Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  The chief importance of writers and celebrities in McWorld (and of course the point here is precisely that the distinction between the two is fading),7 is as food for the endless appetite of television and film for “story” and “story lines,” for plot and character, and for perverse personalities and salably scandalous “real-life” happenings. This is why the pursuit of Paramount by Viacom and QVC was also a hunt for Simon & Schuster and why the German publishing colossus Bertelsmann bought itself a new skyscraper in New York’s image and entertainment center, Times Square. It is why political films starring not just elected officials but the backroom operators who spin their careers—films like The War Room (about colorful James Carville’s role in Clinton’s presidential election victory)—become establishment cult hits. Norman Ornstein, a careful and moderate conservative Washington political analyst, comments: “Recently, there’s been a real blurring of the lines between Hollywood, New York and Washington about who the celebrities are. We have actors playing public-policy figures and public-policy figures playing actors, and I can’t believe that any of this is particularly healthy for the republic.”8

  American books are making inroads on global book publishing that parallel the story of films and television. Best-selling books in Russia, Switzerland, Brazil, England, and Holland nowadays mimic best-selling films: they are strictly American. Der Boekerij, a leading Dutch publisher, carries a list on which 90 percent of the books are foreign translations and almost all of those translations are of American books. They have made the long journey from Anne Frank to Amy Fisher without a hint of embarrassment, scoring at the end of 1993 with their best-selling translation of Fisher’s memoir.9

  In Eastern Europe and Russia, the prospects for literature are even more dismal. Socialist realism was a challenge that sparked a powerful literature of resistance. Commercial realism attests only to the irresistible power of the market. A Russian commentator reports that “publishers—both the old ones who have been freed from the party line yoke, and the new private or joint-stock ones—are not looking for bright and original texts. They are looking for marketable merchandise.”10 Pirated translations of science fiction, detective stories, and erotica flood the bookstalls, driving out local fare other than tepid imitations such as A Book on Delicious and Healthy Food and Sex and a Woman’s Life. In the anarchic Russian economic climate, publishers spring up everywhere (four hundred new ones in the last few years), but reading is in a decline and readers’ tastes are plummeting in almost perfect consonance with the rise of the market. Commerce offers incentives that are even more damaging to literature than the defunct censor’s erstwhile prohibitions. Russia under the tsars and the commissars alike oppressed the body, yet oppression also seemed to feed the soul. Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked that he had never felt so free as under the Nazi occupation. In opposition, literature has a purpose; in the market, it must vie for dollars, appease popular taste, and guarantee profits to publishers. What was the Ministry of Culture under the Soviets has become the Ministry of Culture and Tourism under Yeltsin.

  In what was formerly East Germany, a Leipzig distributor responded to the arrival of the free market by burning 10 million inexpensive volumes printed under the old regime, including works by dissident literary figures such as Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf (who fled to Malibu thinking perhaps that it was better to embrace McWorld voluntarily than to be ravished by it against her will). By the lights of McWorld’s videology, commercial book-burnings to raise prices (like the shredding of unsold paperbacks in the West) have nothing in common with book burnings to repress literature (such as the Nazi bonfires of the thirties); but for authors and readers the difference may be hard to discern, and for literary culture, what happened in Leipzig in 1991 may be more fateful than what happened in Leipzig in 1934. In a typically ironic lyric in his poem “The Book Burning,” Bertolt Brecht, finding that he has been left out of the bonfire, implores the incendiaries, “Burn my books too! What is wrong with my books that you are not burning them?!” But what modern author would think that his integrity depended on the demand that his works be relegated to a fire whose object was to raise book prices? In a sad postscript to the Leipzig funeral pyre, the Göttingen Literary Society awarded its “Göttingen Laurels” to the Reverend Martin Weskott for his efforts to save a half million books from “dumpsters and garbage cans” and put them to “the use for which they were intended” by selling them at charity auctions and donating the proceeds to “Bread for the World.”11 Swords into plowshares and words into bread.

  If publishing mimics the film industry after which it panders in its globalizing distribution patterns, it also imitates it in its zest for internal monopoly. A free and democratic society depends on competition of ideas and heterogeneity of outlets; yet the number and variety of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing firms has undergone persistent contraction at least since the 1960s while the reach of the remaining monopolies has been globally extended. Ben Bagdikian has been tracking the conglomerating tendencies of media for a number of years, and his statistics point unwaveringly to ever-increasing concentration.12 Bagdikian notes that after World War II, 80 percent of American newspapers were independent; by 1989, 80 percent were owned by chains. In 1981, twenty corporations controlled over half of the nation’s eleven thousand magazines; by 1988 those twenty corporations had become three.13 Bagdikian estimates that just twenty-three corporations control “most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and motion pictures.”14

  Bagdikian’s dominant twenty-three corporations:

  Bertelsmann, A.G. (books)

  Capital Cities/ABC (newspapers, broadcasting)

  Cox Communications (newspapers)

  CBS (broadcasting)

