Feed, Pulling Society's Strings

FEED | RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro


What is the fate of today's consumer-citizens? Are we all victims of a "coercive arms race," in which the underhanded tactics of advertisers, spin doctors, and PR firms have exploited and endangered our social fabric, making us do, buy, and say things we wouldn't have otherwise done, bought, and said? Or has new technology (specifically, the internet) empowered individuals to wrest power away from the government, corporations, and the media -- a Promethean coup of control that makes individuals, not large institutional powers, ultimately responsible for securing or destroying our social potential?

The former scenario is advanced by Douglas Rushkoff in Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, the latest of his seven books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia, Media Virus, and Playing The Future. The latter vision is described in The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know, the first book from Andrew Shapiro, director of the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project, First Amendment Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, and a senior advisor to the Markle Foundation.

Recently, FEED's Editor-In-Chief Steven Johnson sat down with Rushkoff and Shapiro to discuss coercion, control, and what, if anything, will allow us to shape the world we live in.


JOHNSON: Let's start by discussing the parallel between the two key words in the titles of your respective books: "coercion" and "control." How much do you see your books as being in agreement with each other, and how much do you see them as differing in their take on the world?

SHAPIRO: In some ways, Doug's book is part of the story that I'm trying to tell in my book. This whole idea I've been investigating -- a shift in control -- I'm curious to know if you [Rushkoff] agree or disagree that it's occurring. But I have a hunch that the kinds of coercive techniques and tactics that you describe so well in your book are a reaction to that potential for individual control.

RUSHKOFF: Right.

SHAPIRO: These coercive tactics represent and reflect the anxiety of people in power, of the heads of institutions, at the prospect of losing their stronghold over us, the individuals.

RUSHKOFF: Right.

SHAPIRO: The first part of my book claims that the emergence of this technology really does allow individuals to do all sorts of things for themselves in ways they couldn't before. And now we are seeing resistance to that development. We can see it in the most traditional forms of governments freaking out about individual autonomy and seeking to crush it. We can see it in corporations developing coercive strategies for resistance, which is where you and I are talking about the same things. Obviously, you're doing it at much greater length and in more depth.

But this leads me to ask you a question: do you think that coercion, or coercive techniques, are in some ways multiplying and proliferating in order to take account of this greater possibility for individual control that the technology allows? Although you talk a little bit about the internet, you don't actually draw much of a causal relationship between the rise of interactive media and the rise of strategies to keep consumers in their place.

RUSHKOFF: Well, actually, I do. The story of the net as depicted in my book is that a communications infrastructure arose which changed the way people thought, changed their behaviors, and began to undo the isolation and separation inflicted on them by broadcast media, like television. The more isolated you are, the more stuff you buy; you're buying "things" to try to fill the space in your life that people are supposed to fill. I saw interactive communications, the internet, as a terrific opportunity. I was very optimistic about the likelihood of people actually seizing that opportunity. I saw it as a window of opportunity where we had a chance to jump off a certain kind of a treadmill where we were being led rather than leading ourselves. My view on that hasn't changed.

But, in the meantime, the initial promise of the net has certainly been diminished and counteracted by public relations, advertising marketers, and to some extent the would-be controllers in the government. In some ways, I feel like we've taken a step backwards. By putting the techniques and efforts of the controllers and the social programmers on automatic, and by computerizing their skills, we've greatly magnified their power. It's not an irreversible development, but it seems that every previous instance -- whether it was Gutenberg or Martin Luther -- there was only a small window of opportunity. With the net, I thought we were going to seize it. But it seems like we didn't. It's not over by a long shot, but...

SHAPIRO: Yeah, the little phrase that I wrote in people's books when they asked me to sign it -- which was always an embarrassing task because you don't know what to write, other than your name -- was "Seize control!" (Laughs) And "Seek balance!" That's the second part of the equation, which I want to come back to.

RUSHKOFF: That's a key point. When people look at a book like Coercion, they ask, "Are you trying to give us more defensive strategies?" The answer is no. We're in a coercive arms race with our social programmers and marketers. They develop a technique; we develop a countermeasure. Then they develop a new technique that takes advantage of that countermeasure. I'm saying: "Don't develop new defensive strategies. Let's get off the treadmill altogether. Let's add back in the idea that we should be able to take the time to consider issues that are important to us, rather than having knee-jerk reactions." For instance, just because there's a poll taken two minutes after Clinton's speech is over doesn't mean we have to have an opinion about Clinton's speech two minutes after it's finished.

JOHNSON: Specifically, how does one do this? What are the, say, "Five Steps To Getting Off The Treadmill?" How do you actually opt out?

