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Peak Nature
Capitalism has no soul.
by Timothy Morton
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
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swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13263292281", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/files\/audio\/Adbusters-98-Morton.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13263292281"});Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata. You can scour the Earth from mountaintop to Marianas Trench. You will never find Nature. That’s why I put it in capitals. I want the reader to see that it’s an empty category looking for something to fill it. Gray goo.
Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that preexists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it: standing reserve, Bestand.
Bestand means “stuff,” as in the old ad from the 1990s, “Drink Pepsi: Get Stuff.” There is an ontology implicit in capitalist production, then, that is strictly materialism as defined by Aristotle. Funnily enough, however, this materialism is not fascinated with material objects in all their manifold specificity. It’s just stuff. This viewpoint is the basis of Aristotle’s problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or handled matter? Have you ever held a piece of “stuff”? Sure, I’ve seen lots of objects: Santa Claus in a department store, snowflakes and photographs of atoms. But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such? Aristotle says it’s a bit like searching through a zoo to find the “animal” rather than the various species such as monkeys and mynah birds. Marx says exactly the same thing regarding capital. “The ‘expanded’ form [of the commodity] passes into the ‘general’ form when some commodity is excluded, exempted from the collection of commodities, and thus appears as the general equivalent of all commodities, as the immediate embodiment of Commodity as such, as if, by the side of all real animals, there existed the Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom – or as if, to use an example from commercial capitalism, by the side of all real spices, there existed the Spice.” As Nature goes, so goes matter. The two most progressive physical theories of our age, ecology and quantum theory, need have nothing to do with it.
What is bestand? Bestand is stockpiling. Gallon after gallon of oil waiting to be tapped. Row upon row of big box houses waiting to be inhabited. Terabyte after terabyte of memory waiting to be filled. Stockpiling is the art of the zeugma – the yoking of things you hear in phrases such as “wave upon wave” or “bumper to bumper.” Stockpiling is the dominant mode of social existence. Giant parking lots empty of cars, huge tables in restaurants across which you can’t hold hands, vast empty lawns. Nature is stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. The Rocky Flats nuclear bomb trigger factory was sited precisely to evoke this kind of mountainous stockpile. The eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the ways in which we still believe that Nature is “over there” – that it exists apart from technology, apart from history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of stockpiles.
So again, I ask, what exactly are we sustaining when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out of control system that sucks in gray goo at one end and pushes out gray value at the other. It’s Natural goo, Natural value. Result? Mountain ranges of inertia, piling higher every year, while humans boil away in the agony of uncertainty. Just take a look at Manufactured Landscapes: the ocean of telephone dials, dials as far as the eye can see, somewhere in China. A real ocean – it lies there at this very moment.
Societies embody philosophies. Actually, what we have in modernity is much, much worse than just instrumentality. Here we must depart from Heidegger. What’s worse is the location of essence in some beyond, away from any specific existence. To this extent, capitalism is itself Heideggerian! Whether we call it scientism, deconstruction, relationism or just good old-fashioned Platonic forms, there is no essence in what exists. Either the beyond is itself nonexistent (deconstruction, nihilism), or it’s some kind of real away from “here.” The problem, then, is not essentialism but this very notion of a beyond. Think of what Tony Hayward said. He said that the Gulf of Mexico was a huge ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don’t want to quibble about the relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would somehow have gotten it into Hayward’s thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward’s assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t worry. The beyond will take care of it.
Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite gray goo, real things writhe and smack into one another. Some leap out because industry malfunctions, or functions only too well. Oil bursts out of its ancient sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of plutonium for 24,000 years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the heat from the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials grows ever larger. Paradoxically, capitalism has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.
Modern life presents us with a choice:
1) The essence of things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, Being).
2) There is no essence. (At present I believe that the restriction of rightness and coolness to this choice is one reason why planet Earth is in big trouble right now. And I believe that the choice resembles a choice between grayish brown and brownish gray). That’s why I believe in a third choice:
3) There is an essence, and it’s right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn.
And that’s why I believe we are entering a new era of academic work, where the point will not be to one-up each other by appealing to the trace of the givenness of the openness of the clearing of the lighting of the being of the pencil. Thinking past “meta mode” will at least bring us up to speed with the weirdness of things, a weirdness that evolution, ecology, relativity and quantum theory all speak about. This weirdness resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them.
When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “away.” Marx was partly wrong, then, when in The Communist Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn’t see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back into the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects. This oozing real comes back and can no longer be ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly “gone and forgotten,” there, look! There it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the surface, square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean. The cosmic U-bend is no more. It can’t be gone and forgotten – even ABC News knows that now.
When I hear the word “sustainability” I reach for my sunscreen.
The End of the WorldWhen Neo touches a mirror in The Matrix it adheres to his hand, instantly changing from reflective surface to viscous substance. The very thing that we use to reflect becomes an object in its own right, liquid and dark like oil in the dim light of the room in which Neo has taken the red pill. The usual reading of this scene is that Neo’s reality is dissolving. If we stay on the level of the sticky, oily mirror, however, we obtain an equally powerful reading. It’s not reality that dissolves, but the subject, the very capacity to “mirror” things, to be separate from the world like someone looking at a reflection in a mirror – removed from it by an ontological sheet of reflective glass. The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity (I’m thinking here of the work of Ortega y Gasset, Levinas and Graham Harman). Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there it is, impossible to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what they reflect. In its ingenuous sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him.
The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because of hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The Greeks called it miasma, the way blood-guilt sticks to you.
Why objects, why now? The philosopher Graham Harman writes that, because they withdraw irreducibly, you can’t even get closer to objects. This becomes clearer as we enter the ecological crisis – “How far in are we?” This anxiety is a symptom of the emergence of hyperobjects. When you approach them, more and more objects emerge. It’s like being in a dream written by Zeno. This strange paradox becomes clearer as we enter the age of ecological crisis – “Has it started yet? How far in are we?” is the question on all our lips, precisely because we are in it, precisely because it has started.
It’s November 2010. You are waiting at a bus stop. Someone else ambles up. “Nice weather, isn’t it?” she asks.
You pause for a moment. You wonder whether she is only saying that to distract you from the latest news about global warming. You decide she isn’t.
“Yes,” you say. But your reply holds something back – the awareness that for you it’s not a particularly nice day because you’re concerned that the heat and the moisture have to do with global warming. This holding back may or may not be reflected in your tone.
“Mind you,” she says. “Oh, here it comes,” you think. “Funny weather last week, wasn’t it? I blame global warming.”
We all have conversations that are more or less like that now. Just as after 9/11 objects to which we may have paid attention – an X-Acto knife, some white powder – suddenly gained a terrible significance, so in an age of global warming the weather – that nice neutral backdrop that you can talk about with a stranger, in that nice neutral backdrop-y way we might call phatic (after Roman Jakobson) – has taken on a menacing air.
In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an ellipsis.
This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological shift in human awareness. Which in turn is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac knows, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of humanists such as ourselves to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to help explain it.
What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are living “in” a world – one that for instance we can call Nature – no longer exists in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don’t want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of Hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been going on now since as long as the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.
As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more threatening, is now looming on our horizon – looming so as to abolish our horizon, or any horizon, in fact. Global warming, the consequence of runaway fossil fuel burning (as we all know ad nauseam), has performed a radical shift in the status of the weather. Why? Because the world as such – not just a certain idea of world but world in its entirety – has evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in the first place.
We could explain this in terms of the good old-fashioned Aristotelian view of substance and accident. I’m sure you are familiar with the idea that for Aristotle, a realist, there are substances that happen to have various qualities or accidents that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. In section Epsilon 2 of the Metaphysics Aristotle outlines the differences between substances and accidents. What climate change has done is shift the weather from accidental to substantial. Here’s Aristotle:
Suppose, for instance, that in the season of the Cynosure [the dog days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heatwave, we would not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case.But these sorts of violent changes are exactly what global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a potential symptom of a substance, global warming. So all of a sudden this wet stuff falling on my head is a mere feature of some much more sinister phenomenon that I can’t see with my naked human eyes. I need terabytes of RAM and extreme processing speed to model it in real time (they were just able to do this in spring 2008).
There is an even spookier problem with Aristotle’s arctic summer. If those arctic summers continue in any way, and if we can model them as symptoms of global warming, it is the case that there never was a genuine, meaningful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real because it kept on repeating for say two or three millennia. Global warming, in other words, plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a reliable world was actually just a habitual pattern – a collusion between forces such as sunshine and moisture and us humans expecting such things at certain regular intervals and giving them names, such as dog days. We took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more withdrawn – climate. As Harman argues, “world” is always presence-at-hand – a mere caricature of some real object. What Ben Franklin and others in the Romantic period discovered was not really weather, but rather a toy version of this real object, a toy that ironically started to unlock the door to the real thing.
Strange weather patterns and carbon emissions caused scientists to start monitoring things that at first only appeared locally significant. That’s the old school definition of climate: there’s the climate in Peru, the climate on Long Island, but climate in general, climate as the totality of derivatives of weather events – in much the same way as inertia is a derivative of velocity – climate as such is a beast newly recognized via the collaboration of weather, scientists, satellites, government agencies, and so on. This beast includes the sun, since it’s infrared heat from the sun that is trapped by the greenhouse effect of gases such as CO2. So global warming is a colossal entity that includes entities that exist way beyond Earth’s atmosphere and yet it affects us intimately, right here and now. Global warming is a prime example of what I am calling a hyperobject, an object that is massively distributed in space-time and that radically transforms our ideas of what an object is. It covers the entire surface of Earth and most of the effects extend up to 500 years into the future. Remember what life was like in 1510?
You are walking on top of lifeforms. Your car drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earth’s crust is distributed bacterial excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms.
The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it’s already here. It is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the “end of the world” are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic space.
If there is no background – no neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climate – then there is no foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, for instance, tucked up like little hobbits in the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning (Heideggerian Dasein for instance) falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction. Worlds need horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere, when I can Google Earth the fish in my mom’s pond in her garden in London, the world – as a significant, bounded, horizoning entity – disappears. We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery for us, as backdrops, have dissolved.
World turns out to be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from an entity’s ignorance concerning objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight” is a charming old saw that evokes days when shepherds lived in worlds, worlds bounded by horizons on which things occurred such as red sunsets. The sun goes down, the sun comes up – of course now we know it doesn’t, so Galileo and Copernicus tore big holes in that particular notion of world. Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You can’t see or smell climate. Given our brains’ processing power, we can’t even really think about it all that concretely. You could say then that we still live in a world, only massively upgraded. True, but now world means significantly less than it used to – it doesn’t mean “significant for humans” or even “significant for conscious entities.”