  Buena Vista Films (Disney; motion pictures)

  Dow Jones (newspapers)

  Gannett (newspapers)

  General Electric (television)

  Paramount Communications (books, motion pictures)

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (books)

  Hearst (newspapers, magazines)

  Ingersoll (newspapers)

  International Thomson (newspapers)

  Knight Ridder (newspapers)

  Media News Group (Singleton; newspapers)

  Newhouse (newspapers, books, magazines)

  News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch; newspapers, magazines, motion pictures)

  New York Times (newspapers)

  Reader’s Digest Association (books)

  Scripps-Howard (newspapers)

  Time Warner (magazines, books, motion pictures)

  Times Mirror (newspapers)

  Tribune Company (magazines)

  Vertical integration and horizontal integration go hand in hand: the imperative is to own deep and own wide. If you own movies, buy book companies and theme parks and sports teams (Paramount acquiring Simon & Schuster, Viacom buying Paramount). If you own hardware, buy software (Sony swallowing Columbia). If you own television stations, buy film libraries (Turner imbibing MGM’s library). If you own telephone wires, buy software. It is not just a matter of eliminating the competitors who are trying to profit by doing the same thing you do; it is a matter of buying up all the people who do what you don’t do, but what nevertheless impacts on your business. If you own wires, get programming to push through the wires. If you own a film studio, get a satellite station so you can control subsidiary broadcasting rights. If you are into newspapers, buy cable and satellite systems and then you will own the news in every medium. If you make movies, buy publishers and leverage the writers. If you are on your own, create a new leviathan: imitate Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful director; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a rich and powerful producer recently cut loose from Disney; and David Geffen, billionaire recording executive. And join up, conjure a little synergy: make a deal with Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, to produce interactive, multimedia entertainment products. Get a half-billion-dollar investment from Gates and call the joint venture (what else?) Dreamw
orks. The newspapers compared the deal projected by this triumvirate to the founding of United Artists by Mary Pickford and her friends sixty years ago, but that would be to compare a flotilla of battleships to a couple of cap-gun-toting kids in a rowboat. Steven Spielberg was closer to the mark when he apparently misspoke himself and declared he was founding a “new country.”15

  Skeptics will insist, looking at the haplessness of Sony and Matsushita in the moving-picture business, that ownership does not touch artistic independence and that who owns publishers does not really matter. Certainly that is what Richard Snyder, the longtime chief of Simon & Schuster, dutifully said when Viacom took over Simon & Schuster’s parent company Paramount. Regarded as both invulnerable and indispensable, too entrenched and too invaluable to fire, Snyder was gone within a year of the takeover, leaving stunned observers like agent Mort Janklow saying that Viacom must think selling books is like selling popcorn.16 What Viacom knows is that in McWorld’s global markets selling books is like selling pop corn: that’s the whole point. Otherwise, why buy Paramount? Under Viacom, Paramount has also taken over Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., another major publisher. Before the merger was even completed, Paramount announced it would “reorganize divisions, reduce the number of imprints and published titles and lay off up to ten percent” of the ten thousand employees of the firm.17

  In fact, far from being the exception to merger mania, the book business follows the rule. As early as the 1960s, major corporations, many of them defense contractors including IBM, ITT, Litton, RCA, Raytheon, Xerox, General Electric, and Westinghouse, invaded the textbook business. Since then film and telecommunications companies, even as they fell prey to larger industrial corporations, had themselves been feeding on publishers. Bowker’s Books in Print lists nearly 26,000 publishers but Bagdikian estimates that there are 2,500 or so that actually publish a book or more a year. Yet just six companies take in over half of the total book-sales revenues—Paramount (what was Snyder’s Simon & Schuster; Ginn & Company); Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Academic Press); Time Warner (Little, Brown; Scott Foresman); Bertelsmann, A.G. (Doubleday, Bantam, as well as RCA Records and Arista); Readers Digest Association; and Newhouse (Random House, The New Yorker).18 Five of these are involved in other media including television, two in filmmaking directly; one—Time Warner—is simply the largest media corporation in the world, as well as the second largest cable company and among the largest publishing companies.

  The trends are similar across the Atlantic where Bertelsmann in Germany, Murdoch’s News Corporation in Australia and England, and Hachette in France have become planetary Goliaths in a world without many prospective publishing Davids. Bertelsmann once was a German publisher, much as Honda was a Japanese motorcycle manufacturer. Now, with its formidable megalith marker in New York’s Times Square, it runs book clubs in England, publishes American magazines like Parents, owns Doubleday, Bantam, and Dell, has taken over the Literary Guild, and is active in records through its RCA and Arista labels. Along with seventy-four magazines around the world, France’s Hachette (which controls nearly a third of French-language books published along with Paris Match) publishes the Encyclopedia Americana, controls the largest distributor in the Spanish-speaking world, and distributes newspapers and magazines in Germany, Britain, Belgium, and the United States.19 I have already described the one-man media octopus that is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Ltd., and will only add that in the context of print, in addition to HarperCollins and partial interests in Viking, Penguin, and Reuters, it controls two-thirds of Australia’s newspaper circulation, one-half of New Zealand’s, and a third of Britain’s. Murdoch also happens to be the world’s largest distributor of video-cassettes—from which an increasing majority of film profits derive and on which the viability of his publishing interests increasingly depend.