RUSHKOFF: For one, don't look to professional salespeople to be your friends, or your parents, or to fill a social role that real people in your life should. The minute you walk into the Gap and want to get positive reinforcement from the Gap salesgirl because you're not getting positive reinforcement from real girls, it's all over. The main rule I have is called the "one-seventh rule," which comes from religions that say, "Take one day a week and respect it." They call it "Sabbath," but for me the goal is that you are not consuming or producing one day a week, and that you can actually live a whole day without consuming and producing. In effect, you're training yourself to believe something that I think is true -- which is, as Mr. Rogers would say: you are sacred just the way you are. You don't need to buy or sell anything in order to justify your existence.

JOHNSON: When reading your book, I was reminded of a wonderful quotation I've always loved from Raymond Williams' piece about advertising in the late '50s in England. To paraphrase, he says: "The conventional wisdom is that we live in a society that's too materialist. But if you think about it, we're living in a society that's not sensibly materialist enough. For if we were normal rational people, we would simply enjoy our materials -- our beer and our deodorant and our cars -- for the sensible material reasons of the goods that they provide us with. As it is, though, we add all these extra spiritual and psychological values on top of them."

RUSHKOFF: Right. The same thing is true with money. We say we're a society driven by money. No. If we were driven by money, we'd be taking care of the environment. What we are concerned about is the quarterly report, the immediate earnings -- but that often hurts the company in the long run.

JOHNSON: Let me pursue another parallel that I see here. Doug, you're talking about coercion, as defined by situations in which you find yourself driven to actions which aren't necessarily in your interest, by forces that are somehow invisible to you. And Andrew, in your book, the idea that's probably most compelling is the idea of "oversteer," which is similar to coercion in the sense that it describes a situation where you, along with a larger, collective body, are driving events towards results that you wouldn't necessarily want, results which you weren't necessarily trying to achieve with your individual local decision. When this oversteer phenomenon is reproduced en masse, you end up getting to a result that often isn't in anybody's interest. On the one hand, in Doug's picture, you have invisible masters above us with kind of like marionette strings. On the other hand, in Andrew's picture, you have this peculiar coercion from below. For people who haven't read the book, can you give a good example of oversteer?

SHAPIRO: Sure. The idea of oversteer is essentially the idea that the control revolution can be pushed too far, that all of our values can be placed in jeopardy when this shift in power occurs in such a way that favors some individuals at the expense of others. Or if the shift in power prohibits individuals from recognizing the ways in which they're disadvantaging themselves. One example is the unintended consequences of a filtering phenomenon that I call "total filtering," where we create these customized universes that are evident in every interface we see online today. My Yahoo! and My AOL often unintentionally shut out dissenting views and voices, or news and information which we haven't preselected in advance. The consequence is the potential for a narrowing of one's horizons, a potential to have a lack of shared information within a community.

JOHNSON: And the potential for absolute one-to-one marketing.

SHAPIRO: (Laughs) Yeah, great potential for one-to-one marketing. Plus a real potential for a tremendous diminishment of the public sphere. I'm trying to describe what happens when individual control is achieved and yet we're still not good at using these new tools of control in a responsible and careful way. This, I think, is where Doug and I having a meeting of the minds. Doug is saying, "Be aware of the media, learn how to use them in a way that's consistent with values." In some ways, my connection with Doug is that I feel oversteer is attributable to the same things that drive resistance: namely, an obsessiveness with control.

Steven, you've been thinking about "emergence," about non-linearity and chaos theory, all of which is very important, because there's something very unhealthy about this obsessiveness and control, whether it's top-down or an individual focus. In the part of my book where I talk about the importance of randomness and accidents, although it's not going as far as some of the chaos theory you're thinking about, I'm talking about it in a public-values way, since elements of public space have always depended on chaos, and openness, engagement between citizens, public dialogue. It's the same impulse to quell chaos that causes people to act coercively, whether it's the marketers, the advertisers, PR...

RUSHKOFF: Or the people, or the public they're talking to, are coercing themselves.

SHAPIRO: Right. Coercing themselves is similar to this value of control -- "I have to be in control of everything, take charge of everything."

RUSHKOFF: Right.

JOHNSON: This is exactly the direction I was going to go, where you two seem to be very much in agreement -- and where perhaps I disagree with both of you. There's a sense from you two that all of these new technologies have pushed us towards a diminished amount of serendipity, a diminished amount of random, uncoerced, unscripted, uncontrolled, unmarketed, unplanned moments. But I still feel that compared to where we were 30 years ago, the web has been a tremendous force for more randomness. Day to day, we are closer to things that we had never expected to stumble across in the first place because of the web being put in all our living rooms.

