willing to spend. The radicality of a conversion is often contingent upon historical factors at the time of the conversion. 2. As an extension of the previous observation, conversion costs fluctuate independently over time. Just as exchange rates between different international currencies vary, so do exchange rates among different types of capital. For example, a famous artist may commit to a selling-out/ institutionalization conversion by accepting a position at a prestigious research university. If that artist later decides he wants to melodramatically resign from his university position in protest as a means for generating Cool via a sociopathy/branding conversion, the conversion may generate either more or less Cool depending on the relative exchange rates at the time of conversion. 3. Throughout a given historical period, multiple conversions may happen in different realms at the same time. While our analysis will show that most historical periods can be characterized by larger macro-scale trends, one of the strengths our methodology is its sensitivity in accommodating multiple micro-scale conversions within the same historical timeframe. 4. It is not always necessary for conversions to be on a human to human basis, rather conversions may also occur through material conversion machines in human-machine or machine-machine transactions. These conversion machines may take many different material forms, including codified human practices, legal constructions, manufacturing technologies, or software programs. In regards to such machines, our analysis will maintain an objective and nondiscriminatory position, meaning that we do not view machinic conversions as inherently of a lesser quality or even different from human conversions. Rather, we find the human-machine distinction a largely arbitrary and archaic one. If anything, conversion machines are often more powerful and efficient than their human counterparts given that their improved durability, sustained intensity, and infinite replicability allows them to exponentially multiply and amplify certain types of conversions across time and space. While human effort is usually required to create new types of machines, we view that as an historically constrained phenomenon and not germane to our analysis. 5. The most profitable conversions are often externalizing conversions in which one person or entity benefits by converting another person or entity’s capital without their permission. Another way of phrasing this tendency is that externalizing conversions often conceal externalities. An externality is the economic term for a transaction cost involuntarily imposed on someone not directly involved in or benefitting from a transaction. For example, consider the following scenario:
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Some external entity (A) with a large amount of economic Capital wants to decrease the social capital (Power) of a second individual (B). One strategy for accomplishing this is to identity another person (C) with whom the target has an immense amount of social capital in the form of trust.: shared social capital
B
trust
C
A
Given a large enough amount of Capital, person A may convince person C to convert his social capital in the form of trust with person B via a sociopathic/capitalization conversion:
sociopathy/capitalization
B
externality
C
A
If person C accepts the terms of the exchange, perhaps by secretly disclosing a socially embarrassing secret about person B that will provide increased social Power to person A, then persons A and C both benefit from the transaction while the cost of the transaction is externalized as a loss of social Power for person B:
B
Cool
C
Capital
A
Power
It is also worth mentioning that it is possible for externalities to occur without a conversion from one form of capital to another. For example, one person stealing valuable jewelry from a second individual and selling it to a third for cash would involve an external cost for the target of the theft even though the resulting capitalization/liquidation conversion involves an in-kind exchange of Capital. That being said, the benefit of externalizing conversions across different types of capital is that it makes the externalities of those conversions much more difficult to detect and account for. Finally, it must be noted that externalizing conversions are almost uniformly radical. This tendency makes sense given that the parties who benefited from the externalities of conversion would have little interest in giving up their freely obtained capital even if restitution were an option. Traditionally, restitution for externalities only occurs in extreme circumstances and at great costs and often involves coercion on the part of a fourth party. 6. In accordance with Bourdieu’s original methodology, the global amount of capital is constant and therefore capital cannot be created or destroyed but is conserved across conversions. Bourdieu referred to this as a “law of conservation” that is “the equivalent of the conservation of energy” in which “profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another (so that a concept of wastage has no meaning in a general science of the economy of practices).” Though “additional” capital may at times appear to have been spontaneously created or de-
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stroyed, this misperception is often due to an externalizing conversion that masks the costs or profits, rendering them temporarily unaccountable. 4 7. Since the total amount a capital in the system is fixed, it is often a more useful diagnostic metric to track relative rates of conversion flows or exchange intensities over time rather than attempting to assess absolute quantities of capital at any single moment. Thus, our system is more mathematically aligned toward derivatives as indicators of exchange intensities in any local area of a more generalized exchange topology. For example, it is analytically unproductive to calculate the absolute number of so-called “sociopaths”5 in a society at any given time since sociopathy is a generally accessible dynamic decoding process that is not ontologically coterminous within any “contained” entity. Rather, it is far more analytically fruitful to monitor the derivatives of varying rates of sociopathic exchange intensities across an area of interest. 8. The differential measures of these derivatives at any given time results in important system performance metrics. Speaking diagrammatically, each side of the conversion triangle can be evaluated according to different modalities of performance. Since the Capital-Power side of the triangle is more concerned with absolute historical measures of long-term growth and stability over time, such as financial portfolio performance (Capital) or growth of familial influence within a social network (Power), its main performance modality is historical performance. The Power-Cool leg of the triangle is more focused on evaluating comparative individual performance or “performativity,” such as compliance with proscribed social customs of respect (Power) or sensitivity to cultural trends (Cool) and is therefore evaluated according to a critical performance modality. Finally, the Cool-Capital side of the triangle is more about instantaneously speed, flexibility, innovation and responsiveness to changing circumstances and is therefore evaluated according to an adaptive performance modality.6 These different performance modalities can be integrated into our initial conversion diagram as follows:
liq uid ati se on llin /br g-o an ut/ din ca g pit ali za tio n
sociopathy/branding selling-out/institutionalization
{
COOL (cultural capital)
{
n tio za n ali tio pit za /ca ali thy ion pa tut cio sti so /in on ati uid liq
{
adaptive performance
CAPITAL (economic capital)
historical performance
POWER (social capital)
critical performance
4 Ibid, 106. 5 As indicated in the following section, “Salvaging Sociopathy,” we find the concept of “sociopathy” ontologically suspect. 6 These three performance modalities are largely though not entirely compatible with those established by Jon McKenzie in Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), such that McKenzie’s concept of “organization performance” and its “challenge of efficiency” are similar to our historical performance modality, his concept of “cultural performance” and its “challenge of social efficacy” are similar to our critical performance modality, and his concept of “technological performance” and its “challenge of effectiveness” are similar to our adaptive performance modality.
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Given this rigorous methodological framework, we can more accurately state the primary thesis of this analysis: since the onset of the Enlightenment, the primary engine of progress has been the externalized radical sociopathic conversion of one group’s institutional social Power into other parties’ increased Capital (sociopathy/capitalization) and/or Cool (sociopathy/branding). Having established the essential points of our Capital-Power-Cool rubric, we will now apply this interpretive methodology through the remaining historical portion of our analysis. Salvaging sociopathy “There is a certain reverence for the sociopath as a major cultural type in American society, along with the frontiersman, the puritan and the outlaw.” 7 — Robert Stone (1981)
Why have we chosen sociopathy as the central concept and term around which our analysis is directed? Of all the conversion processes we have thus described, sociopathy has, by far, the most pejorative connotation. Yet this prejudice is not accidental, for externalized radical sociopathic conversion has been the most historically effective means for generating and consolidating various kinds of capital. Thus, it has been in the best interests of those who have most benefited from sociopathy to conceal its true nature within a vague metaphysical shroud of danger, violence, and immorality. While our analysis takes as its starting point the realization that sociopathy is just one of many rational capital conversion methods, it is worth briefly noting, as a means for comparison, a few of the different ways in which sociopathy has been socially configured since its modern inception. Most commonly defined as a lack of social conscience, as evidenced by habitual indifference towards and transgression of social norms, sociopathy has fluidly oscillated for centuries across multiple ontological boundaries, including psychological/sociological, moral/clinical, legal/psychiatric, and disease/adaptation. This ambiguity has prompted experts such as Robert W. Rieber and Maurice Green to observe in 1989 that “Of all the recognized psychiatric syndromes, that of the antisocial personality, or psychopath, presents perhaps the greatest number of questions.” Even sociopathy’s name has suffered ongoing equivocation and revision. As Donald W. Black notes, the concept first entered medical discourse during the early days of development in the early 19th century when the French physician Philippe Pinel classified it as one of the first psychological diseases: “Pinel used the term manie sans délire—mania without delirium—to describe cases where violent outbursts appeared unmotivated by an underlying psychiatric disturbance.” Since Pinel, a long succession of nomenclature has followed, each imprinting on the condition unique moral and clinical valences. In her 2005 bestseller on sociopathy, The Sociopath Next Door, the American clinical psychologist Martha Stout lists but a few of these equivalent terms, including psychopathy, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity, and moral imbecility. Other historical designations have included unscrupulous man, character deficiency, the manipulative personality, dissocial personality disorder, and—most recently, in the official language of the fourth and current edition American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV): antisocial personality disorder, which was first introduced in 1968 in the second edition of the DSM.8 Yet even more destabilizing for the psychiatric concept of sociopathy has been the question of whether it should be considered a pathological category in the first place. Even Robert D. Hare, considered by many as the foremost international expert on sociopathy and inventor of the most-used diagnostic method for sociopathy, has confessed this concern: A basic assumption of psychotherapy is that the patient needs and wants help for distressing or painful psychological and emotional problems. [...] And here is the crux of the issue: Psychopaths don’t feel they have psychological or emotional problems, and they see no reason to change their behavior to conform to societal standards with which they do
7 Charles Ruas, “A Talk WIth Robert Stone,” The New York Times (October 18, 1981). Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/26/specials/stone-talk.html. 8 Robert W. Rieber and Maurice Green, “The Psychopathy of Everyday Life: Antisocial Behavior and Social Distress,” in The Individual, Communication, and Society: Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson, ed. Robert W. Rieber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 48; Donald W. Black, Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17; Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 6; Theodore Millon et al., Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), vii.; Black, 24.
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not agree. [...] They see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying.
Additionally, unlike most psychiatric diseases in which the afflicted individual is rarely fully aware of his or her own condition and behavior, sociopathy has always been defined by complete consciousness of one’s own actions, as reflected in the current DSM-IV diagnostic criterion that “The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of Schizophrenia or a Manic Episode.” According to Hare, “Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders. Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.” Taken as a whole, such conclusions regarding this “‘disease’ that causes no dis-ease for the person who has it” have led experts such as Stout to concede that “All of this begs the question of whether the absence of conscience is a psychiatric disorder or a legal designation—or something else altogether.”9 Such fundamental misgivings as to the medical validity of sociopathy have resulted in what amounts to a complete abdication of psychiatric judgement in the diagnosis of sociopathy. Current DSM-IV diagnostic guidelines defer the lion’s share of authority to legal distinctions by relying on evidence of repeated criminal arrests. While proponents of this system, such as Black, have argued that reliance on “objectively assessed behaviors like arrests” removes the subjective “biases of a therapist,” critics such as Theodore Millon and his colleagues have attacked the methodology, arguing that “The ambivalence toward classification of psychopaths is exposed in current classification systems, where the criteria of antisocial personality disorder in the DSM system, for instance, are too biased toward criminality, too descriptive, and too socioeconomically skewed to be clinically useful.” Considering that sociopathy, by its very definition, represents a direct challenge to social Power, it is no surprise that, in the absence of any substantive scientific proof of sociopathy as a psychiatric disease, the dominant social regime must resort to exercising its own legislative powers in an attempt to prohibit sociopathic challenges.10 Yet Hare pushes the issue one step further by arguing that “successful” sociopathic behaviors may not only elude criminality but may even provide a competitive advantage: “Cheating skills may have adaptive value in some segments of a competitive society such as ours. In other words, far from landing at the bottom of the heap, psychopaths might be helped up some success ladders by their distinctive personality traits.” Hare has repeatedly argued that the most productive contexts for successful sociopaths is the modern business environment, declaring in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Michael Steinberger that “If I couldn't study psychopaths in prison, I would go down to the Stock Exchange.'' So rampant is successful sociopathy in contemporary business culture that Hare has recently teamed up with industrial and organizational psychologist Paul Babiak to extend his research on psychopathy to the corporate world with the development of the B-Scan, a diagnostic instrument to screen for psychopathic traits and behaviors among corporate managers, and the 2006 book, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work. As Hare and Babiak relate in their book, their initial trials of the B-Scan resulted in “similarities between the development issues for some managers identified as ‘high-potentials’ and psychopathic like features were startling.” As Hare told Steinberger, “psychopaths may be especially adept at scaling the corporate ladder,” adding that “the frenzied nature of modern business—the constant downsizing, the relentless merging and acquiring—provides a very fertile environment for havoc-wreaking psychopaths, who thrive on chaos and risk-taking.”11 Throughout the past decade, several scientists have taken Hare’s suggestion of successful sociopathy as effective competitive strategy seriously, particularly within the burgeoning disciplines of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. First among these was the Australian sociobiologist Linda Mealey, who in 1999 published her research to answer the question “Can we consider sociopathic behavior an adaptive strategy that has evolved as a natural
9 Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), 195, 22 (emphasis in original); Stout, 12-13 (emphasis in original). 10 Black, 26; Millon, vii-viii. 11 Hare, 168; MIchael Steinberger, “Psychopathic C.E.O.’s,” The New York TImes Magazine (December 12, 2004); Paul D. Babiak and Robert D. Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
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response to competitive social pressures, and, if so, should such behavior be considered pathological?” Mealey summarized her findings by stating that “My basic premise is that sociopaths are designed for the successful execution of social deception and that they are the product of evolutionary pressures which, through a complex interaction of environmental and genetic factors, lead some individuals to pursue a life history strategy of manipulative and predatory social interactions.” Through her use of game theory and computational models, Mealey’s studies indicate that sociopathic behavior can be considered a consistently predictable adaptive strategy that naturally evolves as part of any social system, thereby recasting sociopathy more as a naturally occurring social strategy rather than an individual pathological condition. Since Mealey’s original study, many of her colleagues have undertaken more extensive studies of the adaptive advantages of sociopathy and have reached similar if not more pronounced conclusions. Most importantly, what emerges from such sociobiological and evolutionary psychological research is a strikingly new understanding of sociopathy: a perspective of successful sociopaths not as a defective elements within an otherwise perfect social system but rather as masterful game-players, individuals possessing both the immense deductive acumen required to detect the multiple flaws inherent in any social system and the unfettered rationality to exploit them for individual profit. Thus, sociopaths are not deviant anomalies within the competitive dynamics of a social system, rather they are its star pupils.12 Even these more “positive” recent assessments of sociopathy still fall short of understanding its true character, often moralizing about “successful sociopathy” as a sub-threshold criminality in the case of Hare or “adaptive sociopathy” as a kind necessary sociological evil in the case of Mealey. They often tend to erroneously situate sociopathy as a permanent, static, embodied thing, such as an individual defect in a patient’s brain or a genetic predisposition, rather than as a universally accessible, mobile, dynamic process for productively decoding Power into different forms of capital. They habitually define sociopathy negatively as a “lack” or “deficiency” of some vital human faculty that they can never positively identify, whether as metaphysically vague as a “lack of conscience” or more “empirically” myopic as some perpetually elusive inhibitory neurotransmitter, rather than viewing it positively as a productive and essential part of any living system of cultural, social and economic exchange. They mistakenly consider sociopathy an innate quality that is only available to a small population of psychologically or biologically unique individuals rather than as common (almost mundane) process or strategy that is both learnable and available to anyone. However, such misrepresentations, whether intentional or not, are in many ways unavoidable. Given their positions as institutional experts, it is in their best interest to reinforce the prevailing social norms and structures by continuing to denigrate the productive power of sociopathy. Such attitudes do not detract from our analysis, rather they only serve to strengthen it in that they offer further indication of the true power of sociopathy and the immense benefits of its successful employment. It is through this revised understanding of sociopathy that we confront an essential contradiction within the larger ongoing Enlightenment project. If, as the Enlightenment project presupposes, the best path to increasing collective prosperity, freedom and happiness is through the progressive extension of reason to all realms of individual human action, one might consider the practitioner of sociopathy its ideal subject. For what is most unsettling about sociopathy is not its conscious or unconscious disregard for rationality, rather it is in sociopathy that the light of reason burns most fiercely with an almost painful intensity, an unflinching hyper-rationality, a pure calculus of instrumentality that supersedes any countervailing emotionality or social coercion. And it is precisely this vibrant, lifeaffirming, hyper-rational drive to diagnose and exploit the hidden vulnerabilities in any system of Power—what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche poetically called the “will to power” or “instinct to freedom”13 —that makes sociopathy the most effective mechanism for advancing human progress, elevating its daring devotees as the paradigmatic change-agents of human history. 12 Linda Mealey, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, no. 3 (1995): 524; in particular, see J. MacMillan and L. Kofoed, “Sociobiology and Antisocial Personality: An Alternative Perspective,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders 172, no. 12 (Dec 1984): 701-6; Henry C. Harpending and Jay Sobus, “Sociopathology as an Adaptation,” Ethology and Sociobiology 8 (1987): 63S-72S; A.M. Colman and J.C. Wilson, “Antisocial personality disorder: An evolutionary game theory analysis,” Legal and Criminological Psychology 2 (1997): 23-34; Dominic Murphy and Stephen Stich, “Darwin in the Madhouse: Evolutionary Psychology and the Classification of Mental Disorders” in Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, ed. Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62-92; and Ian Pitchford, “The Origins of Violence: Is Psychopathy an Adaptation?” The Human Nature Review, 1 (November 5, 2001): 28-36. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67. Emphasis in original.
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Revisiting Renaissance Florence "History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition."14 — Milton Friedman (1962)
If one were to posit a general historical trend regarding sociopathy, it would be that sociopathy most often functions when certain subordinate groups successfully use externalized radical sociopathic conversions to challenge established institutions of consolidated social Power. In doing so, the challenging sociopathic parties may attempt different types of conversions. The most blatant type of conversion would be a direct assault on the institutions social Power via a similar institution of Power, such as an opposing military force. However, more subtle and effective conversions are the gradual externalizing sociopathic conversion of the dominant institution’s Power into Capital or Cool via sociopathy/capitalization or sociopathy/branding conversions, respectively. If a challenging party is successful in converting the dominant institution’s Power into enough of its own Power, Capital, or Cool, the challenging party may overthrow the institution. Assuming the challenging party is successful in attaining Power, it is always in its best interest to perform a subsequent institutionalizing conversion of Capital into social Power so that new social laws, taboos and moral systems are enacted to specifically forbid the same kinds of sociopathic strategies it used to attain Power. Given this common pattern of successful sociopathy followed by denigration of that same sociopathy, it is no surprise that sociopathy has been so consistently demonized throughout the many different stages of history. Nowhere is this pattern of sociopathy and institutionalization more immediately apparent than in the case of the rapid climb of the Medici family to power during the early Renaissance Italian city-state of Florence. As historian Terrence Rogan has noted in The Original Godfathers: The Revolutionary Rise of the Medici, prior to their ascent, the Medici had employed other more traditionally criminal sociopathic means for challenging power. As speaker of the influential Florentine woolmakers’ guild, Salvestro de’ Medici was involved in the successful Ciompi (“wool carders”) Revolt of 1378. Antonio de' Medici was sentenced to death in 1398. The Medici family involvement in another plot in 1400 resulted in the exile of all members of the family from Florence for twenty years, with the exception of two branches, one of which was that of Averado de' Medici, whose son, Giovani di Bicci, founded the Medici Bank in 1397.15 Thus, it is through the seemingly banal, though significantly more revolutionary, innovations such as doubleentry bookkeeping that the bank grew to become by many estimates the largest bank in Europe, with the Medici political fortunes gradually ascending with its financial ones as the nearly uninterrupted rulers of Florence for nearly four centuries (1360-1737). As the economist Tyler Cowen argues in his compelling historical account In Praise of Commercial Culture, perhaps the single most historically significant fact about the Medici family is its status as the first dynasty of European princes to gain Power not by the traditional mechanisms of social Power such as warfare, marriage, or inheritance, but rather by mastering the economic mechanisms of capitalism. Thus, in the case of the Medici, we see an early example of the effectiveness of alternative means for challenging social Power, namely the conversion economic Capital amassed through the Medici bank into social Power for challenging the existing hereditary rulers of Florence. Cowen goes on to argue that one must not only consider Medici Florence “a birthplace for early capitalism” but also as the site where “The creative artist, whose individual reputation was attached to each work, was born,” noting that “As late as the fourteenth century, the Italian language had no word for artist with a connotation separate from that of ‘artisan.’” As ardent supporters of the arts, the Medici’s extended reign allowed for a stable cultural community and art tradition to blossom in Florence. Yet Cowen is careful to correct previous notions of the relationships between powerful Florentines and artists as a kind of indentured patronage, asserting that “these financiers were first and foremost paying customers” who were not interested in maintaining “the artist in a position of servitude,” adding that “most renowned Renaissance artists were not court artists or kept men of some noble or prelate.” 14 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 10. 15 Terrence Rogan, The Original Godfathers: The Revolutionary Rise of the Medici (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 32-8.
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Rather, Cowen contends that the Florentine Renaissance marked an unprecedented transition in the balance of power in favor of the artist as “emancipated and sovereign in a matter far beyond his predecessors,” citing evidence of Leonardo and other artists spurning patronage offers from the Marchioness Isabella d’Este of Mantua, Donatello’s brashness in “destroy[ing] an artwork rather than accede to a customer’s demand,” and even Michelangelo’s supreme audacity in “refus[ing] to yield to Pope Julius II, one of the most powerful men in the sixteenth century.” Michelangelo’s open defiance of Pope Julius II demonstrates that, even in the early Renaissance, a large enough amount of cultural Cool can trump similarly formidable degrees of social Power. Thus, in their broad cultural and financial support of the arts, the Medici helped further destabilize traditional institutions of Power through the externalizing sociopathic conversion of Power to Cool by prominent Florentine artists.16 In the end, Cowen attributes the gradual decline of Florentine art and capitalism to the absolute consolidation of political power “under a centralized Medici autocracy” in 1531, in which “By mid-century Cosimo I ruled Florence with an iron hand and centralized the finance of Florentine art in his office.” Cowen elaborated further by stating how Cosimo I not only centralized funding of the arts but “also restricted competing sources of patronage from friars, guilds, confraternities, and families. Rights of private patronage were cancelled and artistic commissions were now subject to central regulation. The centralization of patronage [under Cosimo I] was both an effect and a cause of Florentine artistic decline.”17 It is through Cosimo’s actions that we begin to see a reverse sociopathy occurring through his exertion of social Power to force externalizing conversions of Cool to Power (selling-out/ institutionalization) and Capital to Power (liquidation/institutionalization) as a means for centrally institutionalizing all forms of potentially sociopathic capital under his authority—to such an extent that he effectively bankrupted the entire market in process. Yet despite the eventual decline of the Medici dynasty, they established a roadmap for the massive sociopathic conversion of traditional institutional Power into economic Capital and cultural Cool that has become the distinguishing characteristic of Western civilization to this day. Conversion machines “The object is no longer to compare man and the machine in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of one for the other, but to bring them into communication in order to show how man is a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine.” 18 — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977)
As mentioned during our initial methodological discussion, material conversion machines provide an incredibly powerful means for exponentially replicating and amplifying certain types of conversions across time and space. These machines may take a great variety of material forms, and the same machine may enable different conversions in different historical or social contexts. As a means for further explicating the importance of such conversion machines, we will identify a few salient examples from our initial Florentine Renaissance case study with examples for conversion machines for each type of capital. In underscoring the importance of such material machines to early capitalism, the human geographer Nigel Thrift has stressed the degree to which “capitalist business is based on material culture. Its devices—from the vast number of intermediaries required to produce trade, through the different layouts of buildings that discipline workers’ bodies—are not an aid to capitalism; they are a fundamental part of what capitalism is.” In reference to the development of such capitalist machinic practices in the early Renaissance, Thrift has reinforced Cowen’s earlier emphasis that the Medici’s revolutionary accounting invention of double-entry bookkeeping was one of the primary capitalist mechanisms that “gave Florentine merchants a competitive edge as early as the mid-fourteenth century” as a means for reliably managing their daily “blizzard of transactions.” While the type of conversion enabled by double-entry bookkeeping may be subtle and not immediately obvious, it is actually a conversion from increased
16 Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 103, 88, 93, 89, 91-94. 17 Ibid, 106. 18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Balance Sheet – Program For Desiring Machines,” Semiotext(e) 2, no. 3 (1977): 118.
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labor requirements (social Power) for doubling the numbers of transaction to increased economic Capital due to fewer mistakes, and the type of machinic conversion enabled is therefore a sociopathic/capitalization conversion.19 On the artistic front, Cowen has diligently provided a similar list of material innovations and processes that radically transformed artists’ practices, including new innovations in marble and bronze production for sculpture fabrication, significant materials advances in paper and drawing materials, Brunelleschi’s creation of a system of techniques for accurately representing linear perspective, and the exciting invention of the entirely new medium of oil painting.20 These technical conversion machines are relatively straightforward, for they are all artistic fabrication techniques for art and therefore enable a liquidation/branding conversion of artist Capital to Cool. Another example could be Raphael’s foray into print-making as a means for market segmentation and greater profits. Given that this conversion machine enables the dilution of the “exclusivity” of the artist’s aura greater profit in exchange for greater profits through mass-production, the conversion is therefore a selling-out/capitalization conversion from Cool to Capital. Yet, one of the most interesting and enduring conversion machines to have emerged during this period is Niccolò Machiavelli’s notorious 16th-century treatise on political theory, The Prince. Regarded by many as one of the most blatantly sociopathic articulations of how to successfully achieve and manage political power, The Prince was written by Machiavelli while he was a political advisor to the Medici. Machiavelli intended The Prince as a kind of sociopathic field manual designed to specifically address the “new prince” of the Medici, whom Machiavelli believed faced a different set of political challenges from those who had inherited their reign by hereditary means. Whereas “there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary states, and those long accustomed to the family of their prince, than new ones; for it is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise,” the new prince faces the much more formidable task of both consolidating and stabilizing his new political power and actively convincing others of his claim to rule: “Those who solely by good fortune become princes from being private citizens have little trouble in rising, but much in keeping atop.” Machiavelli does not mince words in his endorsing the necessity of committing seemingly ruthless actions for the sake of political ambition, arguing in several passages that “it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity” while being “sufficiently prudent that he may know how to avoid the reproach of those vices which would lose him his state.” The Prince is therefore a somewhat unusual type of conversion machine since its techniques enable both a diverse set of radical externalizing sociopathic conversions from others’ social Power and a number of institutionalizing conversions for re-consolidating that capital into one’s own social Power.21 The measure of The Prince’s effectiveness as an enduring sociopathic machine is rooted not only in its status as a material artifact of a prior sociopathic era or its continued utility as a formulaic system for obtaining and keeping power but also in its abundant array of imitators, including the 1998 national bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Advertising itself as “Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power into forty-eight well explicated laws,” the volume has sold over 800,000 copies in the U.S. alone and, perhaps even more than The Prince, reads like an instruction manual for sociopathy: ‣ Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies. ‣ Law 7: Get others to do the work for you but take the credit. ‣ Law 11: Learn to keep people dependent on you. ‣ Law 15: Crush your enemy totally. ‣ Law 17: Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability. ‣ Law 33: Discover each man’s thumbscrew.