A simple experiment demonstrates plainly that world is an aesthetic phenomenon. I call it The Lord of the Rings vs. The Ball Popper test. For this experiment you will need a copy of the second part of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You will also require a Playskool Busy Ball Popper, made by Hasbro.
Now play the scene that I consider to be the absolute nadir of horror, when Frodo, captured by Faramir, is staggering around the bombed-out city Osgiliath when a Nazgul (a Ringwraith) attacks on a “fell beast,” a terrifying winged dragon-like creature.
Switch on the ball popper. You will notice the inane tunes that the popper plays instantly undermine the coherence of Peter Jackson’s narrative world.
The idea of world depends upon all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous meaninglessness. It’s the job of serious Wagnerian worlding to erase the trace of this meaninglessness. Jackson’s trilogy surely is Wagnerian, a total work of art or Gesamkunstwerk in which elves, dwarves and men have their own languages, their own tools, their own architecture – this is done to fascist excess as if they were different sports teams. But it’s easy to recover the trace of meaninglessness from this seamless world – absurdly easy, as the toy experiment proves.
Stupid Kids’ Toy 5, Wagnerian Tolkien Movie Nil. What can we learn from this? “World,” a key concept in ecophenomenology, is an illusion. And objects for sure have a hidden weirdness. In effect, the Stupid Kids’ Toy “translated” the movie, clashing with it and altering it in its own limited and unique way.
In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to the building of a solar array in a park in 2008 because it didn’t look “natural.” Objections to wind farms are similar – not because of the risk to birds, but because they “spoil the view.” A 2008 plan to put a wind farm near a remote Scottish island was, well, scotched, because residents of the island complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology, and a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature. How come a wind turbine is less beautiful than an oil pipeline? How come it “spoils the view” any more than pipes and roads?
You could see turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size and magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the sublime (rather than the beautiful). But it’s an ethical sublime that says, “We humans choose not to use carbon” – a choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps it’s this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice, rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed “landscape” (a word for a painting, not actual trees and water). (And now of course there are wind spires, which do reproduce a kind of aesthetic distance common in landscape painting.) As a poster in the office of Mulder in The X-Files used to say: the truth is out there. Ideology is not just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke bottle. It’s in the way some things appear “natural” – rolling hills and greenery – as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred. These fake landscapes are the original greenwashing. What the Scots are saying, in objecting to wind farms, is not “Save the environment!” but “Leave our dreams undisturbed!” World is an aesthetic construct that depends on things like underground oil and gas pipelines. A profound political act would be to choose another aesthetic construct, one that doesn’t require smoothness and distance and coolness.
Standard ecological criticism depends upon different concepts of “world.” Indeed, it derives this concept from philosophical thinking about climate, for instance in the proto-nationalist thinking of Humboldt and Herder, or from biological racism that says that I’m white because I was born in a northern climate. This concept is by no means doing what it should to help ecological criticism. Indeed, the more we see and know about ecology, as is inevitable in an era of ecological crisis, the more of that sheer meaninglessness we have. What an irony: the more data we have, the less it signifies a coherent world.
It’s Heidegger, more than anyone else, who generates the concept of world for contemporary ecological philosophy and cultural analysis. In particular, in “The Question Concerning Technology” and “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” world is what is created or “enframed” by equipment. This definition has given rise to the now pervasive doctrine of “worlding,” whereby cultural artifacts embody the world in various ways: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, as they say.
Now for a kick off, there are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept altogether, it shouldn’t be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this: witch-ducking stools constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a wonderful world of witch-ducking in the Middle Ages. Witch-ducking stools constituted a world for their users in every meaningful sense. There is for sure a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesn’t mean we should be preserving it. So the argument that “It’s good because it constitutes a world” is, to use the technical term, bogus. The reasoning that one should not interfere with the environment because doing so interferes with someone’s or something’s world is nowhere near a good enough reason. It may even have pernicious consequences. So I’m afraid we must part with Donna Haraway, whose ethics insists that nonhumans are worthy of our care and respect because they constitute worlds, they are in the worlding business. I part company with Haraway here, just as she parts with me, since she thinks that what I’m proposing by contrast is “exterminism” – getting entities oven-ready for destruction. To which I reply, how can you get an entity that doesn’t exist ready for destruction?
The second area of concern is historical, namely the way in which current ecological crises such as global warming and the sixth mass extinction event have thrown into sharp relief the notion of world. It is as if humans are losing their world, and their idea of world (including the idea that they ever had one), at one and the same time. This is at best highly disorienting. In this historical moment, the concept world is thrown into sharp relief by circumstances demanding conscious human intervention. Working to transcend our notion of world is important at this moment. Like a mannerist painting that stretches the rules of classicism to breaking point, global warming has stretched our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a very good reason. This is simply because no entity at all has a world, or as Graham Harman puts it, “there is no such thing as a ‘horizon.’”
Let’s think about one way in which global warming abolishes the idea of a horizon. This would be the timescales involved – yes, timescales in the plural. There are three of them. We could call these, in turn, the frightening, the horrifying, and the petrifying.
1) Frightening timescale. It will take several hundred years for cold ocean waters (assuming there are any) to absorb about 75% of the excess CO2.
2) Horrifying timescale. It will then take another 30,000 years or so for most of the remaining 25% to be absorbed by igneous rocks. The half-life of plutonium is 24,100 years.
3) Petrifying timescale. The final 7% will be around 100,000 years from now.
There is a real sense in which “forever” is far easier on the mind than these very large timescales, what I call very large finitude. Hyperobjects produce very large finitude, scales of time and space that are finite and for that reason humiliatingly difficult for humans to visualize. Forever makes you feel important. But 100,000 years makes you wonder whether you can imagine 100,000 anything. It seems rather abstract to imagine that a book, for instance, is 100,000 words long.
The “world” as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesn’t exist.
What is left if we aren’t the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul, as it were – the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Our era is witness to the emergence of a renewed Aristotelianism, an object-oriented ontology that thinks essence is right here, not in some beyond. It’s precisely the magical amazement of things like stones, beetles, doors, red hot chili peppers, Nirvana, Bob Geldof, quasars and cartoon characters in the shape of Richard Nixon’s head that truly has to be explained, not explained away. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history … and the end of the human dream that reality is significant for humans alone. Let us welcome the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and nonhumans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world.
Rural > City > Cyberspace
The Biggest Migration In Human History.
by Nicholas Carr
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Lao P. Xia Xiaowan
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13263292282", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/getfile4.posterous.com\/getfile\/files.posterous.com\/temp-2011-11-29\/dzBfICpdqAFsFgxwtxEsqneJrCdaHaBruozsdHiFbBGppGCwjosoAFkzvCgn\/Adbusters-99-15.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13263292282"});A series of psychological studies over the past 20 years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.
The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous and mentally fatiguing series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.
The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.”
There is no Sleepy Hollow on the internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street. The stimulations of the web, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We wouldn’t want to give them up. But they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily, as Hawthorne understood, overwhelm all quieter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is the one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.
It’s not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion. Psychologists have long studied how people experience fear and react to physical threats, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun researching the sources of our nobler instincts. What they’re finding is that, as Antonio Damasio, the director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, explains, the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that “are inherently slow.” In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain – when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously – the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain “to transcend immediate involvement of the body” and begin to understand and to feel “the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation.”
The experiment, say the scholars, indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. “For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” cautions Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a member of the research team. “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.” It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that as the net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.
There are those who are heartened by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the web’s intellectual ethic. “Technological progress does not reverse,” writes a Wall Street Journal columnist, “so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue.” We need not worry, though, because our “human software” will in time “catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible.” We’ll “evolve” to become more agile consumers of data. The writer of a cover story in New York magazine says that as we become used to “the 21st-century task” of “fitting” among bits of online information, “the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.” We may lose our capacity “to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end,” but in recompense we’ll gain new skills, such as the ability to “conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media.” A prominent economist writes, cheerily, that “the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores.” An Atlantic author suggests that our “technology-induced ADD” may be “a short-term problem,” stemming from our reliance on “cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow.” Developing new cognitive habits is “the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”
These writers are certainly correct in arguing that we’re being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it’s a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.”
It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.
Zyprexa
An American psychosis.
by Robert Whitaker
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep 12–14 hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged.
Many gain huge amounts of weight – 20, 40, 60, and even 100 pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness – including young children and teenagers – become diabetic in very short order. Reports of patients occasionally dying from pancreatitis appear in the medical literature. Newspapers and magazines fill their pages with accounts of this new scourge, which is dubbed metabolic dysfunction illness, and parents are in a panic over the thought that their children might contract this horrible disease. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain – dopaminergic, serotoninergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure. Now, such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly’s best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.
Zyprexa
An American psychosis.
by Robert Whitaker
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep 12–14 hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged.
Many gain huge amounts of weight – 20, 40, 60, and even 100 pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness – including young children and teenagers – become diabetic in very short order. Reports of patients occasionally dying from pancreatitis appear in the medical literature. Newspapers and magazines fill their pages with accounts of this new scourge, which is dubbed metabolic dysfunction illness, and parents are in a panic over the thought that their children might contract this horrible disease. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain – dopaminergic, serotoninergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure. Now, such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly’s best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.
Joel Bakan: The Panopticon
Power of the new media.
by Joel Bakan
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
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Its structure, a radical configuration with observation posts in the center and inmates' cells and common areas around the periphery, was designed to ensure guards could always see inmates but never be seen by them. As a result, inmates had to presume guards might be watching them at any given moment, which meant, according to Bentham, that they would have to behave as if they were being watched all the time. In this way, the Panopticon, by its very structure, created the effect of total surveillance, while allowing for actual surveillance to be intermittent and even absent.
The Panopticon was never built, but Bentham's idea was revived by French philosopher Michel Foucault two centuries later to illustrate what he called the "perfection of power." Power was perfected within the Panopticon, Foucault argued, because it did not have to be exercised by guards and prison authorities. Inmates "themselves [became] the bearers of power" within a structure that had the effect of "creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it."
