Media Capitalism: Hegemony in the Age of Mass Deception 9783030879587, 3030879585

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Media Capitalism Hegemony in the Age of Mass Deception Thomas Klikauer

Media Capitalism

Thomas Klikauer

Media Capitalism Hegemony in the Age of Mass Deception

Thomas Klikauer School of Business Western Sydney University Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-87957-0    ISBN 978-3-030-87958-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate with that spectrum —Orphan, K. (2018). The Power of Language in the Anthropocene. CounterPunch, September 20. Retrieved 25 September 2018 the pen is mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen —Monbiot, G. (2016, August 12–18). The Climate Crisis is Already Here. Guardian Weekly, 195(10), 48

This book is written in Memory and Honour of Orson Welles 6 May 1915–10 October 1985 Playing Charles Foster Kane in the movie Citizen Kane

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the proofreading and editorial assistance and support of, firstly, my adored wife, Katja, and my good friend Ralf Itzwerth without whom this book—written and re-written three times between 2009 and 2020—would not have been possible. The second, but nonetheless equal, big Thank You for valuable critique goes to Stephen Ackroyd, Henry Grioux, Harry Kunneman, Richard Hyman and Noam Chomsky. A Thank You also goes to the Western Sydney University’s School of Business because my workload granted three hours per week for writing this book. This book received no internal or external support or funding, no institutional or editorial assistance. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the assistance of WSU’s Library and Document Delivery Service. A substantial Thank You goes to those colleagues who shielded me from the worst excesses of Managerialism, the elements of which have been outlined so truthfully by Don Watson who writes, James and J.S. Mill wrote books that changed the course of history while working for the East Indian Company, a multinational. Today they wouldn’t. Today they would be attending countless meetings, seminars and conferences to update their knowledge of work-related subjects, all of them conducted in the mind-maiming language of Managerialism.1

Furnished with time to engage in scholarship, this book is not about empirical presentations. It is about abstraction, the abstractions of media

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

and capitalism. Just as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead once said, ‘you cannot think without abstractions’.2 Hence, this book is written for people who can think in abstractions.

Notes 1. Watson, D. 2003. Death Sentence – The Decay of Public Language. Sydney: Knopf (p. 29). 2. Gehl, R. W. 2014. Reverse engineering social media. Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, p. 90.

Contents

1 Introducing Media Capitalism  1 2 The History: Of Media Capitalism 61 3 Media Capitalism and the Public Sphere125 4 Media Capitalism and Schools171 5 Media Capitalism and Universities213 6 The Society of Media Capitalism259 7 Human Behaviour in Media Capitalism303 8 Media Capitalism and the World of Work351 9 Democracy Under Media Capitalism405 10 Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Media Capitalism457 Index501

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10

Fig. 2.11 Fig. 2.12 Fig. 2.13

Taming the threat of democracy 31 From Animal Kingdom to Media Capitalism. (It marks the rise of ‘homo spectator’ (Gray, J. 2012. Neoliberalism, Celebrity, and Aspirational Content, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 92)) 62 The History of Value-Support and Economic Changes 68 The ruptured period 71 The development of rationality 73 Four alienations 77 From social to ideological consciousness 78 The development of media capitalism’s new consciousness 82 The concave → convex → concave development 83 Shifting classes 85 The rise and decline of the state. (‘In modern industrial society, the separation of the worker from the means of production has become a technical necessity requiring the individual and private direction and control of the means of production, that is, the autonomy of the personally responsible entrepreneur in the enterprise’ (Marcuse, H. 1968. Negations – Essays in Critical Theory, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 212))88 The history of commodities and values 89 From control to ideology 91 Two transformations. (CFR 2019. Propaganda, Imperialism, and the Council on Foreign Relations (https://www.youtube.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.14 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

com/watch?v=oFkdQuBz2Xg, 10th April 2019, accessed: 15th December 2019)) The PR-marketing split Feudalism and the rise of the liberal public sphere Ideological support from feudal courts to mass media Between liberal ideas and the mass-mediated public sphere From a pluralist public domain to a supportive domain Ideological support from base to target institutions Merging the private-public domain From news to commercial advertising Doubling up media capitalism’s ideology Public opinion and ideological support The ideology of objectivism Diminishing life choice and the rise of the choice ideology Child development and post-educational adults Corresponding ideological schooling to work’s ideologies. (aFour ways of inequality have emerged: distantiation [some go ahead, others fall behind]; exclusion; hierarchy, and exploitation [Therborn, G. 2009. The killing fields of inequality, Soundings, 42[42]: 21; bFleming, P. 2016. How managers came to rule the workplace, theguardian.com [21st Nov. 2016]) The development of the ideological university The ideological university of the twenty-first century The iron law of media capitalism The high and low division of ideological education The parallel development of expanding and shrinking vocabulary The history of academic and non-academic university staff The development of ideological crypto-academic subjects The asymmetry of cost in human and commodity markets The society-economy reversal The changing shape of ideological support From feudalist auxiliary affirmation to system affirmation The utilisation of ideological support Animal→to→human conditioning The behaviourist triple-trap of ideological support Social classes and the process of ideological support A historical-behaviourist model of capitalism Conditioning of situational framed response From control at work to managerial ideology The two forces that create a supportive employee

93 93 127 130 136 137 138 142 143 145 149 151 181 183

191 219 220 221 227 228 232 238 270 281 284 285 286 307 318 322 326 330 364 377

  List of Figures 

Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 9.7 Fig. 9.8 Fig. 9.9 Fig. 9.10 Fig. 9.11 Fig. 9.12 Fig. 9.13 Fig. 9.14 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5

The uninterrupted chain of private and supportive institutions Democracy’s history and leader selection From public sphere to media democracy Media capitalism and democracy Media capitalism’s preferred party system Political parties and media space Political parties, the media industry and the public sphere The party-message-conversion model of mediated democracy Voting mobilisation: media-vs.-organisations The McDonaldisation of voters The democratic idea and the reality of democracy From multi to 2+ party system The end of anti-capitalist parties Excluding democracy from productive and consumptive sphere The workings of media democracy Media capitalism’s process model The elimination of threats Structure-versus-Agency Society’s democratic and non-democratic areas The structure of ideal speech

xv 378 407 410 411 415 416 425 426 427 429 430 431 433 436 437 458 462 470 474 483

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 1.3 Table 1.4 Table 2.1 Table 4.1 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.2 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 10.5

Examples of ideologies supporting media capitalism 8 Two transformations and media capitalism’s rise 17 Media capitalism’s two transitions 20 The public sphere’s short history 22 Four areas of media capitalism 67 Changing costs of education 196 Rule makers and rule abiders 226 The good versus the managerial academic 231 Building ideological bridges 242 The airline metaphor and health cover 267 From individual communication to ideological communication277 The organisation of ideological mass affirmation 283 From religious ideology to the ideology of media capitalism 302 The most inhuman pre-supportive work regime 357 Science, military and management 358 Eight communicative elements of technical domination 361 Framing wealth, poverty, class and unions 369 Establishing corporate identities 371 Media capitalism versus people media 477 Three conditions for ideal speech 480 Three forms of arguments 481 Sentence formulation for discourses 481 Four theories of truth 482

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CHAPTER 1

Introducing Media Capitalism

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organise and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them. —Albert Einstein (Quoted in: Cirino, R. 1971. Don’t Blame The People, New York: Vintage Books, p. 189 and in Einstein’s letter to Sigmund Freud (Caputh near Potsdam, 30 July, 1932) download: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-­dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_ id=3864; accessed 1st June 2017)

In attempting to avoid the tree-forest imbalance—‘the more trees I identified, the less forest I saw’—this book is about the thick forest of media and capitalism,1 indisputably a sizeable subject for a small book. A few years ago, ‘the concentrated symbolic power of media institutions’2 was valued at $2.2  trillion dollars.3 Size matters here and today’s media reach far beyond George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.4 In his masterpiece— that begins with, ‘it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ and closes, ‘it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother’5—Orwell describes a dystopian, people manipulating society and the horror this society inflicts on people. The story was based on Orwell’s experience of Fascism—fascia di combattimento—and Stalinism.6 However, things have changed and today’s societies show no comparable signs of the Orwellian, Zamyatian or Huxleyan nightmares.7 Virtually nobody is controlled by torturers, fascist leaders, Orwell’s Big Brother or panoptical states8 in which the KGB, Stasi, Gestapo, MI5, MI6, NSA, FBI, CIA or Pinochet’s DINA are constantly on the watch.9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_1

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Today’s secret services operate largely on society’s margins while the media-dominated society works almost untouched by them.10 In many respects, contemporary societies represent the very opposite of Big Brother. Instead, and without much hesitation, people comply with capitalism, largely encouraged by two forces: a modernised version of the Roman ‘bread and circus’ engineered through consumerism (marketing) as well as the manipulative powers of corporate media (public relations/ PR, spin, etc.).11 This book is largely about the latter with a particular focus on ‘the most powerful force today’: PR.12 In PR’s own words, ‘public relations serves a propaganda function [and hence has been described as] the latrine of parasitic misinformation’.13 Embedded in media capitalism, PR is known as ‘the purview of quacks and swindlers’ that is ‘pulling the wires which control the public mind’.14 It might best be summed up in the words of Albert Camus’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence: ‘promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can’.15 This is what spin doctors and spinmeisters do today.16

Media Capitalism and PR’s Spin Doctors As Orwellian-like forms of direct control diminished, “Media Power”17 has increased ever since the 1940s when a mass panic during the airing of ‘Invasion from Mars’ illustrated the media’s18 manipulative powers.19 People acted in panic because of the radio’s persuasive power. No control mechanisms were used, just a sophisticated programme. Today, ‘supporting and undermining’20 propaganda is constructed with the knowledge that ‘propaganda that looks and sounds like propaganda must fail [and] indoctrinability [must never be] apparent to the indoctrinated’.21 Over time, control has moved from punishing ‘body-control’ to manipulative ‘psycho-technologies’22 marking a body→to→mind move that focuses on:23 • creating a picture inside the mind, • psychology and behaviourism, • ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation’ of human perception, • conscious ideological warfare,24 and • propaganda (PR, spin, ‘word-merchants’25). Media capitalism ‘is manipulation, but manipulation with a noble higher goal in mind’: stabilising capitalism.26 In plain words, ‘PR [as] weak propaganda’ is ‘the ability to manipulate without the appearance of

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manipulation’.27 It often occurs as agitation versus integration propaganda. While the former leads to rejection, ‘mass media…makes integration propaganda possible [as it] leads men…to adjust themselves to designed patterns’.28 Today, these are the patterns of capitalism. Since capitalism has not disappeared—‘indeed it is more pervasive than ever’— capitalism’s ideological pervasiveness depends more than ever on marketing, PR, spin and propaganda.29 Originally taken from the Catholic Church’s Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide and in a seamless contingency—Kitchener→Creel→Poison Ivy→Bernays30—later applied to ‘psychological warfare’,31 modern propaganda became a key institution32 after it was reframed into PR: propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans…using it [in 1914–18]. So what I did was to try to find some other words…we found public relations.33

Propaganda (Oldspeak) and PR (Newspeak) ‘sprung up virtually unnoticed into an enormous shadow industry of persuasion’34 with its key motto:35 ‘the public be fooled’.36 Despite being euphemistically labelled ‘industry’, global PR firms like Dick Cheney’s ‘Hill and Knowlton’,37 which once helped stabilising a banana republic while also ‘peddling tobacco products’,38 operate rather differently. They manipulate people and, as in the Hill and Knowlton case, got them to smoke (and in many cases to die from it). More recently, worker suicides at Apple-Foxconn were camouflaged by PR firm ‘Bruston-Marteller’.39 In short, PR firms do not operate as any other industry. They ‘do not manufacture nuts and bolts—they manufacture a social and political world’.40 As ‘manipulation became more powerful than reality’,41 ‘The Age of Manipulation’42 is run by ‘professional poisoners of the public mind’.43 Ideology and ‘the profit motive, commercialisation, public relations, marketing, and advertising [are] all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism’.44 Today, capitalism depends on these features with an estimated 150,000 theorists, writers, spokespeople, scientists, freelance writers, former journalists, and assorted organisers who spend at least ten billion dollars a year to keep us compliant with their clients’ wishes. PR isn’t about selling products; in fact, the best PR does not look like advertising at all.45

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Whilst this book is about media capitalism, it primarily looks at ‘cosmetic PR and cover-ups’, the ‘PR-ization of media’ and the things that make good advertising and PR: ‘one, a good simple idea, two, repetition’.46 It is also about the fact that ‘PR is the blood brother of advertising’, and that it ‘is simply propaganda in a dinner jacket’.47 Quite apart from ‘managing rumours [and] attention-grabbing tactics’,48 creating ‘pseudo-facts’,49 ‘staging pseudo-events’,50 ‘concealing facts, [while nurturing] cynicism and distrust’, PR supports media capitalism by ‘imposing business interests on public policy’.51 PR—the ‘little brother of the rich, the Minnesinger to Millionaires, the paid liars’, the ‘media heads…and other assorted hirelings’52 and Poison Ivy53 [who mastered] ‘the art of selling industry to the people’54—often comes in three forms: 1. image PR: putting a company and capitalism in a good and positive light; 2. ad hoc PR: achieving specific and instantaneous PR goals; and 3. crisis PR: protecting a company and capitalism from negative images.55 PR-Godfather ‘Poison Ivy’ and his PR work for Rockefeller after the Ludlow massacre in 1914 is still a good example of crisis PR as it gave Rockefeller a good name after his henchmen killed about two dozen people, including miners’ wives and children.56 As recent as 2017, one of PR’s own said, ‘lying [remains] a key part of [the PR] job’, [we have] been telling lies on behalf of…businessmen…for 40 years.57 Crisis PR lies, ‘shields a company’s identity’ and protects corporations (e.g. ‘Nestle, the baby killer company’58 and ‘Du Pont as Merchants of Death’59) against what PR calls ‘brand terrorists, [targeting] one of the weapons in their arsenal, [e.g.] anti-corporate websites’.60 When crisis PR is not: • covering up problems; • minimising the reporting of bad news; • making a problem historic (a standard PR tactic to eliminate problems); or • pretending that things have since changed for the better; or • when problems are pushed away; or • when PR pretends that a review or inquiry is on the way. PR is always quick to pretend corporate outrage. This is followed by a ‘we will get to the bottom of this’ statement.61 Which typically means

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those at the bottom will be punished, while those at the top get a bonus or a golden parachute.62 Crisis PR also includes the ‘strategic use of information intended to undermine the morale of opponents’.63 Beyond that, one might see ‘propaganda or, in more common jargon, “spin” [as] the international manipulation of public opinion without regard for what is accurate or true.’64 While we are made to believe that ‘public opinion [is] simply out there’, PR is: constructing public opinion [so that] political elites do what they like and…we seem to go along with it.65

To hide the truth about PR’s promotional intent, we have even been made to believe that business ethics is not a contradiction in terms and that corporate social responsibility (CSR)—despite, for example, Enron’s 64-page CSR booklet66—assures us that business behaves ethically.67 Such oxymoronic mythologies are propagated by crypto-academics to ensure that ‘the best PR is actually not seen as PR’.68 In reality however, business ethics and CSR fall under PR’s self-announced motto of:69 act as though you care.

Corporate PR believes that ‘shame is for sissies’.70 PR ‘requires a certain moral flexibility’71 that does not interfere with PR immoralities like ‘bless me, father, for I have spinned’.72 Undeterred, PR and, for example, the military-industrial complex’s main killing machines move on.73 Even ‘Lockheed Martin has a toll-free ethics hotline’74 which is ‘1-800-LM-ETHIC (1-800-563-8442)’.75 With this and much more, media capitalism truly marks ‘the end of modern epistemology [as for today] there is nothing but spin’.76 What ‘once…was called fiction…now…it’s known as spin’.77 Under its self-invented ‘fairness doctrine’, PR and spin present themselves as being objective and balanced.78 In reality however, PR knows that ‘those who advertise get editorial coverage’.79 Today, the ‘media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you’80—works in many ways:81 • actively setting ‘frames of references that readers or viewers use to find interest and discuss’ reality,82 • the branding of commercial goods carried out by ‘brand evangelists’,83 • pleasing advertisers and crowds through ‘going downmarket…using scandals, violence, or sex to sell the news’84 while nurturing a ‘culture of cruelty’,85

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• ‘the act of making news’86 and planting newspaper stories, • ‘agenda setting’87 in the knowledge that while ‘the media may not be able to tell people how to think, they have a major role in influencing what they think about’,88 • use of ‘the weapons of influence’ to engineer a pro-business consent,89 • getting people to support pro-business ideas, • tailoring messages and polishing the truth, • creating fictional and fictitious characters like Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald,90 • writing laudatory puff pieces on great business leaders, • inventing technologies to manipulate and monitor public opinion, often mirrored back to us as evidence that when we go along we do the right thing, • infomercials, infotainment, factoid, advertorial, docudrama, militainment and so on,91 • swaying public opinion, creating and ossifying stereotypes and prejudice, • ‘blurring the edges of reality’,92 • ‘spun by greedy, unethical internet overlords’,93 it invents likeable, that is, ‘clickable’ websites as echo chambers94 and ‘word of mouse’,95 • GAFAM’s internet manipulations (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft),96 • firing up the ‘propaganda machine [of] online advertising’,97 • shaping trends: they almost never just happen but are often invented by PR, • using so-called opinion surveys that ‘basically manufacture news’,98 • using surveys as a scientific measure demonstrating PR’s effectiveness, • the ‘digital lynch mob’99 of ‘black propaganda’,100 for example, destroying a target’s reputation, • political PR that gets attention focused away from the real issue. All this is done in the conviction that ‘the manipulation of public opinion [is] necessary’.101 Historically, the truth→propaganda shift was assisted through the US ‘propaganda machine’102 when one of its prime engineers—Harold Lasswell—realised that ‘propaganda attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilisation that is cheaper than violence, bribery and other possible means’.103 Unlike gruesomely displayed body-controls (e.g. public punishment), media manipulation focuses on the ‘engineering

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of the mind, is selective [and] manages [our] collective attitudes [through] manipulation’.104 As a consequence, this book does not ‘fire volleys at an obsolete target’105—violence, brutality and the illusive surveillance state—but instead focuses on media capitalism and the use of PR that for the most part remains invisible to us. In fact, invisibility is just as essential as manipulation itself. Advancements in ideological manipulation have allowed a general reduction of global authoritarianism seen in a worldwide authoritarianism→democracy shift.106 This shift sees democracy as the only legitimate form to govern people.107 Historically, democracy has increasingly become seen as a ‘strategy for the production of influence [engineered by the] media elite’ over a population.108 This media elite was always part of Mills’ ‘Power Elite’ that ‘runs things [as] a controlling group’.109 Unlike TAMARA (there are many and realisitic alternatives), the elite’s hegemony operates as TINA: there is no alternative to capitalism and democracy. Both are designed ‘to erase political imagination’ beyond them.110 To assure limited imagination, PR involves ‘elite-based framing [rather than] mass-based framing [inside an asphyxiating] framing contest’.111 The ‘framing of the mind’ confines us, for example, to the static left↔right↔centre paradigm, thereby eliminating social progress.112 Mass approval, affirmation, compliance, consent and appreciation globally support capitalism.113 Today, what matters is our willingness to participate in education,114 shopping, going to work and vote diligently for what is presented to us. All of this is greatly supported by corporate media constantly and consistently telling us about the good life we all enjoy. As a consequence, ‘influencing public thought’ extends deep into all areas of our life. This is ideologically camouflaged through the hallucination of a democratic marketplace of ideas.115

The Ideology of Media Capitalism On the much trumpeted notion that ‘the marketplace-of-ideas-equalsdemocracy’ advocate Leo Strauss once noted, ‘one of the most important virtues required for the smooth working of democracy, as far as the mass is concerned, is said to be electoral apathy…lack of public spirit’.116 Not surprisingly, corporate media create voter apathy, as many are made disinterested and apolitical, whilst millions of people have stopped voting altogether.117 More importantly, we support the ‘marketplace of commerce’ based on a few basic ideologies:118

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Table 1.1  Examples of ideologies supporting media capitalism Examples of common ideologies we are all in one boat hard work pays off invest in your own future competition serves all wealth equals happiness globalisation benefits all you are on your own markets serve everyone

do as told and you will get on in life market and capitalism are inherently good125 competition brings the best product to the top there is no such thing as society we are all middle class now, and finally may the best man win it is ‘survival of the fittest’ you can make it126

Table 1.1 shows some—by no means all—ideologies that support media capitalism, often framed as the only game in town.119 Media capitalism’s ideology instils itself in the ‘hearts and minds’ of individuals.120 It is the global ‘mind-making’ industry’s task to produce ever-more sophisticated ideology capable of making us support capitalism.121 There are many definitions of ideology ever since Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) invented the term. On the whole, ideology fulfils three key functions: it camouflages contradictions, cements domination and annihilates emancipation.122 Ideologies engineer compliance so that the victims of ideological socialisation do not rebel but instead support capitalism.123 Beyond that, the purpose of ideology is twofold:124 1. People are made to adhere to a common set of ideas directed towards conformity and achieved through simple thought processes, ‘oversimplification’ (e.g. personalities are more compelling than institutions), KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) and so on. 2. Ideologies cloak capitalism’s contradictions and its pathological and alienating realities. On the whole, ideologies are post-religious and signify ‘the rationality principle’.127 They have superseded superstitions by turning them into ideologies. Ideologies are belief systems that, as an example, can make people affirm to petit-bourgeois possessions, insignificant middle-class affluence,128 simple economic existence, democratic voting and the authoritarian Managerialism of the workplace.129 Next to consumerism, democracy and work, the fourth area over which corporate media has a tremendous influence is the private sphere.130 Upon leaving the parental house’s private sphere, young children encounter kindergarten and school.131 Both have increasingly become semi-corporatised, mirroring business corporations under the ideology that ‘business is leading the way’.132 Corporate

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media publish textbooks as well as school-, college- and university-league tables ‘for us’(!). We are made to believe that they help us—as educational consumers—making the right choices.133 Almost all knowledge and, more importantly, sentiments on how we see ourselves, education, society, co-workers, neighbours, political parties and so on are shaped in media capitalism’s most elementary area: the corporate media sphere. This sphere has a double function: it is the marketplace where commercial goods (a) and ideologies (b) are exchanged.134 When consumerism and ideology merge, media capitalism flourishes. Media capitalism’s structure replaces earlier forms of ‘pre-media capitalism’135 known as ‘culture industry’ (Adorno & Horkheimer),136 ‘consciousness industry’ (Enzensberger), ‘dependency road’ (Smythe), ‘Culture Inc.’ (Schiller), ‘propaganda’ (Herman & Chomsky, Sussman)137 and so on, all of which mutated into media capitalism.138 Media capitalism (MC) combines three ingredients: consumerism (C), media (M) and ideology (I), thereby creating:

MC = MCI 2 .

The superscript ‘2’ indicates turbo-capitalism’s acceleration—an ever faster moving capitalism without signs of social progress.139 In fact, media capitalism has largely eliminated social progress: ‘the contested reign of capital [is] no more’140—revolt and revolutions have ended. Beyond that, media capitalism depends on: 1. turning human beings into hyper-consumers—purchasing goods they actually do not need (e.g. marketing);141 2. conditioning individuals so that human resource management’s conversion of human beings into human resources runs smoothly;142 and 3. the production of ever-more sophisticated forms of ideologies (PR/spin).143 Infiltrating media capitalism’s four relevant spheres (education, consumerism, managerial regimes and democracy) and linking them to the overall ideology of capitalism creates an understanding of what media capitalism is about without ‘merely blaming the media’.144 Despite several significant changes, media capitalism also has several contingencies. Originally, Marx foresaw capital’s imperialism (now framed as globalisation) as well as its oligopolistic, if not monopolistic tendencies.145 But his nineteenth-century perspective disallowed him to also foretell twentieth

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century’s consumerism and twenty-first century’s media capitalism. Nonetheless, early capitalism, consumer capitalism and today’s media capitalism all share capitalism’s key features of profits and commodities as outlined in Karl Marx’s ‘Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie’.146 Adam Smith’s earlier hallucinogenic invisible hand and his version of capitalism fancied the idea of ‘a commonwealth’147 (the wealth of a common person). But today’s media capitalism has moved this even more towards what Thomas Jefferson (15 April 1809) called ‘the selfish spirit of commerce, which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain’.148 Today, much of this is euphemistically framed as ‘The Profit Ethic’.149 Under media capitalism, what counts is the profit motive which is raised to the all-guiding principle.150 Profits—framed as shareholder value—are ideologically justified through academics who are often employed in business schools rather than in philosophy or economics departments. In many universities, economics, philosophy and sociology have made way for business schools, communication studies and marketing.151 These legitimise ‘The Real Bottom Line’ as today’s global leitmotif.152 Today, capitalism can no longer sustain ‘the triumph of consumerism’ without compliant academics (ideology-creator) and corporate media (ideology-broadcaster).153 Hence, corporate media are deeply incorporated into capitalism’s system, functioning in a double dependency (capitalism↔media) and being camouflaged by ideology that sustains the entire structure. Broadcasting ideology has become highly relevant for the exchange of commercial goods, thus rendering capitalism ever-more dependent on the now increasingly commercialised ex-public sphere.154 As a consequence, capitalism had to establish quasi-ownership of the public sphere, securing its almost exclusive use. Media capitalism no longer grants access to just anyone to this all-important sphere. Instead, it colonises commerce-free spheres, turning these into commercial-ideological entities and giving the PR-man—the ‘cynical manipulator of public consciousness’—a free hand.155 This has become media capitalism’s most relevant cornerstone, establishing its functional imperatives through consumerism and ideology and its own transmission belt.156 Historically, this occurred in a five-stage process: . the hand-mill: signified medieval feudalism, 1 2. steam engines: signified eighteenth-century early capitalism, 3. craft workshops: signified nineteenth-century manufacturing capitalism,

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. Fordism: signified twentieth-century consumer capitalism, and 4 5. corporate media: signifies twenty-first century media capitalism. To reach media capitalism, the formerly known ‘public’ sphere had to be converted into a new sphere as it took on a special role connecting people to capitalism like never before while becoming governed by media corporations.157 Today, many ‘individual↔society’ conducts run through this sphere (press, radio, TV, phones, iPhones, iPads, tablets, Facetime and Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Zoom, www.ashleymadison.com,158 etc.). After the ‘graphic revolution [that established] the preference of the image to the actual reality’,159 our images of work, consumption, democracy and the media itself come almost exclusively from corporate media.160 This is assured through the relentless broadcasting of media capitalism’s ideologies.161 Today’s ‘opinion moulders’162 shape our perceptions of media capitalism’s four domains (education, consumerism, work, democracy). Media capitalism’s PR is aware that ‘consumers act on their perceptions’.163 These, rather than people themselves, increasingly shape our political attitudes, beliefs and feelings as corporate media fills us with urban myths, alternative truths and half-truths through PR, paid lying,164 doubtful claims165 and much more.166 As civic citizens are largely excluded from the public sphere, much of corporate media’s power to manipulate is camouflaged through the ideology of free speech.167 What marks media capitalism’s true ideological triumph is their ability for:168 selling us free speech while virtually owning it.

Media capitalism’s ideological triumphs have a long history, perhaps starting with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (fifteenth century) followed by the rise of newspapers169 (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and the granting of basic education (nineteenth century) that enabled the general public to read. After a few decades of a perhaps truly free public sphere during early Enlightenment, things were set to change: capital took over. With the twentieth century’s rise of consumerism, corporate media supported marketing and diversion (entertainment) and news reporting increasingly took the backseat. As a consequence, ‘business news [that today] is corporate propaganda’170 became ‘a paradise for PR’.171 On news-making, a recent survey found that ‘72% of [the news is] based solely on [PR’s] press releases’.172 Eventually, ‘gossip journalism’ and ‘the triumph of trivia’ merged with Brzezinski’s ‘tittytainment’ creating ‘the ignorant mass’.173

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Twentieth century’s consumerism and marketing also merged behaviourism and advertising,174 while an increasingly oligopolistic or even monopolistic media—immortalised in ‘Citizen Kane’175—took on the double task of ideologically sustaining capitalism whilst supporting consumerism.176 To secure this, corporate media constantly and consistently create a positive, convincing and supportive pro-capitalism atmosphere that ossifies its version of capitalism.177 Today, many corporations are aware that ‘it will work only when you have a monopoly’.178 Unsurprisingly, one monopolist, Procter & Gamble [noted], ‘we’re in programming first to assure a good environment for our advertising’.179 Such pro-business environment is secured through capitalism and corporate media sidelining Orwell’s all-controlling super state.180 Today’s media capitalism has achieved what George Orwell has described at the end of his novel, it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.

Today, we are made to affirm media capitalism’s values that guide education, consumerism, work and democracy. In education, we support private and to-be-privatised schools, accepting the ‘education-equals-money’ ideology.181 As ‘money-primed participants’, we even enhance the hallucination that ‘we are living in a money culture’ signified in school and university league tables.182 We accept behaviourism’s stimulus→reward structure183 with its brownie points, stars, marks, assessments, assignments, key learning objectives, marking scales, i-learning, internet degrees, performance management and much more.184 While its inventors may not wear ‘their ideological number-plates on their backs’,185 secret ‘social engineering [and] behavior modification’186 occurs behind our backs as ‘behaviourism continues to be influential’.187 Much of our behaviourism-based education fulfils the dictum that ‘the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instil convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any’.188 While diligently following what is demanded from us at school and work, we believe capitalism represents TINA: there is no alternative to Managerialism’s anti-democratic work regimes as we ‘do what is expected’ of us.189 We affirm to… • corporate mission statements: often telling us managerial fictions, • company policies: asphyxiating us while dictating our behaviour at work,

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• performance management: making us do things would not do, • employment contracts: camouflaging the company power asymmetry, • immediate supervisors: overseeing, watching, evaluating us, • corporate bosses:190 confirming an old idea: ‘the leadership’.191

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we otherwise versus worker judging

and

crowd craves

We even believe in crypto-pathological corporate social responsibility ideologies192 and affirm to an ‘other-organised’ semi-democratic process inside which we diligently ‘vote for the lesser of two evils’,193 whilst we are made to believe that a choice between ‘Coke or Pepsi, Burger King or McDonalds, Republican or Democrat’,194 party A or B makes a real difference.195 This is framed—and accepted—as our democratic choice. The much flaunted free choice ideology often means being free of any choice and, in some cases, being also ‘free of health care, pensions, secure jobs, security in every sense’.196 Media capitalism’s ideology has secretly but successfully reduced life choices to almost zero while compensating us with inconsequential consumer choices.197 We, as homo consumens,198 accept that virtually nothing is ours, nothing is shaped by us and nothing is for us.199 Paraphrasing the aforementioned George Orwell: we have made peace with media capitalism the struggle is finished we have won the victory over ourselves.

We do all this willingly as there is no force, no coercion, no cruelty or duress.200 Media capitalism has comprehensively created ‘the solicitation of its victims’ at a global scale.201 We happily participate and are victims of non-self-directed decision making. We have sold our self-determination in favour of a media guided petit-bourgeois existence.202 Above that, twentyfirst century corporate media are engineering the motivated ‘self-­ salesmanship of individuals’.203 Instead of mere rule compliance, we actively engage and support the rules that rule us while believing in the ‘golden rule’ without ever realising that those who have the gold make the rules. Today, these rules are created in the absence of self-legislation.204 For many things we no longer even need rules as we have internalised capitalism’s imperatives.

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Today, we attend shopping centres the way we used to attend church.205 Instead of actively responding with ‘Amen—so be it’ as the ultimate religious affirmation, we constantly and consistently listen to highly manipulative talkback radio, watch commercial TV and access marketing-driven websites.206 We purchase things as the ultimate active support to media capitalism.207 As we do so willingly, media capitalism operates almost without any sanctioning or domestication powers.208 In contrast to religious churches, there no longer are confessions to be made, prayers to be spoken, absolution to be granted or withdrawn, no inquisition, no punishment, no shaming, no remorse is demanded and no guilt needs to infiltrate our minds. Instead, media capitalism’s ideology-marketing combination directs us towards positive mass support, while media capitalism provides the ideological glue that sustains the entire construct.209 The global media apparatus merges ‘objectivity, values, and ideology’.210 If anything, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, blogs, Twitter and so on, have made things worse, plastering us with rumours, ideological messages, stunts, staged photos, faked or half-truths, ‘entertainment PR presented as news’,211 and irrationalities camouflaged as reality.212 They decide what we see, what we hear, what we believe in, what attitudes we have, how we see society, politicians and capitalism. Much of this targets our emotions213 under one of PR’s key assumptions: the ‘masses are incapable of both reflection and reasoning’.214 Emotional targeting tells us: • of strangers at a playground—James Bulger;215 • that the poor deserve to be poor;216 • ‘all businessmen are good…all wars are humane…the status quo is wonderful’;217 • who is famous (inventing ‘fictitious personalities’218) and who is not; • what art is and what it is not; it defines culture, creates culture and destroys it; • what food looks like before we eat it;219 • which toothpaste we use; and which political attitudes we hold; • TINA: there is no alternative to capitalism; • that ‘the corporation as a responsible citizen [is] a force for good’.220 Corporate media is responsible for all this and more by providing an ideology that guides people in making sense and making choices.221 Meanwhile, the media tells us that it is only assisting us in making choices and we—the consumers and voters—can choose whatever we fancy, that

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we have real choices like never before.222 Media capitalism’s ideological triumph is that: immovably, we insist on the very ideology that enslaves us.223

Media capitalism’s steering of society differs fundamentally from all previous forms of societal control—whether in feudalism, early liberal capitalism or consumer capitalism. Churches have not simply been replaced by shopping centres, and feudal soil has not just been traded in for a computer and a desk. Media ideology has not replaced religion—both are complementary, not contradictory. The fundamental difference between feudalism’s ‘we’ and modernity’s ‘I’ is that the latter is fully integrated, thus reaching far beyond Mead’s ‘Mind, Self, and Society’.224 In fact, feudalism had no need for mass media. By contrast, today’s corporate media have become indispensible to capitalism. Capitalism’s power, scientific approach and ‘system integration’ is far superior to that of feudal churches.225 Media capitalism’s sole target—the public—is much more integrated into the economic reality than ever before.226 Unlike previous systems of mass influence, today’s corporate media rely on scientifically proven psychological neuro-marketing techniques, reaching ever-more deeper into our minds.227 Such a level of ideological integration with a developed scientific-manipulative apparatus became only feasible for two reasons:228 . Media capitalism needs corporate media as an ideology transmitter. 1 2. Manipulative marketing creates a consumer-product link that sustains capitalism.229 Without mass consumption and the camouflaging of capitalism’s global pathologies,230 media capitalism would collapse tomorrow. Corporate media have become capitalism’s structural imperative—without them, capitalism is impossible. Media capitalism is the new normal.231 For media capitalism to emerge, several preconditions had to be in place: 1. the feudalism→capitalism transition needed to be completed; 2. mass production had to lead to the rise of mass consumption; 3. the public sphere’s first transition leading to commercialised media; 4. the corporatisation and concentration of the media;232 5. the development of scientific behaviourism and neuro-marketing; 6. the public sphere’s second transition that merged ideology+media; and 7. the emergence of the ‘media↔corporate↔politics’ interest symbiosis.233

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Starting with modernity, printed pamphlets and newsletters—reporting what is ‘new(s)’—eventually mutated into a global corporate media empire.234 Small media outlets evolved into fully fledged industries capable of ‘perception management’ (PR-talk) that became increasingly supportive of capitalism.235 Capitalism’s structural demand for advertisements created its own industry. To achieve this, it underwent two historical transitions.236

Two Transitions Towards Media Capitalism To arrive at media capitalism, the public sphere and its media had to change twice. The first transition signifies what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas termed ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’.237 Habermas argued that seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Enlightenment could develop because of a public sphere in which society exchanged ideas relatively freely.238 Through this, capitalism and modern societies developed.239 It allowed capitalism’s early growth as a platform for the exchange of information, science and social advancements, leading to universal suffrage, technological inventions and scientific discoveries. This early public sphere was never in stagnation. After its initial rise, it soon underwent Habermas’ first transformation in which the previously public sphere was transformed from an open marketplace of free exchanges of ideas into a sphere with the predominant function of exchanging commercial goods. The increasing demand to exchange commercial goods converted the once free sphere into a commercial exchange sphere, while early media began to ‘engineer…news’.240 News became commodities just like any other commodity.241 From this development, early media markets evolved. Within this rests the development of the second transformation that altered the media fundamentally. Previously, the media had been composed of smaller media companies. The second transformation established a new media landscape that became increasingly shaped by global media oligarchies242 (e.g. ‘AOL/Time-Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News.Corp, and Vivendi’).243 While traditional media companies had— and (some) still have—country-specific homes and features, transnational media corporations no longer have such specific home features. Murdoch’s News.Corp is no longer Australian.244 The true signifier of these two transformations may not even be the media apparatus itself. Instead, these two transformations rest on the ‘society↔media↔capitalism’ interface

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with a functional change of the media towards becoming more ideological, if not more hegemonic. Table  1.2 shows these historical contingencies: Table 1.2 is a brief overview that shows the original public sphere as it moves feudalist societies towards modernity. The first transformation turned the public sphere into a commercial entity. News became a commodity (Table  1.2shaded). The second transformation concentrated the media, turning them into global oligopolies with virtually no ‘heavy American accent’ left.245 Meanwhile, the media’s function changed towards a double-­ combination as sales and ideology merged, thereby engineering mass support for capitalism. Many media observers have noticed this as media corporations and other stakeholders (e.g. PR, marketing, lobbying, manufacturing corporations, states, etc.) became ever closer ‘entwined’ and indeed ‘intertwined’.246 They are based on the ‘interdependence’247 in a ‘mutually healthy relationship’.248 Eventually, this created what might be termed an interest symbiosis.249 This symbiosis lies at the core of media capitalism. Capitalism depends on this symbiosis. To reach it, however, vital steps had to be taken. After society’s mass-commercialisation had been successfully completed during the later part of the twentieth century, consumerism and marketing became well established.250 In addition to marketing, the media carried on in entertainment. Simultaneously, it smothered the free exchange under PR’s conviction that:251 ‘the public can be fooled’.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the established apparatus of consumerism worked so well that corporate media began to shift their Table 1.2  Two transformations and media capitalism’s rise Prior to first transformation First transformation Between first and second transformation Second transformation Post-second transformation

Public sphere

Establishes Enlightenment, opens discussion, advances science From exchange of ideas To marketplace of saleable news and support for consumerism Commercial sphere Supports consumerism and sells news as commodities From saleable news To ideologically shaping society and consumerism Ideological-commercial Mass guidance of society sphere (media+capital merge→media capitalism)

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energies away from simple consumerism and entertainment. They began to move towards creating a pro-business atmosphere (PR), assisting direct marketing (advertisement252) while also engineering ideological mass support for its new version of capitalism: media capitalism that shifted from marketing to PR. Capitalism’s economic focus between the first and second transformation rested on consumerism.253 Media corporations started to colonise the lifeworld so that capitalism’s market imperatives could infiltrate previous non-market guided areas (education, democracy, etc.). Simple consumerism slowly mutated into media capitalism, while serving consumerism and entertainment that provided unsophisticated escapism began to take a backseat. Consumerism was working sufficiently and had been successfully installed and deeply anchored into people’s minds.254 Meanwhile the lifeworld’s commercialisation reached almost completion—signified as the ‘Privatization of Everything’.255 With all that secured, corporate media metamorphosed into a sophisticated ideologically oriented industry.256 Apart from entertainment, capitalism moved from: Marketing (directly advertising products) ↓ Public Relations (creating a pro-business atmosphere for product sales and capitalism’s system support).

