CNN - Should Twitter Fear Saudi Prince?

(CNN) -- The social media universe has been aghast this week after the revelation that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has invested $300 million in Twitter. The shock and awe seems to center around the notion that Twitter has been at least partly responsible for the Arab Spring uprisings that directly threaten the Saudi royal family's grip on power. On the surface, anyway, this seems like a contradiction.

Why would the king's nephew be investing in the medium of his family's enemy? Will he attempt to influence the development of the network or try to make it more susceptible to censorship in a regime-threatening emergency? And what of Twitter?

Will the participation of a major investor widely considered to be the beneficiary of one of the world's most exploitative dynasties tarnish the company's otherwise net-friendly brand image? Why would Twitter accept such an investor, and why would he court them in the first place?

The answer, most simply, is for the money.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is no doubt aware of Twitter and Facebook's tremendous influence in his own and neighboring countries, and may even be personally concerned about what a revolution might do to his own and his family's sovereign rule. But why should that stop him from positioning himself to become the wealthiest deposed royal he can be? It's a win-win.

For its part, Twitter, which isn't even a public company, is not actually selling shares to a Saudi Arabian prince. It's Twitter's early investors who are selling $300 million of their own shares to the Prince's investing group, "Kingdom Holding Company." Of course, Twitter benefited by selling those shares initially, and now benefits indirectly as the resale of these shares puts the company's total valuation up to $8.4 billion.

The dismay and disillusionment associated with this transaction seems overblown to me, or at least misplaced. In short, we are looking at the wrong medium. We are not witnessing Twitter operate against its central, democratizing premise. We are witnessing money operate in perfect accordance with its own, highly abstracting premise. Money, by its very nature, launders.

This is exactly what money and the corporation were invented 700 years ago to do: provide kings and other members of the aristocracy with a way to invest at arm's length in projects they may or may not want to be associated with. The corporation gives people a way to invest passively in companies whose operations they might not want to know about, much less be known for.

Likewise, generic, central currencies give people who have done Lord-knows-what the very same access to markets as those who have earned their money through sweat or innovation. Once it's money, it is as clean as anyone else's money.

Similarly, once you sell your business to shareholders, they can do what they like with the shares. That's what is meant by shareholding. In the simplest language possible, when you sell your business, you have sold your business. (Maybe that's why so many top people have been leaving Twitter lately. Their shares have vested and they are less restricted about what they can do with them once they quit.)

This is the beauty and horror of investment capital. Just as a Saudi prince can invest in our revolution-inspiring Internet darlings, each of us is free to invest our own retirement savings in the likes of cigarette and liquor companies, weapons manufacturers, polluters, outsourcers and sweatshop exploiters.

We can put our kids through college by investing in the very oil companies through which the Saudi royals made their money in the first place. Then, hopefully, our kids can go on to become peace workers, revolutionaries or even Twitter employees. Or not.

If we're truly concerned about the long arm of international investing, we might best reconsider how we invest ourselves. Instead of relying on the anonymity of outsourced investing to the stock market, why not look around for who or what needs money in our towns and communities?

The Obama administration is already in the process of curtailing the regulations that prevent nonmillionaire investors from putting money into one anothers' businesses. This means we can begin to depend on local money to start-up our own ventures, and on local ventures to build our own savings.

And at that point, if we don't feel like having a Saudi Arabian prince participate, we can just say no.

Original at CNN.com

Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it

(CNN) -- Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.

Consider how CNN anchor Erin Burnett, covered the goings on at Zuccotti Park downtown, where the protesters are encamped, in a segment called "Seriously?!" "What are they protesting?" she asked, "nobody seems to know." Like Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American History, the main objective seemed to be to prove that the protesters didn't, for example, know that the U.S. government has been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. It was condescending and reductionist.

More predictably perhaps, a Fox News reporter appears flummoxed in this outtake from "On the Record," in which the respondent refuses to explain how he wants the protests to "end." Transcending the shallow partisan politics of the moment, the protester explains "As far as seeing it end, I wouldn't like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue."

To be fair, the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.

In fact, we are witnessing America's first true Internet-era movement, which -- unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign -- does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.

Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem.

Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street's many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud.

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking's defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That's because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.

But unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It models a new collectivism, picking up on the sustainable protest village of the movement's Egyptian counterparts, with food, first aid, and a library.

Yes, as so many journalists seem obligated to point out, kids are criticizing corporate America while tweeting through their iPhones. The simplistic critique is that if someone is upset about corporate excess, he is supposed to abandon all connection with any corporate product. Of course, the more nuanced approach to such tradeoffs would be to seek balance rather than ultimatums. Yes, there are things big corporations might do very well, like making iPhones. There are other things big corporations may not do so well, like structure mortgage derivatives. Might we be able to use corporations for what works, and get them out of doing what doesn't?

And yes, some kids are showing up at Occupy Wall Street because it's fun. They come for the people, the excitement, the camaraderie and the sense of purpose they might not be able to find elsewhere. But does this mean that something about Occupy Wall Street is lacking, or that it is providing something that jobs and schools are not (thanks in part to rising unemployment and skyrocketing tuitions)?

The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.

And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.

You Are Not Facebook's Customer

(CNN) -- The ire and angst accompanying Facebook's most recent tweaks to its interface are truly astounding. The complaints rival the irritation of AOL's dial-up users back in the mid-'90s, who were getting too many busy signals when they tried to get online. The big difference, of course, is that AOL's users were paying customers. In the case of Facebook, which we don't even pay to use, we aren't the customers at all.

Let's start with the changes themselves. Until now, the main thing that showed up on users' pages was a big list of "updates" from all the friends and companies and groups to which they were connected. It was a giant chronological list that made no distinction between an article (like this one) that may have been recommended by a hundred friends and the news that one person just changed his relationship status or had a funny dream.

Facebook has now prioritized that flow of stories into a news feed that puts "top stories" on top, and the more chronological list of everything down below. Top stories are selected by an algorithm of some sort that "knows" what will be important to the user based on past behavior and numbers of connections to those recommending the story, and so on.

Meanwhile, as if to make up for this violation of the what-just-happened-is-the-only-thing-that-matters ethos of the social net, Facebook added a live, Twitter-like stream of everything everyone else is doing or saying. It runs down the right side of the screen, almost like CNN TV's awfully distracting and wisely retired "news crawl."

On an Internet where everyone and everything are becoming "friended" to one another, such a division of the relevant "solid" bits from the topic stream of data points makes sense. After all, updates from your closest friends and favorite bloggers should take priority over those from some relative stranger you "friended" because he said he was in your fifth grade class and you didn't want to insult him. If everyone ends up connected to everyone, Facebook will have to make some distinctions or the service will be useless.

But users are bothered by all this. On the simplest level, they don't like change, particularly when it results in making their free time more complex and stressful. Facebook was always a lazy person's friend and time waster. Turning into a dashboard designed to increase productivity and relevancy turns it more into, well, work.

Of course, if they stopped and thought about it, they would realize that Facebook is work. We are not Facebook's customers at all. The boardroom discussions at Facebook are not about how to help little Johnny make more and better friendships online; they are about how Facebook can monetize Johnny's "social graph" -- the accumulated data about how Johnny makes friends, shares links and makes consumer decisions. Facebook's real customers are the companies who actually pay them for this data, and for access to our eyeballs in the form of advertisements. The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

Deep down, most users sense this, which is why every time Facebook makes a change they are awakened from the net trance for long enough to be reminded of what is really going on. They see that their "news feeds" are going to be prioritized by an algorithm they will never understand. They begin to suspect that Facebook is about to become more useful to the companies who want to keep "important" stories from getting lost in the churn -- and less useful for the humans.

Ultimately, they don't trust Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and are suspicious of his every move. By contrast, Apple founder Steve Jobs took away his customers' hard drives, Flash movies, keyboards and Firewire ports -- and yet consumers put up with the inconvenience and discomfort every step of the way because they believed that Steve knew best, and trusted that he was taking them somewhere better.

Apple users pay handsomely for the privilege of putting themselves in the company's hands. Facebook does not enjoy this same level of trust with its nonpaying subscribers.

That's because on Facebook we're not the customers. We are the product.

Hidden Architecture

The real space of cyberspace.
Printed in Red Herring

Back in the late 20th century, at the dawn of the Internet Era, Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte told us that to be "digital," we would have to learn the difference between atoms - those tiny particles making up the stuff of the real world - and bits - the units of pure, binary information that define the landscape and content of cyberspace.

But, as these photographs reveal, atoms might best be thought of as units of pure information, and bits, well, bits are anything if not tiny particles with substance, mass, and motion.

Each time our fingers strike the keys on our laptops, the fundamental orientation of particles in our RAM chips is changed. Those changes are recorded for longer intervals on the magnetic media of our hard drives, and occasionally delivered through the electrons in copper wire, the glass filaments of fiberoptic cable, or ions in the air itself. Yet no matter how ethereal or invisible these particles seem, they are very real, indeed.

And the networks we have devised to transport and manipulate them are a physical infrastructure. Computer technology is really just a series of improvised Rube Goldberg conduits - aqueducts, pulleys, and shunts, patched together over time, respecting the legacy of their predecessors.

For however much we try to ignore it, we all still catch an occasional glimpse of DOS code - during a crash or particularly difficult start-up. We know it's still there, slaving away down there in the ship's boiler room while a spit-and-polish Windows strolls the upper decks for all to see. And we've all had that unnerving experience of accidentally picking up the extension phone while we were still online, and hearing the loud kshhh white noise of our computer conversing with its server, in a language that no human ear will ever be able to decipher.

We deny the reality of this unseen world the same way we deny the unseen hands of migrant workers who pick the grapes for our Merlot and Asian children who weave the patterns in our Bokara rugs. Bouquet and aesthetics might be thought of as bits; but grapes and looms are most certainly atoms. And they've found their delightful arrangements thanks to human hands.

But it is not guilt for the laboring electrons that compels us to shun them. It is fear.

We pretend to use the earplug extensions on our cell phones for the convenience, when we actually fear what the very real particles emitting from our Nokia may do when they collide with the gray matter in our skulls. We conduct stock trades on the Web while trying to deny the precarious path of routers, gateways, or even underwater cables through which our orders must travel before reaching their destination. We depend on our most intimate email correspondence reaching our loved ones intact, even though every message is broken down into dozens of components parts, all transmitted individually and tagged with identifying numerals, before being reassembled by the next server, and broken down again. Each time we install a program onto our hard drive, we inwardly acknowledge the possibility that it might prove incompatible with the almost living culture of programs already there, much in the way a transplanted organ is rejected by an organism's resident antibodies.

However independent of physical reality our technologies provoke us to imagine ourselves, the bits on which we base this dream have no less need of a hospitable environment than we do. Instead of denying their existence, let us marvel, instead, at the universe we have created for them.

What's Next

Published in Upside, 1996

I generally hate to think about "what's next" because it implies that there's going to be a next "big thing." I prefer to avoid such predictions, because most big things are really just amalgamations of lots of little things. In fact, as I see it, the very best next big thing we could hope for would be to transcend big things, altogether. Who needs them, except marketers, Walmart, and business plan writers hoping to demonstrate how their brilliant schemes can "scale" to infinity and beyond?

But "what's next," well, maybe I can deal with a bit of that by projecting forward from "what's now."

As far as the Internet is concerned, what's next is not pervasive computing, cellular technology, or wireless solutions. Rather, it's the coming realization of the real role that content plays in our lives. Content may be king, but very few people understand just what content is, or function it serves to we very social beings. The constant flow of content into our lives may make all this a bit clearer.

Take a look back, for a moment, at some content of the past. When my father was growing up, for example, bubblegum companies competed by offering free trading cards inside their packages. Little pieces cardboard with the images of baseball players proved the most successful, and soon children were buying whole packs of baseball cards with only a single stick of bubble gum. Today, baseball cards are sold without any bubblegum at all.

Despite gum's textural attributes, baseball cards proved to be the "stickier" content. Why? Because they provide a richer media experience. Not only can collectors look at pictures, but they can also compare and analyze the statistics of each player as chronicled on the card's back.

More importantly, this depth of data allows the card to serve as what I've started to call "social currency." While children can debate the merits of one brand of gum over another for only so long, they can talk endlessly about the players' whose cards they've collected, trade them, or even just peruse one another's collections. See, the cards aren't really ends in themselves; they are the basis for human interaction. Johnny got some new cards, so the other kids come over to see them after school. The cards are social currency.

We think of a medium as the thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I'd argue, are really just forms of ammunition -- something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day. An excuse to start a discussion with that attractive person in the next cubicle: "Hey! Did you see that streaming video clip at streamingvideoclips.com?"

Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content -- mostly unoriginal content that they've heard elsewhere -- in order to lubricate a social occasion. And what are most of us doing when we listen to a joke? Trying to memorize it so that we can bring it somewhere else. The joke itself is social currency. "Invite Harry. He tells good jokes. He's the life of the party."

Think of this the next time you curse that onslaught of email jokes cluttering up your inbox. The senders think they've given you a gift, but all they really want is an excuse to interact with you. If the joke is good enough, this means the currency is valuable enough to earn them a response.

That's why the most successful TV shows, web sites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans. Sometimes, like with mainstream media, the value is its universality. Right now, the quiz show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" is enjoying tremendous ratings because it gives its viewers something to talk about with one another the next day. It's a form of mass spectacle. And, not coincidentally, what is the object of the game? To demonstrate one's facility with a variety of forms of social currency! Contestants who can answer a long stream of questions about everything from sports and movies to science and history, are rewarded with a million dollars. They are social currency champions.

Content on the Web is no different. Sure, the Internet allows people to post their own content or make their own web sites. But what do most people really do with this opportunity? They share the social currency they have collected through their lives, in the form of Brittney Spears fan sites or collections of illegally gathered MP3's of popular songs. The myth of the Internet -- and one I believed for a long time -- is that most people really want to share the stories of their own lives. The fact that "content is king" proves that they don't. They need images, stories, ideas, and sounds through which they can relate to one another. The only difference between the Internet and its media predecessors is that the user can collect and share social currency in the same environment.

Those of you who think you are creating online content, take note: your success will be directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. For the real measure of content's quality is its ability to serve as a medium.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the next big thing for the Internet and humanity alike is the realization that our media has served as little more than excuse to interact with one another. And once we make that leap, we will most likely come to wonder what it's all for. Why do we have this overwhelming urge to interact by any means (or medium) available?

Because, my friends - and this is where I'll venture into the deep end of the pool - we are attempting nothing less than the construction of a global brain. A shared consciousness.

Like virtually every one of our evolutionary predecessors - from the multi-part cell to the first multi-cellular organisms - human beings will most likely learn to function as a coordinated being. Before you dismiss this as new age optimism, remember that the alternative to such a strategy is, most likely, rapid extinction. Unless we come to understand the nature of our potential interdependency, we will surely go the way of the many bacteria that never learned how to exploit the benefits of teamwork and good communication.

My sense is that the underlying purpose of the Internet was to provide us with a test run of global consciousness. It's a dry, safe, electronic way of experiencing just a hint of what it might be like to participate in an instantaneous, all-encompassing social reality.

Our natural resistance to such a scenario is our fear of losing our cherished sense of individuality - itself, most likely, an illusion broadcast by the genetic materials that depend on our instinct for "self" preservation for their survival and replication. But if our very survival as a species comes to hinge on our relating to one another in a more organismic fashion, you can bet these same genes will compel us towards much more cooperative models of what we now think of as society.

What's next? Probably a few more interim steps like the Internet - cellular networks, wireless communities, and other ways to experience the exchange of content in increasingly effortless ways. But then, and most likely within just a couple of generations, we'll find ourselves working like the best trapeze artists: without a net.

I believe we're on the verge of discovering (or, through genetic engineering, enhancing) as-yet untapped cerebral and emotional resources, like empathy, compassion, and even telepathy. Instead of going online to communicate, we'll accept the fact that we human beings are pretty much "online" all the time, anyway. We've simply refused to acknowledge or develop such an awareness because it means admitting that those people starving over in Africa aren't really "over there" at all. They're right here with us. They are us.