The Panopticon is helpful for understanding the new power and possibilities of social media for kid marketers. On social media, "people influence people," according to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. "It's no longer just about messages … broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information … shared between friends." Social network friends market to each other, in other words, as "viral" tactics (also known as "word-of-mouth" and "buzz" tactics) seamlessly weave brands and commercial messages into communications among them. Users become "fans" and "friends" of brands, and get their friends to do the same; they share across their networks branded contests, quizzes, games, applications, and "widgets" – mini-applications whose viral power makes them, according to one industry insider, possibly the highest expression so far of online marketing in the post-advertising age. They create branded videos, songs, stories, poems, and photographs at company websites and virally distribute them to friends. And these are just a few examples from a huge and growing array of viral strategies.
Marketing as marketing disappears within the viral networks of social media platforms. Boundaries are broken down between marketers and kids (as kids market to each other); between content and advertising (as advertising now infuses, rather than interrupts, content); and between kids' lives and entertainment (as their lives now become the content of that entertainment). It is truly the "perfection of [marketers'] power." Kids, like the prisoners in the Panopticon, now bear the power marketing holds over them, and the marketers, like the Panopticon's guards, drop from view, their power now automatic and self-executing, all the greater for its invisibility.
Joel Bakan: The Panopticon
Power of the new media.
by Joel Bakan
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13263292283", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/getfile0.posterous.com\/getfile\/files.posterous.com\/temp-2011-12-06\/HvayiyxGqrGxqshuFnuunIzjkfgHzHeqvnIlspycIrIueyniJClhsEaGmfpB\/Adbusters-99-17.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13263292283"});The Panopticon (which means all-seeing) is a model prison devised by British philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.
Its structure, a radical configuration with observation posts in the center and inmates' cells and common areas around the periphery, was designed to ensure guards could always see inmates but never be seen by them. As a result, inmates had to presume guards might be watching them at any given moment, which meant, according to Bentham, that they would have to behave as if they were being watched all the time. In this way, the Panopticon, by its very structure, created the effect of total surveillance, while allowing for actual surveillance to be intermittent and even absent.
The Panopticon was never built, but Bentham's idea was revived by French philosopher Michel Foucault two centuries later to illustrate what he called the "perfection of power." Power was perfected within the Panopticon, Foucault argued, because it did not have to be exercised by guards and prison authorities. Inmates "themselves [became] the bearers of power" within a structure that had the effect of "creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it."
The Panopticon is helpful for understanding the new power and possibilities of social media for kid marketers. On social media, "people influence people," according to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. "It's no longer just about messages … broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information … shared between friends." Social network friends market to each other, in other words, as "viral" tactics (also known as "word-of-mouth" and "buzz" tactics) seamlessly weave brands and commercial messages into communications among them. Users become "fans" and "friends" of brands, and get their friends to do the same; they share across their networks branded contests, quizzes, games, applications, and "widgets" – mini-applications whose viral power makes them, according to one industry insider, possibly the highest expression so far of online marketing in the post-advertising age. They create branded videos, songs, stories, poems, and photographs at company websites and virally distribute them to friends. And these are just a few examples from a huge and growing array of viral strategies.
Marketing as marketing disappears within the viral networks of social media platforms. Boundaries are broken down between marketers and kids (as kids market to each other); between content and advertising (as advertising now infuses, rather than interrupts, content); and between kids' lives and entertainment (as their lives now become the content of that entertainment). It is truly the "perfection of [marketers'] power." Kids, like the prisoners in the Panopticon, now bear the power marketing holds over them, and the marketers, like the Panopticon's guards, drop from view, their power now automatic and self-executing, all the greater for its invisibility.
Is the mic on?
Last words for 2012.
by Adbusters
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon
With execution only hours away, and having angrily refused the chaplain’s last rites in his Algiers prison cell, Outsider antagonist Meursault declares “… my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.” Having followed Meursault through his frank admissions of indifference, his trial for murder, his joy in pursuing truth and his unmoving commitment to honesty, Meursault’s last words were Camus’s treatise on how a philosopher ought to live, and ultimately, how it is one should die – that the goal of philosophy itself, as the ancient Cicero said, “is to learn how to die.”
Meursault’s vindication is not the accidental mutterings of alcoholics like Dylan Thomas’s “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record,” the delusional finalities like Napoleon’s “France! Army! Head of the Army! Josephine …” or Victor Hugo’s ominous “I see a dark light.” Rather, gazing out the lone cell window, Meursault’s paradoxical lament is more akin to Socrates’s “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don’t forget,” telling us that death was merely transformation, or Darwin’s “I have no fear of death.” But this is only part of Meursault’s reclamation of philosophy from the elite tangle of scientific method into the words of earthlings. Surely we can see a coupling in Aldous Huxley’s final words, a request on paper to his wife, “100 milligrams LSD, I.M.” – which she obligingly injected – and Australian outlaw hero Ned Kelly’s “such is life” with Meursault’s experience of finality as an anticlimactic absurd bore. Che’s hopeful provocation “I know you have come to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man,” might reckon otherwise with Camus’s absurdity, but Che’s blood bled into the ground all the same. The heartache of Vincent van Gogh’s “the sadness will last forever,” a day after shooting himself in the chest, might likewise cause Meursault’s conclusion pause, save for the fact the painters death was the ill-conceived opus of a genius. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if you want to be a good philosopher, you should become a car mechanic. That learning to live, and consequently to die, is not found in books and platitudes but in the “such is life” of our lives. The secret is not in the grandeur but in the anonymity. In this search it could be considered that if you want to learn something new about how to die today, something about the mundane in solitude, the anonymous anthology of final testaments on Texas’s death row might have something to show.
Is the mic on?
I done lost my voice.
My heart goes, is going, ba bump ba bump ba bump.
Nothing I can say can change the past.
Man, there is a lot of people here.
I came here today to die, not make speeches.
To my sweet Claudia, I love you.
I’m ready, Warden.
Is the mic on?
Last words for 2012.
by Adbusters
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon
With execution only hours away, and having angrily refused the chaplain’s last rites in his Algiers prison cell, Outsider antagonist Meursault declares “… my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.” Having followed Meursault through his frank admissions of indifference, his trial for murder, his joy in pursuing truth and his unmoving commitment to honesty, Meursault’s last words were Camus’s treatise on how a philosopher ought to live, and ultimately, how it is one should die – that the goal of philosophy itself, as the ancient Cicero said, “is to learn how to die.”
Meursault’s vindication is not the accidental mutterings of alcoholics like Dylan Thomas’s “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record,” the delusional finalities like Napoleon’s “France! Army! Head of the Army! Josephine …” or Victor Hugo’s ominous “I see a dark light.” Rather, gazing out the lone cell window, Meursault’s paradoxical lament is more akin to Socrates’s “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don’t forget,” telling us that death was merely transformation, or Darwin’s “I have no fear of death.” But this is only part of Meursault’s reclamation of philosophy from the elite tangle of scientific method into the words of earthlings. Surely we can see a coupling in Aldous Huxley’s final words, a request on paper to his wife, “100 milligrams LSD, I.M.” – which she obligingly injected – and Australian outlaw hero Ned Kelly’s “such is life” with Meursault’s experience of finality as an anticlimactic absurd bore. Che’s hopeful provocation “I know you have come to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man,” might reckon otherwise with Camus’s absurdity, but Che’s blood bled into the ground all the same. The heartache of Vincent van Gogh’s “the sadness will last forever,” a day after shooting himself in the chest, might likewise cause Meursault’s conclusion pause, save for the fact the painters death was the ill-conceived opus of a genius. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if you want to be a good philosopher, you should become a car mechanic. That learning to live, and consequently to die, is not found in books and platitudes but in the “such is life” of our lives. The secret is not in the grandeur but in the anonymity. In this search it could be considered that if you want to learn something new about how to die today, something about the mundane in solitude, the anonymous anthology of final testaments on Texas’s death row might have something to show.
Is the mic on?
I done lost my voice.
My heart goes, is going, ba bump ba bump ba bump.
Nothing I can say can change the past.
Man, there is a lot of people here.
I came here today to die, not make speeches.
To my sweet Claudia, I love you.
I’m ready, Warden.
Advertisers Lose Ground in 2011
Cleaning the toxic areas of our mental environment.
by Adbusters
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Modified D+G advertisement from Vanity Fair, Oct. 2010
After years of concentrated activism, lawmakers worldwide are finally waking up to the impact ads have luring individuals, especially the young, into unhealthy and damaging lifestyles. Alcohol, tobacco, cosmetics and junk food memes are being roasted by governments far and wide. This global awakening is only the first phase of a much more grand action to see ads not as messengers but as the messages themselves – the cause of worldwide mental dysfunction. In phase two, the barriers between physiological and psychological health will wither away and the mental environment will be an equal to the biological one.
Facebook and Twitter’s free advertising ride on French television is over. Broadcast regulators have issued a stern warning that name-dropping the two social media giants and encouraging viewers to “check us out on ––– and –––” is to stop unless the companies pay for the promotion.
Cosmetic titan L’Oreal is forced to remove two print ads by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority. The ads in question, featuring Hollywood actress Julia Roberts and supermodel Christy Turlington, featured airbrushed images of the 40-plus duo so distorted they could have been mistaken as teenagers.
China has been aggressively targeting the tobacco industry, banning smoking advertising on TV, radio and newsprint. The ban is part of China’s strategy to halt its smoking epidemic (an estimated 350 million addicted), the highest addiction rate in the world.
McDonald’s Happy Meal toys are outlawed in San Francisco, killing the top-selling Happy Meal promotion in the city. City Council ruled the toys unfairly manipulate children into purchasing unhealthy and obesity-causing foods.
Fast food chains and junk food makers in the USA are given until 2013 to voluntarily stop advertising to preteens or face government regulation. Michelle Obama’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity said the current advertising self-regulatory body, the Children’s’ Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (whose members included McDonald’s, KFC, Mars, and so on … ) is completely ineffective.
Lawmakers in Canada’s French-speaking province, Québec, continue to defend their 1989 law banning all commercial advertising directed at children 13 and under, the only such law in North America.
SpongeBob SquarePants is proven to make your child dumb and agitated. An American study shows that “children who watched nine minutes of the show scored significantly worse on assessments designed to measure memory and self control than children who watched a slower paced cartoon or kids who spent nine minutes drawing.” The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has launched a campaign to stop Nickelodeon marketing the cartoon to children under six.
The American ad industry admits it is bleeding new recruits. In 2011, 81 percent of managers in the nations’ top firms said the industry faced a talent crisis with fewer young professionals choosing advertising as a career.
