<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2024-07-02</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # AdBusters, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Culture War Swindle  Ads are everywhere. They invade every space. 20 years ago there was a growing movement to corral ads into privately owned spaces and not allow them to escape into public areas. The magazine <u>AdBusters</u> was created around this movement. The magazine still exists, but is very different from its roots. The book <u>No Logo</u> by Naomi Klein was also born of this movement. The idea was/is to keep billboards from ruining picturesque landscapes and parks, and to bring awareness that the corporations responsible for them do **not** endorse the tone of their ads. They are indifferent to whatever social message their ads pretend to convey. It's only a means to an end. So, as pointed out in No Logo, when Old Navy started advertising with gay men in their jeans ads back in the 90s, they were not demonstrating their support for gay rights. Old Navy is *indifferent* to gay rights. They were selling to a market, trying to make money. They were co-opting the gay rights movement to sell more jeans. "Appropriating" I believe is the preferred term. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of ads in general was getting worse. The corporations buying the adspaces were getting richer and having more political influence as a result. The predatory lending of banks was driving the economy into a housing crisis, and American auto makers were designing cars to break down — planned obsolescence is what it was called — in a way to force consumers to have to buy a new car every 10 years or so. They were also moving all their manufacturing plants to Mexico and other countries where labour was cheaper, laying off thousands of American and Canadian workers. So with all that happening in the background, in 2008 and 2009, the US government announced that both the auto industry and several banks, which were on the verge of going bankrupt, needed to be "bailed out" to the tune of several tens of billions of dollars for the auto industry, and several *hundreds* of billions of dollars for the banks. From the point of view of the public, this implied that the government, which everyone was forced to pay money into, did not protect them in any meaningful way—they protected only those who gave the most money. Joe Blow working at the factory who couldn't afford to get braces for his daughter, or was slowly going broke getting his wife's insulin, simply didn't matter. He was irrelevant. It was a cruel irony to have all this happening, while at the same time television ads and billboards were showing the auto industry's cars and trucks as being for the every-man, the middle-class worker, and the friendly banks generously giving service and loans to buy them. This lesson, which was slowly being learned by the public, culminated in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. This was also organised by <u>AdBusters</u> magazine, and grew into its own beast. It grew so large that it couldn't be ignored by the mainstream media. It actually got next to no press for the first week, but grew to sprout demonstrations all throughout the western world. This was the working-class finally standing up and being noticed. After all it was *their* money being used to rescue multinational banks and automobile companies from bankruptcy. These companies and financial institutions were "too big to fail" we were told, and so literal billions were given to them. But working-class families, families whose money in tax dollars just bailed out these massive companies, were [losing their homes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_financial_crisis) to the very banks that received it, after being laid off by the companies they just rescued. The movement itself was colourless. It wasn't a black movement, an Asian movement, a white movement or any racial movement. It wasn't even a left or right-wing movement. The bailouts were George W. Bush's decision, but it was [supported by Barack Obama](https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/19/bush-bails-out-us-automakers-dec-19-2008-1066932), who later gave the auto industry *more* money after he was elected. Indeed, this was a *class* movement. Working-class people of all stripes were affected by the bailouts of these corporations, and the government was giving away their hard-earned money to do so. "We are the 99%" became the Occupy Wallstreet slogan, with the "99%" being those earning working-class wages, as opposed to the 1% who own more wealth than the rest of the world combined. In September of 2011, hundreds of people [gathered in Zuccotti Park](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/occupy-wall-street-begins-zuccotti-park) in lower Manhattan to participate in a sit-in that would last for two months. Other sit-ins were organised in other areas of the country, and eventually the rest of the world. But after the police came with teargas and riot gear and cleared out the parks, the movement was forgotten. It died without so much as a whimper, and the world moved on to the next news cycle. But the corporations learned to never again be the target of public ire. It wouldn't be long before they relied on the old standby to earn people's trust: more advertising.  In the early 90s, a hard recession hit, and people started spending much more frugally. For the first time, larger brand names were being outsold by no-name brands in supermarkets, and vintage clothes from goodwill were outselling department stores. There was a growing anti-consumerist sentiment spreading through subcultures and eventually was absorbed by western culture as a whole. This led to a floundering advertising industry, that seemed to be struggling to figure out a strategy in a growing trend that favoured comfort and low cost over style. The result was extremely odd, if not amusing, advertising campaigns [like this one featuring William S. Burroughs in a Nike commercial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvLTu8Xfhf4). Fashion magazines had runway models advertising not $10,000 dresses, but 20 dollar flannels and corduroy. But what really changed was a bombardment of just **more.** More billboards, more space in print, full page spreads in newspapers and magazines, radio programs had commercial breaks as long as the program itself. Commercials started showing up in movie theatres. TV ad breaks became longer and more frequent. Youth, beauty, and provocativeness became a staple in ads for everything (sex sells, after all). And soon, by the late 90s and throughout the 00s, people were again captured by the vapid styles of old: skimpy, overpriced, stylised sex in a box. The cultural takeover of what I'll call the "Paris Hilton phenomenon" was pretty astounding. Teenage girls were emulating this empty-headed sex bomb who had want for nothing. They were exemplifying skinny figures, and skimpy clothing to show it off. It got so bad that these girls were getting cosmetic surgeries for their 16th birthdays: collagen implants, breast implants, etc. ^ParisHilton The inevitable pushback to this was tremendous, and the media and advertising industries were again targeted, but this time they were ready. The answer came from technology, and the changing landscape of how we all were consuming media now. No longer was information absorbed just though television, radio and print. Legacy media was rapidly declining in public consumption while digital media was on the rise. Social media was capturing the attention spans of nearly everyone. It allowed consumers to become participants