Archive for June, 2008
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Another Change You Can Believe In
Fresh off his post-primary promise not to question existing US policy on Israel, Mr. Obama has now revealed even more of what he meant by “change.” Apparently, the unnamed “changes” he promised during his pathetic battle with the walking disease known as Hillary Clinton were not alterations in the murderous/suicidal policies of our troubled market totalitarian neo-racist nation, but rather swift, sharp shifts away from the things millions of poor, deluded Obama people thought they were voting for:
The general campaign is on, independent voters are up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric – at least when it comes to free trade.
In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.
“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake.”
Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
You Are Inventory
Microsoft, the private oligopoly founded on purchased, publicly-nurtured ideas and pure luck, has just purchased Navic Networks, the proprietor of software surreptitiously embedded in 35 million “set-top” cable TV boxes in the United States.
Ever heard of Navic? Know what it does? Find any mention of it in your cable contract?
Didn’t think so, because it’s 100-percent something nobody would ever permit into their home, if they knew it existed. Nonetheless, 35 million households have it. I’d wager less than 1,000 know they do.
What is it that Navic has going? It’s nothing that has to do with making your cable TV work. Instead, it has to do with making your cable TV serve its primary purpose: extending corporate spying on behalf of big business marketers.
Navic’s main product, the great jewel coveted by Microsoft, is Admira, which Navic describes as follows:
Admira is a media placement service that optimizes television advertising by utilizing settop box measurement data to increase the value of inventory. Efficiently matching advertisers’ desired target audience criteria with media owners’ inventory.
In plain English, Admira is secret spying software that, without your knowledge or consent, constantly tracks everything you watch on TV, down to the minutest detail, and also cross-correlates it:
based on behavioral characteristics, real-time viewership data, program content, and geography.
And you pay money to the very same criminals who sneak this past you, and who are also doing this:
Project Canoe:
The addressable [i.e., household identifiable] advertising market has had major momentum in recent months in the wake of Project Canoe, a consortium of the country’s top cable operators whose mission is to create universal metrics for video on-demand ad opportunities to national advertisers. Part of Canoe’s initiative will be to introduce its own addressable and interactive ad products to the marketplace, with an additional data-and-analytics product to help advertisers assess the effectiveness of Canoe’s ad-serving technology. Just last week, the venture officially appointed its new CEO, David Verklin, former CEO of Aegis Media Group.
This is market totalitarianism. Rarely, if ever, has such a central and cancerous social process gotten so far without even being perceived, let alone debated.
We are in very big trouble…
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
McDonaldization: A Mickey-Mouse Theory
Yesterday, I commented on how pathetic sociology is on the topic of big business marketing and its ongoing commercialization and commodification of modern life.
The most renowned sociologist trying to discuss matters in this vital area is George Ritzer of the University of Maryland.
Ritzer has started a mini-industry around his contention that “McDonaldization” is the proper concept for comprehending the course of events. The basic idea is that McDonald’s restaurants are somehow (Ritzer has no empirical evidence of McDonald’s-copying; he merely asserts that it is happening) the driving essence of what’s happening to us.
Ritzer would have you believe that it’s all a question of runaway rationalization, a.k.a. generic bureaucracy, and that Max Weber, not Karl Marx, is the deepest theorist of our hyper-commercialized reality:
And “McDonaldization,” a.k.a. bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy itself, is supposed to be “the paradigm” for “consumer culture,” a.k.a. the dominant trend in contemporary American life…
What a sophomoric mess! Ritzer seriously argues — and consequently draws along a substantial following of supposedly smart social critics — that everybody is running around inspired to be like McDonald’s, which he treats as a mere bureaucracy, rather than a profit-seeking business. All the while, not only does Ritzer uncritically adopt the rank capitalist bias-words “consumer” and “consumption,” but labors (and belabors) to extend them into even-worse conceptual morasses like “consumer culture” and “consumer society.”
The reality, of course, is that not only is the McDonald’s Corporation itself driven by marketing, but it is the 2-trillion-dollar-a-year (in the USA alone) discipline of big business marketing, not some random bureaucracy fetish, that is driving things forward across the whole society.
And corporate marketing is all about capitalism, not bureaucracy:
[M]arketing is both an art and a science, and like any other investment activity, it must be grounded in research, planned carefully, and measured and evaluated based on return on investment.
Ritzer not only understands none of this, but covers it all up with a deeply misleading shaggy dog story. As a result, today’s sociology, supposedly the art and science of demystifying the institutional conditions of human life, could hardly be less helpful to those hoping to explain and redress our capitalist-dominated, market-totalitarian culture.
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
SpySpace, er, MySpace…
I encourage people to quit and avoid so-called “social networking” sites. They are not what they present themselves to be, and to use them is to provide the assholes who own and run them with free marketing information about yourself and your friends and family.
If you doubt this, take a gander at how BBM Asshole Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder of MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch purchased from DeWolfe and his partner Assholes for a half-billion dollars, explains MySpace to Advertising Age:
Advertising Age: How is the new redesign of MySpace supposed to change the way people interact with the site and its brands?
Chris DeWolfe: If you look at the last six months, we’ve added a lot of new features to the site that provide better exposure for brands. MySpace is now up to 73 million unique users. Instead of being considered as “social media” or “social network,” those people who are spending ‘portal’ dollars [i.e., advertising on MSN or Yahoo] are now putting MySpace into that bucket, so the buys are becoming bigger. There’s more sellable inventory on those high-traffic home pages. I would equate our home page more with, say, a Yahoo, where a big, branded advertiser wants to make a big splash, or a big statement. Then MySpace.com becomes a must-buy.
Touching stuff, no? In public, of course, this Asshole will always prattle on about making new places for people to enrich their own lives. Don’t believe it for a second. The only thing these goons are enriching is themselves. Don’t give these creeps any more “sellable inventory.”
Monday, June 16th, 2008
What is Marketing?
Few outside its inner sanctums understand what big business marketing really and truly is.
In my own “field” of academic sociology, nobody even asks, despite corporate marketing’s overwhelming importance in shaping behaviors and lives.
When sociologists try to touch the topic, they invariably do so by babbling in one direction or another about “consumption,” by which they really mean (or would mean, if they were aware of their own bumbling obtuseness) people’s “free time activities” and/or “product-related activities.”
Trying to comprehend and explain the social logic and effects of big business marketing in that manner is like trying to do surgery wearing catcher’s mitts. The resulting stuff is hopelessly confused and massively violent to reality.
So what is it that gets missed? As usual, the proper answer comes from the professional communications of marketers themselves. Here’s what marketing really is, straight from the horse’s mouth:
[M]arketing is both an art and a science, and like any other investment activity, it must be grounded in research, planned carefully, and measured and evaluated based on return on investment.
In other words, it’s this guy’s stuff, applied to off-the-job behavior:
To miss that fundamental fact is to miss the whole train of social analysis and criticism.
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
An Electric Evening With Billy Bragg
Saturday, I experienced the inspiring ecstasy of getting in to see Billy Bragg do a combination conversation/music show at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
The host of the conversation was the amazing Barry Sanders, whom I had the privilege of meeting, chatting with, hugging, and thanking for his profoundly enlightening intellectual work.
Barry and Billy labored hard to get the remarkably stiff audience of art-school donors (NOT art students) to pick up on Billy’s amazing work and thought. I suspect it was an impossible task. Despite the fact that both the exchange of ideas and the music were truly electrifying, the audience, which included Woody Guthrie‘s old Portland taxi driver, mostly sat on its hands.
No matter. In a very intimate room, Billy played a fan’s dream setlist of songs (roughly 3/4 old classics and 1/4 gems from his wonderful new album) in his old-school solo-act/no-band style. Along with a dozen or so fellow ruffians in the seats, I yelled and whooped throughout the show. When (I suspect and hope as a small jab at the obviously privileged and too-polite audience) an encore included “There is Power in a Union,” I jumped up, sang along, and pumped my fist with abandon.
This I assure you: Billy Bragg remains what he has always been — a lifeline to sanity and (rational) faith in embattled humanity. He’s a former young Clash fan who’s become an “Old Clash Fan” who more than carries on the work of Strummer, Jones, Simonon, and Headon. He is also a very rare thing: a long-careered popular songwriter who gets even better over the years. He shows no signs of running out of energy or ideas.