Advertisers eager to get a share of Egypt’s post revolution deregulation have been warned by national marketing companies to “be mindful of the revolution” or else risk inciting brand hatred. “You have to respect the maturity young people demonstrated in their role in the revolution,” observers warn.
Alcohol companies in Australia have been given notice that athletic sponsorship contracts in the sport-obsessed nation could soon be going the way of tobacco and the dodo. The Canberra government announced a pilot $25 million sponsorship pool for events seeking alternative funding.
Ads targeting kids to consume obesity-causing foods may soon be outlawed in children’s programming in Estonia. The debate comes after a recent WHO report revealed a strong link between childhood obesity and advertising to kids.
Alcohol advertisers have been targeted in the campaign to combat fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in South Africa. SA is proposing a total ban on liquor advertising across the country as five percent of the school-age population is now listed as having alcohol-induced birth disorders.
Online advertisers may soon face strict new privacy regulations and revenue crunches in Spain and Italy. Lawmakers in those countries are discussing whether or not to categorize the information advertisers collect in web browser cookies as private and therefore not collectable by third parties.
Taiwan’s kid advertisers feel the pressure as the government launches a series of sweeping new regulations outlawing junk food ads directed at children. Lawmakers are also debating a broad junk food tax similar to those already in place on tobacco and alcohol.
Advertisers Lose Ground in 2011
Cleaning the toxic areas of our mental environment.
by Adbusters
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Modified D+G advertisement from Vanity Fair, Oct. 2010
After years of concentrated activism, lawmakers worldwide are finally waking up to the impact ads have luring individuals, especially the young, into unhealthy and damaging lifestyles. Alcohol, tobacco, cosmetics and junk food memes are being roasted by governments far and wide. This global awakening is only the first phase of a much more grand action to see ads not as messengers but as the messages themselves – the cause of worldwide mental dysfunction. In phase two, the barriers between physiological and psychological health will wither away and the mental environment will be an equal to the biological one.
Facebook and Twitter’s free advertising ride on French television is over. Broadcast regulators have issued a stern warning that name-dropping the two social media giants and encouraging viewers to “check us out on ––– and –––” is to stop unless the companies pay for the promotion.
Cosmetic titan L’Oreal is forced to remove two print ads by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority. The ads in question, featuring Hollywood actress Julia Roberts and supermodel Christy Turlington, featured airbrushed images of the 40-plus duo so distorted they could have been mistaken as teenagers.
China has been aggressively targeting the tobacco industry, banning smoking advertising on TV, radio and newsprint. The ban is part of China’s strategy to halt its smoking epidemic (an estimated 350 million addicted), the highest addiction rate in the world.
McDonald’s Happy Meal toys are outlawed in San Francisco, killing the top-selling Happy Meal promotion in the city. City Council ruled the toys unfairly manipulate children into purchasing unhealthy and obesity-causing foods.
Fast food chains and junk food makers in the USA are given until 2013 to voluntarily stop advertising to preteens or face government regulation. Michelle Obama’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity said the current advertising self-regulatory body, the Children’s’ Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (whose members included McDonald’s, KFC, Mars, and so on … ) is completely ineffective.
Lawmakers in Canada’s French-speaking province, Québec, continue to defend their 1989 law banning all commercial advertising directed at children 13 and under, the only such law in North America.
SpongeBob SquarePants is proven to make your child dumb and agitated. An American study shows that “children who watched nine minutes of the show scored significantly worse on assessments designed to measure memory and self control than children who watched a slower paced cartoon or kids who spent nine minutes drawing.” The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has launched a campaign to stop Nickelodeon marketing the cartoon to children under six.
The American ad industry admits it is bleeding new recruits. In 2011, 81 percent of managers in the nations’ top firms said the industry faced a talent crisis with fewer young professionals choosing advertising as a career.
Advertisers eager to get a share of Egypt’s post revolution deregulation have been warned by national marketing companies to “be mindful of the revolution” or else risk inciting brand hatred. “You have to respect the maturity young people demonstrated in their role in the revolution,” observers warn.
Alcohol companies in Australia have been given notice that athletic sponsorship contracts in the sport-obsessed nation could soon be going the way of tobacco and the dodo. The Canberra government announced a pilot $25 million sponsorship pool for events seeking alternative funding.
Ads targeting kids to consume obesity-causing foods may soon be outlawed in children’s programming in Estonia. The debate comes after a recent WHO report revealed a strong link between childhood obesity and advertising to kids.
Alcohol advertisers have been targeted in the campaign to combat fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in South Africa. SA is proposing a total ban on liquor advertising across the country as five percent of the school-age population is now listed as having alcohol-induced birth disorders.
Online advertisers may soon face strict new privacy regulations and revenue crunches in Spain and Italy. Lawmakers in those countries are discussing whether or not to categorize the information advertisers collect in web browser cookies as private and therefore not collectable by third parties.
Taiwan’s kid advertisers feel the pressure as the government launches a series of sweeping new regulations outlawing junk food ads directed at children. Lawmakers are also debating a broad junk food tax similar to those already in place on tobacco and alcohol.
The Beggar
Permit me to introduce myself.
by Ann Weaver Hart
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
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My name is Manuel Jesús Maria Cordoba y Herrera. I was born in this beautiful city of Zacatecas in 1919. I have not always been as you see me. When I was a young man, I was strong and handsome and thinner than now. I wore this hat you see in my hands. I had a woman whose beauty reminded me of the stars. But all that has passed now. Now, there is only this corner, the feet of the people passing, and my hat.
Before, with Ana Rosa, it was different.
We married in April 1941. She was 18; I was 22. Her father gave us a rooster and six hens as a wedding present. We lived in an apartment in a green house on a callejón near the mine in those days. We spent many happy years there, Ana Rosa and I. It was not perfect, but we had one another and we were content.
A couple years after we married, no baby had come. Not that year nor the next or the next. At first, I thought nothing about it, because I was so happy with Ana Rosa; we loved each other, and if the Lord did not send us children, we at least had one another.
In those days, I worked in the mine. Ana Rosa raised chickens and flowers and took care of the house. Her flowers were like her: beautiful and colorful and full of joy and life. She sold eggs and flowers in the market each day. One day, I came home from work and found her crying. She told me that she wanted a baby, but God had not permitted it. I took her to the same basilica where we had married years before, and we prayed. The following year, I took her to a doctor, who told us that she would never have a baby.
After dinner that night, Ana Rosa told me that she was finished crying. "Even though God has not blessed us with a child, I will be happy anyway," she told me. And she was as good as her word. I never came home to find her crying again.
We had many happy years together. I cared little whether we had children or not, as long as I had my beautiful flower, Ana Rosa. Over the years, we lost our parents one by one until finally it was just the two of us, alone in the world.
One day in 1990, the boss at the mine called me to his office and told me that I was too old to work as a miner. I had never done anything else. I had spent 50 years bringing silver out of the earth and giving it to the jefe. I was without a way to live. Now I would begin spending my days with Ana Rosa, the hens and the flowers. That was when she gave me this hat.
For 50 years, I never saw the day; I worked in the earth, digging silver. Now I was to spend my days with my Ana Rosa in the garden. At first the light blinded me then, little by little, my eyes adjusted. All that mattered was that I was with my flower.
Each morning, she got up early and passed through the streets to the basilica to pray. After mass, she returned home to make tortillas of fine corn for me. We ate breakfast together, then she gathered the eggs and flowers and we carried them to market. In the evening, we came home together.
She took care of the hens and the flowers and me. I helped her sometimes with her work, but a man who spends his life robbing the earth has no idea how to coax life out of it, how to grow flowers or make chickens thrive. My precious Ana Rosa never scolded me for my clumsiness. She only ever showed me how much she loved me. And we spent years together this way, in happiness.
Last year, or perhaps two years ago, I don't remember, my Ana Rosa, the flower of my life, passed away. She is with God now, but I am alone. I will never have enough tears to express my grief, my loss. Each day I miss her. Each day I weep.
The hens died. I did not know how to take care of them, and dogs carried them off in the night. The flowers died as well, for I could not look at them without thinking of her. So today, like all days until the Lord takes me home to see her, I wake up early and walk through the streets. I do not go to mass, for God and I are not speaking. I go to the market and buy a cake that tastes like dust to me, and then I come here to this corner. I take off my hat, I look at the people's feet passing by, and I beg.
The Beggar
Permit me to introduce myself.
by Ann Weaver Hart
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
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My name is Manuel Jesús Maria Cordoba y Herrera. I was born in this beautiful city of Zacatecas in 1919. I have not always been as you see me. When I was a young man, I was strong and handsome and thinner than now. I wore this hat you see in my hands. I had a woman whose beauty reminded me of the stars. But all that has passed now. Now, there is only this corner, the feet of the people passing, and my hat.
Before, with Ana Rosa, it was different.
We married in April 1941. She was 18; I was 22. Her father gave us a rooster and six hens as a wedding present. We lived in an apartment in a green house on a callejón near the mine in those days. We spent many happy years there, Ana Rosa and I. It was not perfect, but we had one another and we were content.
A couple years after we married, no baby had come. Not that year nor the next or the next. At first, I thought nothing about it, because I was so happy with Ana Rosa; we loved each other, and if the Lord did not send us children, we at least had one another.
In those days, I worked in the mine. Ana Rosa raised chickens and flowers and took care of the house. Her flowers were like her: beautiful and colorful and full of joy and life. She sold eggs and flowers in the market each day. One day, I came home from work and found her crying. She told me that she wanted a baby, but God had not permitted it. I took her to the same basilica where we had married years before, and we prayed. The following year, I took her to a doctor, who told us that she would never have a baby.
After dinner that night, Ana Rosa told me that she was finished crying. "Even though God has not blessed us with a child, I will be happy anyway," she told me. And she was as good as her word. I never came home to find her crying again.
We had many happy years together. I cared little whether we had children or not, as long as I had my beautiful flower, Ana Rosa. Over the years, we lost our parents one by one until finally it was just the two of us, alone in the world.
One day in 1990, the boss at the mine called me to his office and told me that I was too old to work as a miner. I had never done anything else. I had spent 50 years bringing silver out of the earth and giving it to the jefe. I was without a way to live. Now I would begin spending my days with Ana Rosa, the hens and the flowers. That was when she gave me this hat.
For 50 years, I never saw the day; I worked in the earth, digging silver. Now I was to spend my days with my Ana Rosa in the garden. At first the light blinded me then, little by little, my eyes adjusted. All that mattered was that I was with my flower.