What we are working to get over is the false notion that increased interdependency necessitates a subversion of the individual. If we see ourselves as little more than consumers, it's hard to work through the seeming paradox. But if we come to understand that our access to social currency only increases the more open we are to its exchange (I'll begrudgingly take a lesson from the free market libertarians on that one) then "ownership" itself will be revealed as a booby-prize.

For the time being, the Internet and our other developing technologies give us a way to experiment with impending social intimacy. Imagine the privacy issues associated with global consciousness! The Internet provides an opportunity to model strategies a bit more subtle than copyright and encryption. Carrying a cell phone around with us challenges us to develop ways of coping with a lifestyle in which we are accessible to everyone else, all the time. Likewise, as component parts of a community consciousness, we'll need a way to incentivize ourselves with something other than personal profit motives. Perhaps the swelling population of Internet millionaires will start to share with us what it is that gets them out of bed in the morning.

So, as I see it, "what's next" is the thing that we are so industriously preparing for right now: the dissolution of the boundaries that keep us from evolving into something much greater than the sum of our parts.

We Are the Programmers

It all began with the remote control.

The little plastic device empowered us to change the pictures on our screens with the tiniest effort of a single finger. From the comfort of the living room couch, we could exchange Walter Cronkite's mug for David Brinkley's, or reject Angie Dickinson in favor of Suzanne Pleshette. Not to mention how easily we could click away from the latest annoying cereal spokesanimal or hamburger huckster. Thanks to the remote control, the "channel surfer" was born. But it was only the beginning.

A new arsenal of interactive devices promises to change our relationship to TV, forever. Thanks to the videogame joystick, the computer mouse, and the wireless keyboard -- television is now an activity. Something we do, rather than something being done to us. With more interactive opportunities being packed into our set-top boxes every day, our experience of the tube will never be the same.

Think back to the first time you ever encountered a videogame. It was probably some version of "Pong": two white squares on a black background, hitting a tiny white dot back and forth. Now, remember the exhilaration you felt at discovering this new way to enjoy a television set. Were you thinking, "what a great way to practice ping-pong?" Of course not. You were simply thrilled to be able to move something around on the TV set! Just being able to shift that little white box up and down on the screen meant more than winning the game. It launched a media revolution.

That little joystick gives us control of the pixel for the first time. As a result, we don't look at the stuff on television with the same reverence. That screen is no longer the exclusive province of the TV programmers, the news anchors, or the sitcom stars. Its' a place where we can play, as well.

Now, as the computer mouse and keyboard find their way into the culture of the couch, email and web browsing turn the television from a mere monitor into a portal. We can communicate with other people through that box! Within a few years, we will be no more likely to be watching someone else do something on TV than expressing ourselves through the TV set.

Just as reading takes on a whole new significance once we learn how to write, TV takes on a whole new dimension when we can travel through its imagery ourselves, or even create our own.

Even our way of experiencing drama will be changing, as more of us learn how to navigate through worlds like Doom and Tomb Raider. We may no longer be satisfied with the kinds of decisions that Xena makes when battling an army of ghouls - not when we've fought that same battle ourselves the night before in a Playstation game.

Ultimately, the opportunity to use a television set in any number of ways turns passive TV viewing into a conscious choice. We will no longer have to ask "what's on?" and submit to whatever the networks have in store. For we will be television programmers, ourselves.

Which One of These Sneakers is Me?

How Marketers Outsmart Our Media-Savvy Children
London Times


I was in one of those sports "superstores" the other day, hoping to find a pair of trainers for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, each model categorized by either sports affiliation, basketball star, economic class, racial heritage or consumer niche, I noticed a young boy standing next to me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of footwear.

His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over - a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment. It's a phenomenon known to retail architects as "Gruen Transfer," named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.

Having finished several years of research on this exact mind state, I knew to proceed with caution. I slowly made my way to the boy's side and gently asked him, "what is going through your mind right now?"

He responded without hesitation, "I don't know which of these trainers is _me_." The boy proceeded to explain his dilemma. He thought of Nike as the most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe, but had heard something about third world laborers and was afraid that wearing this brand might label him as too anti-Green. He then considered a skateboard shoe, Airwalk, by an "indie" manufacturer (the trainer equivalent of a micro-brewery) but had recently learned that this company was almost as big as Nike. The truly hip brands of skate shoe were too esoteric for his current profile at school - he'd look like he was "trying." This left the "retro" brands, like Puma, Converse and Adidas, none of which he felt any real affinity, since he wasn't even alive in the 70's when they were truly and non-ironically popular.

With no clear choice and, more importantly, no other way to conceive of his own identity, the boy stood their, paralyzed in the modern youth equivalent of an existential crisis. Which brand am I, anyway?

Believe it or not, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of youth culture marketers who have already begun clipping out this article. They work for hip, new advertising agencies and cultural research firms who trade in the psychology of our children and the anthropology of their culture. The object of their labors is to create precisely the state of confusion and vulnerability experienced by the young shopper at the shoe wall - and then turn this state to their advantage. It is a science, though not a pretty one.

Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes. The revolutionary impact of a new musical genre is co-opted and packaged by a major label before it reaches the airwaves. The ability of young people to deconstruct and neutralize the effects of one advertising technique are thwarted when they are confounded by yet another. The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar screens, in a language we don't understand. But we see the confusion and despair that results - not to mention the ever-increasing desperation with which even three-year-olds yearn for the next Pokemon trading card. How did we get in this predicament, and is there a way out? Is it your imagination, you wonder, or have things really gotten worse?

Alas, things seem to have gotten worse. Ironically, this is because things had gotten so much better.

In olden times - back when those of us who read the newspaper grew up - media was a one-way affair. Advertisers enjoyed a captive audience, and could quite authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations. Interactivity changed all this. The remote control gave viewers the ability to break the captive spell of television programming whenever they wished, without having to get up and go all the way up to the set. Young people proved particularly adept at "channel surfing," both because they grew up using the new tool, and because they felt little compunction to endure the tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best interests at heart. It was as if young people knew that the stuff on television was called "programming" for a reason, and developed shortened attention spans for the purpose of keeping themselves from falling into the spell of advertisers. The remote control allowed young people to deconstruct TV.

The next weapon in the child's arsenal was the video game joystick. For the first time, viewers had control over the very pixels on their monitors. A terrain that was formerly the exclusive province of the BBC presenter was now available to anyone. The television image was demystified.

Lastly, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed the TV receiver into a portal. Today's young people grew up in a world where a screen could as easily be used for expressing oneself as consuming the media of others. Now the media was up-for-grabs, and the ethic, from hackers to camcorder owners, was "do it yourself."

Of course, this revolution had to be undone. Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance.

Likewise, as computer interfaces were made more complex and opaque - think Windows 98 - the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet was undone. The original Internet was a place to share ideas and converse with others. Children actually had to use the keyboard! Now, the World Wide Web encourages them to click numbly through packaged content. Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.

But young people had been changed by their exposure to new media. They constituted a new "psychographic," as advertisers like to call it, so new kinds of messaging had to be developed that appealed to their new sensibility.

Anthropologists - the same breed of scientists that used to scope out enemy populations before military conquests - engaged in focus groups, conducted "trend-watching" on the streets, in order to study the emotional needs and subtle behaviors of young people. They came to understand, for example, how children had abandoned narrative structures for fear of the way stories were used to coerce them. Children tended to construct narratives for themselves by collecting things instead, like cards, bottlecaps called "pogs," or keychains and plush toys. They also came to understand how young people despised advertising - especially when it did not acknowledge their media-savvy intelligence.

Thus, Pokemon was born - a TV show, video game, and product line where the object is to collect as many trading cards as possible. The innovation here, among many, is the marketer's conflation of TV show and advertisement into one piece of media. The show is an advertisement. The story, such as it is, concerns a boy who must collect little monsters in order to develop his own character. Likewise, the Pokemon video game engages the player in a quest for those monsters. Finally, the card game itself (for the few children who actually play it) involves collecting better monsters - not by playing, but by buying more cards. The more cards you buy, the better you can play.

Kids feel the tug, but in a way they can't quite identify as advertising. Their compulsion to create a story for themselves - in a world where stories are dangerous - makes them vulnerable to this sort of attack. In marketers terms, Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on "complementary platforms." This is ad-speak for an assault on multiple fronts.

Moreover, the time a child spends in the Pokemon craze amounts to a remedial lesson in how to consume. Pokemon teaches them how to want things that they can't or won't actually play with. In fact, it teaches them how to buy things they don't even want. While a child might want one particular card, he needs to purchase them in packages whose contents are not revealed. He must buy blind and repeatedly until he gets the object of his desire.

Worse yet, the card itself has no value - certainly not as a play-thing. It is a functionless purchase, slipped into a display case, whose value lies purely in its possession. It is analogous to those children who buy action figures from their favorite TV shows and movies, with _no intention of ever removing them from their packaging!_ They are purchased for their collectible value alone. Thus, the imagination game is reduced to some fictional moment in the future where the will, presumably, be resold to another collector. Children are no longer playing. They are investing.

Meanwhile, older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether. The "15-24" demographic, considered by marketers the most difficult to wrangle into submission, have adopted a series of postures they hoped would make them impervious to marketing techniques. They take pride in their ability to recognize when they are being pandered to, and watch TV for the sole purpose of calling out when they are being manipulated. They are armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing the messages of their enemies.

But now advertisers are making commercials just for them. Soft drink advertisements satirize one another before rewarding the cynical viewer: "image is nothing," they say. The technique might best be called "wink" advertising, for its ability to engender a young person's loyalty by pretending to disarm itself. "Get it?" the ad means to ask. If you're cool, you do.

New magazine advertisements for jeans, such as those created by Diesel, take this even one step further. The ads juxtapose imagery that actually makes no sense - ice cream billboards in North Korea, for example. The strategy is brilliant. For a media-savvy young person to feel good about himself, he needs to feel he "gets" the joke. But what does he do with an ad where there's obviously something to get that he can't figure out? He has no choice but to admit that the brand is even cooler than he is. An ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's authenticity.

Like the boy at the wall of shoes, kids today analyze each purchase they make, painstakingly aware of how much effort has gone into seducing them. As a result, they see their choices of what to watch and what to buy as exerting some influence over the world around them. After all, their buying patterns have become the center of so much attention!

But however media-savvy kids get, they will always lose this particular game. For they have accepted the language of brands as their cultural currency, and the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real. For no matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.

The more they interact with brands, the more they brand themselves.

Playing With Fractals

An introdution to the art of Sarah Sze
(from an upcoming book on her work)


I first encountered Sarah Sze - whom I hadn't yet heard of - at a cocktail party in New York. She was about to leave for Paris to do an installation "with ladders."

"Ladders you can climb?"I asked. "Like a jungle gym?"

She smiled, politely. No, one couldn't climb them. Not physically, anyway. For Sze's sculptural works are, indeed, playgrounds. Monkey bars for the mind. Invitations to play, and, in doing so, to comprehend the nature of play in an entirely new context. These are seductive and deceptively unthreatening vehicles for transformation. They force to re-evaluate the role of play in the evolution of species, culture, and spirit.

We can't reckon with the implications of Sze's transformative energy by getting abstract or exploring historical precedents. No, we'd just get lost in the morbidly retrograde cartography that passes for contemporary art criticism these days - a booby prize if ever there was one. Instead, we have to go inside, to our own experience, and trust that what we're feeling and thinking actually matters. And when we go there - to that place Sze's work takes us if we let it, something remarkable happens.

Sarah Sze's work helps us make sense of the world in which we live through the fanciful celebration of the utilitarian. Her pieces allow the manufactured objects of our everyday reality to transcend their intended contexts, and find a new, organismic relationship to one another, and to us. Sze is both discovering and developing the kinds of repetitive patterns that give human beings the reference points they need to resonate playfully rather than strategically with the material and visual world.

Or, to put it much more simply, Sarah is recreating nature out of the unnatural - and beholding these natural systems - these imaginative playscapes - changes us forever.

Perhaps the best metaphor I can use to explain the odd reassurance I feel on encountering one of Sze's installations is that of a fractal. Fractals are the computer-generated graphic representations of non-linear equations. Unsatisfied with the over-determined and oversimplified techniques of traditional linear math and reductive calculus, new math theorists sought to find ways of representing the genuine complexity of our physical world in the perfect language of numbers. They found that by representing the fractional dimensionality of the real world, they could reckon with the roughness of reality.

Of course the billions of calculations required to iterate fractals must be accomplished using a computer. They are products of the computer age. Yet, surprisingly, they yield forms that exemplify the most natural of living systems.

Fractals are self-similar. This means at one level of magnification, you will be able to see certain shapes that are repeated again at much higher levels of magnification. Just as the shapes of veins in a leaf reflect the shapes of branches in a tree or trees in the forest, computer-generated fractals reflect the self-similarity of numbers. As above, so below. The networked systems that fractals represent also tend to have what are known as "remote high leverage points."Although these systems might be extremely stable, profound change can come from extremely remote places, if conditions are right.

My own work in cultural analysis has been largely informed by these discoveries and intuitions. Like the ocean and the weather, our society has been networked together through the media, economic, and telecommunications infrastructures. We experience ourselves in a kind of fractal, with our television screens displaying images of television screens with television screens. And our interconnectedness allows for remote high leverage points: a single, tiny media event in a remote location - like a camcorder capturing the beating of a black man by white Los Angeles cops - can lead to full-scale rioting in 12 American cities.

A fractal sensibility helps one orient to the modern, mediated and non-linear landscape. As humans, we strive to find patterns in the world around us - especially in the seeming chaos. Just as the regularity of waves turns a threatening ocean into a reassuring rhythm, our ability to perceive patterns and self-similarity in the manufactured world of cities and objects helps us understand that there is an order to our existence. A plan. A design.

Sze introduces these sensibilities to all who encounter her work. Our only choice is whether to revel in them, or reel back in horror - our critical presumptions about the shortcomings of the man-made forever altered.

For Sze's pieces are, themselves, fractal in nature. She takes a common household object - something known more for its high frequency than its scarcity - and iterates it with others, thousands of times. Dozens of cotton balls, lined in little rows. Matchsticks, glued together in strands like ladders - no, like DNA helixes, the component codes of cellular reproduction - the genome-based time machines that nature uses to communicate the qualities of her creations through the eons.

Sarah serves as the computer. Instead of churning numbers through equations, however, she arranges objects in sequences. In an ode to obsession that would make HAL proud, Sze constructs fractals out of mankind's most plastic and mass-produced objects - and then these constructions take on the qualities of natural phenomena.

Consider Still Life with Flowers(1999) Swirling ladders of matchsticks and rulers, interspersed with photos of sharks, mice, monkeys and other species, living twigs, and the tiniest components of artificial plants. We can't look at the piece without thinking about the artist herself, repeatedly breaking the heads of matchsticks and gluing them together - those hours, days, maybe weeks of cyclical, repetitive tasks.

The result of her toil mirrors the DNA molecule - an evolutionary tree explicated by photos of the various species along its branches. Yet this genomic map is only secondary to fractal, natural, and fertile quality of the installation's overarching form. This is the primary fruit of Sze's labor: no matter how manufactured these objects may be, when they are iterated enough times they produce natural meta-forms. Fractals. In a nod to remote high leverage points, Sze places C-clamps or spring clips at critical junctures. These tiny and quite deliberately disclosed lynchpins are what hold the whole world together.

Or take a look at her studio piece, Untitled, 1996. A stepladder-as-skyscraper overlooks an urban grid of everything from Hershey's Kisses and Lifesavers to photo slides and tennis shoes. Again, chain ladders of matchsticks and toothpicks grow upward from the two-dimensional grid as if groping for three-dimensionality. Climbing up the stepladder and through the air, like creeping ivy.

This delicate, dynamic, and fractional dimensionality; this teetering at the brink between worlds of factory-made and spontaneously alive - this is what we get when we push through chaos to the other side of order.

