----- Original Message ----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 4:43 PM Subject: Re: FW: [Fwd: pho: Rifkin: The Age of Access]
> Steve Perry wrote:
>
> >
> > > http://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/20000703/t000062700.html
> >>
> >> Monday, July 3, 2000
> >> He May Be Prophet or Pessimist, but Should Be Heard
> >>
> >> Jeremy Rifkin's new book describes a world shifting to
'hypercapitalism,'
> >where
> >> cultural experiences are chief commodity.
> > >
> >> By GARY CHAPMAN
> >>
> >> Jeremy Rifkin has another "big idea," which he describes in great
detail
> >in his
> >> new book "The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where
All
> >of
> >> Life is a Paid-For Experience" (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
>
> [An excellent review of this truly shitty book...]
>
> <http://www.thenation.com/issue/000612/0612slaughter.shtml>
>
> The Nation - June 12, 2000
>
> Brands 'R' Us?
>
> by JANE SLAUGHTER
>
> THE AGE OF ACCESS:
> The New Culture of
> Hypercapitalism,
> Where All of Life Is a
> Paid-for Experience.
> By Jeremy Rifkin.
> Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
> 312 pp. $24.95.
>
> NO LOGO: Taking Aim
> at the Brand Bullies.
> By Naomi Klein.
> Picador. 490 pp. $28.
>
> Jeremy Rifkin wants to rock the world of the jaded reader: He
> predicts that we're entering a completely new--the final--stage of
> capitalism. This new era Rifkin variously calls "cultural
> capitalism," "hypercapitalism" and the Age of Access. We've reached a
> "defining moment in history" that "already is challenging many of our
> most basic assumptions about what constitutes human society," as "a
> new human archetype is being born."
>
> The reader might be excused for wondering if this year's
> fundamentally new era is fundamentally different from the "great
> historic transformation" Rifkin warned us about in his equally
> wrongheaded 1995 book, The End of Work. In that book we were alerted
> to a "momentous change taking place--change so vast in scale that we
> are barely able to fathom its ultimate impact," one that "could spell
> a death sentence for civilization as we have come to know it." Come
> 2000, and in his all-new apocalyptic vision, Rifkin barely mentions
> his central thesis of five years earlier.
>
> That could be because Rifkin's earlier forecasts appear to have been
> a little off-target. Automation was supposed to make manufacturing
> "near-workerless" by the early decades of this century, and the
> service sector would follow suit soon after, thus "the end of work."
> Instead, the trend is in the other direction: The 65 percent of the
> US population now working is the highest percentage in history. To
> take just one example--one that any good futurist assumes is an
> industry on the way out--there are more auto workers in the United
> States today than there were in 1980. (The number of unionized auto
> workers is far less, but that's a different story.)
>
> So completely has Rifkin moved on from his earlier preoccupation that
> the disappearance of jobs plays no role in this year's central
> proposition. Today the main thing we need to know (besides the fact
> that "the foundation of modern life is beginning to disintegrate") is
> that ownership is on the way out. "Owning things, lots of things, is
> considered outdated and out of place in the more ephemeral,
> fast-paced economy." Instead, the new organizing principle is
> "access": access to the web (of course), but also access to "the
> experience economy," a k a "the weightless economy." Consumers today
> don't want to be tied down by owning a carpet; they just want the
> experience of having one in their homes.
>
> Property itself, Rifkin tells us, is outmoded; he repeatedly
> disparages the notion of "mine and thine," the organizing principle
> of a fading era. His main proof is that leasing is increasing and
> that some companies give their products away (cell phones, software)
> when you sign a service contract.
>
> How to argue against ideas like this and the other quarter-baked
> assertions that make up The Age of Access? It's a mishmash of
> management guru-speak (Tom Peters is cited often), musings on
> postmodernism and assertions that various well-known constructs are
> over and done with. The latter include markets, class warfare and the
> nation-state.
