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When the Media Is the Disaster
Rebecca Solnit, Tomgram
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.
…So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well…
(21 Jan 2010)
Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America
Naomi Klein, The Guardian
In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called “Absolut No Label”. The company’s global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that “For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that really matters.”
A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This “stealth Starbucks” (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with “one-of-a-kind” fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called “a community personality.” Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: “inspired by Starbucks”. Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, “This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop.” After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.
Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realised why while reading William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin man. So strong is this “morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” that she has the buttons on her Levi’s jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar affliction. As a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to brands. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture – four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns…
(16 Jan 2010)
The best things in life are free
Charles Leadbeater, The New Statesman
How did things get back to the very odd kind of normal that is the British economy? Steelworkers in Redcar start the year looking for work and public services face deep cuts, while thousands of bankers in the City of London, many kept in business by the taxpayers’ bailout of their banks, prepare to spend bonuses in excess of £1m as another mini-bubble builds, fuelled by low interest rates and the rush into Chinese stocks and shares.
This is what happened in 2009: a small group in society takes a huge gamble with the entire economy to earn large bonuses for itself, inflicts lasting damage on everyone else, expects the public to pick up the bill and then carries on as if nothing much happened, while displaying an extraordinary sense of entitlement and arrogant disregard for the rest of society. Worse was allowed to pass with barely a whimper of challenge, until the plan by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, for a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses. The job raising more fundamental questions about whether we need such a complex, self-interested and dangerous financial system has been left to religious leaders, socially aware financial regulators and journalists.
If 2009 was spent rescuing the financial system, the year ahead should be spent remaking it, and to do that we need to fashion a fundamentally different relationship with money.
The main lesson of the crisis this past year is that money has become a capricious and overbearing ruler of our lives – by turns threatening to discipline us, only to offer us liberation, on its own terms. Instead of hoping for a return to easy credit and rising property prices, we should put money in its proper place by reducing its footprint in society, limiting its reach, promoting alternative ways to account for what we value and finding less socially destructive ways to save and invest, lend and borrow. We need to see money less as a mystical religion or a drug and more as a tool.
…A cornerstone of this would be to recognise the already vast non-monetary economy on which most of life depends. Most of the work of caring for children and elderly parents is done for free, mainly by women. A society that wants to age well should promote the non-monetary values of volunteering and relationships. Consumerism is not a good training for later life. Helping people to participate and contribute, to remain active and independent for as long as possible, is…
(15 Jan 2010)