And, most strikingly, this new order is utterly unrecognizable to those who refuse to play. A cartographer, who can only understand the ocean as a series of longitude and latitude lines, cannot even converse with a young surfer who understands this same water as a pattern of waveforms. In fact, he will assume the surfer is hopelessly lost. Yet the surfer, by immersing in the water, experiencing the waves, and turning this interaction into a game of balance and motion, ends up with a much more intimate and lasting understanding of the ocean's very personality - its life.

As an artist teasing us into re-examining our relationship to the manufactured physical world, Sze surfs her materials in much the same way. Like a skateboarder re-contextualizing the curbs, banisters, and benches of the urban terrain as an obstacle course, Sze uses the multitude of objects passing through our hands each day as Tinkertoy. And her play - I mean, her work - yields forms that exhibit the repetitive, self-similar, and networked properties of nature. Manufactured objects + iterated play = fractals.

Part automaton, part god, Sarah is both a slave to her taskmaster vision, and the human hand intervening in its mechanized execution. She is the delightfully autonomous being who dares to create worlds within worlds, and the autistic match-gluer who churns out the sorts of iterations most suited to a Pentium chip. As our eyes dance over the results of her labors, forced to retrace the swirling lines and self-similar visual echoes manifesting at every possible level of detail, our only choice is to play along. We are engaged in the interdimensional game, incapable of maintaining our objective vantagepoints, yet rewarded in our surrender with something so much greater: the reassurance of pattern recognition - of nature - in a realm where we'd least expect it.

This is what makes Sarah's new work on the Bard campus so very compelling. The three excavations sneak up on you, disguised as little work zones marked with cones and protected by disheveled tarps. Yet once you approach and peer inside, you find multi-tiered cities of plastic, wood, tubing, and water. Entire worlds, and worlds within worlds - a seeming infinity of detail, and in each detail, yet another world, and another world still.

No matter how microcosmic these craters of infinitesimal plastic civilizations, it is still impossible for the viewer to stand outside them. For to look down into one of them is to be surrounded by the others. There are three of these tiny meta-cities, each throbbing, pulsing, and gurgling in its own corner of the grassy knoll. Seemingly linked -- networked to one another and in constant communication - the replicated plastic galaxies challenge our arbitrarily superior vantage points. Who is the artificial stranger, here, and which is the life form?

Sze's latest works most directly explore the relationship of the fabricated to the natural, and the utility to the toy. By inverting one for the other, she demonstrates how the manufactured object reaches the realm of the natural when utility is exchanged for play. Play is portal from the lower, survival-based levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs , to the romantic, nurturing, and spiritual realms at its top.

It is play that fuels the marathon iterations of Sze's labor-intensive creations. Play that transforms matter into life. Play that leads life forms to reproduce, create their cultures, as well as the many artificial and manufactured forms within it. Finally, it is play that - when taken too seriously - recedes from our view as surely as God himself has withdrawn from human affairs. And it is play that returns when we topple the tyranny of utilitarian survival with the dangerously revolutionary spirit of fun. Jokes are what bring down holy empires, because they let everyone see what's really going on. Playful humor serves as a fractal, adding dimensional perspective - drawing a proscenium arch around a social construction that seemed so very real, and turning it into a divine comedy. Play is the source of life.

Sarah's hand-made fractals allow us to experience the cogs of our highly artificial culture as the seeds of an entirely natural system. They make us question the foundations of this very distinction. For what, ultimately, is not natural? Bees make honey, beavers make dams, and people make plastic. Why should our structures have any less geometric intention than a honeycomb? Or any less right to a place in the ecosystem of physical reality? Is human culture any different, fundamentally, from a yogurt culture? If there is a difference, it lies in our human ability to see the similarities - to recognize the patterns.

Sze's creations are not imitations of life, but living forms. Not metaphors, but self-organizing and artfully contagious thought structures. Sze's work is alive.

Suicide Jews

NEWS & COLUMNS
Vol 16 - Issue 25 - June 11-17, 2003

The self-imposed death of institutional Judaism.
By Douglas Rushkoff

I’m a Jew. Or, at least I was last time I checked.

But New York’s official institutions of Judaism would say that I’m not, and, most likely, neither are you. No, it’s not because my mom’s not Jewish (the usual, racist, excuse), but because–like so many other intelligent, engaged people on this bagel-fueled island–I don’t happen to belong to a synagogue. As a result, they label me "lapsed" or, in the optimistic language of the market researchers charged with saving Judaism, "a latent Jew."

Actually, these days they’re calling me an atheist, an Israel hater and an anti-Semite. Not because I’m saying anything bad about God, Israel or Judaism, but merely because I’m asking that we be allowed to discuss these ideas, together.

We all know that there are some sticking points to being Jewish in America today–particularly with what’s going on in Israel. Luckily, Judaism has a wealth of built-in mechanisms for confronting the lure of fundamentalism, nationalism and tribalism. But in my effort to show Jews some of what is so very progressive and relevant about their dwindling religion, I have instead provoked their most paranoid, regressive wrath.

What I’m learning is that today’s Jewish institutions have more to fear from Judaism than they have to gain. That’s why they’re going out of their way to keep Judaism from actually happening.

I’ve written about media and culture for the past ten years. Interactivity has always been my passion–especially the way the internet turned a passive mediaspace into a freewheeling conversation. Instead of depending on the newscaster or sponsor for our stories, we were free to tell our own. I wrote eight well-received books about what was happening to our culture, and how to navigate its new "do-it-yourself" terrains.

Then, just a few years ago, it occurred to me that Judaism had attempted to do the same thing to religion. The mythical Israelites of the Torah left their idols behind in order to forge a new way of life–one in which they weren’t dependent upon the gods to do everything for them. Judaism abstracted God so that people could become thinking, active adults. What made Judaism so radical–so sacrilegious in its day–was the proclamation that people can actually make the world a better place. God may have given us great hints on how to be holy people, but the rest is up to us.

The reason Jews have such a hard time explaining Judaism, "the religion," is that we aren’t about beliefs. All we really have is a process–an ongoing conversation. You get initiated, a bar or bat mitzvah, by proving you can read the Torah and speak somewhat intelligently about it. No statements of faith required–just literacy and an opinion about what you’ve read earn you a place at the table. Then you get to argue with the old guys.

That’s right: Judaism boils down to a 3500-year-old debate about what happened on Mount Sinai and what we’re supposed to do about it. Judaism is not set in stone; it is to be reinterpreted by each generation. All that’s required is a continual smashing of your false idols (iconoclasm), a refusal to pretend you know who or what God is (abstract monotheism) and being nice to people (social justice). In a sense, Judaism isn’t a religion at all, but a way human beings can get over religion and into caring about one another.

Sounds good, anyway.

But like so many latent Jews in America today (we account for more than 50 percent of the total), I had a hard time finding places where this sort of Judaism is still practiced. They exist, but more likely in an apartment living room or school basement than a sanctuary. The vast majority of messages coming out of mainstream Judaism concern post-Holocaust issues such as the dangers of intermarriage, the threat of assimilation and the need to protect Israel.

Worst of all, as I’m learning, these subjects are not up for discussion.

Jewish philanthropies spend millions of dollars and hours counting Jews and conducting marketing research on how to get young people to stop marrying goys and start supporting Israel. If they were to spend even half this effort actually doing Judaism, they might find that they’d attract a whole lot more people to their cause. In an era in which spirituality is about breaking the illusion of self, who wants to be part of a religion or a people that is turned so inward? Judaism’s greatest concern, these days, is itself.

Most of my friends abandoned Judaism as soon as they were allowed to for precisely these reasons. Having found some useful truths in there, however, I was loath to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I figured I owed it to myself, and to Judaism, to revive the conversation. "Can we talk?" I’ve been asking in my lectures, articles and even a book. Apparently not.

Don’t get me wrong: A great majority of the people to whom I’ve been speaking in synagogues and bookstores around the nation agree with what I have to say. Even the rabbis.

"If that’s Judaism," I’ve been told many times, "then count me in!"

A half dozen Torah discussion groups have formed among people who met at my bookstore appearances. But the people running Judaism’s more established institutions–the philanthropies, federations and periodicals that speak for the Jewish people in America today–are so threatened by the notion of an open conversation about Judaism that they can’t help but go on the attack.

"Along comes Douglas Rushkoff," announced one of my intellectual role models, Anne Roiphe, after I wrote a New York Times op-ed about organized Judaism’s self-defeating obsession with race and numbers. Treating Jews as an endangered species in dire need of a breeding program, I argued, was hardly a good strategy for attracting more young, successful and universal-minded people into the fold, if that’s even the object of the game.

She called me "silly" and cited the existence of Tay Sachs disease as evidence of a Jewish "race" that requires protection. Why couldn’t she have spoken to one geneticist before making such an unfounded remark, in print, no less? (Throw a few thousand people in a ghetto for a few dozen centuries and they’ll develop some diseases. Most scientists have abandoned the concept of race altogether.) She went on to cite the Jewish concern with "the degree of Jewishness of one’s parents" as proof that Judaism is a race.

I’ve been amazed as I’ve watched otherwise rational, well-spoken people revert to childlike circularity when confronted by the inconsistencies in their own religious outlooks. I know, I know: That’s why they call it religion. Judaism was supposed to be a smarter solution, a thinking person’s answer to religiosity. A conversation. That’s why, more than their inane remarks or beliefs, what disturbs me about the reaction of Judaism’s gatekeepers is their refusal to make a place for me–and the majority of American Jewry–at the Jewish table.

I do feel for these people, and can understand the wish to believe that we are direct descendents of the mythical characters described in the Torah. But, 42 years circumcised, I refuse to be treated as an outsider for seeing the great benefits of contending otherwise–as Judaism, itself, suggests we do.

They’re not budging. The first major review of my book in a Jewish publication, the Bronfman Philanthropy-funded Jerusalem Report, called me a "yoga-practicing atheist Jew from New York’s East Village," right in the lead paragraph! I’m an atheist because, like most thinking adults, I don’t believe in an all-powerful creature with the white beard who rejoices in animal sacrifice. I get that. But the yoga-practicing and East Village part? Is that supposed to be evidence of how far I’ve strayed–in neighborhood and exercise regime–from the Upper West Side where Jews belong?

Just two weeks ago, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York–headquarters of the biggest, most central Jewish organization in America–yanked an interview that one of their writers conducted with me from their website, along with all mention in their calendar of a benefit I’m doing in their auditorium for a Jewish social justice charity. All because, according to the editor, "a heightened sensitivity to some of the topics we discussed emerged here at UJA-Federation once it was actually posted."

Gotta love the internet: The entire interview was immediately reposted to a webzine called Jewsweek, along with an account of the whole fiasco. A week later, the excised text reappeared on the UJA site, albeit with a new title and a framing paragraph about how "Douglas Rushkoff likes to sound off." A UJA representative now says that the only problem with the original interview was the title.

I’m not the only one who is facing such knee-jerk reactions from the institutions dominating public Jewish discourse. Rabbi David Wolpe, a respected and published rabbinic scholar now on the pulpit at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, made the headlines for daring to suggest to his congregation that the Exodus may not really have happened the way it was described in the Bible. Or at all. Though this question has been pondered out loud by rabbis ever since there were rabbis, today it is too dangerous a topic, and Wolpe is decried as a "silver-tongued devil."

Why?

Because Jews are afraid, and the institutions that should be helping them conquer their ignorance are instead stoking it to further solidify their grasp on Judaism’s future. The darker picture they paint of Judaism’s plight–the further synagogue membership dwindles, the greater Israel’s peril–the more money they raise. Every suicide attack on Israel and each negative report on intermarriage statistics lead to a surge in donations.

So it’s in the fundraisers’ interest to foster panic instead of discussion, and to turn their agendas into inviolably sacred truths. Yet they are not entirely to blame. It is we who must challenge these holy assumptions if we’re going to break free from top-down religion and start to think for ourselves again–the way Judaism demands.

The first forbidden topic is race. The Jews’ crucial error has been accepting our enemies’ contention that we are a race. We are not. The first character in the Torah to mention an "Israeli people" was Pharaoh, and he was looking for an excuse to kill off those he feared wouldn’t support him in a war. The
concept of "Jewish blood" was invented during the Spanish Inquisition, so that they would still have an excuse to slaughter former Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Best yet, it was Hitler, gently reworking a bit of Jung, who claimed that Jews’ "genetic memory" would keep them from ever fully
accepting the natural German order.

Two millennia of being treated as a despised race might convince any people that it’s true. Ironically, Jews were being persecuted, at least in part, for their very refusal to accept such false boundaries. Local gods, ethnic purity and national religions meant nothing to this amalgamation of formerly disparate tribes. Moses’ wife was black, for God’s sake. How much clearer can the story get about race not being the issue here?

By hanging on to racehood, Jews get to hang on to an immature understanding of chosenness. ("I like knowing that God loves us the best," a woman told me after a recent talk.) Along with being God’s chosen people, however, come the racism and elitism that undermine our ethics, but empower our central authorities. If Judaism is not a race, then who exactly are we not supposed to intermarry with? They won’t tell you that this whole matrilineal descent business isn’t part of Judaism, at all, but a remnant of the Roman census conducted in the second century. Assimilation has always been the Jews’ best strategy. Our mandate in Torah is not to protect ourselves from others, but to "share our light" with them.

Part of the reason we don’t know any of this is that we’ve relegated our Judaism to our authorities. The Reform movement was a great idea when it arose in the 1800s in Germany. Judaism was built to be reformed. Problem is, some of the reforms were designed for little purpose other than to make Jewish worship look less weird to any Christians who might happen to drop by. So a spirited, participatory free-for-all was turned into Jewish church: Rabbis put on robes, stood on a stage in front of the room and engaged in boring, monotone responsive readings with the congregation. All the atrophied dullness of Christianity, only without the salvation.

Worse, this induced what Freud would call "regression and transference." The audience of spectators regressed to a childlike state and transferred parental authority onto their rabbis, who became more like priests administering the religion to their congregants.

No matter. Reform Jews figured someone wearing a black hat, probably somewhere in Israel, was doing the "real thing." And so checkbook Judaism was born, through which Americans could practice their religion by proxy. Little did they know their money was going to some of the most stridently Zionist sects around and forcing the Israeli government to cow even further to their bizarre demands.

Which brings us to the real reason we can’t talk about Judaism today: Israel. Note–I’m not suggesting that Israel shouldn’t exist, but many readers will already think I’ve just said that. They cannot even see these words that say otherwise. Our problem is not with the Israelis, but our insistence–as Americans–in justifying a nation’s existence with our religion. By forcing the Torah to serve as an accurate historical chronicle of the Jewish claim to disputed territories, Jews turn themselves into fundamentalists who have no choice but to interpret their texts literally. "Abraham got this piece from God in Genesis, and Jacob got this piece from the Pharaoh…" The transdimensional nature of Jewish myth–as profound as that of any Eastern religion–is reduced to a real estate deed.

This literalism is a problem. Fundamentalists believe that Jews must be in control of the entirety of biblical Israel in order for the messiah to return to Earth. This is why orthodox extremists from Brooklyn race–guns in hand–to settle the West Bank. It is also why the American Christian fundamentalists are responsible for funding a majority of Jewish immigration from Russia to Israel. They want to bring on the End of Days and get to Armageddon already.

But because many Jews refuse to look a gift horse in the mouth, everyone from Bush to Falwell becomes our allies. Fear, desperation and a history of persecution make for strange bedfellows.

To free ourselves from this self-defeating conundrum, American Jews must understand our unwitting complicity in this pact with, well, the devil. We must entertain the possibility that Israel, the nation, may not be the ultimate realization of Jewish ideals as much as a necessary compromise. Israelis get this; New Yorkers seem to have a little more trouble because we insist on seeing Jerusalem as somehow more sacred than Manhattan.

