WHO BENEFITS MOST?
Television - a Western Trojan horse.
Photograph: Adrian Arbib/Still Pictures
TV and computers are facilitating the centralization of global corporate power.
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THE ULTIMATE GOAL of economic globalization is that every place on Earth
should be more or less like every other place on Earth. Whether it's the
US or Europe or once-distant places in Asia or South America, all countries
are meant to develop the same way: the same franchise fast food, the same
films and music, the same jeans, shoes and cars, the same urban landscapes,
the same personal, cultural and spiritual values - monoculture.
Such a model serves the marketing needs of the global corporations. Diversity,
whether cultural or political or biological, is a direct threat to the
efficiency goals of global corporations.
Free-trade agreements and bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization
(WTO), the North American Free Trade Association (nafta) and, soon, the
Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (ftaa) have the specific mandate
to create and enforce rules that accelerate this global homogenization.
The economic integration of all countries forces every nation into the
same set of corporate-created standards and rules - which work best for
corporations. Meanwhile these rules prevent any country from regulating
corporations to protect local and national resources, local livelihoods,
local cultures, local labour rights or local health standards.
In such efficient and autocratic corporate design, the aim is to transform
the internal landscape; to remake human beings themselves - our minds,
our ideas, our values, our behaviours, our desires; to create a monoculture
of humans that is compatible with the redesigned external landscapes.
The idea is that our minds and values should match the systems and technologies
around us, like compatible computers.
This assignment of internal homogenization goes to the global telecommunications system - television, advertising, computers, the internet, and e-commerce. To this list we could surely add film, much of radio, the music industry and certainly education, which is increasingly merging with technology. These are the instruments that speak directly into the minds of people everywhere on Earth, imprinting them with a unified pattern of thought, a unified set of imagery and ideas, a single framework of understanding how life should be lived, thus carrying the homogenization and commodification mandate directly inside the brains of a global population everywhere. In the end, what results is a homogenized mental landscape that nicely matches the franchises, freeways, suburbs, highrise buildings, clearcuts and sped-up physical life of the external universe.
TELEVISION IS THE most efficient medium ever invented for cloning global
consciousness within a homogenized set of corporate values. Let me give
you a sense of its scale and impact by repeating some astounding statistics
from the United States. In the us, 99.5% of all homes have television
sets. 95% of the population watches television every day. The average
home has a tv set going more than eight hours per day, even if no one
is watching. The average adult viewer watches tv more than four hours
a day. The average child aged eight to thirteen watches about four hours
per day. At age two to four, they watch almost three hours. That's not
counting the television they see in schools.
Now, these are amazing statistics when you stop to think about them.
It means roughly that half the population is watching more than four hours
per day. People watch more tv in the US than they do anything else besides
sleep or work or go to school. In the US television is the main thing
people do. It's replaced community life, family life, culture.
Ours is the first generation to have essentially moved its life inside
television; to have replaced direct contact with people and nature with
simulated edited recreated versions. Television is the original 'virtual
reality'.
This situation provides the possibility for autocratic control - the
few speaking to the many. If you were an anthropologist from the Andromeda
galaxy sent to study Earth people and you hovered over the us, chances
are you'd report back something like this: "They're sitting night
after night in dark rooms. They're staring at a light. Their eyes are
not moving. They're not thinking. Their brains are in a passive state;
we've measured them as 'alpha' waves and non-stop imagery is pouring into
their brains - images coming from somewhere thousands of miles away. These
images are being sent by a very small number of people, and the images
are of toothpaste and cars and guns and people running around in bathing
suits. The whole thing looks like some kind of weird experiment in mind
control." And, that is exactly what it is!
In the US the average television viewer sees about 23,000 commercials
every year. That's 23,000 times they're getting hit by extremely invasive
imagery saying exactly the same thing. One may say toothpaste, one may
say car, but the intent of every one of those 23,000 messages is identical
- to get people to view life as a non-stop stream of commodity satisfactions.
Buy something! Do something! Commodities are life! And this message is
the same everywhere on Earth. The last time I checked, about 80% of the
global population had access to television. Most industrialized countries
report similar viewing habits as in the US. In Canada, Britain, France,
Germany, Italy, Russia, Greece, Poland, and many countries in Europe and
South America, the average person watches three to four hours per day.
In Japan and Mexico, they watch more than in the us. In many parts of
the world, the tv they see comes from the us, with very few local programmes.
Even in places where there are no roads - tiny tropical islands, icy
tundras of the north, or log cabins - they're sitting, night after night,
watching a bunch of people in Dallas driving cars, or standing around
swimming pools, or drinking martinis. Life in Texas, California and New
York is made to seem the ultimate in life's achievements, while local
culture, even where it's still extremely vibrant and alive, is made to
seem backward and unworthy.
The act of watching tv is quickly replacing other ways of life and other
value systems. People everywhere are beginning to carry the same images
that we, in the West, are craving: from cars to hairsprays to Barbie dolls.
tv is turning everyone into everyone else. It's cloning cultures to be
like ours. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned this cloning process
via drugs and genetic engineering. We have those too, but tv does nearly
as well, because now life offers few decent alternatives.
The next question, of course, is: "Who is sending these images?"
"Who is in control?" The vast majority of global television
imagery, as well as film, books, newspapers, entertainment imagery, and
internet outlets, is being sent out to hundreds of millions of people
by a tiny number of gigantic corporations. This process is directly assisted
by the rules of the WTO and other global institutions that grease the
pathways for their investments, takeovers and mergers. We're talking about
aol/Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and maybe
three or four others, controlling most of the world's broadcast, publishing
and entertainment industry.
