The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
At the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab in March, I gave a talk called Sleeping Through a Revolution. Subsequently I have given the talk at the European Cultural Forum in Lisbon, UCLA, The National Arts Club in New York, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. The video and its transcript have been viewed over 15,000 times in the last six weeks on Vimeo and Medium.
The title comes from a sermon by Martin Luther King, delivered at the National Cathedral two weeks before his assassination in 1968. King asserted that we were embarking on a technological revolution, but that many were asleep to the changes it would bring; without some sort of moral framework, we would have “guided missiles and misguided men.”
In the discussions after the talk, often with local artists whose living has been destroyed by the culture of “Free Content” on the Internet, I have been brought back to a seminal 1976 work by the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
Bell contended that modern capitalism creates a culture of such self gratification and narcissism, that it may end up causing its own self-destruction.
This idea really seemed a perfect way to think about Digitour. Digitour is a 60-city concert tour of the six most popular YouTube Stars. This year they will sell more than 220,000 tickets, mostly to teenage girls between the ages of 9 and 15. At points the din from the screaming fans gets so loud the security guards stuff Kleenex in their ears. This, of course, is an American ritual, perhaps starting with the appearance of Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater in December of 1942. Jack Benny commented, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion … All this for a fellow I never heard of.”
In 1956 Elvis Presley caused similar screaming crowds and of course in 1964 Beatlemania swept across the country.
But at Digitour, something was different — “the talent” didn’t sing or dance at all. As BuzzFeed noted:
By and large, the cast do not really perform so much as appear. Roughly once every show, a booming voice prods, “Now, let’s — take — some — SELFIEEEES,” in the way another announcer might implore a crowd to make some noise. The fans oblige.
The Internet revolution was supposed to usher a new age of digital democracy, opening up the distribution pipelines to anyone with talent. But what are we to make of a teen phenomena with no talent whatsoever? There is a famous theory called One Million Monkeys, which posits that if you let a millions monkeys type long enough they would write Hamlet. But have the 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every hour produced the new Scorsese or Coppola? The simple answer is no. The evidence is that Chris Anderson (the Editor of Wired) was completely wrong when he put forth the utopian vision of “The Long Tail” — that the Internet would prove to be the greatest discovery mechanism for the small artist to thrive.
In the 1970s, the entertainment reality was the “80–20 rule;” that a distributor would get 80 percent of their revenues from 20 percent of the product. Today in the music business, 80 percent of the revenue comes from 1 percent of the product. Jay-Z and Beyonce are millionaires and the average musician cannot make a living. These same economics rule the book, movie, and video game business. And for those who hold onto the notion that we are living in a Golden Age of Television, it must be noted that all of the great programs cited — Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Walking Dead, True Detective — exhibit a dark tone of nihilism that may perfectly match what the cultural theorist Jacques Barzun calls our Age of Decadence: “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the inevitable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”
One more example to explicate Bell’s thesis. Recently Rhianna released a single and a video called “American Oxygen.” The video is both hyper-sexualized and ostensibly political, filled with images of war and empire.
Breathe out, breathe in
American oxygen
Every breath I breathe
Chasin’ this American Dream
We sweat for a nickel and a dime
Turn it into an empire
Breathe in, this feeling
American, American oxygen
This is the new America
We are the new America
So how does this young girl who “sweats for a nickel and a dime” reconcile appearing in the same week as the record release as the new face of Dior, clutching a $10,000 handbag?
To me the cultural contradictions of this capitalism are almost too much to bear. Is her political stance for the downtrodden in American Oxygen just a pose? Do the artists of today think they can put this on like the bell bottoms and tie-dye they wear to Coachella?
When narcissism meets nihilism, the result is toxic.