There are better arguments to be made for a Jewish homeland than the assertion that the "one and true God" gave it to us. (That’s not what abstract monotheism was invented for, anyway. She’s not just our God–she’s everyone’s.) After centuries of exile or worse by nation states with their own official religions, one Jewish strategy was to create our own nation, with its own official religion. Although long characterized by an independence from territory and local gods, Judaism might not be completely wrecked by the temporary suspension of these values for the greater priority.

Israel may indeed be important to the Jewish people and, as a potential laboratory in ethical nation-building, to the whole world, but its current and inappropriate centrality to the Jewish faith makes it a topic that cannot be approached or discussed openly. Like the synagogue and the Jewish bloodline, Israel has become an idol.

As a result, many American Jews feel that to question the religious or political authority of Israel–to suggest, as I have, that God might not have invented the nation state–is akin to blaspheming Judaism or forgetting the Holocaust. So, as the Jewish authorities have made abundantly clear to me, we are to remain silent.

Life for Jews in New York in 2003 is as good as it has ever been–anywhere. Only by reviving the inquiry and activism that are truly central to Judaism can we serve as antagonists rather than passive supporters of everything from blind fundamentalism to the Bush regime’s designs on the Middle East and the world. Just because the Jews will inevitably be blamed for provoking these crusades doesn’t mean we have to make the accusation true.

Resistance is our tradition, and it’s worth fighting for. At this point, it’s more important to me that I do Judaism than that I get to call myself Jewish.

Rushkoff is the author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (Crown, 2003).

Microsoft Marches On

The New York Times - Op-Ed, June 25 1998

The state and Federal officials accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive practices have found themselves in a precarious battle with two fronts. The Federal courts, as evidenced by Tuesday's appellate decision freeing Microsoft to bundle its Web browsing software with the Windows operating system, will need to be convinced that the company's newly integrated products violate any antitrust laws at all. And the court of public opinion will soon want proof that this enforcement of free-market capitalism will somehow make for a better digital future.
More important, the prosecutors do not realize they have been drawn into a phantom battle. While they think they are preventing Microsoft from using its Windows monopoly to gain control over other areas, they are merely fighting for concessions that soon won't matter to Bill Gates at all.
In the name of competition and consumer choice, the Government wants to make it illegal for Microsoft to demand that computer makers include Internet Explorer or any other software application as a condition for distributing Windows. It also wants assurance that Microsoft's competitors will have ample opportunity to write and distribute their own Windows software.
But what happens when there is no such thing as software? Thanks to rivals like Netscape, which were threatening to expand their programs into entire operating systems, Microsoft got the bright idea of expanding its operating system into programs. In the Windows future, users will no longer open a separate program for word processing, spreadsheet calculations or Internet browsing. The same system window will do all those things. Only the menu bar might change.
In other words, the operating system will not be the platform from which a computer user launches software; it will be the software. Instead of buying new programs, people will simply add functionality to the system, much in the way they now download plug-ins like video players. What we think of as software packages will no longer be "launched" with a mouse click, but will be called up automatically when needed.
That's why Microsoft has nothing to fear in the unlikely event that it loses its battle with the Justice Department. The Internet Explorer icon is merely a placeholder for the program's impending absorption by Windows -- a way to keep Netscape from setting its own Web browsing standards while Microsoft integrates the Internet into its overall system. And the company will apply this same strategy to cable television, palmtop devices and anything else that can be run on a Windows platform.
Microsoft is simply hoping that the current lawsuit takes long enough for the synergy between its different frontiers to take effect. Once that happens, Microsoft will have won the war -- even if it had to lose a few meaningless battles along the way.
It is unlikely the Justice Department will be able to head off such a future. Worse, the approach is misguided; it makes Government into the enemy of every kid shouting, "I want my digital MTV."
Instead, we might best treat Microsoft, Intel or any other company in a position to develop our digital future the way we did cable television providers in the 1970's. If they want to become the architects of our information infrastructure, then they will have to demonstrate their willingness to promote the public interest.
For cable television, that meant public access programming and reasonable rates for basic services. For systems architects, it could mean on-line libraries, educational provisions or open coding standards. What will serve the public interest is not greater competition between information architects, but greater cooperation and greater accountability.
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of "Media Virus" and the forthcoming "Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say."

All God's Children, They Got Vings

The New Kabbalah
Originally published in Paper Magazine

The web site flashes images of a fetus, the mysterious face on the surface of Mars, and a ball of fire. Beneath the images, promises of the mysteries lying in wait for all comers:

The Origins of Humanity! Spiritual Energy! Reincarnation! Parallel Universes! Resurrection of the Dead!

No, this is not the Internet site for a new branch of Scientology but an old branch of Judaism, revived most recently (or at least most controversially) by a charismatic rabbi and trickling down (or up, depending on your point of view), with the help of some show-biz celebrities including Rosanne, Barbra Steisand, and Courtney Love, to the hippest and trendiest denizens of America's most decadent coastal cities.

Remember the Nam Yoho Renge Kyo craze of the late 80's, which saw out-of-work actors lighting incense and chanting Asian phrases they didn't understand towards an expensive scroll in a wooden box, in the hopes of winning jobs, money, and romance? Well, the Kabbalah movement of the late 90's has much the same flavor. Tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews now stare at pages of (expensive) ancient texts and scan their eyes over the printed Aramaic glyphs, believing that the energy of these symbols will be transmitted off the page and into their lives. They pay to have red string tied around their wrists in order to ward off the evil eye. And, with Madonna wearing one to the VH1 Fashion Awards, they get to do all this in style -- or even *as* style.

At the self-proclaimed center of this cultural phenomenon is an organization calling itself, fittingly, The Kabbalah Learning Center. Established in Jerusalem in the 1920's as a quiet but distinguished facility for scholarly research, it was taken over after its founder's death by an ex-insurance salesman, Rabbi Philip Berg, who claimed to have been hand picked for the succession. But the original founder's descendents argue that Berg has no claim to this lineage, and most of the world's Rabbis shudder at the thought that people might confuse this trendy and mind-numbingly coercive New Age network with anything remotely Kabbalistic or even Jewish.

Traditional Kabbalah is a quite extensive system of Jewish mysticism that came to the attention of a wide circle of academics and scholars when it was unearthed and explained by Professor Gershom Scholem earlier this century. Most Kabbalists sit around discussing the ancient texts, analyzing numerical or other relationships between names or places, and occasionally meditating on God's divinity. It's difficult reading, and entirely un-sexy, but what it lacks in marketability it makes up for in Zen koan-like density.

Berg's centers provide modern audiences with a colorful and experiential set of Cliff Notes to the basic tenets of Kabbalah. Thanks to Berg's efforts and the attention of a cadre of movie stars that rivals even the Dalai Lama's crew, his movement has expanded to over 60 centers worldwide, including a brand new five-story HQ in Manhattan.

"The Rav," as his devotees affectionately refer to their 70-year-old leader, broke with tradition by deciding that the more mystical Jewish texts and theology should be available to all -- not just those who had studied the Torah for several decades as was traditionally mandated. His books, most notably "Kabbalah For the Layman," seek to explain phenomena ranging from the unified field theory to life after death by deconstructing ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts for their clues and prophecies. According to his students, the Rav also transmits the essence of Kabbalah by sharing his own divine light with others.

"When you go away on a holiday with The Rav, it's like a little mini-trip to heaven" explains Karen Erikson of Showroom Seven, a leading fashion agency that hosts what is probably New York's most fabulous Kabbalah gathering, started by comedienne Sandra Bernhardt. Students attend classes, visit the Queens Centre on Shabbat, and, most inspiringly, go on weekend retreats with the Rav himself. "You come back flying," says Erikson. "Your feet do not touch the ground."

At the Showroom Seven gathering, Sandra's names is invoked as frequently as the Rav's. One of Sandra's make-up artists says she came to Kabbalah after seeing the "improvement" in Sandra's coping strategies. After a single meeting, she was hooked: "I think I took to it so quickly because my soul recognized an aspect that had been missing for me. It was from looking at the Hebrew letters." For her, the goal of Kabbalah is "breaking your nature, rising above your nature, and sharing."

Of course all this breaking, rising, and sharing costs money. Although classes are only ten dollars a pop, the audio tapes, books, paraphernalia, and retreats do add up. (I wasn't asked to pay for anything except the class I attended, but my phone number was written down on three separate occasions.) The Zohar -- the multi-volume Aramaic text on which most of Kabbalah is based and an essentially mandatory purchase for all students -- costs about $350 to buy from the Centre, yet lists for only a third of that at any regular bookstore. But what else are devotees to do when the text itself emanates divine light, and the Rav's center only sells one edition?

The Kabbalah Centre may sound pretty much like any other New Age self-help group that has come and gone over these bizarre millennium-ending decades, but unlike EST, The Course in Miracles, or most of today's fashionable spiritual pyramid schemes, this one is run by descendants of the folks who built the original pyramids back in Egypt. In other words, where going through spiritual hoops are concerned, the Jews got game.

Historically speaking, the Jewish religion began as human beings evolved from the hunter-gatherer stage to a tent and farming society. Judaism was characterized by the elimination of ritual human sacrifice and idol worship from one's life. It marked a break from tribal pantheism to the worship of a more unknowable and abstract single god, along with the adoption of a set of textual laws governing ethics and action. The Torah can be seen as the first great argument for a less barbaric way of life.

But interwoven into the stories and laws of these ancient texts were many reminders of what the Jews had left behind -- back in the Garden of Eden and before. Kabbalists have been busy for centuries mining the Torah and other sacred writings for their hidden references to existence before the "big bang", the reasons why a perfect God bothered to create matter, evil, or pain.

So why, after the Sufis, Buddhists, Native Americans, Hindus, and Siddha Yogis have all staked their turf in the Spiritual Renaissance, should the pop-Kabbalist movement stand a chance of gaining a reasonable market share so late in the game? Because the Jews have a trump card: Western respectability.

It's a lot easier for a cynical New Yorker to accept spiritual explanations for the Unified Field Theory from a 70-year-old wearing a yarmulke than a bald-headed yogi in a robe. With an odd mix of conservative integrity and outlandish prophecy, the pop-Kabbalists mine stories out of the daily paper for confirmation of the Zohar and Berg's many predictions. They give trendy New Agers a way to hang onto their astrology and tarot cards while doing something that satisfies the superego as much as the need for an immediate, god-confirming rush.

At the Showroom Seven class I attended, a friendly, and yarmulke-capped 40-something teacher from the Kabbalah Center named Abe Hardoon sat amidst racks of pink sheath dresses, speaking in what I could only assume was an at-least-partially affected Yiddish accent. He held up the Science section of the *New York Times* with the headline "Immortality of a Sort Beckons to Biologists" and then proceeded to use the report on genetic engineering as a springboard to a tale about how The Rav once considered resurrecting a young man who had been killed in an accent (we didn't find out if he succeeded), and from there to a discussion about how achieve immortality in this lifetime. On the back cover of the Science section from which he read was a full-page ad for J&R Computer World -- yet another Jewish business that has discovered the key to eternal life: location location location!

But at least the appliance and electronics store is giving its customers something tangible for their money. The Kabbalah Learning Centre solicits so many donations from students, and under such extreme emotional and spiritual pressure, that it has come to the attention of several cult networks. Many ex-students report being told that if they donated tens of thousands of dollars, they would literally be bathed in light, and "chaos" -- which takes the form of disease, poverty, or general unhappiness -- would be eradicated.

For a generation that grew up learning to demand its MTV, this consumer-friendly brand of Judaism offers an immediate fix. In addition to ecstatic experiences that rival those achieved on LSD, students believe they are getting rid of the confusing and debilitating thoughts and energies trapped within them. "Why do we study Kabbalah?" offers Erikson. "To get chaos out of our lives. We've got a good percentage of gay people, fashion people. Our lives are filled with chaos and terror. And Kabbalah is to eliminate those things." This might also explain why the cult has proved so popular with movie stars and other wealthy victims of the instant celebrity that our hypermediated popular culture bestows. Surely what the Lord giveth, he can just as easily -- and arbitrarily -- take away. This version of Kabbalah offers Rosanne and Courtney a rationale for how they achieved God's favor, and how to prevent chaos from altering the status quo.

Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Fund, a leading Kabbalah scholar who teaches his own classes at temples and universities in New York, is delighted that people are finding new reasons to explore Judaism, but guarded about any approach that involves money or superstition. "Any time you bring money into Kabbalah, you have permanently driven the spirit out of it."

Fund is particularly suspect of organizations -- he was careful not to implicate the Centre -- that use the word "Kabbalah" as a rationale for profit or brainwashing. "I'm not aware of any reason in the world why people in the name of Kabbalah should be asked to spend hundreds of dollars on books that are worth a fraction of that amount. I'm not aware of any practice in Kabbalah that has people -- as you describe -- passing their fingers over words they don't understand."

Hardoon doesn't deny his sect's somewhat sensationalist bias. "Look in the bible. They did mass circumcision. They wiped the doorposts with blood. Yes we chant, we scream. We scan the text with our eyes. There are ways of awakening the spiritual within us. We're open about it, and we tell people where it's at."

Many more traditional Rabbis are concerned that by masquerading as a branch of Judaism, this cult will lull its victims into a state of false security where they can be more easily programmed into submission. But -- like Scientology's critics -- these same rabbis are worried for their own safety, and hesitant to criticize Berg in public. The Centre sued Toronto Rabbi Immanuel Schochet for 4.5 million dollars when he called Berg's people "fakers." Los Angeles Rabbi Avrohom Union once considered issuing a letter stating that he did not endorse the Kabbalah cult, but a goat's head hanging in a grocery bag over his doorknob convinced him otherwise.

When I told him about this now-famous incident, Hardoon countered with the fact that several young women selling the Kabbalah Centre's books were themselves assaulted by a group of Lubavich boys. "Does that make me think less of their Rabbi? No."

The real shame here is that, from what I can tell, genuine Kabbalah study does offer a tremendous opportunity for Jews and others to discover what this religion has to offer those looking for some answers to life's great mysteries. "It seems to me there's much more to be gained from studying words you do understand than dancing with your fingers over words that you don't," explains Fund, whose classes I've decided to attend on a regular basis.

But how are we to tell the difference between a genuinely enriching Kabbalah class and a dangerous cult? Hardoon acts as if the question is immaterial. "We *are* a cult, okay? I don't even know what a cult is. There's so many cults out there -- we're a good cult, though. Of course we ask people for money. We ask them to volunteer. But we don't force people to stay at the center. They are free to come and go."

Fund offers a simple test: "First of all, wherever you are, you're already moving in the right direction. What's important is if you are made to feel by the teacher or the spirit of the place that the truth only lies within the four walls of where you are, then you know that this is not for you. If it is an experience that opens you to make you want to go beyond where you are, then you're on your way."

Alas, not even the Jews have a quick fix for the perils of modernity -- and teachers who claim to offer one, whether they wear yarmulkes or not, are most likely charlatans. As another Kabbalah teacher and rabbi (who requested to remain nameless) explained after listening to my tapes of the Showroom Seven class, "It seems to be nothing more than some kind of trendy imitation of what people might want to hear. It's short on what we would call Kabbalah."

Hardoon believes such condemnations are at the heart of the world's current spiritual crisis. "All Rabbi Berg has ever taught people is that, in the end, there's no need for Rabbis. Rabbis are supposed to be teachers -- not people who control people for the sake of religion. According to the Zohar, in our generation the rabbis will be responsible for the spiritual decline of the people. *They* are responsible for the shape that the world is in."

The only question is, which rabbis are "they?"

Welcoming One Another

Special To The Jewish Week, April 25 2003

So just who is allowed to participate in the conversation that is Judaism, anyway? Is it a blood test, a history of contributions to the right philanthropies, or a working knowledge of the Talmud that earns one a place at the table?

Sure, I spent the 15 years after my bar mitzvah engaged in the secular world fighting for media literacy and social justice, with nary a High Holy Days service to keep myself in the correct column of the ledger in the U’Nesaneh Tokef.