Media corporations began redirecting attention away from their previous triple-task of lifeworld colonisation, commercialisation and entertaining. These energies were increasingly reformulated in a move from sales pitch to propaganda in order to redirect these energies towards sustaining capitalism. Leaving the simplicities of selling, naïve escapism and stupefying entertainment behind, media capitalism’s PR began to play ‘a far more important opinion making role than the public perceives’.257 With its new tasks, media capitalism no longer saw—and sees—consumerism as its main battleground. Buynothingday.co.uk, for example, is not even a microscopic challenge. Media capitalism has moved towards the ideological shaping of human behaviour and actions.

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Once the lifeworld is under the ideological control of media capitalism, it will shape virtually every eventuality of human life.258 It represents nothing less than a complete assault on all aspects of life. Needless to say, media capitalism’s ideological colonising project did not remain unnoticed. Media elites learned from marketing that marketing methods can also be applied to ideological propaganda and PR. Explaining the second transformation to perfection, the media elite noted:259 ‘as a commercial investment the newspaper is yielding good returns for investment. But as a political weapon it is worth to self-seeking corporations hundreds of dollars of undercover influence where it is worth dollars in direct returns’

Others have noticed the change. The former US Vice-President Al Gore, for example, diagnosed the media’s increasing powers after the second transformation as ‘An Assault on Reason’, setting up ‘a new structural logic’—the logic of media capitalism.260 Today, this has become an ideological project leading to what has recently been termed ‘post-truth’.261 Post-Truth and fake news are signifiers of media capitalism albeit not media capitalism’s raison d’état.262 Both are merely expressions of media capitalism. A somewhat more detailed development towards media capitalism is shown in Table 1.3: Table 1.3 illustrates media capitalism’s emergence from a three-stage movement. Table 1.3left shows the chronology indicating a few new parameters. There are no specific dates just as capitalism itself has no official starting date.264 With the second transformation completed (Table 1.3bottom½ ), today’s media industry superseded simple commercial exchanges, focusing increasingly on supplying a stabilising hegemony. Media capitalism is acutely aware that ideologically conditioned customers accept and— over the past few decades—have learned to internalise its hegemony.265 Media capitalism was able to build on consumerism’s marketing and ideology foundations, no longer needing to constantly rehearse consumerism’s simple ideologies. Advancing from this, media capitalism is applying ever-­ more sophisticated psychological-behaviourist tools towards the ideological securing of capitalism.266 Put rather crudely, to understand consumerism (before the second transition), one needed to realise that it was not the advertising that interrupted ‘your’(!) TV-movie but the movie that interrupted the

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Table 1.3  Media capitalism’s two transitions Stages of capitalism

Seventeenth Early liberal to capitalism nineteenth centuries

Stages of media development

Media diversity and high number of small media outlets First Liberal Many transition capitalism→consumer small→few capitalism large media outlets Twentieth Consumer capitalism Centralisation century and multinational corporations Second Move towards media From transition capitalism multi- to transnational global media corporations Twenty-first Media capitalism Global media century corporations end of print media

Main function

Minor function

Transformation of Advertising of society: goods feudalism→modernity

Transition to consumerism support for Fordism

Ideology system stability

Support of consumerist and Fordist arrangements

Enlightenment and societal development

Ideological support for neoliberalism263

From marketing to PR (society)

Hegemonic ideology

Sustaining consumerism

TV-advertising.267 Again, after decades of conditioning, we have accepted interruptive TV-ads and internalised them while pretending never to watch them. Consumerism’s old dictum was ‘corporate ideology [is] built into entertainment and documentary programming that the audience believes is presented independent of the thirty-second commercials that happen to appear in the programme’.268 Built on consumerism’s original platform, today’s media capitalism represents a PR-driven hegemony. This finds expression in capitalism’s four common ideologies in the four different spheres:269 1. Education: you are free to choose your school/university—studying leads to success. 2. Work: you are free to choose you work/profession—hard work will be rewarded.

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3. Consumerism: you can buy whatever you want—consumer therapy makes you happy. 4. Democracy: you can vote for any party—you can shape politics. With these (and a few other) ideologies, media capitalism shapes human life by providing the glue that makes people support education, work regimes, consumerism, and democracy and—most importantly—media capitalism itself.270 More than any other form of capitalism (liberal, state, consumer, neoliberal, welfare capitalism, etc.), media capitalism placed corporate media in a unique position, locating it at capitalism’s centre.271 It led to a global consciousness industry272 targeting our consciousness, awareness, attitudes, feelings, sentiments, perceptions, behaviours, political ideas and actions—voting rather than revolting.273 It deceives, shapes, influences,274 manipulates, infiltrates and colonises.275 As the sole ‘individual↔society’ mediator, corporate media have become uniquely positioned ‘image-making [institutions for] business’.276 Today, it is media capitalism that explains to us what Aristotle’s polis and democracy were. It is no longer the great philosophers and our once treasured public intellectuals (e.g. Chomsky) who teach us about these things.277 Now media capitalism:278 shapes your world and the way you live in it.

More than ever before, capitalism depends on attitudes shared among the vast majority of the general public. This secures its existence while camouflaging at least two of its many pathologies:279 the steering power of corporate media and the realisation that ‘media power is political power’.280 It also conceals media capitalism’s interest symbiosis between its multiple corporations. The ‘closely intertwined’281 interest symbiosis occurs whenever ‘the majority of all major…media—newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, books, and movies [and now the internet—are] controlled by [a few] giant corporations [and when these] corporations are interlocking in a common financial [and/or ideological] interest with other massive industries and with a few dominant international banks’.282 Media capitalism’s interest symbiosis might also be called: the iron triangle of media capitalism.

By including democracy, a ‘corporations↔media↔democracy’ triangle has been created with the double task of maintaining consumerism (old) and ideologically sustaining media capitalism (new).283 Almost all companies inside the media’s oligopolistic orbit support these goals. Together, they create media capitalism’s institutional apparatus.284 One of their key

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tasks, for example, is to sideline market competition flanked by the constant ideological barrage of a ‘free market competition’. All the while media capitalism functions with a few oligopolies, if not monopolies, that define today’s global manufacturing, marketing, commercial (Nike, Exxon, GM) and media corporations (news.corp), having established market dominance over what was once known as the free public sphere.285 Media capitalism’s public sphere is an alienated and alienating public sphere with next to no escape door as ‘there is no outside of this system of alienation’.286 Media capitalism is defined by ideological and highly concentrated corporations condensing the ‘free-ideas’ marketplace to an ideological non-marketplace owned by a few media corporations. This marks media capitalism’s present phase. Historically, this process began a long time ago and the process can be shown in the following way: Table 1.4 specifies the ‘capitalism-public sphere’ relationship as an historical ‘feudalism-to-capitalism’ chronology.287 Modernity’s public sphere was set in motion at the end of feudalism.288 The feudal→capital transformation depended on a public sphere289 leading to marketing, entertainment290 and consumerism.291 The second transformation changed the media’s character towards its ideological functions: Stage 1: in the relatively open public sphere new science, new ideas, new politics flourished. Table 1.4  The public sphere’s short history Historical period

Defining underlying features

Institutional tasks

Public sphere

Pre-1789 Soil, rent, serfdom, Religious support Insignificant feudalism priests, peasants through church public sphere The great ‘feudal→capital’ transformation establishing the public sphere Eighteenth to early Liberal capitalism, Development of liberal Free and open twentieth centuries proletariat & bosses society public sphere First transformation of public sphere establishes consumerism and entertainment Second half of the Consumerism and Commercial (main) and Oligopoly and twentieth century corporate mass media ideological (minor) corporate access Second transformation: from consumerism to ideological support for media capitalism Twenty-first Media capitalism and Ideological support Ideological century global media industry (PR↑) commercial colonisation (marketing→)

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Stage 2: after the first transformation, commercial sale rose—news could be sold. Stage 3: after the second transformation, media combines saleability and ideology. At stage 1, news was broadcasted when it revealed something new; at stage 2 it was broadcasted when it increased audiences under the imperative: audience equals advertising that, in turn, equals revenue. News reporting was downgraded towards attracting saleable audiences. In the words of CNN-CEO Jeff Zucker, ‘it is bullshit but this bullshit is good for the ratings’.292 With the ‘prodigious flow of blood on the screen [and the] bang-bang stuff’293 came the new dictum of broadcastable news: when it bleeds—it leads when it thinks—it stinks!

News containing blood, murders, disasters, celebrities and ‘sellebrity’,294 business news (PR) and sports is deemed good because it leads to high viewing numbers resulting in saleable advertising and revenue.295 On the dumbing down side of the equation,296 news that demand thinking lead to lower viewer numbers resulting in less advertising revenue. The same is found in the dictum: ‘truth is whatever produces the most eyeballs’.297 After the second transformation, things started to become different. Today, news is no longer what sells. Media capitalism’s new formula merges sale and ideology, leading to the media equation of: news=saleability+ideology. This formula ranks news and excludes some, yet the assessment of news-worthiness reaches far beyond ‘planting newspaper stories’ (PR-talk). It uses four general rules: . If saleability and ideology go hand-in-hand, it is broadcasted. 1 2. If the saleability and ideology is problematic, controversial and critical but can be reframed298 and manipulated ideologically to support media capitalism, it’s manipulated (reframed) and broadcasted. 3. If either saleability or ideology are ‘non-manipulate-able’, the news item is discarded or printed on page 39 of a newspaper or shown on midnight TV. 4. If saleability and ideology are lacking, the news item is not even considered, having reached the limits to manipulate under the PR notion: ‘you can’t polish a turd’.

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In today’s commercial media featuring the demise of quality journalism, such rules render the flood of news items manageable while cementing the sale+ideology rule.299 As useful guides such rules are applied even though much of today’s news are no more than reformulated PR releases.300 One of the more crucial distinctions between the first and the second transformation is that corporate media and PR have realised that mass support almost automatically leads to sufficient levels of mass consumerism and to revenue increases for media and other corporations. This has led to a powerful interest symbiosis that is covering the key institutions of media capitalism.

Conspiracy Therapy and Interest Symbiosis Media capitalism’s steering power assures that it is no longer the best argument that wins in the free marketplace of ideas in which the power and money code rules with decisive powers.301 In corporate media ‘it’s just the standard currency: money—it vindicates all doubts’.302 The power to rule can now be sustained through money, power and ideology. In the media’s ‘power-to-shape-ideology’ game, those politicians with the most power (e.g. access to the public sphere) win, while media capitalism exclusively decides who is a winner (e.g. by providing access to its sphere and thereby to society). Access is given to those who provide what is of commercial-plus-­ ideological value for media capitalism. Free speech means not much more than the power of roughly 200 people around the world—the media elite—to define what is in their, and media capitalism’s, interest and what is not.303 They decide what reaches the mainstream. In fact, they ‘are’ the mainstream and they define what we believe is the mainstream. Yet they are not part of a conspiracy.304 Although media capitalism’s global apparatus includes a plenitude of institutions such as, for example: • WEF (World Economic Forum), WTO (World Trade Organization), IMF (International Monetary Fund), • TC (Trilateral Commission) and Mount Pelerin Society (www.montpelerin.org), the Conference Board,305 • The World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), GATT, UNCTAD, OECD, G8, G20, • WBA (World Business Association), the Heritage Foundation,

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• WCF (World Chambers Federation), ICC (International Chamber of Commerce), • WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) and so on. And even despite of the emergence of a ‘transnational capitalist class’— who reads their very own in-house magazine, The Economist306—there still is no hidden plot, no secretive agenda and no clandestine scheme of cigar-­ smoking backroom dealers.307 In order ‘to maintain the system that is so good to them’,308 their mutually assured interest sustains media capitalism by creating ideologies—and has the capability to deliver! The ‘ideologies are the product or function of the structure rather than of a group of conspirators’.309 However, the system does not operate in the open either. There is an ‘unseen mechanism’310 of a fourfold interest symbiosis that covers all four domains of society: 1. Education: there is an interest symbiosis between media capitalism and educational corporations that manufacture textbooks; run private schools, colleges and universities in order to create compliant adults (consumers); and trained human resources (workers). 2. Consumerism: there is an interest symbiosis between corporations producing and selling goods, those advertising and broadcasting their advertisements, and the overall ideology that underpins their continued existence. 3. Work: there is an interest symbiosis between media capitalism’s— and all other—corporations and companies in employing functional, uncritical, sympathetic and supportive human resources (newspeak) or workers (oldspeak). 4. Democracy: there is an interest symbiosis between media corporations, marketing companies, PR firms and politicians all needing access to the public sphere in return for favourable support for the ideology of deregulation and the factual pro-business re-regulation. Crucially, those running advertising companies, PR firms, and marketing and manufacturing corporations311 as well as ‘their’(!) politicians do not sit in smoke-filled backrooms cooking up evil plans. Each one of media capitalism’s stakeholders—implicitly more so than explicitly—understands the one thing that keeps media capitalism in power: ideological mass

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support.312 For that, the political domain is particularly helpful. It creates politicians acutely aware that ‘our national reality is television’313 and: if it’s not on TV—it does not exist!

Virtually everyone inside media capitalism’s global interest symbiosis understands the importance of an ideologically supportive, pro-business stance with accommodating attitudes to privatised education, Managerialism, consumerism, capitalism, the products corporations sell and the ‘right’(!) politicians to vote for. All players in this symbiosis understand their own interest as well as media capitalism’s ideologies that link everyone and everything.314 Yet the quintessential importance of establishing their steering capabilities may not rest in the four individual areas (schooling, work, consumption and democracy) alone. Media capitalism’s true power comes from bringing all these seemingly disconnected areas together and linking them under its unifying hegemony.315 Media capitalism’s key is its interconnectedness that provides the guiding influence over nearly all eventualities of human life. Understanding media capitalism means to understand the overall picture that connects what is made to appear disconnected and isolated. Once these parts have been linked and the overall glue (ideology) is understood, media capitalism’s overwhelming power becomes visible. Seemingly disconnected parts start to make sense. Hence, an inquiry into media capitalism is most fruitful when it follows Hegel’s (1770–1832) dictum, ‘the truth is in the whole’.316 The central position of media capitalism has therefore to be seen in its totality to understand that ‘mass media have a strong impact by conceptualising social reality’ that mirrors capitalism.317 What many see as ‘media-­ guided democracy’, for example, has to be linked to its economic base as well as to all relevant areas of life.318 Such comprehensive view shows how media capitalism operates while also allowing predictions on, for example: how media capitalism steers society, what its ideological tools are, and finally, in which direction media capitalism is heading. A sound understanding of media capitalism can render such a task achievable. This, more or less, determines the structure of this book.

The Structure of the Book As a matter of necessity, a book on media capitalism has to keep a general, maybe even a generalising approach (Chap. 1). Since media capitalism has a history, a chapter on history (Chap. 2) is also imperative and as this

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history is also the history of the public sphere, the latter’s role needs to be illuminated (Chap. 3). Once these necessities are established, the book discusses the four key areas of media capitalism: education (Chap. 4) and universities (Chap. 5), society (Chap. 6) and human behaviour (Chap. 7), work (Chap. 8) and finally democracy (Chap. 9). The book’s conclusion highlights elements of a possible emancipatory theory set against media capitalism. The following is an outline of the book’s structure: The Introductory Chapter: Introducing Media Capitalism and Ideology The book’s introduction provides a generic outline on media capitalism that reaches beyond the confinements of critical media studies and the political economy of the media. By combining both and reaching beyond them, capitalism is linked to the media like never before while at the same time highlighting their mutual dependency as they both can no longer exist independently. The media depends on capitalism as much as capitalism depends on the media. This moves the simple media-capitalism link towards the more intense media↔capitalism interface, enhanced by its interest symbiosis while positioning itself at the centre of capitalism. The introductory chapter also outlines key parameters of the book such as capitalism, consumerism, the public sphere, marketing, advertising, propaganda, public relations and spin. Media Capitalism’s History Since capitalism and modern media are roughly 200+ years old, Chap. 2 elucidates their history as well as the role people played in their development, from early tribes, slavery and feudalism to modern capitalism. The chapter focuses on capitalism’s role during the media’s two key transitions—the first transition which converted the public sphere into a commercial sphere and the second transition which converted the commercial sphere into an ideological sphere. This chapter discusses the economic trajectory of media capitalism from early liberal capitalism to welfare capitalism and consumerism and finally to media capitalism.

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The Public Sphere Chapter 3 examines the role of the public sphere from a media standpoint rather than capitalism’s standpoint. It discusses the two transitions that led to media capitalism and their implications for the four key domains of the public sphere, namely, education, work, consumerism and democracy. In particular, this chapter focuses on how the public sphere transitioned from a relatively free exchange sphere for ideas towards becoming a commercial sphere for the exchange of goods (marketing) and later, under media capitalism, a sphere that combines PR with ideology. The chapter shows media capitalism’s key vehicle as it developed into a global apparatus that steers society. Children and Schooling Since schooling is one of children’s key entry points into society, this chapter not only highlights childhood under media capitalism but also the impact media capitalism has on schooling and education. It illuminates how media are shaping our and our children’s understanding of schools and their part in it, for example, by broadcasting school rankings, league tables, exam results as well as corporate PR material framed as learning texts that are used in private and public schools alike. Corporate media also shape our view of what schools are and are not. Apart from direct marketing, media capitalism also uses parents as early access points into the minds of children and students. As media manipulation does not end with schools, it has set two core pathways: entering work or entering work via university. The role of universities is discussed in the next chapter. Universities Chapter 5 shows the transition of universities from nineteenth-century elite universities to twentieth-century mass universities and eventually to twenty-first century ideological universities. On the latter, it remains imperative to remember the words of British philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) who noted,319 it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians…are to think; the rest

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are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.

Universities remain highly relevant to media capitalism as they train its functionaries, administrators, managers, marketing psychologists, PR experts and spin doctors, CEOs, politicians, judges and so on. Furthermore, universities remain one of media capitalism’s main legitimising institutions, delivering functional knowledge as well as crypto-scientific ideologies—knowledge that is useful for media capitalism’s societal steering of society, useful to manipulate people and useful to camouflage capitalism’s pathologies so that ‘even well-educated audiences cannot necessarily detect propaganda or false information’.320 Virtually the same applies to ‘misinformation…and the disinformation of deliberately false information…with the intention to influence the political opinion of those who receive it’.321 Truth in academia is increasingly becoming a ‘truth [that] has come to belong to those who commission it [and as a consequence] it is getting harder to find an honest scientist’.322 Armed with that, many legitimising half-truths enter society. Society With this in mind, media capitalism’s wider impact on society is illuminated in Chap. 6. It shows how corporate media has converted individuals into formatted mass consumers (twentieth century) and carriers of ideology (twenty-first century). Increasingly, manipulative marketing psychology is applied to achieve the ideological sustaining of media capitalism. After the marketing→to→PR switch, PR’s manipulative powers and invented ideologies now link society to education, work, consumerism and democracy. One of the consequences of media capitalism’s ideological distortions, for example, is that ‘people [believe] that the proportions of the U.S. budget said that it comprised of

yet, in reality, the budget is:

45% foreign aid, 32% welfare, and 23% military spending;

1% foreign aid, 4% welfare, and 22% military spending’323

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In many ways such deliberately engineered false perceptions shape people’s attitudes and (voting) behaviours. This is shown in the next chapter. Human Behaviour How media capitalism’s global marketing/PR behemoth uses sophisticated psychological methods (e.g. neuromarketing) to create diligent consumers (willing to buy), diligent societal members (willing to believe) and diligent voters (willing to vote) is discussed in Chap. 7. Media capitalism’s key psychology is not Sigmund Freud’s self-reflective psychology but Pavlov and Skinner’s behaviourism. Behaviourism links a stimulus (Pavlov’s keys) to action (his dog’s saliva) and Skinner’s semi-starved rat in a box pushing a red light button to get food. It became capitalism’s ‘effort→reward’ system.324 Behaviourism believes in the seamless transfer of animal to human behaviour, establishing a mental link between the effort of an animal to use a push-button and a human pushing computer buttons for the respective reward: food-disposal for animals and money-­ disposal (wages) for people. This mental link—conditioning—follows humans in the form of chocolate for tidying up their bedroom (child), to brownie points (school), to graduation certificates (universities), to work (money). Work Chapter 8 shows how much of what has been discussed before stabilises managerial regimes where people spend 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week for 40+ years of their working life. The chapter starts with the transition from simple factory administration to management and to Managerialism. Unlike the brutality of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century factory administration, twentieth-century management increasingly relied on rewards, while twenty-first century’s Managerialism tops this up with TINA (there is no alternative to management). Meanwhile, media capitalism skilfully creates the ‘work-consumerism-capitalism’ connection. Simultaneously, Managerialism eliminates virtually all unwanted influences (e.g. trade unions, industrial democracy, etc.) as corporate media makes people believe they are living in a democracy. The successful elimination of democracy from the important work domain marks one of capitalism’s enduring ideological triumphs. But there is a lot more to say about democracy.

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Democracy While democracy has been eliminated from education, schools, universities, work, and consumption, people are continuously made to believe that they live in a democracy. Even in democracy’s own sphere, the democratic process is reduced to a media spectacle that is ritualistically performed by box-ticking.325 Historically, capitalism was forced to eliminate the potential danger of an untamed democracy as found, for example, in the people’s direct will. For lack of a better term, this might carry connotations to Rousseau’s volonté générale.326 People’s direct access to power through an uncontrolled volonté générale could have—at least potentially—been dangerous for capitalism as an impoverished rising working class might have rebelled against capitalism through voting.327 While more countries than ever are democratic today, implementing democracy came as a slow process and always with the introduction of a tamed version of democracy. In some cases, democracy was introduced as a long, drawn out step-by-step process with significant exclusions on age, gender, race, property-owning and so on. More importantly, its introduction was flanked by the rise of pro-capitalist propaganda that only became possible once a developed media apparatus, capable of engineering pro-­ business propaganda, pro-capitalist ideology and PR-spin emerged. With that, the following picture on the democracy-propaganda interplay emerges: Figure 1.1left shows democracy’s potential threat to capitalism at an historic point when democracy was not controlled via corporate media. Today, this threat has been eliminated, resulting in a widespread but tamed democracy (Fig. 1.1right). Figure 1.1middle shows the move from the untamed volonté générale to a tamed democracy with the rise of the media capable to secure democracy through ideological mass guidance. The rise of corporate media is indicated through an upward line. The crucial point for the introduction of democracy is the place where this line (----) meets the volonté générale threat of democracy

tamed democracy





  time 



----------------------------------------------

Fig. 1.1  Taming the threat of democracy

rise of the ideological power of the media to guide democracy (propaganda, spin, PR, etc.)

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ascending line ( / ) at Fig. 1.1centre. It marks the point where the media has developed sufficient ideological powers to tame and guide democracy. It is the point at which democracy can safely be introduced as democracy’s potential threat has been contained. Together with pacifying mass consumerism, it is the ‘tame democracy’328 that stabilises media capitalism’s entire system.

Conclusion: Fragments of a Theory The conclusion’s task is threefold: it outlines what we can learn from an investigation into media capitalism, its history, its functions, its ideologies and its infiltration of education, work, consumerism and democracy. The final chapter also provides a discussion of a possible emancipatory theory set against media capitalism by showing potentials for a move beyond media capitalism. It is constructed as an emancipatory project aligned to the Frankfurt School of critical theory and reaches beyond the rather pessimistic analysis of media capitalism’s awe-inspiring ideological power—a system that apparently has the capacity to asphyxiate everything and everyone in its path. Set against such a dystopia is the idea of emancipation.

Notes 1. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited: how the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 1. 2. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 8. 3. ‘In 2013, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that global spending for media and entertainment will reach $2.2. trillion in 2017’ (Mirrlees, T. 2016. Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, p. 55). 4. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 3. 5. Orwell, G. 1946. Politics and the English Language, http://orwell.ru. library/essays; Orwell, G. 1948. Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Secker & Warburg; Orwell (1949) & (1946); Chilton, P. 1988. Orwellian Language and the Media, London: Pluto Press; http://action.storyofstuff.org/sign/digital-­n anny/?t=4&referring_akid=6765.534660.-­ ldJkO; Rule, J.  B. 2011. The Whole World Is Watching—In an increasingly monitored world, how can consumers and citizens reclaim ownership of their private lives? (http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/22/the-­whole-­world-­is-­watching, accessed: 12 May 2017); http://

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thegreatestbooks.org/lists/45; Seymour-Smith, M. 1998. The 100 most influential books ever written: the history of thought from ancient times to today, Secaucus: Carol Pub. Group; Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. iv. 6. Eco, U. 1995. Ur-Fascism, New York Review of Books (22 June 1995); Paxton, R. O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 5; Reich, W. 1946. The Mass-Psychology of Fascism, New York (1970): Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. 7. Glover, J. 2012. Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century (2nd ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press; Perez, L. 2013. Life under Pinochet: “They were taking turns to electrocute us one after the other” (www.amnesty.org/en/news/life-­unfile://localhost/message/%253C4 [email protected]. AU%253Eder-­p inochet-­t hey-­w ere-­t aking-­t urns-­e lectrocute-­u s-­o ne-­ after-­other-­2013-­09-­11); http://thejusticecampaign.org/?page_id=273; McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 17. 8. Gitlin is correct: ‘the heart of modernity was not the Panopticon’ (Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 46). 9. With the possible exception of what Edward Snowden has revealed during the cause of the year 2013 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden; tacma.net; www.imdb.com/title/tt2084953). 10. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 13. 11. Powell, L. 1971. The Powell Memo (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/, accessed: 30 October 2017), p. 3. 12. Boorstin, D. J. 1992. The image, New York: Vintage Books, p. vii. 13. Grunig. J. E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 21. 14. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, pp.  20, 24; Bernays, E. 1928. Propaganda, London: Routledge, p. 9; Ross, I. 1959. The image of merchants, Garden City: Doubleday, p.  51ff.; Stanley, J. 2015. How propaganda works, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 15. Camus, A. 1956. The Fall, New York: Vintage books, p. 90. 16. Harrington, T. S. 2017. Big Media (https://www.counterpunch.org; 27 December 2017; accessed 17 January 2018). 17. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 4. 18. This book used the term “the media” to indicate what the majority of people perceive as “the media” which is more tabloid newspapers than quality newspapers and more tabloid-TV than quality TV. In the UK for example, it is the “Sun” newspaper rather than the “Times”, “The Guardian” and the “Observer” and it is “Sky News” rather than “BBC”. In the USA, it is “Fox News” rather than “CNN” and it is the “New York

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Post” rather than the “New York Times”. In Australia, it is the “Daily Telegraph” rather than the “Sydney Morning Herald” or “The Age” and it is “Channel 7, 9, and 10” rather than “ABC” and “SBS” (cf. Klikauer, T. 2020. The Hottest Day on Earth: the Politics of Australia’s Bushfires, Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org), 7th January 2020; Klikauer, T. 2020. Climate Manipulation and Murdoch’s PR Machine, Counterpunch (USA), 10 February 2020). 19. Gantril, H. 2005. The invasion from Mars: a study in the psychology of panic. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 20. Stanley, J. 2015. How propaganda works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 53. 21. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation. New York: H. Holt, p. 94; Grunig. J. E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 4. 22. Mausfeld, R. 2016. Die Angst der Machteliten vor dem Volk (downloaded on 10 March 2017 from http://www.uni-­kiel.de/psychologie/mausfeld/pubs/Mausfeld_Die_Angst_der_Machteliten_vor_dem_Volk.pdf), p.  4; Crogan, P. 2010. Knowledge, Care, and Trans-Individuation: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler, Cultural Politics, 6(2): 159; Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 47. 23. Rothenberg, R. 1996. The Age of Spin, Esquire (New York): 126(6): 73; Morris, T. & Goldsworthy, S. 2008. PR—a persuasive industry, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p.  9; Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New  York: Vintage Books, p. 25; Vanderwicken, P. 1995. Why the news is not the truth, Harvard Business Review (May-June 1995 issue: https://hbr. org/1995/05/why-­the-­news-­is-­not-­the-­truth); Guilday, P., 1921. The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (1622–1922), Catholic Historical Review, 6(4): 478–494; Miller, D. & Dinan, W. 2008. A century of spin: how public relations became the cutting edge of corporate power, London: Pluto Press (p. 1); Reitman, J. 2007. Thank you for smoking: the shooting script (screenplay and introduction by Jason Reitman; based on the novel by Christopher Buckley; foreword by Christopher Buckley), New York: Newmarket Press; see docu-drama “thank you for not smoking” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df32RijORLo); Michael J. Fox’ Spin City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115369/); Frontine’s “the merchants of cool” (2001: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/cool/) and “the persuaders” (­http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/). 24. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 92. 25. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 114. 26. Blyskal, J. & M. 1985. PR—how the public relations industry writes the news, New York: W. Morrow, p. 82; Ariely, D. 2008. Predictably irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions, New York: Harper.

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27. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. x (forward); Cialdini, R. B. 2007. Influence—the Psychology of Persuasion, New York: HarperCollings, p. 9; Morris, T. & Goldsworthy, S. 2008. PR—a persuasive industry, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Ross, I. 1959. The image of merchants; the fabulous world of public relations, Garden City: Doubleday. 28. Kellen, K. 1973. Introduction, in: Ellul, J. Propaganda, New  York: Vintage Books, p. i. 29. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 209. 30. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 103. 31. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 155; cf. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 17. 32. Guilday, P. 1921. The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (1622–1922), Catholic Historical Review, 6(4): 478–494; cf. Cutlip. S. M. 1995. PR History, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, preface p. xi. 33. Miller, D. & Dinan, W. 2008. A century of spin, London: Pluto Press, p.  5; Yaverbaum, E., Bly, B. & Benun, I. 2006. Public Relations for Dummies, Hoboken: Wiley Publishing. 34. Blyskal, J. & M. 1985. PR—how the public relations industry writes the news, New York: W. Morrow, p. 25. 35. Grunig. J. E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 29. 36. Reddi, C.  V. N. 2009. Effective Public Relations and Media Strategy, Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd., p. 32; cf. Raaz, O. & Wehmeier, S. 2011. Histories of public relations, Journal of Communication Management, 15(3): 256–275. 37. Ross, I. 1959. The image of merchants, Garden City: Doubleday, p. 97ff.; Dilenschneider, R L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p. 86; Danner, M. 2014. Cheney: The More Ruthless the Better, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/05/08/ruthless-­dick-­cheney/). 38. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, pp. 27, 156, 177. 39. Dinan, W. 2017. Why PR agencies and their spin should be the subject of greater scrutiny, The Conversation, 27 Oct. 2017 (https://theconversation.com, accessed 4th December 2017), 3 pages. 40. Bagdikian, B. H. 2004. The new media monopoly, Boston: Beacon Press, p.  9; cf. Grunig. J.  E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 142. 41. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 425. 42. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt. 43. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 63.

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44. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 13. 45. Siano, B. 1999. Blue Smoke, Mirrors, and Designer Science, Skeptic, 7(1): 1–10 (internet download, 15 March 2017 from: http://www.briansiano.com/2015/04/04/science-­and-­public-­r elations-­skeptic-­v-­7-­ no-­1-­1999/, p. 1. 46. Duffy, M.E. 2000. There’s no two-way symmetric about it: A postmodern examination of public relations textbooks, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3): 298; cf. Macnamara, J. 2014. Journalism–PR relations revisited, Public Relations Review, 40(5): 742; Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 268. 47. Packard, V. 1957. The hidden persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. [2007 edition by IG publishing, Brooklyn], p. 11; Blyskal, J. & M. 1985. PR—how the public relations industry writes the news, New  York: W.  Morrow, p.  67; Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 70; Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. xii. 48. Dilenschneider, R.  L. 2010. AMA Handbook of PR, New  York: AMACOM, pp. 2, 12. 49. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 47. 50. Dilenschneider, R.  L. 2010. AMA Handbook of PR, New  York: AMACOM, p. 116; Boorstin, D. J. 1992. The image, New York: Vintage Books, p. 9. 51. Grunig, J.E. 1991. Public relations research: A legacy of Scott Cutlip, Public Relations Review, 17(4): 363; Miller, D. & Dinan, W. 2008. A century of spin, London: Pluto Press, p. 1; Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p.  5; Boorstin, D.  J. The Image (http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-­the-­image/#gsc.tab=0); 31 pages, pdf-­ download: 31 March 2017; McNair, B. 2007. Review of Aeron Davis’ “public relations democracy”, Political Communication, 24(2): 227. 52. Rasmus, J. 2017. A Thanksgiving Letter to the Wealthiest 1% (https:// www.counterpunch.org, 29 November 2017, accessed: 12 December 2017). 53. Hiebert, R.  E. 1966. Ivy Lee: Father of Modern Public Relations, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 27(2): 116. 54. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 246f. 55. Dilenschneider, R L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p. xxi (preface); cf. Grunig. J.  E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p.  23; Anthony, A. 2014. 100 Years of Modern Public Relations (https://www.targetpublic.com, 29 July 2014, accessed: 10 December 2017).

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312. Freeman, R.  E., 2010. Strategic management: A stakeholder approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 313. Bageant, J. 2007. Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war, New  York: Crown Publishers, p.  28; Artz (2015, p.  235) writes, “media are the new merchants of reality….what the media affirms remains affirmed. What they ignore does not exist’ (Artz, L. 2015. Global Entertainment Media: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). 314. https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_ the_pitchforks_are_coming. 315. Barry, D. & Elmes, M. 1997. Strategy Retold, Academy of Management Review, vol. 22, no. 2; Strauss, L. 1978. Thoughts on Machiavelli, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Luntz, F. 2007. Words That Work—It’s Not What you Say, It’s What People Hear, New  York: Hyperion Press. 316. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/…/phprefac.htm. 317. Scheufele, D.A. 1999. Framing as a theory of media effects, Journal of communication, 49(1): 105. 318. Pickard, V. 2014. America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform, Cambridge: Press Cambridge University Press. 319. Russell, B. 1922. Free Thought and Official Propaganda, New  York: Watts, p.  15; Ross, I. 1959. The image of merchants, Garden City: Doubleday, p. 54. 320. Crossen, C. 1994. Tainted Truth—The Manipulation of Fact in America, New York: Simon & Schuster, 22; Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge. 321. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New  York: Routledge, pp. 23, 15. 322. Crossen, C. 1994. Tainted Truth—The Manipulation of Fact in America, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 19, 21. 323. Magnuson, A.J. 2003. The Implications of Capitalism for Media: How Democracy Suffers (web.stanford.edu/class/e297a, download: 3rd April 2017), p. 8. 324. Fogg, B.  J. 2003. Persuasive technology, Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, p. 49. 325. Evans, B. & Giroux, H. A. 2015. Disposable futures: the seduction of violence in the age of spectacle, San Francisco: City Lights Books. 326. Grofman, B. & Feld, S.  L. 1988. Rousseau’s general will, American Political Science Review, 82(2): 567–576. 327. Hugo, V. 1984. Les Misérables, New York: Athenaeum Club. 328. Miller, D. & Dinan, W. 2008. A century of spin, London: Pluto Press, p. 2.

