Saturday
Jan242009
Julian's Lounge
Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 10:44AM
Interview with Douglas Rushkoff
February 26, 2001
by Julian Sanchez
Julian Sanchez: Let me start with a sort of general observation. You started out at 26 with a book on getting high with meditation, as opposed to drugs, and moved on to writing about rave culture, then about bottom-up media-jamming, and then the flip side of that, with a book on media coercion.
Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I had Playing the Future between the two, and…
JS: Oh that's right, and the novel [Ecstasy Club] also fits into the "rave culture" rubric, but with a more cynical kind of… well, not cynical but less… optimistic...
DR: Playing the Future, then the novel, then Coercion.
JS: And then Playing the Future kind of fit in with Media Virus.
DR: Ultra-optimistic
JS: Young people taking control of the media
DR: "Don't worry about us." There's a libertarian argument in Playing the Future, too.
JS: It seems the common thread there is an idea of "dropping out" in various ways, either into a meditative state, or into rave culture, or into alternative media. What unites these? Do you see each thing as being part of one project, and if it is, what are you trying to do?
DR: What I'm trying to do, I think, long term, is expand consciousness a bit. I want to let people… I want to promote autonomy. Both autonomy in action and autonomy in thought, and at the beginning it was just saying, look, the war on drugs is one thing, the war on consciousness is another. And they can make the drugs illegal, but the states of consciousness the drugs offer are accessible through other means, and we shouldn't lose those technologies. Then the Internet came around and I was like, wow, OK, here are a lot of people playing with alternate realities. You know, with technology, with rave culture, with electronics… you know, with all that stuff. They were exploring and experiencing alternate ways of seeing our world, and I've always been a believer that while the reality tunnel that we've built for ourselves in Western culture is very useful for certain things, it's also limited in certain ways, and that there's something to be said for people realizing this is just one alternative and that there's a lot of other ways to see what's going on. And I was very enthusiastic about the way that media seemed to be proliferating in the late 80s and early 90s was allowing for very weird ideas to spread very rapidly through sort of a high-leverage point in what seemed like a more chaotic media space.
Then youth culture seemed to be promoting all these very trippy, even if quasi-new age, certainly trippy ideas about evolution and coevolution with technology and kids being empowered through technology in ways that adults weren't and kids seeing through public relations and being willing to sort of build a world in their own image rather than following all the blueprints left before them. I wrote Ecstasy Club to show that if kids do it in a way that's so desperately and intentionally countercultural, they end up falling into another set of utopian traps, where it's just evolve by any means necessary with no direction at all.
Then I realized my books were not reaching the mainstream culture, were not reaching people like my parents and grandparents because they weren't really media literate yet. They didn't even know how the media they were looking at was constructed, or that it was not true, you know. So I wanted to write Coercion just to say, as basically a primer in influence so people could see "Oh, I get it, when I'm made to feel anxious, when I'm made to feel like a kid, it's for a reason, and people are influencing me in ways I might not know." Not to get into mind control and craziness and conspiracy theories, but just to say, OK let's bring everyone up to speed, so they can realize their values might not be intrinsic to their needs, but that they might be imposed.
JS: So does that mean, this is something I wanted to ask later…. Do you now think of the mainstream as your audience? Because some of the earlier stuff seemed more pitched towards people who are already down with Tim Leary or Robert Anton Wilson or whatever. Is something like Merchants of Cool, which is now running on PBS, aimed now at a sort of broader audience? What's your ideal reaction from them? I mean, do you want them to go vote Nader or just stop drinking at Starbucks and shopping at Barnes and Nobles? What would make you happy to see… what sort of reaction from the public on this would make you most satisfied?
DR: I would be happy if the… range of reactions included people deciding to have block parties rather than going to clubs. Kids deciding that music they created was as valuable to one another as stuff they see on Total Request Live. If people stopped looking for self-satisfaction and self-definition purely through consumption. If people felt more comfortable with… and felt like they were contributing to society in a meaningful way even if they weren't producing or consuming. If people stopped… stopped using cash value as the only metric of their self worth. Most basically, and it gets… finally it's Biblical, I suppose, in its origins… I want people to understand that building pyramids is a form of slavery. That sort of aspirational pyramid -- and that shape recurs in a lot of the sort of social hierarchies, market hierarchies, aesthetic hierarchies -- is itself not the healthiest most organic or most productive way to generate thought and culture. I want to alleviate people's fear of change, and I want to help people see… I want to help people evaluate for themselves which institutions in our culture are actually serving their constituencies, and which are more concerned with maintaining their own integrity at the expense of their constituencies.
JS: Let me actually pick up on sort of a thread in there-- you mentioned this is going back to a sort of Biblical ideal…. I mean, while some of this fits into the kind of general lefty, Utne Readery…
DR: Uh-huh
JS: …view, a lot of this, and especially a lot of what was in Merchants of Cool seems to fit with a traditional kind of critique we're used to hearing from the right: early sexualization of teenagers, the erosion of parents and teachers as authority figures, the loss of community. Is there overlap there? Is it just that corporations are the bad guys instead of liberal Hollywood elites?
DR: No, I mean… the right is correct in that there's been this loss of ethical templates, and a loss of enduring value systems. They are incorrect in what they want to do, which is resurrect the ones that failed us in the 1950s and 60s rather than helping people develop new ones. You know, the 60s and 70s were great in that so many idols were smashed, but it's not a matter of going back and resurrecting the old ones, it's a matter of seeing what ones do we want. That's my problem, in a way, is I'm not a lefty and I'm not a righty. I'm… huh… I'm somewhere in between, I guess. I don't see corporations as the enemy as such, I really don't, even though I'll use those lines in Adbusters to show that I'm resonating with them. I do see corporations as nonliving, and I see corporations as unconscious. And I want people who are working in corporations or shareholders in corporations to realize that they are just like computer code. They are lists of commands on paper, and that they shouldn't and needn't be our gods.
You know, when you go down to Times Square and you see the NASDAQ building and it's as if these are the temples erected to our new enduring value systems, and they are not. Corporations are tools, and if you look at why corporations were created, it was a brilliant idea… it was almost as if they were little mini government agencies, essentially. It was a way for people in groups to cluster together to provide specific needs at a specific time. But I think specific corporations like any of our obsolete institutions sometimes end up serving themselves more than their consumers. If people are stupid and people don't think, then they are much more susceptible to the ways corporations or any institution might attempt to cajole them into submission.
JS: This actually brings me to another question that was sparked by the neither-left-nor-right comment earlier. We sometimes like to play, you know, good-cop/libertarian-cop....
DR: Sure, we do that all the time, but because it's fun. And you know, finally I'm not making economic arguments. I'm trying to always come down on the side of human beings making considered choices rather than Pavlovian impulsive reactions.