19 Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism(London: Sage Publications, 2005), 78, 79; Cowen, 86. 20 Cowen, 96-103. 21 Niccolò Macchiavelli, The Prince, trans. W.K. Marriott (Project Gutenberg, 2006), chapter 2, chapter 7, chapter 15. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1232. Originally written in 1513 and published posthumously in 1532.
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In a 2006 New Yorker article, Nick Pomgarten reports that, despite having originally appeared nearly a decade ago, The 48 Laws of Power continues to attract a passionate cult following particularly across influential U.S. hip-hop and gangsta rap communities, including such notable devotees as Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, Ludacris, American Apparel founder Dov Charney, Quincy Jones III, and Karrine Steffans, who rose to international notoriety by detailing her sexual exploits with countless hip-hop celebrities in her scabrous 2005 bestseller, Confessions of a Video Vixen. Thus, the model established by The Prince is often employed to enable a similar but slightly different kind of conversion in these examples contemporary usage from how it might have been used in the past: the conversion involved is a leveraging of one’s Cool as a means for forcing a radical externalizing sociopathic/institutionalizing conversion of others’ Power and selectively consolidating it back into one’s own Power, Capital, or even Cool.22
22 Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (New York, Penguin Books, 1998), back cover, ix-xiv; Nick Paumgarten, “Fresh Prince,” The New Yorker, November 6, 2006, 56; Karrine Steffans, Confessions of a Video Vixen (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
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Chapter 02: Incorporating Sociopathy While early Florentine capitalism had largely been institutionalized according to more traditional guild-based or familial Power structures, new legal and social Power arrangements began to exert themselves as the sociopathic pursuit of economic Capital rapidly matured throughout the subsequent centuries. Accelerated by the ever hungrier sociopathic machines of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism repurposed Europe and the New World at an astonishing rate, radically uprooting landscapes, bodies, and communities in the process. While a great deal can (and has) been said about the new era of sociopathy manufactured during this time, few developments are capable of rivaling a particular assemblage of capitalist sociopathy that coalesced and took stubborn hold of America during the mid19th century: an unrivaled sociopathic machine known only as the corporation. Capitalism starts body-building “CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” 1 — Ambrose Bierce (1911)
Though the concept of the corporation was not entirely new to capitalism, it became a distinctly different beast in the latter half of 19th-century America. As the law professor Joel Bakan explains in his 2004 study of the historical institution of the corporation, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit, prior to this point, “Businessmen and politicians had been suspicious of the corporation from the time it first emerged in the late sixteenth century,” noting that even the so-called “father of capitalism,” Adam Smith, warned in his celebrated An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 that “because managers could not be trusted to steward ‘other people’s money,’ ‘negligence and profusion’ would inevitably result when businesses organized as corporations.” Bakan adds that over fifty years before Smith’s observation, the English Parliament, acting in response to the calamitous financial meltdown unleashed upon the English stock exchange by the fraudulent South Sea Company, formally outlawed the corporations under the Bubble Act of 1720. 2 As business historian Jackson Quaid has shown, the young nation of the United States viewed corporations with similar wariness, often only allowing them to be chartered into existence for a few years’ time and only when necessary to help finance large-scale public infrastructure projects, such as bridges and canals. The event that changed such attitudes was the mammoth undertaking required to build the nation’s railroads, which began prior to the Civil War and boomed directly following it from 1865 to 1885. According to Bakan, such an extensive operation “quickly came to rely on the corporate form for financing its operations” with share ownership expanding beyond the “relatively small wealthy coterie of men who invested in corporations at the start of the nineteenth century” to include, for the first time, vast numbers of investors from the middle class. Additionally, as the business historian Alfred D. Chandler has shown, the ability to successfully manage the staggering operational logistical details of such an enterprise required the invention of new sociopathic machines, including “the formulation of brand new types of internal administrative procedures and accounting and statistical controls.” These complicated new material practices simultaneously required the creation of a new type of worker: “the first group of modern business administrators in the United States,” resulting in the “first administrative hierarchies in American business.” Capitalism had begun to build itself a body.3 Yet these new 19th-century corporations were still handicapped by a number of practical challenges, particularly in regard to shareholder liability. As Bakan explains, “no matter how much, or how little, a person had invested in a company, he or she was personally liable, without limit, for the company’s debts. Investors’ homes, savings, and other personal assets would be exposed to claims by creditors if a company failed, meaning that a person risked 1 Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (Project Gutenberg, 2006). http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/972. Originally published in 1911. 2 Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit (New York: Free Press, 2004), 6-7. 3 Jackson Quaid, A More Perfect Union: An Early History of American Corporations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 14-8; Bakan, 10-1; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 87.
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financial ruin simply by owning shares in a company.” Such severe exposure to risk was often unattractive to most conservative or lower-income investors. As a result, by the mid-19th century, an influential group of business and political leaders began arguing for a new kind of shareholder protection known as “limited liability,” which would strictly limit investor liability to the value of his or her shares. Advocates of limited liability protections promoted the legislation via the rhetoric of economic egalitarianism, arguing that it would open the door to investment for those of “moderate means.” While detractors of the proposal admonished that enabling investors “to embark in trade with a limited chance of loss, but with an unlimited chance of gain” would encourage “a system of vicious and improvident speculation,” limited liability measures gradually became “entrenched in corporate law” in all U.S. states throughout the second half of the century.4 Limited liability was merely a prelude to even more aggressive arguments for corporate protectionism that characterized the turn of the century. Bakan details how in the 1890s, Delaware initiated a trend towards slackening corporate restrictions as a means for attracting new corporations. Among removing other regulations, Delaware ‣ Repealed the rules that required businesses to incorporate only for narrowly defined purposes, to exist only for limited durations, and to operate only in particular locations; ‣ Substantially loosened controls on mergers and acquisitions; and ‣ Abolished the rule that one company could not own stock in another.
Not wanting to forfeit corporate tax revenues, other states quickly followed suit. What these new legal changes really amounted to was a massive mutation of governmental Power into corporate Capital via a sociopathy/capitalization conversion whose costs were externalized onto two involuntary populations. The first consisted of other noncorporate business entities whose competitiveness and protections were diminished in the face of expanded corporate advantages. The second were the people most served by the government: the American citizens who, through the loss of corporate protections, were now more vulnerable to exploitation by increased consolidation of corporate economic Capital and institutional Power. It is not surprising, then, that these major transformations of social Power into corporate Capital prompted an intense flurry of corporate mergers and acquisitions in which “a large number of small and medium-sized corporations were quickly absorbed into a smaller number of very large ones—1,800 corporations were consolidated into 157 between 1898 and 1904,” heralding a new era in corporate capitalism.5 Even more radical was the “bizarre legal alchemy” through which corporate lawyers exploited a strained interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s property protections, originally intended for freed slaves, to formally endow corporations the new legal status of juristic personhood, thereby granting the corporation “its own identity, separate from the flesh-and-blood people who were its owners and managers and empowered, like a real person, to conduct business in its own name, acquire assets, employ workers, pay taxes, and go to court to assert its rights and defend its actions.” Beginning with the landmark 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which first established that equal protection applied to corporations, Balkan notes that “Between 1890 and 1910, business interests invoked the Fourteenth Amendment 288 times before the courts, compared to 19 times by African Americans.” Additionally, the courts also mandated that this new corporate person have a one-track mind, according to a legally defined duty to pursue no other ends other than maximizing profits for its shareholders. The ruling, which Bakan identifies as “the best interests of the corporation principle,” arose from the bizarre 1916 case of Dodge v. Ford in which John and Horace Dodge, two initial investors in Ford Motor Company, sued its founder, Henry Ford, when he cut the price of his Model T cars because he reportedly felt it was unfair to overcharge from them. Since the price cut reduced shareholder dividends, the Dodge brothers sued Ford on the grounds that “Profits belong to shareholders [...] and Ford had no right to give the money away to customers, however good his intentions.” In considering the judge’s decision in favor of the Dodge brothers, a case which is “now a fixture in the corporate laws of most countries,” Bakan draws the logical conclusion that “Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal—at least when it’s genuine.” 6 4 Bakan, 11, 13. 5 Ibid, 14. 6 Ibid, 16, 172n28, 36, 37.
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The cumulative result of the rapid succession of pro-corporate legislation and court decisions near the onset of the 20th century is what corporate executive, consultant, and self-described “shareholder activist” Robert Monks has called an “externalizing machine.” As our analysis has similarly shown, Monks therefore views the legal protections granted to the corporation as, in effect, creating a legal framework that requires corporations to maximize corporate profits by externalizing as many costs as possible, regardless of potential harm to others. As Monks comments in an interview with Bakan, “The corporation,” says Monks, “is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. [...]There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will; the enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it do that for which it was designed. As a result, says Monks, the corporation is “potentially very, very damaging to society.”
In offering his own assessment of the net effect of the legal constitution of the corporation, Bakan writes, “The irony in all this is that the corporation’s mandate to pursue its own self-interest, itself a product of the law, actually propels corporations to break the law.”7 It is thus through the new entity of the 20th-century corporation that the most powerful contemporary sociopathic machine was unleashed upon the world, and it is little wonder that Dr. Hare’s B-Scan studies from the previous chapter found no shortage of sociopathic personalities thriving in various levels of corporation institutions. This epiphany is not unique to our analysis, for it is also occurred to Bakan. If corporations are now legally recognized as persons under the law, Bakan mused, then what kind of psychological profile would such a person have? In an attempt to answer this question, Bakan turned to none other than Dr. Robert Hare, who, while refusing to support the view that corporate executives themselves are necessarily sociopathic, did find a close match between his checklist of psychopathic traits and the behaviors of many leading corporations.8 Given their new legal powers and inherently sociopathic disposition, American corporations swelled as they rapaciously increased their personnel, power, and persuasiveness throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, the true nature of these sociopathic powerhouses did not go entirely unnoticed by the public. Bakan notes that as early as the first decade of the 20th century, the rapid onslaught of corporate mergers and expansions forced many Americans to realize “that corporations, now huge behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.” The solutions to this problem were massive public relations and advertising campaigns on the part of many corporations to convince consumers that corporations were not just giant, impersonal, bureaucratic “things,” but rather were regular people with feelings, personalities and distinctive “souls.” Bakan cites the example of AT&T, who, in 1908, sought to soften the image of its monopoly on telephone services in the U.S. by launching a new campaign “aimed to persuade a skeptical public to like and accept the new company. In much the same way that law had transformed the corporation into a ‘person’ to compensate for the disappearance of the real people within it, AT&T’s campaign imbued the company with human values in an effort to overcome people’s suspicions of it as a soulless and inhuman entity.” Thus, “From 1908 into the late 1930s, AT&T trumpeted itself as a ‘friend and neighbor’ and sought to give itself a human face by featuring real people from the company in advertising campaigns.” Similarly, Naomi Klein has observed in No Logo that In the early twenties, legendary adman Bruce Barton turned General Motors into a metaphor for the American family, “something personal, warm and human,” while GE was not so much the name of the faceless General Electric Company as, in Barton’s words, “the initials of a friend.” In 1923 Barton said that the role of advertising was to help corporations find their soul.
7 Ibid, 70, 80. 8 Ibid, 56. However, Hare’s aforementioned 2006 collaboration with Paul Babiak regarding psychopathy in the corporate world, Snakes in Suits, repudiates Bakan’s claims that Hare’s diagnosed of corporations as sociopathic applies to the general legal entity of the corporation as such rather than a few specific examples. According to Hare and Babiak, “The documentary uses a selected set of examples of corporate misbehaviors, as well as a brief clip of a longer interview with Hare, to make and bolster its position that the corporation meets the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy ... Although the producers of the documentary stated that they used the term psychopath merely as a metaphor for the most egregious corporate entities, it is apparent that they had in mind corporations in general. The short excerpt from the interview with Hare did not convey his view that although the attitudes, philosophies, and behaviors of a given corporation (as a legal entity) might be considered psychopathic, at least as an academic exercise, such a ‘diagnosis’ hardly would apply to all, or even most, corporations.” (Snakes in Suits, p. 95) Emphasis in original.
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Roland Marchand has similarly noted a new emphasis by advertising firms in the 1920s and 30s to create personalized and approachable representations of corporations with whom customers could form intimate connections. Perhaps most notably, Marchand cites General Mills’ creation of Betty Crocker in 1921, whose radio talks regarding cooking advice attracted “letters by the tens of thousands,” steadily reaching 4,000 letters a day. Thus, by the 1930s in America, most corporations not only had managed to acquire a body and legal personhood, but they had also begun to fabricate believable and distinctive souls.9 Nevertheless, as they trampled into the economic turbulence of the 1930s, these new institutions of capitalist sociopathy encountered bumpy rides. Their immense size and profits made them easy public targets for growing discontent, one of the few resources in rife abundance during the 1930s. As Bakan writes, “Many people believed at the time that corporate greed and mismanagement had caused the Great Depression. They shared Justice Louis Brandeis’s view, stated in a 1935 Supreme Court judgment, that corporations were ‘Frankenstein monsters’ capable of doing evil.” In response, the largest of the U.S. corporate executives clustered together in a call for a new generation of “corporate social responsibility” as a desperate means for patching the machinic fissures in their freshly manufactured flesh.10 Sociopathic elitism and creative destruction “This distinction between the way corporations and markets approach the processes of creative destruction is not an artifact of our times or an outgrowth of the ‘dot.com’ generation. It has been smoldering for decades, like a fire in a wall, ready to erupt at any moment.” 11 — Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan of McKinsey & Company (2001)
Despite the massive flows and conversions of different types of capital that occurred throughout the four centuries since the beginning of the decline of the Florentine Renaissance, the overall landscape had not changed as much as one might imagine. While literally billions of dollars in Capital had been generated from the radical externalizing sociopathic conversions of medieval Power structures to modern corporations and, to a much less extent, a fair degree of Cool for the limited artistic avant-garde, much of that exchanged capital had eventually been reinstitutionalized into a small number of towering corporate goliaths which were almost as rigidly hierarchical and perhaps more powerful than their medieval predecessors. Most importantly for our analysis, by this time sociopathy had been so severely monopolized and restricted to such a small coterie of elite corporate executives that by the 1930s the entire system had almost come to a choking halt. As the astute U.S. journalist Walter Lippman warned in 1931, "The simple opposition between people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business."12 No one bemoaned this shambling, top-heavy American moment more than the Austro-Hungarian-born Harvard Professor of Economics Joseph Schumpeter in his celebrated work from 1942, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Though largely ignored by his fellow economists at the time, Schumpeter’s research has enjoyed an unusual resurgence across all professional sectors over the past three decades, with some experts adding him as a fifth member of an economics pantheon that traditionally includes Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen. Schumpeter, an ardent advocate of capitalism, wrote Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as an attempt to resolve a single question, which he answers quite bluntly and quickly: “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Schumpeter’s reasons for his pessimistic outlook are prophetically near to our own. In analyzing the past and future trajectories of American industry, he views large corporations’ monopolistic hoarding of socio-
9 Ibid, 17; Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 2002), 7; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for the Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 352-4. 10 Bakan, 19. 11 Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 10. 12 Walter Lippman, speech to the Academy of Political Science (March 25, 1931). Quoted in Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 277.
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pathic innovation as a strangling of the lifeblood of the system, which will ultimately drive it towards an unpleasant fall into socialism: Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements, tends to automatize progress, we conclude that it tends to make itself superfluous—to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success. The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the small and medium-sized firm and 'expropriates' its owners, but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur and expropriates the bourgeoisie as a class which in the process stands to lose not only its income but also what is infinitely more important, its function. The true pacemakers of socialism were not the intellectuals or agitators who preached it but the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers.
Though it is debatable whether Schumpeter fully believed his prediction would come to pass, there is no denying its admonition that the “petrified form of capitalism” represented by big business would soon undercut its very means of existence.13 Schumpeter’s analysis built upon his previous 1934 work, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle, in which he demonstrated the periodicity of historical business cycles, which he described in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by noting that each of “those long waves in economic activity ... consists of an 'industrial revolution' and the absorption of its effects." For Schumpeter, the key to capitalist growth lay in this cycle of “revolutions” which provide a “process of recurrent rejuvenation of the productive apparatus." In stark contrast to his predominantly Keynesian-minded colleagues, all of whom were proposing a means for stimulating the depressed U.S. economy via manipulation of monetary policy and tweaks to the current system, Schumpeter stood alone in noticing that “the problem that is usually being visualized is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them." Thus, for Schumpeter, the issue was not how best to provide palliative coddling to a deservedly ailing capitalist structure, but rather how to understand and stimulate the “process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one,” declaring that “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”14 It goes without saying that Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction" as the driving force of capitalism bears a striking resemblance to our concept of sociopathy. Similarly, Schumpeter refused to shy away from the fact that creative destruction could be a ruthless but necessary affair. In arguing that economists have too long been distracted by ideas of price competition and other forms of market competition “within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions,” Schumpeter instead contends that “in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization [...] which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.” For Schumpeter, such a ruthless, “evolutionary” impulse is what drives capitalism, and the hero of his account is not the high-minded government regulator or the powerful captain of industry but rather the individual entrepreneur, capable of sociopathically analyzing the vulnerabilities of any system and exploiting them for both profit and progress: We have seen that the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on. [...] This kind of activity is primarily responsible for the recurrent “prosperities” that revolutionize the economic organism and the recurrent 'recessions' that are due to the disequilibrating impact of new products or methods.
Thus, for both Schumpeter’s analysis as well as our own, it is the creative-destructive force of sociopathy and its attendant sociopathic machines that propels innovation and moves the world forward. And it is the monopolistic restriction of that sociopathic creative destruction that smothers the potential for disruptive innovation: “innovation itself is being reduced to routine. Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained 13 Thomas K. McCraw, introduction to Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, by Joseph A. Schumpeter (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), xxxi; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942), 61, 134, 113. 14 Schumpeter, 67, 68, 84, 83.
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specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways," adding that “economic progress tends to become depersonalized and automatized. Bureau and committee work tends to replace individual action."15 In light of such undesirable conditions and the general “atmosphere of hostility to capitalism” plaguing the age, Schumpeter believed that groups of bitter malcontent intellectuals would sway the disgruntled masses—and with them the government—towards an impending socialist system, not through Marx’s prognosis of violent class revolution but rather through a gradual changing of the congressional guard. Ironically, Schumpeter even believed such radical, avant-garde anti-capitalists were a direct product of capitalism itself. According to Schumpeter, “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest." By extending rationality to all aspects of life, capitalism inherently produces an influential and effete cadre of over-educated and under-utilized intellectuals who “are the very symptoms of the tendencies they pretend to fight."16 For all his truly singular diagnostic acuity, Schumpeter’s predictions were ultimately wrong. Despite its brief New Deal foray into increased public assistance, the United States never ventured very close to true socialism. This does not, however, invalidate Schumpeter’s general theory of creative destruction, which has largely proven both astonishingly clairvoyant and useful. Rather, it simply attests to the narrowness of his imagination and his underestimation of both the sociopathy of capitalism and the avant-garde at the time. Somehow he became blinded to the possibility that capitalism’s salvation might lie in an unexpected combination of his two demons: the sour iconoclastic cynicism of the artistic avant-garde was exactly what corporate capitalism needed, just as the corporation’s wider reach into popular consumption was the perfect complement to the avant-garde. But, then, perhaps it was difficult in 1942 for Schumpeter to see anything other than a fractured world of former allies racing furiously towards mass graves.
15 Ibid, 84, 132, 133. 16 Ibid, 63, 146, 127.
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Chapter 03: Sociopathy Comes to the People If Joseph Schumpeter was one of the first to exhort against the dangers of the disproportionately institutionalized Power of corporate America, he was by no means the last. Throughout the subsequent decade of the 1950s, a vanguard of extremely influential popular and academic bestsellers eschewed the dangers of mass obeisance to dubious hierarchical corporate tendencies, a concern that most commonly crystallized around an increasing suspicion of social conformity. In the wake of the Second World War, a new generation of scholars began turning its attention toward the monolithic corporation as the single most problematic institution of social life. Less than two decades later, an entire sea change in attitudes towards sociopathy cannibalized the very foundations of corporate Power, reshaping the popular face of America. Critiquing corporate conformity “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” 1 — John F. Kennedy (1961)
The first significant intellectual challenge to social conformity appeared in 1950 when the sociologist David Riesman published his long-running bestseller, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. In his celebrated account, Riesman highlighted the rise of an “other-directed” (as opposed to “inner-directed”) society in which “fitting in” and conformity to group standards and identities were of prime importance. As Wilfred M. McClay summarized Riesman’s findings fifty years later, Everywhere one looked in the culture, and particularly in the education of children, one saw evidence of "an enormous ideological shift favoring submission to the group," a regime in which "the peergroup is the measure of all things" and "the individual has few defenses the group cannot batter down." Such a culture appeared to value smooth socialization and "adjustment" far more than it did independence or dissent.
Riesman concluded his study by positing that, although “other-directed” individuals are crucial for the smooth functioning of the modern business organization, the domination of such attitudes significantly erodes the social values of individual autonomy, a collective crisis that could result in profound deficiencies in leadership, individual selfknowledge, and human potential. The general implication of Riesman’s research is clear: the long-standing myth of the rugged American individual had taken a very unexpected turn. Given the world’s recent battle with the extreme social conformity of the fascist totalitarianism of World War II and America’s ensuing defensiveness towards Soviet communism, few were pleased to discover their own local strain of infectious collectivism growing hardily on U.S. soil.2 Two years later in 1952, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith began his own assault on the threats posed by corporate capitalism in his American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, in which Galbraith critiqued the widely held premise that the markets will automatically maintain perfect competition and optimum levels of efficiency. Rather, Galbraith argued, at both the macro- and micro-economic levels, the American corporate capitalism of the 1950s favored the consolidation of disproportionate power into several oligopolies or cryto-monopolies with no guarantees of optimum efficiencies: It is a measure of the magnitude of the disaster to the old system that when oligopoly or crypto-monopoly is assumed that it no longer follows that any of the old goals of social efficiency are realized. The producer now has measurable control over his prices. Hence, prices are no longer an impersonal force selecting the efficient man, forcing him to adopt the most efficient mode and scale of operations and driving out the inefficient and incompetent. One can as well suppose that prices will be an umbrella which efficient and incompetent producers alike will tacitly agree to hold at a safe level over their heads and under which all will live comfortably, profitably and inefficiently.
1 John F. Kennedy, address to the U.N. General Assembly (Sept. 25, 1961). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961. 2 Wilfred M. McClay, “Fifty Years of the Lonely Crowd,” The Wilson Quarterly (Summer 1998) 22, no. 3: 34. See also David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Renel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1953).
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Incurring much antipathy from big business, Galbraith advocated that “countervailing powers” were necessary in helping correct the inherent inefficiencies and weaknesses in corporate capitalism. From a far lighter perspective, 1952 was also the year of Shepherd Mead’s national bestseller, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: The Dastard's Guide to Fame and Fortune. Drawing on Mead’s own experiences of climbing the corporate ladder to become vice president of the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, the book was a satirical sendup of corporate culture masquerading as a self-help book. Its immense popularity would go on to inspire a 1961 musical by the same name, which achieved remarkable success, spending four and a half years on Broadway and winning eight Tony awards as well as the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for best drama. 3 In 1955, Edward L. Bernays, often considered the “father of public relations,” published the anthology, Engineering Consent, in which Bernays unabashedly unveiled the multiple ways in which his field had scientifically manipulated public opinion and consumer desires. As the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays had gained a reputation in the U.S. for his many successes in packaging Freudian theories to sell both unnecessary commodities and political ideologies to the general public. Bernay’s bold account shocked many with its incendiary justification of the elitist use of propaganda, brazenly contending that “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.” In 1955, Sloan Wilson’s largely autobiographical fictional novel, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and the 1956 movie adaptation of the same name tell the story of Tom Rath, a corporate public relations executive who struggles to find meaning in his hectic and materialistic life. Emphasizing the lasting cultural significance of Wilson’s book, the Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene commented in 1992 that "The title of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel became part of the American vernacular—the book was a ground-breaking fictional look at conformity in the executive suite, and it was a piece of writing that helped the nation's business community start to examine the effects of its perceived stodginess and sameness." Additionally, in 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills debunked the myth of American meritocracy in his bestselling account of the rigid stratification and top-down control of social Power in the U.S., The Power Elite.4 The year 1956 also witnessed the release of the bestseller that inscribed the most indelible label on 1950s corporate conformist culture, William H. Whyte’s Organization Man. Originally an editor of Forbes, Whyte began his research when the magazine sponsored him to conduct extensive interviews with the CEOs of several major U.S. corporations. Yet Whyte’s account ultimately did not concern itself much with CEOs but rather with the growing ranks of corporate America’s young middle management as “the dominant members of our society” whose values “will set the American temper.” Echoing Riesman’s earlier findings, Whyte argued that this new social group brings with it “a major shift in American ideology,” one in which the traditional narrative of the individualistic, meritocratic Protestant Ethic is replaced by a newly dominant “Social Ethic,” whose adherents are incapable of defining themselves outside of their positions and functions within the rigid hierarchies of major institutions of Power. While Whyte acknowledged that the Social Ethic had always enjoyed some presence alongside the individualistic Protestant Ethic in American society, he asserted that the social climate of the 1950s represented such an extreme shift towards the Social Ethic that it sought to undermine the entire country’s integrity. Thus, for Whyte, The Organization Man is as much proscriptive call to action as it is descriptive, arguing that “we need to know how to co-operate with The Organization but, more than ever, so do we need to know how to resist it.” As Whyte summarizes, But in searching for that elusive middle of the road, we have gone very far afield, and in our attention to making organization work we have come close to deifying it. We are describing its defects as virtues and denying that there is—or should be—a conflict between the individual and organization. This denial is bad for the organization. It is worse for the individual. What it does, in soothing him, is to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs. For the more power organization has over him, the more he needs to recognize the area where he must assert himself against it. And this, almost because we have made organization life so equable, has become excruciatingly difficult.