  When books become a niche category for media octopi like Murdoch or Viacom with commercial entertainment tentacles and political information (news) tentacles and television tentacles and publishing tentacles, but no civic or literary torso, the future of the word and the civic and literary cultures it supports becomes extremely uncertain. When words are subordinated to pictures (film, television, or videocassette) whose producers are indentured to profit, democracy is unlikely to be a beneficiary. Imagine (not hard today) a court in which pictures are the only arguments: will there be the possibility of justice? Imagine a debate conducted in the flashcard imagery of MTV: can there be deliberation? Imagine imagination without words: does it ennoble or debase? Or simply cease to exist? Imagine an ontology, a science of the real, conceived in cyberspace: reality itself is transmuted into a virtual cousin, a species of the extant consisting in equal parts of pretense, illusion, and deception. Virtuality displaces reality, and Plato’s Cave, where flickering shadows dancing on a smoky wall are our only clue to the “real,” becomes the whole of our world. Words open the soul’s window to ideas and the discourse of words is how we grope our way to conversation and, when conversation can be stripped of its inequalities and hidden hegemonies, how we eventually become capable of cooperation, of common life with others, and even of justice. Where democracy thrives on words—conditioners of rationality and commonality and equality—commerce prefers pictures. For pictures are drivers, even conjurers, of need. As need trumps reason, so pictures trump words, at least in the absence of education and hard work. Books into pictures is a devastating development for literature. Image factories in control of books is a devastating development for democracy.

  McWorld as a Theme Park

  THERE IS NO better emblem of the transformation of reality by commerce and the displacement of the actively imaginative reader by the passively receptive spectator than the commercial theme parks that increasingly dot our landscape. They are temples to modernity, our secular churches in which the values of play, health, fun, travel, leisure, and the American way are sanctified in a painless liturgy that draws together entertainment, information, and an effortless hint of instruction. The themes in McWorld’s theme parks are the themes of McWorld.

  I mean to use theme park generically, not just to allude to the Six Flags parks and Walt Disney Worlds and MGM Studios, but to highway commercial strips, malls, and chain eateries. There is a sense in which McDonald’s is a theme park: a food chain featuring its own Mickey Mouse (Ronald McDonald), its miniature nonmechanical rides in the “playlands” outside, its commercial tie-ins with celebrities like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and with hit films like Dances with Wolves, Batman Returns, and Jurassic Park, and its pervasive claim on American lifestyle—all of which make it far more than just a fast food restaurant chain.20 Its annual report rightly focuses on the role of “one of the strongest brand names in the world, with instant recognition” as it seeks to position itself as “the leading foodservice retailer in the global consumer marketplace.”21 It opens as many as one thousand new franchises each year,22 and can boast that one of its newer branches overlooks the intersection in Tiananmen Square where a seeming eon ago a young man captured the imagination of the world by stopping a column of tanks dead in its clanking tracks. It spends $1.4 billion a year on advertising, and projects a planetary capacity of forty-two thousand restaurants (only fifteen thousand built so far).23

  Jim Cantalupo, president of international operations, explains how McDonald’s “is more than just price. It’s the whole experience which our customers have come to expect from McDonald’s. It’s the drive-thrus … it’s the Playlands … it’s the smile at the front counter … it’s all those things … the experience.”24 Brand names sell an experience, and the experience becomes the defining attribute of a food marketplace that is also a theater of consumption and a theme park of lifestyles. The experience sold must be more than just a quick lunch. Fast food fits life in the computer world’s fast lane, the bites and the bytes propelling our bodies and minds through the day at breakneck pace, not a second to lose. Eat fast and serve the business world’s god of efficiency. Serve yourself and reduce t
he number of jobs available. Stand up and eat or take it with you, and transform eating from a social into a solitary activity. Switch (in Eastern countries) from rice or vegetables to meat and increase fat intake, medical costs, and the pressure on agriculture (growing grain to feed cattle that go into the beef we eat is radically inefficient, using up to ten times more grain than is consumed by humans who make grain their diet). The McDonald’s way of eating is a way of life: an ideology as theme park more intrusive (if much more subtle) than any Marx or Mao ever contrived.25 The theme park metaphor rests on the theme park reality.

  Theme parks have their origin in the great world’s fairs and industrial expositions that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were intended as Enlightenment advertisements for a better future by the people who were converting science into industry and technology into commerce for an already globalizing market. In his vivid essay “See You in Disneyland,” Michael Sorkin cites Prince Albert’s address at the opening of the 1851 London Exposition. Speaker Gingrich has nothing on Prince Albert, who is remarkably up-to-date in his futurological enthusiasm: