Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  “[W]e are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind…. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease [T]hought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capitalism.”26

  If, as Sorkin suggests, “the Prince Consort’s evocation of a world shrunk by technology and the division of labor is the ur-theme of the theme park,” then it is also the leitmotiv of McWorld and Prince Albert is the natural progenitor of Ronald McDonald (Sorkin calls the Prince a “mouseketeer avant la lettre”) as well as of cyberenthusiast Gingrich.

  Whatever the genealogy of the theme park, it finds its most common outlet nowadays not in the specialty fairgrounds in Anaheim and Orlando but in shopping malls all across the country. For these malls are entertainment plazas built around the multifaceted pleasures of shopping. Once upon a time, stores found a home in downtown neighborhoods among workshops, churches, restaurants, theaters, schools, and town halls as elements in an architecture of public space that integrated shopping into other public activities and at the same time gave to commerce an appropriately complementary and utilitarian role. The isolation of commercial space from every other kind of public space hinted at by the world’s fairs and certified by mall development has allowed commercial consumption to dominate public space, transmuting every other human activity into a variation on buying and selling. Margaret Crawford, an astute student of mall culture, has noticed that the express aim of the developers is to contain the entire world within the shopping plaza. She cites one of the builders of the world’s largest mall, who at the opening ceremony boasted: “What we have done means you don’t have to go to New York or Paris or Disneyland or Hawaii. WE have it all here for you in one place, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada!”27 Joan Didion has suggested that malls are actually addictive, a space where “one moves for a while in an aqueous suspension, not only of light, but of judgment, not only of judgment, but of personality.”28 The boundaries that separate the mall from the world are intended to remove every boundary between what goes on inside the mall and in the world: very few exits, no clocks. As fast food energizes consumers to shop (“dining” takes time away from shopping) and movie multiplexes provide entertainment incentives to consumption, so the architecture of mall space—the placement of stairways, the grouping of shops by income level, the theming of stores, the funneling of pedestrian traffic—has as its sole object the facilitation of consumption.29

  The mall is not so much part of the suburbs as their essence, for suburbs themselves strive to take on the aspect of a theme park. A pamphlet from the California Office of Tourism invites readers to take a fresh look at Orange County (this was before the county went belly-up bankrupt, which gives the following an even more affecting comic poignancy):

  It’s a theme park—a seven-hundred-and-eighty-six-square-mile theme park—and the theme is “you can have anything you want.”

  It’s the most California-looking of all the Californias: the most like the movies, the most like the stories, the most like the dream.

  Orange County is Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable….

  Come to Orange County. It’s no place like home.30

  Malls are theme parks; theme parks are whole suburban counties; suburban counties are malls. And of course mall stores sport “themes” of their own and specialize in impulse shopping. Necessitarian outlets for everyday items like hardware, stamps, and pharmaceuticals and traditional five-and-dime variety stores are almost entirely absent. In their place spring up nature stores, museum shops, new age boutiques, game and music box studios, and consumption mini-marts such as The Sharper Image and Brookstone that sell nothing you need but everything you want—once you enter the store. Alongside the mini-marts are brand-name stores and commercial offshoots of the big-time theme parks. Hundreds of Disney stores, early entrants in the mall sweeps, now face competition from other studio shops like Warner Brothers and MGM’s. The grand opening of the Manhattan Warner Studio store displayed Mickey’s competitors Bugs Bunny and Tweetie Bird inviting sundry New York sophisticates (animal and human) wearing silk top hats to “Discover New York’s Newest Entertainment Shopping Experience,” thereby offering the question “When is a store a theme park?” a simple answer: “When it is an ‘entertainment shopping experience.’”