3 John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 43. 4 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “Intellectuals and the State,” Huizinga lecture delivered in Leiden (December 1977). Available online at http://www.ditext.com/chomsky/is.html. Bernays’ comment was originally published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1947; Bob Greene, “Another View of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” Chicago Tribune (July 5, 1992).
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Lest one wonder at the sincerity of Whyte’s urgency regarding the stifling conformity of 1950s capitalism, it is worth remembering that this critique is not the product of a left-leaning, pro-Marxist radical but rather, as with Schumpeter’s warnings a decade earlier, is the assessment of an editor of Forbes magazine, a publication whose slogan unabashedly trumpets itself as “The Capitalist Tool.” If someone in Whyte’s position was calling for a sociopathic shakeup of the disproportionate monopolization of sociopathy and Power at the highest levels of corporate bureaucracies, one can only imagine how dire the situation actually was.5 As a final addition to this genre, in 1957 Vance Packard’s million-selling pop-sociological exposé of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders, enraged a far wider audience than Bernays’s earlier PR account by revealing the scandalous techniques of scientific “motivational research” used to gull a hapless public into purchasing goods they did not want or need. Repeatedly intoning the threats of Orwellian manipulation and mind-control throughout, Packard summed up the ultimate threat to the individual as “The Packaged Soul,” beginning with his description of the new community development of Miramar, Florida, in which corporate marketers sold completely pre-furnished lifestyles, including houses, furniture, vehicles and even social circles for a single “packaged price,” and concluding with his suggestion that, by the year 2000, researchers would use direct “biocontrol” methodologies such as implanting electrodes into children’s brains to stimulate the desired consumer behaviors. Emphasizing the massive popular impact of The Hidden Persuaders on the 1950s American psyche, Thomas Frank commented in 1997 that “It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Packard’s book. A bestseller, the book inspired a still-thriving faith in high-tech advertising trickery and, more important, it crystallized future criticism of Madison Avenue around an understanding of the industry peculiar to the way it was organized in the the 1950s.”6 Taken as a whole, by 1957 public anxiety over the pernicious influence of corporate America and its zeitgeist of servile conformity led many American intellectuals to clamor for a solution. Unfortunately, when the often politically embattled young writer Norman Mailer stepped forward later that year to offer his unexpected solution, it was almost ubiquitously received with hostility. However, his critics notwithstanding, Mailer’s unruly vision would dominate the remainder of the century. The avant-garde goes public “An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.” 7 — Eugène Ionesco (1964)
In the face of growing national concern over corporatized cultural conformity, Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" provided a stinging slap of awakening. Published in the journal Dissent in the fall of 1957, “The White Negro” advanced a novel approach to rejecting the numbing cud of corporate conformity. In the opening to the essay, Mailer diagnoses the immense psychic trauma produced by World War II, arguing that “we will probably never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years” and concluding: “The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” According to Mailer, the collective shock from the horrors of the War resulted in a society in which “One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice,” such that “A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve.”8
5 William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 3, 12, 13. 6 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Cardinal editions, 1958), 207; Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 41. 7 Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theater, trans. Donald Watson (University Microfilms, 1964). 8 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent (Fall 1957). Accessed online at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=877, March 27, 2008.
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Mailer’s essay is not solely diagnostic, for he offered an unexpected proscription for surviving the period’s suffocating malaise: It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled. [...] if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself. [...] The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy selfdestroying rage.
Thus, for Mailer, the only escape from a society of creeping fascistic conformity is found in the actions of the Beat hipsters, whose brash rejection of stifling cultural norms Mailer appropriately termed psychopathy. Perhaps even more controversially, Mailer located the inspirational touchstone of this liberating psychopathic impulse in the figure of the American “Negro,” arguing that “it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries [...] The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.” It therefore through this shared rundown, back-alley lust for psychopathic liberation that “a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.”9 Yet it is important to note that Mailer views his hipster psychopathy as more than merely a violent escape from social conformity to an equally sterilizing nihilism. Rather, he was careful to define the hipster “philosopher psychopath” or “antithetical psychopath” as “interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed” and therefore qualitatively distinct from “the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath.” In doing so, Mailer asserts hipster psychopathy as opposed to a purely blind, reactionary psychopathic destructiveness and instead elevates hipster psychopathy as the only meaningful creative act possible in such emotionally bankrupt times. In the face of the anesthetizing conformity and “collective failure of nerve” of 1950s America, Mailer claimed that “What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves.” In doing so, Mailer planted the seed for a program that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze later developed in his linking of art as a “neuroaesthetic” experimentalism to create new kinds of “affect” and “percept,” a position later summarized by John Rajchman that Deleuze’s belief of that art “was not there to save us or perfect us (or to damn or corrupt us), but rather to complicate things, to create more complex nervous systems no longer subservient to the debilitating effects of clichés, to show and release the possibilities of a life.”10 It is thus through Mailer that a new articulation of the artist emerges as anyone bold enough to engage in psychopathic experimentalism with society. Drawing on traditional beat antiheroes such as Marlon Brando’s antagonistic 1953 character of Johnny Strabler in The Wild Ones and Jack Kerouac’s fictionalized version of Neal Cassady, Dean Moriarty, Mailer argued that the conscious act of rebellion was art in and of itself. It is quite telling that Neal Cassady, who served as inspiration to countless hipster artists, writers, and musicians, was himself not accomplished in any of these areas. Rather, it was Cassady’s spontaneous antinomianism that produced hipness in and of itself, his living sociopathic performance that inspired art. While such a willful contempt for tradition was far from a new development in the arts, the beat aesthetic was different in its primarily performative nature, thereby dispelling the requirement for artistic action to produce a traditionally recognizable art object. Indeed, even the supremely modernist
9 Ibid. 10 Ibid; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167; John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 138.
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iconoclasm of Marcel Duchamp fell short of beat psychopathy in that Duchamp’s series of performative skirmishes were more strictly waged against the internalized tradition of artistic discourse itself as l’art pour l’art.11 More importantly, the psychopathy of the beats created a new identity formation that dramatically extended the traditionally elitist function of the artist to anyone wishing to rebel. Through the eyes of the hipster, art no longer presupposed any talent in object-making, but rather everyone had both the capacity and duty to adopt an attitude of sociopathic avant-garde experimentalism towards life. For Mailer, this choice was both binary and absolute: “One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” As such, Mailer saw the hipster psychopath as a new, “better adapted” kind of social subject that would eventually eclipse past conceptions of human sociability, declaring that “the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous frontrunner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over.”12 The degree to which Mailer’s essay is more journalistic or causal is not of concern here, rather its significance lies in its prescient encapsulation of artistic, popular, and even (as we shall see later) corporate sensibilities throughout the ensuing decades. As the 1950s seeped into the 1960s, Mailer’s hipster psychopathy shifted from the limited purview of a small but rabid clutch of social malcontents to the primary aesthetic impulse of its time. As the sociologist Daniel Bell observed shortly thereafter in 1976, “the 1960s added something distinctly all its own: [...] an effort once and for all to erase the boundary between 'art' and 'life' “ which he located in “the conversion of a painting into a happening, the taking of art out of the museum into the environment, the turning of all experience into art, whether it had form or not.” Within the genre of painting, a strong precedent for such a movement had already been established by so-called “American action painters” such as Jackson Pollock, whom the critic Harold Rosenberg indelibly ennobled in his 1952 article, christening a new enterprise of abstraction in which “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” According to Rosenberg: A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a "moment" in the adulterated mixture of his life—whether "moment" means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist's existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
As Bell has indicated, the precedent of the new inseparability of art and life established by abstract expressionism found its logical continuation in works such as Alan Kaprow’s happenings, in which, according to Kaprow, “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”13 This growing trend towards life as art was by no means a strictly American venture, as European artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel called for similar transgressions of previous boundaries through his insistence in “The necessity of going beyond the aberrant subject-object relationship (looker / looked-at, exploiter / exploited, spectator / actor, colonialist / colonized, mad doctor / mad-man, legalism / illegalism, etc.) which has until now dominated the conditions of modern art.” This new international movement continued to gain an increasingly sociopathic momentum, particularly in May 1968, when, as Bell has noted, the students at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris called for a development of consciousness which would guide the “creative activity immanent in every individual,” so that the “work of art” and “the artist” would become “mere moments in this activity.” And a 1969 catalogue of revolutionary art at the Moderna Muséet in Stockholm carried this injunction further by declaring that “Revolution is Poetry. There is poetry in all those acts which break the system of organization.”
11 For an in-depth analysis of the history of iconoclasm and sociopathy in art, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 12 Mailer. 13 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 121-2; Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the New, originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; Alan Kaprow, untitled guidelines for happenings (c. 1965), excerpted from Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 188-98 (emphasis in original).
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Thus, by the end of the 1960s, the international artistic avant-garde and a revolutionary anti-institutional sociopathy had merged into a single movement that came to be known as the counterculture. While the artistic avant-garde has always engaged in occasional dalliances with differing political radicalisms, they had largely been satisfied with assailing institutions of art. In explaining this new countercultural direction for art, critics such as Bell have depicted this period as "a mood which turned against art, and an effort by a cultural mass to adopt and act out the life-style which hitherto had been the property of a small and talented elite." Bell’s analysis, which is perhaps correct in spirit, nevertheless completely inverts the logic of this important period. The countercultural sensibility of the 1960s did not represent a popular run on the avant-garde’s exclusive claim to artistic production, rather it marked the exact opposite: the radical democratization of the avant-garde aesthetic as promoted by the artists themselves. This transformation must not be viewed as a defeat of the avant-garde, but rather its wholesale triumph to such a totalizing extent that it ceased to be distinguished as a unique and separately recognizable entity, a fact Bell himself later admitted by stating that “The commonplace observation that today there is no longer a significant avant-garde—that there is no longer a radical tension between new art which shocks and a society that is shocked—merely signifies that the avant-garde has won its victory.”14 For this new countercultural age was not just a rebellion against previous institutions of art but against all reigning institutions of Power in general. Perhaps more importantly, it signaled a dramatic shift in sociopathic progress away from economic Capital as the primary currency of exchange toward the new, universally desirable measure of value: the hipster’s cultural Cool. As this widely accepted existential imperative to construct uniquely creative identities (and position oneself on the correct side of the hip/square battle lines) permeated all realms of American culture, the resultant explosion of sociopathic/branding conversions rattled even the seemingly imperturbable corporate megaliths, already preoccupied in staunching the flow of their own creative revolutions from within, as all forms of social Power were dismantled, looted, and smelted down to forge new idols to personal Cool. The creative revolution “Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.” 15 — Marshall McLuhan (1976)
Perhaps the grandest yet most untold irony of the many cultural changes wrought throughout the turbulent period of the 1960s is that, at precisely the same moment that the counterculture amassed widespread sociopathic opposition to the traditionally monolithic American corporate establishment, the traditionally monolithic American corporate establishment had already begun a remarkably similar transformation from within. Only more surprising is the degree to which such a fact uproots so many of our own cultural assumptions about current notions of identity, regardless of one’s political affiliation. As the cultural critic and historian Thomas Franks has pointed out, "From both the anti-sixties bombast of Newt Gingrich and from cultural studies' celebration of difference, transgression, and the carnivalesque, a curious consensus emerges: business and hip are irreconcilable enemies, the two antithetical poles of American mass culture." Yet, as Frank points out in his rigorously researched 1997 study, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, corporate culture experienced its own brand of internalized radical sociopathy that paralleled and even occasionally anticipated many of the countercultural revolutions. According to Frank, American business was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s, a revolution in marketing practice, management thinking, and ideas about creativity. It was a revolution as far-reaching in its own way as the revolutions in manners, music, art, and taste taking place elsewhere, and it shared with those revolutions a common hostility for hierarchy, for inherited wisdom, and for technocratic ideas of efficiency. The strange relationship of corporations and counterculture becomes considerably less strange when examined from the perspectives of management literature.
14 Jean-Jacques Lebel, “On the Necessity of Volition,” Tulane Drama Review 13, no. 1 (Fall 1968), 89-105; Bell, 131, 123, 35; For an in-depth history of the relationship between early artistic and political avant-gardes, see Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 103-113. 15 Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Advertising Age (September 3, 1976).
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As Frank is careful to note, such an understanding of the relationship between big business and the counterculture calls into question the often over-simplistic but nevertheless predominantly accepted narratives of the corporate “co-optation” of countercultural identity, a theory first advanced by the Marxist cultural critic Herbert Marcuse and his similarly minded Frankfurt School colleagues. It is precisely Frank’s break with such previously formulaic and unproductive approaches that marks it of particular interest to our analysis.16 Throughout his account, Frank focuses on what he considers to be the field most emblematic of this new countercultural business attitude: corporate advertising. In many ways, advertising was a surprising locus for revolution, particularly considering that the corporate advertising culture of the 1950s was one of the most conservatively and scientifically managed realms of corporate practice. As Frank explains, “In no industry was the 1950s critique of mass society and its business corollary, the dead-end of Taylorism, more applicable than in advertising. ‘Organization Men’ staffed the orderly offices of the great agencies, and in an industry that once redounded with colorful personalities, there seemed to be little place for individualists or dissenters." It is perhaps no surprise, that so many of the already discussed critical attacks on conformity, such as Mead’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying or Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, featured advertising and public relations executives. Additionally, as Frank rightly points out, “Admen have long served as the über-entrepreneurs, eulogists of capitalism's endless cycles of change, its celebration of success, its scorn for failure." Thus, particularly in the wake of recent exposés, such as Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, admen were increasingly reviled as profiteering tricksters, continuously perfecting scientific techniques for defrauding hapless consumers into buying products they really did not want or need. Thus, if any group were held in more suspicion than the corporations by the end of the 1950s, it was the Madison Avenue advertising executives, functioning as unrepentant shills for increased corporate profits.17 Yet, less than two years after the publication of Mailer’s “White Negro” essay in 1957, “well before the counterculture appeared on the mass-media scene,” Madison Avenue was shaken by a “Creative Revolution” that to this day has redefined capitalism and popular consumerism as we know it. Frank locates the source of this revolution in the “towering figure” of Bill Bernbach of the advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), who in 1959 began releasing a series of advertisements that radically reinvented the field. Beginning with its most notable long-running ads for Volkswagen, such as the frequently memorialized “Lemon” ad, Bernbach masterminded a new style of advertising whose appeal focused on a radical cultural critique of the tradition of advertising itself. Just as Mailer had championed the impending rise of the hipster’s psychopathic antihero, Bernbach turned just as sociopathically on the tradition of advertising and “invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism—perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age—to consumerism itself." According to Frank, the ads of the creative revolution not only differed from those of the grey flannel past: they were openly at war with their predecessors. What distinguished the advertising of the 1960s was its acknowledgement of and even sympathy with the mass society critique. It mocked the empty phrases and meaningless neologisms that characterized the style of the 1950s. It deftly punctured advertising's too rosy picture of American life and openly admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. It sympathized with people's fears about conformity and their revulsion from artificiality and packaged pleasure. It pandered to the public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Comparing one brand to the another and finding it lacking was and is a routine advertising technique; in the sixties, advertising actively compared a new, hip consumerism to an older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited.
However, while irrevocably bound to Mailer’s hipster sociopathy, the new Cool of the Creative Revolution differed in significant ways. In the countercultural yoking of beat hipsterism to the perpetual iconoclasm of the artistic avantgarde, the underlying sociopathy was less directed against a real social body or institution and increasingly waged against other objects of Cool. The Creative Revolution rendered sociopathy communicable. It was more symbolically rooted, more a battle of styles against styles than bodies against institutions. It flowed and intensified less in the itinerant social circuits of beat road trips, drug-fueled bar hopping, or spontaneous jazz performances and more in the rapidly expanding mass communications networks of the 1960s, constituting what Guy Debord called in 1967 “the society of the spectacle.” According to Debord in the opening sentence to his treatise by the same name, “The 16 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 18, 20. 17 Ibid, 48, 54.
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whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Mailer was correct in his view that the function of sociopathic Cool was to create a new nervous system; however, the major contribution of the Creative Revolution is that the human nervous system now extended more dramatically beyond the body proper. No one understood this new extended media body better at the time than Marshall McLuhan who, writing in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, argued that “A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.” The energizing sociopathic “buzz” of beat was now the desired media buzz of advertising, which coagulated and circulated most efficiently throughout the externalized electronic pathways that multiplied incessantly throughout the 1960s. It is wrong to view advertising as a secondary or parasitic corruption of these networks; rather, advertising underwrote their very instantiation, it was their primary raison d’être. As McLuhan put it, “it is advertising and the PR community that is most aware of the basic new dimension of global interdependence. Like the Soviet Union, they are concerned about access to the media and about results.”18 The popular appeal of Bernbach’s new approach to advertising, particularly among younger demographic segments, was both immense and unprecedented, as consumers flocked to DDB’s products not so much out of desire for the products themselves as to visibly broadcast their allegiance as proof of their own rebelliously hip identity, a phenomenon that Frank has aptly labeled “hip consumerism.” Yet despite all its preeminently youthful trappings, this new attitude towards advertising and radical consumerism was by no means limited to youth, rather it found its most noticeable audience outside of the youth counterculture. According to Frank, "Madison Avenue's vision of the counterculture was notoriously unconvincing to many who actually took part in the movement—and for a very simple reason: they were not necessarily the primary target of such campaigns." As such, the ability to visibly consume the hipness of counterculture was most desirable to those who were not actually in it, extending to nearly every demographic segment of American culture. Thus, Frank maps the transition through which youthful rebellious energy comes to signify "an attractive consuming attitude, not an age," quoting one adman, who in 1967 declared that “the youth market has become the American market. It now includes not only everyone under 35, but most people over 35." It is thus in the revolutionary foundations of DDB’s new approach to advertising that Frank identifies the ongoing American fixation with the relentlessly sociopathic hipster mythos that continues to characterize all advertising and consumerism to this day. As Frank summarizes, “This, then, was the great innovation of the Creative Revolution, the principle to which Bernbach referred when he spoke so enthusiastically of 'difference': the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced."19 Yet for all of the unquestionably singular influence the work at DDB had on future generations of admen and consumers, Bernbach and the resultant Creative Revolution had an equal, if not greater, impact on the wider culture of corporate management practices. Throughout his account, Frank chronicles the many ways in which DDB exhibited an open “hostility to rules of any kind; a sort of commercial antinomianism,” particularly in the figure of Bernbach, whom Frank describes as “an ideologue of disorder, an untiring propagandist for the business value of the principles of modern art,” arguing incessantly that “advertising was an art; art could not be produced by a rigid scientific system.” In keeping with this wholesale antipathy toward the rigidly conformist corporate structures, DDB dramatically reconfigured its own corporate management practices on a regular basis, dismantling stultifying hierarchical structures in favor of a freer, more laterally open and flexible environment of collaborative creativity. Additionally, advertising “creatives” were increasingly expected to display the same irascible contempt for convention and delicate sensibilities towards work that had previously only characterized successful avant-garde artists, as indicated by the independently successful DDB employee George Lois, who claimed, “"If you're not a bad boy, if you're not a big pain in the ass, then what you are is some mush, in this business." As with Mailer’s psychopathic 18 Ibid, 27, 55, 54. For more recent analyses of the importance of advertising firms functioning as “cultural activist organizations,” see Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 220; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NIcholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 42, 21. 19 Frank, 120, 118, 119-20, 68.
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beat hipsters, this new generation of hip admen fully realized that artistic hipness is more performative than it is objectively demonstrable talent: Cool is as Cool does. Equally notable was the degree to which DDB’s unorthodox innovations in management style were as quickly copied by other advertising firms as its new innovations in advertising style. Frank elucidates the ways in which DDB’s new management practices irrevocably “altered the management style of Madison Avenue when its competitors, stunned by the power DDB's ads, rushed to replicate its less ordered corporate structure and its roster of creative talent." The speed by which this transformation occurred was just as impressive, with Frank concluding that "By 1965, the Creative Revolution had turned the industry's theories and management practices on their head as Madison Avenue entered a period of unrestrained rule-breaking and idolshattering." Nor were these new expectations anti-establishment dissent reserved exclusively for senior partners or creative executives, as Frank illustrates in citing the opening sentence to a 1966 handbook for new copywriters instructing readers that “The first rule for copywriters is to be suspicious of rules.”20 Given the prominent role of advertising as most vocal mouthpiece of the capitalist ethos, the aggregate changes rendered by the Creative Revolution forever altered the narrative identity of corporate capitalism itself. As Frank notes, the innovations at DDB and the wider Creative Revolution not only “would have vast consequences for the way ads were made” or “the way ads appeared,” it profoundly reconfigured “the way American capitalism understood itself" and the means “by which business explained its domination of the national life." Whereas, prior to the Creative Revolution, advertisers endeavored to foster an image of American corporations as paternalistic guarantors of national quality and collective progress, Frank notes that, after the Revolution, advertisers depicted corporations as hip co-conspirators in the endless battle against clichéd conformity: “Now products existed to facilitate our rebellion against the soul-deadening world of products, to put us in touch with our authentic selves, to distinguish us from the mass-produced herd, to express our outrage at the stifling world of economic necessity." Realizing that the barriers to participating in the radical artistic performance of the counterculture were for many still too high, the founding fathers of the Creative Revolution stripped the avant-garde to its barest ideological core and made its sociopathic formula for converting Power to Cool both desirable and consumable by a mass audience. It is thus through this new conflation of popular consumption with Mailer’s transgressive sociopathic antihero that Frank begins to perceive the visible contours of Mailer’s foreshadowed psychopathic typology: "Impervious to criticism of any kind, and virtually without historical memory, hip has become what Norman Mailer predicted: the public philosophy of the age of flexible accumulation." In this new post-revolutionary world order, corporate capitalism’s inherently sociopathic nature was not only on full display, it was celebrated as a sublimely transgressive enterprise, consumption recast as the hiply sociopathic process of ceaseless self-creation.21 Under new management "I am a revolutionary, as you may know, and anytime you give me a fork in the road where the choice is a slow change or a revolution, I will always take the revolution. I am a great believer that that is how changes take place.” 22 — John S. Reed, CEO of Citicorp (1999)
To what extent, as Frank claims, did the Creative Revolution remake all corporate capitalism in its image? While it is difficult to retrospectively apportion the precise amount of causal credit due to the Creative Revolution for what we now know as contemporary capitalism, there can be no denying that its influence was significant. As the global advertising magnate Jean-Marie Dru asserted in the opening paragraphs to his influential 1996 book, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace, “Disruption proved itself to be bigger than advertising. It turned out to be useful for business in general.” Yet there is also no avoiding the fact that, prior to the deluge of revolutionary capitalist ideology unleashed by the unorthodox likes of Bernbach, the pump had quietly been primed by another slowly maturing internal movement: the new industry of management theory.23 20 Ibid, 56 80, 55, 92. 21 Ibid, 57, 229, 232-3. 22John S. Reed, quoted in Timothy L. O’Brien, “Talking the Future with John S. Reed,” The New York Times, December 20, 1999, p. C18. Accessed online at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9406E4DA1130F933A15751C1A96F958260&pagewanted=all (March 14, 2009). 23 Jean-Marie Dru, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), vii.
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No one is more responsible for the early development of management theory than the undisputed doyen of the field, Peter Drucker, whose 1946 treatise on the organizational management structure of General Motors, The Concept of the Corporation, significantly altered the ways in which large corporations organized and managed themselves. As Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have noted in their in-depth study of the discipline of management theory, Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation presented an unusual opportunity for the young author in that "The American car giant [General Motors], then the biggest company in the world, invited Drucker to draw its portrait and gave him unrestricted access to GMers, from Alfred Sloan down." Drucker, whose central argument was that corporate leaders must begin to think of their companies as “a social system as well as an economic organization,” structured The Concept of the Corporation primarily “as a passionate plea for GM to treat labor as a resource rather than just as a cost,” insisting that “industrial relations ought to be based on people's desire to be engaged in their job and proud of their product."24 Yet, as Micklethwait and Wooldridge conclude, despite Drucker’s loftier social agenda, “the subject that most of Drucker's readers seized on was decentralization.” For Drucker, decentralization meant the total overhaul of rigidly hierarchical management structures and processes in favor of flexibly adaptable teams of workers in which ownership of each group’s performance was a matter of individual team pride and responsibility. Micklethwait and Wooldridge describe the effect of this revelation by noting that Drucker showed how GM's decentralized structure enabled it to respond to challenges such as the transition from war to peace—and concluded that the car firm “realized its concepts of decentralization sufficiently to obtain from it an overall pattern of behavior and a basis for the successful solution to the most difficult concrete problems of economic life.” Although Drucker made it clear that he had doubts about the value of decentralization for organizations in general, other big American companies, such as Ford and General Electric, rushed to copy it. By the 1980s, Drucker was credited with moving 75-80 percent of the Fortune 500 to radical decentralization.
Drucker’s penchant for encouraging flexible management in response to disruptive social change is perhaps no surprise given that an early mentor of his was none other than the harbinger of creative destruction himself, Joseph Schumpeter, whose theories were otherwise largely unknown at the time. According to Jack Beatty in his 1998 biography of Drucker, "the economics of innovation had been established by his father's friend and former colleague from the economics faculty of the University of Vienna, Joseph Schumpeter," adding that Schumpeter’s theories of cyclical business trends and entrepreneurial organizational revolutions had a profound influence upon the young Drucker. However, the grand irony of Drucker’s early research is that, despite the influence of the study among other corporate executives particularly from overseas corporations, Sloan hostilely repudiated Drucker’s recommendations for GM, the wisdom of which Micklethwait and Wooldridge wryly judged by stating that "The tragedy for GM was that it rejected Drucker's advice about using teams in the 1940s—only to have the same lesson rammed down its throat by the Japanese in the 1970s."25 If Drucker’s early urgings toward decentralization and more equitable treatment of workers signaled an initial call to arms, then the Creative Revolution signaled the resultant mass uprising, as the primary business of corporate management became the sociopathic attack of previous philosophies of corporate management. In this way, the sociopathic revolt against institutional Power in the name of Cool that originated with Mailer’s countercultural hipsterism extended not only to offices of corporate advertising but also into the very heart of corporate capitalism itself, re-engineering it from within. Throughout the past decade, the human geographer Nigel Thrift has endeavored to map this singularly self-consuming transformation in corporate capitalism. In his 2005 collection of articles entitled Knowing Capitalism, Thrift charts the major trajectories of this shift, referring to this newly self-reflexive industry as “the cultural circuit of capitalism,” locating its genesis precisely at the same moment of the Creative Revolution in 1960s America: the extraordinary discursive apparatus which has been perhaps the chief creation of the capitalism of the post-1960s period, and which I call the 'cultural circuit' of capitalism – business schools, management consultants, management
24 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (New York: Times Books, 1996), 72-4. 25 Ibid, 73, 74; Jack Beatty, The World According to Peter Drucker (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 163-5.