Each morning, she got up early and passed through the streets to the basilica to pray. After mass, she returned home to make tortillas of fine corn for me. We ate breakfast together, then she gathered the eggs and flowers and we carried them to market. In the evening, we came home together.
She took care of the hens and the flowers and me. I helped her sometimes with her work, but a man who spends his life robbing the earth has no idea how to coax life out of it, how to grow flowers or make chickens thrive. My precious Ana Rosa never scolded me for my clumsiness. She only ever showed me how much she loved me. And we spent years together this way, in happiness.
Last year, or perhaps two years ago, I don't remember, my Ana Rosa, the flower of my life, passed away. She is with God now, but I am alone. I will never have enough tears to express my grief, my loss. Each day I miss her. Each day I weep.
The hens died. I did not know how to take care of them, and dogs carried them off in the night. The flowers died as well, for I could not look at them without thinking of her. So today, like all days until the Lord takes me home to see her, I wake up early and walk through the streets. I do not go to mass, for God and I are not speaking. I go to the market and buy a cake that tastes like dust to me, and then I come here to this corner. I take off my hat, I look at the people's feet passing by, and I beg.
A Message Entangled With Its Form
The deeper tones of Occupy.
by Nicole Demby
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
swfobject.embedSWF("http://349774-www1.www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13260722703", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/349774-www1.www.adbusters.org\/files\/audio\/Adbusters-99-9.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/349774-www1.www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13260722703"});As I walk through lush Brownstone Brooklyn at night, I try to reconcile the stillness that pervades these streets with the urgency of Liberty Plaza. I wonder, did I lose touch with the beauty of the wet bluestone and wrought iron gates somewhere along the course of one of my many feverish runs to the 4/5 station to get to Wall Street?
I know that I’m young, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the quaking I feel is the strength of my own heartbeat or the earth moving under my feet. I wonder if it’s impossible at any age to have perspective from the midst of something that resembles a movement; I imagine the view from the middle of the General Assembly looks dramatically different than the one from a calmer, more static place.
Yet the quaking earth hypothesis is supported by the fact that perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Madison’s Capitol Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece. In Liberty Plaza, occupiers’ disaffection is part of a powerful surge of global discontent, a surge that is manifesting itself in the collective realization of bodies and voices as strategic tools for communication and collective action.
Many feel an immediacy springing from a loss of stability, an affordable education, a job, a home, a pension, health insurance, that we had taken for granted. Even those who don’t face immediately precarious situations are admitting to themselves that something has been terribly wrong for some time. We watched as our government deregulated the market and then bailed out the banks whose criminal activities led to the financial implosion; as they cut the taxes of the rich while 15% of American families fell below the poverty line; as they spent billions of dollars on imperial wars that divert money away from education and infrastructure and from any real solution to avert environmental degradation. If we’ve been apathetic, its because we’ve failed to see how to act. We have learned to be wary of “Change.” We lack faith in our politicians, entrenched as they are in the impotent theatrics of the two-party system.
Yet in Liberty Plaza people find themselves confronted with a radically inclusive new platform. In the horizontality of this platform, many who are disaffected now see a means of engagement that is immediate and real. If Occupy Wall Street has failed to use this platform to limit itself to a discrete set of demands, it is because it refuses to undermine the depth and breadth of what’s wrong. OWS’s message is entangled with its form, its self-sustaining structure in which the group provides for its own physical, social and intellectual needs. Given the group’s collective intelligence, it is becoming evident that its members can teach each other as much as, if not more than any, institution can.
Much has been made of the people’s microphone. When it works, its power is immense. People within hearing range chant each other’s words to convey them to those standing on the periphery of the larger group. Each person pits herself between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener in a manner that is both self-affirming and egoless. Loudly echoing the voice of another feels a bit like cursing, a vigorous and strangely gratifying speech act.
Occupiers are learning to use their bodies in ways that break with the modes of moving circumscribed by our culture of efficiency and the near-total encroachment of privatized space. Its members are learning how to stay in one place, how to civilly disobey, how to dumpster dive, how to interrupt auction proceedings. They are also confronting their bodies and the bodies of others, the cold, the rain, the smells and needs that bodies have that we can deal with so quickly in the comfort of the office and the home.
Occupy Wall Street is streamed, tweeted, posted and reposted. It is a curiosity, a screen for projection, a spectator sport, everyone’s favorite and most hated child. Yet people continue to come daily who earnestly want to join or to aid the effort. OWS has become a receptacle for the lost progressive hopes of a previous generation. Despite the attempts of some media sources to caricature the occupiers, they constitute a diverse group that is attracting even more diversity. OWS has gained the support of many labor unions and community groups. Most importantly, its existence is enabling a necessary discourse to enter the mainstream.
Liberty Plaza can also be an immensely frustrating, anxiety-provoking and chaotic space. Sometimes the chaos threatens to prevail and dissolve the whole. This is a particular risk now: as its numbers grow, OWS must become capable of incorporating interested parties in meaningful ways and must begin a real conversation about its own future. Yet in this heightened unknown many sense something uncanny, something real that feels unreal because it has been suppressed by layers and layers of banal culture, farcical politics and corporate sterility. They see a spark of true, systemic indeterminacy, in contrast to the systems entrenched by the collusion of money and power.
Occupy Wall Street is still a writhing, inchoate entity, yet it has a structure that can and must beget more structure. Its future is totally unknown, but the commitment among OWS’s ranks, the resonance of its message, and the appreciation so many feel for the rupture it presents from the status quo, assures me that this occupation will persist, whatever this persistence looks like. Perhaps the group will recognize the naivety of the dreams of its most utopian members, and compromise soon to settle on a list of specific economic demands. Occupiers are smart and knowledgeable, and have big, open ears to those even more so. More probably the occupation will continue to grow, to spread to other cities, to protest, and to self-determine, choosing to partake in a society whose structure its members believe in, rather than one corrupted to the point of disrepair.
In my more lucid moments, I know that Occupy Wall Street is a lichen that is preparing the intractable political ground for more substantive plant growth. In my dreams, however, Occupy Wall Street will evince its true self not when the media and well-meaning liberals tell it to produce a message, nor when it hands over its momentum to sympathetic, institutionalized political groups, but when the egalitarian entity it has created itself yields some kind of answer.
A Message Entangled With Its Form
The deeper tones of Occupy.
by Nicole Demby
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13263292285", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/files\/audio\/Adbusters-99-9.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13263292285"});As I walk through lush Brownstone Brooklyn at night, I try to reconcile the stillness that pervades these streets with the urgency of Liberty Plaza. I wonder, did I lose touch with the beauty of the wet bluestone and wrought iron gates somewhere along the course of one of my many feverish runs to the 4/5 station to get to Wall Street?
I know that I’m young, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the quaking I feel is the strength of my own heartbeat or the earth moving under my feet. I wonder if it’s impossible at any age to have perspective from the midst of something that resembles a movement; I imagine the view from the middle of the General Assembly looks dramatically different than the one from a calmer, more static place.
Yet the quaking earth hypothesis is supported by the fact that perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Madison’s Capitol Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece. In Liberty Plaza, occupiers’ disaffection is part of a powerful surge of global discontent, a surge that is manifesting itself in the collective realization of bodies and voices as strategic tools for communication and collective action.
Many feel an immediacy springing from a loss of stability, an affordable education, a job, a home, a pension, health insurance, that we had taken for granted. Even those who don’t face immediately precarious situations are admitting to themselves that something has been terribly wrong for some time. We watched as our government deregulated the market and then bailed out the banks whose criminal activities led to the financial implosion; as they cut the taxes of the rich while 15% of American families fell below the poverty line; as they spent billions of dollars on imperial wars that divert money away from education and infrastructure and from any real solution to avert environmental degradation. If we’ve been apathetic, its because we’ve failed to see how to act. We have learned to be wary of “Change.” We lack faith in our politicians, entrenched as they are in the impotent theatrics of the two-party system.
Yet in Liberty Plaza people find themselves confronted with a radically inclusive new platform. In the horizontality of this platform, many who are disaffected now see a means of engagement that is immediate and real. If Occupy Wall Street has failed to use this platform to limit itself to a discrete set of demands, it is because it refuses to undermine the depth and breadth of what’s wrong. OWS’s message is entangled with its form, its self-sustaining structure in which the group provides for its own physical, social and intellectual needs. Given the group’s collective intelligence, it is becoming evident that its members can teach each other as much as, if not more than any, institution can.
Much has been made of the people’s microphone. When it works, its power is immense. People within hearing range chant each other’s words to convey them to those standing on the periphery of the larger group. Each person pits herself between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener in a manner that is both self-affirming and egoless. Loudly echoing the voice of another feels a bit like cursing, a vigorous and strangely gratifying speech act.
Occupiers are learning to use their bodies in ways that break with the modes of moving circumscribed by our culture of efficiency and the near-total encroachment of privatized space. Its members are learning how to stay in one place, how to civilly disobey, how to dumpster dive, how to interrupt auction proceedings. They are also confronting their bodies and the bodies of others, the cold, the rain, the smells and needs that bodies have that we can deal with so quickly in the comfort of the office and the home.
Occupy Wall Street is streamed, tweeted, posted and reposted. It is a curiosity, a screen for projection, a spectator sport, everyone’s favorite and most hated child. Yet people continue to come daily who earnestly want to join or to aid the effort. OWS has become a receptacle for the lost progressive hopes of a previous generation. Despite the attempts of some media sources to caricature the occupiers, they constitute a diverse group that is attracting even more diversity. OWS has gained the support of many labor unions and community groups. Most importantly, its existence is enabling a necessary discourse to enter the mainstream.
Liberty Plaza can also be an immensely frustrating, anxiety-provoking and chaotic space. Sometimes the chaos threatens to prevail and dissolve the whole. This is a particular risk now: as its numbers grow, OWS must become capable of incorporating interested parties in meaningful ways and must begin a real conversation about its own future. Yet in this heightened unknown many sense something uncanny, something real that feels unreal because it has been suppressed by layers and layers of banal culture, farcical politics and corporate sterility. They see a spark of true, systemic indeterminacy, in contrast to the systems entrenched by the collusion of money and power.
