Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Nike is perhaps the most aggressive promoter of itself as a brand rather than a product in this consumer sector, but Reebok is not far behind. Its corporate self-definition portrays it as a “leading worldwide designer, marketer and distributor of sports, fitness and lifestyle products, including footwear and apparel” and its advertising features “Planet Reebok” (which it apparently cohabits with Ralph Lauren) where there are also “no boundaries.” In the late eighties, after successfully exploiting the American domestic market, both Nike and Reebok went after the European market, dominated by the German firms Adidas and Puma, and have recently moved aggressively into other world markets.

  In almost any soft consumer-sector one looks at, the pitch is at once ever more American and ever more global: there is less tension than meets the eye, because global pop culture is American. The two elephantine cola war rivals Coca-Cola and Pepsi are typical.29 Coke remains the global soft-drink leader with more than two-thirds of its 1992 revenues coming from abroad (compared with only 20 percent of Pepsi’s). Yet (in its own unparaphrasable words), “as huge as our world of Coca-Cola is today, it is just a tiny sliver of the world we can create.”30 Coke has had global ambitions for a long time.31 But nowadays an ambitious company cannot simply capture global consumer markets by aping their ideologies and accommodating their tastes: it must also be prepared to create global markets by careful planning and control. The new technologies are more powerful than the old, and Coke has now manufactured its own soft-drink ideology that assimilates the ideals of the Olympics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Rutgers University into a theme-park ideal existence for Coke drinkers. McWorld’s innovative virtual industries generate virtual need factories (advertising agencies, corporate public relations and communications divisions, business foundations) where emotions are identified and manipulated with images that forge new wants.32

  Now thirst cannot be manufactured but taste can. The world’s thirsty can drink water (just as the world’s footloose walkers can wear ordinary old shoes): if they are to drink beverages that earn someone else an income, consumption has to be associated with new “needs,” new tastes, new status. You must drink because it makes you feel (your choice): young, sexy, important, “in,” strong, sporty, smart, with it, cool, hot (as in cool), athletic, right on, part of the world as in we-are-the-world as in we-Americans-are-the-world: in sum, like a winner, like a hero, like a champion, like an American, which is to say, above all, fun-loving (as in blondes have more). The one reason you must not consume soft drinks is to quench your thirst in any decisive way. Water would accomplish that. In fact, if you’re going to buy another soda, the ideal soft drink should give you the feeling your thirst has been quenched while actually leaving you metabolically thirstier after you finish than before you began. Within the right informational nexus, even H2O can be sold for profit, as it is with so-called designer waters like Perrier. And if a potable salted beverage could only be found …

  “How long can a company of our scope keep doubling its size?” asks Coca-Cola CEO Roberto C. Goizueta. “Where will the next 10 billion unit cases come from? And the 20 billion after that?”33 Goizueta has an answer, which to him seems obvious. “The fact is,” he observes, “that we are just now seriously entering and developing soft drink markets that account for the majority of the world’s population. These new worlds of opportunity are not only heavily populated, but also culturally and climatically ripe for significant soft drink consumption.” Climatically ripe, that’s pretty obvious: where it is hot, people are thirsty, and if we can only get them off of water But culturally ripe? What can this mean? Coke is anything but disingenuous: in Indonesia (whose Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Cokes in hand, are featured on the 1992 Annual Report’s cover), “aggressive investment” can defeat local culture and force the nation to follow those “societies that have traditionally consumed beverages like tea” but have been brought to make “the transition to sweeter beverages like Coca-Cola.” Getting people off of water is a matter of economics (water is free), but getting them off of tea entails a cultural campaign. The “decline in tea consumption,” which might for cultural anthropologists signal a foreboding onset of erosion in a dominant local culture, is welcomed as a door ajar for sweet beverage sales. If only every Indonesian could switch from tea to Coke—and from sandals to Nikes and from rice to chicken McNuggets and from saris to Laura Ashley dresses and from oxen to Grand Cherokees and from indigenously produced movies to Arnold Schwarzenegger videos and from Buddhism to consumerism—imagine what “worlds of opportunity” would be thrown open to McWorld’s bold corporate adventurers; and imagine what kind of homogenous and profitable McWorld-wide market those once distinctive regions would constitute.

  Even Africa, although it is falling off the world’s economic charts, is to be gathered into McWorld’s fold. For in the gunsight of Coke’s ambitions, it is not the home of endless poverty, rampant AIDS, and ongoing authoritarianism, but rather a 568-million-person soft-drink market featuring “warm climates, youthful populations and governments moving toward market economies.” The same is true of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in ex-Yugoslavia where a “successful bottling system (is) in place.” Where ordinary observers see hell in the making, Coke sees a 24-million-person market, which surely can be “targeted for more investment when territorial/political tension subsides.” After all, when Coke trucks first appeared in Warsaw, crowds lined the sidewalks and cheered.

  Creating the world in its own image also lets Coke redefine political and social reality. Uncontrolled, economy-wrenching birthrates modified only slightly by the plague of AIDS become “youthful populations” ripe for consumer exploitation. Ethnic cleansing, rape as policy, and genocide become “territorial tensions” that, though they may diminish the market by a couple of million consumers, give or take a million Muslims (less likely prospects for Western-style consumption in any case), will eventually yield to less tumultuous, more profitable forces of globalization. From this perspective, the journey from AIDS, starvation, and genocide to just plain fun American-style seems far shorter than anyone could have imagined.

  It is perhaps unfair to hold corporate companies chasing maximum sales, bottom-line profits, and shareholder satisfaction to some vision of global diversity or international justice or world democracy. Yet their strictly economic ambitions turn out to be anything but strictly neutral. As we have seen, they themselves wade into Big Social Issues, if only to stroke a new age middle class they want to target for the same old little economic reasons. And even where multinational companies claim to be interested exclusively in production and consumption figures, increasingly they can maximize those figures only by intervening actively in the very social, cultural, and political domains about which they affect agnosticism. Their political ambitions may not be politically motivated and their cultural ambitions may not be the product of cultural animus, but this only makes such ambitions the more irresponsible and culturally subversive.

  Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales. Long-lunch traditions obstruct the development of fast-food franchises and successful fast-food franchises inevitably undermine Mediterranean home-at-noon-for-dinner rituals—whether intentionally or not hardly matters. Highly developed public transportation systems lessen the opportunity for automobile sales and depress steel, rubber, and petroleum production. Agricultural lifestyles (rise at daylight, work all day, to bed at dusk) are inhospitable to television watching. People uninterested in sports buy fewer athletic shoes. Health campaigns hurt tobacco sales. The moral logic of austerity contradicts the economic logic of consumption. Can responsible corporate managers then afford to be anything other than immoral advocates of sybaritism? Or to act as irresponsible citizens in these new, mostly less developed, worlds of oppor
tunity? Are they not bound as good businesspeople to emerge from the cocoon of the free market and to try to influence cultural and lifestyle habits, some of which may be political as well? A New York Times Magazine fashion spread is only punning when it runs the title “Party Line” across photos of a half-dozen New Year’s celebrants, but it reveals a darker side when it speaks mischievously of being “committed to the ideology of fun.”34

  Elaborating on Marx’s offhand assumption about the political idiocy of rural life, Edward C. Banfield, examining rural Italy after World War II, associated the agrarian lifestyle with a morally backward set of political attitudes.35 Whether he was right or not about agriculture, it seems likely that lifestyles are increasingly relevant to the postmodern political economy. They make a difference: a leisure society may afford more time for civil society, volunteer service, and politics than a work society; suburban lifestyles diminish public and common space of the kind found in towns and cities; twenty-four-hour-a-day global markets linked by electronic telecommunications, and global business communities linked by international flights interfere with schedules and routines rooted in traditional diurnal clocks. Markets demand freedom from public-sector regulation and interference, but increasingly they are themselves engaged in activities that impinge directly on civic culture and public goods. Political agnostics, they nonetheless borrow and warp political ideas and political terms. A Western fast-food chain that sells varieties of baked potatoes thus advertises that it “empowers” customers because it gives them the right to “choose toppings.” Brand choice and, within brands, item choice (Crest blue and Crest regular), have been widely taken to constitute the essence of freedom in market societies and has even been sold to “new democracies” as such. But it turns out to be something less than real liberty. The ideology of having fun actually is an ideology.

  This is most evident in what has perhaps been the greatest growth area for consumer goods qua services, the information and entertainment industries that both drive and are driven by the hardware but depend ultimately on the software. This infotainment telesector is supported by hard goods, which in fact have soft entailments that help obliterate the hard/soft distinction itself.

  5

  From Soft Goods to Service

  THE WALKMAN IS a perfect exemplar of the impact of new hard technologies on choice and liberty, appearing to expand each, yet in truth contracting both. By one measure the Walkman is not new at all: it is just the latest version of a very old modern technology: the phonograph. But the Walkman’s portability, its suitability to solitary listening, and its supermobility make it a ten-ounce fifth column for McWorld that insinuates lifestyle preferences directly into the inner ear while modifying traditional behaviors in socially significant ways. The Walkman technology transforms listening from a social into a solitary occupation; it takes a foreground end-in-itself activity and turns it into background for other consumer-society-desirable behaviors like jogging (Walkmans sell athletic shoes and athletic shoes sell Walkmans!); and it permits a sometime music listening activity to become an all-the-time habit that demands the production and sale of ever more music software.

  Computer technology has equally momentous (equally invisible) social entailments. A computer not only conveys information to users but draws them into new forms of interaction that more or less leave their bodies behind, abandoned in front of screens that are the entry to new and peculiar kinds of virtual community that (unlike, say, books) reconstructs their bodies as cyberspace members and thus suggests some kind of virtual politics. Just what kind of politics remains altogether problematic—albeit we can be sure there will be a politics of one kind or another. Even the form that information takes—video-textual, digital, programmed, time-shifted, technology-dependent—will inevitably impact culture and politics and the attitudes that constitute them. It has been speculated that video-game players acquire hand-eye skills critical to certain professions—fighter pilots, for example, or laboratory technicians handling dangerous materials by remote control; it has also been speculated that players may develop diminished capacities in other domains such as imagination or human sympathy. There have been no decisive empirical studies of such linkages, but it certainly seems likely that linkages exist and will have important political implications. Those interested in democracy, culture, and civic life cannot afford to leave the discovery of their character to chance.

  With these considerations in mind, it is difficult to treat the electronics and computers sector of the hard goods economy as discrete from the high-tech service sector or from the social attitudes that sector mediates. To act as general contractor for the information superhighway but yield control over the nature and content of the traffic for which it will act as a conduit is to misconceive where power lies in McWorld. Industry leaders like IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Matshui, and Nintendo have not fallen prey to such a misconception. They are busy seeking ways through mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts to extend their hardware business (high-tech paving) into the software sector (traffic control and governance over who or what rides in the vehicles). Telephone companies (the Baby Bells), cable corporations, and software producers (film studios) and distributors (Blockbuster Video) are eyeing one another with appetites whetted by social Darwinism and the belief that ultimately capitalism is about monopoly and that only a few of them can emerge from the coming software struggle as winners.

  Seen from the perspective of this intra-American competition, this shift from products to services mirrors an economy-wide trend and corrects the impression given by high-tech manufacturing that America is in a steep decline. In hardware, to be sure, what were once American monopolies have given way to intense rivalry with the Europeans and the Japanese. For example, in 1974 the United States exercised a complete monopoly over the production of sophisticated DRAM memory chips essential to computers. By 1980, the U.S. share had fallen to 56 percent while Japan’s share had risen to 40 percent. Seven years later, the United States produced less than a fifth and the Japanese more than three-quarters of DRAM chips.1 Similar stories can be told about semiconductors, where the American share has fallen from double Japan’s in 1980 to less than Japan’s today, and telecommunications equipment where Japan rose from fourth place among producers in 1980 to first today, while the United States languishes in third place barely ahead of Sweden.2 Even research and development spending—a longtime American virtue—has plateaued and after peaking at $94 billion in 1989 has fallen back to under $90 billion.3 There are many explanations for these trends including the absence of an American state effort to match Japan’s industrial policy, unfair trade practices, and the costs of maintaining a defense from whose responsibilities the Japanese have been largely exempted.

  Yet services and soft goods are where the action is, and in this domain the American story is rather different. Services have gone from being the poor cousin of the global economy to being its first citizen. In the year 1990, Fortune magazine, which had been tracking hard corporations for decades, finally noticed that service no longer meant just food and travel but included finance, information, and telecommunications and that it comprised over 60 percent of GDP and accounted for eight out of every ten American workers.4 The result: a new annual list surveying “The World’s Largest Service Companies.” On the 1990 list of top five hundred service corporations, the United States led with 150 (Japan followed with 106, with Britain, 49, and Germany, 41, trailing). In 1992, America remained the leader with 135, although with its prominence diminished in commercial banks (8 of the top 10 and 31 of the top 100 were Japanese versus 8 of the top 100 for the United States, with Citicorp as the first American bank on the list at number 271) and life insurance companies (where 7 of the top 10 were Japanese). With 128 companies on the top 500, Japan seemed to be closing in on the American lead.5 In software, information, and entertainment, however, America is pulling away.

  The extraordinary significance of this new infotainment service sector to the new world economy can be seen
by its impact on the often lamented American trade deficit. The 1992 deficit of 40 billion dollars is actually a mean average of a far worse $96 billion goods deficit, offset by a $56-billion service surplus. In the service sector, the United States has a powerhouse surplus economy. And with world trade in services now estimated at over $600 billion annually, the edge is of growing importance. Advertising exports now rival automobile exports in revenues. Moreover, all these figures are on the conservative side: the Commerce Department admits its traditional “merchandise bias” probably means exports in services are being radically underestimated.6

  Now critics will point out that even in the service sector where America seems dominant, it leads the world only in the retail sector where Sears and Wal-Mart remain the indisputable giants. In banking and insurance it has been overtaken by others in the top ten category. However, not all service sectors are equal with respect to the emerging postmodern economy of McWorld. From the point of view of the hard economy, banks and insurance companies may seem crucial, but from the perspective of the virtual economy, telecommunications and information along with entertainment predominate; indeed, the first two, if not the third, undergird the real power of the banks and insurance companies. Here the United States maintains an unrivaled and largely unnoticed superiority—with consequences for global democracy that demand careful examination.

  On Fortune’s key 1992 list of the one hundred largest “diversified service companies,” eleven specialize in entertainment, telecommunications and information services: of these, eight are American, while only one each is Japanese, British, and Canadian. Of the top one hundred American diversified service companies, only seventeen are entertainment, telecommunications, or information related but these seventeen comprise $140 billion in sales or one-third of the total sales of $421.5 billion for all one hundred companies.7 One-sixth of the top one hundred companies earn one-third of the revenues. In the following section, the predominance of these companies will be shown to be a matter of much more than just revenues.