Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [49]
Elaborating on Marx’s offhand assumption about the political idiocy of rural life, Edward C. Banfield, examining rural Italy after World War II, associated the agrarian lifestyle with a morally backward set of political attitudes.35 Whether he was right or not about agriculture, it seems likely that lifestyles are increasingly relevant to the postmodern political economy. They make a difference: a leisure society may afford more time for civil society, volunteer service, and politics than a work society; suburban lifestyles diminish public and common space of the kind found in towns and cities; twenty-four-hour-a-day global markets linked by electronic telecommunications, and global business communities linked by international flights interfere with schedules and routines rooted in traditional diurnal clocks. Markets demand freedom from public-sector regulation and interference, but increasingly they are themselves engaged in activities that impinge directly on civic culture and public goods. Political agnostics, they nonetheless borrow and warp political ideas and political terms. A Western fast-food chain that sells varieties of baked potatoes thus advertises that it “empowers” customers because it gives them the right to “choose toppings.” Brand choice and, within brands, item choice (Crest blue and Crest regular), have been widely taken to constitute the essence of freedom in market societies and has even been sold to “new democracies” as such. But it turns out to be something less than real liberty. The ideology of having fun actually is an ideology.
This is most evident in what has perhaps been the greatest growth area for consumer goods qua services, the information and entertainment industries that both drive and are driven by the hardware but depend ultimately on the software. This infotainment telesector is supported by hard goods, which in fact have soft entailments that help obliterate the hard/soft distinction itself.
5
From Soft Goods to Service
THE WALKMAN IS a perfect exemplar of the impact of new hard technologies on choice and liberty, appearing to expand each, yet in truth contracting both. By one measure the Walkman is not new at all: it is just the latest version of a very old modern technology: the phonograph. But the Walkman’s portability, its suitability to solitary listening, and its supermobility make it a ten-ounce fifth column for McWorld that insinuates lifestyle preferences directly into the inner ear while modifying traditional behaviors in socially significant ways. The Walkman technology transforms listening from a social into a solitary occupation; it takes a foreground end-in-itself activity and turns it into background for other consumer-society-desirable behaviors like jogging (Walkmans sell athletic shoes and athletic shoes sell Walkmans!); and it permits a sometime music listening activity to become an all-the-time habit that demands the production and sale of ever more music software.
Computer technology has equally momentous (equally invisible) social entailments. A computer not only conveys information to users but draws them into new forms of interaction that more or less leave their bodies behind, abandoned in front of screens that are the entry to new and peculiar kinds of virtual community that (unlike, say, books) reconstructs their bodies as cyberspace members and thus suggests some kind of virtual politics. Just what kind of politics remains altogether problematic—albeit we can be sure there will be a politics of one kind or another. Even the form that information takes—video-textual, digital, programmed, time-shifted, technology-dependent—will inevitably impact culture and politics and the attitudes that constitute them. It has been speculated that video-game players acquire hand-eye