>
> Markets are being replaced by "networks," buyers and sellers
> transformed into suppliers and users in "win-win" relationships. The
> right-left dichotomy of the industrial era, with its class warfare
> among "the upper class, middle class, working class, and poor," is
> over, subsumed by the struggle between intrinsic value and utility
> value. The "end of the nation-state" is upon us, evidenced by the
> fact that the web knows no borders and by government's inability to
> collect taxes on purchases made on the Net. Guess those corporate
> types spending millions on Gore, Bush and Congress don't realize
> they're wasting their money! I almost expected Rifkin to announce
> "the paperless office," but he admits that's "not yet in sight."
>
> Among his central arguments, Rifkin throws in occasional howlers:
> Small business is the backbone of capitalism. Property is a social
> convention for negotiating individual spheres of influence (not class
> spheres of influence). And "the work environment is steadily being
> transformed into a play environment." Evidence: Kodak has a "humor
> room." (Cf. The End of Work: "Millions of alienated
> workers...experiencing rising levels of stress in high-tech work
> environments.... Millions who experience their own individual deaths,
> daily, at the hands of profit-driven employers.")
>
> * * *
>
> Let's tackle Rifkin's chief and most coherent assertion: "Our long
> attachment to ownership is beginning to weaken." The author has the
> grace to note that this is not true for the vast majority of the
> world's population, who have neither property nor access; 65 percent
> of people living today, he says, have never made a phone call. While
> the "affluent fifth of the [world] population is leaving property
> behind in search of cultural experiences and personal transformation,
> the remaining four-fifths have meager belongings and still wish to be
> propertied." It's that top fifth, though, the trendsetters, who
> count, we're reminded repeatedly.
>
> Rifkin is 180 degrees wrong about his target market. Far from leaving
> property behind, in the United States the top layer owns a larger
> share of property of all kinds, both consumer and money-making
> assets, than at any time since the Great Depression. In 1994 the
> wealthiest 10 percent of families owned 67 percent of all wealth, up
> from 62 percent in 1989. (The poorest 10 percent had no wealth at
> all, but their average debt had increased by half.) When it comes to
> business assets, the wealthiest 1 percent of households own 57
> percent, six times the value in the hands of the bottom 90 percent.
>
> The holders of capital know, as Rifkin pretends not to, that it's
> ownership of all those shares that makes them who they are and gives
> them what they want in the world. If not, why are they so busy giving
> each other stock options? Try telling Bill Gates, fighting tooth and
> nail to hold on to all of Microsoft (one of those playful
> corporations), that ownership is passé.
>
> In fact, Rifkin's got it topsy-turvy--if ownership is now outmoded,
> then it's the majority who are way ahead of their time. The vast
> majority of people have always owned almost nothing: a few consumer
> goods and, if they're lucky, their house, jointly with the bank. Less
> than half of US households contain even one person who owns even one
> share of stock, including pension plans.
>
> If Rifkin had stuck to informing us that franchising is on the rise,
> that more people are leasing certain consumer items and that
> businesses now lease a big chunk of their equipment, that would have
> been interesting. But when he tries to dress these trends up as a
> grand theory that property is dead, he makes a fool of himself. You
> would have been better off with "property is theft," Jeremy.
>
> Rifkin makes his apocalyptic pronouncements with a straight face. As
> if he has learned nothing from the advertisers and experience-mongers
> he decries, his entire book contains not one bit of humor, not even
> an acknowledgment that you're reading about "the death of the author"
> in a non-cyberbook whose author will surely own its royalties. I did
> laugh out loud, though, at the phrase "the nagging question of who
> should control the means of production."
>
> One more jab: Rifkin asks, "Who hasn't defended the virtues of
> property and markets with passionate abandon at one time or another?"
> Raise your hands.
>
> * * *
>
> It's a shame, because some of Rifkin's conclusions are right: that
> the commercialization of every waking moment is disgusting, that we
> need both biodiversity and cultural diversity, that play should not
> be corporatized. Luckily, you don't need to own The Age of Access to
> read an indictment of the corporate attempt to imprint a commercial
> message on everything you see, hear or own (or lease). Naomi Klein's
> No Logo is a far wittier, more down-to-earth look at what Rifkin
> calls the commodification of experience and she calls "branding."