in media that, only a few years previous, went entirely in one direction. We could share what was important to us, and participate in large, overarching conversations of culture, politics, and anything else that interested us. The result was that people started sharing links to media articles, and stopped visiting the home pages of media websites like the NYT. Social media companies, in the mid-to-late 00s, had yet to figure out how to effectively monetise these platforms, though ads were clearly the direction they were going. Newspapers and other print media were also floundering at this point, and partnership was a mutually beneficial proposition. The result was for social media companies to insert posts by media companies into users' feeds. These legacy-media companies used to sell ad space giving exposure to other companies' products, but now they too have to buy ad space along with everyone else, in order to stay relevant. Combine this with multinational corporations' desire to heal their own damaged reputations from the bailout fiascos, buying exposure in these platforms too, and you have a complete takeover of the world's advertising industry. The other half of this equation is data mining. Social media companies, like Twitter and Facebook, are continually logging what posts get attention by their users and create individual profiles on a user by user basis. They track what posts are likely to keep a user on the site, and therefore know which media posts (let's just call them ads), would be the most effective for insertion into a particular user's timeline. All this data is valuable information, and gets sold to other companies who would also find it useful. Amazon, for example, uses it for suggestions as to what people might like to purchase. Amazon also collects their own data on these customers and, in turn, sells it back to social media companies. The advent of tracking technology also made it possible to follow users to whatever site they went, even when they weren't logged into whatever platform was tracking them. And when Google introduced its Chrome browser, then ChromeOS, and of course Android, it really changed the game. Google started watching people's searches, what sites they visited, what purchases they made, the content of their emails and chat messages and logging who they spoke to on the phone and for how long. They started tracking their routes to work, logging what brick-and-mortar stores they frequented and what they purchased, what apps they use, how long they use them, what they read, what podcasts they listen to at any given time of day, etc. And of course they sell this data to other companies at a premium. They also purchase data from social media companies, just as other companies purchase from them. They all have very complete profiles on billions of users. Google of course uses this not just to sell to companies, but to insert ads into their operating systems (ChromeOS and Android), just as Twitter uses it to insert ads into their users' Twitter feeds (or X feeds, rather). Microsoft too, has now got into this game, loading Windows 11 with ads as well. These operating systems are on devices that we spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to own. And just 20 years ago we were complaining about there being too many billboards. Now advertising agencies and tech companies have become Big Brother watching us, building surveillance profiles on everyone, using devices we *voluntarily pay* to own. It's a dystopian nightmare that even AdBusters couldn't envisage. This only gets to the tip of the iceberg, however. The obvious goal in all this profiling is to keep people engaged, staring at screens, and looking at more ads, but there is another, more insidious biproduct here. And that is the culture war itself. One thing that all these companies want to avoid is public ire. They do *not* want to be seen as an enemy of the people. A repeat of events like the 90s anti-consumerist movement and Occupy Wallstreet needs to be avoided at all costs. Nike, Adidas, and other shoe manufacturers went through this in the 90s with it being revealed that their shoes are mostly made overseas by children. Disney was [distorting history by making movies like Pocahontas](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-24-me-16637-story.html), which minimised the struggle of Native Americans of the early 1600s. These and other aforementioned criticisms sparked the 90s anti-consumerist movement. The well-being of the auto industry and banks, with the bailouts mentioned earlier, were seen as far more important to the government than veterans living on the streets, people unable to get proper health care, and minimum wage workers unable to afford basic living conditions, sparking Occupy Wallstreet. These companies became villains in the eyes of the public. Restoring public faith was a struggle that lasted a decade or more, in some cases, and a solution was needed to keep this from happening again. The answer was to use all this data, and while using it to keep people looking at ads, also use it to distract from what was happening right under their noses by keeping them squabbling with each other. This was done by tweaking the algorithms in search results and social media feeds to not only keep people mad and scrolling, but to find things to anger them who *were not* paying customers of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Google began tailoring search results, and Twitter and Facebook began to manipulate people's news feeds. Boogeymen were created, like Dylan Mulvaney, or J. K. Rowling, or Greta Thunburg, or *all* of <u>The Right&trade;</u> or <u>The Left&trade;</u>. Definitions of racism, and men and women, were changed in such a way as to convince people that everybody are bigots of some sort and need to be silenced. This strategy was successful beyond anything they could have hoped for. Everybody began fighting and yelling and accusing each other of hideous things for engaging in normal, every-day activities. Hell, people are now hated simply for liking, or disliking, Star Wars for fuck's sake. Everyone is fighting each other over *everything*. And now these multinational, multi-billion dollar companies were free to continue, business as usual, **and** be the good guys at the same time. All they needed to do was make some timely platitudes in February and June, keep up with rainbow logos, and black squares, and everybody left them alone. Not only that, but if they *did* make some kind of misstep, they had a convenient scapegoat all set up to misdirect the conversation and keep people fighting with each other, rather than ganging up on *them*. This is the greatest swindle in my living memory. We've all been bamboozled. This "culture war" was created by billion dollar companies looking only to avoid public scrutiny. It has utterly collapsed social civility, and has escaped all possible control at this point. Why do we continue to use these companies' tech? Is the convenience really worth it? There are other alternatives, even for those of us who are not in the tech industry. It used to be difficult to avoid using predatory services, but no longer. We need to get back to issues that affect everybody, and stop worrying about who's using what bathroom. But this is impossible while so many people remain hypnotised by the algorithmic feeds on social media and Google search results, fed to them from devices upon which everyone is thoroughly addicted. In part 2 of this post, I'm going to get into alternative technologies, how to avoid most of the profiling, and hopefully provide ways to ween off of the social media drug that is driving driving us all to madness.