JS: So, I guess the question that raises for me is, are there political implications-- I mean, is it that the market system is busted as a whole, or could we have the same sort of legal structure where there are corporations and, you know, whatever to serve various needs and provide goods. And the culture is different, so it's not, you know, this kind of feeding frenzy. Or are they inextricably linked? Does the market system just automatically produce this kind of cultural necrosis?
DR: The market system left to its own devices will produce this necrosis if the masses really are the unwashed stupid masses. In other words, IF the people way back in the Creel Commission were correct and the general public is stupid, then we do need a more benevolent and socially conscious system through which policy and the market is enacted. If the so-called unwashed masses can be educated and enlightened and be made media literate… then let the market rip, because people will see through it when they want to, and they'll make conscious choices.
I… must say that my faith in individual Americans' ability to understand what's going on in the world around them has diminished over the last 3 or 4 years…. and that's a sad thing and it's why my writing isn't as optimistic as it used to be. And basically it's tied into what you were talking about before. As I try to write for a broader audience, I realize that my broader audience is much less willing or able to suppose that everything they're seeing on TV isn't true.
JS: But it seems that if you'd started the other way… if you'd started looking at mainstream adult culture and then looked at teenagers and kids and said… wait a minute, now the parents are kind of out of it, but the kids… it doesn't work on them anymore, they're all catching on; every new tactic has a shorter and shorter half-life every time its tried. Had you approached it the other way, do you think you might be more optimistic and say: Look, this is the younger generation that's not susceptible
DR: Well, in a way I did. And I looked at those kids and I celebrated those kids, and then around the time Kurt Cobain killed himself and grunge music and the sort of early, or... late, I suppose, alternative rock scene was co-opted by the record industry… it seemed to me that Generation X, or what Generation X meant to me, was a temporary phenomenon, and not… it's not like "Oh, great!" it's like, "Yeah the kids WERE difficult, you know, in around that Sprite time when they were putting the basketball players and showing 'Kaching! Kaching!" when they were sort of trying to retool to get that Generation X market back in." Then kids became wise to that, which I thought OK, this is also cool, kids are hip to Wink Marketing. Then somehow…
JS: [Laughs] Yeah, what happened?
DR: It's like what happened was… I mean like what Sprite did was they embraced rap and hip hop to the point where the coolest of cool hip hop artists are part of Coca Cola Corp. now. You know, they're in bed with them now. Is that an evil thing? No, not really; I talked to that guy Jay-Z about it, you know, he's this big rapper guy, and he said "Look, these guys are promoting hip hop music and getting hip hop music to people who might not get it otherwise." And you've got to say, OK if you see Sprite as just a carrier virus for your memes, then God bless. A lot of times I like to think we're just using them. I used to get critiqued in the early 90s for using Harper Collins and Ballantine to promote my ideas in those books. They were like "Oh, you're part of the sold out Rupert Murdoch media." And I'm like "Oh, no no no, I'm putting out my ideas through them."
JS: There's a sort of a question too... There seems to be a background notion in a lot of the stuff you do and a lot of the stuff, I guess... I don't know who I want to pick out here, but the kind stuff of people in your circle, if you will, do… there seems to be this notion that the media is so dominated from the top down and there's… it's like an iron cage and there's no light coming through… and yet, if your book sells, then these huge corporations are still willing to print up a hundred thousand of your book and say "Stop buying corporate bullshit, stop buying the media machine." So…
DR: And haven't I just been subsumed into it, then?
JS: Well, but isn't it sort of like… Marx had this idea that the capitalist will sell you the rope that hangs them… If the profit motive is such that as long as people want to hear your anti-corporate ideas, they'll still act as a vehicle for them… is that a good thing, is that a sign of hope?
DR: Yes, sure. That's what I kept saying in all my books. Any of these corporations will sow the seeds of their own demise. Sure, in that case absolutely. I agree completely, it's just whether or not that will come to pass. Yeah. I've believed it from the beginning. I mean, we're talking about the culture wars, and the culture wars are not going to end. It's not like someone's going to win. It's just sometimes, depending on in what part of the puddle you're swimming, sometimes it feels like, wow, you know, the kids are running the show now and people are thinking for themselves and everything's getting beautiful and sometimes you look and you say "Oh my god, its so gross," and all the kids are standing outside Times Square screaming for Limp Bizkit and they think they're rebelling and they don't know what the hell is going on. You know, it depends where you hang out.
It's my opinion that dwelling on the negative aspects of it, for me anyway, makes me feel disempowered and less able to do anything about it. And when I hang out with smart interesting people who are questioning the world they live in and trying to come up with new expressions and thinking about evolving forward, I feel better, my work is better, and their work is better. So, doing the Frontline thing was a really strange experience for me, because it definitely dwelled on the darker side. And Coercion, writing that book is something I will never do again, because I spent a year and a half researching, I mean, gosh, Nuremberg rallies, Farrakhan, you know, the darkest of the dark. And that's not a fun way to spend one's time. It was important… I wanted to write THE book on coercion as a way of saying to all the Postmans out there, who criticize me as this blanket optimist, "OK, I've looked, I know what they're doing, I know what's there, I understand how it works, better than you do, even. Better than they do, even. Happy?"
So now I can go back and write my comic book on rave kids. I'm writing crazy stuff now. The new book I'm writing now is on Judaism, for god's sake. I'm' writing a book on how I think Judaism is just burying itself in obsolete notions of racism and nationalism and ethnicity. Judaism is this cool idea. To me, Judaism is about being iconoclastic. That's all I've ever been, really, is iconoclastic. And Judaism was like the religion of being an iconoclast. And it turned into another fucking institution, with its own idols and its own untested faulty premisis… premises… premises?
JS: I think premises…
DR: Whatever, plural of "premise."
DR: Really what I want to do at the end of this book is tell Judaism to retire itself.
[Laughter]
DR: I know, I'm going to get shit, it's going to be great. But just to say, basically, it's over. Why don't we just give the best parts of Judaism to the rest of society, then give up being the chosen people, and just basically promote a secular humanism. What I want to do is tell people that Judaism is not a monotheistic religion, that Judaism is basically the process by which people get over believing in god.
[Laughter]
[Phone rings here, & we take a short break]
DR: There was this natural inclination towards libertarian thinking as systems theory came into vogue, because people started to see wow, nature does have its ways, and maybe culture and media and markets themselves can act like nature. I think the problem is that markets are not set up… they are not nature. They're a system of rules, and they can imitate nature, but you've got to tinker with them. It's not just nature, it's a set of agreements, and there are certain kinds of legal structures that can make them work effectively and fairly, and a lot of the problem is a lot of the people who are libertarians are stoned people reading Ayn Rand…
JS: Well, touché… yeah, I'll grant you that one, there's definitely a crazy wing there…
DR: And it doesn't mean just let it rip, it really doesn't. And there should not be…
JS: So what would make it work?
