by Tim Wu
In 1958, as The Hidden Persuaders remained a bestseller forty-six weeks after its publication, CBS’s two big hits were Gunsmoke and a new quiz show named Dotto. Dotto was a funny little program based on the children’s game “connect the dots.” As contestants answered questions correctly, dots were connected revealing a face, the identity of which the contestants were to guess.12
Everything was going well when, one day, a suspicious standby contestant named Eddie Hilgemeier came across a notebook belonging to Marie Winn, another contestant (while in the communal dressing room, he most likely rummaged through her purse). Inside the notebook were jottings. As he examined the notes, he realized that they were the answers to the exact questions Winn was being asked on stage at that moment, on live television.
Taking the notebook, Hilgemeier confronted the show’s producers, who immediately offered him $500 to keep quiet. He declined and was offered $1,500, which he took, but then decided he wanted $5,000. When refused, he spilled the beans. Dotto was fixed, he told the New York Daily News, its winning contestants coached and supplied with answers. Both the casting and the competitive drama were as scripted as a soap opera. It seems rather obvious when you watch the old recordings: on the Dotto episode in question, the attractive reigning champion Marie Winn defeats her dour, overweight opponent with all the theatricality of a professional wrestling match. If the shows were so reliably suspenseful, and the winners always so appealing, surely there was a reason. In fact, even the amounts won were predetermined, budgeted in advance. The truth came out, and Dotto was canceled that summer.
Unexpectedly, the fixing scandal did not stop at Dotto, but spread like a stain as more and more contestants came out of the woodwork. Even before Hilgemeier’s disclosure, Herb Stempel, onetime champion of Twenty One, had been saying he had been coached to take a dive in the final dramatic match against Charles Van Doren. He had been dismissed as a sore loser but when Hilgemeier came forward, the authorities connected the dots, until finally scandal spread to the biggest shows of all, The $64,000 Question and Twenty One. By 1959, Congress had launched an investigation, and called Charles Van Doren to testify. Twenty One’s most famous star gave a shattering confession: “I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol. There may be a kind of justice in that. I don’t know.”13
All of the safeguards—the storing of questions in bank vaults, the isolation booths, and the question-sorting machines—were nothing more than an elaborate sham, similar to the tricks a magician uses to distract his audience. The “little people” were winning big, because the big people wanted it that way. Walter Lippmann, who, having worked for the Creel Committee, knew a thing about putting one over on the public, put things this way in 1959:
Television has been caught perpetrating a fraud which is so gigantic that it calls into question the foundations of the industry….There has been, in fact, an enormous conspiracy to deceive the public in order to sell profitable advertising to the sponsors. It involves not this individual or that, but the industry as a whole…there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates….There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of their audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be “free,” it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandizing.14
Lippmann voiced a now widespread conviction that the television networks had squandered their power over American attention. Even Pat Weaver, former NBC president, long since fired by David Sarnoff, chimed in, saying that when it comes to television network, management “doesn’t give the people what they deserve.”15 At a government hearing, Eric Barnouw, the acclaimed observer of broadcasting, testified. “The real question,” he said, “is whether we can afford to have our culture and artistic life become a byproduct of advertising. My answer is that we can’t.”16
In the popular imagination, it is the 1960s, not the 1950s, that was the era of revolt against commerce, conformism, and the power of advertising. But it is clear that before the decade of counterculture had even dawned, the seeds of doubt about the trustworthiness of prominent American institutions had not only been sown and watered but had borne mature fruit. Disillusionment with the second screen—which, in less than ten years’ time, had gone from an amusing novelty to an almost natural presence in every home, to become the combine of the most bountiful commercial harvest of attention the world had ever seen—was the harbinger of an even greater disenchantment. But no mere harbinger: in their carelessness, the attention merchants had revealed that their pleasant arrangement with the American consumer was essentially a confidence game. When that was finally clear, the reverberations would be felt for the rest of the century.
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* As years went by, Dichter would also provide fodder for feminist critics, like Betty Friedan, who included an attack of motivational research in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan wanted to know why women had returned to being housewives after making gains in independence earlier in the century. She concluded that “the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.” (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963; repr. 1997), 299.