Occupy Wall Street is still a writhing, inchoate entity, yet it has a structure that can and must beget more structure. Its future is totally unknown, but the commitment among OWS’s ranks, the resonance of its message, and the appreciation so many feel for the rupture it presents from the status quo, assures me that this occupation will persist, whatever this persistence looks like. Perhaps the group will recognize the naivety of the dreams of its most utopian members, and compromise soon to settle on a list of specific economic demands. Occupiers are smart and knowledgeable, and have big, open ears to those even more so. More probably the occupation will continue to grow, to spread to other cities, to protest, and to self-determine, choosing to partake in a society whose structure its members believe in, rather than one corrupted to the point of disrepair.
In my more lucid moments, I know that Occupy Wall Street is a lichen that is preparing the intractable political ground for more substantive plant growth. In my dreams, however, Occupy Wall Street will evince its true self not when the media and well-meaning liberals tell it to produce a message, nor when it hands over its momentum to sympathetic, institutionalized political groups, but when the egalitarian entity it has created itself yields some kind of answer.
Jonathan Cook: Next Year in Jerusalem
Ongoing tremors of the Arab awakening.
by Jonathan Cook
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Newscom / Marc Longari
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
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It was not quite the fall of Saigon. But it indicated how in a few months Israel had gone from a state adept at shaping its regional environment to one increasingly buffeted by forces beyond its control. After decades of dictating to its Arab neighbors, Israel looked for the first time confused and vulnerable.
The primary cause of Israel’s discomfort is the Arab Spring, the tentative awakening of democratic forces in the Middle East. After the fall of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, the region’s autocrats have been forced for the first time to weigh the mood of their own peoples against the threats emanating from Israel and its superpower backer, the United States.
Nowhere is the change more obvious than in Israel’s relations with the Palestinians. The past year has seen a dramatic reconfiguration of power between three elements of the Palestinian national movement.
March saw a groundswell of popular activism in the occupied territories, especially among the youth, demanding unity from divided Palestinian leadership. The protests forced the two leading factions, Fatah and Hamas, into an uncomfortable reconciliation in early May. The incident indicated how quickly, in different circumstances, the gains from Israel’s long-standing divide-and-rule policy might unravel.
The point was reinforced by a brief revolt by Palestinian refugees in May, on the anniversary of the Nakba, or the catastrophe of 1948 that came with the establishment of Israel on the Palestinian homeland. Hundreds of refugees stormed the border fences in Lebanon and Syria that for six decades served to bar them from reclaiming their family lands and homes. Israeli soldiers fired on the crowds, killing more than a dozen on that occasion, and at least another 20 in a repeat clash in the Golan Heights a few weeks later.
The millions of refugees – the largest and potentially most significant constituency in the Palestinian national movement – have been effectively shut out of peace efforts for two decades. One of Israel’s major aims in advancing the Oslo peace process was to sideline the refugees through the neutering of the PLO, which represents all Palestinians, and the promotion instead of the Palestinian Authority (PA), a weak government-in-waiting in the occupied territories that represents a minority of Palestinians.
With the usual constraints imposed by their Arab regime hosts loosened by the Arab Spring, the refugees reminded Israel and the world that their silence could not be taken for granted.
And then in late September, in a rare act of defiance against Israel and the US, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, broke free of the confines of endless peace negotiations and applied for statehood at the United Nations. Promises by the US to block the application in the Security Council served only to underline Washington’s duplicitous role as “honest broker.”
One should not be too wide-eyed about Abbas’s role. He appeared to approach this new high-risk strategy with a heavy heart, aware that the PA’s survival depends on US and Israeli support. But with an electoral mandate well past its sell-by date and nothing to show for years of servile diplomacy, Abbas desperately needed to bolster his public standing.
Whatever Abbas’s motives, the move to the UN radically alters the parameters of the conflict for both the Palestinians and Israelis.
Israel has been only too happy to perform a pointless tango with the Palestinians on the diplomatic front while it encouraged its settlers to entrench their hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, gutting any chance of the Palestinian state that was ostensibly being negotiated.
Now Abbas has called Israel’s bluff, revealing Oslo to be nothing more than a stalling tactic. Israel and the US must quickly reinvent the peace process – or be exposed as charlatans. That will be no simple task.
The Palestinian leadership meanwhile has set for itself a goal that it appears to have no power to realize. Achievements toward statehood will remain stuck at the symbolic level, with the infrastructure of occupation still in place. The PA, already deeply compromised, has every incentive to conspire in the new charade being concocted by the Palestinians’ oppressors.
Where Israel and the Palestinians head next will be determined equally by developments inside the Palestinian national movement and by the interests of the region’s main players.
Soon to be shorn of the distracting illusion of statehood, the frustrated populations of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the refugees outside the territories, may be expected to take firmer control of the liberation struggle. Israel is already braced for mass nonviolent demonstrations its security forces – armed for warfare – have no reasonable means to confront. The protests could rapidly escalate into an antiapartheid movement, one whose message is directed at an international community exasperated with Israel.
Similarly worrying for Israel is the threat that the Palestinian leadership, its legitimacy waning, might unsheathe its ultimate weapon – what Israelis term “lawfare,” or actively pursuing Israel for war crimes though global bodies such as the International Criminal Court.
Palestinian campaigns for legal redress and popular demonstrations of nonviolent resistance, as well as Israel’s expected repressive responses, will occur in a region more actively supportive of the Palestinian cause than ever.
The refusal by Israel and the US to concede a Palestinian state is infuriating the most powerful states in the Middle East, worried that the festering Palestinian sore will only further inflame a region still reeling from the tremors of the Arab awakening.
Saudi Arabia, the oil kingdom whose fabulous wealth has bought it significant sway with Washington, threw down the gauntlet in September. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of the Saudi intelligence services, wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times warning that a US veto on Palestinian statehood would end the “special relationship” and make the US “toxic” in the Arab world.
Egypt, the mightiest Arab state, has started to undermine Israel’s blockade of Gaza and is threatening to renegotiate the two countries’ 1979 peace agreement. In October, in a sign of a new independence to its foreign policy, Cairo began air patrols over the Sinai without Israel’s consent.
Likewise Turkey, traditionally a key military ally in the Middle East, has very publicly fallen out with Israel over its killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard an aid flotilla to Gaza in May 2010. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, traveled to Egypt in September to underscore the interests shared by the two countries in isolating Israel.
By making common cause against Israel along with Israel’s main regional foe, Iran, Cairo and Ankara hope to push Israel into making major concessions toward the Palestinians.
Israel, addicted to its own inflexibility, needs a way out of its box. In recent months a batch of outgoing security chiefs, led by the Mossad’s Meir Dagan, have publicly warned that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are bent on attacking Iran. The strategic cul-de-sac Israel now finds itself in may add significant impetus toward such a catastrophic move.
Jonathan Cook: Next Year in Jerusalem
Ongoing tremors of the Arab awakening.
by Jonathan Cook
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
Newscom / Marc Longari
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
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It was not quite the fall of Saigon. But it indicated how in a few months Israel had gone from a state adept at shaping its regional environment to one increasingly buffeted by forces beyond its control. After decades of dictating to its Arab neighbors, Israel looked for the first time confused and vulnerable.
The primary cause of Israel’s discomfort is the Arab Spring, the tentative awakening of democratic forces in the Middle East. After the fall of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, the region’s autocrats have been forced for the first time to weigh the mood of their own peoples against the threats emanating from Israel and its superpower backer, the United States.
Nowhere is the change more obvious than in Israel’s relations with the Palestinians. The past year has seen a dramatic reconfiguration of power between three elements of the Palestinian national movement.
March saw a groundswell of popular activism in the occupied territories, especially among the youth, demanding unity from divided Palestinian leadership. The protests forced the two leading factions, Fatah and Hamas, into an uncomfortable reconciliation in early May. The incident indicated how quickly, in different circumstances, the gains from Israel’s long-standing divide-and-rule policy might unravel.
The point was reinforced by a brief revolt by Palestinian refugees in May, on the anniversary of the Nakba, or the catastrophe of 1948 that came with the establishment of Israel on the Palestinian homeland. Hundreds of refugees stormed the border fences in Lebanon and Syria that for six decades served to bar them from reclaiming their family lands and homes. Israeli soldiers fired on the crowds, killing more than a dozen on that occasion, and at least another 20 in a repeat clash in the Golan Heights a few weeks later.
The millions of refugees – the largest and potentially most significant constituency in the Palestinian national movement – have been effectively shut out of peace efforts for two decades. One of Israel’s major aims in advancing the Oslo peace process was to sideline the refugees through the neutering of the PLO, which represents all Palestinians, and the promotion instead of the Palestinian Authority (PA), a weak government-in-waiting in the occupied territories that represents a minority of Palestinians.
With the usual constraints imposed by their Arab regime hosts loosened by the Arab Spring, the refugees reminded Israel and the world that their silence could not be taken for granted.
And then in late September, in a rare act of defiance against Israel and the US, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, broke free of the confines of endless peace negotiations and applied for statehood at the United Nations. Promises by the US to block the application in the Security Council served only to underline Washington’s duplicitous role as “honest broker.”
One should not be too wide-eyed about Abbas’s role. He appeared to approach this new high-risk strategy with a heavy heart, aware that the PA’s survival depends on US and Israeli support. But with an electoral mandate well past its sell-by date and nothing to show for years of servile diplomacy, Abbas desperately needed to bolster his public standing.
Whatever Abbas’s motives, the move to the UN radically alters the parameters of the conflict for both the Palestinians and Israelis.
Israel has been only too happy to perform a pointless tango with the Palestinians on the diplomatic front while it encouraged its settlers to entrench their hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, gutting any chance of the Palestinian state that was ostensibly being negotiated.
Now Abbas has called Israel’s bluff, revealing Oslo to be nothing more than a stalling tactic. Israel and the US must quickly reinvent the peace process – or be exposed as charlatans. That will be no simple task.
The Palestinian leadership meanwhile has set for itself a goal that it appears to have no power to realize. Achievements toward statehood will remain stuck at the symbolic level, with the infrastructure of occupation still in place. The PA, already deeply compromised, has every incentive to conspire in the new charade being concocted by the Palestinians’ oppressors.
Where Israel and the Palestinians head next will be determined equally by developments inside the Palestinian national movement and by the interests of the region’s main players.
Soon to be shorn of the distracting illusion of statehood, the frustrated populations of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the refugees outside the territories, may be expected to take firmer control of the liberation struggle. Israel is already braced for mass nonviolent demonstrations its security forces – armed for warfare – have no reasonable means to confront. The protests could rapidly escalate into an antiapartheid movement, one whose message is directed at an international community exasperated with Israel.