DR: I don't think there needs to be a polarity between people who want to develop ethical templates for human functioning and people who want to have free markets. Part of what would make it work is somehow helping people and companies evaluate long term cost/benefits rather than just short term ones. It's really hard to do. But… How do you get… I guess the question is how do you get companies to see that dependence on oil, for example, is a short term inexpensive solution that costs us more and more money the longer we do it…
JS: Well, I know a lot of free market environmental types, and I know Jane Jacobs sort of touches on this at some point in "The Nature of Economies"… that in essence, when… that the not-forward-thinking sort of behavior appears when it's public land and they've got a lease or cheap rental or whatever to strip mine or deforest… And when they actually own the forest, they at least make sure that they replant it enough that they can get a future income stream off it…
DR: Right, it's like people living in projects rather than owning their land, they don't take care of it….
JS: ... or oil, or whatever… is that…
DR: Yeah, it has to do with… regulation is important but it seems somehow like the kinds of regulations we have are the worst ones, that the regulations we have in place are ones that actually exacerbate problems rather than help them. And it's also a matter of... there's so much centralized power in corporations right now that some of their decisions... some of their causes can create huge system-wide effects without adequate checks… and it's a matter of figuring out how to do that.
JS: Is there a tension between saying we want to take advantage of this at least somewhat self-regulating kind of quasi-chaotic system that manages to adjust and do all these good things, AND saying "and at the end of the day we want it to point in this direction?"
DR: Yeah but how do we say…
JS: Can we do both things?
DR: … we want to point it in this direction? I don't know how to do those things… I would argue the only way to do those things is, it seems to me, convince people that they are actually in charge of what's going on. Let everyone at whatever stage of the system they're in realize they're not just a cog in some corporate machine, but that they're a thinking person and that their goals can help direct this thing forward.
JS: So if, through market systems, people get hipper and start shopping at Fresh Fields instead of Grand Union, and start using Working Assets instead of AT&T, would that be good? Is that a move in the right direction, or that just this sort of consumer rebellion that…
DR: It's a move in the right direction, but I think what we have to realize is perhaps… and I don't mean to be Malthusian… but perhaps with 6 or 7 billion people on the planet, not everything can be scaled to the individual. And part of the problem is that the corporation will make more money if it sells something to each individual person rather than things to groups of people. And a lot of the things that we buy could actually be enjoyed by more than just one family or one individual. And actually, it could be more fun that way…
I always use the example of the barbecue… you know, it is more fun to barbecue with a bunch of people than it is to do it just by yourself, but we have a value system now in this country where we look at our nuclear family as the unit, and we want everything for that size group. I don't know that the creation or the emphasis on the nuclear family as the supreme unit of American consumption... I don't know if that was created by corporate America, if that was created by government zoning, if that was created by the suburbs…. I don't know what actually made that happen, but right now it's the way that our market tends to think about distribution of goods. And it's a scale on which I think … it's a scale on which if we base our economic models will only lead to environmental … doom.
JS: Well, it seems as though there's nothing…. It's still in theory possible for me to have my little neighborhood party and say "I'll buy the barbecue and you guys bring the hot-dogs and come and we'll all have a party," or even "Everyone throw in 5 bucks and we'll buy a collective barbecue."
DR: Right. And I think that the answer would be in that case, if there's a libertarian answer, it would be by creating sub-markets. Rather than it being, whatever we are, 300 million individual Americans relating to these 300 corporations, if there could be subunits of 30 families that relate to something… so its' a mix of systems that would really work…
JS: Isn't that what websites like Mercata and whatnot are trying to do? Essentially, to get people to pool together and become a sort of purchasing unit?
DR: Yeah, you know, and maybe it has to do with corporatization of consumer groups. But there's this emphasis right now in America on the individual consumer and "my individual rights," and I don't know that individual rights are even real. How can an individual have rights independent of the families and communities in which that individual operates? I think individual rights are somewhat fictional, in that any right that you're fighting for… generally there's going to be a local or non-local community through which you could work.
JS: Wait, if there's a handful of women in some African country, saying "We're not down with this whole female circumcision thing," and there's not really community support there, they're the first ones… are they wrong just because that's not what the community value is?
DR: Well, they might be wrong for other reasons. That's tricky. You've got to look at that culture… that's like so beyond the scope of what I could easily discuss. I mean, you could look at the history of that and whether or not repression is doing that or whether it's the true will of those people to have their clitorises removed. It's hard…
JS: But I mean it's not the true will of a couple of… Maybe it is the true will of the culture, but if there's a couple particular people and it's not their true will, is there anything there that lets you say, "Well, you still can't do it against their will."
DR: In those cultures there's not.
JS: Right, but I mean… as a matter of fact there's not… but is it just a cultural bias that makes us say "No, that's fucked up"?
DR: I think it is fucked up.
JS: OK. But is that just like, "Hey, we're western white males so of course we think that," or is there something more to be said than that?
DR: Are you asking me now, as an ethicist, is there something intrinsically wrong with female circumcision?
JS: Well, I mean, with coercive female… with imposing it because it's what the culture wants
DR: Yeah, there certainly is.
JS: OK
DR: There certainly is, and it has to do with when a group's reality template is so concrete that they can't tolerate variation.
JS: OK. Well, but is the problem just about the general desirability of these kinds of templates, or is it also that the women really do have a right not to be used as a means to… cultural expression or something?
DR: They do have that right.
JS: OK. An individual right?
DR: Oh sure, individuals still have rights. But chances are the one girl who doesn't want to be circumcised in some remote African village, if she were networked, would find a non-local community of other young women who are also against being circumcised. And they might be able to work better together than as individuals. That's all.
JS: Alright, well certainly I'll buy that. I mean, but it doesn't rest on that, right? She's still got something… even if she's the only one, even if she can't find a community or whatever… the African village is an island in space or something…. Is she still right?
DR: She's still right, but she's not living in the kind of culture that I'm imagining. She's not living in a culture with a level of tolerance for alternative points of view. I mean, if you're the only person in your town who wants a car, you're going to be the only one with a car, but chances are you're going to have an awful hard time getting people to build roads for you.
JS: That's certainly fair enough… it still sounds like you're buying into some idea of individual…
DR: She might not get a husband.
JS: Right. But if she's willing to take all that on, you're still agreeing there's a sort of individual right…
DR: You're trying to say, "aren't there examples of where individuals want rights?" … Yeah sure, but I would argue actually what we're talking about is the communal right of people to have command over their own bodies.
JS: But… if it's not first a right at the individual level, how do you get to a right of…
DR: I don't think there's no rights at the individual level, I just don't think that ultimately treating our… certainly American social problems in the spirit that they're currently being treated, which is, "your rights as an individual consumer are the most effective means towards positive social change…" I'm not saying… sure, the rights of the minority, even if it's down to one, have to be respected somehow, but when we basically consider ourselves absolutely singular autonomous units, we're not gonna end up with the most effective means for social change. Most commonly human beings banding together will be much more powerful and have a lot more fun fighting for what they believe in than as individual consumers relating to corporations.