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gurus and the media. This has produced a process of continual critique of capitalism, a feedback loop which is intended to keep capitalism surfing along the edge of its own contradictions.
Thus, just as the advertising of Bernbach and the Creative Revolution became the most trenchant cultural critique of corporate advertising practices, Thrift similarly locates a wider sympathetic transformation in which corporate management and its newly generated intellectual and academic organs became the most sociopathic cultural critics of perviously established norms of corporate management practices. In a surprising turn that Schumpeter would have deeply appreciated though he failed to anticipate it, the bloated behemoths of corporate capitalism themselves became the hapless raw materials fueling ever greater economic growth, their very institutional processes and practices consumed in a frenzy of sociopathic deconstruction by smaller and nimbler corporate innovators. As Thrift has argued, “there is the important fact that the cultural circuit itself constitutes a new and vibrant set of markets for capitalism. Its thirst for information technology, expertise, and all kinds of infrastructure is self-reinforcing.” Whereas previously the business of business had been a closely guarded and private matter, Thrift argues that the cultural circuit of capital represents a strikingly new phase in which "capitalism has become knowledgeable." Not only has this knowledge grown exponentially lucrative, it has also become equally prescriptive, not just in terms of shaping attitudes but in directing real corporate practices on a massive global scale. As Thrift observes, “it has made capitalism into a theoretical enterprise in which various essentially virtual notions [...] are made to take on flesh as, increasingly, the world is made in these notions' likeness."26 As has already been indicated, Thrift isolates the genealogical strains that constitute the cultural circuit of capitalism among a synergistic network of business schools, corporate management consultancies, high-profile management gurus, and an elite cadre of corporate media—all of which emerged from the general sociopathic tumult of the 1960s. Since this inception, the cultural circuit of capital industry has enjoyed a growth rate that has outstripped most of the traditional industries upon which it presumes to operate. Micklethwait and Wooldridge have noted that as far back as 1996, Some $750 million worth of business books are currently sold in America alone every year, and the market for audioand videotapes, courses, and seminars is even bigger. [...] It is hard to think of any other academic discipline that can match management theory in having built an industry around itself. American firms alone now spend $20 billion a year on outside advice. [...] Every year, more than 75,000 students are awarded master of business administration (MBA) degrees in America—fifteen times the total number in 1960. And every year, a quarter of a million people around the world take the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) for entrance to MBA courses.
Citing a 1996 study by H. Ramsay, Thrift notes that “in an 18 month period stretching over 1994 and 1995, 94 of the top 100 British companies had used management consultants.” Given even these most preliminary estimates, there can be no mistake that the cultural circuit of capital is serious business and its business has continuously been booming.27 Yet the knowledge circulated and sold via the cultural circuit of capital is of a very specific type. As was the case with the notable personalities such as Bernbach and Lois who led the early charge of the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, management knowledge is often decidedly performative. As many of the more astute scholars of management theory have noted, "Management, above all, is a performative activity: it does what it says and it says what it does: its utterances and its actions are so frequently fused, so politically meshed.” It is no accident that Micklethwait and Wooldridge titled their chapter dedicated to the 1980s (and present) management guru Tom Peters as “Tom Peters: Management as Performance Art.” As Thrift summarizes, capitalism is performative: it is always engaged in experiment, as the project is perpetually unfinished. [...] The whole point of capitalism, then, is precisely its ability to change its practices constantly, and those who run corporations must be able to surf the right side of the constant change that results, or risk being washed up on the reefs of irrelevance – and thrown into bankruptcy. (It is always worth remembering just how few capitalist firms survive over the
26 Thrift, 6, 21. 27 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 6-7; Thrift, 36. See H. Ramsay, “Managing Sceptically: A Critique of Organizational Fashion,” in The Politics of Management Knowledge, ed. S. Clegg and G. Palmer (London: Sage, 1996), 155-72.
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long term; surely Schumpeter was right to argue that capitalism is a flawed leviathan arising out of creative destruction.)28
But what is so fascinating about the performative nature of management theory is that it is not narrowly reserved for the elite executives of Fortune 500 companies or even more broadly conceived as “those who run corporations” (in Thrift’s language). Rather, this expectation of performative sociopathic self-reinvention extends through all levels of corporate practice, casting even the lowest employees not just as managers of others but, even more astringently, as managers of themselves. Citing Paul Heelas, Thrift notes the degree to which “'work itself is typically seen to serve as a 'growth environment'. The significance of work is transformed in that it is conceived as providing the opportunity to work on 'oneself'.”' Whereas previous exertions of Power resulted in the 18th and 19th century disciplinary regimes articulated by theorists such as Michel Foucault, in which individuals internalized negative social limitations to their freedom via a process of self-discipline, the emergent trend of self-management signals a new configuration of social Power in which individuals must consistently push themselves towards continuously advancing positive metrics of performance rather than merely policing themselves within a framework of negatively inscribed disciplinary taboos. Such a formulation productively couples three otherwise seemingly discordant contemporary notions of the term performance, namely: 1. performance as a physically enacted method of artistic expression, as in performance art; 2. performance as performativity as a mode of critical self-interpretation in relation to discursive power structures, as elucidated in the theoretical writings of intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Andrew Pickering, and Michel Callon; and 3. performance in the corporate or engineering sense of the measurable efficiency with which something fulfills its optimally intended purpose, as in automobile engine performance, corporate quarterly performance reports, or individual performance assessments. The result of this unexpected and unholy union must not be underestimated and has similarly led Professor of Performance Studies Jon McKenzie to conclude, “performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.” While this gradual transformation was largely lost on everyone at the time, particularly on the outspoken intellectuals from the Left who busied themselves with increasingly ineffectual attacks against capitalist strawmen who no longer and possibly never did exist, it is worth noting the degree to which Andy Warhol, himself an unrivaled master of life-asperformance, stoically logged the momentous changes underfoot, as recognized by his nonchalantly radical pronouncement in 1975 that “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called 'Art' or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they'd say, 'Money is bad,' and 'Working is bad,' but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."29 Of course, in the same way that the sociopathic cannibalization of advertising that characterized the Creative Revolution did not restrict itself to the cloistered halls of a few select advertising firms, such an altered compulsion towards performative self-management did not stop at the doors of a handful of innovative corporations. Rather, as the purview of the cultural circuit of capital increasingly expanded to include the production of culture itself, the expectation of productive self-management became an increasingly universal feature of public life. As Thrift has noted, "This cultural circuit of capital is able to produce constant discursive-cum-practical change with considerable power to mould the content of people's work lives and, it might be added, to produce more general cultural models that affect the rest of people's lives as well," concluding that “the kinds of subject positions that are deemed worthy of managers and workers are increasingly similar to the kinds of subject positions that define the worth of the citizenry." Similarly, the British sociologist Nikolas Rose has marked our current relationship to corporate self-
28 Stewart R. Palmer and Gill Palmer, The Politics of Management Knowledge (London: Sage, 1996), 2; Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 84; Thrift, 3 (parentheses in original). 29 Thrift, 41; McKenzie, 18 (emphasis in original); Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1975), 92. See Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 90.
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management by noting that, “Contemporary individuals are incited to live as if making a project of themselves: they are to work on their emotional world, their domestic and conjugal arrangements, their relations with employment and their techniques of sexual pleasure, to develop a ‘style’ of living that will maximize the worth of their existence to themselves.”30 It is thus through the so-called “management revolution” of the cultural circuit of capital that we begin to recognize sociopathy traveling full-circle. As this insatiable and ubiquitous sociopathic conversion became the renewable energy source driving both economic production and consumption, a critical majority of society invested heavily in the mandate to endlessly self-produce and self-consume themselves. Within this new and highly addictive flavor of corporate capitalism, all production is self-production, all consumption is self-consumption. Self-management is synonymous with self-help, and Schumpeter could not have been more right or more wrong in his limited vision of creative destruction. For what is startling about a rigorous analysis of the many revolutions and counter-revolutions that stormed across the 1960s is not the irreparable cultural rifts they belied, as imagined by dour critics such as Bell, but rather their overwhelming consistency and consensus in their common drive toward new modes of sociopathic productivity, surreptitiously consolidating their fury against historical institutions of social Power. In the end, Bell, Schumpeter, and Schumpeter’s Marxist counterparts in the Frankfurt School all failed to understand what Mailer and Warhol knew intimately: economic Capital in the form of corporate capitalism and cultural Cool in the form of the intellectual and artistic avant-gardism were not ultimately locked in fatal embrace with each other but rather were both synergistically fed by the same sociopathic force, a force that was, by its nature, so profoundly radical it cannibalized its own social base, it own history, its own accepted logic. As Eugene Linden demonstrated in his 1979 examination of the ways in which consumer society integrated countercultural “threats” such as the 60s youth movement, rock and roll, and the environmental movement, Discontent in the West has traditionally been interpreted as an indication of the basic instability of modern materialistic societies and a signal of imminent decline. However, a broad look at consumer societies leads to the conclusion that individual discontents and their larger manifestation in countercultural movements are actually a necessary part of a consumer society. Such expressions of mass discontent, far from being an indication of decline, are the way a consumer society brings new areas of behavior within the ambit.
As with all of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines” that “work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down,” the mechanisms of both Capital and Cool require sustained sociopathic challenges within their fields of operations as a means for continuous re-injections of life and capital. Sociopathy is the self-consuming drive, the engine of change, the mechanism of constant creative destruction that we now recognize as contemporary cultural capitalism. Thus, the fractious revolutionary turbulence that characterized the 1960s and 1970s was not an unfortunate by-product of a more progressively minded social transformation, rather, once one wipes away the coagulated clump of joss sticks, hemp resin, and expressionistic sebum that nostalgically clogs our conduits of cultural memory, the only enduring artifact of productive value to withstand the period is its overwhelming democratization of sociopathy. Capitalism and America did not survive the 60s in spite of its new-found sociopathy but rather because of it, as everyone commonly embraced the disruptive zeitgeist Tom Wolfe sardonically termed “radical chic” and boldly began a collective experiment that would reach full expression in the hyperbolic dotcom days of the 1990s. This, then, is the hard-won legacy of the 60s and 70s: the unabashed cultural mandate that we are all heroes of the avant-garde, we are all duplicitous admen, we are all power-hungry corporate moguls, we are all revolutionaries, for the simple reason that we are all sociopaths.31
30 Thrift, 93; Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 157. 31 Eugene Linden, Affluence and Discontent: The Anatomy of Consumer Societies (New York: Viking, 1979), ix; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 8; Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine, June 8, 1970. Available online at http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/ (accessed April 10, 2008).
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Chapter 04: Virtual Convergence In her caustic sendup of the rampant Silicon Valley libertarianism of the 1990s, the journalist Paulina Borsook quizzically noted that many Silicon Valley Baby Boomers “often referred to [the 1990s] as the ‘60s turned upsidedown.” While such a playful observation may prove an irresistible testament to a cultural cohort which credits itself as “the generation that changed the world,” our analysis finds the 1990s not as a disjunctive break with the sociopathic fervor of the 60s, but rather its logical conclusion. As has already been suggested, the sociopathic convergence that began to define itself three decades prior reached its full coherence in the 1990s as economic, political, critical, cultural, and technological realms collapsed into a single conceptual trajectory. Yet, as we shall soon discover, this absolute convergence was not purely ideological (nothing ever is) but rather was materially reified, culturally encoded, and technologically amplified by a new and extremely persuasive form of sociopathic machinery: the networked personal computer as realized in the Internet.1 Wired sociopathy “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” 2 — Alan Kay (1971)
If any social segment found immediate inspiration in the new sociopathic convergence of countercultural, advertising, and management revolutions in the 1960s and 70s, it was the nascent communities of computer programmers or hackers, that grew organically from the major research institutions of the time, particularly in Boston and the California Bay area. For many in these groups, whose brilliance had gone unappreciated by more conventional gatekeepers of recognition and privilege, a sociopathic attitude towards existing institutions of social Power had already been inscribed in their own cultural codes. As Steven Levy reported in his 1984 best-selling account of such early programmer communities, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, the tacitly endorsed “Hacker Ethic” that developed among MIT’s early programmer community in the 1960s enshrined sociopathy as a key component of hacker culture. In addition to more expected tenets of “Access to computers should be unlimited and total” and “All information should be free,” the Hacker Ethic also contained an undeniably sociopathic plank: “Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.” According to Levy, when trying to promote a “free exchange of information,” “The last thing you need is a bureaucracy.” Levy described the hackers’ anti-establishment impulse more clearly by stating that: Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers. Bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary rules (as opposed to the logical algorithms by which machines and computer programs operate): they invoke those rules to consolidate power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as a threat.
As is so often the case in such new communities, this fledgeling generation of hackers most keenly focused its sociopathic rancor on those closest to themselves who had abandoned their ethic, particularly those programmers belonging to the reigning computer corporation of the day: International Business Machines (IBM), which held near monopolistic control over computational information processing. For the self-described community of hackers, IBM’s strictly hierarchical, top-down, “batch-processed” mentality was not just an outmoded approach toward solving computing problems but was indicative of an entire social ideology in and of itself: If IBM had its way (so the TMRC hackers thought), the world would be batch-processed, laid out on those annoying little punch cards, and only the most privileged priests would be permitted to actually interact with the computer. [...] You couldn’t talk to these people—they were beyond convincing. They were batch-processed people, and it showed not only in their preference of machines, but in their idea about the way a computation center, and a world, should be run. Those people could never understand the obvious superiority of a decentralized system, with no one giving orders: a system where people could follow their interests, and if along the way they discovered a flaw in the system, they could embark on ambitious surgery. No need to get a requisition form. Just a need to get something done. 1 Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 76. 2 Alan Kay, early meeting in 1971 of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) employees, 1971.
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As with the Creative Revolution in advertising and the Management Revolution in corporate capitalism, the so-called Computer Revolution shared a similar goal: the sociopathic dismantling of power-hungry bureaucratic institutions such as IBM, which stood in the way of their ultimate ambition of bringing the emancipatory powers of the computing to the people.3 As the 60s surged onward, this hacker call-to-arms resulted in the formation of several loosely organized groups dedicated to bringing computing to the people, most notable among them being the Homebrew Computer Club, which met for the first time near Stanford University in Gordon French’s garage in Menlo Park, California, in March 1975. Founded by French and Fred Moore after the dissolution of their previous attempt at hacker solidarity, the People’s Computer Company, the Homebrew Computer Club included such notable Silicon Valley personalities as Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Adam Osbourne, Lee Felsenstein, and Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. While arguably the two most enduring downstream products of the Homebrew Club were the formation of Apple Computer and Bill Gates’ notorious “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” in which Gates first accused the Homebrew Computer Club of software copyright infringement, the Club served as the frontline for a new and increasingly powerful social movement.4 Every significant movement needs a manifesto, every crusade a bible, and the computer revolution was no exception. The de facto foundational text of hacker culture was the enormously influential periodical the Whole Earth Catalog, edited by the colorful and charismatic Stuart Brand. In his expansive exploration of the relationships between countercultural and computer culture as told through the remarkable figure of Brand, Stanford Communications Professor Fred Turner quotes Homebrew Computer Club founding member Lee Felsenstein to indicate the importance of Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog to the hacker community: Felsenstein remembers the Whole Earth Catalog as a sort of Bible of countercultural technology. At that time, he explains, technology was a “secular religion” in mainstream America; with the Catalog, in contrast, Stewart Brand “set up an alternate temple of the same religion, of the church of technology, telling people in technological society that people needed to learn how to use tools.” For those who, like Felsenstein, were both trained engineers and participants in the youth movements of the 1960s, this new religion offered a way forward. In Felsenstein’s words, the Whole Earth Catalog reminded its readers that “you don’t have to leave industrial society, but you don’t have to accept it the way it is.”
In many ways, Brand is an interesting point of reference in our analysis, for he most clearly embodied the intersection of hacker culture and the wider artistic anti-establishment counterculture. Brand was ultimately not a hacker himself, but rather, as John Markoff has claimed, “Brand was the first outsider to catch a glimpse of this new cybernetic world and discern the parallels between mind expansion through the use of psychedelic drugs and through the new kinds of computing that were being developed around the Stanford campus.” Unlike many of his more socially lumpish hacker acquaintances, Brand travelled fluidly across all areas of countercultural activities, including arts and music scenes, hippie communes, and university technology centers. Among his many early countercultural accomplishments, Brand was a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, landing multiple appearances in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and participating along with Kesey in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program at the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park during the early 1960s, in which LSD and other psychedelic drugs were administered to paid test subjects. Building on his previous experiences as a technology and performance artist in the arttechnology collective USCO, Brand extended his psychedelic aspirations via the Trips Festival, a technologically innovative multimedia concert event held in conjunction with the Merry Pranksters in San Francisco in January 1966, which Turner notes as marking “Brand’s emergence as a countercultural entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold.” Additionally, Brand was passionately engaged in organizing back-to-the-land communes, as a means for rejecting and developing positive alternatives to what he and his colleagues perceived as the irreparable failings of American social Power and conventional mechanisms of political reform.5 3 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Dell, 1984), 40-2. 4 See Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be,” Digital Deli (1984) accessed online at http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php on January 18, 2009; Bill Gates, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter (January 1976) accessed online at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists.jpg on February 5, 2009. 5 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),114, 67, 4; John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), xiii; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1968), 2, 3, 11, 153, 212, 251, 255, 258-9, 362, 387, 400.
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Yet despite all of Brand’s impressive countercultural credentials, he would become best-known for his role as ardent evangelist of the limitless social potential of computer technologies, often functioning most effectively as the cool kid who conferred recognizable hipness on otherwise lackluster computer nerds. Perhaps most notable among such moments is Brand’s December 1972 article for Rolling Stone, entitled “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” in which Brand captured vignettes of the radical, future-warping daily lives of Stanford and Palo Alto computer scientists, accompanied by candid photos by Annie Liebowitz. As Turner has observed, “In Brand’s rhetoric, the Spacewarriors of the AI Lab became countercultural pioneers,” depicting the scene according to what Buckminster Fuller had previously termed “outlaw zones,” in which “hackers became not mere technicians, but cultural revolutionaries.” The primary countercultural hero of Brand’s article is Alan Kay, a newly minted PhD graduate from the University of Utah who had recently accepted a position at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Kay, who is often credited with coining the phrase personal computing and creating what we now know as digital media and computer interfaces, is commonly considered the person most responsible for giving material expression to the countercultural hacker vision. As the insightful artist and media theorist Casey Alt has recently argued in a paper exploring the early history of object-orientation and digital media paradigms created by Kay and his research team at PARC, “Kay became the first computer scientist to vocally promote computation as a [personal] medium,” explaining that “Prior to this time, the term medium was only employed in relation to an external material substrate for storing data and was almost exclusively preceded by the terms input, output, or storage.” Yet it was not enough for Kay to simply give voice to such ideas. Rather, he materially encoded them in his new objectoriented language named Smalltalk, the first version of which debuted at Xerox PARC in 1971.6 While Kay’s invention of Smalltalk and digital media were important computer science breakthroughs in their own right, what most excited Brand and the hacker community was the challenge Kay’s tools posed to the traditional, top-down, hierarchical, IBM-style ideology of computing so many hackers loathed. Instead, Smalltalk promoted a distributed, flattened, massively parallel, bottom-up approach to problem-solving. According to Alt, Kay’s introduction of object-orientation via Smalltalk “constitutes a radical inversion of previous methods of computer science,” in which “Object-oriented programming languages and their accompanying development environments are the technical means for translating this distributed, emergence-based approach to problem-solving into computable instructions for digital computers.” Kay himself described this new model by stating: In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing “computer stuff” into things each less strong than the whole—such as data structures, procedures, and functions that are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages—each Smalltalk object is a recursion of the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network.
Whereas previous programming paradigms employed “main programs” that strictly and hierarchically controlled lower-level programming routines via a “master-slave” model, object-orientation offered a new counterculturally correct computational paradigm, in which distributed fields of equivalent programming objects voluntarily communicated and collaborated to achieve shared ends. Thus for Alt, “in the end, object-orientation is not so much a revolutionary computational breakthrough as it is the social imposition of a very specific set of power relations and practices onto code,” concluding that “object-orientation is as much about recasting our entire view of the universe as exclusively object-oriented as it is about using object-orientation to ‘solve’ certain problems in the lived world.” In short, Kay’s invention of object-orientation via Smalltalk was the material instantiation of the countercultural zeitgeist fueling the rapidly maturing computer revolution. In converting such sociopathic impulses into a new medium for controlling and representing all forms of cultural information and knowledge, object-oriented computing became the ideal sociopathic machine of the new, post-60s turn towards distributed, democratized sociopathy.7
6 Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone (December 7, 1972). Text copy of the article available online at http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html; Turner, 116-7; Casey Alt, “Objects of Our Affection: How Object-Orientation Made Computation a Medium,” in Media Archaeologies: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo & Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 2010) (emphasis in original). 7 Alt; Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” in Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., and Richard G. Gibson, Jr., History of Programming Languages–II (New York: ACM Press, 1996), 513.
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Given Kay’s aforementioned early conception of object-orientation’s programming as “a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network,” it should be no surprise that objectorientation became the dominant paradigm for Internet software development, inspiring now-ubiquitous objectoriented languages, such as Java, Perl, C++, Cocoa, Python, Ruby, and PHP, to the extent that the concepts of objectorientation and the Internet have become practically synonymous. Nor should it be any surprise that, as these languages gradually opened up the programmatic conduits now known as the Internet, Stuart Brand and his colleagues would be among the first to establish a countercultural community there. In 1985, Brand extended the original network vision created by the Whole Earth Catalog to the embryonic regions of cyberspace by creating one of the first online communities called the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” or the “WELL.” As Turner notes, “Within the WELL’s electronic confines, Stewart Brand brought together former counterculturalists, hackers, and journalists [...] collaborat[ing] within a network forum that had been shaped by New Communalist and cybernetic ideals.” As a result of the surfeit of writers participating in the WELL, it rapidly became the most visibly discussed online network of its time, coining such now-ubiquitous terms as virtual community and electronic frontier for a wider audience that likely had little practical understanding of the Internet at the time. In doing so, the activities and culture created by Brand and his colleagues in the WELL would set the rhetorical tone for the wider experience of the Internet, as participants such as former Grateful Dead lyricist and Wyoming cattle rancher John Perry Barlow romantically heralded the new territory of cyberspace as the next global frontier with all the attendant cowboy claims to Manifest Destiny one might expect.8 What excited the early WELL members was the degree to which the online community offered a material embodiment of the less tangible vision of social progress through a collective social mind that first inspired Brand and his fellow commune-minded colleagues throughout the 1960s. As Turner explains, Throughout the WELL’s early years, these systemic embodiments of the Whole Earth ethos, coupled with the lived countercultural experience of many WELL members, suggested that computer networks might bring back to life the New Communalist dream of a community of shared consciousness [...] If the Catalog had represented a community in print, the WELL’s digital technology allowed it to become an interactive collectivity in real time.
Yet what was perhaps most exhilarating to participants was that the WELL produced real value for its members. It was not just a novel social experiment but rather became a pivotal knowledge resource for the professional lives of many of its users. Citing the experience of one WELL participant, Reva Basch, Turner observed how “For Basch, as for the many other information professionals on the WELL, the system offered access to information and expertise that could be transformed into income elsewhere.” Thanks to the combination of countercultural communitarian values and the hacker tenet that information should be free, the WELL gradually began to consider itself a model “gift economy,” which the writer Howard Rheingold describes (by way of Turner) as founded upon “the constant exchange of potentially valuable information without expectation of immediate reward.” As such, WELL members viewed themselves not only as bold pioneers diligently developing the information landscapes of the newfound territory of cyberspace, but they also considered themselves active agents in the construction of an entirely new economic model, a system more appropriate to the rapidly developing global information economy and, not accidently, in perfect resonance with the optimistic, anti-hierarchical, open-access countercultural ethos of the 1960s and 70s.9 For Brand, the materialization of his most deeply held social, philosophical, and economic beliefs in the form of the WELL was so singularly edifying that it was too much to restrict to the relatively small and largely invisible online community itself. Brand wanted to change the world, and, rather than wait for the world to come to the WELL, he brought the WELL to the world. In 1987, only two years after founding the WELL, Brand embarked on perhaps his boldest entrepreneurial venture to date: to inject the lessons of 1960s counterculture, technoevangelism, and the networked information economy of the WELL into the core of the American establishment by creating a management consulting firm known as the Global Business Network, or GBN. Co-founded with his old friend Peter Schwartz, pro8 Turner, 141, 142. 9 Ibid, 146, 151, 154, 157 (emphasis in original). For a more recent examination of the cultural legacy of the WELL’s gift economy in the current Silicon Valley climate, see Turner’s article “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production,” forthcoming in New Media and Society. Accessed online at http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NM&S%20Public%203%2008.pdf, August 12, 2008.
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gram director for the Stanford Research Institute military-industrial consulting firm Jay Ogilvy, Royal Dutch/Shell veteran Napier Collyns, and Bay area fancier and media producer Lawrence Wilkinson, GBN marketed itself as the agency best equipped to advise corporate executives and top-level government officials in adapting their organizations to profit from the many changes unleashed by globalization and the accelerating pace of technological change that would come to be known as “the New Economy.” Turner described the mix of New Age countercultural ideology and techno-evangelism proffered by GBN by stating that In this way, GBN drew on the organizational structure and forecasting tools of cold war-era research culture and blended them with the countercultural turn toward business and social networks as sites of social change. GBN itself became both a model and a source of symbolic and rhetorical resources for corporate executives and government officials looking to understand post-Fordist forms of economic activity. In its meetings, its publications, and its presentations, GBN offered those individuals a vision of the the New Economy as a networked entity, open to management by elite social groups and charismatic leaders and linked by interpersonal and informational networks, an entity whose laws could be made visible through a mix of systems theory, collaborative social practice, and mystical insight.