CHAPTER 12
THE GREAT REFUSAL
In the spring of 1966, a forty-six-year-old former Harvard instructor named Timothy Leary, wearing a jacket, a tie, and a distant look, strode up the red-carpeted steps of the Plaza Hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue and into the Oak Room for lunch. Waiting for him was a man Leary knew only by reputation: another academic, Marshall McLuhan, almost a decade older, graying a bit, but not yet wearing the mustache that would become his signature in the 1970s.
To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were “gurus,” a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who’d become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”). He was referred to, variously, as the “Guru of the Boob Tube” and the “Oracle of the Electronic Age.”
Leary had, at the time, the more traditional claim to guruship. Having been fired from his teaching position at Harvard, he now lived in a fortresslike mansion in upstate New York, where he was overseeing the development of a grand synthesis, part scientific experiment, part new religion. He and a friend from Harvard, Professor Richard Alpert, who was likewise defrocked and later would take the name Ram Dass, called their project the “International Federation for Internal Freedom.” The two men had successfully attracted a large band of devoted followers and their ambitions were grand. As one of them, a British doctor named Michael Hollingshead, explained, “We felt satisfied that our goal was Every Man’s, a project of Every Man’s private ambition. We sought for that unitary state of divine harmony, an existence in which only the sense of wonder remains, and all fear gone.”1
Among other things, Leary and his followers were deeply committed to what might fairly be termed an attentional revolution. They wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary believed in the great potential of taking psychedelic drugs—like LSD—still legal then.
By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his
great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. As he would describe it, “For the first time in our history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect institutional authority,” giving rise to a contest between “the old industrial society and the new information society.” He believed that McLuhan might be able to tell him how he could reach all the disaffected.2
McLuhan was fairly sympathetic to Leary’s project. For McLuhan saw the media as having become “extensions of man”—as much a part of us as our skin. To take control of one’s media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one’s own destiny. And so after hearing Leary out, he finally gave him some counterintuitive advice: “You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer,” said McLuhan. “But the key to your work is advertising.” If Leary truly wanted to wean great numbers from the pernicious effects of the existing media, he needed first to reach those people by the media’s most pernicious means. Most of all, he needed some kind of a catchy line, and to show him how it was done, McLuhan composed a jingle for him then and there, based on an old Pepsi ad: “Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”
That meeting, Leary would remember, “got me thinking further along these lines: the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models of the universe to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter.” Taking McLuhan’s advice seriously, he made a list of the most revolutionary American slogans: “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” came to him first, and then “A Nation Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free,” “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself,” and finally “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” (the latter had been used over the 1940s and 1950s, replacing “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet”). But he needed his own slogan. Later that day, in the shower, the answer suddenly came to him. All he needed was the right occasion to bring it to a broader audience.
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Late in 1966, a “psychedelic artist” named Michael Bowen invited Leary to an event in San Francisco meant to unite various emerging countercultural and “alternative” groups—alienated students, poets, rock musicians, jazz hipsters, and members of biker gangs. His advertising posters billed the event as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” And so it was on January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park that Leary first took his carefully constructed message to a broader audience. His speech centered on the infectious refrain, repeated over and over:
“Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.”
McLuhan’s advice worked. Leary’s line caught on as well as any advertising slogan and became, effectively, the motto of the counterculture.
Most would take Leary’s words as a call to pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt—Packard and Lippmann had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution.