JS: Well, I wouldn't deny that.
I just want to, before we finish, kind of jump back and ask…
DR: Which is what I hate about the left as well, you know, the lefties will say "OK, I'm going to fight for New Simplicity and take my family out to Mount Shasta and clear some land and get some solar generators," and you know, it's like "Oh, great." That's just survivalist retreating silliness.
JS: Yeah, as opposed to… sort of staying in the fray?
DR: Engage, with other human beings! You know, I do believe that this is a team sport.
JS: I had wanted to ask: where did you start developing this view, when did this become your kick? Was this at Princeton where… what were you studying at Princeton?
DR: Oh, I was pre-med for my parents and I studied the theater, and then went into theater.
JS: So did you think you were going to be acting now, or…
DR: This became my kick when I was studying Bertolt Brecht, believe it or not. And Brecht's whole theory of theater was that people should be conscious of the play, people should be conscious of the proscenium. And it was sort of my own dip into what could loosely be called postmodernism or recontextualization or something like that … and its when I started to see that you could use different frames to understand what was going on, that's sort of when it started. And then I realized that so many people around me in those same years, in those same college years, were deciding who they were gonna be and locking it down. And it seemed to me that the opportunity was to do the opposite, to decide… to never lock it down.
JS: Which allows me to sort of close on a final overarching thing I've been kicking around in my head. There's different cultural critics making the same observation- this sort of Baudrillardian "Oh look, instead of commodities just serving this kind of straightforward utilitarian function, now they've become these vehicles for meaning…."
DR: Which has positive and negative aspects, I think…
JS: Well, I was going to say, there's some people like Tyler Cowen, the economist, and that guy James Twitchell who say "Well, isn't that all well and good, we can use our clothing or whatever else to convey information about ourselves to other people, and our identities become more fluid, and we become more tolerant because we see you change the things you own and you almost kind of change yourself as a result… so it makes people tolerant and blah-blah-blah…. I mean, is it all bad? Why is it necessarily bad that we're imbuing our goods with this almost spiritual function?
DR: It's not bad in itself as long as people understand that's what they're doing. It's what I see as… Back in the old, old days, in polytheistic, 1400 BC and before societies, people had many gods, you know, the wind had a god and this had a god and that had a god… and actually, people didn't believe in them as "gods". People instead used gods as ways of personifying the qualities of something. But they knew it wasn't real. And as long as people understand that they are appropriating a brand or a commodity in order to represent something, that's fine…
JS: Did they really know it wasn't real?
DR: Yeah, apparently they did. I've been reading a book on the history of god. And I've really come to believe through her research, and the way she presents the way people…
JS: She?
DR: This writer… I forgot her name; I have the book in the back. This ex-nun. Yeah, no, the people didn't… I mean in caveman days maybe they did, but I don't think so even. I think people understood that this was a way of characterizing nature.
JS: Heh, reminds me of the end of White Noise -- ever read that one? DeLillo? -- [DR Nods] where the nun is like "No you silly bastard, of course we don't believe, we're just here putting on a show so you guys don't have to believe," something like that.
DR: Right, and when you get into any church, and I've been getting very deep into Judaism, the rabbis at the top… most of them don't even believe in God. They don't believe, certainly… not in the god that they preach. But they feel they have to because their poor masses will go crazy if they don't.
I think back when I was playing with brands in the late 80s, I felt as if kids who were putting stickers on their skateboards and all, knew that this was just a set of symbols. And I felt as if certainly the beginnings of the Internet era released language and released symbols… you know, we appropriated them. It was as if people saw that. And now I get worried that not everyone understands brands this way. And it was a bit sanguine of me to assume that kids were manipulating brands with the same level of consciousness about what they were doing as I assumed.
If you believe that the brand actually has power, it's like a Jew putting up a mezuzah on the door thinking it has some magical ability. It doesn't. You put it up because of the magic that you instill in it, and because of how it helps you think, but you know that its not magic. That's what being a true iconoclast is about; you're still allowed to use icons, you just can't believe that they have any intrinsic value in themselves. The only value they have is what we put on them.
JS: Still, if I put on an Armani suit and walking around people have a reaction to that, and I even feel different wearing it, isn't that a sort of magic?
DR: That's the real magic. Real magic is semiotics. It's not that Armani has something intrinsic to it, it's an arbitrary value system. And you can manipulate that and play with it. You know, it's the consensual hallucination. And as long as you're consenting, consciously consenting, go for it, it's great, and play in that world. It's just that a lot of people don't realize that they are consenting. They think that there's intrinsic value to it, and that's where it's different.
JS: Alright, so the last thing I want to ask, since I'm running low on tape, and with my eye to this potential "sleeping with the enemy piece" I'm kicking around, given… it seems like there's a lot here… in terms of the political difference between you and me… at the end of the day it's not really like there's that much clash. If you were going to say something to libertarians collectively, what do they need to know to get their heads out of their ass? Where do they go wrong? Why are they not with it?
DR: I think the main thing they have to understand…. Is sometimes the market can enact things faster than we imagine it will… so one is the speed with which things happen in a market society is sometimes underestimated. Second is that when people think money is real, their relationship as individuals to market realities is felt very differently than people who understand money as an agreement. The net result of that is that people's sense of self worth can get tied up with their net worth in ways that are unhealthy to them. Or, that there are, and I think most libertarians would agree with this, there are many other forces at work in the evolution of culture other than economics
JS: Sure.
DR: And that, I think they all need to be worked on together. And that the release of civilization into economic liberty must be accompanied by a release into intellectual and spiritual liberty as well.
JS: It sounds like this is more a disagreement of cultural attitude than one about… it doesn't sound like what you're saying is "We need the following public policies"… it doesn't sound like a political disagreement, so much, between us. Or is there?
DR: I'm not a political guy. I mean, I would argue that there are at times certain collective, communal responses to problems that can benefit from centralized planning. I look at certain things even in nature, certain things like energy production. Energy production works better when it's centralized than when it's individualized, and that's because of all the loss through heat. So a power plant will fuel cars more efficiently than gas stations. It just will, it just does. And certain collective projects sometimes work better through cooperation than competition. And there can be competition between people on which plan we're going to use, but then at a certain point you've got to go: OK, now we're going to pick one and use it. I look at cell phone innovation in Europe, which is vastly ahead of ours. And that's, you know, because they basically picked a company or a way they were going to do it. And then you can go anywhere and there's one plan and you've got good service everywhere and WAP and everything else.
JS: Although the flip side is HDTV… Japan got all behind HDTV because they thought it was going to be the wave of the future
DR: Yeah. I mean, we do arrive at standards eventually as a market. We arrived at the VHS standard. And why? Well, porn… even though Betamax was a better standard.
The last thing libertarians don't understand is that the markets themselves put lag on… they make the production of goods and development of certain ideas less efficient. Because there are so many traders making money off it. They end up actually adding drag to the system.
