Jihad vs. McWorld (16 page)

Since, as the commercial with which MCI sponsored the 1994 Orange Bowl proclaimed, “the universe
is
information,” the new semisovereign of this universe is the class of information and communication specialists who make, own, and control the software of our global civilization—the books, movies, computer programs, magazines, videos, theme parks, advertising pages, songs, software, newspapers, and television programs. Ted Turner and Jane Fonda are this new age’s model couple, while creators like Disney CEO Michael Eisner and filmmaker Steven Spielberg and superagent Michael Ovitz and communications czar Michael Malone are its true captains of industry. What they control are not the artifacts (the cassette tapes or bound manuscripts or arcade game machines or celluloid that may belong to diverse “American” or “Japanese” multinationals) but the actual words and pictures and sounds and tastes that make up the ideational/affective realm by which our physical world of material things is interpreted, controlled, and directed. The very idea of what constitutes a product putatively serving a “need” is up for grabs—subject to
their
imagination—and those who work the infotainment telesector, in the absence of conscious political will, will inevitably become its default heirs. They may neither actively seek nor even passively wish to exercise power, but inevitably they will have it.

I see no conspirators here, no stealth tyrants using information to secure hegemony. This is rather a politics of inadvertence and unintended consequences in which the seemingly innocuous market quest for fun, creativity, and profits puts whole cultures in harm’s way and undermines autonomy in individuals and nations alike. As reality catches up to science fiction, the literary metaphors committed by cyberspace fiction writers look ever less hyperbolic: “First,” writes Pat Cadigan in the cyberspace novel
Synners
, “you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be
[sic]
video.”
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The players understand the economic stakes of seeing, wearing, eating, and being video well enough, which is why Hollywood as the home of Columbia Pictures outranks Tokyo, the home of Columbia’s parent company Sony, so that (as we shall see in some detail below) though Sony moved mountains to acquire CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989 for a total of nearly $7 billion, they purchased what they cannot possess.

Sony hoped to control and profit from what was being played in its Walkman and Watchman products on which it had built its early economic empire, but the film always owns the camera even when the camera pays for and houses the film. The crux is the live-action images, not the metal-cold, plastic-smooth hardware. McWorld’s software underbelly is Hollyworld and it digests those who think they are swallowing it up. Tokyo can buy but will never own Hollywood. American director Robert Altman predicts that “the Japanese will disappear from Hollywood. They infused a lot of money in here. They’ll eventually sell that interest out. The Japanese have been made kind of fools of here, and I think they’re beginning to get it. They say they don’t have any artistic or cultural inputs. So what are they doing here? They’re just bankers, and they’re being treated like that, and eventually they won’t like it.”
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They don’t. In 1995 Matsushita sold MCA back to a North American firm (Edgar Bronfman’s Seagram). Whether Japanese money stays or goes, it will only be able to lease and take a profit from American pop culture: it can neither create it nor replace it; nor would it wish to do so. To the French, the ideological implications of American hegemony in the infotainment domain are not so subtle: “Of course the U.S. movie industry is a big business,” says Marin Karmitz, a French film producer, “but behind the industrial aspect, there is also an ideological one. Sound and pictures have always been used for propaganda, and the real battle at the moment is over who is going to be allowed to control the world’s images, and so sell a certain lifestyle, a certain culture, certain products and certain ideas.”
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There is an irony in the infotainment telesector’s primacy today. Of the three traditional economic sectors surveyed and the three service subsectors under review here, none has a greater global ideological and political impact on the nation-state and its democratic institutions. Yet none is less susceptible to national constraints or democratic regulatory public goods; none is more wedded to global market imperatives. Indeed, my prediction that Jihad will eventually (if not any time soon) be defeated by McWorld rests almost entirely on the long-term capacity of global information and global culture to overpower parochialism and to integrate or obliterate partial identities. If the choice is ultimately to be (as the French writer Debray has argued) “between the local ayatollah and Coca-cola”
¹¹
—if “the
satellite [TV dish] is exactly against the honorable Prophet, exactly against the Koran”
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—the mullahs will lose, because against satellite television and videocassettes they have no long-term defense. Over the long haul, would you bet on Serbian nationalism or Paramount Pictures? Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman or Shaquille O’Neal? Islam or Disneyland? Can religion as a fundamentalist driving force survive its domestication and commodification and trivialization as something akin to a fun fiction? A consumer fairy tale? Religion can of course itself have recourse to television and the zealots of Jihad have not always eschewed modern technology. But the conundrum of televangelism usually resolves itself at the expense of religion: the medium here really is the message and its currency is measured by dollar donations rather than souls saved.

Finally, the new telecommunications and entertainment industries do not ignore or destroy but rather absorb and deconstruct and then reassemble the soul. In their hands, it becomes a more apt engine of consumption than the physically limited body. Thirst and hunger are too easily quenched: the yearnings of the soul know no limits at all. When the soul is enlisted on behalf of plastic—even protean—bodily wants, it can guarantee a market without bounds.
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If the ardent quest for blood community and eternal redemption can be redirected toward the search for satisfaction of an artificially agitated itch, Jihad itself can be commodified.

The remaining task in the extended working examination of McWorld’s global markets that makes up
Part II
is then to scrutinize the information subsector of the service economy. To confront this sector is to portray a certain American monocultural (or pop monocultural) hegemony. Some will want to deny that what we have here is really “culture” at all. When asked to characterize EuroDisney, Ariane Mnouchkine of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil dismissed it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” But corrupt culture, commercial culture, even radioactive culture is still culture: that is to say, a pervasive set of common symbols and images that bind together and indeed may even constitute a community.

Others will insist global pop culture is not really American, not really a monoculture at all, that it has been internationalized thanks to English pop music, French high fashion, Italian style, Scandinavian minimalism, and Japanese technology; and of course they will
be right. But if “international” means no more than a collection of Western Euro/Anglo/American images packaged and marketed in New York and committed to tape and celluloid in Memphis and Hollywood, “international” is just another way of saying global-American and thus monocultural after all.

Most important, the global culture speaks English—or, better, American.
¹⁴
In McWorld’s terms, the queen’s English is little more today than a highfalutin dialect used by advertisers who want to reach affected upscale American consumers. American English has become the world’s primary transnational language in culture and the arts as well as in science, technology, commerce, transportation, and banking. The debate over whether America or Japan has seized global leadership is conducted in English. Music television sings, shouts, and raps in English. French cinema ads are now frequently in English (where American English is to the French as British English is to Americans). New Information Age critics attack the hegemony of CNN and the BBC World Service but they attack it in English. Somalian clan leaders and Haitian attachés curse America, for the benefit of the media, in English. The war against the hard hegemony of American colonialism, political sovereignty, and economic empire is fought in a way that advances the soft hegemony of American pop culture and the English language.

McWorld’s culture speaks English first but it possesses an even more elementary Esperanto to which it can turn when English fails. Is there a locale so remote in today’s world that a traveler will fail to be understood if he resorts to the brand name—trademark lexicon? “Marlboro? Adidas … Madonna … Coca-Cola … Big Mac … CNN … BBC … MTV … IBM!” he will say, and Babel recedes. Not too long ago, asked about what had turned him into a random killer, a sniper overlooking Sarajevo replied: “I am protecting you against Islamic fundamentalism, someone has to do the dirty work. And by the way, how is Michael Jordan doing?” McWorld’s integrating Esperanto trumps the divisive hatred of Jihad’s killing fields.

The soft hegemony of American pop culture is not just anecdotal. It is everywhere visible in hard data about four key elements of that culture: film, television, books, and theme parks. But it is not limited to such elements, for they are but pieces of a mesmerizing global mediology that suffuses consciousness everywhere. This mediology
uses advertorials and infomercials, faction as well as fiction, myth-making and myth-making’s modern cousin image-mongering, to make over life into consumption, consumption into meaning, meaning into fantasy, fantasy into reality, reality into virtual reality, and, completing the circle, virtual reality back into actual life again so that the distinction between reality and virtual reality vanishes. Indeed, distinctions of every kind are fudged: ABC places its news and sports departments under a single corporate division; television newsmagazines blend into entertainment programs, creating new teletabloids that (in the new parlance) are reality-challenged; films parade corporate logos (for a price), presidents play themselves in films (President Ford in a television special), while dethroned governors (Cuomo and Richards) do Super Bowl commercials for snack food in which they joke about their electoral defeat, Hollywood stars run for office (Sonny Bono, no Ronald Reagan, was elected to Congress in 1994), and television pundits become practicing politicians (David Gergen and Pat Buchanan have crossed and recrossed the street to only mild chastisement from peers). Politicians can do no right, celebrities can do no wrong—homocide included. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Recognizing the power inherent in these forces, corporations from the parallel worlds of publishing, of telecommunication hardware, transmission and software, and of entertainment are fighting for the right to swallow one another up, converging, merging, and buying each other out as fast as financing can be found and stockholders bribed. The courts step in not to preserve a public good nor to impede a developing monopoly but only to assure that stockholder profitability will be the only criterion of a deal (as happened when the Delaware high court insisted Paramount reject a lower “friendly” bid from Viacom and entertain a higher unfriendly bid from QVC). Under the banner of synergy, which is how Mickey Mouse strong-arms the competition, they are doing and spending whatever it takes to secure monopolistic control over what they now see as a single, integrated high-tech mediological package that can dominate the global economy and all of its once diversified markets. While the megacorporations fight, governments (including the government of the United States) sit it out making small clucking noises about free markets, as if no public interests were involved or as if the radically
skewed markets of McWorld would resolve matters judiciously all on their own. They cannot and they will not.

Who exactly is to represent the public interest or the common good in this Darwinian world of corporate predators that just happen to control the defining symbolic essentials of civilization remains moot. Few even raise the question. The multiplicity of broadcast and cable spectra has made the old fairness doctrine obsolete and just about put the F.C.C. out of business. A modest regulatory bill cognizant of the new technologies was left twisting in the wind (along with a lot of other legislation) in the 1994 Congress. Even that bill, sponsored by Senator Ernest F. Hollings, was as much about curtailing as initiating regulations pertinent to the establishment of the new information highway and even the Baby Bells (local phone companies) who would have been subject to its regulations were disappointed in its failure since they were depending on it to legitimize their entry into the cable television and long-distance business.

Yet legislating on behalf of the public weal in telecommunications has become almost impossible. The change from earlier years is palpable. When New York’s classic music radio station WNCN tried to convert to rock in the 1970s, enraged listeners found a friend in the F.C.C. and the station was constrained to retain its classical format. When in 1993 it again jettisoned the classics, the F.C.C. was nowhere to be found, and WNCN’s proprietors were able to make the absurd argument that two classical stations in a city with scores of stations and millions of listeners “saturated” the market, and that one alone would serve. What then will take the place of the F.C.C. or government oversight or democratic regulation and accountability?
¹⁵
Is there any hope for what Fred Friendly a dozen years ago called an “electronic bill of rights” in an era where a new Republican Congress is moving to abolish or privatize public broadcasting and dismantle what remains of the federal regulatory apparatus? How can the public be represented by markets that privilege individual consumption, taken consumer by consumer, but have no way of representing public goods—what individuals share and thus what makes them more than consumers? Where are the market incentives to protect public interests?
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