Does that make me “lapsed,” or worse, turn me into an “outsider”? Because, ironically, the further away I got from what most of us think of as Judaism, the more I could see how my choices, even my career and books, were informed by the religion’s values. I was more surprised than anyone to realize that in spite of my efforts to the contrary, I wasn’t truly “lapsed” at all.

So I decided to re-explore Judaism directly by reading texts and attending services at a Conservative synagogue. I even wrote a couple of mainstream articles hinting at some of Judaism’s best fruits, such as the Sabbath or an emphasis on literacy and community-based learning.

But the further “in” I got, the more disheartened I was by what I found. Jewish institutions appeared frozen in a protective crouch, desperately counting their remaining constituents and wondering why young people were intermarrying and “assimilating” at such alarming rates. Instead of offering the opportunity to engage in the Jewish process of inquiry and engagement, most places I went were obsessed with saving Judaism from its many internal and external threats.

And instead of seeing engaged, secular Jews as success stories, we were mourned as the religion’s failures.

Yeah, I took it personally. I decided to write a book about Judaism’s core insights of iconoclasm, abstract monotheism and social justice, as well as the many reasons why these ideas have taken a back seat to self-preservation. Some of them are very understandable: We’ve been persecuted for centuries. But others, such as the false conception of a chosen Jewish “race” and the inability to parse messianic fantasy from the reality of Israeli national security, seem ripe for revision. I’d welcome everyone to the table to reach a new consensus about what Judaism could be for the future.

The National Jewish Population Study provided an excellent opportunity for me to test some of these ideas in a secular forum, so I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times chastising the organized Jewish world for obsessing with numbers. Treating Jews as an endangered species in dire need of a breeding program was hardly a good strategy for attracting more young, successful and universal-minded people into the fold, I suggested, if that’s even the object of the game.

I received several thousand e-mails — the vast majority extremely supportive. “If that’s Judaism, count me in!” most of the so-called lapsed Jews wrote me. Jews of choice were elated, and told me of the various trials associated with conversion, as well as their continuing sense of exclusion. Even the philanthropies I criticized seemed to welcome the attention from a member of their latest target market and invited me to advise them on how to focus on Judaism’s many offerings rather than its imminent demise — and still raise money.

Dishearteningly, the vast majority of negative response came from rabbis and Jewish pundits who feared that I was reducing Judaism to tikkun olam (which I wasn’t). For some reason, they couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a participatory, welcoming Judaism that emphasizes what it can do for the world rather than how many descendents of the mythical generation at Mount Sinai remain on the roster. Social justice might be the most tangible way to extend our truth, but it’s not the only light we can share with all peoples.

As a historically persecuted bunch (“for you were slaves in Egypt …”), we should understand better than anyone the sin of exclusion. In the Torah, God doesn’t tell his people to be Jews — he tells them to be holy. But too many in the organized Jewish world still think self-preservation is the right course for us as a people, thank you very much, and that we’re in no need of secular outsiders with big ideas.

“Along comes Douglas Rushkoff,” griped one of my role models, Anne Roiphe, in the Jerusalem Report. She wrote as if I were an unwelcome foreigner to the scene, and unaware that “fixing the world is not an idea that has been waiting around for Mr. Rushkoff to discover.” Roiphe’s main problem with emphasizing ethics was that “so do many other religions and people.” She labeled as “silly” my effort to rescue Judaism’s core insights from ethnocentrism, and used the evidence of Jewish disease (such as Tay-Sachs) as proof of a Jewish race.

I can understand the wish to believe that we are direct descendents of the people described in the Torah, and it’s not my purpose to challenge Ms. Roiphe’s faith. But, 42 years circumcised, I refuse to be treated as an outsider for seeing the great benefits of contending otherwise, and beseech Jews of all denominations to consider whether our need for particularism undermines the universalism — the Shema — at the very core of our belief system.

If we’re ever going to welcome in — or be welcomed by — the world’s many communities, we must first learn to welcome one another. n

Douglas Rushkoff is the author most recently of “Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism” (Crown, April 2003).

The Facial

I'm not talking about the latest place in Soho to get mud pack treatments, but a new preferred climax strategy for young men raised on porn videos. That's right: coitus interuptus, once considered a particularly frustrating form of birth control, has been popularized by the "pull out cum shot" into an erotic thrill.

"I always cum on her stomach or her face," a 24-year-old web designer who works in the Flatiron district explained to me. "I never do it inside. That's a waste. I like to see it happening."

Forgoing the sensuous pleasure of a mutually climactic embrace, porn vid aficionados like Zach choose instead to emulate the sexual practices on which they have been weaned. With 70% of all porn videos ending up in the hands of minors, according to the "Christian Alliance for Sexual Recovery," it's no small wonder that a generation of now sexually active young men have been imprinted by viewing the practice in an emotionally receptive state.

The pull-out cum shot was originally developed as a way for porn stars to prove they had truly climaxed. The "money shot." But masturbating to such imagery apparently has its side effects. While young Playboy users of the 60's and 70's may have learned to over-objectify a woman's breasts and buttocks, video users of the 90's appear to have objectified the entire sex act.

Dan, a senior at upper east side's Dalton School, has used porn videos since he was 11 years old, and credits them with teaching him the varied joys of watching oneself ejaculate. "You can do it on her stomach, her tits, or her face" he explains. Then, as if describing the point valuations of a video game, "the face is worth the most."

So what's going on here? Life imitating art, sex imitating media, or fetish imitating film? All I know is that if porn videos had been available when I was an adolescent, I would have probably done almost anything to get ahold of them--and then canceled most of my afternoon activities to use them before my parents got home. Would they have had the same effect on me?

"People learn to become aroused by things," explains New York psychiatrist Dr. Julie Holland. "You learn to be aroused by pairing the sensory with the visual. It's a classical conditioning. You just start to associate the sensoral pleasures with whatever visual imagery is being presented to you at the time." According to Holland, this could work for almost any image. "In theory, you could create any fetish in somebody this way."

So far, so good--from a non-judgmental standpoint, anyway. There's no harm in extra-coital orgasms, and perhaps even a bit of extra safety in this viral age. But what would it mean to have an entire generation of young men who prefer the demonstrative squirt to the intimate throb? It adds a whole new set of parameters to the already long list of sexual performance metrics: range, accuracy, trajectory...

There may be even more psychologically powerful undercurrents at work, here, as well. Dr. Holland believes the symbolic degradation inherent to the facial may well be behind its growing popularity. "The whole idea is very ego-syntonic [in agreement] with the idea that sex is dirty. That you shouldn't be watching a video and masturbating."

I can't help but think the trend is also fueled, at least in part, by our increasingly confused relationship with technology and media. We live in a world where the measure of a man's tongue is its ability to imitate the frequency of a battery-operated vibrator. Likewise, as we grow increasingly dependent on video and computer simulations for the imagery in our fantasy lives, we may begin to aspire towards that which the machine can recreate, rather than that we can create ourselves.

Zach scoffs at such suggestions, believing his fetish has less to do with his video porn practices than the effects of AIDS. "Who wants to shoot into a rubber?" he says, unwittingly blaming yet another piece of technology for his extra-vaginal release. "At least this way you actually do something to her."

E: Prescription for Cultural Renaissance

Originally published as a chapter of Ecstasy, the Complete Guide, edited by Julie Holland, 2001

Every culture and subculture get the drugs that they deserve. In fact, almost every major cultural movement in history can be traced back to the chemicals they did or didn't have.

While ancient nomadic tribes experienced regular psychedelic excursions by eating the mushrooms that grew on the dung of the cattle herds they followed, early agrarian cultures were denied the privilege (and spared the hazards) of such a drug-inspired social system. Historians tracing the shift in value systems towards property ownership and in psychology towards the development and maintenance of ego too often ignore the impact that these natural psychedelics must have had on these early cultures.

Similarly, the coffee beans imported from Morocco to Europe in the 14th and 15th century gave rise to the late night discussions and midnight-oil-burning artistic reverie that launched what we now think of as the Renaissance. Young coffee-drinkers, empowered by the stimulant beverage to stay awake after normal working hours, embarked on a reconsideration of the foundations of their reality. They developed everything from calculus to perspective painting as their apprehension of our world's dimensionality took a leap forward.

That's a renaissance is, really: a rebirth of old ideas in a new context. We gain the ability to reframe many facets of our existence with a greater sense of dimensionality. Whether it's understanding that the globe itself is a sphere instead of a plane, or that paintings can have depth and vanishing points, the renaissance insight marks an increase in understanding of dimension. It is a moment when we go "meta."

Just such a renaissance moment has been underway in the popular culture of the West since the 1960's. Foreshadowed by breakthroughs in relativity and quantum physics, this leap in dimensionality finally hit public consciousness with the escape of the CIA brainwashing drug LSD into academic and subcultural circles.

The psychedelics revolution, though quickly limited to an underground phenomenon, led to a rebirth of ancient ideas in a new, scientific context. Psychologists like Timothy Leary, eager to comprehend the nature of the LSD trance, turned to spiritual systems from the East like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which chronicled the process by which the insights acquired on the transdimensional visionquest could be incorporated into one's daily existence through a "conscious rebirth" at trip's end.

Just as participants of the earlier renaissance had come to grips with the three-dimensional reality of the sphere on which they walked, psychedelics pioneers began to perceive of the planet as a living system, interconnected and interdependent. Biologist-philosophers like James Lovelock developed new theories to explain this phenomenon, such as the Gaia Hypothesis that credits the planet with the properties of a self-regulating form of life.

Meanwhile, mathematicians emerged from their psychedelics experiences with a new appreciation for the dimensionality of the numbers with which they worked. Systems theory posited a new set of dynamic mathematical relationships between the members of natural systems and large populations. People began working with long-detested non-linear equations, discovering "fractional dimensionality," or fractals, which allowed for the mathematical comprehension of formerly unfathomable systems. By granting a cloud its fractional dimensionality, rather than reducing it to a simple sphere, mathematicians were finally able to reckon with its previously untenable surface area.

Just as the 16th Century brought with it a new technique for depicting our newfound perspective, the 1970's saw the emergence of holographic technologies, which went even further to add dimensionality to our representations. In addition to depicting depth, the holograph can represent the passage of time. As the viewer moves across the holographic image, the image itself can move -- a woman can blink her eyes, and a bird can flap its wings.

More remarkably, the holographic plate itself stores information in a way that forces us to re-evaluate the nature of matter. If a holographic plate depicting a flying bird is smashed into thousands of pieces, each piece will contain an image of the entire bird, albeit blurry. When the image is left intact, the separate images are resolved into a single image with all the necessary information. The implication, which is currently under scrutiny in fields as diverse as brain anatomy and cultural anthropology, is that each part of a system somehow contains a faint representation of the whole. When properly networked together, the total picture of reality is resolved.

The original renaissance was also inspired, in part, by a new communications technology: the printing press. Thanks to Gutenberg, the masses became literate. The Bible and other texts were no longer to be read only by the upper classes and religious elite. This led to an increasingly level playing field as far as the dissemination of information, and eventually provoked a religious reformation known as Protestantism.

By the 1980's, our current renaissance found its technological equivalent to the printing press: the personal computer. Now, individuals were empowered not merely with information but with the ability to self-publish across global networks. This marked a clear dimensional upscaling of the relationship of the individual to society at large. Each human being with a computer linked to the Internet became a node in a dynamical system, capable of feedback and iteration. We are still only beginning to reckon with the social impact of this new human interactivity.

But our computer networks give us the best clue as to the nature of our latest increase in dimensional thinking, as well as the reason why MDMA, in particular, became the drug of choice among the newly networked.

Much of early cyberculture was founded by people with psychedelic experience. It seemed that those who already had experience navigating the hallucinatory realm of the LSD trip were most comfortable learning the languages and confronting the as-yet uninvented worlds of cyberspace. As fledgling Silicon Alley firms became dependent on Grateful Deadheads and other psychedelics users as programmers, cyberculture became known as a "cyberdelic" movement. The values of the 1960's psychedelic subculture were revivified by its participants involvement in what was soon to become America's leading industry.

As if in an effort to physically and experientially actualize the networked culture they were building in cyberspace, young, hi-tech San Franciscans developed their own version of the electronic music parties they heard about from friends who had traveled to Britain and Ibeza. In Europe, the huge parties called "raves" were already commonplace. Thousands of revelers would gather in abandoned warehouses or on remote fields to dance until dawn to the throbbing beat of "acid house" music recorded originally by Detroit-based African-Americans. When the first imported raves were held in the Bay Area, however, they took on a more self-consciously evolutionary agenda.

San Francisco raves were designed to be like the famous "Acid Tests" thrown by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The music, lighting, and ambience were all fine-tuned to elicit and augment altered states of consciousness. The rhythm of the music was a precise 120 beats-per-minute, the frequency of the fetal heart rate, and the same beat used by South American shaman to bring their tribes into a trance state. Through dancing together, without prescribed movements or even partners, rave dancers sought to reach group consciousness on a level they had never experienced it before. The object of a rave was to experience a reality that went beyond the self. Ravers aspired to an awareness of group organism. Inspired by the holograms and fractals on their computers, they sought to create a dynamic system in which each member could experience the essence of the whole.

The drug they chose to assist them in this quest was MDMA.

Most of them had already experienced LSD. But the LSD trip was a personal, introspective experience. Although most individuals report a sensation of "connectedness" with the universe at the peak of an LSD experience, this realization of the oneness of reality is a largely intellectual revelation, on the order of an intense spiritual insight. For the LSD trip is epic in structure, like the Aristotelian arc of heroic journey. A rising euphoria climaxes in an ego-shattering epiphany of self-realization. Ego is destroyed, at least temporarily, and the foundations of ego and self are revealed as artificial constructs of mind. But the trip itself is spent challenging and destroying these constructs. Eventually, the tripper takes the long journey back to waking state consciousness, clutching to the insights he has garnered as he is rebirthed back into his ego-defined existence.

MDMA, which gained notoriety as an empathogen through its use by psychotherapists prior to its reclassification as an illegal substance in the 1980's, offered a trip more appropriate to the purposes of the rave. Unlike LSD, Ecstasy -- which most ravers simply called "E" -- provided an even plateau of duration than the highly arced LSD trip. Users took the drug and experienced its full effects in less time. Instead of rising to a crescendo and then releasing users into freefall, Ecstasy came on more subtly, gently coaxing its users into a mild and communicative euphoria. Instead of journeying inward, E users found themselves venturing outward.

Ecstasy's flatter and correspondingly more predictable onset and duration made it a much more practical enhancement to an eight-hour party. Its amphetamine-like side effects helped its users to dance longer and with greater energy than they might otherwise have, guaranteeing that they would be out on the floor with their newfound friends during the group's peak moments. No one wanted to be left out.

For the climax of a group E experience is not individual but collective. Where LSD subjected its users to the harsh crucible of self-analysis, E immediately proved itself a carefree, social drug. Rather than burning through an individual's obstacles to self-awareness, it melted away a group's obstacles to intimacy. Although MDMA became notorious for fostering "inappropriate bonding" in a romantic setting, it was also just as celebrated for developing group cohesion at a larger gathering.

Like alcohol, E served as a social lubricant, dissolving inhibitions and catalyzing an almost tribal sensibility. But instead of doing this by amplifying an individual's sense of power and invincibility, E's effect was to generate a sense of identification between people. It was as if a group of people taking E together was empowered collectively. The sense of individualism and personal gain one strove for in the workaday reality suddenly seemed a hollow illusion, promoted by economics, marketing, and one's own fear of exposure. Competition between individuals, and even the notion of individuated personhood seemed a farce. On MDMA, users came to regard such personal strivings and associated anguish as laughable distractions from the real business at hand: forging intimate relationships on a level previously unimaginable.

Nothing could have been more aligned with the rave's stated purpose. Though not mandatory, dosing with E was deemed extremely beneficial to a group of several thousand strangers hoping to shift itself into the headspace and heart-space of collective awareness. The rave gathering offered experiential evidence of the dimensional leap that had been calculated and depicted by holograms and fractals. It physicalized the sorts of social networking that had only been practiced on a virtual level through the Internet. Stripped of personal ambition and provoked to form emotional bonds, the revelers at a rave gathering were enabled to push their experiments in group dynamics beyond what their egos and inhibitions would have permitted otherwise.