February 26, 2001
by Julian Sanchez
Julian Sanchez: Let me start with a sort of general observation. You started out at 26 with a book on getting high with meditation, as opposed to drugs, and moved on to writing about rave culture, then about bottom-up media-jamming, and then the flip side of that, with a book on media coercion.
Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I had Playing the Future between the two, and…
JS: Oh that's right, and the novel [Ecstasy Club] also fits into the "rave culture" rubric, but with a more cynical kind of… well, not cynical but less… optimistic...
DR: Playing the Future, then the novel, then Coercion.
JS: And then Playing the Future kind of fit in with Media Virus.
DR: Ultra-optimistic
JS: Young people taking control of the media
DR: "Don't worry about us." There's a libertarian argument in Playing the Future, too.
JS: It seems the common thread there is an idea of "dropping out" in various ways, either into a meditative state, or into rave culture, or into alternative media. What unites these? Do you see each thing as being part of one project, and if it is, what are you trying to do?
DR: What I'm trying to do, I think, long term, is expand consciousness a bit. I want to let people… I want to promote autonomy. Both autonomy in action and autonomy in thought, and at the beginning it was just saying, look, the war on drugs is one thing, the war on consciousness is another. And they can make the drugs illegal, but the states of consciousness the drugs offer are accessible through other means, and we shouldn't lose those technologies. Then the Internet came around and I was like, wow, OK, here are a lot of people playing with alternate realities. You know, with technology, with rave culture, with electronics… you know, with all that stuff. They were exploring and experiencing alternate ways of seeing our world, and I've always been a believer that while the reality tunnel that we've built for ourselves in Western culture is very useful for certain things, it's also limited in certain ways, and that there's something to be said for people realizing this is just one alternative and that there's a lot of other ways to see what's going on. And I was very enthusiastic about the way that media seemed to be proliferating in the late 80s and early 90s was allowing for very weird ideas to spread very rapidly through sort of a high-leverage point in what seemed like a more chaotic media space.
Then youth culture seemed to be promoting all these very trippy, even if quasi-new age, certainly trippy ideas about evolution and coevolution with technology and kids being empowered through technology in ways that adults weren't and kids seeing through public relations and being willing to sort of build a world in their own image rather than following all the blueprints left before them. I wrote Ecstasy Club to show that if kids do it in a way that's so desperately and intentionally countercultural, they end up falling into another set of utopian traps, where it's just evolve by any means necessary with no direction at all.
Then I realized my books were not reaching the mainstream culture, were not reaching people like my parents and grandparents because they weren't really media literate yet. They didn't even know how the media they were looking at was constructed, or that it was not true, you know. So I wanted to write Coercion just to say, as basically a primer in influence so people could see "Oh, I get it, when I'm made to feel anxious, when I'm made to feel like a kid, it's for a reason, and people are influencing me in ways I might not know." Not to get into mind control and craziness and conspiracy theories, but just to say, OK let's bring everyone up to speed, so they can realize their values might not be intrinsic to their needs, but that they might be imposed.
JS: So does that mean, this is something I wanted to ask later…. Do you now think of the mainstream as your audience? Because some of the earlier stuff seemed more pitched towards people who are already down with Tim Leary or Robert Anton Wilson or whatever. Is something like Merchants of Cool, which is now running on PBS, aimed now at a sort of broader audience? What's your ideal reaction from them? I mean, do you want them to go vote Nader or just stop drinking at Starbucks and shopping at Barnes and Nobles? What would make you happy to see… what sort of reaction from the public on this would make you most satisfied?
DR: I would be happy if the… range of reactions included people deciding to have block parties rather than going to clubs. Kids deciding that music they created was as valuable to one another as stuff they see on Total Request Live. If people stopped looking for self-satisfaction and self-definition purely through consumption. If people felt more comfortable with… and felt like they were contributing to society in a meaningful way even if they weren't producing or consuming. If people stopped… stopped using cash value as the only metric of their self worth. Most basically, and it gets… finally it's Biblical, I suppose, in its origins… I want people to understand that building pyramids is a form of slavery. That sort of aspirational pyramid -- and that shape recurs in a lot of the sort of social hierarchies, market hierarchies, aesthetic hierarchies -- is itself not the healthiest most organic or most productive way to generate thought and culture. I want to alleviate people's fear of change, and I want to help people see… I want to help people evaluate for themselves which institutions in our culture are actually serving their constituencies, and which are more concerned with maintaining their own integrity at the expense of their constituencies.
JS: Let me actually pick up on sort of a thread in there-- you mentioned this is going back to a sort of Biblical ideal…. I mean, while some of this fits into the kind of general lefty, Utne Readery…
DR: Uh-huh
JS: …view, a lot of this, and especially a lot of what was in Merchants of Cool seems to fit with a traditional kind of critique we're used to hearing from the right: early sexualization of teenagers, the erosion of parents and teachers as authority figures, the loss of community. Is there overlap there? Is it just that corporations are the bad guys instead of liberal Hollywood elites?
DR: No, I mean… the right is correct in that there's been this loss of ethical templates, and a loss of enduring value systems. They are incorrect in what they want to do, which is resurrect the ones that failed us in the 1950s and 60s rather than helping people develop new ones. You know, the 60s and 70s were great in that so many idols were smashed, but it's not a matter of going back and resurrecting the old ones, it's a matter of seeing what ones do we want. That's my problem, in a way, is I'm not a lefty and I'm not a righty. I'm… huh… I'm somewhere in between, I guess. I don't see corporations as the enemy as such, I really don't, even though I'll use those lines in Adbusters to show that I'm resonating with them. I do see corporations as nonliving, and I see corporations as unconscious. And I want people who are working in corporations or shareholders in corporations to realize that they are just like computer code. They are lists of commands on paper, and that they shouldn't and needn't be our gods.
You know, when you go down to Times Square and you see the NASDAQ building and it's as if these are the temples erected to our new enduring value systems, and they are not. Corporations are tools, and if you look at why corporations were created, it was a brilliant idea… it was almost as if they were little mini government agencies, essentially. It was a way for people in groups to cluster together to provide specific needs at a specific time. But I think specific corporations like any of our obsolete institutions sometimes end up serving themselves more than their consumers. If people are stupid and people don't think, then they are much more susceptible to the ways corporations or any institution might attempt to cajole them into submission.
JS: This actually brings me to another question that was sparked by the neither-left-nor-right comment earlier. We sometimes like to play, you know, good-cop/libertarian-cop....
DR: Sure, we do that all the time, but because it's fun. And you know, finally I'm not making economic arguments. I'm trying to always come down on the side of human beings making considered choices rather than Pavlovian impulsive reactions.