Some two decades on, Leary would write that “unhappily,” his ideas had been “often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’ ”3 Indeed, in the 1960s it was earnestly asked where one was supposed to go after dropping out. But enough who got the message understood that it referred to something more profound, and were able to connect Leary’s prescription with the vision of other social critics. Among the most influential of these was another guru of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse of the “Frankfurt School,” one of a set of German philosophers who’d fled the Third Reich in the 1930s. Marcuse believed that he was witnessing a “Great Refusal”—a term he first coined in the 1950s to describe “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—‘to live without anxiety.’ ”4
Like Leary—whom he may have inspired in part—Marcuse tended to believe that liberation could not be achieved from within the system, but required its fundamental reconstruction. “Intellectual freedom,” he surmised in 1964, “would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination” and also the “abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its makers.” And so the youth movement held out the promise for something never achieved except in mythology—the radical liberation of the human condition. It was a far more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system. Marcuse envisioned an end to all forms of repression, whether social, economic, or technological—a sort of return to the Garden of Eden. By this Great Refusal, he dared hope, the people might “recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress.” The result would be “solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace.”5
But on the way to paradise, where should one direct his attention if not to the ubiquitous media? What should people be doing with their lives? For his part, Leary offered an answer from a far older and more mystical prophetic tradition, locating the proper focus of attention with things of the spirit. “The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search,” Leary said, “for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.” This was the ultimate sense of his great exhortation, as he would explain in one speech: “The message of God never changes. It may be expressed to you in six simple words: turn on, tune in, drop out.”6
Leary forecast that enormous resistance would meet those trying to take his advice. “The directors of the TV studio do not want you to live a religious life. They will apply every pressure (including prison) to keep you in their game. Your own mind, which has been corrupted and neurologically damaged by years of education in fake-prop TV-studio games, will also keep you trapped in the game.”7 He was right in seeing that American commerce, and the attention industries in particular, would view what Leary advocated as a mortal threat. But he seems not to have anticipated that just as he had appropriated the tools of advertising for the promotion of his cause, the side of the advertisers might just as easily appropriate his cause for their purposes.
Before Leary, there was Pepsi. In 1963, Alan Pottasch, a newly hired advertising executive at the Pepsi Cola Company, was sitting in his office, pencil in hand, desperately brainstorming ideas for a challenge he might mount against Coca-Cola, the establishment soft drink par excellence, known then as “the brand beyond competition.”
Decades of experience had shown that competing with Coca-Cola was a Sisyphean undertaking. Like other giants of the 1950s, Coke had invested millions in advertising meant to cultivate a fierce brand loyalty. Along the way it had succeeded, as few firms do, in transcending mere persuasion and instead convincing people that Coke was not only the better choice but also somehow the only choice. As historian Thomas Frank explains, “Coke built an unrivaled dominance of the once-localized soft-drink marketplace: it offered a single product that was supposed to be consumable by people in every walk of life—rich and poor, old and young, men and women—and in every part of the country.” Coke managed to create a phenomenally low “brand elasticity”—the economist’s term for the willingness of consumers to accept a substitute, a matter proven by the fact that Pepsi was similar, cheaper, yet remained unable to build market share.8
Coke had succeeded by identifying itself with everything wholesome and all-American, drawing on the deep American self-regard and desire to belong—and somehow making it feel that to drink something else might be vaguely treasonous. At Christmas, it even associated itself with Santa Claus, and in fact the company helped cement the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness as a rotund bearded
man with a broad belt, clad in Coca-Cola’s red and white.
Pepsi, meanwhile, was the perennial underdog. First bottled in 1893, when it was called Brad’s Drink, Pepsi was originally sold as a minor-league patent medicine: the “healthy” cola. The name was a play on its claim to treat dyspepsia, or indigestion. As the trailing brand, Pepsi was willing, early on, to try innovative promotional techniques, like catering to the disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an all-black marketing department, known as the “negro-markets” department.9 Over the 1950s, Pepsi depended entirely on identifying itself not as healthful, or even better tasting, but the cheaper cola, occupying the market niche that generic colas hold today. Its most successful jingle, the one McLuhan borrowed for Leary’s psychedelic venture, had gone like this: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; 12 full ounces, that’s a lot.” Truth in advertising: Pepsi was sold in a 12-ounce bottle for 5 cents, the price of 6.5 ounces of Coke. By 1957, when Pottasch joined the company, despite all its efforts Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice—but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke, that’s all.
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Pottasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary, Marcuse, and others, Pottasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people, who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and—while this was still the early 1960s—giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order, Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola.