by Naomi Klein
Sell or Be Sold
After almost a decade of the branding frenzy, cool hunting has become an internal contradiction: the hunters must rarefy youth “microcultures” by claiming that only full-time hunters have the know-how to unearth them —or else why hire cool hunters at all? Sputnik warns its clients that if the cool trend is “visible in your neighborhood or crowding your nearest mall, the learning is over. It’s too late…. You need to get down with the streets, to be in the trenches every day.”29 And yet this is demonstrably false; so-called street fashions —many of them planted by brandmasters like Nike and Hilfiger from day one — reach the ballooning industry of glossy youth-culture magazines and video stations without a heartbeat’s delay. And if there is one thing virtually every young person now knows, it’s that street style and youth culture are infinitely marketable commodities.
Besides, even if there was a lost indigenous tribe of cool a few years back, rest assured that it no longer exists. It turns out that the prevailing legalized forms of youth stalking are only the tip of the iceberg: the Sputnik vision for the future of hip marketing is for companies to hire armies of Sputnik spawns — young “street promoters,” “Net promoters” and “street distributors” who will hype brands one-on-one on the street, in the clubs and on-line. “Use the magic of peer-to-peer distribution —it worked in the freestyle sport cultures, mainly because the promoters were their friends…. Street promoting will survive as the only true means of personally ‘spreading the word.’”30 So all arrows point to more jobs for the ballooning industry of “street snitches,” certified representatives of their demographic who will happily become walking infomercials for Nike, Reebok and Levi’s.
By fall 1998 it had already started to happen with the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo hiring two thousand college students on two hundred campuses to talk up the cars to their friends. Similarly, Anheuser-Busch keeps troops of U.S. college frat boys and “Bud Girls” on its payroll to promote Budweiser beer at campus parties and bars.31 The vision is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs.-spy corporate-fueled youth culture stalking itself, whose members will videotape one another’s haircuts and chat about their corporate keepers’ cool new products in their grassroots newsgroups.
Rock-and-Roll CEOs
There is an amusing irony in the fact that so many of our captains of industry pay cool hunters good money to lead them on the path to brand-image nirvana. The true barometers of hip are not the hunters, the postmodern admen, the change agents or even those trendy teenagers they’re all madly chasing. They are the CEOs themselves, who are, for the most part, so damn rich that they can afford to stay on top of all the coolest culture trends. Guys like Diesel Jeans founder Renzo Rosso, who, according to Business Week, “rides to work on a Ducati Monster motorcycle.”32 Or Nike’s Phil Knight, who only took off his ever-present wraparound Oakley sunglasses after Oakley CEO Jim Jannard refused to sell him the company. Or famed admen Dan Wieden and David Kennedy who built a basketball court — complete with bleachers —in their corporate headquarters. Or Virgin’s Richard Branson, who launched a London bridal store in a wedding dress, rappelled off the roof of his new Vancouver megastore while uncorking a bottle of champagne and then later crash-landed in the Algerian desert in his hot-air balloon —all during the month of December 1996. These CEOs are the new rock stars —and why shouldn’t they be? Forever trailing the scent of cool, they are full-time, professional teenagers, but unlike real teenagers, they have nothing to distract them from the hot pursuit of the edge: no homework, puberty, college-entrance exams or curfews for them.
Getting Over It
As we will see later on, the sheer voracity of the corporate cool hunt did much to provoke the rise of brand-based activism: through adbusting, computer hacking and spontaneous illegal street parties, young people all over the world are aggressively reclaiming space from the corporate world, “unbranding” it, guerrilla-style. But the effectiveness of the cool hunt also set the stage for anticorporate activism in another way: inadvertently, it exposed the impotence of almost all other forms of political resistance except anti-corporate resistance, one cutting-edge marketing trend at a time.
When the youth-culture feeding frenzy began in the early nineties, many of us who were young at the time saw ourselves as victims of a predatory marketing machine that co-opted our identities, our styles and our ideas and turned them into brand food. Nothing was immune: not punk, not hip-hop, not fetish, not techno — not even, as I’ll get to in Chapter 5, campus feminism or multiculturalism. Few of us asked, at least not right away, why it was that these scenes and ideas were proving so packageable, so unthreatening —and so profitable. Many of us had been certain we were doing something subversive and rebellious but … what was it again?