The net result is that a handful of media billionaires in New York, Hollywood, London and one or two other places are implanting the brains of the entire global population with concentrated and nonstop doses of powerful images that tell them to hate where they live, worship McDonald's and Coca-Cola, and believe that corporations are the answer to their problems.
"THAT'S THE OLD TECHNOLOGY," people say, "Now we have
computers. We have the internet. Now we are free and interactive. We can
network with each other and get organized and mould the world to our wishes."
But is the internet really 'our' technology, or is it 'theirs'? Is it
really decentralizing or centralizing?
The ultimate politics of the computer revolution is still unclear. Everybody
on all sides is in agreement about it. Everyone thinks, "It's just
great." The right and the left, the corporations and the anti-corporate
activists, the engineers and the artists, all express utopian visions
of democracy and empowerment brought by computers and the internet. But
is this right? Is it really a new democracy? Is equity improved? Or is
it the opposite of democracy?
We surely know that corporations are pretty excited about the computer
revolution, and they keep selling it to us via terms like 'empowerment'
and 'freedom'. The ads show happy monks in Asia, happy children in Africa,
happy farmers in Japan, all joining the internet revolution. Everyone
should 'think different', but all at the same time, and with the same
machine. "Computers will set us free," we are told.
Meanwhile, political leaders advocate wiring up every classroom in the
US and in the rest of the world, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
This despite research that proves that immersing kids in computer technology
doesn't make them happier, smarter, more creative or more alive but maybe
the opposite - alienated, lonely and depressed. Kids don't learn better
from computers. They learn best from nature, from other kids, from teachers
… but, alas, we're in a technological stampede. We live in a technological
utopia. We're in technological free fall.
But are computers empowering? Well, yes and no. They serve us well in
many ways; there's no denying that. They help us organize our work, write,
edit, help us communicate with like-minded people around the world. We
can disseminate ideas, build web pages; promote demonstrations through
our emails. That's the good news. But what's the rest of the story? Here
are a few points advertisers have left out:
- Privacy and surveillance: Make a purchase online and you're automatically
adding to huge, accessible databanks that know everything about you,
your job, your family, your buying habits, credit status, social security
number, and habits you might rather nobody knew about. Computers have
let loose the greatest invasion of privacy in history. There's a thriving
industry selling data about you. Computers can be used in the workplace
to achieve a kind of surveillance impossible till now; anyone with a
clerical job has to worry a lot about having their keystrokes counted
or how long it takes to complete a phone transaction. Computers are
used in military or police surveillance or corporate-to-corporate surveillance.
- Toxics: Silicon Valley loves to describe computers as a clean industry,
unlike those dreadful smokestack industries. But the real difference
is that the junk from computers goes into the ground and into water
rather than into the air. Computer chip manufacturers are responsible
for more landfill sites than any other industry. Silicon chip manufacture
requires huge amounts of pure water, which it poisons and then leaves
in the ground. At a time when the planet is experiencing fresh-water
scarcity, chip manufacturing is becoming one of the serious threats
to the Earth.
- E-commerce: The gigantic pressure by the US government to push rules
through the global trading system to ban all tariffs and taxes on e-commerce
is surely one of the most cynical and undemocratic acts by government
ever in history. In fact, one of our least-noted victories in Seattle
was that the WTO did not get to codify global rules banning tariffs
and taxes on e-commerce, thus avoiding one of the greatest corporate
handouts ever. Such tax-free e-commerce would have been a death blow
to an entire economic class of hands-on, small-scale retail and artisanal
activity, particularly in the Third World. It would have meant the end
of tens of thousands of businesses that have physical presence, where
humans beings can actually gather and relate directly. This entire effort
really amounts to the old 'planned obsolescence' strategy, but this
time, obsolescing entire economic systems and, in many cases, entire
ways of life. If this is 'empowering', then it is so mainly for the
biggest high-tech companies in the world - not for you and me.
Computers have had a central role in encouraging corporate giantism. In fact, modern global corporations could not exist at their present scale, operate at the speed that they do, without the global networks to keep their thousand-armed enterprises in touch seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
They use the same networks to instantaneously move billions of dollars in assets around the world without the ability of any nation-state to observe it, or regulate it.
SO WHAT KIND of revolution is this? To use a term like 'empowerment'
to summarize the effects of the computer revolution is to seriously misjudge
the ultimate social, political and economic outcomes of this revolution.
The internet and computers are terribly useful in very many ways to ordinary
citizens, but global corporations use these same instruments at a scale
that makes our use pathetic by comparison. When corporations hit their
keys, they move billions of dollars from banks in Geneva to, say, Sarawak,
and a forest gets cut down. When they buy billions in national currencies
and resell them an hour later, they cause whole currencies to crash. While
common people move information, corporations express power. There's a
difference.
It's not just who benefits from computers? It's who benefits most? It's like George Bush's tax plan. He says everybody benefits, and everybody does. But who benefits most? You or I may get a $300 rebate at the end of the year; but he and his friends get millions. So it is with the computer revolution. It's not the small player that benefits most; it's the biggest players. Global computer networks are facilitating the greatest centralization of unregulated, unaccountable, global corporate power ever. It's crucial for democracy that we think this through. It's not that we should give up computers. But let's stop calling them empowering. o
Extracts from a lecture given at the Technology Teach-In, New York, February 2001.
Jerry Mander is President of the International Forum on Globalization and author of many books, including Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (William Morrow & Co., 1978).