JS: So, I guess the question that raises for me is, are there political implications-- I mean, is it that the market system is busted as a whole, or could we have the same sort of legal structure where there are corporations and, you know, whatever to serve various needs and provide goods. And the culture is different, so it's not, you know, this kind of feeding frenzy. Or are they inextricably linked? Does the market system just automatically produce this kind of cultural necrosis?
DR: The market system left to its own devices will produce this necrosis if the masses really are the unwashed stupid masses. In other words, IF the people way back in the Creel Commission were correct and the general public is stupid, then we do need a more benevolent and socially conscious system through which policy and the market is enacted. If the so-called unwashed masses can be educated and enlightened and be made media literate… then let the market rip, because people will see through it when they want to, and they'll make conscious choices.
I… must say that my faith in individual Americans' ability to understand what's going on in the world around them has diminished over the last 3 or 4 years…. and that's a sad thing and it's why my writing isn't as optimistic as it used to be. And basically it's tied into what you were talking about before. As I try to write for a broader audience, I realize that my broader audience is much less willing or able to suppose that everything they're seeing on TV isn't true.
JS: But it seems that if you'd started the other way… if you'd started looking at mainstream adult culture and then looked at teenagers and kids and said… wait a minute, now the parents are kind of out of it, but the kids… it doesn't work on them anymore, they're all catching on; every new tactic has a shorter and shorter half-life every time its tried. Had you approached it the other way, do you think you might be more optimistic and say: Look, this is the younger generation that's not susceptible
DR: Well, in a way I did. And I looked at those kids and I celebrated those kids, and then around the time Kurt Cobain killed himself and grunge music and the sort of early, or... late, I suppose, alternative rock scene was co-opted by the record industry… it seemed to me that Generation X, or what Generation X meant to me, was a temporary phenomenon, and not… it's not like "Oh, great!" it's like, "Yeah the kids WERE difficult, you know, in around that Sprite time when they were putting the basketball players and showing 'Kaching! Kaching!" when they were sort of trying to retool to get that Generation X market back in." Then kids became wise to that, which I thought OK, this is also cool, kids are hip to Wink Marketing. Then somehow…
JS: [Laughs] Yeah, what happened?
DR: It's like what happened was… I mean like what Sprite did was they embraced rap and hip hop to the point where the coolest of cool hip hop artists are part of Coca Cola Corp. now. You know, they're in bed with them now. Is that an evil thing? No, not really; I talked to that guy Jay-Z about it, you know, he's this big rapper guy, and he said "Look, these guys are promoting hip hop music and getting hip hop music to people who might not get it otherwise." And you've got to say, OK if you see Sprite as just a carrier virus for your memes, then God bless. A lot of times I like to think we're just using them. I used to get critiqued in the early 90s for using Harper Collins and Ballantine to promote my ideas in those books. They were like "Oh, you're part of the sold out Rupert Murdoch media." And I'm like "Oh, no no no, I'm putting out my ideas through them."
JS: There's a sort of a question too... There seems to be a background notion in a lot of the stuff you do and a lot of the stuff, I guess... I don't know who I want to pick out here, but the kind stuff of people in your circle, if you will, do… there seems to be this notion that the media is so dominated from the top down and there's… it's like an iron cage and there's no light coming through… and yet, if your book sells, then these huge corporations are still willing to print up a hundred thousand of your book and say "Stop buying corporate bullshit, stop buying the media machine." So…
DR: And haven't I just been subsumed into it, then?
JS: Well, but isn't it sort of like… Marx had this idea that the capitalist will sell you the rope that hangs them… If the profit motive is such that as long as people want to hear your anti-corporate ideas, they'll still act as a vehicle for them… is that a good thing, is that a sign of hope?
DR: Yes, sure. That's what I kept saying in all my books. Any of these corporations will sow the seeds of their own demise. Sure, in that case absolutely. I agree completely, it's just whether or not that will come to pass. Yeah. I've believed it from the beginning. I mean, we're talking about the culture wars, and the culture wars are not going to end. It's not like someone's going to win. It's just sometimes, depending on in what part of the puddle you're swimming, sometimes it feels like, wow, you know, the kids are running the show now and people are thinking for themselves and everything's getting beautiful and sometimes you look and you say "Oh my god, its so gross," and all the kids are standing outside Times Square screaming for Limp Bizkit and they think they're rebelling and they don't know what the hell is going on. You know, it depends where you hang out.
It's my opinion that dwelling on the negative aspects of it, for me anyway, makes me feel disempowered and less able to do anything about it. And when I hang out with smart interesting people who are questioning the world they live in and trying to come up with new expressions and thinking about evolving forward, I feel better, my work is better, and their work is better. So, doing the Frontline thing was a really strange experience for me, because it definitely dwelled on the darker side. And Coercion, writing that book is something I will never do again, because I spent a year and a half researching, I mean, gosh, Nuremberg rallies, Farrakhan, you know, the darkest of the dark. And that's not a fun way to spend one's time. It was important… I wanted to write THE book on coercion as a way of saying to all the Postmans out there, who criticize me as this blanket optimist, "OK, I've looked, I know what they're doing, I know what's there, I understand how it works, better than you do, even. Better than they do, even. Happy?"
So now I can go back and write my comic book on rave kids. I'm writing crazy stuff now. The new book I'm writing now is on Judaism, for god's sake. I'm' writing a book on how I think Judaism is just burying itself in obsolete notions of racism and nationalism and ethnicity. Judaism is this cool idea. To me, Judaism is about being iconoclastic. That's all I've ever been, really, is iconoclastic. And Judaism was like the religion of being an iconoclast. And it turned into another fucking institution, with its own idols and its own untested faulty premisis… premises… premises?
JS: I think premises…
DR: Whatever, plural of "premise."
DR: Really what I want to do at the end of this book is tell Judaism to retire itself.
[Laughter]
DR: I know, I'm going to get shit, it's going to be great. But just to say, basically, it's over. Why don't we just give the best parts of Judaism to the rest of society, then give up being the chosen people, and just basically promote a secular humanism. What I want to do is tell people that Judaism is not a monotheistic religion, that Judaism is basically the process by which people get over believing in god.
[Laughter]
[Phone rings here, & we take a short break]
DR: There was this natural inclination towards libertarian thinking as systems theory came into vogue, because people started to see wow, nature does have its ways, and maybe culture and media and markets themselves can act like nature. I think the problem is that markets are not set up… they are not nature. They're a system of rules, and they can imitate nature, but you've got to tinker with them. It's not just nature, it's a set of agreements, and there are certain kinds of legal structures that can make them work effectively and fairly, and a lot of the problem is a lot of the people who are libertarians are stoned people reading Ayn Rand…
JS: Well, touché… yeah, I'll grant you that one, there's definitely a crazy wing there…
DR: And it doesn't mean just let it rip, it really doesn't. And there should not be…
JS: So what would make it work?