Similarly worrying for Israel is the threat that the Palestinian leadership, its legitimacy waning, might unsheathe its ultimate weapon – what Israelis term “lawfare,” or actively pursuing Israel for war crimes though global bodies such as the International Criminal Court.
Palestinian campaigns for legal redress and popular demonstrations of nonviolent resistance, as well as Israel’s expected repressive responses, will occur in a region more actively supportive of the Palestinian cause than ever.
The refusal by Israel and the US to concede a Palestinian state is infuriating the most powerful states in the Middle East, worried that the festering Palestinian sore will only further inflame a region still reeling from the tremors of the Arab awakening.
Saudi Arabia, the oil kingdom whose fabulous wealth has bought it significant sway with Washington, threw down the gauntlet in September. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of the Saudi intelligence services, wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times warning that a US veto on Palestinian statehood would end the “special relationship” and make the US “toxic” in the Arab world.
Egypt, the mightiest Arab state, has started to undermine Israel’s blockade of Gaza and is threatening to renegotiate the two countries’ 1979 peace agreement. In October, in a sign of a new independence to its foreign policy, Cairo began air patrols over the Sinai without Israel’s consent.
Likewise Turkey, traditionally a key military ally in the Middle East, has very publicly fallen out with Israel over its killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard an aid flotilla to Gaza in May 2010. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, traveled to Egypt in September to underscore the interests shared by the two countries in isolating Israel.
By making common cause against Israel along with Israel’s main regional foe, Iran, Cairo and Ankara hope to push Israel into making major concessions toward the Palestinians.
Israel, addicted to its own inflexibility, needs a way out of its box. In recent months a batch of outgoing security chiefs, led by the Mossad’s Meir Dagan, have publicly warned that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are bent on attacking Iran. The strategic cul-de-sac Israel now finds itself in may add significant impetus toward such a catastrophic move.
Post Cool
Carving up the new frontier of style.
by Ted Gioia
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
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This article is available in:
But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties.
Of course, the old-school cool ethos will not disappear completely. Even when some color or fabric is passé, it still finds its way into our wardrobe. But cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. One busy cash register is worth more than a thousand pundits. The arbiters of taste – at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media – will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview.
One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas – from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.
In consumer food products the postcool celebration of the natural and authentic is spelled out in the recent dramatic growth in the sale of organic fruits and vegetables, vitamin supplements, antibiotic-and-hormone-free beef, and other products that previously existed only on the fringes of the food industry. Of course this trend spells trouble for packaged-food multinationals, who are the real losers here. How do they respond? In the postcool society, representatives of the old paradigm imitate the new one. So we have the Naked Juice company, with its line of 100 percent natural, unsweetened beverages … but it’s owned by Pepsi.
The registered slogan of this company is “Nothing to Hide” – but one thing is clearly hidden in its marketing campaigns: its connection with PepsiCo Inc. Visit the Naked Juice website, and see if you can find the name of the parent company anywhere. Goodluck! Then again, Naked Juice needs to deal with its competitor Odwalla, a leader in all-natural juices … owned by Coca-Cola.
Next stop on your itinerary, please visit the website for Dagoba, a company committed to the highest quality organic chocolate, and see if you can find any mention of parent company Hershey. But Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s and Snickers, has gone even further, acquiring Seeds of Change, which sells more than six hundred types of 100 percent organically grown seeds. And we have the Back to Nature brand of cereal and granola … but it is now owned by Kraft foods, makers of Cheez Whiz and Velveeta. Heinz, through its minority position in Hain Celestial, has an equity share in dozens of natural brands. I could cite countless other examples. In fact, almost every major purveyor of packaged, processed food loaded with preservatives and various chemicals is trying to position itself as a champion of healthy, natural eating.
But the fascinating angle here is how well hidden these relationships are. In the old days, Hershey would make sure everyone knew they were involved when they sold chocolate. After all, what could be a better endorsement for confections than the Hershey brand name? Or Coca-Cola’s for beverages? Or Pepsi’s? These companies have invested billions of dollars in building and enhancing the value of their brand names. Pepsi alone has purchased celebrity endorsements at untold cost from Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, David Beckham, David Bowie, Shakira, Jackie Chan, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Tina Turner, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce Knowles, Mary J. Blige, the Spice Girls, Ray Charles, and many, many others. Yet now this company needs to conceal its involvement in the fastest-growing segments of the beverage market? What gives? We see the same old shift in field after field – music, media, consumer products, retailing, politics, fashion, academia, the internet, almost everywhere you look. Organizations that have spent decades investing in their image, their brand, their logo, now admit that it’s best to junk all that and start with a clean sheet of paper.
This paradox will become part of the day-to-day life in postcool society. Even if postcool celebrates the real and authentic, the simple and down to earth, it doesn’t mean that these attributes will actually dominate public life. Instead we will find a grand charade of phony pretending to be authentic, of contrived acting as though it is real, the intricately planned putting on the mask of the simple and unaffected. In many instances, postcool will just be the same folks who brought you cool, hiding behind a mask.
But this faux postcool will increasingly be forced to compete with the real thing. Grassroots movements will be built around the core postcool values of simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness. These will flourish outside the market place, in public and private discourse, shaping attitudes and interpersonal relations. True, they will have an economic impact, but their significance will not be reducible to dollars and cents. Postcool will inhabit people’s psyches long before it takes control of their wallets.
This core distinction will be our chief guide in distinguishing the phony corporate maneuverings from the real grassroots changes that will drive postcool society. The former will always inhabit a product or service. And if the cool was a friend to business, seeing its own destiny in accessories and gadgets, the postcool will have a more ambivalent relationship with the prevailing economic interests. The new ethos does not require expensive new accessories and often will take positive delight in downscaling lifestyles and paring back on unneeded extras.
Simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness … I mentioned these as though they were parts of a product positioning exercise. But in fact they will be in the foundations of the postcool personality type. Just as the cool was at its best when internalized as a way people acted and not just trumpeted as a marketing message, so will postcool have its greatest impact as a way people instinctively deal with situations and circumstances. In a book such as this, the examples gathered inevitably come from things that can be seen, heard, touched, measured – in short, what we call empirical evidence. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that these are the primary signs of the new postcool era. Many of the most salient changes will be those that we can grasp only indirectly and will not be measurable with any exactitude by statisticians and pollsters.
For the same reason, postcool will be less fickle and changeable than cool. Postcool is not just another style, another trend. It is the antithesis of style, of trendiness. And because it reflects an emerging personality type and not a passing fashion, postcool will probably be around for quite a while. Many merchants of cool will be tempted to dismiss or misinterpret postcool, seeing its key elements as a new, marketable lifestyle, as just one more way of being cool. We can already see many examples of this shortsighted behavior. But ultimately the attempt to treat postcool as just another variant on cool will fail.
For 50 years, the prevailing tone has been focused outward. Cool was in the eyes of the beholder, and those who lived by its principles needed constantly to be attuned to what others were thinking and doing. As trends and fashions and languages changed, the cool cats had to change as well … or risk being left behind. And even though good guys are expected to finish last, according to the adage, cool cats are not allowed to bring up the rear. The cool was a demanding deity, requiring its adherents to keep up with the times, to maintain a retinue of admirers. But postcool, by nature inward focused and self-directed, will not be so easily budged. From now on, the game will be played by different rules.
Postcool will be more intense than cool. Higher strung. More determined and less easily deflected and distracted. For this reason, many parties will strive to win the allegiance of this rapidly growing constituency. Political candidates will build their campaigns to appeal to the new psyche. Marketers will position products to maximize their perceived value to this demographic. Social movements and churches and media will all try to attract them. Who wouldn’t want these assertive, strong-willed folks in their camp? But the challenges involved in securing their support should not be minimized. The postcool person is not a belonger, not a follower. As Arnold Mitchell discovered when he first identified this group in the seventies – when it was just a tiny subset of the American public, maybe one or two percent by his measure – these individuals are the hardest to market to … because by their nature they are suspicious of marketing and resistant to its methods.
As a result, the postcool society will be full of surprises. The scene will be marked by unexpected grassroots activities that come to the fore despite the best-laid plans of politicians and corporate execs. Exciting? Perhaps. Dangerous and volatile? Certainly at times.
Of course, even postcool may sow the seeds of its own eventual decline. A new personality type lasts longer than a passing fashion, but even deep-seated character patterns and emotional styles can outlive their usefulness. Just as the cool personality became less effective over time, postcool could find itself replaced by some yet-to-be defined paradigm. We can already see postcool’s vulnerability in its unstable reliance on bluntness and aggression, its susceptibility to anger and confrontation. When so much irritability and adversarial posturing permeate our national and local lives, won’t this breed another reaction in time, a new cooling down of the temperature and the emergence of consensus building and a softer, gentler emotional style in public and private life?
But old-school cool will not come back. The cool is dead … at least as we knew it back in the second half of the 20th century. If aspects of it still hold center stage from time to time, they will do so because they have adapted to the new state of affairs. As with all passing movements, the age of cool will inspire nostalgia and retain a few adherents, those folks who always look back dreamily at the past, lamenting the loss of the good ol’ days. But the future belongs to a different personality type and hard-nosed assertiveness. It’s like everything Mom and Dad told you is finally coming true … only now you will be hearing it from your own children.
Post Cool
Carving up the new frontier of style.
by Ted Gioia
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
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This article is available in:
But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties.
Of course, the old-school cool ethos will not disappear completely. Even when some color or fabric is passé, it still finds its way into our wardrobe. But cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. One busy cash register is worth more than a thousand pundits. The arbiters of taste – at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media – will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview.
One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas – from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.
In consumer food products the postcool celebration of the natural and authentic is spelled out in the recent dramatic growth in the sale of organic fruits and vegetables, vitamin supplements, antibiotic-and-hormone-free beef, and other products that previously existed only on the fringes of the food industry. Of course this trend spells trouble for packaged-food multinationals, who are the real losers here. How do they respond? In the postcool society, representatives of the old paradigm imitate the new one. So we have the Naked Juice company, with its line of 100 percent natural, unsweetened beverages … but it’s owned by Pepsi.
The registered slogan of this company is “Nothing to Hide” – but one thing is clearly hidden in its marketing campaigns: its connection with PepsiCo Inc. Visit the Naked Juice website, and see if you can find the name of the parent company anywhere. Goodluck! Then again, Naked Juice needs to deal with its competitor Odwalla, a leader in all-natural juices … owned by Coca-Cola.