CHAPTER 2

The History: Of Media Capitalism

Public opinion can be manipulated (Bernays, E. L. 1928. Manipulating public opinion: The why and the how, American Journal of Sociology, 33(6):958.

Media capitalism’s history started at a time when early humans began to form cooperative groups about 3.2 million years ago, with upright walking Lucy as the best known signifier of this process.1 Ingroup solidarity secured collective survival.2 These early humans were not primarily individuals as today’s ideological lenses like to pretend.3 Being part of a group meant survival.4 Survival did not depend on competition—a concept superimposed ever since ideologue Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) framed his famous idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Evolution focused on mutual support to guarantee cohesion within the bands of early humans5—a decisive factor in the process.6 Hunting, gathering, child rearing and the like demanded sophisticated levels of coordination, communication and cooperation.7 The Hobbesian idée fixe of bellum omnium contra omnes (1651) ‘could not be further from the truth’.8 Instead, cooperation sustained life.9 From a cooperation-versus-competition viewpoint, it was cooperation that allowed humans to flourish.10 Superiority over animals demanded consciousness, kinship, compassion, affinity and altruism, all of which created collective arrangements based on ‘symbolic associations’.11 Early humans crafted abstract rules to govern their tribes, associating human-­ made symbols with natural phenomena to understand and master nature. This demanded serious brainpower.12 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_2

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In sharp contrast to capitalism’s ideologies justifying the survival-of-­ the-fittest, evolutionary science has rendered Spencer irrelevant.13 Yet despite Charles Darwin’s scientific facts, the media has anchored Spencer’s survivalist ideology in far too many minds.14 Worse, corporate media even attributes much of this to Darwin, not Spencer.15 Romantic images of a highly individualistic survivor like Robinson Crusoe are extremely useful to capitalism.16 Defoe’s work is deeply racist, merging race and class with a savage servant called Friday—a working day!17

Tribes and Slavery Despite such literary hallucinations, in reality, human beings are rather different. At some point in time, early human cooperation led to surplus values. Tribes produced more food than they needed.18 This allowed spare time for culture, art, the formation of sophisticated group structures and complex forms of social cohesion. Soon, an emerging predatory elite occupied privileged positions.19 Legitimising superiority, early pagan beliefs became useful in creating enough cohesive powers for rulers to rule over those to-be-ruled. With that, tribes moved towards farming, while ideological methods of control mutated towards early forms of priests and beliefs that resembled religion. Figure 2.1 shows this development in an overview:20 Figure 2.1 indicates that by the time early farming communities became slave economies, the ideological superstructure moved from paganism towards a multitude of Gods. This supplied ideological affirmation to the slave economies, creating system stability for pharaohs and emperors.21 (i)

(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(v)

(vi)

(vii)

(viii)

Animal

Consciousness Groups & Tribes

Pagan Beliefs

Multitude of Gods/Polytheism

Church & Monism

State & Rationality

From State to Media

Corporate Mass-Media

Kingdom

Surplus Creation

Surplus Economy

Slavery Economy

Feudal Economy

Early/Liberal Capitalism

Advanced Capitalism

Media Capitalism

Pharaoh/Emperor

Lords / Kings

Capitalist

Cap./Manag.

Finance

Workers 

Employees

Human Res.

Post World War Two

21st Century Post-198922

50 Years

For Years To Come 

Alpha-Male

Chief

Herd/Pack

Hunters/Gatherers

Lucy Neanderthals║ 5 million Years

Chiefs / Priests Harvester/Herder

Homo Faber

Homo Eco 10,000s Years

Slaves

Peasants

2500AD  Christ 

Galileo Columbus

2,500 Years

1,800 Years

1789 

WW II

150 Years

Fig. 2.1  From Animal Kingdom to Media Capitalism. (It marks the rise of ‘homo spectator’ (Gray, J. 2012. Neoliberalism, Celebrity, and Aspirational Content, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 92))

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Domination over slaves is often portrayed as brutality,22 yet slave societies always included ideology—brutality alone was never enough. Ideological beliefs such as idolising pharaohs as Gods provided the background for challenging engineering feats. This enabled the building of pyramids, done by believers rather than slaves driven by whips. Believers constructed such monuments for pharaohs as Gods.23 The brutal enslavement of captured natives might have been useful but it was not elementary. The God-­ equals-­pharaoh ideology did the work for the ruling elite.24 Historically, sophisticated elements of this arrived in Greece, furnishing a flourishing upper class on the backs of slave labour. Slaves were brutalised, while their owners had an interest in keeping them at bay by dominating them through chains and whips but also through ideology: Gods and mythology.25 In Plato’s anti-democratic polis,26 the economic base below the reproductive structure (polis) ensured surplus extraction from slave labour, strengthening the ruling elite’s ability to fine-tune its ideology (a Greek word), ethics, authority, autonomy, hierarchy, politics and democracy.27 In demokratia, the demos (people) were ruled by excessive power elites (kratos). Soon, much of this changed with the arrival of Roman military might. Meanwhile, slavery as the economic base continued. Ideology shifted from Greek to Roman Gods as Roman power crushed most of Europe’s paganism.28

Feudalism and Religion Rising feudalism ended the Roman Empire (~500 AD) providing a new economic structure as surplus creating slaves became feudal peasants based on land, fiefdom, soil and rent. Feudalist priests and the church replaced Roman military power while creating a new ideology: theological-feudal tutelage.29 The slave → feudal peasant shift demanded an ideological transition. Polytheism’s multitude of Gods was overtaken by monism’s single God.30 Ideological rationalisation established centrally administered religion. Pagan symbols were replaced by Christian symbols ( ) maintained through Christian rites and rituals and repeated over and again in daily prayers. The rites included birth rites, baptism, communion, marriage and finally death rites. Between these, believers attended weekly ideology-­ reaffirmation-­sessions called Sunday Church while conducting daily prayers

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skilfully linked to normal life (waking up, working, sleeping and eating) culminating in the highest form of religious affirmation: Amen—so be it!

Religion and Modernity Until today, some forms of religio-ideological affirmation have retained their original bond to God (e.g. amen, so be it) and are found in Hebrew Bibles, the New Testament and in the Qur’an.31 They remain part of God worshipping, prayers and hymns. In sharp contrast to feudal-religious institutions, modern-ideological institutions are no longer churches, while modern societies are no longer religious societies.32 Modern capitalism uses science for the mesmerisation33 and ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation’ of society.34 In modernity, ‘science entered propaganda…(as) without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda’.35 This converted church-goers into newspaper-readers,36 TV-watchers and internet-searchers.37 Capitalism’s new ideology came with a rising media apparatus that is using science to create powerful ideological manipulations.38 Post-religious societies still have sanctioning regimes expressed in penal codes and criminal laws.39 In contrast to feudal brutalities metered out to peasants—e.g. Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, where an eight-year old boy was stripped naked, ‘shivering numb with terror [and torn] to pieces before his mother’s eyes!’40—most of today’s sanctioning shows diminishing levels of physical brutality.41 Fear kept peasants at bay. Virtually all attempts to challenge feudalism through peasant revolt were negated through violence and what is today called TINA—there is no alternative to God’s natural order.42 The same ideology is used today: there is no alternative to capitalism. When the mighty French Revolution denoted a feudal-to-capital shift,43 the feudalism → capitalism transition also shifted ideological affirmation. This became necessary with rising manufacturing workshops signified by Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine (1712).44 Soon, commercial commodities replaced homemade products, flanked by commercial markets.45 These replaced feudal rent and turned peasants into labourers. However, replacing feudalism was by no means a smooth operation; it created a period of intense rupture.46

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The Rupture Feudalism’s breakdown resulted in decades of incomplete, broken and ruptured ideological affirmation, marking a period of intense strive for Europe’s struggling ruling elite to change ideological affirmation from soil+God to capitalism+state. Towards the end of the rupture period (1789–1940s), securing capitalism even led to the re-emergence of an old idea: demokratia—rule-over-people.47 The Great Transformation had re-­ moved barons and kings in favour of capitalists and state, challenging a previously unbroken ideological lineage.48 The rupture period of unsecured ideological affirmation was defined by struggles, revolts, riots and revolutions with significant highlights such as:49 • 1789: French Revolution • 1848: European Revolutions • 1871: French Communé • 1917: Socialist Revolution • 1918–1920s: several European revolutions and revolts • 1936: failed Spanish Civil War • 1945–1949: Socialist Revolution (China) The rupture period stretched approximately from 1789 to the last great successful revolution (China 1945–1949). By that time, capitalism’s new ideological regime (consumerism) assured that no further revolutions equal to Russia and China were to take place.

Capitalism and Consumerism By the mid-twentieth century, the ruling elite had successfully overcome the rupture period by moving towards new forms of ideological affirmation, merging mass consumerism with rising mass power.50 Consumerism and corporate media were able to camouflage many problems of consumerism, for example, ‘the public shift away from its puritan complex [towards a] desire for comfort, for luxury, and prestige’.51 The consumerism-media combination granted limited social welfare provisions as a class compromise. It buffered capital from labour and stabilised capitalism.52 In politics, many new ideologies assisted labour’s integration. This allowed labour to sit at the ruling elite’s table.53 Meanwhile, ruling class ideology started to rely on PR’s crowd-managing experts.54 Both agreed that ‘civilisations had

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always been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds’55 as well as: it is one of the great unspoken ironies of the PR industry that while it may have set out in the United States in the 1920s to control the irrational feelings of the masses, it has succeeded finally in amplifying them. Globally.56

As PR’s manipulative apparatus strengthened, labour took capital’s bait when it solicited the cooperation of capital’s victims.57 Labour supplied decades of support. Meanwhile, capitalism also pacified workers by herding them towards consumerism.58 Crucially, labour’s incorporation into consumerism’s system always included society’s core: education, work and consumption.59 Simultaneously, media capitalism’s incorporation project also marginalised most emancipatory forces, while those who played along—for example, ‘you are being played’ 60 along!—were rewarded. The dividing line between incorporated and non-incorporated labour is expressed as:61 socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; communism was the very opposite.

Capital’s ideological programme converted many of labour’s anti-­ capitalist energies into ideological affirmation. Today, labour dutifully participates in ritualised democracy, accepts capitalism and supports democracy’s exclusion zones of education, work, media and consumerism. The ideological ‘manipulation by PR…was justified by the end of…asserting subtle social control and prevent disaster’62—the potential disaster of a democratic free will. Capital’s pacification came with widely accepted ideology like equality-before-the-law and living-in-a-democracy.63 Mass participation became a routinely rehearsed legitimising session called elections, finely balancing cohesion (affirmation) and coercion (law and order).64

Cohesion and Coercion As all previous systems, consumerism too continues to rely on ideology and coercion. Today’s democratic regimes still include sanctions for non-­ supportive behaviours defined by those in power. Overwhelmingly however, democratic capitalism always means ideological capitalism. Coercion and ideology are two sides of the same coin even though capitalism’s

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‘hegemonic order [stresses] consent rather than coercion’.65 Capitalism’s worst outburst of inhumanity has been franked by cohesion—Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camps and its death factories were never established by coercion alone. There were always Hitler’s Willing Executioners,66 the generous financial support of German industry and willing men joining the SS.67 Beyond that, Nazi Germany had ideological support within German society.68 Ideology secured twentieth century’s three great evils: fascism, capitalism and Soviet State Socialism. Nonetheless, fascist and communist propaganda69 appear rather primitive compared to today’s sophisticated psychology of the global marketing behemoth.70 Media capitalism uses sophisticated processes of ideological mass affirmation that leave coercion and violence largely in the past.71 It operates under the conviction that ‘those who…control the opinions and beliefs of our society resort less to physical force and more to mass persuasion’.72 Exposed to capitalism’s mass manipulation, people uphold consumerism; carry positive, sympathetic, accommodating, assuring and loyal attitudes; and concur and support capitalism.73 Media capitalism converts people into carriers of ideology inside its four key areas:74 Table 2.1 shows four conversions of people into ideology carriers.75 Most of this emerged when Fordism delivered a decisive element to capitalism: ideological affirmation to consumerism.76 Fordism’s craft → to → mass-production shift and subsequent mass consumerism marked the most important shift towards capitalism’s ideological success: capitalism underwritten by ideology and consumerism.77 Table 2.1  Four areas of media capitalism Area Education

Description

Spontaneous children are converted into ideologically motivated educational objects that accept commercialised education. Work Workers are made to subscribe to the human resource ideology and accept Managerialism that masks ‘capital-versus-worker’ contradictions under the motto: we have to convince the have-nots that the way they can become haves is not by tearing down our system but by supporting us. Consumerism There is a total transformation of everyday life into commercial acts and economic transactions Democracy Voters have been converted into mass-guided agents of ritualistic affirmation ceremonies (voting), while democracy is excluded from all other spheres.

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Consumerist Ideologies Once consumerism was firmly established, ideological affirmation became capitalism’s main ideological project.78 Consumerism marked a significant structural shift when it moved the capital ⇔ worker conflict to a capital ⇔ consumer relationship. This was achieved by three developments: 1. the first movement shifted    use-­value towards    exchange-value   liberal capitalism (production) 2. the second movement shifted   exchange-value towards   sign-value79     consumer capitalism (marketing)80 3.  the third movement shifted   sign-­ value towards   ideological-value    media capitalism (PR+propaganda)81

These shifts changed liberal capitalism (1) to consumer capitalism (2) and to ideology-driven media capitalism (3),82 redirecting economic activities from making things to distributing commodities (2) and to creating ideological sign-value (3).83 After the consumerism → media-capitalism (2 → 3) shift, capitalism started to depend structurally on ideology.84 One signifier of a rising sign-value dominance occurred when the sign Rolls Royce exceeded the actual value of the car plant.85 Figure  2.2 shows these shifts: Figure 2.2 shows the three stages that indicate the use → exchange → sign transition.86 The emerging U-shape shows the rise of ideological sign-­ value capitalism. At each of the three stages, the use → exchange → sign relationship changed with media capitalism no longer predominantly relating to the making of commercial goods (brands) but to creating a positive pro-business87 atmosphere that supports capitalism.88 Brands indicate a transition from useful-to-have (use-value) to a label-to-have (sign) that demanded the ever greater ideological incorporation of customers through the media while creating an emotional consumer⇔sign connection (via ideology), solidifying the media ⇔ capital interface.89

use

exchange

sign

Liberal Capitalism

use

exchange

Consumerism

sign

use

exchange

sign

Media Capitalism

Fig. 2.2  The History of Value-Support and Economic Changes

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Consumerism moved consumers into the centre, while media capitalism moves consumers as ideology carriers into the centre.90 Securing an emotional customer⇔product link, media capitalism’s ideological apparatus merged sign-value-driven consumption with ideological support for capitalism.91 What emerged was Emotional Capitalism.92 Even before securing sign-value dominance, consumer capitalism had already ended almost all ideas of anti-consumerism when it redirected worker-vs.-capital contradictions towards consumption, creating a petty bourgeois middle class.93 Today, remnants of Fordism’s big labour versus big capital are only found in dying trade unions, declining socialist/communist parties and anarchist movements as media capitalism increasingly marginalises them.94 More importantly, its overwhelming ideological power succeeded in anchoring petty bourgeois and pro-capitalist values in people’s minds.95 As the media fostered the ideological affirmation to capitalism, proletarian milieus started to disintegrate.96 Proletarianism simply imploded under the media’s ideological onslaught, dissolving any workers-as-­ proletarian awareness, weakening labour organisations and incorporating their parties into its ‘ideological…apparatus’.97 The consumerism+media combination converted class solidarity into pro-capitalist affirmation—a lasting achievement realised through mass deception.98 Workers’ mutual support turned into system dependency through limited welfare systems as proletarian neighbourhoods, social clubs, trade union halls and so on lost grounding.99 This turned consumerism into a system imperative, skilfully using social welfare to smooth capitalism’s rawness.100 Meanwhile labour’s quest for industrial democracy remained a pipe dream.101 Until today, anti-democratic management controls the affairs of capital whilst buffering capital from labour.102 Simultaneously, the purposefully engineered decline of trade unions was flanked by management’s self-assigned right to manage, made acceptable via PR’s TINA offensive.103 Capital dealt with labour in the following way: in the non-productive sphere, labour was made to oscillate between ideological affirmation to consumerism and ritualised spectacles of democratic elections; in the production sphere, labour was made to support management aided by HR ideologies and flanked by a well-engineered demise of trade unions.104 All this secured mass affirmation to media capitalism. To reach today’s level of ideological affirmation, capitalism had to travel some distance.

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Media Capitalism’s Ideology Never before has ideology mutated into an all-inclusive hegemony that infiltrates education, work, consumerism and democracy so comprehensively and manipulatively. Never before has a scientifically guided ideological apparatus been able to use psycho-manipulation mass distributed by global media.105 This shifted mass media towards the centre. For the first time in human history, media capitalism organised itself as a fully integrated sphere—standing on its own feet. In all previous societies, ideological affirmation had been sourced from elsewhere. It had been external, directed through Gods, religion, churches and so on. Media capitalism has turned ideological affirmation into capitalism’s internal affair as media capitalism depends on ideology like no other system.106 More than ever before, ideology has become an economic necessity. Today, corporate media influences virtually all of society’s steering. It guides:107 • schools by defining education; • higher education by defining universities, research and science;108 • the economy by ideological mass support to consumption; • work through a general pro-business atmosphere (e.g. Managerialism); and • democracy through ideological mass support to elections. In the areas of economy and business, an omnipotent business press assures acceptance of Managerialism’s imperatives and the rule of corporations—sold as TINA.109 Unless presented in a highly ideological way, workplace realities have become mostly absent from TV and Hollywood.110 Meanwhile, Managerialism’s pathologies are camouflaged through petit-­ bourgeois affluence (i.e. Affluenza) under the ideologically equation:111 support for managerial regimes = money = consumption = higher living standard = happiness

As consumer psychology increases, manufacturing is outsourced to China and the global south. In management education and business schools, marketing has overtaken operations management as the leading revenue generating crypto-academic subject. Media capitalism’s training institutions assure ideological mass affirmation through mass compliance

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alongside the spectacle of democracy. Establishing media capitalism demanded three transformations: 1. the first transformation     replaced feudalism with early liberal capitalism; 2. the second transformation    replaced poor proletarians with petitbourgeois consumers; 3. the third transformation    replaced consumerism with ideology (PR/propaganda).112

The three-stage model of Fig. 2.3 illustrates these changes over a period of 5000+ years. It shows the historical rupture period (~150 years) of ideological instabilities.113 Before this period, Enlightenment and early capitalism had ended feudalism as system imperatives demanded a feudalism → capitalism shift. With the end of the rupture period, the ruling elite had consolidated itself. Figure  2.3 shows the accompanying shifts in social structures:114 Feudalism’s rule was secured through religious affirmation that stabilised the entire structure. Events like Martin Luther’s Reformation (1483–1546) remained what they always set out for: an attempt to reform feudal ideology by setting up a semi-modern religious variation without ending feudalism itself. Reformation was never a revolution against feudalism.115 It was a movement within religion. Luther’s revolutionary friend Thomas Münzer’s (1468–1525) Peasant Wars of 1524/1525 proclaimed a strong anti-feudal stance, while Luther maintained feudalism’s Godly support. Despite the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), feudal ideology remained functional and ended only when capitalism triumphed.116 Capitalism’s new ideologies—for example,

5,000 years of affirmation Support through pagan beliefs to pharaohs & Gods

support through religion & rites by the churches

150 Years of change

support through corporate-media to consumer – capitalism

revolutionary phase 1789-1949

conditioning systems

Religious belief-systems

house + land + slaves

land + rent + peasants

Fig. 2.3  The ruptured period

affirmation

ruptured support through semi-open public domain belief-system rationality

land

capital + peasants

workers

commodity + workers

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hard-work-means-success—assisted individuals to successfully adapt to capitalism’s new imperatives while camouflaging its contradictions and irrationalities.117 Changes at the economic base (feudal → capital) were sustained through ideological changes in the superstructure (religion → rationality) creating individuals with previously unseen individual rights throughout Europe, the USA and even reaching Haiti.118 All this was a traumatic shock for European aristocratic elites during the eighteenth century. To preserve top-down ruling, it urgently had to anchor a new ideology in people’s minds that was capable of dealing with unwanted situations like European revolutions (1848–1851), the Paris Communé (1871)119 and the far more serious challenge that came with the Russian Revolution (1917) leading to an anti-capitalist society that survived until 1989. Nonetheless, some revolutions achieved a temporary ideological shift away from the ideologies of the elites.120 In its Soviet version, affirmation existed on the mistaken equation of state+society=socialism.121 In the capitalist world, serious challenges arose towards the end of World War I (1918/1919)122 when European workers revolted against the three evils of war, capitalism and monarchy. Towards the end of the rupture period, one of the final challenges came with Spanish fascist Franco’s victory assisted by Italian fascism and German Nazism, burying European dreams of freedom as signified in Picasso’s Guernica.123 Yet despite Nazism and ascism, rationality was on the rise.

Rationality and Ideology Notwithstanding countless other European revolts, strikes and uprisings (1789–1940s), by the middle of the twentieth century, European capitalism no longer experienced any serious challenges to its ideological hegemony.124 Meanwhile consumerism gained ground.125 A hegemonic ideology capable of linking all parts of society came into being.126 Only ideological mass affirmation engineered through corporate media could create compliant and ideologically affirmative members of capitalism. Today, media capitalism’s ideology of hyper-individualism (e.g. rags-to-­ riches) has been moored deeply in the public’s mind.127 Media capitalism depends on conforming educational consumers (education), diligent human resources (work), happy shoppers with mass taste (consumerism) and compliant voters (democracy).128

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True individuals could have never developed mass taste, converging political attitudes, similar choices and compliant behaviour.129 Establishing mass taste had to be based on psycho-marketing camouflaged by the ideology of individualism.130 Mass consumption had to be organised rationally through psychology (marketing) first and propaganda (PR) later, also structuring education, work, consumerism and democracy.131 It also needed people to be unconscious of capitalism’s pathologies, thus preventing the use of critical rationality as an emancipatory weapon. Rationality had to be divorced from Kant’s critical rationality.132 Potentially, critical rationality might have been damaging to techno-driven capitalism. As ‘technology always embodies ideology’,133 techno-instrumental rationality enhanced ideological affirmation to capitalism. Enlightenment’s critical-rational potentials were replaced with techno-rationality and ideological mass affirmation to sustain early capitalism. Soon, enlightenment’s ‘empiricism without principles’134 gave ideological support to capitalism.135 Nonetheless, some early ideas remained important for liberal and later media capitalism136 shifting mass support from ‘God wants you to be rich’137 to more modern means.138 Capitalism’s new rationality demanded a fully functional public sphere.139 Figure 2.4 shows capitalism’s problematic relationship to rationality: Figure 2.4 shows the role of rationality from feudalism to media capitalism. The shaded area indicates today’s—marginalised but still existing— religious support for capitalism. The non-shaded areas show the core of ideological rationality as a form of positivist rationality that is exclusively directed towards supporting capitalism. It rejects critical rationality outlined in Kant’s Trilogy of Critiques.140 Securing a capitalism-compliant-­ rationality took a long time. During this period, rationality experienced several changes (Fig. 2.4). These are explained in the following six brief sections: Pre-Modern Feudalism

Modernity based on the Development of Ideologically Supportive Rationality

 1789

Irrationality



Religion

Irrationality 

Superstition Rationality

19th Century

Rationality 





20th Century

21st Century



Religion

= media capitalism

Superstition

= Supportive Rationality

Instrumental Rationality      

= Supportive Rationality

Supportive-Critical Rationality  Critical Rationality Non-Supportive-Critical Rationality 

= Supportive Rationality





Fig. 2.4  The development of rationality



= Non-Supportive Rationality

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1. Feudal-Religious Affirmation Feudalism depended on the church as an external institution that supplied religious ideology to peasants. Ideology was rationality constructed in monasteries and churches but it came as an irrational belief system. Feudalism also needed some minor forms of rationality to function, for example, cathedral construction, rent calculation and so on. In short, religious irrationalities supported rationally organised peasant exploitation. 2. The End of Feudalism’s Ideology Rationality’s rise included Roussau’s volonté générale that introduced political participation, capitalism, democracy and legal equality.141 Simultaneously, ‘the free trade faith’142 legitimised economic inequality rationally.143 Rationality stabilised a new economy even though some irrationalities have survived until today (religion, cults, superstition, mascots, sects, astrology, occultism, New Age, talisman, magical TV-shows, horoscopes, etc.).144 3. Nineteenth-Century Rationality Kant’s Trilogy of Critiques signified The Age of Reason even though rationality contained a purposive, controlling and technical rationality (Kant’s pure reason) and a critical rationality born out of a critique on religion. Both became necessities. Kant correctly outlined the critical-vs.pure rationality tensions, warning that pure or instrumental rationality should never replace critical rationality. But this is exactly what happened. 4. Instrumental and Ideological Rationality As capitalism progressed, instrumental rationality was systematically favoured over critical rationality, replacing it eventually.145 As ideologies they annihilated Kant’s critical rationality, providing system stability while integrating people into capitalism. System stabilising rationalities are defined by thinking inside the square, selling capitalism as mainstream, objective and rational. Soon, much of this led to severe pathologies using rational means for an irrational system that created global poverty, environmental destruction and the like.146 Capitalism’s pathologies are camouflaged through the media’s ability to disguise them (Fig.  2.4centre).

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Media capitalism moved from ideology+rationality to rationality=ideology. Increasingly, ideology—not rationality—moved into the centre.147

Supportive and Non-supportive Rationality Media capitalism’s ideology-rationality merger still allows some versions of critical rationality (Fig. 2.4bottom). These carry remnants of Enlightenment’s critical rationality. This divides critical rationality into two sub-structures: supportive and non-supportive rationalities. Assuring system stability, minor critical inputs are needed; they feature as system stabilising critiques used for the fine-tuning of capitalism.148 This adjusts and improves capitalism while directing critical energies towards system stability.149 This setup allows media capitalism to appear as open.150 5. Ideologically Supportive Rationality Overall, four versions of rationality emerge (Fig. 2.4right): three became supportive while one is system challenging. Media capitalism’s power has divided Enlightenment’s version of rationality into negative and positive rationalities. As a consequence, almost all forms of rationality support media capitalism. Very few critical rationalities are about capitalism—most are made to work within capitalism. They are system stabilising, relying, for example, on the hallucinations of an equilibrium based on system theory, functionalism and status quo enhancement while annihilating any emancipatory telos.151 Today, non-capitalist critical rationalities are marginalised. The media largely excludes them or confines them to the margins of society.152 Even though there exist some forms of ‘watchdog journalism’,153 media capitalism uses them as entertainment in reminiscence of feudalism’s harlequin and jasper traditions.154 Feudalism’s harlequin and modern anti-­ capitalist critique have their assigned places.155 Historically, anti-capitalist thinking has always had some access to the public sphere, even before the latter’s first structural transformation. It produced revolutionary ideas and system challenging heroes such as Thomas Müntzer, Robespierre, Rudolf Rocker, Rosa Luxemburg, Sacco and Vanzetti, José Buenaventura Durruti and more recently Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Rudi Dutschke, Subcomandante Marcos and so on.156 Today however, media capitalism has successfully eliminated these ideas. Nowadays, Che Guevara features on fashionable t-shirts, while his

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anti-­capitalist project is virtually unknown.157 Such projects are absent from a cleansed history portrayed in manipulated history books and commercial history channels.158 Nineteenth-century history, for example, is represented as Jane Austen’s lovely Mr Darcy, obliterating any memories of the Condition of the Working Class in Britain.159 What is shown is the history of the upper 5%, not of the 95% suffering poverty, prison and horrific working conditions. Media capitalism has co-mingled (PR-talk) words (history) and images (Mr Darcy on his horse) in the public mind.160 PR is convinced that people ‘think not in ideas but in images’.161 But PR has not completely deleted anti-­ capitalism—it still exists despite PR’s best ideologies, perhaps even because PR is convinced that ‘any PR is good PR’.162 As a consequence, media capitalism is forced to constantly asphyxiate critical energies or convert them into pro-capital affirmation. Mostly, media capitalism deals with anti-capitalist energies in two ways: 1. Rebellious energies are portrayed as negative, controversial, antisocial, against society and as hostile to us all. In that way, the ideology of media protects society can be anchored into the public mind. Media capitalism becomes our protector. Anyone questioning the goodness of the media=society=capitalism synonym is described as being against society. 2. Media capitalism romanticises revolts as youthful escapades and misguided misadventures carried out by minor individuals or isolated groups disconnected from society. Anti-capitalist resistance—for example, Occupy Wall Street163—no longer places media capitalism in discomfort although it eliminates all alternatives, perhaps purely because it has the ability to do it.164 Nevertheless, media capitalism supports religious ideologies, traditional values, neo-conservatism, neoliberalism, positivist rationalities, pro-­ business pragmatism as well as insignificant critical rationalities. Many of them deliver system support, sustaining media capitalism165 under the TINA ideology of ‘bend over—here it comes again’.166 With that, media capitalism remains a cancerous outgrowth of the previously more pluralistic society,167 arresting Enlightenment’s citoyen inside a bi-spherical asphyxiation of a work  shopping oscillation. Media capitalism’s ideologically conditioned and semi-rational individuals remain other-directed and are kept in the belief to have real choices.168 Its lasting achievement is the asphyxiation of people inside its ideological

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orbit. At work, the managerial orbit denies individuals access to the humanising concept of personhood. This denial is completed when an equally alienating parallel structure of market-driven consumption creates a self-sustaining circulatory system of thought (PR-talk). Such alienating arrangements are ideologically sustained inside media capitalism’s four areas of influence.169 As a consequence, alienation… These ideologically guided beliefs (Fig. 2.5) turn work and consumption into a self-reinforcing totality of ideological self-alienation. The trick is to assure that individuals actively support these four alienating regimes with active participation in an alienating society with false consumer choices,170 false television programmes, false democracy and false individuality.171 Simultaneously, protests against this have been contained—www. buynothingday.co.uk has essentially no impact. Unlike simple consumerism’s passive conformity, media capitalism demands perpetual participation172 as the current ideology of the entrepreneur173 promises to find fulfilment from workplaces to love.174 It promotes active self-marketing, active self-promotion, employability, job readiness and active affirmation to media capitalism. The self-driven market-­conform entrepreneur is a signifier of media capitalism, reaching way beyond the simple incorporation of individuals. Twentieth century’s career path settings have mutated into twenty-first century’s promotability, entrepreneurship and constant LinkedIn visibility.175 It ended passivity and replaced it with the active participation in one’s own alienation.

Ending of Marx’s Consciousness Media capitalism’s hyper-active individuals are incorporating themselves ever deeper into an existence as mere functionaries, numbers or equations on an HRM spreadsheet, trapped in an eternal work → earn → shop → work → earn → shop circulation.176 Workers are no longer simply assessed under performance management by direct supervisors. Now, self-­ assessment is conducted by workers for (!) management.177 Today’s human …in educational regimes …in managerial regimes …in consumptive regimes …in democratic regimes

Fig. 2.5  Four alienations



is ideologically sustained through beliefs such as



1 2 3 4

I choose my university I work where I like I buy what I want I vote for my party

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resources (e.g. workers) are performing under guidelines they have set themselves as self-guided employees.178 In Berthold Brecht’s words, workers umfunktioniert (re-functioned) into self-supporting units have become reality. Overall, people, willing to be trained and support the system, supply… . work with self-manage-able human resources; 1 2. consumerism with convincible consumers;179 and 3. democracy with manipulate-able voters.180 Today, individuals actively self-produce and self-reproduce their own conditions guided by media capitalism.181 To achieve this, the rather passive consciousness had to be converted into an active consciousness.182 One of the more challenging problems on the way to media capitalism was solving the Marxian problem of being determining one’s consciousness— das Sein bestimmt das Bewußtsein (Fig.  2.6below).183 Marx’s nineteenth-­ century analysis correctly assessed that social-economic existence [Sein] shapes workers’ consciousness [Bewußtsein].184 But the event of consumerism, and even more so media capitalism’s subsequent rise with a psychologically sophisticated apparatus that engineers ideological-manipulative powers, made it possible to use Marx’s very own Sein-equals-Bewußtsein equation for media capitalism’s ideological ends.185 Marx’s idea that ‘consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the

 19th Century 

Ideological

 20th Century 

Working Class 

Media Capitalism



1st & 2nd Restructuring of the Public Domain



 21st Century 





Economic Reality



Ideological Reality 

Consumer Capitalism

  

Marx’s Assumption(ii) 

Liberal Capitalism

Working Class Ideological Consciousness Directed towards Ideological Support

 Working Class

Mass-Mediated Petty Middle-Class

Fig. 2.6  From social to ideological consciousness

Ideological Middle Class

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existence of men is their actual life process’186 is pre-media capitalism thinking. What shapes consciousness under media capitalism is no longer Marx’s existence but media capitalism’s ideology that has overtaken reality. Media capitalism has achieved what Marx’s nineteenth-century way of thinking could have never envisioned. It has converted Marx’s consciousness into manipulated mass deception and ideological affirmation.187 How this works is shown in Fig. 2.6: Figure 2.6 shows one of media capitalism’s likely most important achievements. The lower left-hand corner (Fig. 2.6) depicts nineteenth-­ century liberal capitalism that converted peasants into workers. By the mid-twentieth century, consumerism linked to limited social welfare provisions developed an affluent petty-bourgeois middle class.188 It also created a middle-class ideology with an atomised and hyper-individualised consciousness.189 The bottom right-hand corner shows the completion of this development, integrating the proletariat (nineteenth century) into a petty-bourgeois middle class (twentieth century) first and into ideological affirmation carriers (twenty-first century) later.190 On the left-hand side (Fig. 2.6), the development of capitalism is shown from early liberal capitalism (bottom) to consumerism (middle) to media capitalism (top). This shift depended on a media sphere that ideologically assisted the worker → consumer conversion engineered through consumerism’s marketing apparatus. Affluent workers became directed towards consumption when organised consumer capitalism demanded the planning of mass taste.191 To achieve that, the public sphere’s first structural transformation was absolutely essential (Fig.  2.6centre). Increasingly, the sphere began to be used as consumerism’s transmission belt. After the second transition (Fig. 2.6centre), the public sphere was utilised for ideological affirmation—in a marketing(sale) → PR(ideology) shift. News and politicians became saleable and ideological commodities. Media capitalism’s ideological onslaught reversed Marx’s nineteenth-­ century Sein=Bewußtsein dictum (shown at Fig. 2.6upper-right). Marx’s equation was separated into an economic existence and a media-organised ideological existence with the latter converting Marx’s Sein-equals-­ Bewußtsein into Ideology-equals-Bewußtsein. Today, ideology assures that there is no longer a connection between Sein and Bewußtsein (consciousness). This crucial detachment was achieved in a two-step process: firstly, the rise of consumerism, and secondly, the subsequent escalation of media capitalism’s ideology. The successful work-consciousness separation came with consumerism’s affluent worker—a process finished with media

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capitalism’s ideology as the foundation. Around the middle of the twentieth century, consumerism was fully installed. On this foundation, corporate media began working towards the public sphere’s second transition, moving from consumerism to ideology. Before nineteenth century’s liberal capitalism and twentieth century’s consumerism became twenty-first century’s media capitalism, several vital steps had to be taken.192 First, unhindered access to individuals had to be engineered. Today, virtually every previously untouched sphere has been colonised by media capitalism following a concerted strategy to ‘manipulate…perceptions’.193 Simultaneously, this ‘turned man [further and further] into a thing’194—a mere function of capitalism. Twentieth-century capitalism’s consumerism already operated with four key concepts: 1. commercial commodities   just saleability; 2. for many commodities     just saleability; 3. news no longer need     just saleability; 4. products don’t        just saleability.

do not need to contain truth   there is no need to have use value to inform and educate, now it is need to have artistic value and culture

Media capitalism added an ideological dimension to all four elements of simple consumerism. This did not end consumerism, it enhanced it by creating a fully developed system of ideology that governs virtually all eventualities of life. Today, nearly everything needs to have ideological value. Twenty-first century media capitalism operates with: 1. commercial commodities do not need to contain truth but    saleability and ideological value; 2. for many commodities there is no need for use-­value but    saleability and ideological value; 3. news no longer need to inform and educate but    saleability and ideological value; 4. products don’t need to have artistic value and culture but    saleability and ideological value.