  To ensure that malls are fun, many developers are installing hightech virtual reality arcade games at very considerable cost (up to $2 million) and thereby further collapsing the distinction between Disneyland, McDonald’s (which is also experimenting with the games), and the suburban mall. An investment analyst predicts “malls may find it necessary to have that kind of amusement to keep up as a destination point.”31 Malling neighborhoods and then theme-parking neighborhood malls makes them sure destination points for everyman and everywoman too, especially since in the suburbs (where well over half of America lives today), the mall is the “neighborhood” and commercial space is the only community space in sight.

  Theme parks that are really shopping malls and malls that are actually theme parks are everywhere. Movie studios build them as real-world monuments to their other-world fantasies, durable goods producers establish them as entertainment arms of their sales strategies (Nike Town, for example—see above), and governments and states sponsor them in hopes of burnishing an image or commemorating a past or turning a profit. The same French government that successfully exempted the French audiovisual industry from the last GATT round played a major role a few years earlier (along with leading French financial institutions) in assembling the property and building the hotels for EuroDisney. They even financed a stop on the express train service that is France’s pride. The French private sector retains a 51 percent holding in EuroDisney today, though its poor performance in its first years has left investors with a bad taste and Disney with its first prospective fiasco.

  In the self-effacing spirit of government under assault, the state has mostly stayed on the sidelines. Local authorities have the right to demand concessions from developers to allow curb cuts and building permits, but they have played the zealous suitor to, rather than the public regulator of, the developers and have asked little. Indeed, H. Wayne Huizenga, the Blockbuster video magnate who also owns a group of professional sports clubs and recently merged Blockbuster with Viacom, Paramount’s successful buyer, has also persuaded the Florida legislature to allow him to build “Blockbuster Park” on twenty-five hundred acres of swampland north of Miami as a kind of sixty-eighth Florida county. The enabling legislation calls it a “Multi-Jurisdictional Tourism, Sports and Entertainment Special District,” while locals call it “Wayne’s World.” A five-member council representing district landowners will govern. There is only one landowner, however: Blockbuster. The pro-park chairman of the Dade County Commission explains, “We’re tinkering with the outer edges of democracy as we know it—the privatization of government.”32 Not so very long ago, this pungent phrase might have been deemed oxymoronic or perhaps just moronic. If any institution is irreducibly public by its very definition, it is government. But state sovereignty apparently ends at the gates of the theme park. To be without boundaries, unaccountable to any public authority whatsoever, is no longer just a metaphor on Planet Reebok.

  The theme-parking of reality has many overseas zealots. Led by Berlin concert manager Frank Georgi (who had fled the German Democratic Republic in 1989), businessmen from the eastern states of Germany are currently discussing an “Ossi Park” theme fair on a five-hundred-acre army base near Wandlitz in Brandenburg that sits astride what was once East German leader E
ric Honnecker’s nuclear shelter. According to the planners, visitors to Ossi Park (the attraction is named for the slang term for Easterners during the Cold War) will:

  experience a condensed “typical year” in the [Communist era] German Democratic Republic, including state-organized mass celebrations, such as May 1. One-day visitors will be required to leave by midnight, as they were in the GDR; guards will patrol the border; attempts to escape will lead to hour(s)-long imprisonment. All visitors will be required to exchange a minimum of hard currency for eastern marks …. Political commentary will be available through a reconstructed “black channel” as it was in the GDR; there will also be static-ridden transmissions of western German television (and) blackmarketeers and an underground opposition. [The whole park will be surrounded by barbed wire and a wall and will] include badly stocked stores, snooping state secret police (Stasi) and scratchy toilet paper known as “Stalin’s Revenge,” whose texture, according to an old GDR joke, ensured that “every last ass is red.”33

  Whether the plan, goofy to be sure but hardly goofier than some of Disney’s projects now under way, will come to fruition is uncertain in Germany’s troubled fiscal condition. That it could even be conceived suggests how far the theme park ideology has come from its inception in London in 1851 or its second coming (with Disney) at Anaheim in 1955.34

  Walt Disney World is McWorld’s front parlor. The cartooning of reality with which Walt Disney established his first theme park at Anaheim nearly half a century ago foreshadowed McWorld’s seductive blend of commerce, illusion, manipulated desire, and vicarious satisfaction. According to an early promotional piece:

  Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.

  Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives.35

  Not really the “hard facts” and not quite a part of our lives, as things turn out. Eileen Orgintz writes in what is presumably intended as high praise (in the Los Angeles Times), “Disney World is an unreal place, and don’t expect reality to intrude. Everyone is happy and well-fed. Everything is clean. Everyone is courteous. Don’t be suspicious. Wait until you get home to feel guilty about all the world’s problems.”36

  As once the sun never set on the British empire, so today, Disney can boast, “the fun now follows the sun around the globe.”37 Disneyland in Anaheim, template for all the models that followed, is approaching the half-century mark, Walt Disney World is over twenty years old, Tokyo Disneyland (with its new Splash Mountain), is over ten and in 1992 added another 16 million visitors to its 100 million plus in the nine previous years. Japanese couples are among those that select Disney theme parks for their postmodern nuptials. EuroDisney outside Paris has been the exception to the rule: even if it avoids becoming the first Disney Bankruptcyland, it will have a hard time denting the tough European market. For Europe is where dreams die; the dreamers have all emigrated to America’s warmer climes. Florida, America’s playground, has been a natural Disney venue: even at a moment when to some wary European tourists it has the feel of Murderland, it holds out the promise of Walt Disney World, the Disney-MGM Studios theme park, Disney’s Dixie Landings Resort and Bonnet Creek Gold Club, the Disney Vacation Club Resort, the Epcot Center, and the projected new Disney town of Celebration. The Disney theme parks around the world earn $3.3 billion of Disney’s annual $7.5 billion a year, with films accounting for another $3.1 billion and consumer products (with theme park and film tie-ins) representing another $1.1 billion. All three divisions of Disney derive inspiration from a single set of cartoon images spun out in endless variations by an Imagineering Department responsible for redefining our reality.

  In recent years, the Disney Company has set about virtualizing American history and cartooning its politics. Walt Disney World in Florida recently added Bill Clinton to its popular Hall of Presidents. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, President Clinton has been “imagineered” as an Audio-Animatronic robot who can walk and talk—and unburden himself of some surprisingly terse oratory.38 The company also nearly succeeded in building a “Disney’s America” Civil War theme park at Manassas where America’s bloodiest war was to have been reconsecrated as a pay-per-view spectacle rendered (in accord with the dourly correct realism expected of our times) in all its fratricidal mayhem. Political opposition in Virginia and the District of Columbia along with a national publicity campaign by indignant historians scotched the Manassas venture at the eleventh hour, but the Disney people are still seeking an Americana theme park. For the failed Civil War theme park, “with fake Indian villages, a replica farm, mock Civil War battles and a faux fair” all “within hailing distance of real Indian trails, actual farms, a county fairgrounds and a town that was sacked and burned by Union troops,” was certified by reputable historians.39 Scholars debate the preservationist merits of these new theme parks while the Disney company tries to approximate their exacting standards, but the issue is not preservation and there was something comical about securing scholastic certification for a virtual reality being raised up right next to the Civil War actuality it was reproducing.

  Disney’s creations, however, aspire not to truth but to verisimilitude: the metatruth of virtuality. The whole point of virtual reality is that it is just like the reality that it assiduously is not and cannot be. You cannot have sex in Pirate’s Cove or get to Germany on a ride through a Disney Bavarian castle or assassinate Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents. All you can do is buy a ticket to watch: watch without consequences, watch without engagement, watch without responsibility. That is perhaps why Dexter King (Martin Luther King’s youngest son) has met such resistance to his plan to turn his father’s Atlanta memorial into a Disney-like theme park to be known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Time Machine and Interactive Museum.40

  The King family is one thing, but Disney is another; one should not ask Disney to bear a greater burden than the responsibilities of an entertainment company warrant. The company’s aim is innocent enough, even endearing: not reality modification but a few hours or days (or ideally, if its hotels are to remain full, weeks) of escapist relaxation for the tired masses. Theme parks are not just shaping but are being shaped by the larger McWorld whose values they manifest. In one sense, McWorld itself is a theme park—a park called Marketland where everything is for sale and someone else is always responsible and there are no common goods or public interests and where everyone is equal as long as they can afford the price of admission and are content to watch and to consume.