Yet for all GBN’s business unorthodoxy, it was a winning combination, establishing it as “a small but highly influential consulting firm” with an impressive client list that included “not only multinational corporations such as Xerox, IBM, BellSouth, AT&T, Arco, and Texaco, but also the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Department.” In doing so, GBN profoundly shaped the ways in which major corporations and heads of state approached the many sociotechnical changes of the 1990s, definitively marking the merger of the sociopathic transformations of the 1960s in advertising and corporate management practices with the powerful gospels of the Hacker Ethic and countercultural technologies. As Turner concludes, “In keeping with the New Communalist turn away from government, GBN promoted the corporation as a site of revolutionary social change and interpersonal and information networks (including the computerized networks of EIES and the WELL) as tools and emblems of that change.”10 Following their new version of corporate-cum-counterculture ideology, Brand and his growing group of collaborators engineered a return to their initial publishing roots by launching WIRED magazine—a venture that tenaciously branded their unique intellectual perspective on global technology and business culture. Founded by the libertarian American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe in 1993 with initial funding from Brand’s longtime friend and mentor, Nicholas Negroponte, WIRED became the international platform for spreading the techno-utopian gospel in ways that the Whole Earth Catalog could only have dreamed. In considering WIRED’s first executive editor, Rossetto and Metcalfe selected Kevin Kelly, a former editor of both the Whole Earth Catalog and the spinoff Whole Earth Review, as well as a longtime active member of the WELL. Given these initial connections, it is no surprise that WIRED immediately drew upon the various Whole Earth communities, GBN, and Negroponte’s MIT Media Lab connections as its core group of writers, editors, and content contributors for the new enterprise. It is thus through WIRED that the Whole Earth community began its full ideological articulation of the strange new synthesis of technoutopianism, countercultural values, libertarian New Right politics, and free market capitalist enthusiasm that set the rhetorical stage for the ensuing New Economy and Silicon Valley culture in general. Despite the assumed cognitive dissonance among such seemingly incompatible political positions upon which WIRED was founded, Turner details how the New Right libertarian ideals of Rossetto and the countercultural communalist beliefs of Brand had met at the extremes: “At about the same time that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were rejecting the politics of the New Left and the hippies of the Haight were heading back to the land, Rossetto was coming to a similarly antipolitical position” in his disillusionment with his early Young Republican allegiances. It is thus through this shared commitment to a rabidly sociopathic, anti-establishment antipathy that the WIRED community coalesced. Much to the WIRED staff’s delight, this risky and unproven new formula was an instant success. As Turner reports, Almost immediately, readers began to believe that WIRED and the executives and engineers it profiled might in fact be harbingers of the future. Over the next five years, the magazine became a touchstone for CEOs, politicians, and, above all, other journalists. It won two National Magazine Awards, saw its readership grow to more than three hundred thousand a month, developed a book publisher (HardWIRED) and a variety of online ventures (HoteWIRED, Suck), and helped spawn a clutch of magazines focused on the internet and the New Economy, including Fast Company, Business 2.0, the Industry Standard, and Red Herring. 10 Ibid, 184, 177, 188, 194. For a more journalistic account of GBN and its culture impact, see Joel Garreau, “Conspiracy of Heretics,” WIRED (November 1994). Accessed online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/gbn.html on September 14, 2008.
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Thanks to the rapid ascendancy of WIRED, the Whole Earth philosophy had hit the global scene in a major way, permanently establishing the language and rules by which the Internet revolution and the Economy would be discussed, casting the entire cultural phenomenon as an irresistible conceptual hybrid that has yet to be sundered. Brand himself later boasted at the power of this mongrel coupling in a 1995 Time Magazine article entitled “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Newcomers to the Internet are often startled to discover themselves not so much in some soulless colony of technocrats as in a kind of cultural Brigadoon—a flowering remnant of the '60s, when hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution. At the time, it all seemed dangerously anarchic (and still does to many), but the counterculture's scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.
If such self-memorializing tributes were any indication of things, this new flavor of sociopathy was here to stay, as the Internet became not only a liberating social experiment or a tool for new forms of communication but also an entire self-justifying rhetorical machine unto itself, establishing itself as indisputable evidence for the inevitability of Brand and his colleagues’ radical new interpretation of the world.11 It is thus how Alan Kay’s extremely optimistic intentions in creating Smalltalk and object-orientation produced a sociopathic machine like none other in the history of Western civilization, a material ideology whose very existence consistently legitimated the bizarre flavor of 1960s hacker counterculture Brand and his colleagues ascribed to it, trapping materiality and discourse in what Alt has called “a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing feedback loop.” As Alt elaborated, “As more of our culture is reordered as object-orientated, the more the beliefs of systems theory and its ideological offspring—complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, the New Economy—become empirically reified.” At the end of his account, Alt is careful to note that he is not the first to recognize this sociopathic potential of Kay’s object-orientated paradigm and its resulting technological advances, explaining that Kay himself reached the same realization only years after creating Smalltalk, prompting his attempt to destroy the project: The reason I wanted to “burn the disk packs” [at the end of 1975] is that I had a very McLuhanish feeling about media and environments: that once we have shaped tools, in his words, they turn around and “reshape us.” Of course this is a great idea if the tools are really good and aimed squarely at the issues in question. But the other edge of the sword cuts as deep—that inadequate tools and environments still reshape our thinking in spite of their problems, in part, because we want paradigms to guide our goals. Strong paradigms such as LISP and Smalltalk are so compelling that they eat their young: when you look at an application in either of these two systems, they resemble the systems themselves, not a new idea.
It is precisely this threshold onto an endless hall of mirrors that we crossed in the 1990s, as virtue melded with virtuality and the Internet became the single most powerful ideological force propelling humanity’s next giant leap in sociopathic evolution. Brand’s new digital sociopathy had arrived on the global scene in a big way, and it was very big business.12 Virtuality, flatness, and other grand unification theories “The Net is the archetype—always the same picture—displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic and social and ecological, all communications, all democracy, all groups, all large systems. The icon is slippery, ensnaring the unwary in its paradox of no beginning, no end, no center. Or, all beginning, all end, pure center. [...] Hidden in the Net is the mystery of the Invisible Hand—control without authority. [...] Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control. The network symbol signifies the swamp of psyche, the tangle of life, the mob needed for individuality.” 13 — Kevin Kelly (1994)
If there is a single buzzword that best captures the heady spirit of the 90s (and there are so many to choose from), it is virtuality. Though seldom rigorously defined, the multiplicitous concept of virtuality came to stand for a 11 Ibid, 210, 208; Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time Magazine (March 1, 1995). Accessed online at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,982602,00.html on November 16, 2008. 12 Alt; Kay, 549 (emphasis in original). 13 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 25-6.
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wide variety of idealized states throughout the 1990s, many of which found a common thread in the rejection of the messy particulars of everyday lived experience in exchange for the logical, consistent, quantifiable predictability of computational systems. In this way, virtuality was often opposed to physicality and materiality, suggesting a pure, idealized omega point the entire world was perpetually on the verge of attaining. Consider, for example, the inspirational preamble to “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” written in August 1994 by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler and funded by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to Newt Gingrich: The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.
Or, consider this stirring excerpts from John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” signed into existence on February 8, 1996, by the privileged participants of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. [...] Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.
Though lacking the poetic fervor of the above depictions of virtuality, the following definition by Paulina Borsook distinguishes a sense of the virtual of great relevance to our analysis: The desire to slip the surly bonds of earth, which runs through much of technolibertarian thinking, might be called virtuality. Meaning, not “virtue” in the sense of Plato or chastity before marriage, but in the sense of “virtual reality.” In the positive sense, virtuality means using computers to overcome boundaries of time and space and physical limitations: It’s about email and flight simulators. In the negative sense, it means the same thing, but with the blinding consequences of ignoring the ways, good and real, that we are all grounded in time and space and the realm of the senses. Local politics is all about really being there.
Extrapolating on Borsook’s explanation, the most accurate description of virtuality is the abstraction of the social field, the liquidation of the local, space-bound, territorial particularities in favor of a rarified, abstract realm of mathematical predictability and precision. As an abstraction of the social, virtuality is therefore inherently antisocial and therefore sociopathic. As Tyler Cowen has similarly asserted in his 2002 defense of globalization appropriately entitled Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing World Cultures, “Cross-cultural trade does not eliminate difference altogether, but, rather, it liberates difference from the constraints of place." Yet, as Cowen’s comment suggests, this convergence on and absolute fetishization of virtuality is not merely a product of the Internet and information technologies, rather it is the culmination of the larger sociopathic trends in art, advertising, and corporate management, and technologies we have been illustrating throughout our analysis.14 In fact, one of the most striking discoveries in reading William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone’s influential management study from 1992, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (the first book to describe corporate structures and operations as virtual), is how little their notion of virtuality is dependent on information technologies, partly because the Internet and World Wide Web as we now know them did not exist at the time. Rather Davidow and Malone distinguished between conventional computer industry notions of virtuality such as “virtual computers,” emphasizing that they are more interested in “virtual products,” which are “produced instantaneously and customized in response to customer demand.” In doing so, the authors “extended the idea of virtuality one step further to reflect what is going on around us today—formerly well-defined structures beginning to lose their edges, seemingly permanent things starting to continuously change, and products and serv-
14 Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Release 1.2, August 22, 1994),” Information Society 12, no. 3 (1996): 295-308. Available online at http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html, accessed November 20, 2008; John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 1996. Available online at http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. Accessed on July 4, 2008; Borsook, 14; Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing World Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 129.
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ices adapting to match our desires.” In response to the self-posed question “What will a virtual corporation look like?,” the authors responded that There is no single answer. To the outside observer, it will appear almost edgeless, with permeable and continuously changing interfaces between company, supplier, and customers. From inside the firm the view will be no less amorphous, with traditional offices departments, and operating divisions constantly reforming according to need. Job responsibilities will regularly shift, as will lines of authority—even the very definition of employee will change, as some customers and suppliers begin to spend more time in the company than will some of the firm’s own workers.
Additionally, Davidow and Malone underscore the fact that such a virtualization is a radical and wholesale affair, not just the addition of a new element to an existing corporate structure: “the only way to build a virtual product is to revise R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales, service, distribution, information systems, and even finance—all must metamorphose.” Yet the self-transformation is not enough for corporate virtualization, for the whole surrounding social structure must also change such that “employees, management, customers, suppliers, and government all work together to achieve common goals.” Thus, for Davidow and Malone, the concept of virtuality flowed more directly from early processes of corporate management theories in response to the new challenges of socially abstracted virtualization of global capital, ownership, and laws with its transnational supply and distribution chains than from the radical transformation of communications soon to be unleashed on the world.15 Of course, the impending introduction and popularization of the World Wide Web dramatically catapulted such initial movements toward virtuality into stratospheric overdrive, mixing with the digital utopian business theory of influential sources such as GBN and WIRED to produce a body of management ideology that came to be celebrated as the New Economy. With the advent of this New Economy, entirely new business practices and lingo flooded the market, as sleek “e-commerce sites” and “online marketplaces” rapidly outpaced their slow, physically bound “brick-andmortar” competitors. Within this new mode, materiality and products were transformed from assets to liabilities overnight, and attention, flexibility, and customer conversations assumed infinite importance over traditional strengths such as factories, labor forces, and storefront locations. As Kevin Kelly advised in his New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World, “Because information trumps mass, all commerce migrates to the network economy.” Amid the forceful rush for all corporations to virtualize and for new startup companies to stake a claim to their own patch of cyberspace, it became increasingly difficult to discern what constituted a business anymore, as people, places, and things were abstracted into pixels, IP addresses, and remote transactions, and we all slipped into Bill Gates’ 1996 prediction of an online nirvana of “friction-free capitalism.” The business journalist John Cassidy captured this lust for the virtual in 2002 book dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by describing the ways in which the business media reacted to Amazon.com: The media presented Amazon.com as a new type of business—one that wasn’t hemmed in by the physical constraints facing other companies. ‘Amazon.com is truly virtual,” Fortune informed its readers in December 1996. “Though it has become a multi-million-dollar business that employs 110, there’s still no storefront and little inventory.” Even the normally skeptical Economist fell for this line, describing how “three floors above an art gallery on a slightly seedy street in Seattle, the world’s biggest bookstore, Amazon.com, hums inside a refrigerator-sized box in the corner of a humble storeroom.”
Though rarely stated in such media endorsements of the expansive agility of new virtual companies such as Amazon.com, the unsavory material “frictions” that so many New Economy entrepreneurs were so eager to evade often translated sociopathically into “human bodies.”16 Yet the rapid virtualization of business that occurred as a result of globalization and the Internet can only be understood in light of another dramatic transformation of the early 1990s: the conceptual sea change in advertising and marketing from the promotion of products to the creation of brands. In her in-depth study of this phenomenon in 15 William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1992), 4, 6, 7, 8. For an example of how the virtual corporation revolution extended to archetypal hierarchical organizations such as the U.S. Army, see the U.S. Army commissioned RAND report by Francis Fukuyama and Abram N. Shulsky, The “Virtual Corporation” and Army Organization (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997), available online at http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2007/MR863.pdf (accessed March 12, 2009). 16 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Penguin, 1998), 76; Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996), 180; John Cassidy, dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 142.
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her book No Logo, Naomi Klein identifies the various strains of this movement by noting that while certain brand names suffered a loss of consumer recognition during the first half of the decade, a number of other brands such as Nike, Apple, the Body Shop, Calvin Klein, Disney, and Starbucks excelled, due in large part to a new strategy of marketing the brand itself rather than its products. As Klein explained, For these companies, the ostensible product was mere filler for the real production: the brand. They integrated the idea of branding into the very fabric of their companies. [...] Everything was an ad for the brand: bizarre lexicons for describing employees (partners, baristas, team players, crew members), company chants, superstar CEOs, fanatical attention to design consistency, a propensity for monument-building, and New Age mission statements. Unlike classic household brand names, such as Tide and Malboro, these logos weren’t losing their currency, they were in the midst of breaking every barrier in the marketing world—becoming cultural accessories and lifestyle philosophers. These companies didn’t wear their image like a cheap shirt—their image was so integrated with their business that other people wore it as their shirt.
According to Klein, this wake-up call travelled like lightning throughout advertising and marketing industries, as “Overnight, ‘Brands not products!’ became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as ‘meaning brokers’ instead of product producers.” With the transition from advertising products to selling the brand of the companies themselves, advertising entered its own stage of 1990s virtuality akin to that of corporate management and the ensuing e-commerce transition: Ever since, a select group of corporations has been attempting to free itself from the corporeal world of commodities, manufacturing, and products to exist on another plane. Anyone can manufacture a product, they reason ... Such menial tasks, therefore, can and should be farmed out to contractors and subcontractors whose only concern is filling the order on time and under budget (ideally in the Third World, where labor is dirt cheap, laws are lax, and tax breaks come by the bushel). Headquarters, meanwhile, is free to focus on the real business at hand—creating a corporate mythology powerful enough to infuse meaning into these raw objects just by signing its name.
Not surprisingly, as Klein notes, the onset of Internet-based commerce only further drove the singular focus on brand name recognition as the sole, etherial value of a company, stating that This project has since been taken to an even more advanced level with the emergence of on-line corporate giants such as Amazon.com. It is on-line that the purest brands are being built: liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations.
In its newfound desire to rid itself of the sinking weight of materiality, these aspiring new brands constituted the third element of the virtual turn that charted the 1990s into its signature sociopathic trajectory. Though the seeds of mass sociopathy had been sown in the 60s, the full ideological integration occurred in the virtuality of the 90s.17 The degree to which this New Economy virtuality resonated with the already humming sociopathy of American desire cannot be overstated. Almost immediately, the predictive rhetoric from WIRED and other pro-New Economy media outlets elevated dotcom market valuations to unprecedented levels. In dot.con, Cassidy assiduously unpacks how the accelerating trend toward virtuality similarly deracinated market valuations from more concretely based methods for valuing companies. Cassidy explains that prior to the “irrational exuberance” of the New Economy (to use Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s diagnosis), economists and financial analysts required more substantive methods for calculating stock valuations, the most reliable of which is often the price-to-earnings ratio, which Cassidy explains “is calculated by dividing a company’s stock price by it’s earnings-per-share.” While other valuation methods, such as “dividend yield” (the annual dividend payment a stock yields divided by its current price) and “price-to-book ratio” (a company’s stock market valuation divided by the accounting value of its assets), have similarly served as alternate means for reliably valuing companies, none of these methods worked well for the new dotcoms, precisely because many of the new companies initially made no profits and had so few costs. Rather, these companies claimed as their assets virtualized potentials only calculable using the fuzzy logic of future market shares. In The New New Thing, Michael Lewis succinctly captured this sense of altered reality in the wake of Netscape’s immensely successful initial public stock offering (IPO) in 1995:
17 Klein, No Logo, 15-6, 21, 22 (emphasis in original).
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In the frenzy that followed, a lot of the old rules of capitalism were suspended. For instance, it had long been a rule of thumb with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists that they didn’t peddle a new technology company to the investing public until it had had at least four consecutive profitable quarters. Netscape had nothing to show investors but massive losses. No longer did you need to show profits; you needed to show rapid growth. Having a past actually counted against a company, for a past was a record and a record was a sign of a company’s limitations. Never mind that you weren’t actually making money—there’d be time for that later, assuming someone actually figured out how to make money from the Internet. For the moment you needed to plow all of your revenues back into growth. You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future. The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility.
Particularly in the case of so-called “concept” stocks, such as search engines and financial transaction sites, which no one had any idea how to value, new and more radical mechanisms of valuation were engineered to such an extent that it did not take long for all previously reliable methods to be jettisoned, with stocks trading solely on the abstractly perceived value of their brands. Companies were worth whatever the market said they we worth without any pragmatic consideration for the usual techniques of reliable market valuation. Additionally, as Cassidy explains, the question of valuation was further exacerbated by the fact that most investment banking firms calculated a company’s market capitalization by multiplying the number of publicly available shares offered during their IPO—a figure that is artificially limited so as to drive up the per-share value—by the number of all outstanding shares (whether publicly traded or not). The result of this “discrepancy,” as Cassidy notes, is vastly overvalued businesses, a fact that the investment bankers staging the IPOs undoubtedly understood but chose not to publicize. Cassidy points out that this newfound ability to manipulate the public valuation of a company fundamentally transformed the entire purpose of an IPO: “In the old days, firms went public because they needed the money to expand, but in the 1990s IPOs had turned into marketing events.” Thus, in the end, the New Economy, branding, and management theory all converge as a single event that is pure virtuality, pure branding, pure management theory, pure sociopathy all in a single movement to create the most lucrative public performance art in history.18 If there was a single message amidst this massive shift toward virtuality on all fronts, it was how incredibly revolutionary it all was. If one understands (as our analysis does) that virtuality is simply an idealized form of sociopathy, this tendency is expected. The whole point of sociopathy in all its various forms is the radical externalized conversion of established institutions into Capital and Cool. However, for many in privileged positions of Power, the rhetoric of the New Economy as revolutionary battle cry was a bit unsettling. Thomas Frank discussed this precise formulation in 2000, by observing the degree to which the New Economy was portrayed as “an antielitist machine [...]depicting the workings of the market as a kind of permanent social revolution.” According to Frank, The “New Economy” was a narrative of class warfare as much as anything else: Wherever its dynamic new logic touched down, old money was said to quake and falter. The markers of inherited wealth were being superseded by more extreme tastes; operagoing CEOs were giving way to those who wore goatees and fancied deffer rhymes of the stree; the scions of ancient banking families were finding their smug selves wiped out by the new jack trading of a working-class kid; the arrogant stockbrokers of old were being humiliated by the online day-traders; the buttoneddown whip-cracking bosses were getting fired by the corporate “change-agents”; the white men of the world were getting their asses kicked by the women, the Asians, the Africans, and the Hispanics.
The political dimensions of this popular revolt did not go unappreciated by aspiring politicians and pundits, particularly of the New Right libertarian variety. Meshing with the object-oriented, bottom-up, “embrace the swarm” ideology of Kevin Kelly and other heroes of the WIRED media juggernaut, many politicians and pundits emphasized the fact that this newer, smarter economy was essentially self-regulating. Perfect information and perfect technology had united to obviate the need for government regulation or meddling in any markets. As Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth, and Toffler make clear in their “Cyberspace and the American Dream” document, “Indeed, if there is to be an ‘industrial policy for the knowledge age,’ it should focus on removing barriers to competition and massively deregulating the fast-growing telecommunications and computing industries.”19
18 Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” at the Annual Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (December 5, 1996). Accessed online at http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm on March 15, 2008; Cassidy, 71, 149, 81; Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 85 (emphasis in original); . 19 Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 31; Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth, Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.”
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Yet the sociopathy of the New Economy had its sights set on much bigger targets. It was not enough to merely remove government from technology and market actions, rather the new market removed the need for government altogether. The New Economy was the perfect democracy. According to Dyson and her colleagues, “It also spells the death of the central institutional paradigm of modern life, the bureaucratic organization. (Governments, including the American government, are the last great redoubt of bureaucratic power on the face of the planet, and for them the coming change will be profound and probably traumatic.)” Frank has encapsulated the rational logic of this new “fundamental faith” in the following formula: The market and the people—both of them understood as grand principles of social life rather than particulars—were essentially one and the same. By its very nature the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet. In fact, the market was more democratic than any of the formal institutions of democracy—elections, legislatures, government. The market was a community. The market was infinitely diverse, permitting without prejudice the articulation of any and all tastes and preferences. Most importantly of all, the market was militant about its democracy. It had no place for snobs, for hierarchies, for elitism, for pretense, and it would fight these things by its very nature.
It is this final solution, in a complete libertarian assault against the government itself, the social institution that funded and constructed the Internet in the first place, that we begin to understand the true, immaculate power of virtual sociopathy. Under this enlightening regime, past social problems began to either fall away or solve themselves, as the nation, and by extension the world, fell into perfect mathematical alignment: DEMOCRACY = THE MARKET = THE INTERNET = SOCIETY = FREEDOM = SOCIOPATHY.20 If one need any other indication of the triumph of sociopathy in the 90s, consider the degree to which Schumpeterian economics finally received its much-deserved comeuppance on the national stage. Appearing as early as 1994 in the foundational “Cyberspace and the American Dream” document, we begin to see traces of Schumpeter’s alluring ideology: Static competition is good, because it forces costs and prices to the lowest levels possible for a given product. Dynamic competition is better, because it allows competing technologies and new products to challenge the old ones and, if they really are better, to replace them. Static competition might lead to faster and stronger horses. Dynamic competition gives us the automobile. [...] Such dynamic competition—the essence of what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction"—creates winners and losers on a massive scale.
This rediscovery of Schumpeter’s theories only accelerated throughout the remainder of the decade as New Economy proponents, particularly government policy makers, heralded the once-forgotten economist as the only way to understand the current age of prosperity. As WIRED journalist Frank Rose noted in his 2002 article entitled “The Father of Creative Destruction: Why Joseph Schumpeter Is Suddenly All the Rage in Washington,” new Schumpeterian devotees included everyone from Alan Greenspan to “the warring parties in the Microsoft antitrust case” to House majority leader Dick Armey to FCC Director Michael Powell to current Director of President Barak Obama’s National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers. Given the degree to which the creative destruction of the virtualized New Economy was being celebrated across all aspects of American private and civil society, one can only conclude that an even more accurate appellation for the New Economy would be New Sociopathy.21
20 Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth, Toffler; Frank, One Market Under God, 28. 21 Ibid; Frank Rose, “The Father of Creative Destruction: Why Joseph Schumpeter Is Suddenly All the Rage in Washington,” WIRED (March 2002). Available online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/schumpeter.html, accessed November 1, 2008. For specific examples of such Schumpeterian invocations, see: “Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan on Trade Policy Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance” (April 4, 2001), accessed online at http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/Testimony/2001/200104042/default.htm on October 2, 2008; Dick Armey, “Telecom Law in MIchigan: Change or Get Left Behind,” transcript of remarks at a luncheon hosted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (May 24, 2005), accessed online at http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7135 on November 12, 2008.
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From society to free agency “By the year 2020, the largest employer in the developed world will be ‘self.’ Is this good? You bet.” 22 — Nicholas Negroponte (1995)
What can it mean for this unified sociopathic virtuality to completely abstract the social? After all, it is not as though all American social institutions—families, churches, schools, cities, the federal government—instantly evaporated following the first issue of WIRED or the Netscape IPO. Because it is inherently material, the social persists. Yet that does not mean we will recognize it. In fact, the most interesting aspect of the real/virtual discussion is not what happens online or even in the market, which are both already mathematically abstracted spaces, but rather what happens in the world of the everyday, the immediately material, the social. How has the virtual extended into the realm of daily life to the point of being indistinguishable, reordering its material practices to bring them into accordance with the power relations inherent to its specific abstract machine? The living social body itself adapts with alarming ease to a new regime, but the ossified structures of social Power in the form of institutions do not. With the convergence on virtuality, institutional Power has been shattered, looted, fenced, distributed, atomized. Of course, one of the most immediately noticeable social consequences to result from this new radically virtualized, distributed, and flexible corporate structure is the increased preference for temporary, independently contracted, and even globally outsourced labor relations as opposed to more traditional models of long-term employment with a single employer. Such a preference for limited contract work over employment has been particularly popular in high-technology industries, which is not surprising given that new information technologies have been largely responsible in creating the possibility for such distributed work relationships in the first place. As business journalist Daniel H. Pink has explained in his decisive treatment of the subject, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, the concept of the “independent contractor” is not merely a colloquial expression but rather defines a very specific legal relationship: While Europe in the Middle Ages produced a knightly label for soloists, America in the twentieth century produced—what else?—a legal term: independent contractor. Just as “freelancer” is ingrained in the vernacular, “independent contractor” is defined in the law. It’s a term that defines what a soloist is by what she is not. An independent contractor is not an “employee.” She doesn’t have a single, enduring, more or less permanent relationship with one employer. This distinction matters under the law. Most wage-earning employees, especially those employed by large companies, are covered by a quilt of labor laws—statutes and regulations that guard their pensions, give them the right to unionize, require time-and-a-half for working more than forty hours in a week, protect them against race and sex discrimination, and mandate minimum safety levels as their workplaces. Independent contractors, by contrast, lack the protections of almost all of these laws.
While Pink acknowledges that it is currently difficult to quantify the exact number of free agents in the U.S., his conservative 2001 estimate is that 33 million Americans—about one in four—should be considered free agents. Pink underscores the importance of this figure by noting that “Even this conservative 33 million figure means that free agents easily outnumber all manufacturing workers and all government workers—and may be the largest single cluster of workers in the economy.” For Pink, the real story of the New Economy is not the advent of the Internet or the exponential growth of the NASDAQ, rather “Free agency is the real new economy,” arguing that “as these tectonic plates slide into new positions, what appears on the surface will begin to change as well.”23 While such figures and claims speak volumes about the transformations in corporate structures and management practices throughout the 1990s, what can we say about their parallel interpretations beyond the quickly thinning walls of the corporate offices? In his extensive study in 2000 of the current state of America’s social fabric entitled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Harvard Professor of Public Policy Robert D. Putnam explored several forms of social participation in the U.S. and found, overwhelmingly, that sociality has seriously waned throughout the 1990s. In surveying this trend, Putnam researched a wide gamut of social engagement, 22 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996), 240. 23 Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (New York: Warner Business Books, 2001), 33-4, 46, 24 (emphases in original). For a more rigorous though similarly sanguine critique of PInk’s claims, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 106-8.