Next stop on your itinerary, please visit the website for Dagoba, a company committed to the highest quality organic chocolate, and see if you can find any mention of parent company Hershey. But Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s and Snickers, has gone even further, acquiring Seeds of Change, which sells more than six hundred types of 100 percent organically grown seeds. And we have the Back to Nature brand of cereal and granola … but it is now owned by Kraft foods, makers of Cheez Whiz and Velveeta. Heinz, through its minority position in Hain Celestial, has an equity share in dozens of natural brands. I could cite countless other examples. In fact, almost every major purveyor of packaged, processed food loaded with preservatives and various chemicals is trying to position itself as a champion of healthy, natural eating.
But the fascinating angle here is how well hidden these relationships are. In the old days, Hershey would make sure everyone knew they were involved when they sold chocolate. After all, what could be a better endorsement for confections than the Hershey brand name? Or Coca-Cola’s for beverages? Or Pepsi’s? These companies have invested billions of dollars in building and enhancing the value of their brand names. Pepsi alone has purchased celebrity endorsements at untold cost from Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, David Beckham, David Bowie, Shakira, Jackie Chan, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Tina Turner, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce Knowles, Mary J. Blige, the Spice Girls, Ray Charles, and many, many others. Yet now this company needs to conceal its involvement in the fastest-growing segments of the beverage market? What gives? We see the same old shift in field after field – music, media, consumer products, retailing, politics, fashion, academia, the internet, almost everywhere you look. Organizations that have spent decades investing in their image, their brand, their logo, now admit that it’s best to junk all that and start with a clean sheet of paper.
This paradox will become part of the day-to-day life in postcool society. Even if postcool celebrates the real and authentic, the simple and down to earth, it doesn’t mean that these attributes will actually dominate public life. Instead we will find a grand charade of phony pretending to be authentic, of contrived acting as though it is real, the intricately planned putting on the mask of the simple and unaffected. In many instances, postcool will just be the same folks who brought you cool, hiding behind a mask.
But this faux postcool will increasingly be forced to compete with the real thing. Grassroots movements will be built around the core postcool values of simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness. These will flourish outside the market place, in public and private discourse, shaping attitudes and interpersonal relations. True, they will have an economic impact, but their significance will not be reducible to dollars and cents. Postcool will inhabit people’s psyches long before it takes control of their wallets.
This core distinction will be our chief guide in distinguishing the phony corporate maneuverings from the real grassroots changes that will drive postcool society. The former will always inhabit a product or service. And if the cool was a friend to business, seeing its own destiny in accessories and gadgets, the postcool will have a more ambivalent relationship with the prevailing economic interests. The new ethos does not require expensive new accessories and often will take positive delight in downscaling lifestyles and paring back on unneeded extras.
Simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness … I mentioned these as though they were parts of a product positioning exercise. But in fact they will be in the foundations of the postcool personality type. Just as the cool was at its best when internalized as a way people acted and not just trumpeted as a marketing message, so will postcool have its greatest impact as a way people instinctively deal with situations and circumstances. In a book such as this, the examples gathered inevitably come from things that can be seen, heard, touched, measured – in short, what we call empirical evidence. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that these are the primary signs of the new postcool era. Many of the most salient changes will be those that we can grasp only indirectly and will not be measurable with any exactitude by statisticians and pollsters.
For the same reason, postcool will be less fickle and changeable than cool. Postcool is not just another style, another trend. It is the antithesis of style, of trendiness. And because it reflects an emerging personality type and not a passing fashion, postcool will probably be around for quite a while. Many merchants of cool will be tempted to dismiss or misinterpret postcool, seeing its key elements as a new, marketable lifestyle, as just one more way of being cool. We can already see many examples of this shortsighted behavior. But ultimately the attempt to treat postcool as just another variant on cool will fail.
For 50 years, the prevailing tone has been focused outward. Cool was in the eyes of the beholder, and those who lived by its principles needed constantly to be attuned to what others were thinking and doing. As trends and fashions and languages changed, the cool cats had to change as well … or risk being left behind. And even though good guys are expected to finish last, according to the adage, cool cats are not allowed to bring up the rear. The cool was a demanding deity, requiring its adherents to keep up with the times, to maintain a retinue of admirers. But postcool, by nature inward focused and self-directed, will not be so easily budged. From now on, the game will be played by different rules.
Postcool will be more intense than cool. Higher strung. More determined and less easily deflected and distracted. For this reason, many parties will strive to win the allegiance of this rapidly growing constituency. Political candidates will build their campaigns to appeal to the new psyche. Marketers will position products to maximize their perceived value to this demographic. Social movements and churches and media will all try to attract them. Who wouldn’t want these assertive, strong-willed folks in their camp? But the challenges involved in securing their support should not be minimized. The postcool person is not a belonger, not a follower. As Arnold Mitchell discovered when he first identified this group in the seventies – when it was just a tiny subset of the American public, maybe one or two percent by his measure – these individuals are the hardest to market to … because by their nature they are suspicious of marketing and resistant to its methods.
As a result, the postcool society will be full of surprises. The scene will be marked by unexpected grassroots activities that come to the fore despite the best-laid plans of politicians and corporate execs. Exciting? Perhaps. Dangerous and volatile? Certainly at times.
Of course, even postcool may sow the seeds of its own eventual decline. A new personality type lasts longer than a passing fashion, but even deep-seated character patterns and emotional styles can outlive their usefulness. Just as the cool personality became less effective over time, postcool could find itself replaced by some yet-to-be defined paradigm. We can already see postcool’s vulnerability in its unstable reliance on bluntness and aggression, its susceptibility to anger and confrontation. When so much irritability and adversarial posturing permeate our national and local lives, won’t this breed another reaction in time, a new cooling down of the temperature and the emergence of consensus building and a softer, gentler emotional style in public and private life?
But old-school cool will not come back. The cool is dead … at least as we knew it back in the second half of the 20th century. If aspects of it still hold center stage from time to time, they will do so because they have adapted to the new state of affairs. As with all passing movements, the age of cool will inspire nostalgia and retain a few adherents, those folks who always look back dreamily at the past, lamenting the loss of the good ol’ days. But the future belongs to a different personality type and hard-nosed assertiveness. It’s like everything Mom and Dad told you is finally coming true … only now you will be hearing it from your own children.
Simon Critchley: What Is Normal?
The surprising power of the political imagination.
by Simon Critchley
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
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swfobject.embedSWF("http://349774-www1.www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13250762535", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/349774-www1.www.adbusters.org\/files\/audio\/Adbusters-99-What-Normal.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/349774-www1.www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13250762535"});We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But they don't and they can't.
We do not live in democracies. We inhabit plutocracies: government by the rich. The corporate elites have overwhelming economic power with no political accountability. In the past decades, with the complicity and connivance of the political class, the Western world has become a kind of college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders.
This situation has led to the disgusting and ever-growing gulf that separates the superrich from the rest of us. State politics in the West in the past four decades has become a machine for the creation of gross inequality whose patina is an ideology of ever-more vapid narcissism. As the Eurozone crisis eloquently shows, state politics in the West simply exists to serve the interests of capital in the form of international finance, which exerts a human cost that Marx could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. No matter how much people suffer and protest in the street, it is said, we must not upset the bankers. Who knows, our credit rating might drop.
It is time to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of Western capital, corporations and corrupt local elites. They want to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalization of major state industries.
The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East – and one is simply full of admiration for their individual and collective courage and peaceful persistence – aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. Let's be clear: it is not just democracy that is being demanded all across the Arab world; it is socialism. And the tactics that have been developed to bring it about are anarchist.
There is a deeply patronizing view of these protests – common among Western politicians and their intellectual epigones – namely that they want what we have: the liberal democracy and neoliberal economics of our fine regimes. On the contrary, the movements in North Africa and the Middle East should be held up as a shining example for European and North American societies of what suddenly seems not only possible, but increasingly probable: that another way of conceiving and practicing social relations is not just possible, it is practicable.
Politicians in the West should be scared, very scared. The clock is running down. What we see emerging across our societies with increasing boldness, coherence and clarity are movements that refuse the separation of politics and power and who want to take power back through the invention of new forms of political activism.
It is in this spirit that I'd like to celebrate and congratulate the protesters in the Wall Street occupations and their followers all around the world.
We should not predict the future, but I think we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, dialectical inversions, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But I think we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything – and nothing can stop them.
Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don't know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible. What we require now is solidarity, persistence and the endlessly surprising power of the political imagination.
Simon Critchley: What Is Normal?
The surprising power of the political imagination.
by Simon Critchley
From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012
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swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13257816726", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/files\/audio\/Adbusters-99-What-Normal.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13257816726"});We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But they don't and they can't.
We do not live in democracies. We inhabit plutocracies: government by the rich. The corporate elites have overwhelming economic power with no political accountability. In the past decades, with the complicity and connivance of the political class, the Western world has become a kind of college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders.
This situation has led to the disgusting and ever-growing gulf that separates the superrich from the rest of us. State politics in the West in the past four decades has become a machine for the creation of gross inequality whose patina is an ideology of ever-more vapid narcissism. As the Eurozone crisis eloquently shows, state politics in the West simply exists to serve the interests of capital in the form of international finance, which exerts a human cost that Marx could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. No matter how much people suffer and protest in the street, it is said, we must not upset the bankers. Who knows, our credit rating might drop.
It is time to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of Western capital, corporations and corrupt local elites. They want to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalization of major state industries.
The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East – and one is simply full of admiration for their individual and collective courage and peaceful persistence – aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. Let's be clear: it is not just democracy that is being demanded all across the Arab world; it is socialism. And the tactics that have been developed to bring it about are anarchist.
There is a deeply patronizing view of these protests – common among Western politicians and their intellectual epigones – namely that they want what we have: the liberal democracy and neoliberal economics of our fine regimes. On the contrary, the movements in North Africa and the Middle East should be held up as a shining example for European and North American societies of what suddenly seems not only possible, but increasingly probable: that another way of conceiving and practicing social relations is not just possible, it is practicable.
Politicians in the West should be scared, very scared. The clock is running down. What we see emerging across our societies with increasing boldness, coherence and clarity are movements that refuse the separation of politics and power and who want to take power back through the invention of new forms of political activism.
It is in this spirit that I'd like to celebrate and congratulate the protesters in the Wall Street occupations and their followers all around the world.
We should not predict the future, but I think we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, dialectical inversions, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But I think we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything – and nothing can stop them.
Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don't know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible. What we require now is solidarity, persistence and the endlessly surprising power of the political imagination.