  McWorld as Marketland is, however, not a natural entity imagineered by some benevolent deity. It is fabricated and it is owned, and how it is owned tells us a great deal about its nature.

  9

  Who Owns McWorld?

  The Media Merger Frenzy

  THE INFOTAINMENT TELESECTOR is the heart of McWorld and increasingly has the look of a wholly owned subsidiary of a small handful of powerful corporations that, by the month, grow fewer in number and more encompassing in ambition. The concept that drives the new media merger frenzy carries the fashionable name “synergy,” which describes what is supposed to be the cultural creativity and economic productivity that arise out of conglomerating the disparate industries that once, quite separately, controlled all three segments of the infotainment telesector: the software programming, the conduits and pipes that distribute it, and the hardware on which it is displayed. The production companies turning out product, the phone and cable and satellite companies, and the companies manufacturing or controlling television sets and computers and multiplexes all, in McWorld’s ideal economy, belong in the hands of one glob
al company. Synergy turns out to be a polite way of saying monopoly. And in the domain of information, monopoly is a polite word for uniformity, which is a polite word for virtual censorship—censorship not as a consequence of political choices but as a consequence of inelastic markets, imperfect competition, and economies of scale—the quest for a single product that can be owned by a single proprietor and sold to every living soul on the planet.

  Traditional corporate ambitions that aimed at monopoly within a particular medium have been displaced by the drive for monopoly across media. By the 1990s, according to Bagdikian, seventeen intermedia conglomerates were earning half the total revenues “from all media” including recordings, cable, and videocassettes.1 Conglomeration had reduced the number of players from forty-six in 1981 to twenty-three in 1991, of which a handful are genuinely intermedia.2 Moreover, Bagdikian was describing the situation just before the Japanese buy-in and the very recent erosion of boundaries between telephone, cable, and broadcast transmission that has accelerated the conglomeration process even more radically.

  Corporations are aiming at control over each step of the image-making process from source to consumer. Where once an author wrote a book and (perhaps via an agent) sold it to a publisher who then printed it, sold serial rights to an independent magazine, and then found still other independent distributors and booksellers to sell it; and where once the author or agent or publisher marketed it to Hollywood, where an independent film studio bought it and turned it into a film, and then found an autonomous distributor to release it and an independent movie-house owner or chain to show it; and where once the film studio sold rights to an independent broadcaster to show the film on television—so that when the full commercial cycle was completed perhaps a few dozen different independent entities participated in a complex, competitive process to bring a creative work to an extended multimedia public by means that allowed both entry and exit for many different creative and financial forces, and maximized choice and opportunity for cultural creators and cultural consumers alike—today the wonders of synergy permit one entity to control the entire process. Not only is the corporate proprietor of a conglomerate likely to own a stable of publishers, one of which will publish a given book, but it can also own the agency that sells the book, the magazine that serializes it, the movie studio that buys and films it, the distributor that purveys it, the cinema chain that screens it, the video export firm that brings it to the global market, and perhaps even the satellite pods or wires through which it is broadcast and the television set and VCR on which it is finally screened somewhere in, say, Indonesia or Nigeria. This is not synergy: this is commercial totalitarianism—a single value (profit) and a single owner (the monopoly holder) submerging all distinctions and rendering all choice tenuous and all diversity sham. No wonder even partisan Republicans were nervous about the meeting between Newt Gingrich and Rupert Murdoch. No wonder other critics faulted not just the $4.5 million deal (now set aside) for an unwritten book by the Speaker but the meeting itself.