>
> I was chilled, reading No Logo. I have a 12-year-old who wishes she
> lived in a Delia's catalogue. In her downtown Detroit school, I'm
> told, kids get razzed if they mix their brands--you're not supposed
> to wear Adidas shoes with a Nike sweatshirt. But I never buy
> anything, my neighborhood is still almost 100 percent logo-free
> (well, not the gas stations) and I hadn't quite realized how much the
> rising generation has been subjected to "colonization not of physical
> space but of mental space."
>
> Klein and Rifkin cover a lot of the same territory: corporate
> sponsorship of cultural events; "cool hunting" agencies paid to track
> down trends among black teenagers; marketing inside the schools;
> franchises crowding out mom-and-pops; outsourcing to sweatshops;
> buying an experience, not just a thing; shopping as theater;
> Celebration, Florida, Disney's branded town; Disney as the
> grandfather of it all; and Bill Gates Bill Gates Bill Gates and Nike
> Nike Nike. One big difference is that Klein, a 29-year-old red-diaper
> baby, has been there and rejected that, while over-50 Rifkin, who
> lectures at the Wharton School, is mostly disapproving but also
> gulled by management-speak about what they're up to. More important,
> Klein's main mission is to report on the resistance to the "brand
> bullies." She stresses that her book is not about predictions--unlike
> Rifkin's--but it reads like a prophecy of the WTO protests in Seattle.
>
> Klein, who is a master of the razor-sharp soundbite, introduces us to
> the moguls of marketing, who, she says, decided in the eighties and
> nineties that companies should be "meaning brokers" rather than
> product producers. Polaroid needed to stop thinking of itself as a
> camera--it's really a "social lubricant." Levi's problem was that it
> hadn't promoted any particular lifestyle to go along with its
> jeans--no denim house paint. Says Starbucks' marketing VP: Coffee is
> the company's "opportunity for emotional leverage.... A great brand
> raises the bar--it adds a greater sense of purpose to the
> experience." The Body Shop, says founder Anita Roddick, is not about
> bath oil but is the conveyor of her philosophy about women and the
> environment. The author of a sixth-grade math book riddled her text
> with references to Oreos and Nike, not because she was paid to do it
> but because she wanted to speak to kids in their own language--brands.
>
> Then, once the brands have turned you into a "life-sized Tommy
> doll"--walking billboards--once they've made themselves ubiquitous
> parts of the landscape and everyone's mental map, they tell you that
> you can't use their name in vain. They take up all the public
> space--those building-sized paste-on ads are only the biggest
> example--and then they remind you that brands are private property.
> The owners of Barney won't let shops rent out dinosaur costumes, if
> they're purple. Disney forced a group of New Zealand parents to
> remove their homemade version of Donald Duck from a playground mural.
> After making Barbie a cultural icon, Mattel sued the rock band Aqua
> for its hit song "Barbie Girl." Artists and activists who "jam" ads
> run afoul of trademark, copyright, libel and "brand disparagement"
> laws. Island Records and CBS Records sued artists, successfully, for
> sampling or remixing Casey Kasem and Michael Jackson. The message,
> says Klein, is that "culture is something that happens to you. You
> buy it at the Virgin Megastore or Toys 'R' Us.... It is not something
> in which you participate, or to which you have the right to respond."
>
> * * *
>
> Klein's chapters that describe the brand bullies and the resistance
> to them are the best parts of No Logo. Her information on the
> outsourcing of work to overseas sweatshops (though enlivened by her
> personal visits to Indonesia and the Philippines) and the
> casualization of work back home is more-oft-trod territory. Yet the
> latter is a necessary part of her argument. She shows how "the
> 'strongest' brands are the ones generating the worst jobs, whether in
> the export processing zones...or at the mall. The companies that
> advertise aggressively on MTV...are the very ones that pioneered the
> McJob sector and led the production exodus to cheap labor
> enclaves.... After pumping young people up with go-get-'em
> messages--the 'Just Do It' sneakers...--these companies have
> responded to job requests with a resounding 'Who, me?'"