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from “politics and public affairs,” to “the institutions of our communities—clubs and community associations, religious bodies, and work-related organizations such as unions and professional societies,” to “the almost infinite variety of informal ties that link Americans—card parties and bowling leagues, bar cliques and ball games, picnics and parties.” Based upon this analysis, Putnam concluded that The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.
Whereas Putnam has noted that “In the 1960s, in fact, community groups across America had seemed to stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement” with “Each annual report registered rising membership,” the period since then has been marked by a decreasing participation in all forms of traditional social engagement—a fact that corresponds precisely to our own analysis of the rising tide of sociopathy that swept across the country from the late 60s to the 1990s. While one might easily expect that, given the aforementioned increased trend towards individual contract labor throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a graph of rates of union membership over the past century might resemble the following (p81):
It is far more interesting that Putnam finds similar declines among informal forms of social organization, such as the rates of social card playing compared to other more solitary activities (p105):
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As these two samples from Putnam’s much larger collection of data reveal, the increasing transition towards virtuality throughout the 1990s had a parallel effect on the types of relationships formed by Americans.24 But do Putnam’s findings suggest that all forms of community interaction had come to a rapid halt? Throughout his exploration of the New Economy boom in the 1990s in dot.con, Cassidy indicated a compelling counterexample to Putnam’s larger trend: Putnam’s was an interesting thesis, and it had some truth to it, but it ignored the proliferation of one type of voluntary organization where millions of Americans gathered regularly, talked with each other, and acted in unison on an issue close to their hearts: money. In 1992, there were 7,200 investment clubs listed with the National Association of Investors Corp., a nonprofit organization based in Madison Heights, Michigan; at the start of 1999, there were more than 37,000. By then, the United States contained more investment clubs than movie houses. And this figure only included those investment clubs that had gone to the trouble of listing with the National Association of Investors. Probably half as many again hadn’t bothered.
In describing this massive increase in investment clubs, Cassidy has indicated that they also typically broke traditional stereotypes about the demographic profiles of investors themselves, citing the facts that “More than twothirds of the members of investment clubs were women” and “There were investment clubs catering to blacks, Asians, college students, and even high school students.” Clearly, Americans still found common ground in at least one topic and the social urge to come together over it: the New Economy.25
24 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 27, 16. 25 Cassidy, 233, 234.
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Given our discussion thus far, a tempting immediate solution to Putnam’s quandary as to where all the social capital went in the 1990s is a mass migration toward online social interactions and away from more traditional community interactions. While there was undeniably an increase in online relationships throughout the latter half of the 90s (due to the simple fact that there were so few prior to this point), the shift towards online forms of social interaction is not enough to account for the much larger transformation of social practice described by Putnam. As Putnam himself has been careful to clarify: One truism, however, is this: The timing of the Internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling social connectedness described in previous chapters. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting, and so on had all begun to decline while Bill Gates was still in grade school. By the time that the Internet reached 10 percent of American adults in 1996, the nationwide decline in social connectedness and civic engagement had been underway for at least a quarter of a century. Whatever the future implications of the Internet, social intercourse over the last several decades of the twentieth century was not simply displaced from physical space to cyberspace.
Putnam’s comments regarding the relationship between social engagement and online activity overwhelmingly support our larger argument that the national shift towards widespread, democratized sociopathy began much early in the 1960s and only reached its cumulative acceleration in the 1990s. When considered in conjunction with Cassidy’s example of investment clubs, these arguments strongly reinforce one of the main thrusts of this analysis: even though the abstracted virtuality of the New Economy was largely imagined as a computer-mediated online phenomenon, its larger sociopathic ideology extended to all realms of material cultural and practices, reconfiguring all relationships throughout the 1990s.26 As one might expect, the result of all this independently contracted, flattened field of free agents begins to approximate the material properties and processes of the Internet itself in very real ways. As Alt has explained in his discussion of object-orientation, the standard practice for creating object-oriented programming objects is for the programmer to not just create the executable code that will create the object (often called the implementation) but to also create a separate, non-executable document called the interface or protocol that serves as the “public face for the object,” declaring “which of the objects internal methods may be requested by another object, the necessary format for making each request, and the sort of message (if any) the requesting object should expect in response to the requesting message.” Alt goes on to note the importance of this interfacial element by arguing that: It is through these mechanisms that object-orientation inserts the concept of interface at the level of the code itself. One of the terms most frequently used to describe the interface is that of a public contract between every object within the community of objects, and such a rules-based community structure injects a social element into the space of the code. However, this society of objects is not limited just to computational objects, for interface is also the means by which the concept of the human user enters the program. Just as interfaces dictate possible interactions among objects, they similarly proscribe possible interactions between objects and human users. As a result, users are made to inhabit the space and medium of the other objects and are treated as objects themselves.
When viewed through Alt’s elucidation of object-oriented coding practices, one can immediately begin to see how closely the material logic of the individually contracted free agents that constitute much of the current workforce begin to mirror the inherent design logic of object-orientation itself, in which all objects are treated as independent information processes entities and their social relationships contractually constructed. This relationship is not necessarily a technologically determined causal process, rather it is the result of a complex coupling and convergence of corresponding types of material practices and cultural desires. As the Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig decisively ruled in 1999, “Code is law.”27 In his comprehensive analysis of business, technology, and advertising literature of the New Economy, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, University of California English Professor Alan Liu locates a similar reorganization of independently contracted free agents and computational objects into a single field of operations via the ubiquitous metaphor of user friendliness:
26 Putnam, 170. 27 Alt; Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 6 (emphasis in original).
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No more than a modification—a tweak—of the existing friendship system of corporate culture was needed. Here is where figuration becomes crucial—specifically, figuration that feels so “real” and “objective” that IT could now seem to stand for restructuring in a relation that was not just allegorical but symbolic. [...] I refer to the business deployment in the 1980s and 1990s of the “graphical user interface” (GUI), whose “metaphors” imaged a “friendly,” harmonious culture of production seemingly part of the very infrastructure that now networked corporations together. Friendly corporate culture became “user friendly.” This was the great object-metaphor or symbol of efficient service in the age of distributed production.
As with Alt’s reading of the contractual positioning that the object-oriented interface indifferently enacts on both users and other programming objects, Liu’s related concept of user friendliness trickles out through the now-permeable corporate walls to all of American consumer culture, recasting it as a flattened network of autonomous, nomadic nodes: “Culture” will now be figured as a networked world of corporate subjects become pure, distributable objects—teamworkers who have no legitimate identity and emotion except when wired like animated paperclips into the network. Culture will consist of “human agents” who are finally indistinguishable from friendly software agents.
Thus, if Alt and Liu’s analyses are to be accepted, the social terminus of the virtuality of the 1990s was not the ecumenically cozy hamlet of the “global village” as first imagined by McLuhan in 1962 and since rehashed in every conceivable techno-utopian permutation imaginable. Rather, this new social habitus assumes the shape of a much cooler, impersonal, and anonymous network of contractually interconnected but ultimately independent human and computational free agents. This, then, is the final face of the New Economy, the end result of sociality abstracted, the transient immediacy of the social rendered virtual. Welcome home.28 Good business is the best art “The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced Critique with sales promotion. The simulacrum, the simulation of a packet of noodles, has become the true concept; and the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist. How could philosophy, an old person, compete against young executives in a race for the universals of communication for determining the marketable form of the concept, Merz?” 29 — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994)
If we ask the question that Liu’s previous comment begs, what, then, became of culture in the New Economy? The quick answer is that, within this new social formation, culture reigned supreme. As had begun in the 1960s, Cool became the ultimate currency, human attention the holy grail. As stated earlier in establishing our analytical model: Cool is an individual performative measure of collective desirability, which is most fundamentally reducible to units of human attention and may be quantitatively approximated by different metrics, such as number of imitators, television viewership ratings, or website views. Cool’s site of operation is communication networks, which may include informal word-of-mouth networks, academic texts, or more formalized mainstream media channels.
As society became the Internet and the Internet society, as electronic communication networks became the exclusive conduits of sociality, Cool assumed a very specific bias: only that which is immediately digitally communicable, linkable, attachable, Diggable, can be Cool. Everything else falls outside the closed circuits of attention. As JeanFrançois Lyotard predicted in 1979, all culture follows the strict mandate: “be operational or disappear.” It is important to note that this digital communicability is not merely a means for transmitting Cool, rather the very fact that it can be transmitted digitally affirms its Cool, such that the very process of digital communicability adds value. Additionally, Cool became discretely quantifiable in ways never previously imagined by other large-scale broadcast media, as page hits, click-through rates, download frequencies, and other extremely granular measures of human atten-
28 Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 158, 172 (emphasis in original); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 31. 29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 10-1. As the translators note, “Merz is the term coined by the artist Kurt Schwitters to refer to the aesthetic combination of any kind of material, and the equal value of these different materials, in his collages and assemblages. The term itself came from a fragment of a word in one of his assemblages, the whole phrase being ‘Kommerz und Privatbank’” (11).
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tion transformed the previously ephemeral and inestimable cultural capital into a reliable, numerical currency. In the New Economy, Cool was calculable.30 But what was this Cool and how was it produced? In the simplest sense, the Cool of the 1990s was what it had always been: sociopathic. Anything that intelligently and authentically broke with established social conventions was Cool. In this respect, the Cool of the 90s followed in the endless procession of binarisms, such as hip/square, cool/suck, wired/tired, hot/not, sick/gay, that have continued to entrap us ever since Mailer first scribbled those prophetic words in 1957: “One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” This enticing, ceaseless thumbs-up/thumbs-down logic excludes any other possibility of critical evaluation, particularly in the networked society, in which binary votes are tabulated in real-time, allowing massive comparative tallies of any object’s aggregate degree of Cool. According to Kevin Kelly, this wide-scale capacity for amassing the simplest of critical decisions represents one of the truly great gifts of the network, as encapsulated in his axiom that “Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results,” directly leading to his corollary revelation that “The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.”31 Similarly, Cool was produced in the 1990s the way that it has always been produced: through the radical branding conversion described in our analytical model, whether via a sociopathy/branding conversion of social Power as was common in the WIRED crowds frequent technolibertarian attacks on established institutions of Power, via a liquidation/branding conversion as in the case of hiring a hot new branding firm to revamp a corporate image, or some combination of both. However, what did change in the 90s was exactly who was allowed to perform these conversions. Whereas in the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, admen viewed their relationship to the countercultural avantgarde as more of a wannabe admirational affinity (creative solidarity against the Man), the brand managers of the 1990s considered themselves as having largely superseded and/or subsumed artists within the new category of “creatives,” the exclusive arbiters of Cool. In supplanting the traditional roles of artists, such creatives became the new cultural vanguard, successful in large measure because its operations were more cleanly integrated into the larger sociopathic machine of virtualized corporate capitalism. In 2004, the L’Oréal Chair of Marketing at Oxford University, Douglas B. Holt, hailed brand managers as “cultural activists.” According to Holt, As cultural activists, managers treat their brands as a medium—no different than a novel or a film—to deliver provocative creative materials that respond to society’s new cultural needs. [...] For brand owners that seek to build iconic brands, the challenge is to develop a cultural activist organization: a company organized around developing identity myths that address emerging contradictions in society. [...] The greatest opportunity for brands today is to deliver not entertainment, but rather myths that their customers can use to manage the exigencies of a world that increasingly threatens their identities.
In an earlier article from 2002, Holt equated branding and the arts by asserting branding as a sort of more timely, postmodern meta-art: “Of course, for a brand to serve as an artistic expression does not imply it will no longer make use of other bits and pieces of expressive culture, such as music, films, and even other ads. Art is often concerned with reorienting how we perceive conventional cultural texts.”32 According to this new regime, brand managers and other creatives became cultural stewards conferring Cool, creating it, seeking it out, exploiting it, as in Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 article for The New Yorker entitled “The Coolhunt,” in which Gladwell described corporate marketers’ increasing use of “coolhunters,” self-styled cutting-edge cultural prospectors who sniff out emerging creative street trends and offer them up for corporate colonization before spreading to the mainstream. Or, perhaps the statement that said it all was Daniel Pink’s 2004 article in the Harvard Business Review proclaiming “The MFA is the New MBA.” According to Pink, “An arts degree is now perhaps the 30 this.getPage(7); (emphasis in original); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxiv.. 31 Mailer, “The White Negro;” Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, 13, 14. 32 Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 219-21; Holt, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding,” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (June 2002): 87.
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hottest credential in the world of business,” adding that “with ever more arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree.” While Pink argues that part of the reason for this change is the overwhelming glut of MBA school graduates over the past decade, a larger reason is that, in the New Economy, all production is now creative production. According to Pink, skeptics should just listen to auto industry legend Robert Lutz. When Lutz took over as chairman of General Motors North America [in 2001], a journalist asked him how his approach would differ from his predecessor’s. Here’s what he said: “It’s more right brain. ... I see us as being in the art business. Art, entertainment, and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” General Motors—General Motors!—is in the art business. So, now, are we all.
If there is any lesson to be gleaned from the remarkable decade of the 1990s, it is that of corporate CEOs emerging somewhat surprisingly as the most celebrated global artists, spanning all genres including the visual arts, performance arts, and concept arts. As Michael Lewis observed in relating Jim Clark’s fabled “Magic Diamond” back-of-thenapkin pitch for a dotcom company that would solve the nation’s healthcare crisis, “Clark had no plans to spend even a day in the Healthscape offices. He had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist.”33 Artists did, of course, push back against this aggressive intercession into their territory; however, the majority of the responses lacked the sophistication and (ironically) creativity of their corporate counterparts. In No Logo, Klein applauded the efforts of “culture jamming” and “adbusting” artists, terms inspired by the San Francisco audiocollage band Negativeland and the founder of ADBUSTERS magazine, Kalle Lasn. Most culture jammers and adbusters function as reverse marketing guerrillas, subverting corporate advertising campaigns in subtle and not so subtle ways, as in changing an Apple Computer billboard slogan from “Think different” to “Think doomed” or the common “skulling” phenomenon which literally defaces fashion models images by turning their faces into menacing skulls. As Klein described the logic of culture jamming, The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions—counter-messages that hack into a corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively, because anytime people mess with a logo, they tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful. [...] A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms.
In the introduction to his own treatise on the subject, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America™, Lasn trumpeted a similar call to self-importance by proclaiming We call ourselves culture jammers. We’re a loose global network of media activists who see ourselves as the advance shock troops of the most significant social movement of the next twenty years. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge major adjustments to the way we will live in the twenty-first century. We believe culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights was to the ‘60s, what feminism was to the ‘70s, what environmentalism was to the ‘80s.
Before concluding his introduction, Lasn also linked the tradition of culture jamming to “Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau,” though he found particular inspiration in the disruptive social strategies of dériviste and détournement articulated by Guy Debord and the Situationists from the 1960s as providing Matrix red-pill moments of sudden “political awakening” or “powerful, secular epiphanies.”34 While one might appreciate the intent behind such culture jamming, there is no question that both Klein and Lasn seriously overplay culture jamming’s hand in terms of its real cultural and social impacts, let alone its theoretical viability. One immediate challenge limiting most culture jamming works is their lack of visibility and impact. Few of us have ever actually seen or been affected by a work of cultural jamming in the real world, often only experiencing them in books and magazines specifically about culture jamming. This deficit, though, is a matter of degree rather than kind; however, there are also a number of theoretical problems inherent in the practice itself. The first is both Klein and Lasn’s shared belief that culture jamming is capable of exposing some “deeper truth, a tragically lost 33 Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1997; Daniel H. Pink, “The MFA Is the New MBA,” The Harvard Business Review (February 2004): 13; Lewis, 91. 34 Klein, 281-2; Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America™ (New York: Eagle Brook, 1999), xi, xv, xvi, 99-110, xii.
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but preserved “true” reality quietly awaiting rescue beneath the massive sedimentation of advertising lies. Such utopian expectations succumb to a slightly more optimistic view of Jean Baudrillard’s version of postmodern life as simulacrum, as advanced in his 1981 essay “The Procession of the Simulacra,” in which Baudrillard posits that all of lived reality consists of hyperreal references to a real that can never be recovered. What culture jamming presupposes is that there’s a hidden, unadulterated America that remains cryogenically preserved somewhere beneath multiple layers of misleading marketing, and we can catch brief glimpses it through the right combination of artistic tactics. For Klein and Lasn, there must always be a world that is recoverable, that is being conspiratorially denied to us, as though we did not end up with this version of reality because it’s exactly the one we all wanted. What Klein and Lasn completely fail to recognize is that consumers don’t require an act of culture jamming to feel cynical about advertising, rather consumers have been feeling cynical about advertising since at least the 1960s, which is the whole reason the Creative Revolution worked in the first place. It would be extremely problematic to assume that after 30 years of Creative Revolution-inspired anti-advertising practices that consumers had somehow forgotten how to be smart and critical about advertising, rather this is precisely why such advertising sustains its appeal.35 A second critique of the ineffectiveness of culture jamming and other common modes of resistance is their inherently anachronistic nature. All proponents of culture jamming seem universally to take their cues from methodologies that passed out of use over three decades ago, such as Situationist tactics, organized online or street protests, and virtual sit-ins. The marked preference for such tactics raises several questions: Why do culture jammers choose to use antiquated techniques to fight a contemporary media empire when that empire has transformed itself multiple times over since the 1960s? Why are culture jammers still fighting the enemies of the 60s when, obviously, the same techniques were not even successful when they were historically relevant? Douglas Holt has similarly noticed this penchant for battling straw zombies in his recognition that Today’s critical academic accounts of consumer culture freeze history at the zenith of modern branding, when firms assumed that they had carte blanche to push brands at consumers and shape their desires at will and when consumers often ceded this role. [...] [Such accounts] advance a dated view of marketing that ignores the transformation of the branding paradigm over the past 40 years. In their view, the market stubbornly remains an authoritarian institution. [...] Their call for cultural revolution—liberatory postmodernism—was absorbed into the firmament of consumer culture by the late 1960s.
Indeed, as the final sentence of Holt’s comments indicates, this tendency for culture jamming activists to portray themselves as diametrically opposed to the current pantheon of corporate brands is particularly amusing given that, as our analysis has demonstrated, the majority of said corporate CEOs and their brand managers view themselves as part of the exact same 1960s countercultural revolutionary lineage.36 Yet, this last point raises an even more powerful reason regarding the ineffectiveness of culture jamming strategies to which we have already alluded in discussing the 1960s: the fact that the logic of contemporary capitalism not only anticipates such forms of cultural resistance, it requires them. Holt has similarly critiqued this position, arguing that “Consumers are revolutionary only insofar as they assist entrepreneurial firms to tear down the old branding paradigm and create opportunities for companies that understand emerging new principles,” adding that “They never threatened the market itself. What has been termed ‘consumer resistance’ is actually a form of marketsanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates itself.” It should therefore not be surprising that it did not take long for branders themselves to integrate culture jamming techniques into their own brand strategies, often cleverly staging actions to culture jam their own brands as a means for demonstrating their cutting edge street cred and the fact that their ads are important enough to be busted. In the end, the much ballyhooed culture jamming movement amounted to little more than a brief attack on a sprinkling of the symptoms of capitalism without having an impact on its cause, particularly since that cause, as the New Economy made clear, was widely distributed across a vast network of individually desiring free agents. While certain, more critically sophisticated,
35 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 36 Holt, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?,” 88.
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culture jamming groups such as Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men have proven more successful at negotiating these problems, all culture jamming strategies ultimately suffer from the aforementioned shortcomings.37 If there is a morality tale to be had from the difficulty of waging critique in the 1990s, consider the recursive sociopathic irony of Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. In 1991, Ellis unleashed his chilling commentary on the thriving hypercapitalist ethos of the 1980s, in which he chronicled approximately two years in the fictional life of Patrick Bateman, a handsome and affluent 26-year-old Manhattan investment banker whose stream-ofconsciousness narration details the banal trivia of his everyday life, including obsessive rituals of personal hygiene and exercise, relentless preoccupations with the encyclopedic minutiae of high-end brand name products, and an insatiable appetite for methodically mutilating and killing his fellow New Yorkers. Though originally slated for release by Simon & Schuster in March 1991, the publishing house refused to distribute the book due to its highly disturbing content. When Vintage Books published American Psycho later that year, it elicited widespread protest and condemnation, particularly from prominent members of the American feminist community—most notably from the feminist activist Gloria Steinem—for its extremely graphic depictions of horrific violence to women. Nine years later in 2000, Mary Harron released her equally controversial film adaptation of American Psycho, which starred Christian Bayle, the stepson of Gloria Steinem. Currently, Harron’s film version of American Psycho has attained cult status among young New York investment bankers as perhaps the single most repeated source of intra-office jokes and references. In the brief fifteen-year span since its turgid debut, American Psycho finds itself as a unifying source of cultural identity for the exact community it sought to vilify. Capitalism and Cool, it seems, are quite slippery indeed.38 Yet not all artistic attempts at cultural critique in the 1990s fell prey to such political impotence. A few chose to adopt a different, more productive strategy, one more akin to Warhol’s aforementioned observation that “Good business is the best art.” These artists employed a muddled, performative style of critique that perfectly emulated and simultaneously deconstructed the virtual convergence of the 1990s. Considering that the CEOs of the 1990s had christened themselves the most relevant artists of the new era, it stands to reason that the most relevant artists of the 1990s had become CEOs themselves. Perhaps the most obvious, though often forgotten, exemplar of this approach (whether consciously or not) was the Swiss-Austrian art collective etoy. As Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler detailed in their fascinating book, Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & other battles to control cyberspace, etoy was first formed in 1994 as a registered company in Switzerland and consisted of seven angry young male artists who were excited by the Internet. It ended in 2001 (at least in Wishart and Bochsler’s telling), as “a conceptual-art project that brilliantly summed up the times.” Before etoy even knew what it wanted to do, it knew it wanted to be an Internet company: “They remained adamant that their countercultural ideas were best furthered not by a manifesto, a poem or a painting, but by a corporation.” Exhausted by the repetitive one-dimensionality of other art students’ regurgitation of anti-capitalist pablum and electrified by the WIRED horde’s rhetoric, the seven etoy “agents” created a computer program to randomly generate their company’s name and breathed life into it as a website, subsequently throwing a party and claiming, “We were so excited that we told everybody how brilliant the future would be.” But, from the outset, etoy knew enough to recognize that no one created companies anymore, rather the future lay in brands. According to Wishart and Bochsler, Hans borrowed a corporate identity booklet from his father’s company; from this they learned that they needed a rigorously defined set of rules on how to present themselves to the world. First they designed the logo, deciding that “etoy” would always appear only in lowercase. They chose a typeface—Microstyle Bold Extended Oblique—with precise stretch of 135 percent. And they picked their corporate color—orange—because it recalled warning signals.
Opting for a “uniform corporate look” over the more laid-back casual style of Silicon Valley, they ironically emulated the monoclonal corporate aesthetic of IBM, choosing to each wear an “identical orange bomber jacket with the etoy logo on the back [...] black trousers, mirrored pilot sunglasses and little black attaché cases. They put the final touch 37 Ibid, 89. 38 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
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on the look by shaving their heads.” Each boy also selected a special name, written in object-oriented dot-syntax, such as “agent.BRAINHARD” and “agent.ZAI,” that they religiously used whenever discussing etoy company business. Additionally, they began to devise their own language and imposed upon themselves a set of absurd corporate policies to disrupt their external social routines, including rules dictating “when members were allowed to go on holiday—and even when they were allowed to see their girlfriends.” As agent.ZAI, the de facto leader explained, “No one could stick out, and this guaranteed the group’s equilibrium; it solved several problems at once. That members were interchangeable was also good for the art aspect.” As Wishart and Bochsler conclude, “The result was a complicated intellectual construct, an absurd fantasy world of branding that was a sort of amalgamation of a company, an artists’ club and an absolute sect.” Their most often used slogan, which became the official sign off for all their “communiqués” was “etoy, leaving reality behind.”39 Initially, etoy viewed its corporate mission as a way to plan and advertise parties using the Internet. Their initial etoy.com website followed an unusual design logic in which “Zai and Gramazio proposed a metaphor that was a network of tanks and pipes—like a sewage farm.” The various webpage “tanks” consisted of the most “hardcore” and sociopathic images the team could find: As Zai remembers, “etoy, at the time, thought than any moral was bad.” Their method was to shock in the most extreme and distasteful ways. The Underground tank contained a photograph of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it had been bombed; underneath it was the caption “Such work needs a lot of training.” There was also a picture of a woman’s naked breasts pierced with dozens of needles, and a naked man bound and hung upside down.
In addition to the website, etoy also began performing publicly, most noticeably crashing the nearby international media arts festival in Linz, Austria, Ars Electronica, in June 1995 to promote themselves “and shock the crowd,” only to find that “the open-hearted liberals were only wryly amused.” Yet etoy was inspired by the festival, particularly by John Perry Barlow and his cloying fantasies of cyberspace. For the following year, etoy planned a more ambitious venture, creating the online art piece Digital Hijack, which, quite brilliantly, reverse-engineered the algorithmic logic of contemporary Internet search engines to slyly redirect browsers to a special Digital Hijack webpage followed by the etoy site. Digital Hijack garnered etoy both international acclaim and hatred, winning the 1996 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Best Web Art piece, affording them access to the exclusive circles of the international art digerati, and launching a series of wonderfully quirky European and American performances and installations during the subsequent years, including selling official shares of the company to a wide number of international celebrities and dignitaries.40 Had their clever response to New Economy entrepreneurship been limited to such exploits, etoy might have been remembered as merely an extremely innovative performance art collective skirting the fringe of more traditional cultural jamming activities. Yet two important and somewhat interrelated factors kept etoy from being condemned to such a limited legacy. The first is that etoy, agent.ZAI in particular, really considered themselves a viable Internet company—the vanguard of a newer, smarter generation of dotcoms, particularly as sales of their shares picked up. Secondly, and most surreally, etoy gradually attracted the legal attention of eToys.com, a “real” Los Angeles-based online company headed by CEO Edward C. “Toby” Lenk that bristled at being such close online neighbors with the radically minded art collective. In the introductory authors’ note to their account, Wishart and Bochsler provide an aptly phrased setup to what would become the most symbolically loaded battle of the New Economy: There first was etoy®™, created by a group of thrill-seeking young men. It masqueraded as a corporation, with a brand, a corporate identity, a logo, a system of global officers and tradable shares. In reality, however, it was little more than a fiction, a series of myths created by artists. All it sold was itself. Then there was eToys®™, a real corporation, characterized as the Web’s leading toy retailer. Its purpose was to sell millions of dollars’ worth of Barbie dolls and Pokémon. At one point, the company was worth $8 billion. Yet it too was a kind of illusion, a set of myths created by legions of institutions and small investors fired up by the Internet bubble.
39 Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler, Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & other battles to control cyberspace (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 3, 38, 31-2, 40, 41, 43, 53. 40Ibid, 51, 52, 43. For a web-based simulation of the original etoy Digital Hijack piece, see Ken Jones’ http://www.hijack.org (accessed September 9, 2008). For a list of works see Wishart and Bochsler or the browsable history page of the etoy website at http://history.etoy.com. For a list of shareholders, see Wishart and Bochsler, 293-7.
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Despite the glaring fact that etoy.com existed prior to eToys.com, Lenk and his corporation increasingly flexed their corporate muscles, attempting to legally strong arm etoy into reproachful submission, igniting a hyberbolically strident, protracted battle that included international protests, hacking attacks, and boycotts against eToy.com by a passionate community of artists, activists, and New Economy idealogues who would have otherwise cheered eToy.com’s entrepreneurial spirit. In the end, as agent.ZAI increasingly played Moby Dick to Lenk’s Ahab, both organizations collapsed under the weight, leaving both leaders bankrupt and alienated in the aftermath of the dotcom bust.41 While one might definitely question the critical wisdom of etoy’s decisions, they played their roles perfectly, driving a stubborn wedge into the most vulnerable joists of the New Economy’s mystically syncretic ideology. They were afforded this critical potency by the very fact that they really viewed themselves as CEOs lost in their own fantasies, to the same extent that New Economy CEOs such as Jim Clark did. As agent.GOLDSTEIN would later confess, “We did not know anymore what was real and what was fake, what we had staged and what was happening just like that.” As Wishart and Bochsler observed, “They were not afraid of playing both ends against the middle, paradoxically celebrating and lampooning corporate life.” Rather than maintaining a stable and easily locatable position “against” something, to vainly attempt to resist or subvert the technolibertarian, systems theory-based, free market extremism of the New Economy, etoy employed a strategy that Gilles Deleuze puckishly dubbed enculage in describing his own early philosophical writings: My book on Kant is different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs ... But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery (enculage) ... I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.
Rather than fighting the system while maintaining the safety net of one’s liberal “otherness,” as with all its culture jamming counterparts, etoy opted instead for Deleuze’s more intimate and risky approach: to embrace the New Economy, love it, learn its secrets, couple with it, inject its corrupting animus inside, create an unholy offspring, make it monstrous. In choosing not to stand apart from the object of its work, in losing itself completely in it, etoy literally transformed it. As with Warhol decades prior, one never knew what side etoy was on or if they even considered there to be sides. The most chillingly powerful aspect of Warhol’s masterful performance of himself lay not in some hiply coded irony but rather in the possibility that he was not performing at all.42 It is thus through the messy, half-born tactics of etoy that we realize a productive alternative to Baudrillard’s postmodern simulacrum, one proposed, once again, by Gilles Deleuze. In his essay “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” Deleuze erased the possibility of Baudrillard’s ever-haunting remainder of the Real by asserting that everything is and always has been a part of a single continuously mutating and unfolding simulacrum that is so expansive, fascinating, and baroquely crenulated that no space remains for a pristine metaphysical “Real”: The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction. [...] It is not even enough to invoke a model of the Other, for no model can resist the vertigo of the simulacrum. There is no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all points of view. There is no possible hierarchy, no second, no third ...
Inverting the traditional lesson of the catechism, in which God made man in his resemblance and image but, through sin, “man lost the resemblance while maintaining the image,” Deleuze strips the simulacral of any moral valence, replacing it with the productive powers of art: “We have become simulacra. We have forsaken moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence.” As such, for Deleuze, the work of art is no longer secondary or dependent upon the imagined existence of a persistent “Real,” the safe utopian liberal fallback that through the proper techniques—culture jamming or otherwise—the truth is out there, waiting to be rescued and recuperated. Rather, for 41 Wishart and Bochsler, ix. 42 Ibid, 156, 39; Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.
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Deleuze, the successful work of art breaks this “wrenching duality” of aesthetics by conflating the creation of the real and the simulacral, art and life: “For these two meanings to be tied together, the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience; in this case, the work of art would really appear as experimentation.” According to Deleuze, this empirical rediscovery of the world by engaging in spontaneous material co-creation with it is the hallmark of the “Great Work.” In this mode of artistic practice, there is no option for retreat, no space for distance, only a bold ongoing experiment with the constantly created material present. Ariadne’s thread is severed. As such, etoy’s decision of “leaving reality behind” was one of the 90s’ most poignant acts of critical sobriety. The New Economy’s drive for the disembodied utopia of virtuality was the exact same impulse as the culture jammers’ crusade for a mythical Real. Only in abandoning both pursuits, sundering the Gordian knot of their false dilemma, can one begin to move forward.43 etoy reminds us that our American lust for sociopathy is not the problem but rather the solution. It is not our enemy but our only reliable friend and ally. It is only when sociopathy becomes recast as morality itself that one need beware. As the powerful sociopathy of the early 1990s became too tightly coupled to the WIRED crowd’s bornagain Platonism of moral self-righteousness, virtuality shifted from transformative animus to embalming agent. In the end, the WIRED crowd’s virtuality was not an unfettered radicality but a stultifying transcendence. As has always been the case, transcendence is death. Stasis. Limbo. Paralysis. The very straitjacket of conformity that horrified both Nietzsche and Mailer. The rank, cadaverous Grateful Dead children’s crusade of 1960s that still parades as the malignant moral backbone of the New Economy is the opposite of Mailer’s enervating call for productive action. Somewhere along the line, someone pulled a bait and switch: we were promised neuromancy but got necromancy. In exchange for the older metaphysics of Power (the Church, the Nation, the Modern), we somehow ended up erecting yet another altar to metaphysics in the form of virtuality. How could there ever be an asymptote to sociopathy? Sociopathy exists not in the anesthetizing transcendence of virtuality but in life-affirming affect, the experimental cocreation of the material. Believing in the asymptote of virtuality or fighting against it is the same thing. A more productive strategy is to call the New Economy’s bluff. Push it further than it has ever been pushed, beyond where anyone wants it to be pushed, beyond comfort levels, beyond satire, beyond pain. Break off the safety levers and overclock the sociopathic machines. Spin them into a shuddering, febrile lather. Deregulate everything, not just markets but everything: all forms of valuation, especially social values, and especially the hermetically ingrown, intellectually arid, Burning Man value system quietly undergirding the New Economy that preaches sociopathy in public but takes communion in private. Burning Man is burning Man. It has served its purpose and now must let go. Everything is fair game, but especially that. In etoy, we find the first appropriate response to the New Economy and its suffocating critical anemia. What began with art must end with art, and good business is the best art.
43 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 262, 257. Emphasis in original.
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Chapter 05: Beyond Asymptotes The drive toward convergence, as we have seen, is always a myopic trip. It implies an asymptote, a rational, teleological, messianic event horizon that is forever approaching and forever deferred. It’s a metaphysical treadmill. We’ve been on it so long, we don’t even bother asking: What happens once we arrive? How will we know when we’re there? When driving blindly and blindly driven, there is no end in sight. It’s Xeno’s paradox all over again, adorned in bellbottoms and bright spangly silicon. We might postulate that we reached the asymptote, that the treadmill broke down along the information superhighway somewhere after the dotcom bust. But not really. Not as long as the entrenched material practices of the New Economy persist. As former CEO of Citicorp Walter B. Wriston predicted as early as 1992 in his appropriately titled account The Twilight of Sovereignity, “We have learned that freedom is a virus for which there is no antidote, and that virus is spread on the global electronic network to people in the far corners of the world who previously had no hope or knowledge of a better way of life. This process is in train and it cannot be reversed, since the technology on which it is based will not go away.” In 2005, Nigel Thrift empirically affirmed Wriston’s forecast in his judgment that “elements of the new economy will live on. To write it off as simply a discourse is to misunderstand discourse’s materiality,” adding that “though many of the investments in the new economy will be written off, many of the practices and products of the new economy will carry over into what follows.” The discourse and material practices are coextensive. In fact, they are all the more powerful in their rhetorical silence. In more recently plotting the long-term legacy of e-commerce, Thrift and his colleagues have ascertained that It might be possible to argue that e-commerce was something of a failure, given the account that we have presented in this paper. However, we would argue the opposite. Despite much of the rhetoric, the practices of e-commerce have proved to be highly influential but in mundane ways that it is very difficult to ‘brand’ as particularly novel or particularly earth-shattering. This is because most of these practices have proved to be logistical frameworks that, by their very definition, should sink into the background if they are working successfully. Therefore, we would argue that the effects of e-commerce will persist and become more pervasive precisely because they are, in many ways, becoming less remarkable within the contemporary business environment. And yet, these kinds of logistical frameworks have provided some of the most profound changes in business practice which, precisely because they go unnoticed by so many theoretical commentators, will provide an unquestioned ground upon which future examples of virtualism will be built. The most abstract abstractions are often not abstract, because they are culturally coded as material that is already in being, and articulate understandings that were previously tacit; they exist as systems of positioning that guide action but do not have to be accounted for.
Apparently, the New Economy is more difficult to unplug than we thought. Good. The machines are in place. It’s high time we used them.1 We must quicken our pace now. Things are moving very fast and will only get faster. The treadmill is overheating. We’re getting warmer. Corporations-of-one “The deepest act will henceforth be a scripting that binds workers not just to the friendship system of corporate culture but, through their automatic participation in a universal environment of ‘user friendliness,’ to corporate culture as the stage of general culture, as the new model of general sociality, interaction, and communication. We don’t need to be kind, generous, tolerant, accepting, sympathetic, or, in a word, social anymore. We just need to be user friendly, which is the same as being corporate.” 2 — Alan Liu (2004)
The shift towards the society of independently contracted free agents in the 1990s was just an initial opening to a longer term process. Eliminating the social in a network of free agents was a positive first move, but it leaves us
1 Walter B. Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignity: How the Information Revolution is Transforming Our World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), xiii; Thrift, 129; Andrew Leyshon, Shaun French, Nigel Thrift, Louise Crewe, and Peter Webb, “Accounting for E-commerce: Abstractions, Virtualism and the Cultural Circuit of Capital,” Economy and Society 34, no. 3 (August 2005): 446. Emphasis in original. 2 Liu, 172. Emphasis in original.
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too open, too vulnerable, too dependent on corporations to define the rules and write the contracts. We need to adapt and rewrite our public interfaces at will. We need the same legal protections as corporations. We must stop trying to fight corporations and become them, incorporate, become corporations-of-one. Rather than trying to compete as individuals against corporations who always have the rules stacked in their favor, we must endow ourselves with the same powers. We must abandon natural personhood for juristic personhood and enjoy all the rights of corporations with none of the responsibilities encumbering human persons. There are precedents for this: Michael Jordan, Oprah, Martha Stewart. Unlike Pink’s description of free agency, becoming a corporation-of-one isn’t a matter of choice but survival. Either be incorporated or disappear. As corporations-of-one, we must brand and rebrand ourselves obsessively and continuously. As Tom Peters, “the world's leading brand when it comes to writing, speaking, or thinking about the new economy,” explained in his 1997 Fast Company article “The Brand Called You,” “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” We must obsessively recreate our brands, rewrite our public interfaces as frequently as possible: “Instead of making yourself a slave to the concept of a career ladder, reinvent yourself on a semiregular basis.” Obsessive rebranding is a crucial component of sociopathy. Unpredictable, opportunistic morphing is its greatest weapon. As with becoming a corporate-of-one, branding is no longer optional: “It's this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.”3 Either be branded or disappear. Primitive technology platforms for marketing and valuing our branded corporations-of-one already exist in the form of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Throughout the past few years, these social value exchanges have grown at exponential rates, multiplying their trader volumes within a matter of months. In March 2009, Facebook alone reached an active member population of 200 million, doubling its size from the 100 million mark in just eight months. According to the company’s own internal statistics, Facebook’s trading volume rivals that of many national exchanges with “More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week.” One encounters similar statistics regarding total amounts of time spent on these exchanges as reported in a June 2, 2009, Nielsen Company press release: “In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site when ranked by total minutes for the month.” Additionally, Nielsen measured an astonishing 3,712% increase in time spent on Twitter, establishing the social networking site as the fastest growing among its peers. 4 There is no question that such social networking sites signal significant advances towards instantiating manyto-many social value exchanges required of successful corporations-of-one. Yet, while they powerfully digitize social relations, they do little to fully leverage this immense resource or provide effective mechanisms for corporations-ofone to compete against the resources of traditional corporations, including armadas of lawyers, assistants, and analysts to manage the corporate brand. But such sociopathic functions can be automated. That’s what software is for.
3 Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You,” Fast Company 10 (August 1997). Available online at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html?page=0%2C4 (accessed June 21, 2008). 4 Brad Stone, “Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?” The New York Times, Internet Section, March 28, 2009. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html (accessed March 29, 2009); Facebook.com, statistics page. Available online at http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (accessed June 2, 2009); Nielsen Company, “Time Spent on Facebook up 700%, but MySpace Still Tops for Video,” nielsen wire, June 2, 2009. Available online at http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/time-spent-on-facebook-up-700-but-myspace-still-tops-for-video/ (accessed June 2, 2009).
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Trust-busting “trust: –noun, Commerce. an illegal combination of industrial or commercial companies in which the stock of the constituent companies is controlled by a central board of trustees, thus making it possible to manage the companies so as to minimize production costs, control prices, eliminate competition, etc.” 5 — Dictionary.com (2009)
One need survey only a sampling of New Economy management, branding, and technology rhetoric to realize its greatest irony: every author claims that the single most important requirement of the New Economy is trust. In The Virtual Corporation, Davidow and Malone hammer this point home repeatedly from the outset of their study: “trust, as we will show, is the defining feature of a virtual corporation.” As the traditional corporate hierarchical structures of discipline melt away, the virtual corporation necessitates “a frightening degree of trust” at every single point of operation: from the independently contracted employees (“it requires an unprecedented levels of trust and commitment in placing the fate of the company in the hands of people who aren’t even employees.”), to upstream suppliers (“Like all types of management in the era of the virtual corporation, the management of suppliers must be built upon trust.”), to distributors and retailers (“their sense of trust and co-destiny must be extremely high”), even amongst its customers, and, more drastically, even from the otherwise interfering government itself (“One of the recurring themes throughout this book has been the need for trust and teamwork among government, business, and workers.”). As the original management guru, Peter Drucker, has ceaselessly intoned, “Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust.” Douglas Holt ascribes a similar importance to trust in the related practice of branding, arguing that “Of the brands that are able to make the transition to provide original cultural materials, consumers will carefully weed out those that they do not trust.” As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman noted in his encyclopedic analysis of the New Economy, The World is Flat, “If you wanted to summarize the net effect of all these institutions, cultural norms, business practices, and legal systems, it can be reduced to one word: trust.” Trust is the backbone not just of the virtual company but also the entire New Economy, according to Kevin Kelly in his New Rules for the New Economy: “The network economy is founded on technology, but can only be built on relationships. It starts with chips and ends with trust.” In their quirky but popular polemic from 2000, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, authors Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger assert that “Companies that let their customers and suppliers into the process early on deliver better products. And they forge bonds of trust and delight that are the only ones that work in the ‘frictionless’ Web.” Daniel H. Pink resoundingly agrees in Free Agent Nation: “The basic unit of this Free Agent Operating System—the 1s and 0s of the underlying code—is trust.” Pink underscores the New Economy’s absolute reliance on trust in general by drawing upon a quote from the celebrated neoconservative philosopher and political economist Francis Fukuyama’s 1995 book entitled Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity: “One of the most important lessons we can learn from the examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.” There is no question that, if the literature is to be believed, trust is the single most important force buoying the New Economy.6 Yet such a universal emphasis on trust as the sole underwriter of the New Economy is profoundly paradoxical, particularly in light of this sociopathic analysis. Trust is a distinctly social phenomenon, guaranteed and enforced by the dominant institutions of social Power, the exact same institutions the New Economy and its countercultural progenitors have been so eager to dismantle ever since the 1960s. Micklethwait and Wooldridge have identified a similar discrepancy festering at the ideological core of management theory: One of the more fashionable words in management theory is “trust”—it is this, the theory holds, that will keep “knowledge workers” loyal and inspire them to come up with ideas. Yet all the gurus also preach the virtue of “flexibility,” which is usually shorthand for firing people. Indeed, there is a growing contradiction between the interests of compa5 Dictionary.com. Online at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trust (accessed on April 1, 2009). 6 Davidow and Malone, 9, 19, 144, 149, 233, 183, 263; Peter F. Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” Harvard Business Review (January 2005): 8; Holt, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?,” 88; Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, 3rd edition (New York: Picador, 2007), 334; Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, 137; Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 156; Pink, Free Agent Nation, 155; Francis Fukuyama quoted in Pink, Free Agent Nation, 155. Originally in Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), 14.
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nies and those of their employees. What companies do to make themselves secure—laying off workers, putting them on short-term contracts, or introducing flexible work schedules—is precisely what makes those workers feel insecure.
If anything, the Creative, Management, and Computer Revolutions that converged on the New Economy have weakened trust far more than they have enhanced it. As Putnam observed in Bowling Alone, “Most Americans believe that we live in a less trustworthy society than our parents did.” Putnam notes that prior to the 1960s, social trust was on the rise, abruptly reversing the trend in the mid-60s, neatly coinciding with the emergence of the new social and technological mechanisms for sociopathic convergence already identified by our analysis. Additionally, the data indicate that this loss of social trust is even more prevalent among recent generations: “this decline in social trust has been even steeper among younger Americans than among the rest of us, especially since about 1985.” If anything, this last statistic affirms the remarkable success of the past decades of corporate advertising and marketing. The demographic youth segment most actively wooed by corporate marketers since the 1960s as the ultimate arbiters of Cool have definitely learned their sociopathic lessons.7
Yet none of these more academic indicators confirm the wholesale deconstruction of social trust as vividly as the recent meltdown of the global financial system. As reserve banks around the world rushed to flood their economies with Capital to unfreeze credit markets, commentator after commentator around the world reported the same problem: credit markets weren’t suffering from a shortage of Capital, they were frozen by an almost complete dissolution of trust. As New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt observed in his September 30, 2008, article “Lesson From a Crisis: When Trust Vanishes, Worry,” As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector. The same thing is happening now. Financial markets are 7 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 16; Putnam 139-40.
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global, not local, today, so the problem isn’t that the failure of any single bank locks individuals or businesses out of the credit markets. Instead, the nasty surprises of the last 13 months — the sort of turmoil that once would have been unthinkable — have caused an effective breakdown in informational capital.
Even after weeks of drastic Capital infusions and bailouts, the same problem of trust persisted, as Mohamed A. ElErian reported for Newsweek on November 15: “The credit crisis has led to an unprecedented evaporation of trust among financial intermediaries. The absence of trust has blocked the stabilizing forces that normally kick in to smooth the functioning of global markets.” As banks in the U.S. continued to hoard Capital, the federal government began to publicly discuss legal options for forcing them to loan to one another as a means for thawing the system. Yet such an approach proved as legally intractable as forcing younger generations to trust their fellow citizens. Even the feverishly sanguine brahmins of the 2010 World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland—ground zero for the New Economy—are no longer capable of sugar-coating the situation. As New York TImes reporter Alison Smale observed, “If there was one takeaway from the annual gathering of business and political leaders in Davos this year, it was this: trust in governments, corporations and above all banks has become as elusive as sure footing on the icy streets of this Alpine resort.” Something significant has happened, and it isn’t a credit crunch but a trust crunch.8 The inexplicable thing about this snowballing lack of trust (financial or otherwise) is not that it has happened but that it took so long to happen. As we have seen, sociopathy has a long history, particularly on the part of corporations. In fact, we would say it is corporations’ only history. We would even question whether this alleged sense of trust really existed in the first place. Is trust really such an important factor that its absence can bring the global economy to its knees? The brute fact is that it isn’t. Corporations abandoned their reliance on trust decades ago, replacing it with incredibly powerful sociopathic technologies such as quantitative risk-management software which distributes and diversifies risk so effectively that trust is an unnecessary part of the equation. As James Surowiecki explained in an October 20, 2008, New Yorker article aptly entitled “The Trust Crunch,” traditional face-to-face modes of evaluating trust are obsolete: For [J.P.] Morgan, that process of evaluation was all about relationships. In the modern financial system, by contrast, risk evaluation involves two things: impersonality and outsourcing. Personal judgments about the reliability of a borrower—the sort of judgment that Morgan, or a small-town banker, would make before issuing a loan—have been replaced by mathematical models. And lenders have delegated much of the responsibility for evaluating borrowers to other players such as credit-ranking agencies.
Thus, the ensuing trust crunch wasn’t so much a new extinction of trust, as the popular media often has made it out to be, but rather was a hiccup in the data supplied to risk-management models. As Alan Greenspan made clear in his October 23, 2008, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it wasn’t so much the lack of trust that weakened the system or even the inappropriateness of the riskmanagement software that has taken its place, but rather it was due to insufficient data: “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades a period of euphoria.” Trust had nothing to do with it. It hasn’t had anything to do with it for decades. The discussion of trust is merely a palliative for the rest of society, which prefers to take comfort in antiquated notions of social functioning. Corporations clearly understand something the rest of us are only beginning to recognize: Trust is a liability we can no longer afford. Informational capital is best managed by information technologies. All corporations-of-one need these technologies.9 The best way forward is not for the entire world to trip over one another in a mad dash to reassemble the Humpty Dumpty of social trust that was only ever a children’s story. Rather, we must accomplish the opposite: to 8 David Leonhardt, “Lesson From a Crisis: When Trust Vanishes, Worry,” The New York Times, September 30, 2008, Economy section. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/business/economy/01leonhardt.html (accessed October 1, 2008); Mohamed A. El-Erian, “The Chance of a Lifetime,” Newsweek, November 15, 2008. Available online at http://www.newsweek.com/id/169268 (accessed November 15, 2008). 9 James Surowiecki, “The Trust Crunch,” New Yorker, October 20, 2008, 36; Alan Greenspan, quoted in Patrick Thibodeau, “Greenspan: Bad data hurt Wall Street computer models,” The New York Times, Technology section, October 23, 2008 (accessed online at http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2008/10/23/23idg-Greenspan-Bad.html on October 24, 2008). Alison Smale, “Leaders in Davos Admit Drop in Trust,” The New York Times, January 30, 2010, Global Business section. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/global/31davos.html?ref=global-home.
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accelerate the engines of sociopathy so as to liquidate whatever remaining reserves of social trust still exist. We have had too much false nostalgia already. As with culture jamming, we have seen that chasing a nonexistent ideal is counterproductive. Rather than bemoaning its mythical demise, we must view this moment as an opportunity, strike while social trust is at its weakest, and shatter its mesmeric hold on us. It is time we realize that the glorified “social trust” and the vilified “corporate trust” are one and the same. To think otherwise is to surrender one’s rationality to the manipulative forces of Power and is tantamount to throwing away half a century’s worth of earnest sociopathic progress. Defrauding the social trust is and always has been the only way to rekindle the reactors of cultural change. Corporations-of-one eliminate trust from their balance sheets. They are the mathematical limits of self-reliance and agility. Trust is nothing but grit in their gears. Being derivative “But closing down a derivatives business is easier said than done. It will be a great many years before we are totally out of this operation (though we reduce our exposure daily). In fact, the reinsurance and derivatives businesses are similar: Like Hell, both are easy to enter and almost impossible to exit.” 10 — Warren Buffet (2002)
If there is a cultural flipside to our irrational fetishization of mythic trust and authenticity, it is our omnipresent disdain for anything derivative. In a society obsessed with the continuous creation of the new, the original, the authentic realization and expression of one’s “true self,” being derivative is an unforgivable sin. Yet derivative is just another word for simulacrum, and we have already disassembled that trap. As Deleuze has shown us, we are all derivatives, there are only derivatives. Particularly in the current digital moment, in which there is no distinguishable difference between original and copy, everything becomes a copy. The Real, the True, the Authentic are all part of the same metaphysical Power grab as the mythical social invention of “trust.” When most people in the current economic climate hear the term derivatives, they immediately think of the much scapegoated financial derivatives, a subject to which we will return shortly. However, from a curious cultural perspective, the contempt for derivatives has most recently manifested as a spate of attacks against none other than so-called “hipster culture.” As Douglas Haddow asserted in his vitriolic censure of hipsterism entitled “HIPSTER: The Dead End of Western Civilization” that appeared in the September/October issue of ADBUSTERS in 2008, We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style. [...] Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counterculture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society. After punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” [...] it is the ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture.11
While there is so much one could say about Haddow’s stultifying tirade, beginning with his knee-jerk valorization of “authenticity,” “originality,” and every other metaphysical bogeyman, what is most amazing is the singularly onedimensional view he takes of the counterculture and “revolution,” a view strikingly concordant with the New Economy’s expectation of a socially responsible sociopathy that has never existed. It never occurs to Haddow that perhaps the most productively radical and sociopathic thing a generation that has been steeped in the tepid 1960s brew of cloudy countercultural sociopathy can do is be indifferently immiscible to it. His maudlin longing for political movements is incongruous with corporations-of-one. What can it even mean for hipsters “to consume the very core of Western counterculture” when consumption is the very core of Western counterculture? A singular devotion to 10 Warren Buffet, annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 13. Available online at http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2002pdf.pdf (accessed September 17 2008). 11 Douglas Haddow, “HIPSTER: The Dead End of Western Civilization,” ADBUSTERS 79 (September/October 2008), ? (ADBUSTERS is too radical for page numbers.). For a similar, though slightly more intelligent, perspective, see Christian Lorenstzen, “Why the hipster must die: A Modest Proposal to Save New York Cool” Time Out New York 609, May 30June 5, 2007. Available online at http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die (accessed July 22, 2008).
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consumption is radical, and the stochastic cultural “mutation” Haddow derides is actually what creates the new. There is a reason Schumpeter described creative destruction as a “process of industrial mutation.” Faithful reproduction doesn’t drive survival, mutation does. Evolution has never been teleological or even logical but rather is capriciously derivative.12 The same logic applies to financial derivatives. Everything is a derivative, even the mighty dollar itself. The dollar is a derivative quantization of human desire and, in doing so, gains its own creative independence, the ability to produce vast freakish families of derivatives upon derivatives, which in turn generates wealth. Some might say it is an abuse of language to conflate financial derivatives and cultural derivatives. But in our current material reality of the New Economy, we see them as completely interchangeable. Whether human or computational, we are all abstracted derivatives interfacing on an equally flat plane of perpetual object-oriented becoming. Financial derivatives create new Capital in the same way that cultural derivatives create new Cool, and conversions are always possible between these two systems, in fact they’re absolutely critical to it. In his illuminating November 2008 New Yorker essay entitled “Melting into Air,” John Lanchester adduced an apposite comparison between the notions of “value” in contemporary financial derivatives markets and “meaning” in postmodern cultural markets. In identifying the definitive moment in the turn toward financial poststructuralism, Lanchester cites the publication of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes’ 1793 paper entitled “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities” in the Journal of Political Economy. As Lanchester explained, “The revolutionary aspect of Black and Scholes’ paper was an equation that enabled people to calculate the price of financial derivatives based on the value of the underlying asset.” Prior to the Black-Scholes paper, derivatives trade had been hampered [...] by the fact that—owing to the numerous variables of time and risk—no one knew how to price them. The Black-Scholes formula provided a way to do so. It was a defining moment in the mathematization of the market. The trade in derivatives took off, to the extent that the total market in derivative products around the world is counted in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Nobody knows the exact figure, but the notional amount certainly exceeds the total value of all the world’s economic output, roughly sixty-six trillion dollars, by a huge factor—perhaps tenfold.
Primarily designed to mitigate or “hedge” the risk of economic loss arising from changes in the value of something else, derivates commonly take the forms of forwards, futures, options, and swaps. By separating the potential risk of an investment from its potential gain, many economists and policy makers, most notably Alan Greenspan, believe that derivatives help stabilize markets by broadly distributing risk across organizations better able to manage and profit from it. As highly abstract mathematical entities, derivatives are often designed by mathematics or physics PhD-holding “quants,” or quantitative analysts. Given their computational nature, the proliferation of derivatives trading was dramatically hastened by significant reductions in computing costs from the 1980s onward, with some estimates of such computational “algotrading” accounting for as much as 40% of all trades on the London Stock Exchange in 2006 and as much as 80% of all trades on some American equity markets during the same period. Additionally, if one extends Lanchester’s thesis about the “postmodernizing” effect of derivatives, it follows that, as derivatives entered the market, all instruments became derivatives since the market, by definition, marks all values relative to one another. In other words, everything is a derivative, and the computers might barely even understand the complexity of relationships anymore. Financial value becomes a massively distributed, free-floating signifier that can only be appreciated in ephemerally localized eddies.13 To his credit, Lanchester balks at aligning himself with the flurry of skeptical economic “realists” who have proposed, in the wake of the collapsed derivatives market, that all derivatives trading be eliminated or highly regulated. There are many reasons why such an approach is a bad idea. “For one thing,” as Gene Callahan and Greg Kaza point out in their 2004 article “In Defense of Derivatives,” “many of the current uses of derivatives are ways to dodge existing regulations. It seems probable that a new round of regulation will spur the development of new derivatives designed to bypass its restrictions.” However, Lanchester’s reluctance towards curtailing the derivatives market 12 Schumpeter, 83. 13 John Lanchester, “Melting into Air,” New Yorker, November 10, 2008, 82-3; Sean Dodson, “Was Software Responsible for the Financial Crisis?” The Guardian, October 16, 2008. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/16/computing-software-financial-crisis (accessed October 16, 2008).
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stems not from the fact that we shouldn’t do it but that we can’t: all valuations are so intermixed that undermining derivatives trading would invalidate the entire global economy. The markets and the machines (as if there’s a difference) won’t let us, a point Richard Dooling made in an October 2008 New York Times editorial entitled “The Rise of the Machines”: “As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.”14 In explaining his own qualms regarding abolition of the derivatives market, Lanchester cites the latest book by Yale economist Robert Shiller, whom Lanchester notes, “would merit attention if only for the fact that he predicted the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, with his book ‘Irrational Exuberance.’” As Lanchester points out, what is most striking in Shiller’s book, The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It, published in August 2008, is Shiller’s “startlingly counterintuitive” solution that the only path out of the current economic crisis (which became much worse after the book’s publication) is not to limit the activities of the derivatives market but rather to expand and accelerate them. In his chapter entitled “Mend It, Don’t End It,” Shiller claimed, The current financial crisis is often viewed as a reason to sound retreat—to return to yesterday's simpler methods of financial dealing. This would be a mistake. On the contrary, the current situation is really an opportunity to redouble our efforts to rethink and improve our risk-management institutions, the framework that undergirds our increasingly sophisticated financial sector. [...] Every crisis contains the seeds of change. Now is the time to restructure the institutional firmament of financial activity in positive ways that will stabilize the economy, rekindle the wealth of nations, reinforce the best of financial innovation, and leave society much better off than if there had not been such a crisis.
In particular, Shiller argued that what is needed isn’t further limitations of derivatives but rather more derivatives. The only reason the real estate bubble was allowed to inflate so uncontrollably was that real estate is an artificially illiquid market in comparison to other financial derivatives. Allowing for the development of a globally traded real estate derivatives market would have hedged the very risks that caused the collapse: Such derivative markets have the potential to tame speculative bubbles in real estate. Without such markets, there is no way for investors to sell real estate short. There is no way for skeptical investors, who perceive that a bubble is in progress, to express this opinion in the market, except by actually getting out of the market, that is, selling their homes, which is of course a drastic and very difficult step. If we did have a liquid market in real estate futures by city, then any skeptic anywhere in the world could, through his or her actions in the marketplace, act to reduce a speculative bubble in a city, for such a bubble represents a profit opportunity for short sellers.
Additionally, Shiller strongly advocated against any luddite attempts to reduce the usage of computational quantitative analysis and risk-management technologies but rather, again, to expand their prevalence: Institutional reform starts with understanding the available technology. Information technology is the story of our time. It is key to the subprime solution. The continued growth of computers, data collection and processing capabilities, 'smart' technology, and rapid, inexpensive communications all provide dramatically effective tools to implement the subprime solution—to correct some of the egregious faults in the economy's institutional foundation. Along with this expanding information technology, there has been over recent decades a magnificent development of our knowledge in the field of mathematical finance. [...] This theory, as part of economics, in turn allows us to harness the full potential of risk-management technology—especially when it is implemented on a sufficiently large scale, as our information technology now allows.
Given the current massive public mistrust of derivatives as the sole cause of the financial debacle, Shiller recognizes that his position is a tough but necessary sell: "It may be difficult, in the present climate of public anger directed at our financial markets, for political candidates to win support on the promise of expanding and developing our financial markets. But that is exactly what is needed now to solve the subprime crisis and prevent a recurrence of similar economic crises in the future." Lanchester agrees, summarizing, “It seems loopy that the cure for a disaster caused 14 Gene Callahan and Greg Kaza, “In Defense of Derivatives,” Reason, February 2004. Available online at (http://www.reason.com/news/show/29033.html); Richard Dooling, “The Rise of the Machines,” The New York Times, October 11, 2008, Opinion section. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html (accessed October 11, 2008).
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by a headlong dash in the direction of ever freer capital markets should be even freer capital markets, but that is part of Shiller’s point. When it comes to the free global movement of capital, there is no plan B.”15 We can’t go backwards. Turning off our sociopathic machines is not an option. As we established at the outset of our analysis, the externalizing sociopathic conversions that fuel Capital and Cool are always radical, irreversible, unrecoverable. We must push forward, not only because it’s the most productive course, but because we don’t have a choice. We don’t need to handicap algorithmic derivatives, rather we must drastically amplify them and significantly extend their application domains, in particular to counterproductive regulation of social values. What we require more than anything is derivates technology not just for financial values but for social values as well. An example of one such social value derivative is an intentionally deceptive statement or lie. Though purely abstract, symbolic social inventions, deceptions stand in for real social transactions, often trading equally with factual statements and bestowing an equivalent or even greater social value upon those invested in them. For example, a deception about having graduated from an elite academic institution or being a military veteran effectively confers the same level of social value as those who actually accomplished the purported claims. As with financial derivatives, deceptions often assume a life of their own, radically breaking with and surviving long beyond any "real" relationship to historical events and gradually constituting reality itself through their heightened accretion of social value and desire. However, similar to financial derivatives, deceptions pose significant risks of social exposure to their investors that, if improperly managed, threaten to undermine their immense and immediate profitability. Valuable deceptions often require the creation of other deceptions to hedge against such exposure risks. While the invention of such deceptive hedges is a commonly accepted practice, the effective management of numerous deceptive instruments operating in multiple time-frames across a widely distributed social network requires extremely sophisticated management mechanisms for successfully reducing exposure. As a result, those individuals who have traditionally most profited from deceptive derivatives, namely the leaders of large governmental and corporate organizations, often require multiple teams of personal assistants, accountants, legal teams, and PR groups to efficiently track and reliably manage the risks implicit in their numerous high-capital deceptions. Consider the ultimately illfated and over-exposed pariahs of Enron, Dick Cheney, or Bernard Madoff as recent examples of how difficult such deceptive management can become. Unfortunately, CEOs of corporations-of-one, by definition, lack the legions necessary to help mitigate and manage such exposure. However, the digitization of social value transactions via social media, particularly online social networks, opens the opportunity for creating sophisticated software applications for reliably managing such complexities. As deceptions are increasingly digitally born and bred, they become immediately computable and their risks algorithmically manageable. All it takes is the right technology for deceptive derivatives to become profitable investments—not just for Fortune 500 executives and heads of state but for individual corporations-of-one as well. We must develop the same intelligent, protean technologies for algorithmically managing social risk as currently exist for financial risk. This is the business of corporations-of-one and the only appropriate response to our current situation. It is not just a matter of good business or social justice but the only effective strategy for guaranteeing our individual survival. Fuck Being Digital. Any dumb machine can do that. Start being derivative. Beyond good and evil “ ... it was by means of the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket that man was really made calculable.” 16 — Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)
Financial derivatives flourish in deregulated financial markets, thereby encouraging further deregulation through increased wealth generation. In an identical fashion, social derivatives can only flourish in deregulated social markets, thereby encouraging further deregulation through increased freedom generation. What is most aston15 Lanchester, 84; Robert J. Shiller, The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 10, 150, 118-9, 178, 84. 16 Nietzsche, 40. Emphasis in original.
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ishing about the New Economy is the degree to which most free market fundamentalists were simultaneously hyperbolically moralistic Christian religious fundamentalists. The two positions are antithetical: why believe that markets are self-regulating but people aren’t? After all, aren’t the markets made of people? For corporations-of-one, deregulation begets deregulation. The good news is that deregulation will happen anyway. As with the increased deregulation of financial derivatives markets, the technology demands it. So too will the technology of social markets, commonly knows as online social networks. As with financial networks, improvements in transaction speeds and increasingly mediated depersonalizations tend to improve exchange volume and performance while decreasing social regulation. An April 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of Southern California suggests that the transaction speed of digitally mediated social interactions frequently occurs below the time threshold necessary for moral judgment in the brain: If replicated, this finding could have important implications for the role of culture and education in the development and operation of social and moral systems; in order for emotions about the psychological situations of others to be induced and experienced, additional time may be needed for the introspective processing of culturally shaped social knowledge. The rapidity and parallel processing of attention-requiring information, which hallmark the digital age, might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions, with potentially negative consequences.
In press discussions surrounding the paper, the primary author, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggested that “rapidfire media,” such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social-networking tools, may be particularly effective at bypassing moral judgment: “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.” Indeed, one cannot help but see the glaringly obvious connections between the significant promise of such rapid-fire social media and similar software allowing “rapid-fire trades in financial markets,” such as software recently purported to be stolen by Goldman Sachs employee Sergey Aleynikov. According to a July 6, 2009, report in the New York Times, while Goldman Sachs “divulged little about the trading programs,” “court documents related to the case said the code that Mr. Aleynikov was suspected of stealing allowed the bank to ‘engage in sophisticated high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets’ and “generated ‘many millions of dollars of profits per year’ for the bank.” It would seem that effective sociopathy, whether financial or social, is, quite literally, only ever a matter of time. 17 Current research about the inherent sociopathy of social media may not surprise most people, given that many of the most popular online social exchanges, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, and Orkut, have steadily gained international media attention for their ability to subvert external social regulations. Such scandals are almost too numerous to list, a few crossing over into the truly criminal, such as the infamous “MySpace Suicide Hoax” incident in 2006, in which thirteen-year-old Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, committed suicide after being extensively tormented on MySpace by her adult neighbors via a fictionally created boy. Others have been merely moronic and annoying, as in the case of “griefers” and “trolls,” online communities whose members fiendishly harass others to in order to get crude “lulz,” or laughs. These unfortunate abuses have resulted in a disproportionate crackdown of regulation, though, interestingly, not by governments but rather by the social networking companies themselves, as evidenced by Facebook’s May 2009 bans on hate speech groups, YouTube’s ongoing ban on offensive content, and Apple’s April and May 2009 rejections of the Baby Shaker, Me So Holy, and Nine Inch Nails iPhone appli-
17 Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio, “Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 2009 106: 8021-8026. Available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/106/19/8021 (accessed April 16, 2009); CNN, “Scientists warn of rapid-fire media dangers,” CNN.com, April 16, 2008. Available online at http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/mentalhealth/04/14/twitter.study/ (accessed April 15, 2009). Graham Bowley, “Ex-Worker Said to Steal Goldman Code,” The New York Times, July 6, 2009, Business section. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/business/07goldman.html (accessed July 6, 2009).
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cations from their online store. Thus, technology and online media companies are increasingly finding themselves in the roles of moral police, a responsibility that tends to only inspire criticism regardless of the resolutions.18 Yet the trend towards technology companies masquerading as moral regulators presents several very promising entrepreneurial and creative opportunities. According to such a reconfiguration of moral authority, code is not only law, as we have already established by way of Lawrence Lessig, but code is also morality. Under such a system, the so-called “moral code” that is tacitly programmed into all of us during our developmental processes of socialization actually becomes material computer code, providing an interesting reversal of Friedrich Nietzsche’s pronunciation in 1887 that “it was by means of the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket that man was really made calculable.”19 Even more significantly, participants in social media technologies are no longer strictly constrained to their previous roles as passive users, rather social media have also become full-fledged development platforms. Ever since Facebook unlocked the ability for its users to create and sell their own applications to leverage and exploit the Facebook exchange, or “social graph,” in August 2006, software developers around the world have created hundreds of thousands of new social applications and developed similar software for competing platforms such as MySpace. This new capacity creates a singular and often under-appreciated opportunity that nearly all existing social media developers seriously fail to recognize. As social media increasingly render our social exchanges computational, the prospect of programming new sociopathic machines for automating and abstracting these exchanges means that we can now create algorithmic social derivatives in the same way that financial quants invent new financial derivatives for circumventing traditional market regulations. Such social derivatives software effectively excise the messy liability of social trust from the equation, replacing it with advanced computational strategies for managing risk and social uncertainty. In the creation and democratization of such social derivatives software, we suddenly discover the promise of liberation from the calculating strait-jacket of morality Nietzsche bemoaned over 120 years ago: We can outcode our moral code. We desperately need such technologies, for they are the logical conclusion to the brilliant flame of absolute individual freedom and full deregulation of social value systems ignited by the Enlightenment Project. Rather than vainly fretting over the moral consequences of rapid-fire social media, we need to increase their rapidity all the more, accelerating social derivatives beyond human frames of cognition to the lightning simultaneity of digital computation, eventually removing humans from the computational loop altogether. Every corporation-of-one needs the same nearly unpierceable corporate veil currently afforded only to major corporations. We must do this not only because it is a social and humanistic imperative but also an unprecedented business opportunity. Killer apps “Nite Owl: But the country’s disintegrating. What’s happened to America? What’s happened to the American dream? The Comedian: It came true. You’re looking at it.’” 20 — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (1986-7)
Poised at the cusp of a millennia-long struggle to shrug off the shackles of brute social imposition, it is shocking the degree to which the unexpectedness of our victory haunts us—it’s triggered a counterproductive retroactive 18 For an extended account, see Laruen Collins, “Friend Game,” New Yorker, January 21, 2008, 34-41. Available online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_collins. For a report of the ensuing legal trial, see Jennifer Steinhauer, “Verdict in MySpace Suicide Case,” The New York Times, November 26, 2008, National section. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html. See Julian Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World,” WIRED, January 18, 2008, available online at http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons; Mattathias Schwartz, “The Trolls Among Us,” The New York Times, August 3, 2008, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html. For coverage of Facebook’s ban on hate group sites, see Caroline McCarthy, “Hate Speech on Facebook: How much is too much?” CNET News, May 13, 2009, available online at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10239926-36.html. For coverage of Apple’s iPhone application store rejections, see Kit Eaton, “Apple Quickly Pulls ‘Baby Shaker’ iPhone App After Predictable Outcry,” Fast Company, April 23, 2009, available online at http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/apple-quickly-pulls-baby-shaker-iphone-app-after-predictable-outcry. Brian X. Chen, “Apple: You Can’t Play Jesus on iPhone,” WIRED, May 11, 2009, available online at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/jesusphone/; and BBC News, “Reznor takes a byte out of Apple,” May 8, 2009, available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8039779.stm 19 Nietzsche, 40. Emphasis in original. 20 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1986-7), 18.
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nostalgia for a past none of us wanted while we had it (and for good reason). We now find ourselves in a moment of wistful hesitation, as though there is a line yet to cross, the vast majority of us not realizing, as this analysis makes undeniably clear, that we collectively crossed that Rubicon decades ago. In sociopathically strip-mining the social and, by extension, history itself, even nostalgia loses is potency. As we have seen, there is no way backward. No return to a virgin American eden, but rather only a daring dash into this bright and glorious experiment of productive, collaborative, highly mediated self-creation. For the true measure of our collective resolve will not be a trust in overly simplistic metaphysical dogmas such as founding documents, our country, our traditions, or our moral authority, but rather in our individualism, our creations, in ourselves. As corporations-of-one, we must each, quite literally, divest ourselves of the negligent caprices of the public markets and begin to take stock in ourselves. We must stop relying on the insidious traps and trappings of archaic social customs and believe once again in the world itself. It is our most human birthright, our most cherished destiny. It is through our wholehearted embrace of sociopathy that we can finally begin to see what lies beyond—not a sociopathy of fascism in which wanton inequity parades beneath a sanctimonious facade, but a civil sociopathy through the total democratization of the sociopathic field. We must begin to see sociopathy for what it has been all along: the inalienable right to individual freedom and full actualization of life. As this analysis has amply demonstrated, the stage is set, the necessary precedents in place. The centuries of human social Power that we have investigated throughout this study have been deterritorialized and reassembled into a new, unstable field of programmable social objects. The social matrix is hackable in ways never before imagined. All that is needed is the technology to make it so, the killer app to push us over the brink, collapse sociopathy inward on itself, and open vast, new, unpredictable dimensions for interaction. What began with art must end with art. We are extremely fast now and white hot. A brilliant new star is created in the singular collapse of the sociopathic. The end is beginning. The killer app is near. Slightly Sociopathic Software™ from VacilLogix™ is that killer app. It is what we want, what we need, what we deserve. The world will flock to it like moths to Enlightenment. It will change everything as we know it. An eternal return on investment. And it will come suddenly, like stomach acid in the back of your mouth, sour and remotely metallic, rotting the only good teeth you have left.
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PART 02: THE VACILLOGIX™ BRAND STRATEGY
V A C I L L O G I X™ BRAND STRATEGY
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Founded in 2007 and incorporated in 2008, VacilLogix™ is the first consciously created corporation-of-one.
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VacilLogix™ is currently a privately held corporation.
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Given its commitment to the unpredictable oscillations inherent to sociopathy, the VacilLogix™ trademark is the computer graphics morph itself, often represented via the elegant “blue virus” animation depicted at the right.
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V A C I L L O G I X™ CORPORATE IDENTITY
VacilLogix™ is not just a software company or even a brand, but a social movement, a cultural revolution, a collective art performance.
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VacilLogix™ is committed to the creation of social value derivatives and the universal democratization of sociopathic strategies.
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The rapid digitization of social relations via social networking media presents an ideal environment for broad dispersal of sociopathic technologies, allowing all humans to achieve their full potentials as self-actualized corporations-of-one.
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V A C I L L O G I X™ MISSION STATEMENT
Our goal is complete deregulation of social value systems.
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VacilLogix™ will accomplish its mission through the complementary combination of computer software and cultural software product lines.
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Our computer software line is intended to bootstrap and amplify individual sociopathy.
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Our cultural software, what others might call branding or marketing, increases consumer awareness and demand for sociopathy.
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The combination of these two product lines creates a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop we call the paranoia-sociopathy synergy engine. CUSTOMER POPULATION
SOCIOPATHY CUSTOMER POPULATION TIME COMPUTER SOFTWARE PARANOIA
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CULTURAL SOFTWARE
V A C I L L O G I X™ PARANOIA-SOCIOPATHY SYNERGY ENGINE
If we consider the above center point an initial customer population of zero and the arrow as time, we see that as our target population comes in contact with our cultural software via advertising initiatives, our population approaches a heightened state of paranoia, suspecting that competitors have already adopted sociopathic strategies, which, in turn, fuels the likelihood of purchasing our computer software, thereby increasing the size of our customer population. This enlarged customer base similarly escalates the public presence of sociopathy, which, when combined again with new cultural software, fuels more public paranoia.. As this vicious cycle expands ever outward, we approach our goal of complete global penetration and social deregulation.
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Primary market: ‣14-30 year-olds ‣Middle to upper class (requires reliable access to computer or internet-enabled mobile device) ‣Research indicates higher appeal among disenfranchised minority segments
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All cultural software artifacts are available for purchase.
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Social movement / collective art action model creates huge potential for viral, guerilla marketing.
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Early and effective cultural software dissemination is crucial to jump starting paranoia-sociopathy feedback loop.
V A C I L L O G I X™ CULTURAL SOFTWARE
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An example of VacilLogix™ cultural software is the VacilLogix™ promotional video , which debuted at our brand launch event at the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 15, 2008.
V A C I L L O G I X™ PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
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Slightly Sociopathic Software™ Software designed for human nature.™
Deceptionist ™ Your personal deception receptionist.™
EntitlementManager ™ Feed your greed.™
StalkBroker ™ Surveillance made simple.™
V A C I L L O G I X™ COMPUTER SOFTWARE
StatusGuard ™ Protect your privilege.™
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Web 2.0 applications
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Software-as-service model
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Initial platforms: ‣Facebook ‣iPhone ‣MySpace
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Initial software release target: ‣September 2009
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Deceptionist ™ Your personal deception receptionist.™
CheatSheet™ Since one of the most difficult challenges of successful deceptions is remembering exactly what deceptions you told certain people and when, CheatSheet™ is an intuitive and intelligent organizational tool that effortlessly organizes your deceptions by targets, date and time, customizable content tags, and success ratings. CheatSheet™ even sends you regular reminders of what others think you are doing so that you can consistently keep your stories straight.
InCahoots™ Repetition is reality. The more people who corroborate your deception, the truer it is. That’s why the Deceptionist™ also features InCahoots™, our advanced alibi confirmation system that allows you to instantly send alibi requests to your friends and schedule alibi reminders at the same moment you’re planning your deception.
V A C I L L O G I X™
MeddleDetector™
SAMPLE FEATURE SET
Nothing spoils a perfectly good deception faster than failing to realize its various targets might know one another and put 2 and 2 together. That’s why the Deceptionist™ includes MeddleDetector™, a fast and extremely accurate network analysis engine that alerts you to any potential for interference before you make your deception. MeddleDetector™ quickly analyzes the friend lists of your deception targets to predict whether their combined knowledge might undermine the believability of your deceptions.
MultipLiar™ MultipLiar™ allows you to infinitely multiply your presence by making you appear to be in multiple places at the same time. Preset as many different messages to as many different people as you like, and they’re automatically delivered exactly whenever you think is most strategically advantageous, so that you can concentrate on what really matters in life.
DeceptionShare™ Need a deception but can’t think of one? The Deceptionist™ stores every single deception from every single user in an anonymous database that can be instantly searched by content tags and average deception ratings so that you can quickly find and reuse the best deception for any moment of your life. We call this feature DeceptionShare™, and it is a testament to the true power of community.
GrandScheme™ Personal development implies metrics — the ability to assess one’s performance is essential to a healthy sense of progress. That’s why we’ve built our real-time performance-assessment tool, GrandScheme™, into every Slightly Sociopathic Software™ product. As the name implies, GrandScheme™ delivers a big picture view of your current sociopathic performance so that you can adjust your behavior accordingly.
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‣Revenue model ‣Minimal 1-time software purchase with monthly
fee-for-service subscriptions ‣Initial market size (Facebook, iPhone & MySpace) ‣100 million unique users (conservative estimate) ‣Individual application price points: ‣$1.99 – one platform + 1 month
subscription$1.99 – each additional platform ‣$.99 – monthly subscription (after first month)
V A C I L L O G I X™
‣Year 1 sales projections (based on 100m market) ‣5-20% initial trials – $15-60m ‣2-15% continued subscriptions – $33-245m ‣2-10% at least one additional platform – $6-30m ‣1-10% more than one application trials – $3-30m ‣TOTAL REVENUES: $57-365 million
BUSINESS PLAN
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2009
06
‣ Prospectus release ‣ Brand guide release
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‣ Software beta
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‣ Marketing campaign launch
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‣ Facebook application release ‣ iPhone application release
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‣ Web 2.0 Summit (SF)
‣ MySpace / OpenSocial release ‣ Web 2.0 Expo (NYC) 12 ‣ Holiday promotions 11
2010 01
‣ Venture capital funding
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‣ South by Southwest
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UPCOMING TIMELINE
‣ CES ‣ MacWorld
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V A C I L L O G I X™
drive (Round 1)
‣ Facebook & iPhone 2.0 release
‣ Web 2.0 Expo (SF) ‣ Apple Worldwide Developer Conference
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‣web: http://vacillogix.com ‣email:
[email protected] ‣skype: vacillogix
V A C I L L O G I X™ CONTACT
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