RUSHKOFF: That's absolutely true. The terrain has changed from a controlled landscape to a dynamical-system landscape. But I would argue that corporate conglomerates have basically tracked this landscape and positioned themselves to take advantage of both the normal and the strange attractors in the system, so that you will randomly come across a thing -- and then buy it. Eventually the money's going to seep up to Time Warner or Rupert Murdoch.

The forces of chaos and emergence are with us. They are happening in a real way. People, especially young people, are learning to surf and navigate that chaotic space. The more comfortable you are surfing that chaotic space, the less you can be manipulated. I still believe that there are 12- to 18-year-olds out there who are masters of this stuff in a way that Murdoch and Time fail to understand. But I overestimated what percentage of the American and global population fell into that category.

SHAPIRO: That's interesting, because to a degree I accept that one of the messages of my book, especially the message of the part where I talk about how to achieve balance, is that the masses are too stupid!

JOHNSON: We should stop letting them vote! (Laughs)

SHAPIRO: But seriously, what I'm saying is that there's this mythos, this do-it-yourself mythos of the internet. You know the rhetoric: you can day trade from your home; you can start your own business; you can control commerce; you can control politics; we don't need politicians; direct democracy. And what I'm saying is, "Do not overlook the value of middle men, delegates, agents, trusted representatives in the spheres of commerce, news, information, politics."

RUSHKOFF: Right.

SHAPIRO: You may agree, but there's some tension here because you're also saying, "Don't trust the experts."

RUSHKOFF: No, I'm not!

SHAPIRO: You said, "Don't trust the people who are experts, the salespeople, etc."

RUSHKOFF: Experts and salespeople are two different things. A doctor might actually have stock in a company whose pharmaceuticals he prescribes. Or a doctor might actually be there for your best interest -- to heal you. You're going to have to learn how to differentiate between the two. When people ask me, "What's the biggest danger? What's the worst thing going on online today?" I tell them it's e-trading, because it convinces people that they can actually make educated and informed decisions about their investments. When, in fact, the guys on CNN and CNBC who are giving their stock picks are actually announcing the stocks they're about to sell. So I do agree with you on this point: is it elitist to say someone knows more than me in this area or that? I don't think so. But I do think people, if they were given the right information, might actually be able to make intelligent decisions.

SHAPIRO: I agree with that, up to a point. But take the direct democracy example. Can you imagine people actually sitting down for the weekend to read a budget bill and then voting on it through the internet on a Monday morning? It's an absurd proposition. I fear that in the next generation, in part because of the strength of the resistance and coercion that we've been subjected to today, people are going to be pushing the other way as hard as they can. And that means, "I'm in charge. I don't trust a single soul." And why would we? Why would we trust our politicians in this culture? The campaign finance system is so absolutely screwed up that the drive to a direct democracy, however wrong-minded, is understandable.

JOHNSON: Let me take this conversation a little bit away from direct democracy and more towards the one-to-one marketing, which we mentioned earlier. Consider the following thought experiment: imagine that the sequence of events in marketing happened backwards, historically. That is, pretend we started with one-to-one marketing, and we grew up with it for most of the 20th century. Then, one day, mass advertising comes along and they get rid of all this personalized stuff, and it's not customized, and it doesn't know what you bought last week on Amazon. All of a sudden, the message from the marketers is "we have no idea who you are, but here's an ad."

My intuition is that we would look at that development and say, "Jesus, this is really repulsive. These people are just broadcasting stuff to us without any sense of who we are. It's just as commercial as it was before, but it's so indifferent to anything about me that I feel like my whole life has been polluted by these apersonal ads that are getting broadcast at me all the time."

RUSHKOFF: Well, if you define yourself as a consumer, then the reverse-order, broadening of advertising is insulting. But if you are attempting to define yourself as something other than a consumer, then the narrow casting of this stuff to your identity as a consumer is more and more threatening to your sense of self.

SHAPIRO: And if you're defining yourself as a citizen... I had this realization while writing my book that so much of the left's critique of the mass media is actually at odds with itself. There's this aspect of the do-good society that wants dialogue, deliberation, and democracy among the citizens. And that depends completely on shared information. And shared information means not only shared media but even mass advertising, because mass media are only going to be supported by mass advertising. Therefore, ironically enough, there's something actually pretty positive about the broad sheet, the newspaper, the film, newsreel, television, and so on -- something positive insofar as they give citizens this shared base of knowledge from which they can debate and disagree. However, my deep fear about the opposite side -- the hyper-customized, personalized, you're-the-master-of-your-own-domain media world -- is that it really distances us from one another in terms of at least our geography. It really does fragment neighborhoods and communities, and even nation-states.