Notes
Progressive-minded journalists wrote well-meaning accounts of how the masses were “sinking into degradation and misery,” unwittingly fueling the flight of the wealthy to the safe haven of more distant dwellings. In February of 1894, Godey’s Lady’s Book justified this retreat, arguing that “society is not friendly,” and that every man required a home to serve as “a little bulwark against the outside world, in which those matters personal to himself should be carried on privately.” The pursuit of happiness thus moved from the public realm—a cooperative urban landscape—to the private realm. People sought to become spectators to society, shaking their heads in disbelief as they read the evening paper, rather than true participants. They disconnected from public space and purchased their own private spaces instead. Their abstention from public life made them all the more ravenous for sensationalist depictions of what they had left behind: strangers
became criminals, political activity became sinister conspiracy, and cities became pits of depravity.
The more disconnected people became from one another, the more easily they could be manipulated. Unions of workers and functioning communities of citizens threaten the power of corporations, while individuals out for their own interests behave more like corporations themselves. The social concerns that make collective human behavior multifaceted and complex get smoothed out as people take actions directed by the much simpler calculus of the market. This makes people entirely more predictable, better targets for advertising, increasingly more isolated from one another, as well as more dependent on central authorities to create both value and meaning.
The invention of the printing press turned reading, literature, and Bible study from a group activity into an individual one. Instead of listening to a priest read from a sacred manuscript, people (at least the rich ones) could now read from mass-produced texts. To read individually meant interpreting texts as an individual. The gentleman sat in his study alone, reading great works and developing his own perspective.
Now people were supplying commodities to more centralized business institutions, or even to the great shipping expeditions. Yes, their autonomy as individual businesspeople had increased, but their relationship to one another as members of a local business community diminished. Instead of seeing themselves as members of their village or ward, they began to see themselves as subjects of national monarchies.
Branding defined and redefined individuals as subjects, citizens, workers, consumers, and eventually shareholders, always counting on the power of image and myth to stir people’s hearts more effectively than other people ever could.
At each step of the way, human relationships were further mediated through capital, products, or myths. Collectivist impulses were shunned in favor of strident individualism and personal achievement. Dreams of achieving status through social participation were replaced by dreams of purchasing status through private acquisition. For corporate industrialism to work as an economic model, people would have to be sold on individuality and personal freedoms as the paramount human goals—even if this actually meant a more isolated and alienated existence.
On his tour of America, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville marveled most of all at institutions like the public library and the New England town meeting. Imposing industrialization on America would have to involve the diminution of these social institutions and a heightening of self.
In the kinds of towns de Tocqueville visited, human relationships dominated the local economy. If you needed oats, you’d go buy them from the general store—just one step removed from the mill—or maybe even from the miller himself. If the oats were bad, you’d know where to find the man responsible. You knew his face and his wife’s. His kids might have gone to school with your kids. If his oats were bad, he’d lose more than a customer, for you lived and worked in the same town. You might fix wagon wheels, or even work as the local chemist, mixing his wife’s medication. If you ate bad oats, you wouldn’t be doing your job as well, either. The miller might end up with a dangerously assembled wheel or, worse, an incorrectly dosed prescription. If the miller supplied a bad product, he had more at stake than your business. You were more than just each other’s customers; you were interdependent members of a community.
But at each stage along the way, the industrialization of the economy required a corresponding desocialization of the people within it. Industrial Age factories reduced the laborers within them to cogs in a machine. From the time clock to the assembly line, the pace of work was dictated by mechanical engines to which the human workers conformed. Rewards were likewise shifted from personal satisfaction, the joy of teamwork, or a sense of accomplishment to the much more symbolic compensation of cash. Instead of using skill to make things they could be proud of, people performed repetitive, meaningless tasks for cash. Their sense of genuine achievement and connection had to be replaced with loyalty to an abstracted corporate parent. Meanwhile, worker-to-worker solidarity (the dreaded unionization) was repressed and derided at every turn. Each worker was to be in this alone, in competition with his fellows, and loyal only to the company.
The premise for an industrial society rested in the ability of corporations to secure cheap and willing labor. Today, this means outsourcing. But originally it meant creating a compliant workforce at home, however coercively it had to be done. In order to be controlled, the teeming masses would be broken down into a mass of teeming individuals.
Fortune magazine suggested that big business refer to itself as a “public utility,” central to the very foundations of American life.
The corporations represented at the fair used it as an opportunity to battle New Deal collectivist propaganda, and they did so by creating highly personal, individualistic exhibits. Westinghouse’s promotional film The Middleton Family represented America’s plight through the experience of one family. While the daughter was seduced by a “radical thinking” boyfriend, corporations offered the family a life of abundance. The film depicts a consumer paradise—not a worker reality—in which machines did all the work and the family could enjoy a world filled with entertainment. GM’s “Futurama” exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, conveyed people through scenes of an automotive utopia characterized by “accident-free” highways and idealized suburbs.
humanizing the corporation. People working in concert, whether in an American work camp or a Soviet factory, were part of the awful totalitarian machine. American free enterprise, on the other hand, offered loyal citizens the opportunity to live “the good life.” Soldiers in particular, who had just risked their lives conquering fascism, did not want to return to a country where their identities were defined through their relationships to the companies for whom they worked. Rather than see themselves as workers, Americans would learn to see themselves as consumers.
Corporations made themselves over as the best friends people could ever have: they were empowering people, through their consumption, to become more themselves. At its core, the new tactic would be to promote the idea that corporatism restored people’s individuality, while collective action and community forced only stultifying conformity. Corporatism would help you be more you.
As Atkin writes, “The evidence of my and others’ research is that whether we like it or not, brands are being used as credible sources of community and meaning. And I think there’s an important reason why they have been elevated to this role.” According to Atkin, corporations have simply stepped in where traditional meaning-makers have failed us. If churches and civic organizations have become incapable of providing people with meaning, why shouldn’t corporations provide this necessary human need? What this analysis leaves out is that the failure of churches and civic organizations was not an entirely unaided phenomenon. Corporations, sometimes as a part of misguided government strategizing, intentionally undermined the foundations of community organizations from union halls to credit unions in their effort to promote self-interested consumerism.
members of real and “consumer” cults—from Scientology members to Harley-Davidson riders—and found them yearning for the same things: to belong and to make meaning. By investing a brand with the qualities that make cults so compelling, Atkin helped the corporations who hired him build deep connections with consumers. Whether a laptop or a pair of running shoes can actually come close to fulfilling either of these fundamental needs depends on just how disconnected we are from the possibility of their genuine fulfillment in the first place. The more desocialized we are, the more dependent on Atkin’s external, prefab meaning systems we become.
other main difference between brand cults and real religion, culture, or art is the intent. While religious iconography is almost inevitably corrupted by one institution or another, its original intent is to communicate values and meaning useful to human beings. Whether each of the Ten Commandments is valid or appropriate in hindsight is less important than the fact that they were written with the intention of making society more functional and ethical. Some human being somewhere participated mindfully in their creation. The symbols emerging from corporate advertising have no such origins. They are the product of focus groups and brainstorming sessions. They are icons and images tested to evoke a response, and nothing more.
Values that don’t resonate with buying things—such as those that actually bring people into direct contact with one another—will be eschewed in favor of those that require corporate-manufactured intermediaries.
Practitioners now like to call this exploitation of community and friendship “social marketing.” They don’t see it as the destruction of social reality, but as its very rehabilitation. Sufficiently disconnected from the remains of a shared human culture, the amateur marketers believe that they are creating opportunities for people to engage with one another once again. The products they’re pitching are just the excuse to start up a good conversation.
But it’s a difficult moment to try to return to being human again, too. Even that sounds more like a self-help course than a workable strategy. And so human beings go from subjects to citizens, citizens to workers, workers to consumers, and consumers to brands. In the journey toward self-incorporation, market-friendly spirituality provides a momentary release from this uneven fight. All the while, the artificial structures we created—corporations—become bigger players, the true gods of this artificial realm, immortal, utterly impervious to our humanity, and capable of rewriting the rules as they go along. Our only hope may be to consider the possibility that neither our corporations nor the money on which they thrive are real. They weren’t here to begin with. We invented them, together, just as we invented our selves.
human beings are just as likely to share and cooperate as they are to cheat and compete.
is a vast middle ground between attempting to design a socialist welfare state and leaving self-interested individuals alone to spontaneously develop a free-market utopia—especially when the rules of that marketplace have been imposed by forces as powerful as any dictator. To approach that middle ground, however, we must dispense with the assumption that human beings were born to be economic actors or, in Hayek’s more nuanced view, that we are all the unconscious arbiters of natural market forces. The principles of the intentionally corporatized marketplace are not embedded in the human genome, nor is self-interested behavior an innate human instinct. If anything, it’s the other way around: a landscape defined by the competitive