>
> * * *
>
> Not that long ago, corporations could defuse citizen resistance with
> job blackmail. Yes, we poison the river, but what would you do
> without a paycheck? Now that the jobs are gone, no one but the
> stockholder has an investment in these companies' profitability.
> Klein believes that anticorporate activism is on the rise precisely
> because branding has worked so well: "Multinationals like Nike,
> Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators
> of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports,
> community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project
> is, the more vulnerable these companies become: When they do wrong,
> their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another
> corporation trying to make a buck.... This is a connection more akin
> to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but
> shallow enough to turn on a dime."
>
> So Klein documents "a largely underground system of information,
> protest and planning" against the brand bullies. We read about
> culture jamming, "the practice of parodying advertisements and
> hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages."
> The idea is that people "should have the right to talk back to images
> they never asked to see." Joe Camel turns into Joe Chemo. Calvin
> Klein ads are scrawled with "Feed me." Problem is, the branders fight
> back, with prejammed ads like Sprite's "Image Is Nothing" campaign
> and Nike's "I am not a target market, I am an athlete." Nike even
> asked Ralph Nader to "take a light-hearted jab at us," in a script of
> their writing, for $25,000. (He said no.) For the angriest of the
> adbusters, attempts at co-optation just fuel their fires.
>
> Youth culture meets political protest at Global Street Parties,
> efforts to establish noncommercial space. Sponsors tell you that
> concerts are "made possible by..." The "Reclaim the Streets"
> rave-cum-demo asserts that kids can do it themselves. Klein notes
> that the first was held in thirty cities on May 16, 1998, the day G-8
> leaders gathered for a summit. In the United States 1995-96 was the
> Year of the Sweatshop, the year Kathie Lee cried on TV. As everyone
> knows, students have been on a tear ever since. Central American
> garment workers are brought to the United States to speak to their
> Northern age-mates on campus. For thousands and thousands of people,
> Nike, Disney and Wal-Mart are forever branded with the image of the
> sweatshop.
>
> Klein is not starry-eyed about the possibilities of brand-based
> activism. She's not thrilled that we seem to need to reshape issues
> of injustice so that they can be brought home to us as shoppers, and
> she warns that campaigns should not degenerate into mere ethical
> shopping guides.
>
> Like Rifkin, Klein is weakest when she overreaches. Anxious to
> connect her two themes, branding and sweatshops, she says that
> corporations began outsourcing because they needed more money for
> their ad campaigns. Not that simple: Profit rates began slipping in
> the sixties, long before branding took off, and companies are using
> all kinds of strategies to recover: speedups, demanding union
> concessions, automation, unionbusting and tax-dodging as well as
> full-court-press marketing and contracting out.
>
> * * *
>
> And since Klein's subject is youth radicalization, she barely
> mentions unions (except the need for them in the Third World), which
> potentially have more power to disrupt corporate plans than even the
> best spray-can wielder. Arguing the need for both parts of the
> coalition, Jeff Crosby, president of a General Electric local,
> reported on Seattle in Labor Notes:
>
> Without the [kids'] Direct Action, which disrupted the WTO, the labor
> march would have received a two-minute clip on the nightly news, with
> something like, "A bunch of inefficient union workers from the
> rustbelt marched for a return of the bad old days. Fortunately the
> WTO delegates largely ignored these bits of road kill on the way to
> the new economy. Although they are hopeless Luddites, it is true that
> something must be done for the losers in the new world economy who
> are too old and hidebound to run a computer."
> Then again, without the thousands of union members, it would have
> been easier to write off the young protesters as flakes, people who
> aren't worried about basic issues like having to earn a living.
>
> Many of the readers of this magazine doubtless spent some time as
> young protesters themselves, in the last great wave of youth
> activism. We've often looked over our shoulders to see if anyone was
> coming behind, and for too many years they weren't. Klein helps
> explain where the new passion is coming from, what it grew up on, how
> it sees the enemy. Own her book. Ignore its brand name.
>
> Jane Slaughter is a labor journalist in Detroit.
>