Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Our brief journey from the postwar to the postmodern economy tells a fairly plain story that moves from goods to services, low-tech to high-tech, hard to soft, real to virtual, body to soul. Its lesson for today is that tomorrow’s McWorld will be less about resources than about goods, less about manufactured goods than about goods tied to telecommunication and information; less about goods than about services; less about services in general than about information, telecommunication, and entertainment services; less about software per se than about cultural software of the kind found in images and sound bites being manufactured in advertising agencies and film studios. As we follow this logic and move along the economic spectrum it describes, the United States looks better and better and bigger and bigger and the story of the fall of America from economic grace looks more and more suspect. More important, the consequences of the logic, although good for American economic leadership, are bad for democracy. Nation-state capitalism once contributed to democracy’s founding: today McWorld’s global capitalism may signal its demise.

  Yet the full story remains to be told. Because the new information service economy shapes global marketing and sales, it shapes and indeed constitutes the new ideology of McWorld. Capitalism once had to capture political institutions and elites in order to control politics, philosophy, and religion so that through them it could nurture an ideology conducive to its profits. Today it manufactures as among its chief and most profitable products that very ideology itself. Communism collapsed for internal political and economic reasons, but there were external pressures on it as well. Hollywood and Madison Avenue have made the bourgeois revolution practically unnecessary and the proletarian revolution nearly impossible: there are no “workers,” only consumers, no class interests, only a global pop culture that flattens economic contours and levels the spiritual playing field. Television, photocopy and fax machines, international travel, and the ideology of fun guaranteed that failing Communist regimes would expire even more expeditiously. These hard goods are, however, only so many vehicles. What they carry is McWorld’s videology, which belongs not to the goods sector at all but to the service sector.

  The Service Sector: Overview

  THE SERVICE ECONOMY is a strange hybrid, including the oldest and most elementary industries like food delivery, education, and health care but also encompassing new age information and communication technologies that are being invented and introduced almost faster than they can be described. The catch-all service category thus lumps badly paid, nonunion hospital workers and no-future fast-food employees together with computer programmers, airline pilots, and information technicians. It includes commercial banks where Japan has long since seized the advantage from America and Europe as well as entertainment companies where American global leadership is actually growing and seems secure well into the next century. Examining the service sector affords an opportunity to make good on my rhetorical amalgamation of McDonald’s, Macintosh, and MTV—fast food, computer software, and video—by showing how in this sector McWorld manufactures its own specially tailored twenty-first-century videology. When McDonald’s sells Dances with Wolves and Jurassic Park videos and sundry movie tie-ins in a vague celebration of multiculturalism or environmentalism or extinct reptile preservation, or hires Michael Jordan to link its products to celebrity sport, simple service to the body, I have suggested, is displaced by complex service to the soul. McWorld is a product above all of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form is style, its goods are images. It is a new world of global franchises where, in place of the old cry, “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” is heard the new cry, “Consumers of the world unite! We have everything you need in our chains!”

  In order to focus on McWorld, however, I must first sort out the odd bedfellows who cohabit the generic service sector. There are in fact three powerfully distinctive service subsectors that in many ways are more different from one another than they are as a whole from the natural resource and industrial manufacturing sectors. By the measure of training, income, prospects, and self-worth, a Burger King “cook” hand-grilling mass-produced preformed frozen meat patties has a good deal more in common with a sweatshop seamstress machine-stitching cheap frocks than she does with a computer programmer developing virtual reality arcade games, even though the cook and the programmer are in the service sector while the seamstress is in the manufacturing sector. Distinguished by their varying constituencies, my three candidates for subservice sectors are:

  The traditional service sector, comprising those who serve people directly with traditional food, transportation, health, and housing services, including food preparers and servers, hoteliers and their helpers, airline pilots and train conductors, doctors and social workers, and all others who deliver services directly to the individual human body;

  The systems facilitation sector, comprising those who serve the infrastructure—the political, economic, and social systems that make modern society possible; these include lawyers, accountants, economists, bankers, insurance people, computer operators, telephone operators, policy specialists, and anyone else who facilitates the operation and interaction of our national and global systems, all those who serve the corporate body; and

  The new information sector, what I will dub the infotainment telesector, comprising those who create and control the world of signs and symbols through which all information, communication, and entertainment are mediated, including wordsmiths and image-spinners like advertisers, moviemakers, journalists, intellectuals, writers, and even computer programmers, as well as—to the degree they are in the sign/image business also—teachers, preachers, politicians and pundits, and others who minister to the individual human and collective corporate soul.

  These three subsectors, each with its own professional (or not so professional) class of employees, stand to each other roughly as the three basic economic sectors (natural resources, industry, and service) stand to each other—in a hierarchy that is also an economic ladder. The new information subsector is on the frontier of economic development and corporations or nations that control it are prospective world leaders likely to dominate the next century. The traditional service subsector is the third world of the services domain, with its dependency at the lower end on relatively unskilled labor and uncomplicated work. It is a first but also quite possibly a terminal step on the stairway to power; it is certainly no ticket to global dominion. Doctors and transportation experts, though part of this first subsector by virtue of the direct consumer services they deliver, are also information technicians who, by the measure of their training and the science on which their service is premised, belong at least in part to the most advanced information subsector as well—just as fast-food workers can be seen as low-skilled manufacturing laborers (they “make” hamburgers). Between the two subsectors that define the parameters is the powerful new world of bankers, accountants, lawyers, and programmers who serve the great corporate entity, part real, part virtual, that is McWorld’s global market. Although highly profitable and professionally rewarding, this sector can be overrated. For it neither delivers services directly to the mass of the world’s people nor controls the crucial information and telecommunications services on which it wholly depends and that potentially can govern their minds and souls. It is global business’s janitor and while it is well paid and makes the machine go it can tell it neither where nor how. That is the task of the infotainment telesector, from which McWorld draws its informal and mostly unarticulated governing norms.

  Old-fashioned class analysis associated modes of production with class structure: Marx thus suggested that the ancient slave-master relationship was founded on the sovereignty of human labor (he who mastered labor was master of his world and eventually the political master as well), that the feudal relationship was rooted in sovereignty over land (he who owned the land ruled the world), and that the capitalist relationship rested on sovereignty over capital (he wh
o capitalized machinery and bought labor bought into the ruling class). To the extent there is such a relationship between control over the economic mode of production and access to political power (and surely, though it is not as neat as Marx would have it, there is some relationship), it is the infotainment telesector of the service economy that is acquiring a certain postmodern sovereignty. She who controls global information and communications is potentially mistress of the planet. Sovereignty here is exceedingly soft, however, entailing rule by persuasion rather than by command, influence via insinuation rather than via coercion. This form of power, scarcely visible, is not easily rendered accountable. Its implications for democracy are in some ways far more disturbing than those that can be inferred from the anarchy bred by Jihad (see Part III).

  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.”8 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.”9 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.”10

  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”12—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.13 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.