DR: I don't think there needs to be a polarity between people who want to develop ethical templates for human functioning and people who want to have free markets. Part of what would make it work is somehow helping people and companies evaluate long term cost/benefits rather than just short term ones. It's really hard to do. But… How do you get… I guess the question is how do you get companies to see that dependence on oil, for example, is a short term inexpensive solution that costs us more and more money the longer we do it…
JS: Well, I know a lot of free market environmental types, and I know Jane Jacobs sort of touches on this at some point in "The Nature of Economies"… that in essence, when… that the not-forward-thinking sort of behavior appears when it's public land and they've got a lease or cheap rental or whatever to strip mine or deforest… And when they actually own the forest, they at least make sure that they replant it enough that they can get a future income stream off it…
DR: Right, it's like people living in projects rather than owning their land, they don't take care of it….
JS: ... or oil, or whatever… is that…
DR: Yeah, it has to do with… regulation is important but it seems somehow like the kinds of regulations we have are the worst ones, that the regulations we have in place are ones that actually exacerbate problems rather than help them. And it's also a matter of... there's so much centralized power in corporations right now that some of their decisions... some of their causes can create huge system-wide effects without adequate checks… and it's a matter of figuring out how to do that.
JS: Is there a tension between saying we want to take advantage of this at least somewhat self-regulating kind of quasi-chaotic system that manages to adjust and do all these good things, AND saying "and at the end of the day we want it to point in this direction?"
DR: Yeah but how do we say…
JS: Can we do both things?
DR: … we want to point it in this direction? I don't know how to do those things… I would argue the only way to do those things is, it seems to me, convince people that they are actually in charge of what's going on. Let everyone at whatever stage of the system they're in realize they're not just a cog in some corporate machine, but that they're a thinking person and that their goals can help direct this thing forward.
JS: So if, through market systems, people get hipper and start shopping at Fresh Fields instead of Grand Union, and start using Working Assets instead of AT&T, would that be good? Is that a move in the right direction, or that just this sort of consumer rebellion that…
DR: It's a move in the right direction, but I think what we have to realize is perhaps… and I don't mean to be Malthusian… but perhaps with 6 or 7 billion people on the planet, not everything can be scaled to the individual. And part of the problem is that the corporation will make more money if it sells something to each individual person rather than things to groups of people. And a lot of the things that we buy could actually be enjoyed by more than just one family or one individual. And actually, it could be more fun that way…
I always use the example of the barbecue… you know, it is more fun to barbecue with a bunch of people than it is to do it just by yourself, but we have a value system now in this country where we look at our nuclear family as the unit, and we want everything for that size group. I don't know that the creation or the emphasis on the nuclear family as the supreme unit of American consumption... I don't know if that was created by corporate America, if that was created by government zoning, if that was created by the suburbs…. I don't know what actually made that happen, but right now it's the way that our market tends to think about distribution of goods. And it's a scale on which I think … it's a scale on which if we base our economic models will only lead to environmental … doom.
JS: Well, it seems as though there's nothing…. It's still in theory possible for me to have my little neighborhood party and say "I'll buy the barbecue and you guys bring the hot-dogs and come and we'll all have a party," or even "Everyone throw in 5 bucks and we'll buy a collective barbecue."
DR: Right. And I think that the answer would be in that case, if there's a libertarian answer, it would be by creating sub-markets. Rather than it being, whatever we are, 300 million individual Americans relating to these 300 corporations, if there could be subunits of 30 families that relate to something… so its' a mix of systems that would really work…
JS: Isn't that what websites like Mercata and whatnot are trying to do? Essentially, to get people to pool together and become a sort of purchasing unit?
DR: Yeah, you know, and maybe it has to do with corporatization of consumer groups. But there's this emphasis right now in America on the individual consumer and "my individual rights," and I don't know that individual rights are even real. How can an individual have rights independent of the families and communities in which that individual operates? I think individual rights are somewhat fictional, in that any right that you're fighting for… generally there's going to be a local or non-local community through which you could work.
JS: Wait, if there's a handful of women in some African country, saying "We're not down with this whole female circumcision thing," and there's not really community support there, they're the first ones… are they wrong just because that's not what the community value is?
DR: Well, they might be wrong for other reasons. That's tricky. You've got to look at that culture… that's like so beyond the scope of what I could easily discuss. I mean, you could look at the history of that and whether or not repression is doing that or whether it's the true will of those people to have their clitorises removed. It's hard…
JS: But I mean it's not the true will of a couple of… Maybe it is the true will of the culture, but if there's a couple particular people and it's not their true will, is there anything there that lets you say, "Well, you still can't do it against their will."
DR: In those cultures there's not.
JS: Right, but I mean… as a matter of fact there's not… but is it just a cultural bias that makes us say "No, that's fucked up"?
DR: I think it is fucked up.
JS: OK. But is that just like, "Hey, we're western white males so of course we think that," or is there something more to be said than that?
DR: Are you asking me now, as an ethicist, is there something intrinsically wrong with female circumcision?
JS: Well, I mean, with coercive female… with imposing it because it's what the culture wants
DR: Yeah, there certainly is.
JS: OK
DR: There certainly is, and it has to do with when a group's reality template is so concrete that they can't tolerate variation.
JS: OK. Well, but is the problem just about the general desirability of these kinds of templates, or is it also that the women really do have a right not to be used as a means to… cultural expression or something?
DR: They do have that right.
JS: OK. An individual right?
DR: Oh sure, individuals still have rights. But chances are the one girl who doesn't want to be circumcised in some remote African village, if she were networked, would find a non-local community of other young women who are also against being circumcised. And they might be able to work better together than as individuals. That's all.
JS: Alright, well certainly I'll buy that. I mean, but it doesn't rest on that, right? She's still got something… even if she's the only one, even if she can't find a community or whatever… the African village is an island in space or something…. Is she still right?
DR: She's still right, but she's not living in the kind of culture that I'm imagining. She's not living in a culture with a level of tolerance for alternative points of view. I mean, if you're the only person in your town who wants a car, you're going to be the only one with a car, but chances are you're going to have an awful hard time getting people to build roads for you.
JS: That's certainly fair enough… it still sounds like you're buying into some idea of individual…
DR: She might not get a husband.
JS: Right. But if she's willing to take all that on, you're still agreeing there's a sort of individual right…
DR: You're trying to say, "aren't there examples of where individuals want rights?" … Yeah sure, but I would argue actually what we're talking about is the communal right of people to have command over their own bodies.
JS: But… if it's not first a right at the individual level, how do you get to a right of…
DR: I don't think there's no rights at the individual level, I just don't think that ultimately treating our… certainly American social problems in the spirit that they're currently being treated, which is, "your rights as an individual consumer are the most effective means towards positive social change…" I'm not saying… sure, the rights of the minority, even if it's down to one, have to be respected somehow, but when we basically consider ourselves absolutely singular autonomous units, we're not gonna end up with the most effective means for social change. Most commonly human beings banding together will be much more powerful and have a lot more fun fighting for what they believe in than as individual consumers relating to corporations.
JS: Well, I wouldn't deny that.
I just want to, before we finish, kind of jump back and ask…
DR: Which is what I hate about the left as well, you know, the lefties will say "OK, I'm going to fight for New Simplicity and take my family out to Mount Shasta and clear some land and get some solar generators," and you know, it's like "Oh, great." That's just survivalist retreating silliness.
JS: Yeah, as opposed to… sort of staying in the fray?
DR: Engage, with other human beings! You know, I do believe that this is a team sport.
JS: I had wanted to ask: where did you start developing this view, when did this become your kick? Was this at Princeton where… what were you studying at Princeton?
DR: Oh, I was pre-med for my parents and I studied the theater, and then went into theater.
JS: So did you think you were going to be acting now, or…
DR: This became my kick when I was studying Bertolt Brecht, believe it or not. And Brecht's whole theory of theater was that people should be conscious of the play, people should be conscious of the proscenium. And it was sort of my own dip into what could loosely be called postmodernism or recontextualization or something like that … and its when I started to see that you could use different frames to understand what was going on, that's sort of when it started. And then I realized that so many people around me in those same years, in those same college years, were deciding who they were gonna be and locking it down. And it seemed to me that the opportunity was to do the opposite, to decide… to never lock it down.
JS: Which allows me to sort of close on a final overarching thing I've been kicking around in my head. There's different cultural critics making the same observation- this sort of Baudrillardian "Oh look, instead of commodities just serving this kind of straightforward utilitarian function, now they've become these vehicles for meaning…."
DR: Which has positive and negative aspects, I think…
JS: Well, I was going to say, there's some people like Tyler Cowen, the economist, and that guy James Twitchell who say "Well, isn't that all well and good, we can use our clothing or whatever else to convey information about ourselves to other people, and our identities become more fluid, and we become more tolerant because we see you change the things you own and you almost kind of change yourself as a result… so it makes people tolerant and blah-blah-blah…. I mean, is it all bad? Why is it necessarily bad that we're imbuing our goods with this almost spiritual function?
DR: It's not bad in itself as long as people understand that's what they're doing. It's what I see as… Back in the old, old days, in polytheistic, 1400 BC and before societies, people had many gods, you know, the wind had a god and this had a god and that had a god… and actually, people didn't believe in them as "gods". People instead used gods as ways of personifying the qualities of something. But they knew it wasn't real. And as long as people understand that they are appropriating a brand or a commodity in order to represent something, that's fine…
JS: Did they really know it wasn't real?
DR: Yeah, apparently they did. I've been reading a book on the history of god. And I've really come to believe through her research, and the way she presents the way people…
JS: She?
DR: This writer… I forgot her name; I have the book in the back. This ex-nun. Yeah, no, the people didn't… I mean in caveman days maybe they did, but I don't think so even. I think people understood that this was a way of characterizing nature.
JS: Heh, reminds me of the end of White Noise -- ever read that one? DeLillo? -- [DR Nods] where the nun is like "No you silly bastard, of course we don't believe, we're just here putting on a show so you guys don't have to believe," something like that.
DR: Right, and when you get into any church, and I've been getting very deep into Judaism, the rabbis at the top… most of them don't even believe in God. They don't believe, certainly… not in the god that they preach. But they feel they have to because their poor masses will go crazy if they don't.
I think back when I was playing with brands in the late 80s, I felt as if kids who were putting stickers on their skateboards and all, knew that this was just a set of symbols. And I felt as if certainly the beginnings of the Internet era released language and released symbols… you know, we appropriated them. It was as if people saw that. And now I get worried that not everyone understands brands this way. And it was a bit sanguine of me to assume that kids were manipulating brands with the same level of consciousness about what they were doing as I assumed.
If you believe that the brand actually has power, it's like a Jew putting up a mezuzah on the door thinking it has some magical ability. It doesn't. You put it up because of the magic that you instill in it, and because of how it helps you think, but you know that its not magic. That's what being a true iconoclast is about; you're still allowed to use icons, you just can't believe that they have any intrinsic value in themselves. The only value they have is what we put on them.
JS: Still, if I put on an Armani suit and walking around people have a reaction to that, and I even feel different wearing it, isn't that a sort of magic?
DR: That's the real magic. Real magic is semiotics. It's not that Armani has something intrinsic to it, it's an arbitrary value system. And you can manipulate that and play with it. You know, it's the consensual hallucination. And as long as you're consenting, consciously consenting, go for it, it's great, and play in that world. It's just that a lot of people don't realize that they are consenting. They think that there's intrinsic value to it, and that's where it's different.
JS: Alright, so the last thing I want to ask, since I'm running low on tape, and with my eye to this potential "sleeping with the enemy piece" I'm kicking around, given… it seems like there's a lot here… in terms of the political difference between you and me… at the end of the day it's not really like there's that much clash. If you were going to say something to libertarians collectively, what do they need to know to get their heads out of their ass? Where do they go wrong? Why are they not with it?
DR: I think the main thing they have to understand…. Is sometimes the market can enact things faster than we imagine it will… so one is the speed with which things happen in a market society is sometimes underestimated. Second is that when people think money is real, their relationship as individuals to market realities is felt very differently than people who understand money as an agreement. The net result of that is that people's sense of self worth can get tied up with their net worth in ways that are unhealthy to them. Or, that there are, and I think most libertarians would agree with this, there are many other forces at work in the evolution of culture other than economics
JS: Sure.
DR: And that, I think they all need to be worked on together. And that the release of civilization into economic liberty must be accompanied by a release into intellectual and spiritual liberty as well.
JS: It sounds like this is more a disagreement of cultural attitude than one about… it doesn't sound like what you're saying is "We need the following public policies"… it doesn't sound like a political disagreement, so much, between us. Or is there?
DR: I'm not a political guy. I mean, I would argue that there are at times certain collective, communal responses to problems that can benefit from centralized planning. I look at certain things even in nature, certain things like energy production. Energy production works better when it's centralized than when it's individualized, and that's because of all the loss through heat. So a power plant will fuel cars more efficiently than gas stations. It just will, it just does. And certain collective projects sometimes work better through cooperation than competition. And there can be competition between people on which plan we're going to use, but then at a certain point you've got to go: OK, now we're going to pick one and use it. I look at cell phone innovation in Europe, which is vastly ahead of ours. And that's, you know, because they basically picked a company or a way they were going to do it. And then you can go anywhere and there's one plan and you've got good service everywhere and WAP and everything else.
JS: Although the flip side is HDTV… Japan got all behind HDTV because they thought it was going to be the wave of the future
DR: Yeah. I mean, we do arrive at standards eventually as a market. We arrived at the VHS standard. And why? Well, porn… even though Betamax was a better standard.
The last thing libertarians don't understand is that the markets themselves put lag on… they make the production of goods and development of certain ideas less efficient. Because there are so many traders making money off it. They end up actually adding drag to the system.
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