Earlier today, I was on a radio program during which a Chicago-based activist seemed to have claimed that the Occupy movement contributed to the failure of the Super Committee. Given that a number of conservatives, including my Economics 21 colleagues James Capretta, were also suggesting failure might be the best outcome, this struck me as an interesting if somewhat implausible point of view. Indeed, at the time the Super Committee was created, it was widely argued that its failure was overdetermined.
To really understand the Occupy movement, it is important to understand branding. Mattathias Schwartz’s excellent profile of Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the editors at Adbusters who dreamed up the idea of occupying Wall Street, includes the following passage on Lasn’s background:
He has a degree in applied mathematics, and he began his career designing computer war games for the Australian military. Using this expertise, he started a market-research company in Tokyo during Japan’s postwar boom, where, by feeding punch cards into an I.B.M. mainframe, he created reports for consumer brands, many of them alcohol and tobacco products. “It’s easy to generate cool if you have the bucks, the celebrities, the right ideas, the right slogans,” he says. “You can throw ideas into the culture that then have a life of their own.” He made a lot of money, travelled around the world, moved to Canada, and devoted himself to experimental filmmaking and environmental protection. In 1989, when the CBC refused to sell him airtime for a thirty-second “mind bomb” aimed at the forestry industry, Lasn realized that his politics would never have a place within the mass media. With Bill Schmalz, an outdoorsman who had worked with him as a cameraman, Lasn founded Adbusters.
This struck me as particularly interesting. Postwar Japan was very much a cultural and technological frontier. It was one of the first non-European societies to have experienced true mass affluence, and understanding the fast-evolving psychological terrain of the Japanese consumer was the perfect opportunity for a savvy entrepreneur interested in throwing “mind bombs.” Japan continues to be an innovator in street fashion and youth culture, arguably more so now than at the height of its economic boom. That experience was, I suspect, invaluable to Lasn. Having made a lot of money, he could then indulge his interests in street theater and provocation.
Lasn says that Adbusters has a circulation worldwide of roughly seventy thousand. The magazine accepts no advertising, and relies on newsstand sales and donations. Adbusters was an early supporter of Buy Nothing Day, a protest holiday, in late November, during which people abstain from shopping. In 2003, Lasn started producing the Blackspot, a sneaker made partially of hemp, which he still sells online. Lasn has long used the magazine as a platform for stridently criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and his most controversial moment came in 2004, when he wrote an essay on how Jews influence U.S. foreign policy. Alongside the essay was a list of powerful neoconservatives, with asterisks next to the names of those who Lasn believed were Jewish.
Adbusters is not the only magazine to have advanced an anti-consumerist gestalt. The Baffler, founded by Tom Frank and friends, advanced a particularly incisive critique of consumer culture and “market populism,” which has helped make Frank an intellectual celebrity and that has launched a number of other media brands that retain their appeal. A number of new media properties, including The Awl, are informed by a Baffler-esque sensibility, and publish some of the writers and thinkers were associated with The Baffler itself. Yet while The Baffler crowd spoke the language of the academy in its critique of consumer culture, Adbusters is all about the power of the arresting image — that is, it draws on what we might call the “anesthetizing technologies” of the capitalist consumer economy (pop, entertainment, the logo, the icon, the sitcom trope) to inspire a kind of radical tricksterism. It uses marketing to fight marketing.
This spring, the magazine was pushing boycotts of Starbucks (for driving out local businesses) and the Huffington Post (for exploiting citizen journalists). Then, in early June, the art department designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the “Charging Bull” sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: “the juxtaposition of the capitalist dynamism of the bull,” he remembers, “with the Zen stillness of the ballerina.” In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality—Adbusters’ signature. “What is our one demand?” the poster asked. “Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent.”
There was something about this impish message that proved appealing to a surprisingly large number number of people. What Lasn understood is that “coolness” is an empty vessel that can be colonized by the market or by radical critics of the market:
“It’s easy to generate cool if you have the bucks, the celebrities, the right ideas, the right slogans,” he says. “You can throw ideas into the culture that then have a life of their own.”
Actually, it’s not “easy to generate cool if you have the bucks,” which is why the cool-generation business is so large and lucrative. Coolness is about creating the illusion of rarefied knowledge, i.e., a kind of knowledge that only a select few can access. Consider the cliche of “I was into [band X] before [popular album X].” When the knowledge belonged to the select few, it has value. Once lame people came to share the knowledge, it no longer had value. Ostensibly, the Occupy movement represented an incipient majority. But of course it never would have been “cool” had it really captured the sensibilities of a majority. Over time, as the Occupy movement has grown less popular with the wider public, it has not lost its “cool” currency. If anything, the opposite is true.
Lasn is quite self-conscious about the role of branding, as demonstrated by an interview with William Yardley:
He has also been accused of playing off the image-oriented culture that dominates advertising, instead of rejecting it outright. But Mr. Lasn said he believed in the power of media to subvert traditional power structures.
“If you’re able to come up with a very sexy sounding hash tag like we did for Occupy Wall Street, and you come up with a very magical looking poster that seems to have something very profound about it, these devices push these memes, these meta memes, into the public imagination in a very powerful way,” he said.
An obvious critique of Lasn is that traditional power structures are more robust than he understands, and that he is merely creating memes that can themselves be commercialized. Yet Lasn is on to something: he understands that large numbers of disembedded individuals are desperate for compelling narratives. The devoutly religious or young parents aren’t in desperate need of ready-made, pre-packaged narratives because they have them in the form of strife, struggle, obligations, and living communities. Large numbers of other people do need them, which helps account for the outsized power of brands like Apple. Lasn has given some nontrivial number of people a compelling narrative. It is not a convincing one, in my view, but it does resonate with a portrait of the world offered by much of the establishment media — only it’s “cooler”: a more rebellious and rarefied and edgy form of the politics of, say, the New York Times editorial page, plus direct action.
The real goal of Occupy, I suspect, is not so much to create political change in the short term, but rather to enhance the legitimacy of a larger, more radical critique of our existing institutions, of consumerism, and of market democracy. If the proportion of people who embrace this radical critique goes from, say, 1 percent to 1.1 percent, the movement will have been a success, even if it sparks a short to medium-term political backlash.