The E seemed to serve almost as a fuel. While some believed that the MDMA molecule had an almost conscious agenda of its own, more users tended to identify their new sensibility as coming directly from the heart, uncovered and activated at last by the drug's catalytic power.

It was a three-part process. First, Ecstasy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature. Young men who had long repressed their feminine sides felt an irrepressible urge to express their "anima," or female spirit. While a few experimented with homosexuality, it usually had less to do with defining sexual identity than eradicating over-determined and intimacy-restricting social roles. In this first stage of the Ecstasy trip, users experience themselves in full spectrum and without reservation. Old or young, gay or straight, muscular or nerd everyone is okay and beautiful just exactly as he or she is.

This first stage is also the time when psychological discomfort if it is to occur generally will. Though extremely minor compared with the harrowing, hallucinatory nightmare of a bad LSD trip, a difficult E experience usually results from the user's resistance to the emotional needs or personality traits he or she has been repressing all along. The reason why negative experiences are so rare is that MDMA does not parade people's hidden traits before them, demanding that they give voice to them or else. Rather, E makes people feel so open and accepting that these orphaned personality constructs finally rise to the surface where they can be manifest without shame. The user is so open-minded and emotionally giving that he or she welcomes the formerly eschewed sentiments with open arms. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, the user generally feels consolidated and whole for the first time.

Once this process of self-acceptance is completed, the user still feels a burning need to accept more. This is when the second stage begins in earnest, and the user seeks to recognize and embrace the emotional needs and personality traits of others. With the same openness and judgment-free enthusiasm with which they embraced themselves, the users strive to accept the hearts, minds, and bodies of those around them. They understand that their friends are also experiencing and expressing new parts of themselves, and seeing the world through the same non-prejudicial eyes. The overwhelming need to empathize with one another outweighs every other consideration. This is why almost no one on Ecstasy looks to score sexual conquests or increase his or her social status. People are too busy accepting and embracing each other to care about themselves.

This is when the third stage, the action of E most important to the group as a whole, finally takes effect. The majority of the crowd soon realizes that speech and one-to-one contact is no longer a sufficient means of reaching out and accepting the thousands of other people present. That's why they turn to the dance. As part of the collective, ten-thousand-armed, dancing mass, everyone gains the ability to accept and embrace the totality of the group simultaneously. Everyone has liberated personally, accepted one another individually, and must now accept the totality of the group itself into their hearts. In a sense, they go "meta." Like the quantum physicist who realizes he cannot make an observation without finding himself under the magnifying glass, the raver realizes he is a part of the very thing he is trying to accept.

This is "magic moment" of the rave that so many people talk about for months or even years afterwards. Unlike a rock concert, which unites its audience in mutual adoration for the sexy singers on stage, the rave unites its audience in mutual adoration for one another. The DJ providing the rhythm is more of an anonymous shaman than a performer, mixing records from a remote corner of the room. The stage is the dance floor, and the stars are the revelers themselves. The group celebrates itself.

The peak of the E-xperience is when the drug and dance ritual brings the revelers into a state of collective consciousness. Descriptions of these extended moments of group awareness often fall into cliché, but they are profound, life-changing events for those who have experienced them. The dancers achieve what can only be called "group organism." That is, the individuals form a dynamical system like a coral reef, where each living individual experiences itself more as member of the collective entity than as an individuated cell.

But in lower-order hive minds, the individual members, be they bees or plankton, have little or no awareness of their own participation in the collective. Their service is instinctual, the collective to which they belong has no purpose other than mutual survival. The collective formed purposefully by E-charged ravers is the result of a ritual self-consciously performed for no purpose other than the sensibility of group mind itself.

The mass spectacle results in a fleeting but undeniable rush of collective awareness or an excellent simulation that is indistinguishable from reality. Dancers move about freely on the floor, making eye contact that feels as though one were looking in the mirror: a single being with thousands of pairs of eyes, using people who formerly thought of themselves as individuals to look at itself.

The collective awareness achieved through mass MDMA use perfectly matched the social agenda of the subculture it came to serve. In their quest to find a drug capable of forging new social bonds, the rave underground happened upon a chemical that exceeded their original expectations. Ecstasy broke social inhibitions while engendering an empathic imperative that fostered new levels of emotional bonding. But the intensity of these bonds, augmented by the self-consciously inclusive and egalitarian environment that the users had engineered for themselves, led to an entirely new and unexpected way of understanding the relationship of individuals to the larger groups they form.

Like a hologram, the human project itself is understood as a collective enterprise. Each individual contains the entire process - albeit a fuzzy, unresolved picture of that process - within him or herself. The only way to resolve the picture is to bring those individuals together into a single, coordinated, and multi-dimensional being. For those keen on enacting a renaissance of this magnitude - and hoping to do so before human beings had the ability to accept themselves, much less one another -- MDMA served as a crucial social medicine.

Ironically, perhaps, just as the hi-tech Internet tended to encourage what media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted would be "tribal" affiliations and a sense of electronic Global Village, the laboratory-born MDMA molecule spawned a similar network of tribal communities. Like "primitive" tribal people who, after ingesting various combinations of rainforest psychotropics, would dance in group trance around the shaman's fire, young, techno-savvy ravers find their newfound tribal imperative actualized on the dancefloor, and catalyzed by a chemical.

Though ingested by individuals, this powerful molecule's greatest action might be on the group.

They Call Me Cyberboy

Originally published in TIME DIGITAL

Not so long ago, I could freak people out by talking about cyberculture. It was fun. They'd laugh nervously when I'd say they'd be using email someday. They'd call me "cyberboy" and mean it as an insult. I felt like a renegade.

However frustrating it was to be an Internet evangelist in the late 1980's, it beat what I'm feeling now having won the battle. A journey into cyberspace is about as paradigm-threatening as an afternoon at the mall. The Internet is better, bigger, faster, and brighter, but the buzz is gone.

I remember when following Internet culture or, better, actually participating in it, meant witnessing the birth of a movement as radically novel as psychedelia, punk, or, I liked to imagine, the Renaissance itself.

Here was a ragtag collection of idealistic Californians, bent on wiring up the global brain, one node at a time. Every new account on the WELL - the Bay Area's pre-eminent online bulletin board, Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link - meant another convert to the great digital hot tub. The struggle of obtaining the computer, the modem, the software, the phone number and the appropriate protocol was a journey of Arthurian proportion. The community you'd find when you'd got there was as political, high-minded, and tightly knit as the Round Table. No wonder "universal access" became our Holy Grail.

Conceived on the bongwater-stained rugs of Reid College dorm rooms, the Apple personal computer bent over backwards to bring even the most stoned of us into the mix. The Macintosh soon became the central metaphor for our collective challenge to God himself. We held more than a forbidden fruit: we had the whole world in our hands. Access was power.

Our arrogance was only matched by our naivete. Like hippies scheming to dose the city's reservoir with LSD, Internet enthusiasts took a by-any-means-necessary attitude towards digital enlightenment. Getting a friend to participate in a USENET group was as rewarding to us as scoring a convert is to a Mormon.

And the beauty of it was that we were the freaks! Not just nerds, but deeply and beautifully twisted people from the very fringes of culture had finally found a home. We all had the sense that we were the first settlers of a remote frontier. We had migrated online together in order to create a new society from the ground up.

Cyberculture was hard to describe - and a good number of us got book contracts paying us to try - but it was undeniably real when experienced first hand. It was characterized by Californian idealism, do-it-yourselfer ingenuity, and an ethic of tolerance above all else. You couldn't go to a hip party in San Francisco without someone switching on a computer and demonstrating the brand new Mosaic browser for the fledgling World Wide Web. The patience with which experienced hackers walked newbies through their virgin hypertext voyages would make a sexual surrogate ashamed.

Coaxing businesses online was simply an extension of this need to share. It was less an act of profiteering than an effort to acquire some long-awaited credibility. Somehow it seemed like the revolution was taking too long; so our best-spoken advocates loaded up their laptops and made presentations to the Fortune 500. Then something happened on NASDAQ, and cyberculture was turned upside down.

It should have come as no surprise that big corporations, whose bottom line depends on public relations, direct selling, and "staying ahead of the curve," would eventually become the driving force behind cyberculture's evolution. Once the conversation itself was no longer the highest priority, marketing took its place. Though the diehards protested with the fervor of Christ ejecting moneychangers from the temple, the Internet became the domain of businessmen.

To be sure, commercial interests have taken this technology a long way. Thanks to Internet Explorer 4.0, America Online, and banner advertisements, the holy grail of universal access is within our reach. But universal access to what? Direct marketing, movies-on-demand, and up-to-the-second stock quotes?

Even if the Internet has not yet been rendered ubiquitous, it has certainly been absorbed the same mainstream culture that denied its existence and resisted its ethos for an awfully long time. True, cyberculture has inalterably changed its co-opter, but in the process has become indistinguishable from it as well.

Every day, more people conduct their daily business online. The Internet makes their lives more convenient.

I can't bring myself to see mere convenience as a victory. Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it's which browser we'll be using to buy products from the same old world.

The only way I can soothe myself is to imagine that the essentially individualistic and countercultural vibe of the Internet I once knew has simply gone into remission. Corporate money is needed to build the infrastructure that will allow the real world to get access to networking technology. By the time Microsoft and the others learn that the Web is not the direct marketing paradise they're envisioning, it will be too late. They'll have put the tools in our hands that allow us to create the interactive world we were dreaming of.

In the meantime, I now get paid for saying the same sorts of things that got me teased before. But I preferred tweaking people for free. That's why they called me cyberboy.

Clonaid

SEED Magazine March/April 2003

Media Virus column
By Douglas Rushkoff

On the sensationalized landscape of American media, scientific breakthroughs and alien fantasies often seem to walk hand in hand. It’s as if our inability to cope with the implications of a new discovery makes us susceptible to the most outlandish and unfounded claims.

Like most of America, I woke up to the Clonaid story on December 27th (I can’t help but suspect Eve was supposed to be born on Christmas day, just to stoke America’s messianic fervor). And, if for no other reason than its uncontextualized placement at the heart of the news stream, I believed it to be true for at least seven minutes. But even seven minutes is a long time when it comes to media cycles. In the minds of countless television viewers and, worse, news media professionals, the damage had been done.

For the Clonaid claim was an opportunistic media virus. As such, it fed on our current deficit of understanding and rationality—as well as our media’s cognitive dissonance—when it comes to new science.

It quickly became apparent that most major media outlets, while admitting that Clonaid’s claim was unsubstantiated, would be pressing hard on the alien angle. Cable news channels couldn’t help but delight in the eccentricity of the tube-friendly Raelians. Fox News’ Brit Hume deconstructed the otherworldly facial expressions and costumes of Raelian spokesperson Bridgette Boisellier and her robed leader, Rael himself. By nightfall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was reporting the story side by side with his cloned duplicate on a split screen special effect.

When the programmers ran out of their own tacky ideas, it was the audience’s turn to clone more clone story permutations. Radio call-in shows and participatory TV programs like CNN Talkback Live were swamped with creative, if absurd, questions and suggestions, from the notion of a mother giving birth to her twin sister to lottery winners cloning copies of themselves in order to reap double rewards. These antics would have made the Ringling Brothers—not to mention P.T. Barnum—proud.

The media circus took the place of hard facts. In fact, there were no facts—no baby, no lab reports, nothing; just an assertion. Were it not in the area of science—a science with particularly taboo associations given the public’s religious bias and ignorance of the facts—the editors and top decision-makers at our media outlets would have likely rejected the story. Or, at least they would have put it on page 16 where it belonged.

Instead, they harped endlessly on the most bizarre aspects of Raelians behind Clonaid, irresponsibly setting the alien agenda in the public mind, and forever marrying the real science of cloning with UFOs and sex cults in the cultural consciousness. Sure, the media is driven by profit. Sensationalist stories attract our eyes to the newsstands and keep our fingers off the remote control. But the hoopla surrounding the Cloneaid debacle seems rooted in something deeper than simple sensationalism.

It’s not the first time America has wrestled with a challenging new science or suffered the same associated media insanity. Back in the 1940’s, shortly after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on a real population, America’s combined sense of guilt and fear of reprisal led thousands of eyes to scan the skies for invaders from beyond. Newspapers couldn’t resist reporting each new claim and printing every doctored photo depicting alien spacecraft.

By the early 1970’s, shortly after Roe vs. Wade confirmed our commitment to a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion, UFO mythology shifted from the heavens to our bedrooms. As the Christian right mounted its religious attack on early pregnancy termination, people began reporting that they had been taken against their will by aliens whose heads looked alarmingly like those of an unborn fetus. Once abducted, the human victims were forced to undergo “suction” procedures and genital scrapings remarkably analogous to the abortionist’s D&C.

The Clonaid saga is nested in the same great mire between science, popular culture, and religion that gave rise to these epidemic UFO sightings and abductions. Our vulnerability to stories having anything to do with cloning finds its root in our ignorant, complex and unresolved relationship to genetics and science at large. This is the decade of the genome, after all, and we are facing new questions about the limits of appropriate medical research, and the essence of humanity.

It is power that frightens us so. The power to kill millions or to end the progress of one’s fetus in a simple and legal procedure freaked us out in their own eras as they emerged. The public’s all-too-primitive understanding of genetic engineering, likewise, makes us feel as though we are on the brink of having access to the kinds of decision-making we had always deferred to higher powers.

We are at one of those moments where we fear we have overstepped our bounds. And rather than discussing all this intelligently, we are racing back to our ideological and religious predilections.

Into the void step the Moral Right, smelling something along the lines of abortion. They rush to equate stem cell research with baby killing, and genetic mapping with a Gnostic alchemist’s challenge to God’s authority. Hell, they’re still fighting the theory of evolution for its affront to the creation myth of Genesis and the alternative it offers us to the predetermined fires of Armageddon.

Meanwhile, the keepers of the biomedical stock indices put their heads in a different sort of sand, maintaining the equally absurd proposition that we are on the brink of absolute mastery of the human genome, and thus well within striking range of eliminating cancer, choosing eye color, intelligence, and disposition.

Along come the Raelians, who we call a “cult” for having followers that believe that DNA was planted on earth by an alien species, and that it is our destiny to develop the ability to manipulate our own genetic material and even push life extension to the point of infinity.

Really, how much more absurd is this than the contention of so very many Americans that we were created by an all-powerful being, and that it is our destiny to await the return of a man-God, his son, who will deliver us into eternal bliss beyond the confines of our bodies?

Is the notion of DNA arriving on earth extra terrestrially and then finding a suitable breeding ground in our warm nitrogen-rich soup really more improbable than the accepted hypothesis of a spontaneous leap in molecular self-organization from amino acids to proteins to, well, life?

We’ll be defenseless against the cultists and the media they are getting so very good at manipulating as long as we refuse to recognize the cults into which we’ve fallen ourselves. We must not respond to each new scientific discovery with the reactive fear that it will shake the foundations of our religious narratives. Neither can we develop a surefire business plan or new global society around the untested promise of every promising breakthrough.

Until we find a reason to grow up, our relationship to science—particularly in the area of reproduction—will remain hopelessly stymied by our self-imposed immaturity. We respond to stories about reproductive science like giggly junior high school kids first hearing about nocturnal emissions in hygiene class. Our uneasiness can certainly be alleviated through comedy on Letterman or Leno, but it will only be exacerbated when our serious news media involuntarily succumb to the same urges as our late-night clowns.

But the God-like abilities coming soon to a laboratory near you demand we all grow up, and grow up fast. Education about the fundamental opportunities and liabilities of any scientific breakthrough is no longer a luxury, but a responsibility. They cannot be deferred to those who “know better,” because these leaders are simply taking their cue from us.

We must demand that our news media—at least some of the time—treat us like adults who need to make real decisions for ourselves and our futures based on what they tell us. They are our first line of defense against those who mean to deliver their own agendas in the Trojan Horse of misunderstood science. While they’re on the job, anyway, they must resist the temptation to turn every alien idea into an invader from Mars. The airplay it earns isn’t worth the price.

Bart Simpson, Anti-Hero

The Simpsons are the closest thing in America to a national media literacy program. By pretending to be a kids' cartoon, the show gets away with murder - that is, the virtual murder of our most coercive media iconography and techniques. For what began as an entertaining interstitial material for an alternative network variety show has revealed itself, in the 21st Century, as nothing short of a media revolution.

Maybe that's the very reason the Simpsons worked so well. The Simpsons were born to provide the Tracey Ullman show with a way of cutting to commercial breaks. Their very function as a form of media was to bridge the discontinuity inherent to broadcast television. They existed to pave over the breaks. But rather than dampening the effects of these gaps in the broadcast stream, they heightened them. They acknowledged the jagged edges and recombinant forms behind the glossy patina of American television, and by doing so, initiated its deconstruction.

Consider, for a moment, the way we thought of media before this cartoon family quite literally satirized us into consciousness. Media used to be a top-down affair. A few rich guys in suits sat in offices at the tops of tall buildings and decided which stories would be in the headlines or on the evening news, and how they would be told.

As a result, we came to think of information as something that got fed to us from above. We counted on the editors of the New York Times to deliver "all the news that's fit to print," and Walter Cronkite to tell us "that's way it was." We had no reason not to trust the editorial decisions of the media managers upon whom we depended to present, accurately, what was going on in the world around us. In fact, most of us didn't even realize such decisions were being made at all. The TV became America's unquestioned window to the world, as the Simpson's opening sequence - which shows each family member rushing home to gather at the TV set - plainly acknowledges.

But we call the stuff on television programming for a reason. No, television programmers are not programming television sets or evening schedules; they're programming the viewers. Whether they are convincing us to buy a product, vote for a candidate, adopt an ideology, or simply confirm a moral platitude, the underlying reason for making television is to hold onto our attention and then sell us a bill of goods. Since the time of the Bible and Aristotle through today's over-determined three-act action movies, the best tool at the programmer's disposal has been the story. But, thanks to interactive technologies like the remote control, and cynical attitudes like Bart Simpson's, the story just doesn't hold together anymore.

For the most part, television stories program their audiences by bringing them into a state of tension. The author creates a character we like, and gets us to identify with the hero's plight. Then the character is put into jeopardy of one sort or another. As the character moves up the incline plane towards crisis, we follow him vicariously, while taking on his anxiety as our own. Helplessly we follow him into danger, disease, or divorce, and just when we can't take any more tension without bursting, our hero finds a way out. He finds a moral, a product, an agenda, or a strategy - the one preferred by the screenwriter or his sponsor, of course - that rescues him from and danger, and his audience from the awful vicarious anxiety. Then everyone lives happily ever after. This is what it means to "enter-tain" -- literally "to hold within" -- and it only works on a captive audience.

In the old days of television, when character would get into danger, the viewer had little choice but to submit. To change the channel would have required getting up out of the La-Z-Boy chair, walking up to the television set, and turning the dial. 50 calories of human effort. That's too much effort for a man of Homer's generation, anyway.

The remote control changed all that. With an expenditure of, perhaps, .0001 calories, the anxious viewer is liberated from tortuous imprisonment and free to watch another program. Although most well-behaved adult viewers will soldier on through a story, kids raised with remotes in their hands have much less reverence for well-crafted story arcs, and zap away without a moment's hesitation. Instead of watching one program, they skim through ten at a time. They don't watch TV, they watch the television, guiding their own paths through the entirety of media rather than following the prescribed course of any one programmer.

No matter how much we complain about our kids' short attention spans or even their Attention Deficit Disorder, their ability to disconnect from programming has released them from the hypnotic spell of even the best TV mesmerizers.

The Nintendo joystick further empowers them while compounding the programmer's dilemma. In the old days, the TV image was unchangeable. Gospel truth piped into the home from the top of some glass building. Today, kids have the experience of manipulating the image on the screen. This has fundamentally altered their perception of and reverence for the television image. Just as the remote control allows viewers to deconstruct the television image, the joystick has demystified the pixel itself. The newsreader is just another middle-aged man manipulating his joystick. Hierarchy and authority are diminished, and the programmers' weapons neutralized.

Sure, they might sit back and watch a program now and again -- but they do so voluntarily, and with full knowledge of their complicity. It is not an involuntary surrender.

A person who is doing rather than receiving is much less easily provoked into a state of tension. The people I call "screenagers," those raised with interactive devices in their media arsenals, are natives in a mediaspace where even the best television producers are immigrants. Like Bart, they speak the language better, and see through those clumsy attempts to program them into submission. They never forget for a moment that they are watching media, and resent those who try to draw them in and sell them something. They will not be part of a "target market." At least not without a fight.

So, then, what kind of television does appeal to such an audience? Programs that celebrate the screenager's irreverence for the image, while providing a new sort of narrative arc for the sponsor-wary audience. It's the ethos and behavior embodied by screenager role-model and anti-hero Bart Simpson.

His name intended as an anagram for "brat," Bart embodies youth culture's ironic distance from media and its willingness to dissemble and resplice even the most sacred meme constructs. From with the plastic safety of his incarnation as an animated character, Bart can do much more than just watch and comment on media iconography. Once a media figure has entered his animated world, Bart can interact with it, satirize it, or even become it. Although the Simpsons began on adult television, these animated tidbits became more popular than the live-action portion of the Tracy Ullman show and Fox Television decided to give the Simpson family their own series. It is not coincidental that what began as a bridging device between a show and its commercials--a media paste--developed into a self-similar media pastiche.

"The Simpsons'" creator, comic-strip artist Matt Groening (rhymes with "raining"), has long understood the way to mask his countercultural agenda. "I find you can get away with all sorts of unusual ideas if you present them with a smile on your face," he said in an early 1990's interview. In fact the show's mischievous ten-year-old protagonist is really just the screen presence of Groening's true inner nature. For his self-portrait in a Spin magazine article, Groening simply drew a picture of Bart and then scribbled the likeness of his own glasses and beard over it. Bart functions as Matt Groening's "smile," and the child permits him--and the show's young, Harvard-educated writing staff--to get away with a hell of a lot. "The Simpsons" takes place in a town called Springfield, named after the fictional location of "Father Knows Best," making it clear that the Simpson family is meant as a nineties answer to the media reality presented to us in the fifties and sixties. This is the American media family turned on its head, told from the point of view of not the smartest member of the family, but the most ironic. Audiences delight in watching Bart effortlessly outwit his parents, teachers, and local institutions. This show is so irreverent that it provoked an attack from George Bush, who pleaded for the American family to be more like the Waltons than the Simpsons. The show's writers quickly responded, letting Bart say during one episode, "Hey, man, we're just like the Waltons. Both families are praying for an end to the depression." The show shares many of the viral features of other nineties programs. Murphy Brown's office dartboard, for example, was used as a meme slot; in each episode it has a different satirical note pinned to it. The "Simpsons'" writers also create little slots for the most attentive viewers to glean extra memes. The opening credits always begin with Bart writing a different message on his classroom bulletin board and contain a different saxophone solo from his sister, Lisa. Every episode has at least one film reenactment, usually from Hitchcock or Kubrick, to satirize an aspect of the modern cultural experience. In a spoof of modern American child care, writers re-created a scene from The Birds, except here, Homer Simpson rescued his baby daughter from a daycare center by passing through a playground of menacingly perched babies.

These media references form the basis for the show's role as a media literacy primer. The joy of traditional television storytelling is simply getting to the ending. The reward is making it through to the character's escape from danger. While most episodes of the Simpsons incorporate a dramatic nod to such storytelling convention, the screenagers watching the program couldn't care less about whether Principle Skinner gets married, or if Homer finds his donut. These story arcs are there for the adult viewers only. No, the pleasure of watching the Simpsons for its media-literate (read: younger) viewers is the joy of pattern recognition. The show provides a succession of "aha" moments - those moments when we recognize which other forms of media are being parodied. We are rewarded with self-congratulatory laughter whenever we make a connection between the scene we are watching and the movie, commercial, or program on which it is based.

In this sense, The Simpsons deconstructs and informs the media soup of which it is a part. Rather than drawing us into the hypnotic spell of the traditional storyteller, the program invites us to make active and conscious comparisons of its own scenes with those of other, less transparent, media forms. By doing so, the show's writers help us in our efforts to develop immunity to their coercive effects.

The show's supervisors through The Simpsons' golden years of the mid-1990's, Mike Reiss and Al Jean, were both Harvard Lampoon veterans. When I met with them on the Fox lot, they told me how they delighted in animation's ability to serve as a platform for sophisticated social and media satire. "About two thirds of the writers have been Harvard graduates," explained Jean, "so it's one of the most literate shows in TV."

"We take subjects on the show," added Reiss, who was Jean's classmate, "that we can parody. Homer goes to college or onto a game show. We'll take Super Bowl Sunday, and the parody the Bud Bowl, and how merchants capitalize on the event." Having been raised on media themselves, the Diet Coke-drinking, baseball-jacketed pair gravitated toward parodying the media aspects of the subjects they pick. They did not comment on social issues as much as they did the media imagery around a particular social issue.

"These days television in general seems to be feeding on itself. Parodying itself," Jean told me. "Some of the most creative stuff we write comes from just having the Simpsons watch TV." Which they did often. Many episodes are still about what happens on the Simpsons' own TV set, allowing the characters to feed off television, which itself is feeding off other television. In this self-reflexive circus, it is only Bart who refuses to be fooled by anything. His father, Homer, represents an earlier generation and can easily be manipulated by TV commercials and publicity stunts like clear beer. "Homer certainly falls for every trick," admitted Reiss, "even believing the Publishers Clearing House mailing that he is a winner." When Homer acquired an illegal cable TV hookup, he became so addicted to the tube that he almost died. Lisa, the brilliant member of the family, maintains a faith in the social institutions of her world, works hard to get good grades in school, and even entered and won a Reader's Digest essay contest about patriotism.

"But Lisa feels completely alienated by the media around her," Jean warned me. "The writers empathize with her more than any other character. She has a more intellectual reaction to how disquieting her life has become. When Homer believes he may die from a heart attack, he tells the children, 'I have some terrible news.' Lisa answers, 'Oh, we can take anything. We're the MTV generation. We feel neither highs nor lows.' Homer asks what it's like, and she just goes 'Eh.' It was right out there."

Bart's reaction to his cultural alienation, on the other hand, is much more of a lesson in GenX strategy. Bart is a ten-year-old media strategist - or at least an unconscious media manipulator - and his exploits reveal the complexity of the current pop media from the inside out. In one episode - the show that earned Reiss and Jean their first Emmy nomination - Homer sees a commercial for a product he feels will make a great birthday gift for Bart: a microphone that can be used to broadcast to a special radio from many feet away (a parody of a toy called Mr. Microphone). At first Bart is bored with the gift and plays with a labeler he also received instead. Bart has fun renaming things and leaving messages like "property of Bart Simpson" on every object in his home; one such label on a beer in the fridge convinces Homer that the can is off limits. Bart's joy, clearly, is media . . . and subversive disinformation.

Homer plays with the radio instead, trying to get Bart's interest, but the boy knows the toy does not really send messages into the mediaspace; it only broadcasts to one little radio. Bart finally takes interest in the toy when he realizes its subversive value. After playing several smaller-scale pranks, he accidentally drops the radio down a well and gets the idea for his master plan. Co-opting a media event out of real history, when a little girl struggled for life at the bottom of a well as rescuers worked to save her and the world listened via radio, Bart uses his toy radio to fool the world and launch his own media virus.

He creates a little boy named Timmy O'Toole, who cries for help from the bottom of the well. When police and rescuers prove too fat to get into the well to rescue the boy, a tremendous media event develops. News teams set up camp around the well, much in the fashion they gather around any real-world media event like the OJ Trial or Waco stand-off. They conduct interviews with the unseen Timmy--an opportunity Bart exploits to make political progress against his mean school principal. In Timmy's voice he tells reporters the story of how he came to fall into the well: He is an orphan, new to the neighborhood, and was rejected for admission to the local school by the principal because his clothes were too shabby. The next day, front-page stories calling for the principal's dismissal appear. Eventually the virus grows to the point where real-world pop musician, Sting, and Krusty the Clown, a TV personality from within the world of "The Simpsons," record an aid song and video to raise money for the Timmy O'Toole cause called "We're Sending Our Love Down the Well." The song hits number one on the charts.

So Bart, by unconsciously exploiting a do-it-yourself media toy to launch viruses, feeds back to mainstream culture. He does this both as a character in Springfield, USA, and as a media icon in our datasphere, satirizing the real Sting's charity recordings. The character Bart gets revenge against his principal and enjoys a terrific prank. The icon Bart conducts a lesson in advanced media activism. But, most importantly, it is through Bart that the writers of "The Simpsons" are enabled to voice their own, more self-conscious comments on the media.

Finally, in the story, Bart remembers that he has put a label on his radio toy, earmarking it "property of Bart Simpson." He decides he better get it out of the well before the radio, and his own identity, is discovered. In his attempt to get the damning evidence out from the bottom of the well, however, Bart really does fall in. He calls for help, admitting what he has done. But once there is a real child in the well - and one who had attempted to play a prank on the media - everyone loses interest in the tragedy. The virus is blown. The Sting song plummets on the charts, and the TV news crews pack up and leave. It is left to Bart's mom and dad to dig him out by hand. In our current self-fed media, according to the writers of "The Simpsons," a real event can have much less impact than a constructed virus, especially when its intention is revealed.

No matter how activist the show appears, its creators insist that they have no particular agenda. Reiss, insisted he promoted no point of view on any issue. In fact he claimed to have picked the show's subjects and targets almost randomly: "The show eats up so much material that we're constantly just stoking it like a furnace when we parody a lot of movies and TV. And now so many of our writers are themselves the children of TV writers. There's already a second generation rolling in of people who not only watched TV but watched tons of it. And this is our mass culture. Where everyone used to know the catechism, now they all know episodes of 'The Twilight Zone,' our common frame of reference."

Reiss was being deceptively casual. Even if he and the other writers claim to have no particular agenda - which is debatable - they readily admit to serving the media machine as a whole. As writers, they see themselves as "feeding" the show and using other media references as the fodder. It is as if the show is a living thing, consuming media culture, recombining it, and spitting it out as second-generation media. With a spin.

Even Bart is in on the gag. In one episode, when Homer is in the hospital, the family stands around his sick bed recalling incidents from the past, leading to a satire of the flashback format used by shows to create a new episode out of "greatest hit" scenes from old ones. As the family reminisces together about past events, Bart raises a seeming non sequitur. His mother, Marge, asks him, "Why did you bring that up?" "It was an amusing episode," replies Bart, half looking at the camera, before he quickly adds ". . . of our . . . lives." Bart knows he's on a TV show and knows the kinds of tricks his own writers use to fill up airtime.

Such self-consciousness is what allows "The Simpsons" to serve as a lesson in modern media discontinuity. Bart skateboards through each episode, demonstrating the necessary ironic detachment needed to move through increasingly disorienting edits. "It's animation," explained Jean, who has since returned to writing for the program. "It's very segmented, so we just lift things in and out. If you watch an old episode of 'I Love Lucy,' you'll find it laborious because they take so long to set something up. The thesis of the Simpsons' is nihilism. There's nothing to believe in anymore once you assume that organized structures and institutions are out to get you."

"Right," chimed in Reiss, finally admitting to an agenda. "The overarching point is that the media's stupid and manipulative, TV is a narcotic, and all big institutions are corrupt and evil." These writers make their points both in the plots of the particular episodes and in the cut-and-paste style of the show. By deconstructing and reframing the images in our media, they allow us to see them more objectively, or at least with more ironic distance. They encourage us to question the ways institutional forces are presented to us through the media and urge us to see the fickle nature of our own responses. Figures from the television world are represented as cartoon characters not just to accentuate certain features, but to allow for total recontextualization of their identities. These are not simple caricatures, but pop cultural samples, juxtaposed in order to illuminate the way they effect us.

As writers and producers, Reiss and Jean served almost as "channels" for the media, as received through their own attitudinal filters. While they experience their function as simply to "stoke the furnace," the media images they choose to dissemble are the ones they feel need to be exposed and criticized.

Reiss admitted to me, ''I feel that in this way 'The Simpsons' is the ultimate of what you call a media virus. It sounds a little insidious because I have kids of my own, and the reason we're a hit is because so many kids watch us and make us a huge enterprise. But we're feeding them a lot of ideas and notions that they didn't sign on for. That's not what they're watching for. We all come from this background of comedy that has never been big and popular--it's this Letterman school or 'Saturday Night Live,' Harvard Lampoon, National Lampoon. We used to be there, too."

The Simpsons provided its writers with a durable viral shell for their most irreverent memes: "It's as though we finally found a vehicle for this sensibility, where we can do the kind of humor and the attitudes, yet in a package that more people are willing to embrace. I think if it were a live-action show, it wouldn't be a hit," Reiss concluded quite accurately.

In the mainstream media, only kids' TV appears sufficiently innocuous to permit such high levels of irreverence. Like a Trojan Horse, the Simpsons sneaks into our homes looking like one thing, before releasing something else, far different, into our lives. The audience interested in the program's subversive doctrine may not be large enough to keep the show in prime time, but the millions of kids who tune in every week to watch Bart's antics are.

If the Simpsons fades in popularity in the coming decade, it will merely be a testament to the show having accomplished its purpose. Once we fully recognize the way that our media attempts to make us care about things we ought best not care about - from the label on our sneakers to the hair style of our politicians - Bart's lesson in media literacy and activism will be complete.

Let it Grow

Originally published in Adbusters
November 1999

It's not easy being a marketer these days, especially a teen marketer. Budgets are down, the promises heralded by Internet commerce have all but vanished, and the kids themselves?those very kids who you are hoping to attract?hate you and everything you're trying to do to them. There are more than 32 million teenagers in the United States, spending $100 billion on themselves every year, and directly influencing the spending of another $50 billion by their parents. And, unlike most consumers, teens spend their money almost exclusively on luxury purchases such as music, designer clothes and movie tickets?purchases that have almost nothing to do with product attributes or intrinsic value, and everything to do with branding. This makes teens your holy grail: the ultimate target market. It's also why there are so many of you out there, desperately competing for their attention and their loyalty. You put an average of 3,000 television and print advertisements in front of the American teenager each day. It's a crowded media space. How can you make your brands appear cooler than anyone else's?

For most of you, the answer rests with research. You hire high-priced, young anthropologists armed with Polaroid cameras to follow teens around and document their activities, their piercings and their tattoos. Problem is, once you identify a new style or trend, you seize upon it and then pump it out across the breadth of the broadcast universe. Then it's no longer cool, but ubiquitous. So the kids move onto something else, and the cycle begins again.

If you put yourselves in the shoes of your customers, rather than simply noting which brand of sneaker they've purchased, you'd find out that just as you use all the tools at your disposal to trap them, they use everything at theirs to avoid you. Kids armed with remote controls surf away from your paid programming as soon as they can identify it as marketing. The way around that seems to be to turn entertainment into marketing. Movies and television programs are themselves extended commercials for the rock groups, fashions and lifestyles appearing in them. MTV is an end-to-end advertisement; there's no need to cut to commercial because the programs are themselves ads, often paid for by the company or film studio whose product is being featured.

You closed the loop. Even teen rebellion is a marketing trend, sold to kids in the form of rage rock bands like Limp Bizkit or faux sexual liberation icons like Britany Spears. But today's coolest cool kids are learning to see corporations and consumption as the enemy. Witness the news footage of demonstrators outside World Trade Organization meetings. It would seem that there's no winning. But what if the job of marketers isn't to predict teen trends, but to create real possibilities for new ones?

If so, the alternative would be to seek out or even conceive new companies that are making products or creating experiences of genuine value. It's been done before. Take video games.. In 1998, the industry took the business world by surprise by surpassing Hollywood in total revenue and profits. It happened organically: Games provided kids with an alternative media experience?one where their interaction encouraged skills such as problem-solving and learning new interfaces. Many games offered kids the ability to create their own worlds. Video games were empowering.

Larger corporations took notice of this thriving electronic subculture and began applying conventional wisdom to an unconventional business. Instead of relying on the game culture and its community of diehard fans to develop new games and ideas--as they had been--game companies got greedy and impatient. They began to leverage existing media properties, such as TV and movie characters, into games instead of inventing new ones. They began instituting high licensing fees and other barriers to development, so that young, independent shops could no longer develop for the major platforms. After all, this was now big business.

They conducted focus groups and market surveys, which led inevitably toward an emphasis on least-common denominators such as sex and violence. By adopting a top-down development scheme, they ended up destroying the bottom-up culture that they should have been nourishing. In short, they made the same mistake that almost everyone makes in marketing to kids: They destroyed the thing they should have been promoting. And, predictably, game revenues went down.

The way I see it, marketers have two choices. Either create products and brands with genuine value, or give young people the tools to develop their own. In order to recognize what's valuable, try to determine whether the product you're pushing comes from an organic culture. Skateboard clothes do; the manufactured fantasies of the Abercrombie and Finch catalog do not. Pogs and baseball cards appeal to an innate desire to collect, learn and trade. Pokemon cards exploit this desire by turning obsessive purchasing into a crucial part of the game.

Promote as much autonomy as possible. Think guitars, cameras, and editing systems. True, it's hard to brand creative experiences, and if young people are actually making videos and music for themselves, it could compromise their loyalty to Britney. But then again, maybe teens have something more to offer our society than their disposable income. Let's find out.

The Sabbath Revolt

Printed in Adbusters no.34, 1999

When I was a kid, we lived in a relatively modest neighborhood and shared one barbecue pit at the end of the block. Every weekend, anyone could go down there and make some hotdogs. Parents would even cook for one another's kids. When we got a bit wealthier, we moved out to the suburbs. There, each family had its own barbecue in the backyard. Instead of barbecuing with the neighbors, we competed with them. "The Jones's have sirloin, so we better get filet mignon!"

Sure, in the suburban sprawl schema, the Weber Grill company gets to sell a whole lot more barbecues, but our experience of community is surrendered to the needs of the marketplace.

I've been making this argument for the past couple of years in articles and speeches around the US. Then, just last month, a libertarian magazine made a fascinating critique of my work that they believed should neutralize such anti-corporate sentiments: Those of us taking a stand against the marketplace as the dominant social paradigm are only doing so in order to make money!

That's right - the whole 'leftie' thing is a disingenuous scam to sell books, posters, and magazines like this one. We're actually in it for the profit.

What makes this argument particularly perplexing is that, if it were true, shouldn't the libertarians praise us? We would be adhering, after all, to the very principles they espouse! We are simply providing a product that meets consumer demand, and - because we don't really believe the rhetoric we spew - we are doing so without prejudice or forethought. We are as blameless as corporations selflessly catering to the will of the all-powerful consumer. Just like global conglomerates, we - the merchants of Marx - are simply appealing to a target market. In our case, we sell a hip, anti-consumerist aesthetic to people who fall into the Seattle Demonstrator psychographic.

This kind of circular, self-perpetuating analysis is symptomatic of a society getting itself into some serious ideological trouble. We are so inundated by the free market's rhetorical whitewash that we are fast approaching what can only be labeled "market fascism": a social contract that can no longer tolerate any opinion or event that doesn't serve the speculative economy. Its adherents can't understand motivation in any other terms than profit-mindedness; they can't imagine alternatives to the logic of capitalism. Those who can conceive of counter-currents become the latest-variety "enemy of the state." The state itself, of course, is to be reduced to the barest regulation required for the free flow of capital and protection of property. Market opponents must be eliminated or, better, assimilated. The bottom line really does become the bottom line.

Currently, trillions of dollars and man-hours are being spent to lock down just such a reality template. Through intimidation, reward, and an odd scheme of justifications, the market is yearning towards the status of sacred doctrine. While it's still permitted, let's deconstruct some of its sacred cows before they become our only source of milk.

The first faulty premise of market fascism is that consumption invariably leads to an expression of democratic will - that we vote with our dollars. In this sense, corporations conduct focus groups, polling, and other forms of cultural anthropology, and justify this information gathering as an effort to get to the heart of what people really want.

In reality, the results of such studies are divided into two categories: desires that can be monetized, and those that can't. If focus groups conducted by the music industry, for example, determine that kids want to hear songs made by their own neighbors, record labels do not rush to market songs by anonymous teens. Instead, they use this information to construct publicity campaigns for the groups they have already decided to back.

No, the reduction of the role of citizens to that of consumers does not translate into cash register democracy. It means that the scope of our influence has been reduced to very limited conversation with our marketers.

Market fascists dismiss such arguments, claiming that we are paranoid leftists, imagining a conspiracy between a group of fictitious marketers and corporate chiefs-- that such people do not really exist. In a sense, they are right. In the corporate reality, no one is in charge.

When you walk into the GAP, a young clerk will initiate a well-researched sales technique called GAPACT (Greet Approach Provide Add-on Close Thank). Should we be mad at her? Of course not. She's just doing what her manager has told her to do. If she doesn't end the day with a certain quota of multiple-item sales, she'll get in trouble. So do we blame her manager? No. He's got to meet a quota, too, set by corporate headquarters. Do we blame the marketing department? Well, they're just taking their orders from the CEO. And he's just taking his from the Board of Directors. And they're just listening to their shareholders. And those shareholders, well, they're some of the same people walking in the door as customers, who happen to have GAP stock in the mutual funds of their retirement plans.

The whole thing is on automatic. Although corporations may have the legal rights of human beings, they aren't human at all. A corporation is just a set of code - like a computer program - a recipe for making money. The human beings enacting the code, from executives to customers to marketers, become part of the machine.

Worse still, today we are empowering our corporations with the most advanced techniques of persuasion known to science. I'm not talking about discredited notions like subliminal advertising, but much more pernicious forms of influence, like neurolinguistic programming, regression and transference, pacing and leading, and other forms of hypnosis. Sure, marketers and advertisers have always used versions of these techniques, but never have we extended and automated them through computers and onto the Internet. The Internet gives the formerly abstract corporate entity its eyes and ears. Consumer feedback is instantaneously recorded, compiled, shared, and acted upon. There is no need for human intervention, or, of course, the conscience or ethical considerations that might slow any of this down. Sell more stuff in less time with higher profit is the only corporate command set.

Like most Adbusters' readers, I've spent a good deal of time examining how these techniques work. Suffice to say, the way to make people buy things they don't really want is by making them tense. In order to sell unnecessary goods, you must convince people they are unhappy so that they yearn to make their lives better - to fill in that sad vacuum. The plain truth is rarely put this plainly: A marketer's job is to make people unhappy.

And that gets us back to the oldest trick in the book for keeping people in line: take intimacy away from them. If a teenage boy is sitting on the couch next to his girlfriend, he's less likely to be persuaded to buy those jeans in the TV commercial. He's already getting laid! So what are the marketer's alternatives? Get the girl to worry about how her boyfriend's clothes reflect on her, or, better, find a way to keep the kids from having sex at all.

This all became stridently clear to me a few months ago, when I was asked to appear in a debate on CNN about censorship online. They had me up against a "family values" advocate. I was supposed to argue that the right to free speech outweighed the concerns of parents about what sorts of pornography their kids might stumble upon while surfing the web. As the debate went on, I realized we were all accepting the premise that kids should be protected from sexual imagery. What studies have ever been done to prove it's dangerous for kids to see pictures of people having sex? We let kids watch sitcoms in which parents regularly lie to one another - but we fear what will happen if they see people making love?

My point is not that kids should be exposed to porn. Rather, it is that the sacred truths we hold be self-evident are, in fact, blasphemous distortions of social reality intended to reduce thinking human beings into compliant consumers . This, combined with marketing techniques designed to limit human agency to impulsive Pavlovian responses, leads to an unthinking, unquestioning, and absolutely unfulfilled population, ripe for market fascism.

The irony here is that religion might actually serve as a last line of defense against this branded cultural imperialism. Adbusters' annual "Buy Nothing Day" used to occur once a week as a long-forgotten ritual called "Sabbath." Once every seven days, the Judeo-Christian founders concluded a few millennia ago, people should take a break from the cycle of consumption and production.

Imagine trying to practice Sabbath today. What's left to do that doesn't involve paying for admission? Are they any public spaces left other than the mall? Though the Sabbath was widely celebrated even 10 years ago, it now falls outside the imaginable for the market fascists: Wouldn't it throw the economy into a recession?

Perhaps, but it would also give us 24 hours each week to restore a bit of autonomy into our own affairs. The hard right has claimed the spiritual high ground (as a way of promoting market values) but it may actually belong to us. It's our way of disengaging from the corporate machine, unplugging from the matrix, and considering whether we would rather have a communal barbecue pit at the end of the block. It's not time off; it's time "on." It's a sacred space for the living. We might even use it to have sex.

Articles and Essays

Hacking The Economy May 2009
H+ Magazine

Let it Die: Why we should let big banking fail. May 2009
Arthur Online

Stimulus, Ass-Backwards April 2009
Arthur Online

How I Became an Enemy of the People June 2009
The Daily Beast

Too Big to Live: Why Letting Banks Fail Is Actually Good For Real People
June 2009
Change This / CEO Reads

Futurenomics Janurary 2009, page 36
Holland Herald

Don't Judge Judaism by the Numbers, November 20 2002
New York Times OpEd about why Judaism's biggest concern should be something other than itself.

AOL/TimeWarner Was Doomed from the Start, July 25 2002
The Guardian of London runs the OpEd I wrote when the merger was first announced - the piece that got canceled by the NYTimes.

Yahoo Internet Life, "Playing God", December 2001
The Net is the antidote to fundamentalism, forcing us to look deeply at our beliefs and to challenge the stories of the past.

Sportswear International, "The Pursuit of Cool", 2001
Rushkoff speaks directly to marketers about the social costs of their heinous youth targeting methods.

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times
A Computer Ate My Book, Douglas Rushkoff
An anthology of original essays from our most intriguing young writers.

We know what you want: How they change your mind. 2005
Introduction to Martin Howard book, We Know What You Want

Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print. Edited by David Wallis

Wrestling with Zion.Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Leaving Springfield.The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture

Disinformation: The Interviews.
Richard Metzger interviews Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson, Peter Russel, many others, and me, in a nice colorful package.

Communication and Cyberspace
A graduate-school level textbook on "social interaction in an electronic environment." Essay from me on renaissance culture

Yahoo Internet Life, "The People’s Net", July 2001
The Internet is back, alive and well. It may be a little shell-shocked, but that's only because it's just won a war.

Esquire, "Timothy Leary's High-Dive", August 1996
A personal account of Timothy Leary’s death.

Swing Magazine, "Playing Undead", April 1995
Rushkoff explores the underground world of Camarilla, a live vampire-themed fantasy role-playing game.



The Sabbath Revolt, March/April 1999
If It's A Free Market, Why Does it Cost So Much?

Let it Grow, November 1999
What if we all decided to take our cues from kids?

Bart Simpson, Anti-Hero

Clonaid, Media Virus Column, SEED Magazine, March/April 2003

They Call Me Cyberboy

E: Prescription for Cultural Renaissance, 2001

The Facial

The Jewish Week, "Welcoming One Another", April 25 2003

All God's Children, They Got Vings

Microsoft Marches On, The New York Times, June 25 1998

Suicide Jews, New York Press, June 11-14 2003
The self-imposed death of institutional Judaism.

Playing With Fractals
An introdution to the art of Sarah Sze.

Which One of These Sneakers is Me?
How Marketers Outsmart Our Media-Savvy Children.

We Are the Programmers
It all began with the remote control.

What's Next

Hidden Architecture
The real space of cyberspace.