In retrospect, a central problem was the mostly unquestioned assumption that just because a scene or style is different (that is, new and not yet mainstream), it necessarily exists in opposition to the mainstream, rather than simply sitting unthreateningly on its margins. Many of us assumed that “alternative” —music that was hard to listen to, styles that were hard to look at —was also anticommercial, even socialist. In Hype!, a documentary about how the discovery of “the Seattle sound” transformed a do-it-yourself hardcore scene into an international youth-culture-content factory, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder makes a rather moving speech about the emptiness of the “alternative” breakthrough of which his band was so emblematic:
If all of this influence that this part of the country has and this musical scene has —if it doesn’t do anything with it, that would be the tragedy. If it doesn’t do anything with it like make some kind of change or make some kind of difference, this group of people who feel this certain way, who think these sorts of things that the underdogs we’ve all met and lived with think —if they finally get to the forefront and nothing comes out of it, that would be the tragedy.33
But that tragedy has already happened, and Vedder’s inability to spit out what he was actually trying to say had more than a little to do with it. When the world’s cameras were turned on Seattle, all we got were a few antiestablishment fuck-yous, a handful of overdoses and Kurt Cobain’s suicide. We also got the decade’s most spectacular “sellout” —Courtney Love’s awe-inspiring sail from junkie punk queen to high-fashion cover girl in a span of two years. It seemed Courtney had been playing dress-up all along. What was revealing was how little it mattered. Did Love betray some karmic debt she owed to smudged eyeliner? To not caring about anything and shooting up? To being surly to the press? Don’t you need to buy in to something earnestly before you can sell it out cynically?
Seattle imploded precisely because no one wanted to answer questions like those, and yet in the case of Cobain, and even Vedder, many in its scene possessed a genuine, if malleable, disdain for the trappings of commercialism. What was “sold out” in Seattle, and in every other subculture that has had the misfortune of being spotlighted by the cool hunters, was some pure idea about doing it yourself, about independent labels versus the big corporations, about not buying in to the capitalist machine. But few in that scene bothered to articulate these ideas out loud, and Seattle —long dead and forgotten as anything but a rather derivative fad —now serves as a cautionary tale about why so little opposition to the theft of cultural space took place in the early to mid-nineties. Trapped in the headlights of irony and carrying too much pop-culture baggage, not one of its antiheroes could commit to a single, solid political position.
A similar challenge is now being faced by all those ironic consumers out there —a cultural suit of armor many of us are loath to critique because it lets us feel smug while watching limitless amounts of bad TV. Unfortunately, it’s tough to hold on to that subtle state of De Certeau’s “in-betweenness” when the eight-hundred-pound culture industry gorilla wants to sit next to us on the couch and tag along on our ironic trips to the mall. That art of being in-bet
ween, of being ironic, or camp, which Susan Sontag so brilliantly illuminated in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” is based on an essential cliquiness, a club of people who get the aesthetic puns. “To talk about camp is therefore to betray it,”34 she acknowledges at the beginning of the essay, selecting the format of enumerated notes rather than a narrative so as to tread more lightly on her subject, one that could easily have been trampled with too heavy an approach.
Since the publication of Sontag’s piece, camp has been quantified, measured, weighed, focus-grouped and test-marketed. To say it has been betrayed, as Sontag had feared, is an understatement of colossal dimensions. What’s left is little more than a vaguely sarcastic way to eat Pizza Pops. Camp cannot exist in an ironic commercial culture in which no one is fully participating and everyone is an outsider inside their clothes, because, as Sontag writes, “In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.”35
Much of the early camp culture that Sontag describes involved using an act of imagination to make the marginal —even the despised —glamorous and fabulous. Drag queens, for instance, took their forced exile and turned it into a ball, with all the trappings of the Hollywood balls to which they would never be invited. The same can even be said of Andy Warhol. The man who took the world on a camping trip was a refugee from bigoted smalltown America; the Factory became his sovereign state. Sontag proposed camp as a defense mechanism against the banality, ugliness and overearnestness of mass culture. “Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”36 Only now, some thirty-five years later, we are faced with the vastly more difficult question, How to be truly critical in an age of mass camp?
Or perhaps it is not that difficult. Yes, the cool hunters reduce vibrant cultural ideas to the status of archeological artifacts, and drain away whatever meaning they once held for the people who lived with them —but this has always been the case. It’s a cinch to co-opt a style; and it has been done many times before, on a much grander scale than the minor takeover of drag and grunge. Bauhaus modernism, for example, had its roots in the imaginings of a socialist utopia free of garish adornment, but it was almost immediately appropriated as the relatively inexpensive architecture of choice for the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of corporate America.
On the other hand, though style-based movements are stripped of their original meanings time and time again, the effect of this culture vulturing on more politically grounded movements is often so ludicrous that the most sensible reaction is just to laugh it off. The spring 1998 Prada collection, for instance, borrowed heavily from the struggle of the labor move ment. As “supershopper” Karen von Hahn reported from Milan, “The collection, a sort of Maoist/Soviet-worker chic full of witty period references, was shown in a Prada-blue room in the Prada family palazzo to an exclusive few.” She adds, “After the show, the small yet ardent group of devotees tossed back champagne cocktails and canapés while urbane jazz played in the background.”37 Mao and Lenin also make an appearance on a Spring 1999 handbag from Red or Dead. Yet despite these clear co-optations of the class struggle, one hardly expects the labor movements of the world to toss in the towel in a huff, give up on their demands for decent working conditions and labor standards worldwide because Mao is suddenly the It Boy in Milan. Neither are union members everywhere accepting wage rollbacks because Pizza Hut aired a commercial in which the boss delivers pizzas to a picket line and all anti-management animosity is abandoned in favor of free food.
The Tibetan people in the West seem similarly nonplussed by their continued popularity with the Beastie Boys, Brad Pitt and designer Anna Sui, who was so moved by their struggle that she made an entire line of banana-print bikini tops and surfer shorts inspired by the Chinese occupation (Women’s Wear Daily dubbed the Tibet line “techno beach blanket bingo”38 ). More indifference has met Apple computers’ appropriation of Gandhi for their “Think Different” campaign, and Che Guevara’s reincarnation as the logo for Revolution Soda (slogan: “Join the Revolution;” see image on page 62) and as the mascot of the upscale London cigar lounge, Che. Why? Because not one of the movements being “co-opted” expressed itself primarily through style or attitude. And so style co-optation —and indeed any outside-the-box brain-storming on Madison Avenue —does not have the power to undo them either.
It may seem cold comfort, but now that we know advertising is an extreme sport and CEOs are the new rock stars, it’s worth remembering that extreme sports are not political movements and rock, despite its historic claims to the contrary, is not revolution. In fact, to determine whether a movement genuinely challenges the structures of economic and political power, one need only measure how affected it is by the goings-on in the fashion and advertising industries. If, even after being singled out as the latest fad, it continues as if nothing had happened, it’s a good bet it is a real movement. If it spawns an industry of speculation about whether movement X has lost its “edge,” perhaps its adherents should be looking for a sharper utensil. And as we will soon see, that is exactly what many young activists are in the process of doing.
Top: Image from 1984 Apple television campaign; Apple has been a major promoter of technology in classrooms. Bottom: Channel One is broadcast in 12,000 U.S. schools.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BRANDING OF LEARNING
Ads in Schools and Universities
A democratic system of education … is one of the surest ways of creating and greatly extending markets for goods of all kinds and especially those goods in which fashion may play a part.
—Ex-adman James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice, 1934
Although the brands seem to be everywhere —at kids’ concerts, next to them on the couch, on stage with their heroes, in their on-line chat groups, and on their playing fields and basketball courts — for a long time one major unbranded youth frontier remained: a place where young people gathered, talked, sneaked smokes, made out, formed opinions and, most maddeningly of all, stood around looking cool for hours on end. That place is called school. And clearly, the brands had to get into the schools.
“You’ll agree that the youth market is an untapped wellspring of new revenue. You’ll also agree that the youth market spends the majority of each day inside the schoolhouse. Now the problem is, how do you reach that market?” asks a typically tantalizing brochure from the Fourth Annual Kid Power Marketing Conference.
As we have just seen, marketers and cool hunters have spent the better part of the decade hustling the brands back to high school and pouring them into the template of the teenage outlaw. Several of the most successful brands had even cast their corporate headquarters as private schools, referring to them as “campuses” and, at the Nike World Campus, nicknaming one edifice “the student union building.” Even the cool hunters are going highbrow; by the late nineties, the rage in the industry was to recast oneself less as a trendy club-hopper than as a bookish grad student. In fact, some insist they aren’t cool hunters at all but rather “urban anthropologists.”
And yet despite their up-to-the-minute outfits and intellectual pretensions, the brands and their keepers still found themselves on the wrong side of the school gate, a truly intolerable state of affairs and one that would not last long. American marketing consultant Jack Myers described the insufferable slight like this: “The choice we have in this country [the U.S.] is for our educational system to join the electronic age and communicate to students in ways they can understand and to which they can relate. Or our schools can continue to use outmoded forms of communications and become the daytime prisons for millions of young people, as they have become in our inner cities.”1 This reasoning, which baldly equates corporate access to the schools with access to modern technology, and by extension to the future itself, is at the core of how the brands have managed, over the course of only one decade, to all but eliminate the barrier between ads and education. It was technology that lent a new urgency to nineties chroni
c underfunding: at the same time as schools were facing ever-deeper budget cuts, the costs of delivering a modern education were rising steeply, forcing many educators to look to alternative funding sources for help. Swept up by info-tech hype, schools that couldn’t afford up-to-date textbooks were suddenly expected to provide students with audiovisual equipment, video cameras, classroom computers, desktop publishing capacity, the latest educational software programs, Internet access —even, at some schools, video-conferencing.
As many education experts have pointed out, the pedagogical benefits technology brings to the classroom are dubious at best, but the fact remains that employers are clamoring for tech-trained graduates and chances are the private school down the street or across town is equipped with all the latest gadgets and toys. In this context, corporate partnerships and sponsorship arrangements have seemed to many public schools, particularly those in poorer areas, to be the only possible way out of the high-tech bind. If the price of staying modern is opening the schools to ads, the thinking goes, then parents and teachers will have to grin and bear it.
The fact that more schools are turning to the private sector to finance technology purchases does not mean that governments are relinquishing any role in supplying public schools with computers. Quite the opposite. A growing number of politicians are making a computer on every desk a key plank in their election platforms, albeit in partnership with local businesses. But in the process school boards are draining money out of programs like music and physical education to finance this high-tech dream — and here too they are opening the door to corporate sponsorships and to direct forms of brand promotion in cash-strapped cafeterias and sports programs.