In consumerism’s thing world everything had been turned into saleable objects/things.195 Media capitalism enhances this by adding ideology. It carries forward consumerism’s human=thing equation. The commodity

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market196 remains ideologically accepted, while in the labour market the commodity-equals-life assumption has also been accepted as living workers have been replaced by commodity human resources.197 Not unsurprisingly, ideology-driven market-exchanges create pathologies as alienation demanded that markets are flanked by ideological cover-ups that camouflage capitalism’s pathologic irrationalities. Guided by tabloid-media, individuals began to view these pathologies as irrelevant and incomprehensible.198 Simultaneously, several pathologies were moved out of sight by offloading—externalising—them to distant sweatshops and remote environments (global habitat destruction).199 Media capitalism’s task is to make these real pathologies appear abstract, incomprehensible, distant and irrelevant.200 A 12,000-ton oil spillage, for example, is made as incomprehensible just as a two degree temperature rise under global warming.201 In a camouflaging global-warming → to → climate-change move, media capitalism has even created a non-threatening idea: change the climate just like the dial on your car’s air conditioning!202 More than ever before, media capitalism has merged economy and ideology, creating an adhesive hegemony for the ‘deceptive harmonisation of societal contradictions’.203 Camouflaging contradictions places strong emphasis on ideological affirmation towards capitalism capable of covering media capitalism’s four spheres (education, work, consumerism and democracy).204 The ideological incorporation of individuals into these spheres is achieved through PR concoctions like we have something for everyone seen ‘as an all encompassing fabric of perception [in which] every moment of human attention [is] mobilised’.205 It provides the ideological glue binding all four spheres together while converting almost all eventualities of human existence into ideological support and thereby creating a totalising support system. Within it, individuals are left with no other function than affirming to media capitalism just as alternatives are deleted under TINA.  Media capitalism’s ideological offensive is legitimised by willing academics known as Servants of Power who invent status quo legitimising ideologies such as, for example, rational choice theories.206 These camouflage media capitalism’s contradictions as specific words—class struggle, trade unions, strikes and so on—have mostly been annihilated from public debate. Eliminating the word strike, for example, is achieved through, at least, six methods: 1. strikes are framed as historical and deleted from today’s vocabulary;

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2. capitalism’s inherent contradictions (often causing strikes) are almost eliminated from the public’s mind; 3. conducting a system-challenging analysis on strikes is rendered almost impossible; 4. with the assistance of behaviourist techniques anti-capitalist words have been consistently paired with negative associations (negative ‘images are attached to certain words’207) so that the word strike came to be seen as negative; 5. off-putting news-items are linked to strikes to create negative associations and establish strikes are bad beliefs; 6. revenue oriented corporate media view strikes as revenue damaging, seeking to avoid strikes at their own for-profit media corporations. To media capitalism, strikes represent a triple negative: firstly, any withdrawal of work damages corporate profits; secondly, it represents diminished consumption because of reduced disposable income; and finally, it represents a danger to the hegemonic ideology of media capitalism that is based on competition and markets rather than on human-to-human integration and solidarity.208 Potentially, strikes can mean that people discover solidarity and human ⇔ human rather than human ⇔ commodity relationships that are not guided by media capitalism and might lead to unwarranted self-directed positive social change.209 Even worse, individuals might discover that supporting one another creates more happiness than competition and consumerism. Avoiding all this is one of media capitalism’s prime tasks. Hence, an Orwellian annihilation of a certain language is engineered.210 Under early capitalism, strikes were prevented; under media capitalism, thinking about strikes is prevented. Together with strikes, almost all adjacent anti-capitalist concepts have also been deleted.211 This is not new. Historically, the manipulation of human consciousness had to go through several stages as shown below: Figure 2.7 shows the initial period signified in Marx’s Sein=Bewußtsein formula that shaped social—proletarian—consciousness (eighteenth and 19th Century



20th Century



21st Century

social existence shapes class consciousness



cultural industry shapes consumer consciousness



media industry shapes affirmation consciousness

Fig. 2.7  The development of media capitalism’s new consciousness

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nineteenth centuries), while twentieth century’s rising cultural industry212 eroded this equation, separating work from petit-bourgeois existence. After the public sphere’s first structural transformation, marketing integrated consuming individuals while starting to apply marketing instruments to ‘the engineering of consent’.213 Engineering consent may have been enough for consumerism.214 Media capitalism is ‘no longer content with such bread-and-butter chores, [it is] eager to get into mind-­moulding on a grand scale’.215 Put simply, consumerism is defined by marketing (read: selling)—media capitalism is defined by PR (read: ideology) in the conviction that ‘mass persuasion is possible’.216 Under consumerism, sophisticated marketing techniques began to reach ever deeper into the human brain, altering the individual’s psychological make-up217 and reshaping even the most intimate moments of human life as media-engineered images manipulate psychological well-­ being.218 Increasingly, individuals have become marketing’s mirror-images: we love chocolate while our loved ones have become partners.219 Media capitalism’s final touch delivers false, faked and artificial PR images that no longer just distort reality but provide a positive image of capitalism. Initially, these images were created for saleability (twentieth century’s consumerism) rather than for human enlightenment, truth and enjoyment.220 Twenty-first century’s media capitalism’s focus on PR added ideology to this as these PR images carry ideology.221 Truth, society’s original idea of social steering, became further removed, camouflaging core pathologies such as inequality.222

concave-shaped society 19th Century  early capitalism & liberal society top of society

convex-shaped society  20th Century  consumerism & social-semocratic states top of society

concave-shaped society  21st Century  media capitalism & deregulated capitalism top of society

middle

bottom of society

middle

bottom of society

Fig. 2.8  The concave → convex → concave development

bottom of society

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Inequality Media capitalism shrinks the middle-class while camouflaging capitalism’s pathologies. Meanwhile ideological support continuously redevelops society towards media capitalism’s concave-shaped form (Fig.  2.8bottom).223 The concave silhouette, a characteristic of Liberal capitalism, was shaped by a wealthy elite at the top consisting of feudal leftovers and newly rich industrialists (Fig. 2.8left). It was top and bottom heavy with a small middle class as correctly predicted by Marx. Newly created workers faced the overwhelming power of capital, resulting in the creation of anti-capitalist organisations such as some (by no means all) trade unions, rebellious movements and revolutionary political parties to match the asymmetrical power of capitalism. These anti-capital organisations addressed the stark inequalities of asymmetric wealth distribution.224 Rising parliamentary democracy increasingly disallowed labour to organise at productive levels which subsequently lead to creating progressive and largely non-revolutionary political parties that together with non-­ revolutionary unions fought successfully for welfare provisions. Partially, their task was wealth redistribution through taxation at the political level combined with rising wages at the productive level to support Fordist consumerism.225 As a result, twentieth-century consumerism flanked by welfare provisions expanded a rising middle class. Unlike nineteenth century’s concave shape of society (with a small middle class), twentieth century’s Affluent Society pushed the top level downward while lifting lower levels upward, leading to a more convex shape (Fig. 2.8middle).226 The redistribution task became largely a state issue with social democratic welfare parties and taxation supporting ‘the promise of a growing middle-class’.227 Welfare states and wealth redistribution created equality unmatched in human history.228 While workers enjoyed some of their often bitterly eked out benefits, capitalism’s rising Superclass229 began undermining society’s concave shape.230 This project was enforced by neoliberalism’s ‘economic policy agenda [originating in] the Mont Pelerin Society, [Friedrich Hayek and] the Chicago School’ with Hayek becoming the more noted brains behind neoliberalism.231 The aristocrat von Hayek’s neoliberal ideology232 of free markets, deregulation, anti-unionism, privatisation and so on pushed towards a convex society.233 Overall, these developments are shown in Fig. 2.8:234

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upper class middle class lower class 19th Century

‰  

upper class middle class middle class lower class 20th Century

85

upper class   

middle class lower class 21st Century

Fig. 2.9  Shifting classes

Figure 2.8 illustrates that towards the end of the twentieth century— with many social welfare achievements eroded—society’s shape started to change back to its earlier model.235 Today, ‘mass affluence is over’.236 Media capitalism’s future task lies in the successive destruction of a once affluent middle class, shifting this section of society downwards while moving the elite upwards (Fig. 2.9): With a focus on the middle class, Fig. 2.9 shows shifting class relations. Nineteenth century’s upper class had clearly separated itself from the middle and lower classes. This changed during the twentieth century with welfare provisions, open public education, strong trade unions and labour party elections. While the affluent middle class increased in size, social mobility increased, opening up options (for some) to merge with the upper class. Other middle-class sections remained marginally above the lower class. This signifies the concave → convex → concave movement outlined above (Fig. 2.8). The task of twenty-first century media capitalism will be to pacify those sections of the middle class that will experience less affluence. They will be forced to re-merge with the lower class as trade union protection is removed, free university education disappears and well-paying secure lifetime employment vanishes. A recent quote may illustrate this move that has already started:237 children, for example, make up a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States in that they are 26 per cent of the total population, but constitute 39 per cent of the poor [meanwhile] the United States ranks first in billionaires and in defence expenditure and yet ranks an appalling 29th in infant mortality.

This signifies media capitalism’s neoliberal triumph in the move towards a concave society. Media capitalism will shift society even further towards its core ideologies.238 This not only ‘leaves societies mired in the icy water

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of egoistical calculations’,239 it also weakens wealth redistribution institutions (e.g. trade unions and states). Capitalism’s continuous mantra—now aided by a powerful and highly manipulative media apparatus—is:240 blame the poor for being poor.

This will continue to cement media capitalism’s ideological triumph that is skilfully linked to Hayek’s ideological programme and carried about by rafts of neoliberal political parties.241 Neoliberalism and media capitalism have been able to alter the ideologies of many conservative parties. They no longer conserve society but react against welfare states. Despite their reform ideology, conservative parties became reactionary in character. Rolling back welfare state provisions became their and media capitalism’s key ideological project that is successfully exchanging the term reactionary (negative) with reform (positive). Media capitalism’s ideological and linguistic shift supports the rising concave society (Fig.  2.9).242 The rich are made richer while the poor become poorer.243 Media capitalism ensures that the public not just passively accepts these ideologies but actively supports them through the election of reform (read: reactionary) parties.244 Media capitalism enabled many concave societies to establish tax cut policies.245 Inside neoliberalism’s tax cut hegemony, progressive taxation no longer represents a rich → poor transfer.246 Media capitalism’s broadening-­the-tax-base ideology made it possible for corporations247 and society’s upper sections to experience serious wealth creation based on lower taxes. Meanwhile, society’s lower end is increasingly confined to a higher tax burden. Simultaneously, much of the upper level has simply disconnected itself from most, if not all social responsibilities.248 For the top, broadening the tax base means rewards—for the low, the same ideology means incentives as encouragement to work even harder whilst trapped in an increasingly uphill struggle.249 This has been expressed as: socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor250

with the latter defamed as welfare cheats.251 Media capitalism’s hegemony assures that those at the bottom are depicted by ideologies that portray them as failed to make it and it was their choice. Failing to make it simply means having made bad choices. Media PR has successfully based this on the fact that ‘the secret of all true persuasion is to induce the

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person to persuade himself…that a person is led to do what he overwhelmingly feels’.252 With that in place, there is hardly any challenge to wealth redistribution towards the top. Media capitalism has even engineered ideological support for all this with much backing coming from the disadvantaged classes.253 It has achieved to receive support from Marx’s Lumpenproletariat even though it labels them as lazy welfare cheats, welfare queens, aspirational job seekers and so on.254 As part of media capitalism’s overall hegemony, redirecting working-class anger towards the innocent has been one of its more outstanding achievements.255 Framed as TINA, individualised self-blame has been anchored deep into people’s minds, making it possible to move semi-affluent middle-class sections into disadvantaged lower-class sections without much protest.256 For others in the middle class, the latent downward threat creates a competitive drive towards even stronger ideological support for capitalism. Meanwhile, a selected few of the middle class still move into upper classes to show that the system of upward mobility works.257 Media capitalism parades the few who make it—not the many who do not—as glorious examples of its eternal rags-to-riches and slumdog-millionaire ideology.258 At the same time, its pathologies are masked through rising boat ideologies and an increasingly useful terrorism threat.259

The Communism → Terrorism Shift Media capitalism’s ideological project has been accompanied by scapegoatism flanked by rising xenophobic policies and The Politics of Fear.260 With the demise of Soviet-style state socialism, the new mantra of fear became Muslim terrorism signified in a communism → terrorism shift. Almost word-by-word, one can take 1950s anti-communist speeches and swap the terms communism with terrorism and Soviet Union with Muslim, and those speeches can be redelivered time and again. The ideology stays the same—only the names have changed. Then as today, such successful ideologies cloak capitalism’s pathologies such as global suffering, military inventions, social amnesia and environmental destruction. This assists in creating additional commitment to media capitalism.261 Consumerism remains a key cloaking tool. The aforementioned convex → concave shift has not significantly interrupted consumerism’s ability to provide the lower-middle and lower classes with inexpensive consumer goods. While the upper class uses brand names, the lower classes are

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liberal state  social welfare state  media capitalism rise of the state 

decline of state ideologically supportive society  media capitalism

feudal society 

shifting societal risks: unemployment, health, accidents, pensions, etc.  family   state   private corporations266  19th Century

 20th Century 

21st Century 

Fig. 2.10  The rise and decline of the state. (‘In modern industrial society, the separation of the worker from the means of production has become a technical necessity requiring the individual and private direction and control of the means of production, that is, the autonomy of the personally responsible entrepreneur in the enterprise’ (Marcuse, H. 1968. Negations – Essays in Critical Theory, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 212))

satisfied with faked brands unifying both classes under marketing’s prime ideology of we have something for everyone.262 It pretends celebrity illusions to millions, ‘para-social interactions [and the] intimacy at a distance’.263 Carrying a faked Gucci handbag turns you into another Audrey Hepburn, Spice Girl, Paris Hilton, Melania Trump, Kardashian and whoever comes next. For the illusion to work, one does not need progressive taxation, progressive parties or progressive trade unions. Instead, the progressive state has to be eliminated (Fig. 2.10): Figure 2.10 shows the state’s role from feudalism until today. Historically, nineteenth century’s social problems were rudimentarily eased through social, pension, health and unemployment funds. During the twentieth century many of these social welfare measures became state provisions until their partial or full privatisation during late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Today social risks are commonly no longer covered by nineteenth-century trade union funds organised through a collective of workers. They are no longer covered by large social welfare states.264 Ending much of this signifies media capitalism’s ability to secure mass support.265 Under media capitalism’s privatisation drive, the profit

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motive has been inserted between fund-contributor and fund-user. This insertion occurred in three stages:266 1.  19th century:    cooperatives of workers organised their social existence collectively until in the 2. 20th century:    this model was replaced by state welfare bureaucracies; until 3. 21st century:    this was replaced with individuals supporting userpay principles.

Social support systems originally constructed as public goods (nineteenth century) became commercial goods (twentieth century) only to become ideological goods (twenty-first century). These changes have been underpinned by individualism so that individuals accept private profits—successfully established by the media. The consumerism → media transition supported the exchange → sign-value shift and introduced Your Premium Health (read: credit) Card. It also replaced collective choice about public goods (e.g. health, hospitals, etc.) with faked consumer choices between for-profit provider A or for-profit provider B.267 Eventually, media capitalism’s victory converted commercial—into ideological goods (Fig. 2.11): In tribal societies (Fig.  2.11) material objects (e.g. tools) enabled human beings to become homo faber.268 Tool-making humans started to use goods and tools, exchanging them in a largely non-commercial but use-value oriented transaction. Even feudalism did not depend on monetary exchange that only occurred occasionally on weekend and seasonal markets attended by traders rather than peasants. Feudalism was based on serfdom, soil and simple homemade handcrafted goods. These were time 

domination of use-value non-commercial exchanges

from early exchanges to exchange-value use-value of homemade products

signvalue exchangevalue usevalue

early tribes, slavery and early liberal capitalism

from liberal capitalism to consumerism

media capitalism

Fig. 2.11  The history of commodities and values

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exchanged among the selected few attending these often distant markets. Exchanging goods only became important after the feudalism → capitalism transition when investment → exchange → profit gained in importance. Capitalism produced large amounts of commodities designed for exchange. With mass consumption exchange became central.269 Later, commercial goods appeared with high sign-value while having less and less use-value. Meanwhile, high use-value goods (e.g. air and water) have next to no exchange-value and absolutely no sign-value. On the downside, the highest exchange- and sign-value good is colourful printed paper having been assigned its value as money.270 Surprisingly, money has next to no use-value, but its high exchange-value renders it to being perhaps the highest sign-value good.271 Without the media—for example, Money Never Sleeps272—it might have never achieved this sort of sign-value. To reach today’s level of obscenity, at least three stages were relevant: 1. early capitalism     needed workers willing to work         in factories; 2. consumerism      needed consumers willing to consume      in shopping centres; 3. media capitalism   needs people willing to believe       in media invented signs.

Media capitalism depends on 1 and 2 but its emphasis is 3. The 1 → 2 → 3 transition is not a move from one to the other but a process of building on 1 to enable 2 (capitalism). Finally, media capitalism uses 1 and 2 to enable 3: capitalism+consumerism+ideology. As such, it no longer relies on factories (1) and simple marketing (2). It had to build an ideologically integrative infrastructure capable of making individuals believe in brands and signs (3).273 It needed a new, fully functioning ideological apparatus capable of infiltrating and governing media capitalism’s four areas.274 In that, media capitalism favours a control → ideology shift (Fig  2.12). Thought-controllers became ideology-engineers.275 Inside the control → ideology continuum media capitalism locks itself on the side of ideology: Figure 2.12 shows control’s historic decline ( ) that eventually crossed over into ideology ( ) when consumerism created two early mechanisms: (1) technical, press → radio → TV → internet,276 and (2) scientific, behaviourism → advertising277 → neuro-marketing. Together, they transmit consumerism’s ideology first and media capitalism’s ideology later.278 No

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control

ideology

slavery & gods slaves & masters

Feudalism god, religion, churches lords, barons & peasants

liberal capitalism & welfare state workers & capitalists

91

media capitalism and its ideology human resources & mass consumers management

Fig. 2.12  From control to ideology

tribal, slave, feudalist or early capitalist apparatus has been able to match that. This is for three reasons: 1. before the mid-twentieth century, there were simply no technical devices (radios, TV, websites) to reach people at today’s level; 2. more importantly, early twentieth century fascistic (Italy, Japan, Spain) and Nazi-regimes (Germany and Austria) were not able to combine state propaganda with consumerism. Trapped in outmoded race mythology and warfare, both systems failed to develop modern consumerism to a stage usable for ideological regime support.279 Furthermore and in sharp contrast to Soviet state propaganda, media capitalism’s ideology is not engineered by states; finally, 3. no other previous regime has been able to use psychological-­ manipulative (e.g. behaviourism) and medical (neuro-marketing) mechanisms at today’s sophisticated levels to convert a sufficient number of people into fully functional ideology-carrying individuals. Media capitalism’s high dependency on manipulative behaviourist science only emerged around the middle of the twentieth century.280 The con sumerism+behaviourism+advertising281 combination provided the base that eventually led to media capitalism. But soon market saturation demanded ever-more sophisticated sales trickery, manipulation and what Adorno and Horkheimer called mass deception.282 It invented sign-values and brands using behaviourism. These techniques are useful when engineering sophisticated mass beliefs in the values and ideologies supporting media capitalism.283 Highly manipulative behaviourist techniques came out of a field that originally sought to understand the psychology of human beings. Behaviourism provides manipulation and control.284 It used animals first and humans later (read: rat=human), eventually

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infiltrating non-psychological fields such as marketing (e.g. marketing psychology and consumer behaviour). It utilises psychology for emotional selling (marketing) and appeals to the heart under PR’s motto ‘if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’.285 Today, behavioural psychology and neuro-marketing are guiding shopping centre layouts just as they guide buying behaviour. Such corporately financed research programmes into psychology are not about human understanding. The understanding → marketing shift has denigrated psychology into a sales and PR technique. For PR, it was seen as ‘necessary to sway public opinion in today’s cynical world’.286 All previous societies lacked such scientific-psychological means. Scientific behaviourism established two key instruments: consumer manipulation (marketing) and voter manipulation (PR). PR believes that ‘manipulation of the masses is natural and necessary in a democratic society’.287 Eventually, both led to media capitalism.288 Media capitalism demands three elements: 1.  technical   instruments:    press (‘print-­ capitalism’), digital printing, radio, TV, internet,289 2.  scientific   instruments:    behaviourism, consumer psychology, neuro-science, and 3.  institutional  instruments:    global media corporations and open markets (GATT, IMF, WTO)

These three constitute media capitalism. Its ideological framing structures marketing while also communicating social meaning.290 Seamlessly, these have been applied to further ideology.291 Media capitalism has made ideological affirmation an internal process that constitutes its raison d’être. No external support is needed as media capitalism stabilises itself. As a consequence, media capitalism can devalue the relevance of government, political parties and state institutions, relying instead on the ‘all-powerful propaganda of the mass media’.292 What media capitalism did not abolish is authoritarian thinking expressed as ‘intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends to help bring order out of chaos’.293 By chaos they mean the potential hazards of democracy—the rule of the people by the people. Instead, media capitalism sees the future of civilisation in the capacity of the ‘opinion manipulation industry…a powerful giant’.294 Hence the rise of PR as propaganda signifies the current state of a three-step process: Figure 2.13 shows capitalism’s development as a three-stage movement from its early stage as liberal capitalism to its mid-twentieth century Fordist

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1st transformation liberal capitalism relative free sphere



93

2nd transformation





Consumerism



media capitalism



Marketing



public relations298

Fig. 2.13  Two transformations. (CFR 2019. Propaganda, Imperialism, and the Council on Foreign Relations (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oFkdQuBz2Xg, 10th April 2019, accessed: 15th December 2019)) Fig. 2.14  The PR-marketing split

capitalism

media

marketing public relations

form of mass production and mass consumerism, and capitalism’s subsequent development into media capitalism.295 Between each stage, a transformation of the public sphere (▼) occurred with the 1st transformation correctly outlined by Habermas in 1988.296 Capitalism’s development did not end during the late 1980s. Soon, a second transformation (▼) occurred giving rise to media capitalism. While liberal capitalism utilised a relative free public sphere, consumerism necessarily had to convert this public sphere into a marketing dominated sphere. Later, simple marketing was accompanied by PR (propaganda) as system directed towards a more comprehensive ideological inclusion. This might be seen as the two key functions of the media in capitalism emerging after simple capitalism became media capitalism—marketing and PR (Fig. 2.14): Less in marketing but more in public relations, media capitalism’s ideological offensive almost entirely annihilated previous ideologies (God, etc.), the ethics of liberal capitalism and fascist leader-follower constructions, imperialism297 and colonialism by establishing its own ideology as an internal force. Unlike consumerism’s simple sale of commercial goods, in media capitalism, ideology became an economic necessity. Media capitalism merged ideology with production and reproduction amalgamating economy and ideology with everyday live. Without active ideological affirmation to media capitalism’s core spheres, the entire construct would stop functioning. Ideology was set to become part of everything. Media capitalism equals ideology and economic necessity at once. To achieve this, media capitalism conquered and integrated all relevant spheres. It simply internalised the public sphere. Today, media capitalism owns its most

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important sphere—the public sphere. It is through this sphere that media capitalism transmits its stabilising ideology. How capitalism has achieved this is highlighted in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Jungers, W. L. 1982. Lucy’s limbs: skeletal allometry and locomotion in Australopithecus afarensis, Nature, vol. 297, no. 5868, pp. 676–678. 2. Marcuse, H. 1937. The Affirmative Character of Culture, originally published in the German Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (journal of social research), vol. vi, also in: Marcuse, H. 1968. Negations – Essay in Critical Theory, translated by Shapiro, J.  J., London: Penguin Books; Krebs, D. 2011. The Origins of Morality: an Evolutionary Account, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Washburn, S. L. 2004. Social Life Of Early Man, London: Routledge. 3. Ryan and Jethá call the unconscious application of individualism onto premodern societies the ‘Flintstonization of prehistory’ because the outcome is a false picture of pre-history. (Ryan, C. & Jethá, C. 2010. Sex at Dawn, New York: Harper, p. 32). 4. Axelrod, R. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books. 5. Shermer, M. 2007. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, New York: Macmillan (p. xvi); Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, New Haven: Yale University Press. 6. Nowak, M. & Highfield, R. 2011. Super Cooperators: Evolution, altruism and human behaviour (or why we need each other to succeed), London: Penguin Press; Klikauer, T. 2012. Evolution, Altruism, and Human Behaviour, Organization, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 939–940. 7. Knight, C. & Lewis, J. 2017. Wild Voices Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language, Current Anthropology, 58(4). 8. Sahlins, M. D. 1960. The Origins of Society (pp. 59–65) in: Hammond, P.  B. (eds.) 1964. Physical anthropology and archaeology: introductory readings, New York: Macmillan, p. 63. 9. Axelrod, R. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books; Kropotkin, P. A. 1902. Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution (foreword by A. Montagu, The Struggle for Existence by T. H. Huxley, new introd. for Garland ed. by E. Kingston-Mann), New York: Garland Pub. (1955 & 1972); Kropotkin, P. 2014. Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology, Oakland: AK Press & Consortium Book Sales &

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Dist.; ­Sennett, R. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, London Penguin. 10. Herskovits, M.  J. 1940. The economic life of primitive peoples, New York: Knopf. 11. Kahneman, D. 2013. Thinking, fast and slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 12. Bennett, J.  G. 2012. Design fundamentals for new media (2nd ed.), Clifton Park: Delmar Press (p. 255ff.); Searle, J. R. 2002. Consciousness and Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (p. 7); Reynolds, L & Herman-Kinney, N. 2003. Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 13. LeDrew, S. 2015. The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Buss, D.  M. (eds.) 2016. Handbook of evolutionary psychology (2nd ed.), Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. 14. Darwin, C. 1874. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2nd ed.), New York: A. L. Burt. 15. McChesney, R. 1999. Rich Media, Poor Democracy – Communication Politics in Dubious Times, New  York: The New Press (p.  281); McChesney, R. W. 2002. Our media, not theirs: The democratic struggle against corporate media, New  York: Seven Stories; McChesney, R. W. 2004. The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the twenty-first century, New York: Monthly Review Press; McChesney, R. W. 2008. The Political Economy of media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas, New  York: Monthly Review Press; Postman, N. 1966. Language and Realty, New York: Holt (pp. 30–31); New Scientist 2015. Island of wild children: Would they learn to be human? (3rd June 2015, newscientist.com/article/mg22630240-­300-­island-­of-­wild-­children-­ would-­they-­learn-­to-­be-­human); Spencer, H. 1880. The Principles of Biology, New York: Appleton & Co. 16. See also: Defoe, D. 1727. Conjugal Lewdness, (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967). 17. Boyd-Barrett, O. 2014. Media Imperialism, Thousand Oaks: Sage; Defoe, D. 1719. Robinson Crusoe, London: Penguin Classics; Habermas, J. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge: MIT Press (p. 100); Adorno, T. W. 1991. The Cultural Industry, London: Routledge (p.  62); Downey, J. 2008. Recognition and the Renewal of Ideological Critique, in: Hesmondhalgh, D. & Toynbee, J. (eds.). The Media and Social Theory, London: Routledge (p. 59ff.); Stevens, B. 2014. The way of tea and justice: rescuing the world’s favorite beverage from its violent history, New York: Jericho Books.

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276. McChesney, R. W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New York: The New Press, p. 68; cf. Abramson, J. 2019. Merchants of truth, New York: Simon & Schuster (ebook), p. 864. 277. This occurred long after Volney Palmer opened the first advertising agency in 1843 (www.designhistory.org). 278. Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 50. 279. Eco, U. 1995. Ur-Fascism, New York Review of Books, 22nd June (http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-­fascism/). 280. Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (trans. By Hubback), Mansfield: Martino Publications; Peter & Olson’s Conditioning and Learning Processes (Peter, J. P. & Olson, J. C. 2008. Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Strategy, 8th ed., New  York: McGraw-Hill (p.  213ff.); Lindstrom, M. 2008. Buyology: truth and lies about why we buy, New York: Doubleday (pp.  55–57 & 144–146); Vedantam, S. 2010. The Hidden Brain: how our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save our Lives, New  York: Spiegel & Grau; Turow, P.  J. & McAllister, M. P. 2009. The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader, London Routledge; Jubas, K. 2010. The Politics of Shopping: What Consumers Learn about Identity, Globalization, and Social Change, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press; Shaw, J. 2010. Shopping  – Social and Cultural Perspectives, Oxford: Polity Press. 281. ‘Massive advertising…means managing demand’ (Smythe, D. W. 1977. Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory, 1(3):17). 282. wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry. 283. Berger, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing, London: BBC and Penguin Books, p. 8. 284. youtube.com/watch?v=4rnJEdDNDsI; documentaryheaven.com/ human-­resources. 285. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 126. 286. Norton, M.  I., Rucker, D.  D. & Lamberton, C. (eds.) 2015. The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 287. Stauber, J. C. & Rampton, S. 1995. Toxic sludge is good for you, Monroe: Common Courage Press, p. 24. 288. Johnston, J.  M. 2013. Radical behaviorism for ABA practitioners, Cornwall on Hudson: Sloan Publishing; Schultz, D. P. & S. E. 2012. A history of modern psychology (10th ed.), Belmont: Thomson/Wadsworth. 289. Desai, R. 2008. The inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: A review essay of Imagined Communities on the occasion of a new edition, Global Media and Communication, 4(2):185; Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media

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Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 19; Anders, G. 1956. The World as Pantom and as Matrix, Dissent, 3(1):14. 290. Sandlin, J. A. & McLaren, P. (eds.) 2010. Critical pedagogies of consumption: living and learning in the shadow of the “shopocalypse”, New  York: Routledge (p. 5). 291. Baillargeon, N. 2007. A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense – Find your inner Chomsky, Toronto: Seven Stories Press (p.  50ff.); Snow, N. 2002. Propaganda, Inc.: selling America’s culture to the world, New  York: Seven Stories Press; Jowett, G.  S. & O’Donnell, V. 2006. Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays, London: Sage; Macdonald, S. 2009. Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century: Altered Images and Deception Operations, London: Routledge. 292. Pratkanis, A.  R. 2007. An Invitation to Social Science Research, in: Pratkanis, A. R. (eds.) The Social Science of Social Influence, New York: Psychology Press, p. 4; cf. Sussman, G. 2016. Propaganda as Production, in: Fuchs, C. & Mosco, V. (eds.) Marx and the Political Economy of the Media, Leiden: Brill Publishing, p. 317. 293. Bernays, E. 1928. Propaganda, London: Routledge, p. 159. 294. Stauber, J. C. & Rampton, S. 1995. Toxic sludge is good for you, Monroe: Common Courage Press, p. 15. 295. Smythe, D. W. 1977. Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory, 1(3):15. 296. Habermas, J. 1988. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: MIT-Press. 297. Brenner, R. 2007. What is, and what is not, imperialism?, Historical Materialism, 14(4): 79–106.

CHAPTER 3

Media Capitalism and the Public Sphere

The public is enormously gullible. —Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co., p. 200 Buy a paper, go to the movies, pay for a radio or TV set … he opens the door to propaganda. —Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 351

The public sphere may have made its first appearance at the time of Greece’s slavery society where male-only slave owners, by not being confined to labouring under harsh conditions, could engage in open and free debates, constructing Plato’s not-so-democratic polis.1 Ideas such as the public, oligarchy and plutocracy (Plato), democracy (Aristotle), philosophy, discourse and debate flourished. Many of these ideas were fundamental for the structure of today’s society but, needless to say, they did not extend to those who produced the economic basis of Greek society: slaves. Slavery was later converted into peasantry when feudalism replaced Greece’s slave-based home economy of oikos with lush gardens, orchards and estates built around Mediterranean homes. Early Greek regimes distinguished between the private oikos and the public polis sphere. Soon, the Greek idea of a public sphere was to suffer a lethal blow when feudalism’s Dark Ages ravaged societies. But even then, in rare and isolated places such as medieval courts, monasteries and religious seminars, public debate survived even though these were minor attempts to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_3

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continue public spheres. Despite feudal brutalities, ideas of a public sphere persisted in highly restrictive circumstances until modernity’s dawn. During the late feudal period, a minority of partially commercialised mercantilist elites created wealth in a few trading cities where they operated quasi-exclusion zones largely free of feudal interference.2 This started to occur at a time when the Bible was still the legitimising source of ideological-­religious power.3 Written in Latin language, it was inaccessible to the mostly uneducated peasants; hence, the public sphere of religious discourse was reduced to a tiny minority, excluding the large majority of peasants. Much of this supported feudalism’s long drawn-out fight against a rising public sphere for the exchange of early commercial goods and free ideas. Meanwhile, societal steering under feudalism came from the dual structure of. . Ideology: the Catholic Church and religion and 1 2. Economy: feudal fiefdom based on rent and soil. Both had no use for a public sphere. In slavery as in feudalism the great majority was largely forced into being slaves and peasants. Ideologically, they were made to support first the Greek, then the Roman Gods whilst they were kept in the ideologically supportive delusion of a God-given feudal order administered through an equally God-given clerical structure. This structure provided steering mechanisms for feudal societies between the decline of the Roman Empire (slavery) and the rise of modernity (capitalism). Capitalism, Enlightenment and modernity did not reach maturity in most parts of Europe before the nineteenth century when eventually the God-given serfdom ended.4 By that time, key feudalist ideologies such as binding peasants to soil could no longer be sustained. The new economic structure demanded double-free labour—free from soil as well as from the means of production—machinery and capital. By the time peasants became labourers, feudalism’s core institutions of fiefdom, serfdom and the church had increasingly lost their ideological grip on the peasant mind. The development that ended thousands of years of serfdom while creating early public spheres is shown in Fig. 3.1: While feudalism had no need for public spheres (Fig. 3.1), rising liberal capitalism depended on new political and economical steering mechanisms that could only be satisfied through the establishment of a relatively open public sphere. In fact, modernity and Enlightenment established two public spheres: in the first sphere, commercial goods and labour were

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no public sphere social = church economy = soil  Feudalism 

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public sphere for economic & social steering of society  

need for social regulation need for economic regulation

 

conduct of society market & labour

 Liberal capitalism’s need for a regulative public sphere 

Fig. 3.1  Feudalism and the rise of the liberal public sphere

exchanged, creating the so-called marketplace of commodities (goods, machinery, labour).5 In the second sphere, social, cultural, political, legal and scientific ideas were exchanged. This provided society with scientific inputs that increasingly replaced religion and God. For that, post-feudalist society created a marketplace of ideas—called public sphere with the double function noted above.6 With the feudalism–capitalism transformation and the demise of religion, ideological support moved onto a newly developed public sphere. Despite its ideology of a night-watchman state,7 liberal capitalism always depended on social and politico-legal groundings to issue money and establish legal codes, norms, rules, laws and other regulations that provided a stable ‘regime of accumulation’ for capital through, for example, the mediation of capital-class frictions.8 Religion could no longer provide a sufficient framing for that.9 Modernity forced society to find new instruments for regulation and ideological support. Hence, information exchanges on the scale needed for liberal capitalism were established with the arrival of Enlightenment’s public sphere.10 As society was forced into new production arrangements, it had to stand on its own feet—first intellectually and later ideologically. Standing on one’s own feet meant the establishment of new self-steering methods for the core areas of education and work to which later consumerism and democracy were added. As a consequence, a double exchange institution emerged11: . labour and commodity markets, and 1 2. ideas markets for science and societal steering. The French Revolution of 1789 brought these developments to an historical flashpoint, thereby becoming the semi-official date for the end of feudalism even though it took more than 100 years to completely overcome feudalism, marked by the official abolition of serfdom. The nineteenth century remained a major period for liberal capitalism’s public sphere, signifying a period during which the bourgeois public sphere experienced its peak.12 Only during the nineteenth century had economic and

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political developments succeeded in pushing religion almost completely aside in favour of regulating society through a public sphere. All this changed during the twentieth century when the public sphere underwent its first structural transformation.13 During the twentieth century, the process of the first structural transformation of the public sphere came into full swing.14 It started to place its newly developed steering methods of money and power into the hands of consumerism first and media capitalism later. With this development, the historical period of free speech—‘measured by how well it … gives citizens the information they need to keep their freedoms and rights’15—and open discourse largely ended as the media ‘abandoned the idea of meaningful public dialogue’.16 The first structural transformation of the public sphere had been successfully completed towards the end of the twentieth century, making way for twenty-first century’s second transformation.17 Media capitalism was built on the remnants of nineteenth century’s public and twentieth century’s commercialised sphere. The contemporary media industry was only able to come into being after the second structural transformation of the public sphere which incorporated those elements useful to media capitalism into its version of an ideologically affirmative sphere. It is a decisive factor of today’s victorious media to leave enough space for largely engineered, faked and semi-public debate, limited free speech and crypto open discourse. Through provisions like that, enough people can be kept in the hallucinating belief that they have a real voice that will actually be heard.18 This citoyén-like group includes intellectuals, semi-­ critical academics and society’s enlightened middle class.19 Their critical albeit system-stabilising ideology plays an important part. ‘Ideology is likely to be most effective when it is not total, absolute or consistent’.20 Media capitalism’s ‘engineering of consent in democracy’21 also ‘creates a consensus for capitalism’.22 Some people are allowed to debate, discuss, criticise, philosophise and moralise in the margins of media capitalism. During the twentieth century, obliging citoyéns mutated into opinion leaders whenever mobilising public opinion for capitalism was required.23 They always represented published rather than public opinions, featuring as ‘opinion-journalists’ that churn out massive amounts of spin under ‘churnalism’.24 Overall, there are two key PR assumptions: ‘there will always [be] leaders and the [to be] led’, and there always is ‘the planned effort to influence opinions’.25 For example, party leaders are paraded by the ‘opinion-management industry’.26 Originally and mistakenly, the US Republican

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party thought that Fox is working for them—some have discovered that they are working for Fox. After the first transformation of the newly commercialised public sphere (nineteenth to early twentieth centuries), the sphere was ‘manipulated in support of commercial and corporate interests’.27 The second transformation eventually converted a corporate public sphere into an ideological public sphere as ‘a complete system for explaining the world [which] invades every area of consciousness’.28 Today, the vast majority of people are guided through ideology as ‘the mass media have become core systems for the distribution of ideology’.29 All others represent the to-be-pacified citoyéns. Historically, citoyéns represented the other side of bourgeois society. It was the non-commercial minded petit-bourgeois that eventually merged with a small section of the proletariat. Such democracy, civil and human rights requesting citoyéns are less focused on petit-bourgeois consumerism30 that represents the remnants of an older—public engagement—sphere which stretched roughly from the French Revolution until the rise of media capitalism. Today’s media capitalism has made them more or less passé.31 It used to allow the citoyéns to flourish largely because of a gap in ideological affirmation between feudalism and consumerism. During the rupture period (roughly: 1789~1949), independent and even anti-capitalistic public debates developed. Some remnants have survived until today even though ‘radical voices such as Michael Moore and Naomi Klein [are] kept to the margins’.32 They are the mere fragments of a nineteenth-century public sphere. Today, these fringe dwellers are largely minuscule and played out in critical, anti-capitalist or in the handful of remaining progressive newspapers, enlightened weekly magazines, open-­ minded journals or a few websites and blogs—all of which are allowed to exist in the margins of media capitalism.33 On the whole however, media capitalism has firmly established itself so that gatherings of anti-capitalist and ideology-challenging sections of society can safely be allowed to continue, largely untouched by state intervention.34 With declining state interventions during the late twentieth century, a powerful media industry annihilated and/or marginalised such anti-­ capitalist individuals and groups whenever the ‘manipulating (of) the maladjusted individual’ was unsuccessful.35 This has been achieved to such an extent that state intervention became largely unnecessary. Marginalisation, isolation and non-access to the public sphere have diminished their capacity to battle media capitalism’s prevailing ideology. Large-scale state

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repression is simply no longer needed or is only occurring in a few isolated cases. Meanwhile, the consuming petty-bourgeois remain untouched by such events. Under media capitalism, marginalised groups generate entertaining value by being paraded on TV programmes dedicated to political affairs.36 Corporate media parades them to inflict fear in the knowledge that ‘fear-arousing situations attract the largest audiences’37 which is important for ‘the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers’.38 All this is supported by showing violence on TV with an awareness that ‘the most fundamental effect of media violence [is] not increased aggression in individual viewers but instead a more general climate of fear’.39 Media capitalism makes sure that: those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute aninvisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.40

The mid-twentieth century’s image of the all-controlling, nightmarish Orwellian super state of Nineteen-Eighty-Four depicted exactly what it was: a mere literature image of a century that had passed. Today, society is not controlled—it affirms itself. Orwell’s nightmare is replaced by ideological processes of mass guided consumerism and ritualised democracy that both deliver stability as PR ‘helps [to] maintain the status quo’.41 Media capitalism satisfies all steering needs of society.42 But before media capitalism could achieve this, the public sphere had to undergo several rigorous challenges. Figure 3.2 shows the movement from feudalist courts of marginalised public spheres through to the rupture period (1789 to the mid-twentieth century). At the first level, individuals had virtually no access to a public sphere. Feudal courts and religious seminars remained closed to unwarranted sections of medieval society. The idea of public debates only came forth during the nineteenth century when steering mechanisms were no longer supplied by religion and church.43 This marked a time when many modern states and their constitutions started anchoring free speech no access feudal courts, etc. feudal rule (pre-1789)

partial access to debate 

public sphere rupture period (post-1789)

access for ideologically supportive contributions only 

corporate mass-media = media industry Ideologically supportive society (since mid-20th century)

Fig. 3.2  Ideological support from feudal courts to mass media

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ideologies in the minds of people while increasingly ‘the freedom of the press belonged to the conglomerates that owned them’.44 During the general insecurity of the rupture period, the ideology of free speech became important, yet real free speech was still too dangerous in its original concept.45 Free speech in a truly open public sphere might have resulted in anti-capitalist energies that could have destabilised liberal capitalism’s rising rule over labour and society. Free speech could only be rolled out to larger sections of society once it had been converted into an ideological support mechanism. By that time, the development of the media industry had already overtaken the development of civil liberties. Today, free speech is no more than an option for access to the public sphere that is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful media corporations.46 The fiction of free speech became a massively distributed ideology only after the transformation from the public sphere into an ideologically supportive sphere. By that time, free speech no longer served as a steering function for society. As so often, the introduction of free speech was paralleled by the closing of the public sphere. Only after the public had no longer access to the public sphere was the fiction of free speech granted in full. This is shown in Fig. 3.2: Unfortunately for the ruling elite, the rupture period (centre of Fig. 3.2) came at a time when liberal capitalism still demanded steering mechanisms organised through a relatively open public sphere. Free speech and an open public sphere came as post-feudal and post-religious instruments needed to supply knowledge, science and steering capacities in support of liberal capitalism. After the capitalism–consumerism transition, corporate media started to set up ideologically supportive structures. These were required to sustain consumer capitalism that demanded ideological steering capability, leading to the second structural transformation of the public sphere. With the second structural transformation, media capitalism’s overarching ideological project came into being. It still supplies today’s steering mechanisms. Under the steering power of media capitalism (Fig. 3.2), ideological support to mass consumption came no longer from a semi-­ open democratic public sphere—consumerism simply does not need that. Increasingly, democracy and free speech also became irrelevant. They became features viewed as having been part of an older system. Both used to be essential to the development of early liberal capitalism. Today, media capitalism is capable of guiding consumerism, creating mass taste and a

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‘totalitarian attitude’ to guide mass behaviour. Media capitalism no longer has any need for free speech.47 But even today, the remnants of the previous public sphere can still be detected in the form of traditional discrimination, being ‘expelled by the front door [and] climbing back in through the rear window’,48 in marginalised debating institutions, and ritualised mass democracy.49 Largely marginalised semi-open debates still occur inside the confinements set by the media industry, allowing for pacification of social groups that historically demanded voice, participation and democracy. As many ‘people [are] deprived of independent thought’,50 one of the minor tasks assigned to todays’ media industry is to confine, organise, circumvent and convert these remaining critical voices into positive affirmation for media capitalism. It has achieved this by creating a delusion of participation and engagement, to be listened to, and having true democratic involvement. Simultaneously, the media industry has sealed off most anti-capitalist alternatives, converting almost everything into pure ideological affirmation and loyalty to media capitalism.51 Outside of those encircled, incorporated citoyén groupings who believe in democracy, mass democracy has long been reduced from being a steering medium into affirmation for media capitalism. Today, democracy represents no more than a formalised, ritualised money and power driven mass pacification process that functions but hardly touches state, bureaucracy and production systems. The common belief in public discourse, free speech and democracy is the only thing left of an idea that once saw the rule by the people as its core. In today’s society, the core function of a pretended open and democratic debate is sometimes rather euphemistically and, above all, mistakenly labelled discourse even though neither democracy nor open debates, discourse, and not even the public sphere itself are relevant to media capitalism. Instead, the central function of the ideologically supportive sphere of democracy is to provide a stabilising service with the prime task of creating mass affirmation.52 This supports the illusion of living in a democratic and open society based on the equation: free speech = free media = free democracy = free market = free capitalism

Today, media capitalism simply uses its occupied sphere as a non-­ democratic (read: corporate) exchange platform to broadcast its ideologies. Media oligopolies invaded the marketplace of ideas led by PR/

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propaganda’s godfather Walter Lippmann.53 This led him to the foresight that the public sphere is a mere phantom.54 Ownership of the public sphere always meant owning free speech and the ability to manipulate democracy. Media corporations occupy the marketplace of commodities needed for an equally non-democratic exchange of consumer goods.55 Since the demise of free speech, the ideology of free speech remains important for both as it serves largely two purposes: 1. Having successfully reduced free speech to a mere ideology eclipses the fact that corporate media define free speech into whatever serves free enterprise, the free market and free capitalism. 2. The media oligopoly has effectively and de facto ended free speech. As a result, media capitalism wins twice by claiming to support free speech—it gains ideologically supportive powers while destroying free speech. The equation free-speech=democracy has successfully been transformed to a new equation: media industry = ideologically affirmative democracy. Today, the free-capitalism=free-democracy link no longer exists—if it ever did. Media capitalism’s equation is ‘capitalism = non-democracy while pretending to be democratic’. Apart from the ritualised mass spectacle of box-ticking to select an all new but only cosmetically differentiable leader in set intervals, almost all relevant institutions of media capitalism—managerial regimes, corporate media, marketing, schools, universities, police, courts, business corporations, rating agencies, lobbying organisations, think tanks, the local kindergarten and so on—are run in total absence of democracy.56 Enlightenment’s public-sphere=democracy equation actually represented dialogue. Under media capitalism, Enlightenment’s dialogue=democracy equation has ended. Its ideological support sphere is not structured as a dialogical sphere. Relationships between media capitalism and the public are laregly constructed in a linear (→) way—rather than dialogic ().57 Before all this could occur, significant changes had to be made which changed the relationship between capitalism and media. These changes occurred in two steps. Firstly, capitalism had to change when liberal capitalism (nineteenth century) became consumer capititalism. Consumer capitalism is unthinkable without media as mass consumerism depends on the media to sell commodities to large numbers of people. Secondly and more significantly, a far deeper admittance of the media into capitalism—this time as public relations (PR58) and no longer

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as marketing—appeared towards the end of consumer capitalism (twentieth century). While there is no exact date for the start of media capitalism, it happened at a time when consumer capitalism was functioning extremely well so that the media could gradually move its focus from selling things (marketing) to influencing people (PR). This marks the time when consumer capitalism became media capitalism. By that time, corporate media had already begun to support media capitalism’s ideology in ever-more systematic, scientific and psychologic-­ manipulative ways. This resulted in a much more unified mass media apparatus—something German psychologist Rainer Mausfeld calls system of indoctrination [Indoktrinationssystem].59 This system emerged during the mid-twentieth century when ‘the media became a notable new source of power’.60 Soon, it mutilated many of Enlightenment’s core assumptions. One of the key bourgeois themes that guided the process of modernity, for example, was based on the ideology that commodity markets bring the best product forward61—equal to the assumption that human markets bring forward the best employees.62 As an extension of those two ideologies, an open and public ideas market would bring forward the best ideas. These three ideologies were seen to be able to add strength to the steering of society. Together, they equated the market mechanism with free speech, establishing a seamless link between. free commodity market→best commodity. ↓ free labour market→best labour. ↓ free ideas market→best society.

Like many ideologies, these links also had some factual grounding— they were not purely a hallucination. Many elements of this belief system were carried through to the twentieth century. Today however, media capitalism has turned all this into pure ideology—while its factual base has been eroded. Key players in each market have long realised that free markets create disturbing instabilities. Hence they were curbed when the free markets became oligopolistically organised markets.63 The ideological function of free markets has best been expressed by on of Managerialism’s finest, former Harvard Business Review editor Magretta who candidly stated,64

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a monopoly is excellent for us, because we can exploit it to make and keep people dependent on us. In our economy, business people, professionals and technicians profess gladly to embrace free market competition. Let’s face it: it’s all a sham. Given half a chance, any business would become a monopolist like a shot so that it could set the rules in its own interest.

The creation of monopolistic cartels65 governing markets has been paralleled by maintaining the ideology of ‘the glory of unfettered Wild West laissez-faire capitalism’ under Hayek’s neoliberalism.66 After decades of transmitting neoliberalism’s ideas, corporate media was able ‘to implant that idea into [people’s] minds’67 so deeply, so successfully and so widely that these ideas remain largely unchallenged and unquestioned dictums.68 Predictably, competitive market ideologies furnished oligopolistic markets with a relatively small number of ‘modern megacorporations’.69 GAFAMs, for example, dominate IT and the internet: Google, Apple, Facebook,70 Amazon and Microsoft.71 Today, simply applying for a job is no longer possible without GAFAM as job applications are written on Microsoft or Apple and sent via email or even Facebook. It changed the workings of the labour market and the way many people work. Yet, even work itself and the way how labour is managed has changed. The management of labour occurred in three stages depicting a move from violence (1) to administration (2) and finally to ideology (3): 1. Initially, the state suppressed labour 2. Then it organised and pacified labour 3. It turned labour into affirming itself

Nineteenth Violence, repression, police, century etc.; Twentieth century Administration and subsequently, Twenty-first Ideology (e.g. century Managerialism).

This trajectory mirrored the decline in violence in favour of ideology seen in many areas during the development from liberal to media capitalism. Unsurprisingly, the media market also reflected the mechanisms of the commodity market. Again, capital itself organised the illusive marketplace of ideas. It compartmentalised its media market into print, newspapers,72 books, movies, radio,73 the internet74 and websites—under one single premise: ‘traffic is money’.75 Among the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,76 ‘Google categorises the web, Wikipedia orders knowledge and Facebook77 organises friendships’.78 Today, we see worldwide oligopolies with ‘Facebookistan and Googledom as virtual nation-states’.79

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By the twenty-first century, only a few global players were left after having absorbed previously separated niche markets. Academic publishing became largely eaten up by global corporate media corporations. Meanwhile, these oligopolies also took over previously state-owned media organisations under the neoliberal banner of privatisation. In other cases, public entities were forced to operate under the dictum of Managerialism.80 A weakened and diminishing role of states as engineered through neoliberalism only accelerated this process. Eventually, the creation of large corporate media oligopolies resulted in a unified industry—the media industry.81 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this industry was strong enough to move societal steering from the public sphere onto itself. Today, the media industry organises societal steering exclusively with the public sphere downgraded to be a sideshow.82 Media capitalism essentially followed developments in the manufacturing industry with a gap of about half a century. By the early twentieth century, ownership of the means of production in manufacturing started to concentrate.83 The media industry followed. The merging of commercial news—is ‘it newsy enough?’—and the: information→infotainment→entertainment.

conversion coincided with ‘a trend toward consolidation in newspapers’ and other media.84 The commercial infotainment market did not behave differently from commercial markets. The former operates under the motto: ‘what makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality’85—that is, mass manufacturing. The mass manufacturing of commercial news commodities led to ‘junk-entertainment’86 and the ever advancing ‘tabloidization of the news’.87 Eventually, it developed a one-dimensional ideology—the ideology of media capitalism—capable of structuring at least five oligopolistic markets: the education market, labour market, consumptive commodities market, political market (democracy) and the media market. This development is shown in Fig. 3.3: ideologically supportive ideas

   

liberal marketplace of diverse ideas

   

some opposing ideas granted

 the liberal bourgeois idea of society 

oligopoly of ownership of corporate mass media



onedimensional ideology



affirmative society guided by ideology

 media capitalism as an ideologically guided society 

Fig. 3.3  Between liberal ideas and the mass-mediated public sphere

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Figure 3.3 highlights the two opposing structures of the liberal market sphere and the ideologically affirmative sphere of media capitalism. The separation between both spheres does not indicate a razor-sharp separation in historical terms. Being a functional model, Fig.  3.3 shows both spheres that are functionally divided into two separate spheres. The transition from one to the other has in fact been a historical development that took the better half of the twentieth century. It was a period when anti-­ capitalist communism collided with two different ideologies: . Capitalism + fascism 1 2. Capitalism + democracy After the demise of fascism (mid-twentieth century) and communism (end of the twentieth century), twenty-first century’s media capitalism has converted all remaining ideologies into its means to ends mechanism supportive of media capitalism. Deprived of their original content, they serve largely as entertainment, kept in place as long as people can be made to believe that contemporary society is a democratic society. By having achieved this, media capitalism has been able to convert critical elements into a stabilising factor within a sphere that is no more than a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’88—non-challenging but with some entertainment value. The move from public domain to an ideological domain under media capitalism is as expressed in Fig. 3.4: Figure 3.4 shows the cone-like narrowing of a plurality and diversity of ideas. The plurality of ideas that existed during the nineteenth century became increasingly one-dimensional during the course of the twentieth century. Eventually, it mutated into a unifying hegemony summed up as ‘free market that claims to give choice and value; a political system that

public domain: pluralist ownership of media & pluralist public opinion 19th century 

20th century

ideological domain: oligopoly of mass media ownership onedimensional & supportive opinion 21st century

Fig. 3.4  From a pluralist public domain to a supportive domain

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claims to be democratic and representative; and a media that calls itself independent’.89 Historically, the ideology of democracy and open public sphere included pluralism as a core value. Soon, pluralism was narrowed to a mere support function. For media capitalism pluralism became a mere ideology, ending the nineteenth-century plurality of ideas. Today’s plurality still exists but only inside the confining parameters set by media capitalism. Historically, nineteenth century’s labouring classes were largely excluded from participation in open debates and confined to limited education, working 16-hour days with life oscillating between slums, poverty, starvation, prison, workhouses and armies. During the early twentieth century, the labouring class was granted access to mass education, however, with granting some levels of education (a few years of basic schooling90), the bourgeois faced a stark choice: labour’s rising demand for access to the public sphere had to be curbed. It had to be converted into ideological support for capitalism. Eventually most anti-capitalist forces stemming from labour’s miserable conditions were converted from conflict against the dominant structure into conflict within society. Democracy provided a particularly useful tool to achieve that. Its non-direct and non-­ deliberative version was greatly supported by mass media. It easily pacified labour, integrating it into an organised institutional body. Straight-jacketed in that way, labour became part of the capitalist pathologies. During the twentieth century, the productive and consumptive sphere took care of this problem. It created an oligopoly of corporate media as the single most powerful apparatus against unwarranted disturbances while converting the remaining anti-capitalist forces into ideologically supportive energies.91 Eventually, it developed an interest symbiosis that implicitly shaped non-formally organised capitalism with the core being ‘the connection between business [and] media’.92 With the end of a pluralistic marketplace of ideas, this interest symbiosis provided an ideological platform to steer society. In short, the oligopoly of media ownership resulted in an oligopoly of ideas that reduced diversities to the single common denominator of ideological affirmation shown in Fig. 3.593:

capitalism base institution



Ownership form



media capitalism supportive institution

 ideology



form

Fig. 3.5  Ideological support from base to target institutions

affirmation of society target

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Figure 3.5 shows that the core institution remains capitalism. However, media capitalism depends on the media to an extremely high degree. Neither nineteenth-century nor twentieth-century capitalism had developed a media industry strong enough to provide the sole steering apparatus for society.94 Nineteenth-century society relied on an open public sphere (albeit without democracy). Twentieth-century society relied on an increasingly confined, corporatised and therefore limited public sphere (plus democracy). Only twenty-first century’s media capitalism enabled ideology to supersede many previous forms of societal steering. This has a long history. Whilst the media became increasingly important to consumerism, with media capitalism, it took centre stage. Media capitalism has developed instruments that combine all vital components by linking consumerism with mediated ideological support engineered through corporate media.95 The interest symbiosis in conjunction with the media oligopoly created a highly structured supportive sphere that serves at least two functions: . It allows supportive consumption to work. 1 2. It allows society to function without any interference of unwarranted elements. Non-democratic management and non-democratic consumerism have the same core—media capitalism based on a ‘wealthy interest’96 symbiosis between: 1. corporations that design and make things (e.g. General Motors, Nike, Apple, etc.); 2. corporations that sell these things (e.g. marketing, media, Disney, News.Corp), and 3. corporations that create a positive business climate (PR, The Economist, foxnews.com). Virtually all of them are glued together through an overall ideology defined by a few global oligopolies. Their products pretend plurality and neutrality.97 Yet it is a faked pro-business plurality resulting in sameness.98 Cosmetic product differentiation—just as cosmetically differentiated tabloid-­TV/websites99—keeps up the appearance of pluralistic media in the acute awareness that ‘what happens on TV will overshadow what happens off TV’.100 All the while, ‘TV is still the dominant medium’.101 Corporate

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PR’s ‘sensation mongers and ballyhoo artists’102 have learned that it ‘can win a public relations war’103 based on the acute awareness that ‘most brands are basically not that different [while the perception of difference is an] advertising fantasy’:104 [A marketing manager] would hold up two identical shiny silver dollars, one in each hand, and would tell his audience in effect: Never forget that your job is very simple. It is to make people think the silver dollar in my left hand is much more desirable than the silver dollar in my right hand.

A vast range of cosmetically (non)-differentiated consumer commodities have created the appearance of difference and competition. This is seamlessly applied to the media. Today, media capitalism has successfully created a quasi-mythical belief in competition even though many newspapers, for example, face almost ‘no … competition’.105 The competition ideology assists global media corporations in shaping pro-capitalist attitudes.106 Similarly, media capitalism has also been able to give a narrow range of ideological ideas the appearance of competing with each other. In fact, the competition ideology itself is made to appear highly pluralistic. As long as these ideas have the common denominator of ideological support for media capitalism, they are allowed to enter our minds. The narrowing band of increasingly similar products, global knowledge (Paris Hilton, Madonna, the Kardashians, etc.), taste (McDonalds, Subway, Coca Cola) and opinions (Fox, CNN, foxnews.com, etc.) has been mirrored by a narrowing band of increasingly similar ideologies that have been made acceptable globally.107 It is sameness wrapped in different paper. Media capitalism has kept up. • a faked competition between commodities, • a faked competition between different corporations, and • a faked competition between different ideas. Inside the pretended competition of the ever-same—Coke versus Pepsi, Financial Times versus Wall-Street-Journal, Sky News versus Sky Sport and so on—ideological support for media capitalism became media capitalism’s raison d’être.108 By targeting consumers to consume goods and ideologies, media capitalism is given ‘an open door to the public mind’ and is allowed even into individuals’ bedrooms.109 But the almost unlimited access of media capitalism to individuals has also altered the

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relationship between public and private. During the public sphere’s early period, a strict separation of public and private realm dominated until the event of media capitalism has altered this most dramatically. The private became public and the public became private (e.g. Facebook’s 2.9bn users by 2021).110 The unique access of the media industry to all areas of private life has colonised all private spheres and turned them into a public sphere with devastating consequences.111 Today, even love letters reflect slogans, sound bites and buzzwords of the marketing industry. Individuals are confined to pre-formulated ideas presented to them during thousands of advertisements.112 Most of us have seen TV commercials long before the social concept of love has had any meaning to young consumers.113 We are even made to consume love. PR’s belief that ‘every brand needs an enemy [is] one of the entertaining principles of marketing. Pepsi-Cola has Coca-Cola. Burger King has McDonalds. The Republicans have the Democrats’.114 These are already faked enemies as PR/marketing knows that ‘the most effective brand advertising, after all, does not try to convince you to make a choice, but rather convinces you that there is no choice—that Coca-Cola is your cola, that Camel is your cigarette, and Harley-Davidson is the only motorcycle one would consider’.115 Between these faked fights, people diligently choose between toothpaste A or B and vote for party A or B.116 Consumption and voting has been successfully reshaped through marketing and PR’s ‘doctored image’.117 The ‘conflict between profits and the public’s right to know’ is no longer seen as a conflict.118 Media capitalism and PR work hard to assure that nobody ‘could say for sure what [is] truth and what [is] spin’.119 Truth only exists under media capitalism’s two conditions: saleability and ideology120—‘truth is validated as what sells’.121 Ever since PR’s early days of Lord Kitchener (1914) when ‘the British [WWI propaganda] example would come to be copied … by commercial actors’,122 corporate PR has been aware that123: the truth is whatever you can get people to believe.

In fact, in media capitalism, ‘legions of ideological cosmeticians routinely package truth for public consumption’.124 This has merged truth with saleability and media capitalism’s own version of crypto-morality— the tautology of business ethics125 now influencing politics and private

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lives. Media capitalism has created an amalgamated private-­public sphere shown in Fig. 3.6: The old separation of public and private spheres (Fig.  3.6) has been reshaped so that individuals can no longer experience a private sphere untouched by the media industry. Media capitalism can no longer grant individuals the option of remaining undamaged by the media industry (Fig. 3.6). The power of this industry has colonised both spheres, merging them into one single ideologically affirmative sphere. Nobody can escape the mass mediated structural imperatives of marketing, PR, ideological affirmation and, above all, the media industry—we are all consumers!126 Only those living on an isolated island with no electricity and have completely disconnected themselves from the mass guiding media apparatus can escape. For the overwhelming majority the following maxim applies: almost everything we know, we know through the media industry. Its structural imperatives are all inclusive, just as the advertisement slogan says, we have something for everyone so that ‘the whole public gets our message; not just the active practitioners of capitalism’.127 But the private=public equation has even more fundamental implications.128 It converts almost all non-commodity elements into commodities, thereby sealing the faith of those elements that are unconvertible. Media capitalism has only space for those aspects that can experience commercialisation and for those that can be converted into affirmative ideologies. Only those ingredients that can be utilised by media capitalism are assigned value. Even the term value is no longer attached to humanity, society, ethics, philosophy and truth.129 Under media capitalism these no longer have any value. Value is exclusively assigned to commercial values expressed in monetary terms and in ideological values measured by their ability to support media capitalism. Almost everything is converted into a sellable good or service because this—despite all ideologies such as corporate social responsibility, business ethics130 and so on—still provides the economic base of media capitalism. Today, commercialisation applies to public sphere separated from private sphere



Lib-Cap 19th century



public = private merged private = public

mass-mediated sphere



consumer cap. since 20th century

 media capitalism of 21st century 



Fig. 3.6  Merging the private-public domain

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goods as it applies to ideas. Under media capitalism, saleable ideas and saleable commodities enter the public sphere. Only through that they can enter the mind of consumers. Non-saleable and ideologically non-supportive ideas—human ethics, humanity, truth, non-commercial aesthetics and so on—have largely been destroyed, annihilated and, if at all still existent, located to the fringes of society.131 Yet contemporary society is not an entirely untruthful society. Truth simply is no longer needed. It has become like toothpaste A or B. All it needs is to carry exchange—or even better sign-value as the sign— and ‘exchange value of messages overtake their use value’.132 The truth value is largely redundant. Commercial advertising-engineered sales processes rendered truth value a non-value. Commodities have to have sale value. To the advertising industry truth is only needed when assisting a saleable entity. On top of that, the diminished truth value in commercial marketing has been extended to marketing politicians where ‘you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal’.133 Politics and truth are largely irrelevant for the politician/cereal sale. What is relevant is sale-elect-ability—not truth. Neither one needs truth but both need commercial-­ ideological mass appeal as exclusively guided through the media. Figure 3.7 shows how this works: Figure 3.7 shows the decline of the vital public sphere being replaced by a ‘commercial rather than a public-service model’ in which commodities and ideas are exchanged.134 Exchange means receiving ideology in exchange for system affirmation to media capitalism. These ideologies are exchanged on the basis of support for capitalism. In the middle section (Fig. 3.7), the change from the public to the ideological sphere is depicted. It uses the shift from TV-news to infotainment and to pure advertising. This highlights the first structural transformation of the public sphere. During this transformation, the function of news, print and electronic media changed fundamentally. News reports during the time of the liberal public sphere were seen as essential to well-informed enlightened public sphere:

un-saleable no commercial value use-value truth

the restructuring of the public sphere:

news 

advertising   infotainment

Fig. 3.7  From news to commercial advertising

commercial sphere

saleability commercial value exchange-value none (not un-)truth

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members of democratic societies fulfilling a liberal promise of rationality and democracy.135 With the rise of mass participation, the public sphere’s role altered. It guided the twentieth century’s social-welfare state through a semi-democratic but increasingly corporate media influenced public sphere. The slow takeover of corporate media over the public sphere ended non-system-conforming alternatives. It also prevented any development beyond twentieth-century social welfare states.136 The subsequent rise of media capitalism allowed the comprehensive Sabotage of Consciousness.137 Images that individuals have of society, history, economics, politics and even individual memories became mass media engineered, induced and moored in the mind of the public. These increasingly deeper internalised (mis-)representations in the mind of human beings are no longer shaped through social and societal discourse. They are externally created, planned and implanted through top-down sender→receiver mass mediation mechanisms engineered by the media industry.138 Orwell’s mid-twentieth-century two-way Telescreen remains a literary fiction.139 Equally, the media industry’s steering capabilities do not live from open discourse. They live through ideological support and the occasional checking of mass affirmation to capitalism through opinion-­ checking devices, largely conducted through marketing agencies and pollsters. In this, ‘the audience [that] remains the object, not the subject’ of media capitalism is confined to the double activity of receiving ideologically affirmative messages and internalising them to further media capitalism’s stability.140 In that respect, media capitalism is by far more intensive than feudal-­ religious liturgies and sermons. It has established a quasi-monopoly on public opinion. ‘The prevailing mode of media is to monopolise and manipulate information flows’.141 It encapsulates individuals at a daily and even minutely level. It measures and tests human response to advertising’s ‘thirty-second drama’142 reaching deep into the brain through neuromarketing.143 At this level, standard media advertising barrages are microscopically dissected and engineered, producing advertisements for maximum impact. On this, billions144 of dollars are spent globally and scores of psychologists are engaged, while every microsecond of an advertisement is well crafted, planned, designed, engineered and re-engineered, focus group tested and fine-tuned to perfection.145 This creates mass support without any need for societal feedback and criticism. Meanwhile, alternatives are excluded and discarded as unwarranted. Many advertisers know in advance how, when and why people

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react to what is presented to them—whether commercially or politically. They know this better than the people who watch the advertising, read bestsellers, trashy magazines and silly Hollywood movies that ‘maximise … advertising revenue’.146 Media capitalism’s entire system ‘will occupy every moment of the individual’s life’, and convert human existence into ideological system support.147 In fact, ‘every moment of human attention is exposed to the game plan of spin doctors, “cracker-jack PR persons”,148 image managers, pitchmen, communications consultants, public information officers, and public relations (PR) specialists’.149 The move from human existence to saleability (consumer capitalism) and eventually to ideological affirmation (media capitalism) is nowhere more obvious than in modern TV-news such as foxnews.com.150 Media capitalism assesses every news item not by its truth content and relevance for a democratic society but on its saleability and whether it enhances ideological support. While a ‘diversity of channels and programmes does not necessarily mean diversity of content’, corporate media pretends diversity while selling advertisements and ideology like a first-class sales assistant.151 News programming has to be ideological and revenue positive or at least revenue neutral. Ideally, it must fund itself through ads and deliver a profit. In short, news matters when it supports exchange rather than societal use. The interest symbiosis between media, consumerism and ideological support determines what news is and what it is not. News items enhancing the ideology of media capitalism are pushed (Fig. 3.8). News and commercial-ideological interests have long merged into a one-dimensional interest symbiosis, ideologically eclipsed through the euphemism of independent media.152 It masks the news→infotainment and advertisement→infomercial merger (Fig.  3.7) leading to commercialisation and ‘tabloid thinking.’153 Dumping-down’s key motto is, ‘the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract’.154 Much of this occurs under the motto of ‘semi-nudity, sexual innuendo, violence,155 anything to capture the viewer’s attention’.156 Today’s news has a ideological system support  consumption  mass market corporations

 

extra support through democracy consumption + ideology  media corporations

common ownership = common interest in common ideology Fig. 3.8  Doubling up media capitalism’s ideology

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double-­value of saleability and ideology. This can be observed on almost every TV-news and current affairs programme. These are no more than pure entertainment, infotainment or tittytainment, running under the rough formula of157: • ¼ crime reporting,158 • ¼ celebrity news—a person who is known for their well-knownness,159 • ¼ political/non-political news ‘emphasising sex and celebrities to juice the traffic’, • ¼ depicting a favourable attitude towards … companies’ and capitalism (+the weather). Together with ‘celebrity trivia’,160 $ellebrity161 and the ‘celebrification of everyday life’,162 corporate media has reduced real news to tabloid gossip occasionally mixed with ‘product placement’ as ‘embedding products in the plots’ became the guiding principle.163 To negate any sense-making, this formula is further sliced up into fractured and disconnected items that are governed by ‘thirty-second’164 sequences interrupted by even more advertisement—commercial breaks.165 At the next stage of use-value replacement, reports with commercials, infotainment and infomercials, TV-news, foxnews.com and so on are exclusively measured on the double of ideology+saleability. Indicating the marketing→PR shift in the final stage of ideology-sation (turning something into an ideology), news is viewed as an interruption to advertisements. Under media capitalism, news is a commercial and ideological enterprise. Under pre-media capitalism, ‘facts [were] selected with commerce in mind’166—under media capitalism facts are selected with commerce and ideology in mind. Once upon a time, media organisations might have been truly public interest institutions. Now they are ideologically driven corporations that sell media capitalism’s hegemonic ideas like others sell shoes or cars. But in contrast to such corporations, corporate media also broadcast media capitalism’s ideology. Media capitalism has created a form of self-affirmation (Fig. 3.8). Its interest symbiosis between ideological affirmation and marketing binds individuals to media capitalism. Media capitalism has developed a mediated image of society, cementing an image that has been engineered by corporate media. In other words, ‘between you and reality [is the] media [as] you are enormously influenced by the media’.167 Its influence occurs via media images engineered for the sale of commercial goods and political

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ideas. Media capitalism’s ideological double image focuses on ideological support through marketing, the ideology enshrined in market driven cultural products and ‘the top-down diffusion of [a] dominant culture’.168 This image leads to a doubling of ideological and marketing-driven support for media capitalism. Yet this has not yet become an Orwellian society.169 Remnants of Enlightenment’s original idea of democracy can still be found. The ideological media apparatus allows individuals to democratically participate, maintaining the illusion of real democratic choice (Fig. 3.8). But democracy can only occur in a mediated form. Media capitalism applies marketing techniques to politicians, having developed sophisticated instruments to engineer what is ideologically labelled public (read: published) opinion in which ‘business interest not … public service [is] the defining factor’.170 ‘That so-called “public opinion” is generally nothing more than a naïve collective impulse which can be manipulated by catchwords’.171 According to a Public Relations Handbook, this is achieved through a four-stage process.172 • Phase 1: an issue is generated (invented) and ideologically framed.173 • Phase 2: an issue is disseminated and repeated frequently. • Phase 3: it becomes established and well known. • Phase 4: erosion and decline, making space for the next ideology. Media capitalism produces these well-crafted opinions that are sold when they have reached the level of exchange-value. Apart from isolated blogs, and so on, there are virtually no longer any other mass-accepted opinions. This is shown in Fig. 3.8174: Figure 3.8 shows how society is forced to cope with the second part of the doubling up of ideological support: democratic-ideological support for media capitalism. Media capitalism has successfully integrated democracy into its structure as remnants of nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century liberal belief systems into open and pluralist democracy are still alive. These can be kept alive at minimum or no cost to the system of media capitalism. However, incorporating democracy demands several methods: firstly, mass societies function with pre-fabricated ideological images of the mass society.175 The original individual  individual contact prevalent in medieval villages has ended under liberal capitalism and demands larger human conglomerates with industrial cities and nation states. Medieval individual  individual links were therefore replaced

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with an abstract and imaginary individual  society link for citoyéns and individual  nation links for the bourgeois.176 Consequently, this new and imaginary individual  society/nation link could only ever be a mediated link—an image of society and nation placed in the individual mind. Nineteenth-century liberal media followed by twentieth-century corporate media created such links first to the nation, then to consumerism. The subsequent media industry of the twenty-first century lives off these links, but it has shifted early society/nation links to ideological mass affirmation for itself.177 Today, nearly all images of individuals (Taylor Swift), corporations (Coca Cola) nations (USA), politicians (Trump), consumer products (iPad), the environment () and so on are created by the media industry. This opened up image-shaping to the structuring and ideological powers of media capitalism. The media industry has inserted itself as the sole ideological image creating and mediating agency.178 Another way in which media capitalism has inserted itself has been through the establishment of a supportive ideology for consumer capitalism first and media capitalism later. The media industry’s banality of evil simply equates consumer products with political products. Both have to advertise themselves through the only instrument available: the media industry. A third method of media capitalism inserting itself as the sole ideological image creating agency has been the mediation between individuals and political parties. Even though somewhat challenged by social media,179 many links between political parties and party members and voters remain mediated through the media industry. This is done in the same way as the media industry mediates the voting of party members for party candidates. The media-mediated image of a candidate has been sold to party members through the media industry. Media capitalism’s final insertion occurred through the transmission of outcomes of democratic decisions to individuals. For many, the media industry is the sole transmitter of governmental decisions—policies, plans, regulations, new laws and so on—to individuals. Taken together, the media industry has created a version of democracy that is no more than an ideological tool (Fig. 3.8). Democratic choices—party A or B—are no more than simple auxiliaries for media capitalism. Virtually all political parties have to support media capitalism because of its domineering powers. It is this industry that decides whether or not a political party is ideologically supported or not. In true enemy-propaganda-style, such Psy-Ops use labels such as controversial or untrustworthy in order to undermine support.180 This generates a

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subject of critical political power



PR double win—it creates doubt in the voter’s mind while at the same time adhering to PR’s motto: ‘controversy breeds coverage’,181 that is, revenue (read: profits). Following on from here, the media industry alone decides which party is granted access to the general public, and therefore to a voting public, under the motto: if it’s not on TV it does not exist!182 This can seriously shape voting decisions. Parties can only endorse minor variations in order to receive overall support from media capitalism. Choice is reduced to a cosmetic selection that reflects consumer choices between cosmetically (un)differentiated products. Whichever party wins the competition for leadership needs to have the support of media capitalism.183 The idea of pure, simple and market-driven public opinion is an idea that might have existed in the nineteenth century. Under media capitalism, public opinion can only ever be an engineered ideological opinion.184 This is because the power of the media industry allows it to assure that almost all forms of public opinion are ideologically affirmative opinions (Fig. 3.9). Today, the starting point is not a liberal public sphere but an ideologically supportive public sphere that shapes opinions (Fig. 3.9): Figure 3.9 shows how media capitalism shapes public opinion through a conversion of opinions into saleable commodities (commercial) and ideologies (political) just as it converts all civic goods into saleable goods. It redirects public opinion towards ideological support. It has annihilated the original idea of public opinion. The public sphere has become something that belongs in the nineteenth century. Under media capitalism, public opinion can only be associated with the history of Enlightenment. Today, it has to be associated with ideological affirmation (Fig.  3.9). Despite this, media capitalism is still forced to keep the ideology of public opinion alive. Its societies are not dictatorships.185 It simply isolates democracy from the centres of production and consumption. Democracy has no functional significance for media capitalism; therefore, it has been moved from something to must have to something nice to have. Electoral spectacles have entertainment value ‘feeding … the masses to keep them in isolated consumers & critical intellectuals



object of ideology & manipulation



supportive consumers & supportive voters

supportive public opinion

Fig. 3.9  Public opinion and ideological support

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eternal servitude’.186 Media capitalism has developed a highly structured apparatus that allows some forms of public opinion to function as ideological support for media capitalism. Today the once valued critical power of public opinion is no more than a legitimising accessory. It serves to pacify the critical-enlightened citoyén through the inclusion into its ideology. Through this process it enhances its very own legitimacy. By keeping some public opinions inside the sphere of system supportive critical political power, media capitalism successfully deflects all accusations of being fascistic, authoritarian or totalitarian. Any critique runs into empty space.187 Any challenging critique—for example, capitaloscene188—is purged using the 3Ds: deny (something exists), deflect (diminish it as much as possible) and delay (the inevitable as long as possible). This allows media capitalism to hide its deceptive character. While sidelining real anti-establishment critique, media capitalism can afford to split the remaining public opinions into a dominant section of ideologically affirmative public opinion and a minor section of critical public opinion (Fig. 3.9). Media capitalism’s goals are achieved through: 1. preserving support through the creation of ideologically affirmative public opinion; and 2. allowing critical but supportive sections of society to exist inside the confinements set by media capitalism. This achieves two things: the conversion of critical public opinion into ideologically supportive opinion and the creation of ideologically motivated voters that guarantee system stability under PR’s core assumption that a voter ‘lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct’.189 Simultaneously, it accepts a minor group of critical citoyéns and intellectuals (Fig. 3.9). One guarantees domination while the other deflects criticism. Challenging opinions issued by independent and critical citoyéns and intellectuals are admitted but framed as controversial and diminished.190 This allows media capitalism to present itself as open and objective. A pretended balance and objectivism occurs in the form of sophisticated pro-and-contra ideologies that always promise to listen to both sides. Ideological support is more powerful when it takes critical public opinion on board and deals with it inside its ideological structure. This avoids relocating critique into harder to control anti-capitalist or subversive sub-cultures. To avoid this, media capitalism presents critical support as supportive objectivism (Fig. 3.10):

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 ideologically supportive – PRO position Ideologically supportive – CONTRA position   media capitalism provides a stage for system-supportive debates

Fig. 3.10  The ideology of objectivism

By dividing ideologically supportive elements into pro-supportive critique and contra-supportive critique—both are supportive—media capitalism is able to present system supportive critique as objective. Once real anti-supportive critique has been successfully isolated, the remaining version of system supportive critique can be successfully allowed to enter into the secured domain of affirmative public debate. A secured and established framework for such confined pro-and-contra debates is exclusively provided by the media industry. The public sphere is no longer a ‘space of autonomy’ but a platform for ideology broadcasting.191 It also provides a general environment in which highly affirmative pro-and-contra exchanges take place. In that way, real critique can safely be excluded, while ideological affirmation is played out in full view of the public. One of the original ideas of truth finding (thesis→anti-thesis→synthesis) is reduced to simulacra—a simulation.192 For the vast majority of pacified and ideologically conditioned people, truth only appears in the form of what is presented inside media capitalism’s confinements. Nonetheless, a small minority of critical citoyéns has to be entertained and made to believe to be engaged. This is a simulation of truth finding, exercised to serve those remaining sections of society that still hang on to a belief in truth and truth finding exchanges. However, their debates are no longer critical discourses. They are simulated tabloid-TV/web spectacles where those with the better arguments are pushed aside by those with the loudest voice,193 for example, in shouting matches on Fox TV. All this is played out inside narrowly confined infotainment that entices viewers for ratings and advertising revenue while simultaneously disengaging truth and critique. It is based on the simple premise that truth does not sell but spectacles do.194 These debates are engineered as hyped-up competition with winners and losers. When pretence overtakes substance, truth, ethics and authenticity die. By allowing highly ideologicalised and simulated pro-­ and-­contra debates, media capitalism achieves five important tasks195: 1. Real opposition can be successfully marginalised and excluded.196 Yet in a few minor incidences, occasionally some minor anti-­

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supportive elements have managed to break into the secured domain of media-engineered debates. In these cases, these anti-supportive elements are effectively portrayed as violent or as violating an established framework or a faked peace defined by the power and structural violence197 of the media industry. 2. Critical elements can be split into being affirmative pro-supportive or a dangerous anti-supportive opposition, thereby weakening real opposition under the proven divide-and-conquer rule. 3. Such a division allows for the pacification of both: the anti-­supportive opposition is portrayed as controversial, partisan, radical, violent, militant and criminal, leading to marginalisation and exclusion, while the affirmative opposition is allowed to participate in the manufacturing of media capitalism. 4. Those social groups showing critical but system-supportive attitudes can be paraded as being on the right track. Their system support secures participation while stabilising media capitalism. 5. Critical but supportive groups are still provided with a forum for counterpoint and contra-point exchanges. They consist of system stabilising progressive intellectuals and remnants of the citoyén. However, pre-organised structures of objective support (Fig. 3.10) have already done the work before they are permitted access to the media industry’s public sphere. They are allowed to take part in so-­ called balanced, unprejudiced, unbiased, fair, impartial, neutral and objective pro-and-contra debates. Under conditions of ideologically supportive objectivism, media capitalism can successfully simulate the existence of an open public sphere. This has managed to isolate true anti-capitalist ideas while moving all remaining soft-critical energies onto ideologically supportive objectivism (Fig. 3.10).198 Those anti-supportive groups that resist any conversion into pro-­ support have been reduced to a microscopic fringe existence and are being cut-off and ignored.199 For them, the apparatuses described in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995) and Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1948) provide sufficient force to assure their microscopic existence. Today, the stunning success of media capitalism has rendered these groups insignificant, of no consequence and without power to challenge media capitalism.200 Symptomatically, the Occupy Wall Street (2011+a-year) and the 99% movement have changed next to nothing. These movements have

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been successfully isolated by the media industry and exposed to capitalism’s police force until they quickly became irrelevant. All these are marginal issues with mild entertainment value for media capitalism. On the whole meanwhile, societies under media capitalism are no longer sustained through prisons and Orwellian super states. The vast majority of people have been moved into ideological mass affirmation where they have been asphyxiated for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, real anti-affirmative critique on the horrors of police states, panoptical surveillance and overdone security laws only become a marginal issue that has virtually nothing to do with mainstream society and can— rather successfully—be rendered irrelevant.201 Hence, nearly all critique of the panoptical super control state runs empty.202 Media capitalism can easily deflect these mark-missing critiques by framing them as irrelevant— which they actually are, except in the minds of a few remaining romantics and their tiny entourage still fighting the battles of the pre-media-­capitalism age. Trapped inside their fantasies of a surveillance super state, these critiques have comprehensively failed to attack the core of media capitalism and its ideological affirmative apparatus.203 Meanwhile, media capitalism has created ideologically supportive consumers, employees and voters. None of them need surveillance or police states. Surveillance is only needed for marginalised groups that still show resistance to media capitalism’s overall ideology. Media capitalism as the sole mechanism for ideological affirmation has rendered almost all forms of mass control and mass surveillance obsolete. Today, surveillance is only experienced at society’s margins. This freed up media capitalism to take on more fruitful fields of ideological endeavour. Young children are manipulated and conditioned to ideologically support media capitalism—achieved through media capitalism’s family-school duo-supportive interplay. Early conditioning is vital for media capitalism. The exposure to corporate media from an early age onwards is shown in the next chapter.204

Notes 1. Habermas, J. 1988. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: MIT-Press (p. xi); Smart, B. 2010. Consumer Society, London: Sage; Habermas, J. 1998. The Inclusion of the Other, Cambridge: MIT-Press (p. 3); Boggs, C. 2000. The End of Politics—Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere, London: Guilford Press (p.  37);

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135. McQuail, D. 2005. McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 5th edition, London: Sage (p. 47ff.); Thussu, D. K. 2007. News as entertainment: the rise of global infotainment, Thousand Oaks: Sage; Richardson, K., Parry, K. & Corner, J. 2012. Political culture and media genre: beyond the news, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 136. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn–Meidner_model. 137. Jacoby, R. 1997. Social Amnesia—A Critique of Contemporary Psychology, London: Transaction Publishers (p.  7); Theobald, J. 2004. The Media and the Making of History, Aldershot: Ashgate. 138. Kahneman, D. 1973. Attention and Effort, Englewood: Prentice-Hall; Kahneman, D. 2002. Maps of Bounded Rationality: A Perspective of Intuitive Judgement and Choice, Nobel-Prize Lecture, Dezember 8th, 2002; Eysenck, M. 2006. Fundamentals of Cognition, Hove: Psychology Press; LeDourx, J. 1996. The Emotional Brain—The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, New York: Touchstone Books (p. 15); Postman, N. 1966. Language and Realty, New York: Holt (p. 6ff.). 139. Schramm, W. & Roberts, D. (eds.) 1971. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, Chicago: University of Illinois Press (p. 570); McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media—The Extension of Man, New  York: McGraw-Hill (p. 329ff.); Negt, O. & Kluge, A. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience—Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (p.  40ff.); Crisell, A. 2006. A Study of Modern Television—Thinking Inside the Box, Houndmills: Palgrave. 140. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.  492; cf. Truzzi, M. 1968. Sociology and Everyday Life, Englewood: Prentice-Hall, p.  2; Jaeger, L. 2004. Adorno—A Political Biography, London: Yale University Press; Bernstein, R.  J. 1991. Introduction, in: Adorno, T.  W., The Cultural Industry, London: Routledge, p.  9; Held, D. 1997. Introduction to Critical TheoryHorkheimer to Habermas, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 77ff. 141. Ahmed, N. & Markell, A. 2017. The Collapse of Media (https://www. counterpunch.org, 1st December 2017, accessed: 12th December 2017). 142. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 71; cf. Pratkanis, A. R. 2007. Social Influence Analysis, in: Pratkanis, A. R. (eds.) The Social Science of Social Influence, New York: Psychology Press, p. 17. 143. Lindell, A. K. & Kidd, E. 2013. Consumers Favor “Right Brain” Training: The Dangerous Lure of Neuromarketing, Mind, Brain, and Education, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 35–39. 144. https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-­digital-­ad-­spending-­2019.

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145. Kamberelis, G. & Dimitriadis, G. 2013. Focus Groups: From Structured Interviews to Collective Conversations, London: Routledge. 146. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 353; cf. Gray, J. 2012. Neoliberalism, Celebrity, and Aspirational Content, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 104. 147. Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 17. 148. Holborow, M. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, p. 78. 149. Ewen, S. 1996. PR!: a social history of spin, New York: Basic Books, p. 19; cf. StormClouds 2014. Propaganda, Imperialism, and the Council on Foreign Relations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8ERfxWouXs, 8th January 2014, accessed: 15th December 2019); Domhoff, G.W., 2014. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Grand Area: Case Studies on the origins of the IMF and the Vietnam War. Class, Race and Corporate Power, 2(1): 1–41; Shoup, L. H. & Minter, W. 1977. Imperial brain trust: the Council on Foreign Relations and United States foreign policy, New York: Monthly Review Press. 150. Klikauer, T. & Campbell, N. 2020. Tabloid Goes TV: the Foxification of America (https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/24/tabloid-­goes-­ tv-­the-­foxification-­of-­america/, 24th April 2020, accessed: 5th April 2021). 151. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 497. 152. Edwards, D. & Cromwell, D. 2006. Guardians of power: the myth of the liberal media, London: Pluto Press; Drew, J. 2013. A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media, London: Taylor & Francis; Uscinski, J. E. 2014. People’s news: media, politics, and the demands of capitalism, New York: New York University Press. 153. Pratkanis, A. R. 2007. Social Influence Analysis, in: Pratkanis, A. R. (eds.), The Social Science of Social Influence, New York: Psychology Press, p. 43. 154. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 267. 155. Shanahan, J. 2020. Media Effects, Cambridge: Polity Books. 156. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 94. 157. Boorstin, D.  J. The Image (www.bookrags.com/studyguide-­the-­ image/#gsc.tab=0), pdf-download: 31st March 2017, p.  7; Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, pp. 74 & 161; McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p.  189; Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p.  200; Key, W.  B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New  York: H. Holt, p. 100.

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158. Leigh, R. 2017. Myths of PR, London: Kegan Page, p. 54. 159. As engineered by the ‘celebrity-manufacturing genres’ (Gray, J. 2012. Neoliberalism, Celebrity, and Aspirational Content, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 95). 160. Hood, B. 2012. Self Illusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 192. 161. Mazur, K. 2012. $ellebrity (Documentary, 1  h 29  m; Jennifer Lopez Movie HD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFuctZT-­Nus, accessed: 29th December 2017); cf. Gray, J. 2012. Neoliberalism, Celebrity, and Aspirational Content, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.), Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 89. 162. Bartholomew, M. 2017. Adcreep, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.  124; cf. Vaidhyanathan, S. 2018. Antisocial Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 82. 163. McChesney, R. W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New York: The New Press, p. 155; cf. Boorstin, D. J. 1992. The image, New York: Vintage Books, p.  23; Facebook, Twitter, etc. “publish” (!) ‘rumors and single-source stories’ (Gehl, R. W. 2014. Reverse engineering social media, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, p. 48). 164. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 123. 165. ‘Hardt, H. 2004. Myths for the Masses—An Essay on Mass Communication, Oxford: Blackwell (pp. 42 &75); Good, H. & Borden, S. L. (eds.) 2010. Ethics and Entertainment: Essays on Media Culture and Media Morality, Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. 166. Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 231. 167. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 90; cf. Boorstin, D. J. 1992. The image, New York: Vintage Books, p. 37. 168. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 518. 169. Kateb, G. 1966. The Road to 1984, Political Science Quarterly, 81(4): 564–580. 170. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 410. 171. Ewen, S. 1996. PR!: a social history of spin, New York: Basic Books, p. 135. 172. Theaker, A. 2001. The Public Relations Handbook, London: Routledge, p. 116. 173. Borah, P. 2011. Conceptual issues in framing theory: A systematic examination of a decade’s literature, Journal of communication, 61(2): 251; Fielits, M. & Marcks, H. 2019. Digital Fascism, free download: https:// d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net, accessed: 15th June 2020, p. 9.

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174. Althusser, L. 1984. Essays on Ideology, London: Verso; Schramm, W. & Roberts, D. (eds.) 1971. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, Chicago: University of Illinois Press (p. 579ff.). 175. Skoll, G. R. 2010. Social Theory of Fear: Terror, Torture, and Death in a Post-Capitalist World, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan; Doris, J.  M., & Murphy, D. 2007. From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: the moral psychology of atrocity, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 25–55. 176. Anderson, Be. R. 1983. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London: Verso. 177. Sahlins, M. D. 1960. The Origins of Society, in: Hammond, P. B. (eds.) 1964. Physical anthropology and archaeology: introductory readings, New York: Macmillan. 178. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. 1998. What Is Agency?, American journal of sociology, vol. 103, no. 4, pp.  962–1023; Loyal, S. 2012. AgencyStructure. Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, Published Online: 29th Feb. 2012 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com; Canaan, J. C. & Shumar, W. (eds.) 2008. Structure and agency in the neoliberal university, New York: Routledge. 179. Gehl, R. W. 2014. Reverse engineering social media, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, p. 15. 180. Pomerantsev, P. 2019. This is not propaganda, New York: Public Affairs (Faber & Faber, eBook), p. 398. 181. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 26. 182. Later it became if it is not on Facebook, it does not exist as the Facebook case of Phan Thi Kim Phúc (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YZv5KimnaVQ) shows (Vaidhyanathan, S. 2018. Antisocial Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 45). 183. Tourish. D. 2013. The dark side of transformational leadership: a critical perspective, London: Routledge (p. 77ff.). 184. Bourdieu, P. 1979. Public Opinion does not exist, in: Mattelart, A. & Siegelaub, S. (eds.), Communication and Class Struggle: Capitalism, imperialism (vol. 1), New York: International General, p. 124. 185. Boggs, C. 2018. Fascism old and new: American politics at the crossroads, New York: Routledge. 186. Escobar, P. 2017. In An Age of Hollow Men and Existential Angst (https://www.counterpunch.org, 26th December 2017; accessed: 18th January 2018). 187. Giroux, H. A. 2018. American nightmare: facing the challenge of facism, San Francisco: City Lights Books. 188. Moore, J. W. 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3): 594–630.

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189. Lippmann, W. 1927. The Phantom Public, London: Transaction Publishers, p. 4. 190. Cf. Entman, R.  M. 1991. Framing US coverage of international news: Contrasts in narratives of the KAL and Iran Air incidents, Journal of communication, 41(4): 6–27. 191. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 104. 192. Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Lash, S. & Urry, J. 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity (p. 289); Debord, G. 1977. Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black & Red; Green, J. E. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an age of Spectatorship, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Bennett, W. L. & Entman, R. 2001. Mediated Politics—Communication in the Future of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (p. 7). 193. Tocqueville, de, A. 1835. Democracy in America (transl. Edited & introd. by Harvey C.  Mansfield and Delba Winthrop), Chicago: University of Chicago Press; McChesney, R.  W. & Schiller, D. 2003. The Political Economy of International Communications, Geneva: UNRISD (p. iv). 194. Kellner, D. 2013. Media Spectacle, London: Routledge; Markovitz, J. 2011. Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice, London: Taylor & Francis. 195. Gitlin, T. 2003. The whole world is watching: mass media in the making & unmaking of the New Left, Berkeley: University of California Press; Farmer, P. 1996. On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below, Daedalus, vol. 125, no. 1, pp.  261–283; Farmer, P. 2004. An Anthropology of Structural Violence, Current Anthropology, vol. 45, no. 3 (online: jstor.org/stable/10.1086/382250); Curtin, D. & Litke, R. (eds.) 1999. Institutional Violence, Amsterdam: (Value inquiry book series) Rodopi Press; Lewis, J. 2012. Global media apocalypse: pleasure, violence and the cultural imaginings of doom, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Muchembled, R. 2011. A History of Violence, Oxford: Polity Press; Davies, M. 2013. Oppositions and ideology in news discourse, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 196. ‘A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’ (Pilger, J. 2017. This Issue is Not Trump. It is Us, Counterpunch.org, 17th January 2017, p. 2). 197. Farmer, P., et al. 2004. An anthropology of structural violence Current anthropology, 45(3): 305–325.

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198. fodi.sydneyoperahouse.com is a perfect example because “Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas” that is anything but dangerous. What is paraded are system stabilising ideas. 199. Dilenschneider, R.  L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p. xv (preface). 200. Comité invisible 2009. Insurrection qui vient/The coming insurrection, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) & Cambridge: MIT Press; Schrager-Lang, A. & Lang-Levitsky, D. 2012. Dreaming in public: the building of the occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist; van Gelder, S. (eds.) 2011. This changes everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement, San Francisco: Berrett-­Koehler Publishers. 201. Chomskly, N. 1997. What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, Z Magazine, October 1997 (https://chomsky.info/199710__/, accessed: 15th January 2020). 202. Giroux, H. & Evans, B. 2015. Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectaclem, San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. 203. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series); Boghosian, H. 2013. Spying on democracy: government surveillance, corporate power and public resistance, San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. 204. Hartley, J., Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. 2015. A Companion to New Media Dynamics, Oxford: John Wiley; Dimofte, C.  Haugtvedt, C. & Yalch, R. 2015. Consumer Psychology in a Social Media World, London: Routledge (P. 251); Verlegh, P., Voorveld, H., & Eisend, M. 2015. Advances in Advertising Research (Vol. VI): The Digital, the Classic, the Subtle, and the Alternative, New York: Springer (p. 243).

CHAPTER 4

Media Capitalism and Schools

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason toban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. —Vaidhyanathan, S. 2018. Antisocial Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 24; Briggs, A. et al. 2020. A Social History of the Media, Cambridge: Polity Books In the world of commercechildren are fair game andlegitimate prey. —Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co. p. 156

Media capitalism has intimately linked education to ideological system support.1 Most obviously, proponents of media capitalism never admit I am ideological.2 Still, their ideology assures social cohesion. The main task of ideological education is the introduction of individuals to media capitalism.3 This is foremost linked to accepting managerial regimes, mass consumption and media capitalism’s rule—all made to appear as ‘a normal part of life’.4 These ideological mechanisms also contain some minor elements of control even though ideological education relies predominantly on ‘manufactured impressions’.5 Their manipulative techniques have been applied to two main forms of ideological education: (a) formal education (‘schools [as] indoctrination centres where students are trained rather than educated’,6 vocational training, colleges and universities)7 and

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(b) informal education through families, parents, relatives, friends and the social or not-so-social media8 (e.g. Disney,9 Nickelodeon, Facebook10). Media capitalism infiltrates a child’s mind through ‘the idiot box’, that is, TV which is ‘training [them] to not think’,11 magazines, books, plays, games and consumer gadgets that carry implicitly or explicitly the prevailing ideology of media capitalism.12 All this is designed ‘to keep you so caught up and consumed [in the consumer] bubble that you don’t even realise you’re in one’.13 On the other side of the coin, formal education uses the instrumental rationality of modern production methods, techniques and engineering concepts and applies these to education. Today, the Fordist mode of organising industry through standardisation and process techniques has infiltrated substantial parts of formal education. As a result, standardised education introduced rational delivery processes, quality checks, assessments, key learning objectives, controlling (fancying the ‘ideology of objectivity’14), feedback systems, supply-chain mechanisms and cybernetic systems designed as a self-regulatory system to improve itself. These systems also feed of themselves. Before Fordist and cybernetic self-regulatory techniques could be applied to ideological education, the educational sector had to become Taylorised.15 Frederick Taylor’s industrial concepts began to enter schools—as ‘the factory model of school with its emphasis on structure, discipline, and order’16—during the early part of the twentieth century by introducing Taylor’s horizontal task division and his vertical hierarchies, resulting in a disintegration of knowledge at the horizontal level and top-­ down authorities, principals (top) and teachers (down), at the vertical level.17 At the horizontal level, ideological education demands that subjects are taught in disconnected ways so that a to-be conditioned ‘innocent and defenceless’18 child—now called ‘young consumer’19—understands everything about how but never why capitalism is the way it is constructed.20 Ideological education never creates a comprehensive and holistic understanding, for example, by linking different subject areas. Instead, the media’s meaning-making focuses on the ideological conditioning of ‘children [as] consumer trainees’ who do not need to understand what is done but perform their individual tasks to get pocket money and go shopping.21 Conditioned by corporate media, they will demand TVs and iPads, never following John Lennon’s words,

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if everyone demanded peace instead ofanother television set, then there’d be peace.22

The how explains the world in endlessly assembled and evermore minute technical and functional details. It remains surface structure knowledge.23 This appears to the educational objects—children24—as an ever expanding jigsaw puzzle of linear and, above all, functional knowledge.25 The why is often avoided, perhaps because it explains connections and reasons comparable to deep-structure understanding. For the ideological conditioning of ‘uniquely impressionable’ children, it is enough to explain the world in surface structure terms.26 That allows ideological educators to fragment knowledge into minute Taylorist pieces. Surface structure knowledge and Taylorised items link up nicely. Both mutually create fragmented educational objects: children.27 Simultaneously, a connecting whole is made to appear highly abstract, intellectual, incomprehensible and largely useless for getting on with life. It is portrayed as not having practical applications with real-world connections. Knowledge has been constructed as something that is only experienced as fractured, disconnected and sliced up, disallowing linkages even between surface and deep structures. As George Orwell (1949: 83) once put it: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY

As objects of educational power, children are kept disconnected. They can never establish deeper understanding, being prevented from gaining any consciousness of underlying processes. Instead, their world is exploited and manipulated in the marketing awareness of manipulability where ‘proof [comes] from psychological research’.28 The ‘manipulation of children’s minds’ through such techniques is designed to keep the child manipulatable and unconscious.29 In Orwell’s warning words: until they become conscious they will never rebel!

Media capitalism wants consuming—not rebellious—children. This, perhaps, is the key to understand its ideological drive. Today, almost all rebellion has been annihilated or is redirected into pure sign-value consumption. Expressions of rebellion have been directed into consuming rebellious labels—like the Che Guevara t-shirt. Media capitalism works

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with the slogan: you need to reach everybody!30 To prevent rebellion against media capitalism: transnational media representations construct consumerist culture as democratic—open, free, where anything is possible. Its underbelly—poverty, hunger, and unemployment—remain uninteresting to mainstream media.31

Still, one of the more serious manifestations has been to connect the question why only with rebels while simultaneously keeping the majority safely inside a superficial how sphere.32 This structure sustains itself through ideological education supported by the media industry. It has managed to assimilate rebellious children and defiant juveniles into its structure—the rest awaits prison in the infamous school-to-prison-pipeline.33 No longer does ideological education need to focus on revolt avoidance measures as outlined by George Orwell. Even if the conditioned people of media capitalism34: took the trouble to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, noneof them would see it as anything other than a story about animals.

Today, ideological education is only to a very minor extent coercive or punishing. Ideological education does not rest on negativity in the form of panoptical setups. It does not need controlling instruments such as surveillance and punishment against rebellion. Instead, it offers positive measures.35 These positive measures are ideological instruments based on incentives and rewards.36 They are administered inside a structure that prevents educational objects from developing too much of a why awareness. A reward encouraging apparatus has been constructed, ranging from brownie points, stars and goodies to performance-related-pocket-money under the ideology of ‘you are what you can buy’.37 Educational objects are deterred from critical thinking and rebellious questioning by a smoothing out of contradictions. Instead of becoming critical, defiant and anti-capitalist, educational objects will be fully functional individuals, shaped to be good at a job—not getting a good job. They are formed by an ‘authoritarian socialisation of schools where good writing is a kind of breaking-in’ of an early child ‘to mould the consumers of the future’.38 This has been perfectly expressed by Goldman39:

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Emma Goldman made a similar observation early in the twentieth century. “What, then, is the school of today?” she asked. “It is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier—a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself. It is but part of a system which can maintain itself only through absolute discipline and uniformity”.

For many schools, strict discipline has long been paramount,40 perhaps ever since French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) emphasised that ‘it is through the practice of school discipline that we can inculcate the spirit of discipline in the child’.41 Strict discipline, standardisation, top-­ down hierarchical school management and a division of academic subjects aid a system-first-and-child-later process. In that way, the pathological managerial training hallucination that children are interested in mathematics on a Monday morning between 9:15 am and 10:15 am and in biology between 11:45 am and 12:15 pm can be maintained.42 After all, at the centre of ideological education are not the children but a process that conditions them to adapt themselves to media capitalism. They have to become ideologically functioning members in the consumptive and managerial spheres without understanding either. The educational apparatus of media capitalism carries connotations of industrial assembly lines. It assembles a positive and ideological consciousness through a strong link between primary and secondary socialisation. This socialisation process occurs through conditioning based on psychologically sophisticated but principally basic effort→reward structures with the trajectory of brownie-points→awards→wages. Children see43 learning as something that leads to reward points and good marks, just as they will see adjusting themselves to managerial regimes as something that leads to rewarding wages.44 For both, the top→down creation of ‘various forms of automatic behaviour’ remains imperative for schooling, management and media capitalism in general.45 It empties the content of education by focusing on rewards. This is conditioned over decades. In short, children are conditioned into accepting joyless learning as a preparation for a joyless working life run by joyless managerial regimes.46 Education is made utterly boring so that children’s intuitive behaviour, inquisitiveness and spontaneity can be replaced with acceptance of the monotony of a future working life. In addition, it also prepares children for the monotony of the supermarket aisle and a consumptive existence.

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Children’s acceptance of educational regimes is further secured by structuring education as externally prescribed. This replays authoritarian forms of life over and over again in a form ofmicro-fascism.47 Education is not made to appear as an area in which children and young adults can have any human input. Rafts of educational experts, pedagogically trained administrators, childhood psychiatrists and educational managers make sure that this cannot happen.48 Early affirmation to school hierarchies, rankings, targets, scorecards and key performance indicators set by educational institutions convey an all important equation: ideological-affirmation-equals-­ rewards. This makes children accept the prevailing ideology and the imperatives of work hard and rewards will come your way. Post-childhood adults are made to see hierarchical work regimes, hierarchically structured consumption and hierarchical status symbols as normal, natural, unchangeable and eternal. With that, one of media capitalism’s prime ideological frameworks has been implanted. Linking ‘mass media [that is] bombarding you [with commercials during] every waking hour’ rather skilfully to ideological education conditions individuals to remain asphyxiated in externally given and behaviouristically induced hierarchical effort→reward (E→R) structures.49 This occurs under the awareness that ‘behaviourism is at its most persuasive when children are concerned’.50 The first advantage of this lies in converting human and humanist education to functional training while emptying training of nearly all human substance through shifting from human quests for knowledge towards efforts.51 Secondly, it downgrades education to conditioning regimes, redirecting energies towards rewards. This creates the ideological E→R link that serves two functions: it drains education of unwarranted, critical and emancipatory truths that seek to preserve a humanistic element whilst simultaneously, its efforts (E) and rewards (R) structure becomes an end-in-itself.52 Meanwhile, ‘providing the whole truth … is simply not their function’.53 Instead, Adapting yourself to ideology education (E) leads to praise (well done!) ↓ Adapting yourself to work leads to money (wages) and commodity status

Ideological education relies heavily on the money and power code, reducing children in processable educational units managed by substantial private and public educational bureaucracies.54 On these organisations, Meyer and Rowan noted,55

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the political consolidation of society and the importance of education for the allocation of people to positions in the economic and stratification system explains the rise of large-scale educational bureaucracies. These processes also explain why educational organisations focus so highly on the ritual of classifications of education. Educational organisations are created to produce schooling for corporate society.

In such an educational structure, educational customers are made to follow the user-pay ideology, having become self-paying units themselves. They function inside private, soon-to-be-privatised and for-profit facilities powerfully supported by mass media. These ‘profit centred businesses [have] a desire to make money’.56 Exposed to the ideology of media capitalism, educational customers become training objects with next to no intrinsic end in-itself. They are processed inside institutions that resemble factories with operations management delivering ideological education in ‘classrooms [that are] transformed into consumer incubation chambers designed to equip students with the best chances of getting employed in an increasingly shrinking job market’.57 These objects are to be conditioned to pre-accept their pre-designed future as human resources. Their natural curiosity and investigative interest are ruthlessly exposed to ‘the manipulation of interests’—the ‘manipulation of opinion [for the] promotion of the rich and powerful’ as well as media capitalism.58 It reflects capitalism’s ‘persuaders of merchandising’59 that sees young children as commodity purchasers while later ‘tapping into teen purchasing power’.60 Ever since ‘the Age of Television has completely succeeded The Age of Typography’, child advertising61 via TV does not operate for or with educational values, truth and ethics.62 Instead, the child advertising motto is, ‘if you are going to lie, stick with the lie’.63 Much of what might best be called ‘against-the-child marketing’ operates with the pathological depictions of an ideologically affirmative and commercialised world inside which product advertising with ‘easy-to-remember names’,64 silly, unintelligent, uneducational, and deliberately dumbed-down65 ‘childish amusement’ nonsense is broadcast.66 For PR and marketing, this is not nonsense at all but ‘commercial indoctrination [as] a massive wave of advertising to children’ is engineered.67 Even though called baby TV,68 child TV is actually not for children at all. Instead, it is television against children, broadcast in the corporate awareness that TV and ‘movies are a powerful form of propaganda’.69 It serves to manufacture social cohesion as well as the acceptance of marketing and capitalism from an early age on.

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Moving to the internet’s online media platform makes things even worse.70 The online platform dictum is ‘the more time kids spend online, studies have shown, the worse their [school] grades are’.71 In media capitalism, this is not unusual. ‘Venture capitalist and former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya admitted … that he regrets helping the company expand its global reach as Facebook72 has more than 2.6 billion73 users worldwide and is still growing. ‘We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works … you are being programmed’.74 For TV and internet corporations, ‘the sinister worlds of Wayne Chilicki, chief executive of General Mills [applies]’75: When it comes to targeting kid consumers,we at General Mills … believe in getting themearly and having them for life.

In Child TV, children’s shows are interrupting mini-commercials— both ‘systematically break large subjects into small chunks’. This automatically leads to simplification and ‘showmanship’ with simple consumers and simple people as the end goal.76 While ‘television actually increases the total volume of advertising business…, a growing volume of propaganda’ always comes with it.77 In some cases, TV-ads and TV child programmes have already become indistinguishable, encouraging, for example, ‘the rags-to-riches fantasy’.78 Programmes like these are only of value to marketing when they carry commercial value, whilst for media capitalism they need to carry its ideology. ‘In the tabloid world [of] public gossip and entertainment’,79 child tabloid-TV no longer interrupts but extends the ideological value of commerce in children’s minds. In the mind of mature adults, advertisements and TV-shows are separated while for the child both are one and the same—and this is whether children live in a ‘constant television household’ (TV never switched off) or ‘spend more time each day with the mass media than without them’.80 The ideological task of Child TV has become to lock media capitalism’s ideology into the brains of unsuspecting children.81 Many of today’s children are ‘not better informed but rather more confused’.82 Feeding them mis- and ‘disinformation destabilises, disintegrates, or disorients identity’83 so that corporate media can—in a second step—provide stability, integration and orientation. For that, corporate media has hideous tools as a child’s brain plasticity can today be manipulated by using fMRI.84 Child programmes on corporate media are not produced to enhance an inquisitive mind and encourage creativity. Instead, they manipulate the child.

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Media capitalism has always ‘understood their needs, they also understood their longings’.85 ‘Non-rational aspects of human action [are working on] generally suggestible and obedient [children while manipulating their] sentimentality, emotions and sympathy, [rendering children] open to suggestions made by advertisers’.86 As ‘emotions can be used for propaganda purposes’87 and manipulation abuses human sentiments, it often also excludes ‘pertinent information’.88 As a consequence, children are exploited to the fullest extent. Advertisers plant specific ideologies, attitudes, ‘feelings and passions’ in the unprepared and still developing mind of a child.89 Commercial-ideological TV-advertisements have long superseded reality and marketing (first) and PR (later) are well aware of that90: The human mind can never grasp all of reality in total, but it can isolate and grasp parts of that reality. It then uses those parts of reality to construct ideas. Those ideas model reality, although they also simplify it by not including reality.

This is where marketing and PR—‘whose very business is the influence of consciousness’91—come in. To achieve current levels of manipulability, children are enticed to spend more hours in front of the TV than in nature.92 Meanwhile, ‘TV-Turnoff Week’ has next to no impact.93 There are cases where children have been made to believe that milk comes from supermarkets instead of from cows. Under crude and rather simplistic twentieth-century consumer capitalism, a sales pitch was the central task of child-TV. Under media capitalism this is no longer enough. The target has shifted. Media capitalism demands a society in which ‘the overriding goal for children aged ten to thirteen is to get rich’.94 In the words of the American feminist bell hooks, multimass media has played the central role as propagandistic voice promoting the notion that this couture remains a place of endless opportunity, where those on the bottom can reach the top.95

Media capitalism’s double task in commercialised and ideologically driven child-TV lies in the sale of commodities as well as in an ideological conditioning of children into media capitalism’s value system that secures system stability for decades to come by reaching ‘into the home of every family [enjoying its] influence over people’s lives’.96 It gives unhindered access to the still developing minds of young children—for example,

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‘Nintendo’s Pocket Pikachu’.97 Parents unconsciously expose their children to the power of the media industry.98 Many do so because of their own uncritical upbringing and because of the time demanding and time constraining oscillation between managerial regimes and consumption they find themselves in. This renders many of them incapable to understand the sophisticated techniques of modern behaviourist marketing psychology (e.g. ‘subliminal priming … perception in the absence of awareness’, etc.99) and ‘modern propaganda [that] is a scientific machine’ applied day in and out to the creation of child TV.100 Today’s managerially induced time constraints prescribed under the ideological banners of work-life-balance and spending-quality-time (an excuse for spending next to no time at all) are supported as one of media capitalism’s prime ideologies.101 In reality, these ideologies force parents all too often into an easy and seductive option of TV-as-child-minding.102 This is successfully sold to parents through the free choice ideology: employment choices, labour market choices,103 contract choices, TV programme choices and viewing choices.104 What media capitalism’s ideology of free choice camouflages is the invention of a pressurised necessity of everyday life, while it simultaneously reduces real life choices that have been confined to the trajectory of105: birth→schooling→working/consuming→death

Much of this exposes children to ideological content engineered by the media industry. As so often, the ascendancy of the choice ideology seems to run counter to the degree to which real life choices have been diminished by media capitalism. The starting point of diminishing life choices (Fig. 4.1) occurred some time during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The eventual closing of choice happened when student revolts and a rising Hippy and alternative lifestyle movement opened many post-World War II societies to non-traditional models, demanding more choice as signified in another world is possible.106 As a reactionary move to that, conservative political parties and increasingly media capitalism itself started to work towards restricting such often non-capitalist and even anti-capitalist choices.107 This produced two developments and their counter-­ developments (Fig. 4.1): Figure 4.1 shows two parallel running movements. On the upper left-­ hand side, it shows a relatively high degree of life choices opened up by alternative movements during the late 1960s and 1970s. These

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high life choices

ideology of free choice low

 time 

 time 

181

high ideology of free choice

life choices low

Fig. 4.1  Diminishing life choice and the rise of the choice ideology

movements ran counter to consumerism first and media capitalism later. They did so in two ways: as non-compliance with consumerism by simply refusing to take part in consumerism when living in communes and the like, and as a deliberate anti-capitalist movement that highlights the pathologies of rampant mass consumerism. To counter these movements, media capitalism fostered—and still fosters—the ideology of free choice. Simultaneously, it reduced life choices, confining evermore sections of the population to media capitalism’s pre-designed path-dependency.108 The taking away of alternative life choices runs exactly counter to the rise of the ideology of free choice. At an individual level, the annihilation of life choices starts early when child TV successfully replaces community parenting with mini ‘families [that] have been restructured [for] miniature audiences’.109 In many families, TV and internet access opens a vital space as corporate media ‘converts computers into vending machines’.110 By doing that, media capitalism can attach its ideological values of a commercialised world to reach virtually anyone with access to radio, TV and the internet. Media capitalism is acutely aware that ‘the idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering, talk’.111 Media capitalism operates through ‘the psycho-seduction of children’, creating semi-tabloidised TV-shows that ‘vulgarise taste [and deliver] narcotisising dysfunction [while they] serve to reaffirm social norms, affirming the status quo [and] conformism’ which results in ‘conformity of life and conformity of thought [which] are indissolubly linked’.112 It creates view-habits and TV-addictions—Oh! she likes to watch the show—under the awareness that ‘there is money to be made [by] addicting users’.113 The softness of the colourful delights of a fairy-tale-like wonder-world merges uneducational TV-shows with advertisements carrying the values of media capitalism. This merger in the unsuspecting mind of a still developing and

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defenceless child borders on child abuse.114 But media capitalism has safely associated child abuse with the tabloid-TV-driven stranger in the park— no association with media capitalism (as the abuser of children) will ever be made by corporate mass media. Meanwhile, child TV appears to gullible parents as harmlessly selecting from an ‘ever expanding menu of entertainment’ and ‘pleasure-selling amusement’.115 Corporate PR sells this as116: ‘give the masses what they want’ which actually means ‘dictate to them a desire for what [marketing/PR] thought they should want’.

Corporate media is convinced that a toddler’s mind can be re-­engineered through years of ideological pre-schooling exposure to the media. It is ‘implanting’117 the ideology of being a useful member of society in which the word useful equates to capitalism’s triple usefulness of: 1. being useful in managerial regimes—work diligently from 9–5 for decades to come; 2. being useful in consumerism—under the shop-until-you-drop maxim; and 3. being useful as a carrier of media capitalism’s ideology—accept capitalism. For media capitalism, children have ceased to be children. They are viewed as future carriers of media capitalism’s ideology. Once the ideology of media capitalism is successfully installed in a child’s mind, senseless consumption comes along free and happily. It is perceived as a normality of human life—a kind of ‘common sense of capitalism’.118 When such children are called mature, they have completed an ideological formatting regime that converted them into ideologically affirmative consumers and diligent human resources.119 The end product is ‘the loss of massage pluralism’, for example, a one-dimensional and ideologically conditioned childish individual with no other options than to find fulfilment in the commercialised and ideological world of media capitalism.120 Such an existence—as opposed to life—is constructed for two spheres: managerial regimes and consumption. Unlike Fig. 4.1 that shows the reduction of life

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choices paralleled by the rise of the free choice ideology, Fig. 4.2 shows the narrowing of life options that ideological education has set: Figure 4.2 shows that the pathway inside media capitalism leaves almost no other path open to children other than to become a mere functional entity inside a pre-set apparatus. There is virtually no existence outside of media capitalism’s ideological support framework broadcasted by the media industry. Its final destination is a one-dimensional asphyxiation inside an extremely narrow band of oscillation between consuming and working constructed as TINA.121 Media capitalism has closed almost all alternative options for a development towards anything but ideological support to its regime. Emancipatory expressions and even resistance against media capitalism have almost completely been destroyed by the media industry. As a consequence, almost everyone goes through ideological education, works and consumes almost without exception. Media capitalism has been able to close the mind of almost all individuals to any form of anti-capitalist lifestyles, alternative models of living and utopia.122 Hence, corporate media ‘forces its way into the mind’ as ideological conditioning in schools becomes deeper and deeper anchored into the minds of children.123 While disallowing alternatives, it establishes one-­ dimensional attitudes inside which only one trajectory is made possible. This trajectory starts with the integration of children into media capitalism.124 Mass media and corporatised education provide powerful ideological support mechanisms to assimilate children into the apparatus of media capitalism. Historically, all this might have started with early capitalism’s peasant→to→worker conversion that always included (and still includes) child labour.125 Adaptation to capitalism includes many generations of adaptation, refinement and fine-tuning of these integrative processes, first by liberal capitalism (child is labourer), then consumerism

 ideologically designed education 

Originally, non-ideological child (birth)

post-educational sphere  Consumer  Oscillation  Worker

 course of ideological conditioning   ideologically designed education 

post-educational sphere 

Fig. 4.2  Child development and post-educational adults

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(child is consumer), and eventually by today’s media capitalism (child is ideology carrier).126 The ideological apparatus that creates conditioned children operates increasingly flawless. After more than two centuries of developing ideological support for capitalism, generations of parents have internalised the ways-and-means of liberal capitalism, with consumerism handing it down to their children.127 Media capitalism feasts on that by targeting parents and children through ‘subliminal psychology and imagery aimed at the subconscious, [manipulating a child’s] visual attention [in an acute awareness that] attention is the gatekeeper for everything’.128 Enhanced by media capitalism’s hideous methods, today’s children inherit middle-class petty-consumer ideology.129 They are supplied with a full set of ideologies upon which schooling can build. Education supplies a function to this, creating the mutuality of an unconscious inheritance paralleled by ideologically trained peers and ideologically conditioned parents that encircle the mind of the young comprehensively with no escape door left.130 This is manifested in the functional structures of today’s schools that represent the all-inclusive conditioning system of ideological education.131 The process of converting human beings into useful human resources occurs to a significant extent long before these resources reach the point of consumerism and managerial regimes. The way from the individual to the functional human resource as a corporate asset includes ideology to an ever greater extent. It links managerial and consumptive regimes to educational experiences based on conditioning effort-reward(E→R) structures built on three key mechanisms: 1. Primary education:  through ideologically supportive homes, parents, peers and relatives; 2. Secondary education:  through compulsory, ideological and formal schooling; and 3. Tertiary education:  through ideologically supportive universities and training colleges.132 All are guided through media capitalism that shapes education attitudes and parents’ knowledge of education, school boards, parent associations and professional education managers. But this also establishes a triple ideological structure (see above) of education skilfully linked to the commercialisation and ideologicalisation of everyday life that has turned a previously common good (education) into a commercial and ideological good.

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Today, individuals can experience private kindergarten, private schools, private colleges and private universities, unaware that133: when managers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatised schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programmes, bombard students with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to success.134

Media capitalism and ideological education have created an interest symbiosis that supports the all-guiding effort-reward(E→R) ideology based on behaviourism. The internalisation of the E→R ideology is carefully engineered through the tandem of schooling and media industry.135 It is established through efforts in studying (E = achievement and efforts) in expectation of rewards (R = marks and praise). This also means that skilled manipulators and ‘PR people can manipulate expectations’.136 E→R is applied outside and inside managerial regimes under the ideological equation: hard work equals monetary rewards. From childhood onwards, the imprint of E→R structures engineers future adults as willing participants in consumerism and managerial regimes. Through school and later employment, capitalism’s prime object (money) is attached to nearly everything, elevating it to the highest medium in existence while assuming fetish character.137 It converts adults on the eternal treadmill of the money-hunting rat race into willing objects of power while reducing their life choices to an eternal but always unfulfilled quest for capitalism’s highest object, namely, money (Fig.  5.1). It converts nearly everything and almost every eventuality of life into monetary exchange-values and the ideology that comes with it. Through money’s tremendous quality of being the single most highly valued exchange item, it also became the ultimate reward as well as the definitive symbol of the ideology of media capitalism.138 The monetary exchangeability of everything inside consumerism has been turned into the prime ideological objective of existence in media capitalism. As ideologically educated individuals have internalised the E→R ideology, they are also fully adaptive to all future eventualities which are seen inside the ideological framework of E→R.  Rather than corporations receiving non-formatted and non-adaptive individuals, they receive the exact opposite. Corporate HR-managers do no longer have to induct unformatted and resisting individuals into managerial regimes because

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managerial regimes increasingly receive pre-formatted, adaptable, compliant, willing and ideologically trained individuals. These can be converted most easily and successfully into human resources and human capital.139 An education system that has ideology as an end in itself converts human beings into individuals with the right ideological attitudes towards managerial regimes. These human resources need only minimal additional corporate-­ based adjustments—so-called induction programmes. Today, these programmes spend more time on portraying the delights of the corporation than on shaping future employees. An individual’s absorption into managerial regimes through the triple-­ ideological effort—home, schooling and media—has been made to appear as no more than a continuation of an already internalised mechanism. It converts our critical faculties into ideologically shaped faculties through an overwhelming apparatus that ‘catches their eye at literally every turn’, engineering one-dimensional narrow mindedness and TINA.140 Just as one of Germany’s prime philosophers, Theodor Adorno, once noted,141 in a phase when the subject abdicates before the alienated hegemony of things, its readiness to vouchsafe what is everywhere positive or beautiful, displays a resignation of critical capacity as much as of the interpretive imagination inseparable from such. If the linguistic behaviour blocks conceptual development, if it militates against abstraction and mediation, if it surrenders to the immediate facts, it repels recognition of the factors behind the facts, and thus repels recognition of the facts, and of the historical content. In and for society, this organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioural rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of reason.

Camouflaging the inescapability of the human-beings→human-resources transition, media capitalism supports the ideological bridging of schoolregimes→managerial-regimes. To underscore the smooth human→to→resource transition, five key mechanisms are used142: 1. Training institutions have taken on an ideological existence representing media capitalism’s overall dogma. 2. Because of their business (private or privatised) or business-like (publicly but under the directives of Managerialism) setups, educational institutions can match the user-pay ideology with their own reality.

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3. Media capitalism’s educational institutions combine ideology with the teaching of functional knowledge and research. This is camouflaged through a kind of we-help-you (to function in media capitalism) approach. 4. Their setup, tuition structure and ideology make educational consumers aware that entry to media capitalism’s upper steering branches—top-management in corporations, marketing agencies, PR, consultancy firms and so on—does no longer come free. 5. This cannot be done passively. Educational consumers have to subscribe to the ideology of entrepreneurship that demands active ideological assistance to media capitalism: you are asked to show your ability to further the ideology of media capitalism. The structure of media capitalism’s core educational institutions includes accreditation institutions, university-based business schools, academics, textbooks, business-to-high-school partnerships, conferences, research projects, academic and semi-academic journals and so on.143 Their task is to convert crypto-scientific knowledge into ideological textbook and managerial knowledge. At the level of educational institutions, ideologically guided textbooks have become one of the main tools for sustaining media capitalism. Textbooks ‘do this not [only] by repressing information, but by creating a situation in which [students] cannot tell the difference between information and disinformation’.144 Beyond that, much of their ‘information isn’t information; it’s just hastily assembled symbols’.145 Media capitalism’s highly ideological textbooks are sold to schools, universities and business schools146 where ideological and functional conditioning towards managerially constructed hierarchies takes place.147 Media capitalism, Managerialism and commercialisation are presented as normal, natural and shrouded in facts-of-life ideologies. They are portrayed as unavoidable, eternal, a-historical and presented as to-be-internalised under TINA. Real facts are ‘absorbed from [an] atmosphere [of ideology that is defined as] an intellectual life consisting of things that sound right, a blend of modern folk wisdom, cliché, talk radio, and … radio babble’.148 After school and university, these are linked to managerial conditioning processes—so-called graduate entry programmes. Submission to managerial regimes is made to appear as a continuation of school based E→R.149 As an important bridging institution, business school conditioning seeks to establish at least five core elements150:

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1. In management, it simulates that there is a minor gap between ordinary schooling and managerial regimes that only they—business schools—can bridge. 2. Business schools provide the only way into the managerial upper sphere. 3. Their we-will-help-you ideology has been successfully established. 4. Educational consumers purchase access to these realms and networks. 5. A subsequent degree indicates the level of achieved ideological affirmation expressed in the sign-value of an MBA and a particular business school (LBS, Harvard, Warwick, INSEAT, Wharton, etc.). All of that links ideology and education to corporate imperatives as broadcasted by media capitalism. As ‘business has the press, the pulpit, and the schools’, it established a seamless system that defines school and working life.151 During pre-media times, much of learning was simply functional, but under media capitalism, simple functionality became inextricably linked to ideology—an ideology that represents a corporate value system conducive to managerial regimes and media capitalism. This value system is formed from an early age onwards. During the twentieth century, a particular ideology emerged that viewed every new-born child as raw material to be converted into submissive human resources.152 In the twenty-first century, children are to be converted into ideological entities that naturally follow the demands of media capitalism.153 Adhering to the factory model of upper and middle management and workers, schooling in the past used to manufacture a set of passive obedient attitudes—do as told. For the lower ranks, this was enshrined in the obedience concept: ‘obedience is regarded as fulfilling someone else’s request, whether the subject thinks these are reasonable or not’.154 Today, the unseen media engineers (PR-talk) manufacture an emphasis on a set of ideological attitudes that reach beyond the out-dated idea of following orders is good for your career. This sort of manufacturing combines ideological consent with actions. It occurs by ‘opening the schoolhouse doors’155 for corporate media, further enhanced through the power and money code in the absence of human goals.156 Educational values based on humanistic goals such as assuring maximum participation in the democratic process, the protection of minorities against prejudices, support for the weak and disadvantaged, equality, environmental protection and so on are cast aside for the money and power code.157 What counts is minimal participation in school decision making processes flanked by an acceptance of a total exclusion of institutional

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democracy. This is the preparation for anti-democratic managerial regimes and consumerism camouflaged through the process of ticking a box every four years. Democratic and ethical values are sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, learning outcomes, measurable achievements, key performance indicators and ideological affirmation to media capitalism. An unconditional adaptation to media capitalism’s master ideologies—free market, the right to manage and Managerialism—is relentlessly fostered.158 This links the three modes of education to media capitalism’s three ideological demands: 1. system demands demanding the creation of an ideologically affirmative workforce; 2. an acceptance of hierarchies and managerial domination; and 3. motivation for managerial regimes and consumerism demands rewards (E→R). Based on these three ideological demands, schools have been turned into highly ideological institutions.159 They have been incorporated into media capitalism’s overall structure of ideological affirmation. This has successfully deleted most forms of humanistic education. Instead, education has become useful as an ideological support system that in turn has become rather useless for the development of human beings. The lack of personal development is accompanied by the rise of the self-help industry.160 Instead of creating virtues and moralities, media capitalism creates ‘moral emptiness’,161 system adaptation, pathologies and psychopaths of Machiavellian dimensions.162 Instead of mature human beings, exchange-­ value training is cherished in the form of degrees and certificates in exchange for managerial positions.163 Any gap between ideological school regimes and managerial regimes is painfully avoided. The ‘excessive marketization of public spaces’ leaves nothing that could be utilised for selfreflection, independence, autonomy, alternatives, resistance and emancipatory experiences.164 The short bridge between ideological schooling and adulthood has been converted into a structure that asphyxiates individuals in an uninterrupted chain of conditioning mechanisms. Pre-engineered schools, managerial and consumption regimes result in a triple asphyxiation: asphyxiation through a teacher’s authority at school; asphyxiation through a boss at work; and asphyxiation through conspicuous consumption.165 Media capitalism can never allow individuals to experience free self-development, self-determination, self-actualisation,

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autonomy and real individuality.166 In short, the seamlessness of existence under media capitalism has to be organised ‘to keep good people down’.167 Flanked by media capitalism’s deregulation ideology, behavioural adaptation to regulation, instructions and rules ensures ideological support, material comfort and status. It is a world governed solely by the money and power code (E→R). Behavioural control is exercised over students at school, over customers at shopping malls and over workers at workplaces.168 An early, continuous and successfully conditioned ideological affirmation to these regimes is flanked by the media industry that entices students, and later human resources, to be ushered through authoritarian hierarchies at school and at work. Under media capitalism, almost all schooling corresponds to the ideological demands of managerial regimes. This link is shown in Fig. 4.3169: Figure 4.3 shows an incomplete list of items that support ideological education. These correspond most directly with the ideological demands of managerial regimes, converting the early conditioning of E→R (brownie points) into the monetary E→R codes for consumption. Finally, all this still manages to divide people—under the proven divide-and-rule statute—into two groups: there are those who govern and rule in the form of teachers and headmasters. And, as a consequence, there are also those who are governed and ruled over. This corresponds directly to workplaces divided into managers and workers. Schools, factories, workhouses and today’s open-plan offices remain hierarchical institutions mirroring authoritarianism, obedience, consumption and hierarchies of consumer products (brands) that establish different statuses. With the ‘emotionalisation of price’,170 brands take on different sign-value as ‘the seduction of young people [converts them] into becoming loyal followers of a brand’.171 Almost nothing signifies the triumph of media capitalism more than172: by her 10th birthday, the average American child recognises one hundredbrand logos; children know the names of more branded characters than of real animals.

These manufactured hierarchies colonise private lives. They dictate that ‘under the sign of Mickey Mouse, James Dean, E.T., Bart Simpson, R2-D2’ and many more, individuals accept hierarchical orderings— Mickey Mouse ranks above R2-D2, Bart Simpson is bigger than James Dean and so on.173 It defines a multitude of mutually stabilising

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in correspondence to

compliance & dependence = success in school & grades aggressiveness & independence = failure & exclusion failure is failure of an individual student, not the school system at school one learns obedience teacher says – student does teacher, subject head, department head, headmaster motivation is conditioned via external rewards (brownie points) pass examination = reward by family and peers teacher makes decisions students are not allowed to participate in decision-making the promotion of system conform values value system stresses certainty over ambiguity & innovation hierarchical authority and dependency educational leader-follower orientation enhanced student values: not a quitter, responsibility, orderly, no day-dreamer, determined, persevering, punctual, dependable, externally motivated, self-control, neatness, honesty, manners Deleting of unwanted behaviour: temperament, aggressiveness, frankness, unpredictable, etc. private school ownership & no ownership by students market exchange between school and student teaching time controlled by a teaching system law takes out attractive alternative to school student is commodity to be processed pyramidal structure: school captain (up) + students (down) control emanates from top via headmaster & school board teaching is determined by system needs, not students’ needs students must be properly supervised at all times diligent in carrying out assignments and tasks internalise school values & mission statements students must be methodical and predictable fundamental change of school system is not feasible creation of a consciousness of inevitable system imperatives token gestures towards participation via student councils conditioning through reinforcement and punishment legitimise & accept inequality172 via different grades education directed towards measurable outcomes, not interest

              

                  



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the ideologies to working life

compliance & dependence = success in reward & promotion aggressiveness & independence = punished & unwanted failure is failure of an individual worker, not the company system at work one needs to show obedience supervisor says – worker does supervisor, middle-management, top-management motivation is conditioned through external rewards (money) performance review = reward via money and status symbols management makes decisions workers are not allowed to participate in decision-making the use of system conform values value system stresses certainty over ambiguity & innovation hierarchical authority and dependency business leader-follower orientation enhanced work regime values: not a quitter, responsibility, orderly, no day-dreamer, determined, persevering, punctual, dependable, externally motivated, self-control, neatness, honesty, manners deleting of unwanted behaviour: temperament, aggressiveness, frankness, unpredictable, etc., private company ownership & no ownership by workers market exchange between company and worker working time controlled by a work system economic system takes out attractive alternative to work worker is commodity to be processed pyramidal structure: managers (up) + workers (down) control emanates from top via CEO and board of directors work-tasks determined by system needs, not workers’ needs workers must be properly supervised at all times diligent in carrying out work assignments and orders internalise company values & mission statements workers must be methodical and predictable fundamental change of work system is not feasible use of a consciousness of inevitable system imperatives token gestures towards participation via trade unions conditioning through reinforcement and punishment legitimise & accept inequality via different wages173 work directed towards measurable outcomes, not interest

Fig. 4.3  Corresponding ideological schooling to work’s ideologies. (aFour ways of inequality have emerged: distantiation [some go ahead, others fall behind]; exclusion; hierarchy, and exploitation [Therborn, G. 2009. The killing fields of inequality, Soundings, 42[42]: 21; bFleming, P. 2016. How managers came to rule the workplace, theguardian.com [21st Nov. 2016])

hierarchies that have infiltrated virtually all layers of society. Media capitalism portrays them as natural and normal and something one has to adapt to. But support to these hierarchies has never been a natural process. It is deeply ideological. It is ideologically conditioned through years of exposure to evermore sophisticated conditioning processes applied in schools. The original conditioning process used during the peasant→worker conversion was mostly based on simple carrot-and-stick forms (incentives and punishment) with an emphasis on the latter. During the course of

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capitalism, this has been transformed into a scientific enterprise with developments in social and psychological science during the twentieth century—science in the service of consumer capitalism, not human beings.174 Perhaps the most important milestone came with Skinner’s behaviourism that replaced nineteenth-century carrot-and-stick methods with sophisticated and scientifically based reward (E→R) structures. Behaviourism’s positive and negative reinforcement—more than its punishment—has been applied by Skinner on white rats in mazes and laboratories. Today, educational consumers are forced through huge sets of maze-like institutions such as pre-schools, kindergartens, schools, high-schools, colleges and universities with real laboratories, gymnasiums, halls, libraries, headmaster’s offices, classrooms and the like. Ideological conditioning—that educators have learned based on studying Skinner’s behaviourism using semi-starved rats—always occurs in places that are removed from the real-world experience. For university students, this is largely achieved through, for example, ideologically framed textbooks that reduce nearly everything to media capitalism’s E→R ideology in the acute awareness that ‘framing can have dramatic consequences for people’s preferences and choices’—in one word: manipulation.175 It is measured and directed towards exchange- and ideological sign-value. This sort of knowledge is useful to managerial regimes under the following reward chain: ideological education→job→performanceE→R→money→consumption→s ign-­value→status

It shows that ideologically conditioned learning is not directed towards individual needs but towards media capitalism’s needs. The educational management of engineered but always external and ideological needs has been most successfully established. It occurred inside an ideology that sells media capitalism’s needs as individual needs. For pupils and parents, it conveys, we know what is good for you!176 As a final touch, the ideology of status symbols is successfully hammered into the minds of individuals ‘because they [the media] repeat. And repeat. And repeat’ these messages.177 In PR-talk it is called ‘repetition adds heat to the image. The viewer becomes more familiar with it. It gradually becomes part of him or her’.178 Interestingly, individuals ‘continue to obey catchwords [even] though they no longer listen to them’.179 These catchwords, messages and

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symbols of status achievements have infiltrated individuals through media constructed sign-values. Carriers of media capitalism’s ideology willingly purchase these signs with sign-value and wear them as proudly as the rat carries a food pill into a corner inside Skinner’s laboratory. Success in ideologically conditioned education relies on three key elements: . positive reinforcement (e.g. a rat’s food pill equals good grades); 1 2. negative reinforcement (rejection, e.g. refusal of a school trip and denial of rewards), and; 3. punishment (schools detention equals demotion, exclusion and dismissal).180 The measurability of learning outcomes inside ideological education mirrors the measurability of subsequent managerial rewards. It divides ideological education into unwarranted, un-measurable and non-tangible outcomes on the one hand and on the other hand into warranted, measurable and tangible outcomes with the focus on measurable outcomes. Ideological education prepares individuals for a world in which only material outcomes are recognised as the sole measure of achievement. Today’s learning outcomes reflect a measurement of performance manifested in )performance-related pay (PRP) inside a tidily structured reward chain. PRP corresponds to school-based performance-related marks (PRM). The common denominator of the PRM→PRP contingency is ideological affirmation to the overall E→R ideology that underwrites media capitalism. It equates PRM→PRP with E→R, ending virtually all forms of non-­ measurable aspects of life.181 Only what is accountable really counts. Today’s schools increasingly reflect the exact opposite of a sign Albert Einstein had in his Princeton University office: Not everything that counts can be counted andnot everything that can be counted counts!

Finally, media capitalism’s ideological demands can be best assured when schooling itself becomes part of a private system based on ownership.182 The socially constructed myth of ownership is precisely one of these unchallenged ideologies of capitalism that has been accepted as a given. It was none other than the great French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1755) who noted in his seminal masterpiece On the Origin of Inequality,183

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The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “this is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind…

The acceptance of the socially constructed idea of ownership and property as a given guarantees that ideologies enshrined in school curricula and in the physical existence of schools coincide. In that way, schools, colleges and universities have become the real, actual and physical expression of media capitalism’s overall ideology. They are the living proof of media capitalism’s ideology and its success. What is important, perhaps more than the business of financial privatisation in-itself, is the ideological message it establishes for media capitalism. It preserves the money and power code inside a real existing institution (school) and its agents (students), and it establishes this ideology from an early age on. Ideological education based on an unwavering belief in markets converts everything and everyone into commodities bought and sold at market price. Education itself has become a commodity, being part of a consumption regime that consumes it like any other commodity. It has annihilated the original Enlightenment ideas of a humanist image of self-­ awareness, self-consciousness, self-reflection, self-determination, self-­ actualisation and a self-criticising human being. Instead, ‘falsehood and distortion are now the routine products’, while education became a business guided by Managerialism as its own sole image.184 It establishes a triple-functionality consisting of being functional at work, adhering to consumption, and to media capitalism’s ideology. The consumption of education follows a capitalist and industrial structure. Education has been industrialised, standardised, mass produced and massively consumed. The oligopoly that exists in educational markets is expressed, for example, through the few global textbook publishers who have long incorporated many other publishing houses as so-called imprints. The fake variety of textbooks and university courses and degrees is a pretended variety of global sameness. It establishes an oligopoly of ideology expressed in cosmetical (in)difference. At the level of management schools, there is a pretended but largely ornamental variety of different business schools that essentially teach the same subjects: financial management, operations management, marketing and HRM at the same levels (BA, MBA and PhD).185

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Even the methods used to teach are the globally standardised methods of the manufacturing industry taken from Taylor and Ford and increasingly from McDonalds.186 Over time these have been perfected. They use modern manufacturing techniques such as outsourcing, supply-chain management and customer satisfaction feedback surveys called student evaluations.187 Even simple things like school lunches are a case in point. These have been exposed to Managerialism’s outsourcing, privatisation, industrial food products and consumption patterns engineered by the media industry.188 School lunches, lunch boxes and their content are manufactured on industrial scale, with industrial methods and sold to mothers and children via ideological images transmitted by the media industry. School lunches have been subjected to Taylorised and Fordist practices much like fast-food halls, thereby converting schooling into the privatisation of everything and everything for sale ideology.189 Before ideological education arrived at private schools (and government schools run under the imperatives of Managerialism) and replaced human-to-school interaction with, first, a human-market/profit-school (consumer capitalism) and then with a human-to-ideology (media capitalism) interaction, several steps had to be completed.190 These historical steps converted education during liberal capitalism into education for consumers (consumer capitalism) and after that into media capitalism. In some cases, this also meant some social-democratic welfare attachments.191 Finally, it reached the stage of ideological education under media capitalism. Ideologically driven media capitalism maintains education as an economically, managerially and, more importantly, ideologically useful structure. This is governed by media capitalism’s ideology linking consumption to ideology as shown in Table 4.1: Table 4.1 shows at the top the rather limited educational demand of pre-mass production and pre-mass consumption (nineteenth century). Education was administered in elitist schools off limits for labourers, proletarians, a relatively small middle class and women. Nineteenth-century liberal capitalism had only a limited need for schooling beyond basic skills192 in pre-managerial times which prevented higher mass education from occurring. Early liberal capitalism depended on commercial operations without the need for a large and well-trained number of engineers, marketing experts and managers. As a result, selective elites were able to pay substantial private tuition through the extraction of surplus value based on their privileged position in the economic process of liberal capitalism.

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Table 4.1  Changing costs of education Time Education Cost and attendance

Contribution

19th Elite

Private/surplus extracting wealthy elite (bourgeois) State covers for rising middle-class attendance Education becomes ideology, state’s role declines

20th Mass 21st

Private

Cost and reproduction of elite State finance and mass attendance Private cost and mass attendance

Schools changed dramatically during the course of the twentieth century, resulting in the arrival of new demands in education. The change emerged because of a fundamental shift in production methods brought about by Taylorism and Fordism with more scientific methods of production, the administration of workers and an adjacent ideology shaping work (first) and education (later). Under Fordism, an ever-increasing production-­consumption integration demanded new occupations, professions as well as sophisticated and trained managers. This demanded mass attendance and mass education for a growing middle class. But the middle class lacked the funds that paid for elite education. Hence, twentieth century social-democratic welfare states started to cover the cost for an education to support ‘the mass-production-consumption society’.193 The social-democratic welfare state became a necessary auxiliary of consumer capitalism. Twentieth-century corporate media were able to frame this necessity of capitalism as victory of social-democratic political parties—a capitalist necessity became an ideology. This had a much-needed and designed impact. It resulted in an increased participation of a rising middle class on mass education. The educational demands of consumer capitalism shifted substantial sections of a previous lower middle class, and even the working class, onto higher college education and university. The lower middle class increased numerically as capitalism oligoplised itself, destroying small businesses in favour of ever larger corporations. Parallel to that, capitalist developments demanded the creation of a sufficient class of managers, also creating a need for an ideology that supported this class. Neoliberalism and Managerialism provided such ideologies.194 As schools and universities were privatised or fell under neoliberalism’s ideology of Managerialism, state funding was reduced. This led to the student-as-revenue idea which, in turn, led to greater competition among schools, colleges, and universities. Yet, the student-as-revenue idea

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also supports media capitalism’s pre-designed ‘dog-eats-dog world [where] only the strong survive’.195 As a consequence, marketing and PR gained in importance. Both share one commonality: ‘in the world of public relations, there is no such thing as a notion of truth’.196 Today the ideologies of Neoliberalism and managerialism have infiltrated almost all eventualities of everyday life: Manage your Finances, Manage your Marriage, Manage your Relationship and, of course, there is also the inevitable Manage your Sex Life. These are only a few examples of the fact that media capitalism tells us that the reality of experiencing human life has been superseded by something to be managed. With the explosion of management, Managerialism and the subsequent introduction of university-based management studies, newly founded management schools allowed for an almost revolutionary restructuring and re-focusing of mass universities during the second half of the twentieth century.197 During that time, demands originating from mass consumption had changed university education dramatically, ending almost all earlier forms of access restrictions. Working-class access to higher education increased, providing admission to non-functional, critical, reflective and even anti-capitalist knowledge. This resulted in severe problems for capitalism’s ideology. Capitalism countered this in two ways: firstly, it broadcast the message that the young ‘learns in school [and] from mass media [that] we live in a classless society where individual effort … is the sole engine of success … [and] we … blame ourselves individually if we fail to succeed’.198 Secondly, learning, science, research and universities were restructured. They could no longer be places of anti-capitalist sentiments and student revolts but had to become part of capitalism’s ideological support structure. How this was done is explained in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Lakoff, G. 2004. Don’t think of an elephant!, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Pub. p. 83 f. 2. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 44. 3. Gabbard, D. 2012. Updating the Anarchist Forecast for Social Justice in Our Compulsory Schools, in: Haworth, R. H. (eds.) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Oakland: PM Press (p. 35). 4. Kendall, D.  E. 2011. Framing class (2nd ed.), Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 220.

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5. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited: how the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 2; von Heyking, J. & Trepanier, L. 2013. Teaching in an age of ideology, Lanham: Lexington Books. 6. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 251. 7. Giroux, H.  A. 2011. On critical pedagogy, New  York: Continuum (pp. 10 & 77). 8. Baccarella, C. V. et al. 2018. Social media? It’s serious! Understanding the dark side of social media, European Management Journal, 36(4): 431–438. 9. Wasko, J. 2020. Understanding Disney, Cambridge: Polity Books. 10. Abramson, J. 2019. Merchants of truth, New  York: Simon & Schuster (ebook), p. 986. 11. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 912. 12. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New  York: Metropolitan Books, p. 142; Schramm, W., Lyle, K. & Parker, E. B. 1961. Television in the lives of our children, Stanford: Stanford University Press; Schramm, W. 1961. The Effects of Television on Childen and Adolescents, Paris: UNESCO: p. 8; cf. Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p.  12; Bernays, E. L. 1928. Manipulating public opinion: The why and the how, American Journal of Sociology, 33(6): 968; Whitehouse, M. 1967. Cleaning-up TV: From protest to participation, London: Blandford. 13. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 284. 14. Gitlin, T. 2003. The whole world is watching, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 2. 15. Monahan, T. 2013. Globalization Technological Change and Public Education, London: Routledge. 16. Ehrensal K. N. 2002. Training Capitalism’s Foot Soldiers, in: Margolis, E. (eds.) The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education, London: Routledge, p. 100. 17. DeVitis, J.  L. 1974. Marcuse on Education: Social Critique and Social Control, Educational Theory, 24:3, 269–268; Coffey, D. & Thornley, C. 2013. Industrial and Labour Market Policy and Performance: Issues and Perspectives, London: Routledge; Monahan, T. 2013. Globalization Technological Change and Public Education, London: Routledge; Weir, R. E. 2013. Workers in America: a Historical Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 18. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 77.

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19. Chaplin, N.  L. & Connell, P.  M. 2015. Developmental Consumer Psychology, in: Norton, M.  J. et  al. (eds). Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 183. 20. von Heyking, J. & Trepanier, L. 2013. Teaching in an age of ideology, Lanham: Lexington Books. 21. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p.  154; Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New  York: Metropolitan Books, p. 9. 22. Bitette, N. 2015. Remembering John Lennon: 10 famous quotes on his 75th birthday (http://www.nydailynews.com, 9th October 2015, accessed: 17th January 2018). 23. Chomsky, N. 1969. Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club. 24. Smythe, D. W. 1977. Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory, 1(3):13. 25. Lynd, R. S. 1939. Knowledge For What?—The Place of Social Science in American Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press (p. 210); Beder, S., Varney, W. & Gosden, R. 2009. This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The corporate capture of childhood, Sydney: UNSW Press. 26. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 17. 27. Goldman, E. 1906. The Child and its Enemies, Mother Earth, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 7–14. 28. Maison, D. & Gregg, A. 2016. Capturing the Consumer’s Unconscious, in: Jansson-Boyd, C. V. & Zawisza, M. J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p.  145; Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 89. 29. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 156. 30. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 247. 31. Hooks, B. 2000. Where we stand: class matters, New York: Routledge, p. 72. 32. Croall, J. 2013. Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel, London: Routledge. 33. Kim, C.  Y., et  al. 2010. The school-to-prison pipeline: Structuring legal reform. New York: NYU Press. 34. Bageant, J. 2007. Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 82. 35. Freud, S. 1922. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: Norton Press (1965); Lynd, R.  S. 1939. Knowledge For What?—The Place of Social Science in American Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press (p. 6). 36. Eyal, N. 2014. Hooked: how to build habit-forming products, New York: Portfolio, p. 73.

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37. Hooks, B. 2000. Where we stand: class matters, New  York: Routledge, p. 126; Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 82. 38. Barber, B.  R. 2007. Con$umed—How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, New  York: Norton, p. 16; Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 13; cf. Saltman, K. J. & Gabbard, D. A. (eds.) 2011. Education as enforcement: the militarization and corporatization of schools (2nd ed.), New  York: Routledge. 39. Goldman, E. 1906. The Child and its Enemies, Mother Earth, vol. 1, no. 2, pp.  7–14; quoted from Gabbard, D. 2012. Updating the Anarchist Forecast for Social Justice in Our Compulsory Schools, in: Haworth, R, H. (eds.) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Oakland: PM Press; Neill, A.  S. 1990. Summerhill: a radical approach to child-rearing, London: Penguin Books; Neill, A. S. 1993. Summerhill School: a new view of childhood (edited by Albert Lamb), New York: St. Martin’s Press; Suissa, J. 2010. Anarchism and education: a philosophical perspective, Oakland: PM Press; Croall, J. 2013. Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel, London: Routledge; Spring, J. H. 2013. Corporatism, social control, and cultural domination in education: from the radical right to globalization: the selected works of Joel Spring, London: Routledge. 40. Gardner, H. 1999. The disciplined mind: what all students should understand, New York: Simon & Schuster; Miller, A. 2002. For your own good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence (Am Anfang war Erziehung), 4th ed., transl. by H. & H.  Hannum, New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 41. Durkheim, E. 2012. Moral education, in: Ballantine, J.  H. & Spade, J. Z. (eds.) Schools and Society—a sociological approach to education, Los Angles: Sage. 42. Gabbard, D. 2012. Updating the Anarchist Forecast for Social Justice in Our Compulsory Schools, in: Haworth, R. H. (eds.) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Oakland: PM Press (p. 38). 43. Children absorb the advertising. They become what they see (Mander, J. 2012. The Capitalism Papers, Berkeley: Counter Point Press, p. 214). 44. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New York: Basic Books; Fleming, P. & Cederstrom, C. 2012. Dead Man Working, Alresford: Zero Books; Davies, B. 2012. Social Control and Education, London: Routledge. 45. Martin, E.  D. 1920. The Behavior of Crowds—A Psychological Study, New  York: Harper (downloaded 28th February 2017 from: www.mir-

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rorser vice.org/sites/gutenberg.org/4/0/9/1/40914/40914-­ h/40914-­h), p. 6; Domfte, C. V. 2016. Unconsious Cognition Effects in Consumer Research, in: Jansson-Boyd, C.  V. & Zawisza, M.  J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p. 126. 46. Antunes, R. 2012. The meanings of work: essay on the affirmation and negation of work (transl. by Elizabeth Molinari), Leiden: Brill. 47. Haworth, R. H. 2012. Introduction, in: Haworth, R. H. (eds.) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collecive Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Oakland: PM Press (p. 5). 48. Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (30th anniversary edition), New  York: Continuum; Giroux, H.  A. 2011. On critical pedagogy, New York: Continuum. 49. Biagi, S. 2015. Media/impact (11th ed.), Stamford: Cengage, p.  2; Riesman, D. 1961. The lonely crowd, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. lii (preface). 50. Giles, D. 2003. Media psychology, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 19. 51. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (transl. by Myra Bergman Ramos), New  York: Continuum; Freire, P. 1998. Pedagogy of Freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage (translated by Patrick Clarke, foreword by Donaldo Macedo, introduction by Stanley Aronowitz), Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Freire, P. 2005. Education for Critical Consciousness, London: Continuum. 52. ‘The implanting of the ideologically supportive equation starts early as from the parental commendations you hear everywhere these days, ‘Good job, Good job!’—rapt parents salute the smallest accomplishments in this way. Did little Emily, adorable embodiment of toddler concentration, finally manage to retrieve the toy or mount the step or open the box? The it’s ‘Good job, Good job!’—how she beams in response!—and a particular vision of her future is evoked, one in which Emily will master an ever-­ expanding horizon of undertakings and stand securely at the helm of the unfolding enterprise of being herself’ (Zengotita, T. 2005. Mediated— How the Media shapes your World and the Way you Live in it. New York: Bloomsbury, p. 71; cf. Fromm, E. 1960. The Fear of Freedom, London: Routledge, pp.  208–209; Offe’s Achievement Society Offe, C. 1976. Industry and Inequality—The Achievement Principle in Work and Social Status, London: Edward Arnold, p. 40ff.; Rorty, J. 1934. Our master’s voice: advertising, New York: John Day Company. 53. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 106. 54. On the ‘money and power code’ see: Baxter, H. 2011. Habermas: the discourse theory of law and democracy, Stanford: Stanford Law Books (p. 87).

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55. Meyer, J. W. & Rowan, B. 2012. The Structure of educational organisations, in: Ballantine, J.  H. & Spade, J.  Z. (eds.) Schools and Society—a sociological approach to education, Los Angles: Sage (p. 97). 56. Biagi, S. 2015. Media/impact (11th ed.), Stamford: Cengage, p. 10. 57. Davis, C. 2017. Creating an educational alternative front to the neoliberal academy (www.counterpunch.org, 3rd August 2017, accessed 20th August 2017), p. 3. 58. Hutchinson, J.  W., Lu, J. & Weingarten E. 2016. Visual Attention in Consumer Settings, in: Jansson-Boyd, C.  V. & Zawisza, M.  J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p. 77; Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 1; cf. Molnar, A. 2005. School commercialism: from democratic ideal to market commodity, New York: Routledge. 59. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 165. 60. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 420. 61. Mander, J. 2012. The Capitalism Papers, Berkeley: Counter Point Press, p. 210. 62. Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 62. 63. Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 402. 64. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 185. 65. Abramson, J. 2019. Merchants of truth, New  York: Simon & Schuster (ebook), p. 725. 66. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p.  157; Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 128. 67. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 77. 68. Mander, J. 2012. The Capitalism Papers, Berkeley: Counter Point Press, p. 207. 69. Editorial 2017. Editor’s Introduction: Reeled into Complacency: How the CIA and the Pentagon Use Hollywood to Shape Our Ideas About Friends and Enemies, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 76(2): 238. 70. Wong noted, ‘the result of unchecked hate and propaganda can be deadly … Facebook’s failure…’ (Wong, J. C. 2020. Too big to fail? Tech’s decade of scale and impunity, https://www.theguardian.com, vol. 202, no.4, 10th January 2020, p. 30). 71. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 284.

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Routledge; Eyal, N. 2014. Hooked: how to build habit-forming products, New York: Portfolio, pp. 86–89. 105. Ballantine, J. H. & Spade, J. Z. 2015. Schools and society: a sociological approach to education, Los Angeles: Sage. 106. Hancox, D. 2013. The Village Against the World, London: Verso. 107. They rely less on force, brutalities and massacres but on corporate media so that ‘attitudes and opinions [are] shaped and controlled. We must regiment the mind of men the way an army regiments their bodies. In particular, we must introduce better discipline into the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. If that is achieved, then it will be possible to avoid such dangerous periods as the 1960s’ (Chomsky, N. 2016. What kind of creatures are we?, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 76). How this is done in media reality has been shown by Nixon aid—John Ehrlichman (Thrasher, S. W. 2016. We should blame the democrats, Guardian Weekly, 13th May 2016, p. 35). 108. Pereboom, D. 2001. Living without free will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Ariely, D. 2008. Predictably irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions, London: Harper Collins. 109. Anders, G. 1956. The World as Phantom and as Matrix, Dissent, 3(1):17. 110. McChesney, R. W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New York: The New Press, p.  147; Arestis, P. & Sawyer, M. 2004. (eds.). The Rise of the Market: Critical Essays on the Political Economy of Neo-Liberalism, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; Court, J. 2004. Corporateering: how corporate power steals your personal freedom—and what you can do about it, New York: Putnam; Beder, S., Varney, W. & Gosden, R. 2009. This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The corporate capture of childhood, Sydney: UNSW Press; Fogg, B.  J. 2003. Persuasive technology, Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, p. 9. 111. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 277. 112. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 153; Lazarsfeld, P. F. & Merton, R. K. 2007. Mass communication, ̇ im kuram ve araştırma popular taste, and organized social action, Iletiş dergisi Sayı24 Kş-Bahar (download: http://www.irfanerdogan.com/dergiweb2008/24/13.pdf, accessed: 1st June 2017), pp.  231, 238, 240; Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 68. 113. Eyal, N. 2014 . Hooked: how to build habit-forming products, New York: Portfolio, p. 118. 114. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 162. 115. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New  York: Metropolitan Books, pp. 53 & 47. 116. Cutlip, S. M. 1995. PR History, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 172.

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117. Bernays, E. L. 1928. Manipulating public opinion: The why and the how, American Journal of Sociology, 33(6): 969. 118. Hall, S. 1996. The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees, in: Morley, D. & Kuan-Hsing, C. (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, p. 30. 119. Lemov, R. 2006. World as Laboratory—Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men, New York, Hill and Wang (p. 173); and Simpson, C. 1994. Science of coercion: communication research and psychological warfare, 1945–1960, New York: Oxford University Press. 120. Biagi, S. 2015. Media/impact (11th ed.), Stamford: Cengage, p. 14. 121. Heath, J. 2003. Communicative Action and Rational Choice, Cambridge: MIT Press (p. 115); Joyce, D. D. & Chomsky, N. 2003. Howard Zinn: a radical American vision, Amherst: Prometheus Books. 122. Moore, T. 1516, Utopia (2nd ed. 2013), New Haven: Yale University Press; Jacoby, R. 1999. The end of utopia: politics and culture in an age of apathy, New  York: Basic Books; Miles, M. 2012. Herbert Marcuse: an aesthetics of liberation, London: Pluto Press; Noble, D. W. 2012. Debating the end of history: the marketplace, utopia, and the fragmentation of intellectual life, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 123. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 237. 124. Schramm, W. & Roberts, D. (eds.) 1971. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, Chicago: University of Illinois Press (p. 596); Hart, C., & Chesson, R. (1998). Children as consumers, British Medical Journal, 316(7144), 1600. 125. Bunting, A. & Quirk, J. (eds.) 2018. Contemporary slavery, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 126. Higgs, R. 2008. The Complex Course of Ideological Change, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 67, no. 4, p. 560. 127. Hall, S. 1996. The Problem of Ideology, in Morley, D. and Kuan-Hsing, C. (eds.) Stuart Hall—Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, p. 29. 128. Stauber, J. C. & Rampton, S. 1995. Toxic sludge is good for you, Monroe: Common Courage Press, p. 4; Hutchinson, J. W., Lu, J. & Weingarten E. 2016. Visual Attention in Consumer Settings, in: Jansson-Boyd, C.  V. & Zawisza, M.  J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p. 61. 129. Watkins, E. 2008. Class degrees: smart work, managed identities, and the transformation of higher education, New York: Fordham University Press; cf. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 61.

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130. Spring, J. H. 2013. Corporatism, social control, and cultural domination in education: from the radical right to globalization: the selected works of Joel Spring, London: Routledge (p. 12). 131. Pavlov, I.  P. 1928. Lectures of Conditioned Reflexes, New  York: International Publishing; Skinner, B.  F. 1953. Science and Human Behaviour, New York: Macmillan. 132. Monahan, T. 2013. Globalization Technological Change and Public Education, London: Routledge. 133. Slaughter, S. & Leslie, L.  L. 1997. Academic Capitalism—Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Lane, R. 2000. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, New Haven: Yale University Press, p.  59ff. Bauman, Z. 2001. The Individualized Society, Cambridge: Polity; Bauman, Z. 2001. On Mass, Individuals, and Peg Communities, in: Lee, N. & Munro, R. (eds.) The Consumption of Mass, Oxford: Blackwell. 134. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 193. 135. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New York: Basic Books. 136. Morris, T. & Goldsworthy, S. 2008. PR—a persuasive industry, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 36. 137. Matthew P. 2015. Commodity Fetishism (onlinelibrary.wiley.com); Wyatt, S. 2012. Defetishised Society: New Economic Democracy as a Libertarian Alternative to Capitalism, London: Continuum Publishing. 138. Hawkes, D. 2012. Ideology, London: Routledge; Zizek, S. 2012. Mapping ideology, London: Verso. 139. Hart, T. J. 1993. Human Resource Management—Time to Exorcize the Militant Tendency, Employee Relations, vol. 15, no. 3, pp.  29–36; Tittenbrun, J. 2014. Anti-capital: human, social and cultural: the mesmerising misnomers, Burlington: Ashgate. 140. Biagi, S. 2015. Media/impact (11th ed.), Stamford: Cengage, p. 20; on ‘object of power’, Horkheimer (Horkheimer, 1964. Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum Books (internet download from www.marxists.org, p.  8); Whitehead, A.  N. 1932. The Aims of Education—And Other Essays, London: Ernest Benn (p. 11ff.). 141. Adorno, T.  W. 1944. Minima Moralia—Reflections from the Damaged Life, London: New Left Books (p.  28); Key, W.  B. 1989. The Age of Manipulation—The Con in Confidence—The Sin in Sincere, Boston: Madison Books (p.  250ff.); Lemov, R. 2006. World as Laboratory— Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men, New  York, Hill and Wang (p. 164).

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142. Albert, M. 2006. Realizing Hope—Life beyond Capitalism, London: Zed Books (p.  93); Eisenberg E. & Goodall H. 2001. Organizational Communication—Balancing Creativity and Constraint, Bedford: St Martin Press; Klikauer, T. 2013. Managerialism—Critique of an Ideology, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Lewis, J. 2013. Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination, Cambridge: Polity Press; Poole, S. 2006. Unspeak, London: Little Brown (p. 59ff.); Gardiner, M. E. 2000. Critiques of Everyday Life, London: Routledge (p. 135); Kihn, M. 2005. House of lies: how management consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time: a true story, New York: Warner Books. 143. Locke, R. R. & Spender, J. C. 2011. Confronting Managerialism: how the business elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance, London: Zed Books; Hojat, M., Gonnella, J.  S. & Caelleigh, A.  S. 2003. Impartial Judgment by the “Gatekeepers” of Science: Fallibility and Accountability in the Peer Review Process, Advances in Health Sciences Education, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 75–96; Alvesson, M. & Sandberg, J. 2013. Has Management Studies Lost Its Way? Ideas for More Imaginative and Innovative Research, Journal of Management Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 128–152. 144. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 43. 145. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I’m lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York: Portfolio, p. 439. 146. As a business school professor once openly admitted, ‘we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous’ (Galloway, S. 2018. The four: the hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (eBook) New York: Portfolio, p. 169). 147. Cameron, K. S., Ireland, R. D., Lussier, R. N., New, J. R. & Robbins, S.  P. 2003. Management Textbooks as Propaganda, Journal of Management Education, vol. 27, no. 6, 711–729; DelFattore, J. 1992. What Johnny Shouldn’t Read—Textbook Censorship in America, New Haven: Yale University Press; Gagnon, P. 1987. Democracy’s Untold Story—What World History Textbooks Neglect, New York: The American Federation of Teachers; Jobrack, B. 2011. Tyranny of the Textbook: an Insider Exposes how Educational Materials undermine Reforms, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Perlmutter, D. 1997. Manufacturing Visons of Society and History in Textbooks, Journal of Communication, vol. 47. no. 3; Harding, N. 2003. The Social Construction of Management— Texts and Identities, London: Routledge; Giordano, G. 2001. Twentieth century textbook wars: a history of advocacy and opposition, New York: Lang. 148. Bageant, J. 2007. Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 21. 149. Ballantine, J. H. & Spade, J. Z. (eds.) 2012. Schools and society: a sociological approach to education (4th ed.), Los Angeles: Sage/Pine Forge Press.

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150. Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Voasea, R. 2013. The Television Entrepreneurs: Social Change and Public Understanding of Business, Managing Leisure, Published online: 02 May 2013; Boyle, R. & Kelly, L. 2012. The television entrepreneurs: social change and public understanding of business, Burlington: Ashgate Pub. Company; Alger, H. 1876. Ragged Dick, Brown & Lauder (2001: 58). 151. Cochran, T. C. & Miller, W. 1961. The age of enterprise—a social history of industrial America, New York: Harper, p. 343 f. 152. w w w . filmsforaction.org … social_engineering_in_the_20th_century_2010. 153. Uscinski, J.  E. 2014. People’s news: media, politics, and the demands of capitalism, New  York: New  York University Press; Taylor, P.  A. 2013. Zizek and the Media, New York: John Wiley. 154. Etchezahar, E. & Brussino, S. 2013. Psychological perspective on the study of authoritarianism, Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences, 5(3): p. 505. 155. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 13. 156. Herman, E.  S. & Chomsky, N. 1988. Manufacturing Consent—The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New  York: Pantheon Books; Mitchell, P. & Schoeffel, J. 2002. Understanding Power—The Indispensable Chomsky, New  York: The New Press; Hardt, H. 2004. Myths for the Masses—An Essay on Mass Communication, Oxford: Blackwell (p.  24); Smart, B. 2010. Consumer Society, London: Sage; Duran, J. 2013. The money code: improve your entire financial life right now, Austin: Greenleaf Book Group Press. 157. Giroux, H. A. 2011. On critical pedagogy, New York: Continuum (p. 11). 158. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J-P. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Beverly Hills: Sage; Cole, M. 1988. Bowles and Gintis Revisited—Correspondence and Contradiction in Educational Theory, London: Falmer-Press; Morrow, R.  A. & Torres, C.  A. 1995. Social Theory and Education—A Critique of Theories of Social Cultural Reproduction, New York: State University of New York Press; Bauman, Z. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters—On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals, Cornell: Cornell University Press (p.  68ff.); Peters, M. & Besley, A. 2006. Building Knowledge Cultures—Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 159. Aronowitz, S. 2008. Against schooling: toward an education that matters, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. 160. Salerno, S. 2005. SHAM: how the self-help movement made America helpless, New York: Crown Publishers.

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161. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u n t e r p u n c h . o r g / 2 0 1 7 / 1 0 / 1 8 / mental-­health-­and-­neoliberalism-­an-­interview-­with-­william-­davies/. 162. Klikauer, T. 2018. Hannibal Lector goes to work: The Psychopath Factory—How Capitalism Organises Empathy, Organization, 25(3): 448–451. 163. Collins, R. 1979. The Credential society: an historical sociology of education and stratification, New  York: Academic Press; ABC 2005. Corporate Psychopaths, ABC Catalyst Programme (5th May 2005), (www.abc.net. au); Babiak, P. & Hare, R. D. 2006. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work, New York: Regan Books; Park, S. 2013. Evolutionary Explanation of Psychopaths, International Journal of Social Science Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 1–7. 164. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 140. 165. Veblen, T. 1899. Theory of the Leisure Class (introduction by Alan Wolfe; notes by James Danly), New  York: Modern Library (2001); Langer, B. 2002. Commodified enchantment: Children and consumer capitalism, Thesis Eleven, 69(1): 67–81. 166. Callero, P. L. 2012. Myth of individualism: how social forces shape our lives, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 167. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New York: Basic Books (www.webster.edu). 168. Spring, J. H. 2013. Corporatism, social control, and cultural domination in education: from the radical right to globalization: the selected works of Joel Spring, London: Routledge (p. 155). 169. Linder, M. & Nygaard, I. 1998. Void where prohibited: rest breaks and the right to urinate on company time, Ithaca: ILR Press; Baritz, L. 1960. The Servants of Power. A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 170. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 144. 171. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 154; Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 195. 172. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 76. 173. Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 176. 174. Buchholz, R. 2012. Reforming Capitalism: The Scientific Worldview and Business, London: Routledge; Mulgan, G. 2013. The locust and the bee: predators and creators in capitalism’s future, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 175. Krüger, T., Volge, T. & Wänke, M. 2016. Framing Effects in Consumer Judgement and Decision Making, in: Jansson-Boyd, C.  V. & Zawisza,

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M.  J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p. 349. 176. Ehrenreich, B. & English, D. 2005. For her own good: two centuries of the experts’ advice to women, New York: Anchor Books. 177. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 181; Gitlin, T. 2001. Media unlimited: how the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives, New York: Metropolitan Books, p. 8; Ross, I. 1959. The image of merchants, Garden City: Doubleday, p. 76. 178. Mander, J. 2012. The Capitalism Papers, Berkeley: Counter Point Press, p. 212. 179. Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 183. 180. Rusche, G. 2003. Punishment and social structure (Georg Rusche and Otto Kirschheimer, with a new introduction by Dario Melossi), New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers; Kohn, A. 1999. Punished By Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. 181. Kohlberg, L. 1971. From is to ought, in: Mishel, T. (eds.) Cognitive Development and Epistemology, New  York: Academic Press; Kohlberg, L. 1981 & 1984. Essays on Moral Development (vols. 1 & 2), San Francisco: Harper & Row; Freire, P. 1998. Pedagogy of Freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage (translated by Patrick Clarke, foreword by Donaldo Macedo, introduction by Stanley Aronowitz), Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Lake, R. & Kress, T. 2013. Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis, New  York: Bloomsbury Publishing. 182. Mandell, B. 2002. The Privatization of Everything, New Politics, vol 9, no. 1; Dorfman, A. & Harel, A. 2013. The Case Against Privatization, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 67–102. 183. Rousseau, J.-J. 1755. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (second discourse); Polemics; and, Political Economy (edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly & transl. by Judith R. Bush), Hanover: Published for Dartmouth College by University Press of New England (1992) & Mineola: Dover Publications (2004); Illich, I. 2012. Deschooling Society, in: Ballantine, J. H. & Spade, J. Z. (eds.) Schools and Society—a sociological approach to education, Los Angles: Sage. 184. Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p.  432; Brown, R. 2013. Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, London: Routledge; Deem, R. & Brehony, K.  J. 2005. Management as ideology: the case of ‘new managerialism’ in higher education, Oxford Review of Education, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 217–235; Duke, C. 2001. Networks and Managerialism: Field-testing competing paradigms, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, vol. 23, no.

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1, pp.  103–118; Inglis, F. 2012. Confronting Managerialism, Times Higher Education, 31st January 2012. 185. Augier, M. & March, J.  G. 2011. The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools after the Second World War, Stanford: Stanford Business Books. 186. www.mcdonaldization.com/whatisit. 187. Ritzer, G. 2011. The McDonaldization of Society (6th ed.), London: Sage; Afanasev, V.  G. 1971. The scientific management of society, Moscow: Progress Publishers. 188. Mason, J. & Singer, P. 1990. Animal Factories, New  York: Harmony Books; Wallach, J. J. 2013. How America eats: a social history of U.S. food and culture, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; Lymbery, P. 2014. Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, London: Bloomsbury. 189. Mandell, B. 2002. The Privatization of Everything, New Politics, vol 9. no. 1. http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue33/bmande33.htm; Ackermann, F. & Heinzerling, L. 2004. Priceless—On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, London: The New Press; Sandel, M. J. 2012. What isn’t for sale, The Atlantic, April 2012. 190. Lemov, R. 2006. World as Laboratory—Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men, New York, Hill and Wang (p. 113). 191. Coté, M., Day, R. J. F. & de Peuter, G. (eds.) 2007. Utopian pedagogy: radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 192. Klikauer, T. 2019. STEM—Education for the global economy, Australian Universities’ Review, vol. 61, no. 2, p. 93–96. 193. Ewen, S. 1996. PR!: a social history of spin, New York: Basic Books, p. 219. 194. Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. 2012. Introduction, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p. 12. 195. Hooks, B. 2000. Where we stand: class matters, New York: Routledge, p. 69. 196. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 142. 197. Edu-Factory 2009. Towards a Global Autonomous University, New York: WWW.Autonomedia.Org. 198. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 39.

CHAPTER 5

Media Capitalism and Universities

The media sector looks set to continue dining at the top table of international business with its chief executives firmly implanted at the core of the global business elite.1 Intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having options, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate2

During the twentieth century, an increase in the complexity of production demanded ever-more sophisticated skills beyond reading, writing and mathematics. Historically, these skills came through mass literacy programmes, Sunday schools and primary schools teaching newly proletariatised peasants.3 The end of Western-European serfdom was flanked by the rise of mass schooling becoming one of liberal capitalism’s main vehicles. Building on this, the introduction of Taylorist production methods— euphemistically labelled scientific management—legitimised management shifting power even more inside companies.4 Taylorism transferred craft knowledge towards management. Management simply stole much of the knowledge that workers had. At the management level, Taylorism demanded an educated managerial class that administered a rising number of unskilled (de-educated) workers, that is, Taylor’s infamous gorillas. Much of this multiplied even further when Taylor’s simple manufacturing converted into Fordist mass production. Mass production and mass © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_5

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consumerism demanded serious educational improvements for a rising class of production and marketing managers, resulting in previously unseen demands for new sets of specific managerial skills such as those managing the distribution of consumer goods—marketing—as well as personnel management. Capitalism demanded a fully integrated training regime that carried the functional imperatives of management first and the ideologic imperatives of Managerialism later.5 The management (production/marketing) to Managerialism (corporate PR/ideology) transition led to even higher levels of training, forcing a shift towards university training. The ideology of scientific management—Taylor’s book did not have a single scientific experiment!—was to provide scientific legitimacy. Decades later, this unified four previously separated spheres under one umbrella, enforcing its unitary ideology onto universities:6 . Management and Managerialism 1 2. Mass consumerism 3. Mass media 4. Ideologically driven higher education By the twentieth century, most nineteenth-century elite universities had become mass universities. Eventually, they were converted into twenty-first-century ideologically driven universities. While nineteenth-­ century universities were open to a self-funded, male-dominated upper-­ level elite, twentieth-century mass universities were opened to the rising middle class including some students from the working class. Their insufficient means to fund university attendance were compensated through state provisions. The welfare state subsidised the educational demands of capitalism as businesses offloaded their skill requirements onto the state, heralding the period of mass universities. Vocational training became university training. As media capitalism’s ideology developed and advanced, it was ready to anchor some of its new ideologies (e.g. entrepreneurship,7 user-pay, etc.) deeply in the minds of the middle class. Eventually, twenty-­ first-­century universities were able to move increasingly towards the full user-pay ideology while simultaneously setting up managerial structures as demanded by Managerialism until successively, Managerialism’s ideology fully took over the universities.8 Reflecting this, some academic subjects started to command a so-called contributional fee (partial user-pay). Later, more and more subjects were converted to either full-fee subjects (full user-pay) or partly user-pay systems. In the arena of research, industry (corporate funding under the

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heading ‘money-making-equals-influence-making’9) gained in importance as state funding declined.10 What became essential was the three-stage conversion of universities: elite→mass→ideology. Despite their full-fee status, today’s universities did not revert back to elite universities. They remained mass universities because capitalism demands a well-trained large workforce with the right ideology and the right skills to manage the affairs of media capitalism. As a consequence, most universities moved from being so-called research universities towards being teaching universities providing largely vocational training—also known as ‘diploma mills’.11 Meanwhile, the user-pay ideology allowed the state to reduce funding, thereby shifting the burden onto educational customers (students) flanked by an educational entrepreneurship ideology.12 In short, ideological universities combine the twentieth century’s mass universities with the nineteenth-­century user-pay system. As a result, a relatively large population of university attendees are able to reproduce itself as second and third generation university graduates carrying pro-capitalist ideologies. Media capitalism’s ideologies even hold when graduates incur significant monetary debts as each cohort operates a generational class-sustaining renewal contract. For this, marketing and PR became highly relevant. PR’s awareness that ‘public relations can be scientifically managed’ stabilised a university regime relying on the science of cybernetically self(re)enforcing systems.13 Media capitalism has created an interest symbiosis between a well-educated middle-class and media capitalism’s ideological virtues. The formula is: university degree  =  high salaries  =  pay for children’s university education and alumni donations

As a consequence, a circular system of alumni self-reproduction developed. Simultaneously, non-university graduates from lower classes and the Lumpenproletariat became largely excluded from accessing universities as social mobility declined. Much of this is engineered through specifically designed ideologies deterring them from university attendance:14 • Not everyone needs a university degree. • Why attend university when you can make money now. • I didn’t need to go to university and so do you. • Attending university is expensive and will result in huge personal debts. • Society needs plumbers too, and so on.

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These ideologies were designed for the lower classes, and they had— and still have—the designed effects, leading to a decline in social mobility and asphyxiating unwarranted people inside pre-designed confinements.15 As a consequence, they exclude many people with non-graduate parents from entering costly universities through an invisible wall erected through tuition fees and they are often flanked by unrealistic hopes of gaining a scholarship. As a result, the lower classes are increasingly excluded from university, thus solidifying class structures. Meanwhile, upper, middle and ideologically affirmative societal sections experience social and monetary reinforcements of their ideological beliefs. This stratification is reflected, for example, in a divide between an The Economist-versus-Sun reader, a CNN-versus-Fox watcher and the like. All this enhances ideological affirmation based on the exclusion of unwarranted elements and the conversion of universities into one of media capitalism’s prime ideological agencies. Simultaneously, media capitalism’s ideology tells us that universities are open to all and it’s your free choice. At the same time, this is the place where the free choice ideology is paralleled by a marked decline in actual life choices but this decline is only one aspect of media capitalism. Overall, there are three elements that distinguish today’s ideological universities:16 1. Attending twenty-first-century ideological universities is based on personal investment seen as return of investment in a real sense of the word: investment in expectation of financial returns (higher wages)—the age of Enlightenment’s humanistic education has ended. 2. University education no longer captures consumerism; it incorporates the ideologies of consumerism and media capitalism, offering three kinds of academic subjects: a) those vital to media capitalism’s functioning (business, media studies, etc.) b) those dealing with pathologies (e.g. psychology, medicine, social work, etc.) c) fig leaf subjects that sustain media capitalism’s ideology (art, culture, etc.) 3. Virtually all ideological training has to be paralleled by vocational skills training needed for the selling of things (business) and the selling of ideologies (media).

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All this exists because today’s universities deliver academic qualifications as ideological legitimation for media capitalism. Before all this could be established, however, significant sections of society needed to be conditioned and ideologically trained to accept the rise of the PR university— now inextricably linked to media capitalism.

Overcoming the Danger of Mass Education The accessing of previously non-accessible forms of critical knowledge in newly opened mass universities began to occur during the 1950s and 1960s and provided a fertile ground for critical thought that furnished student revolts during the late 1960s. These revolts shocked capitalism’s upper echelons. The elites17 realised that they had provided an oppressed middle and working classes with access to critical and emancipatory knowledge, turning previously lower middle class and proletarians into students who understood capitalism and what it did to them.18 Understanding capitalist pathologies led to a radicalisation of students who increasingly expressed severe anti-capitalist attitudes. Hence those running capitalism’s ideological facilities faced a dilemma: they needed mass universities to run consumerism, but they had to avoid a merger between anti-capitalist knowledge and rebellious working-class forces. As a possible solution, students started to be ‘conditioned by our system not to think of themselves as working class’.19 Withdrawing rafts of students was no longer an option.20 The mass could no longer be excluded from universities.21 In addition, universities could not return to elite universities again. To preserve mass universities and curb anti-capitalist thinking at the same time, universities had to become ideological training institutions so that post-1970s working-class students could be prevented from further radicalisation. In order to achieve this, five measures were put in place:22 1. Media capitalism’s ideological offensives increasingly pacified students, assuring that they supported media capitalism’s value system. 2. The media industry engineered a systematic campaign against protest movements during the late 1960s and 1970s in preparation for a punishing state response against student movements. 3. In a classical divide-&-rule policy, sections of the protest movement were isolated and framed as violent and criminal, leading to

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c­riminalisation (terrorists), while others were incorporated into media capitalism’s apparatus.23 4. Mass universities were converted into ideological institutions (e.g. culture war24), turning them into business-like entities now running under Managerialism.25 5. Wage increases gained through high unionisation (1950s–1970s) assisted the process of de-proletarianisation by moving workers into a petty-bourgeois middle class, focusing on individualist advancement through university education. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, de-proletarianisation was largely completed. Consumerism had shifted a revolutionary proletariat towards a petit-bourgeois lifestyle.26 Simultaneously, private, newly privatised and state universities were sufficiently colonised by media capitalism’s prime ideology of Managerialism, enticing students to move away from critical knowledge and towards managerial-ideological knowledge.27 The push towards media capitalism was first recognisable in the privatisation of the so-called education industry.28 Later the same ideology infected state universities. The outcome was twofold: 1. Curricular developments were ideologically restructured to mirror the demands of consumerism (saleability) first and media capitalism (ideology) later.29 2. Vocational subjects—for example, management—were lifted up to university level.30 As a result, ideological and conditioned human resources were created before they entered corporate employment.31 This established education as TINA, converting it from Enlightenment to a facilitation for commerce (first) and ideology (later). Today, universities resemble corporations driven by Managerialism.32 Once deprived of its critical Enlightenment faculties, Enlightenment’s rationality became an instrument to enhance capitalism. The overall development can be shown as follows: Figure 5.1 shows the development of tertiary education based on the demands of liberal→consumer→media capitalism. It shows consumerism as a transitional period during which elite universities were converted into privatised-corporatised mass universities dedicated to servicing capitalism. Figure 5.1 starts with elite universities followed by mass universities (state supported and subsequently privatised/corporatised institutions) to

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elite university



public mass university



privatised university



ideological university

edu = restricted good



edu = public good



edu = commercial good



edu = ideological good

use value 19th Century liberal capitalism

 

 

sign value 21st Century media capitalism

from use value to exchange value 20th Century Consumerism

Fig. 5.1  The development of the ideological university

eventually become ideologically driven PR universities run by Managerialism.33 These PR universities do not necessarily have to be privatised in terms of ownership. The key is that they are run under Managerialism’s ideological imperatives.34 Under media capitalism, it is ideology—not factual ownership—that shapes universities. In fact, true Managerialism sustains state ownership so that the ultimate responsibility can be pushed towards the state.35 In any case, Managerialism established substantial increases in university revenue collection through student tuition (teaching) and so-called industry (read: corporate) partnerships.36 Universities became money collecting institutions.37 Historically, higher education from ancient Greece to feudal monasteries and the nineteenth century’s liberal capitalism was always reserved for elites. Starting with the ancient Greek’s skholion (school) and universitas, it evolved into medieval seminars. Eventually, the nineteenth-century elite university was constructed as an elitist and highly restricted place (Fig. 5.1)—not a public good. The public was excluded. Much later, capitalist education incorporated the mass (first) and domesticated them (later). Under simple consumerism, individuals purchased education like any other good.38 This became moored in the minds of the public. Education became part of capitalism’s efford-rewardE→R structure.39 An interest symbiosis between the commercialisation of everything and that of universities prevailed.40 Both are unified in capitalism’s power and money code, commercial interests and, above all, media capitalism’s ideology. All this links the prime educational tools (textbooks,41 educational software, commercially sold online classes, etc.), ideology providers (media), commercial interests (corporations) and the ‘influence-peddlers’ of corporate lobbying, representing the so-called special interest42 (PR and managerial accreditation agencies).43 Together, they shape media capitalism’s deeply ideological education. The one-dimensional ideology defines education.44 Inside this circular, self-referencing and self-enhancing setup, ideologically conditioned individuals invest in training regimes that are functionally related to the imperatives of media capitalism. The zenith of

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media capitalism had been achieved once individuals willingly paid for their own ideological training, accepting user-pay school fees and university tuition.45 Media capitalism also meant that academic subjects had to relate directly to the corporate media’s ideological demands.46 Business subjects became superior as business schools grew.47 Simultaneously, truly academic subjects (e.g. philosophy), deemed distant to media capitalism’s ideological imperatives, were framed as less appealing by the media industry. They are no longer supported by university managerialists.48 At times, they are simply deleted from a university’s programme.49 If not removed, these academic subjects are either deprived of their critical, emancipatory and humanistic content or marginalised. Key subjects of humanity—dedicated to what makes us human—such as history, pedagogy, political science, music studies, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and arts have been financially starved, marginalised, made inaccessible, diminished or simply exterminated.50 Media capitalism deems them useless and worthless. They are made to look insignificant as they lack ideological compliance to ideologies such as good job prospects. Unless they lead to employability, these subjects are framed as time-wasters. Through that, university managerialists can use the diminished demands excuse—often framed as having no-market-appeal—to axe certain subjects. The media invention of useless subjects creates an ideologically shaped attitude in educational consumers even before they enter university, thereby assisting universities’ managerialists in legitimising the so-called restructuring (read: axing) of degrees. Guided by corporate media, educational consumers are made to even support the demise of certain subjects.51 This changed universities as shown in Fig. 5.2: Figure 5.2 shows ideologically driven universities as education became an ideological good for media capitalism. Nonetheless, universities remain mass universities that deliver a highly unifying ideology. Corporate media steering requires skilled human resources that show ideological affirmation. Today, universities operate as ideological clearing houses for future employees in the service of media capitalism. A consumerism-ideology ideological universities mass university for vocational job training science = factor of production consumption & ideology

 symbolic association 

conditioned association through mass textbooks & standardised teaching

 

science applied science for productconsumerism & ideology

 

ideologies of funding user-pays, tuition, fees privatised & corporatised university ideology  accreditation lobby industry corporate partnerships

Fig. 5.2  The ideological university of the twenty-first century

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interface demands exactly that. Another outcome has been the process of scientification seamlessly applied to media capitalism itself, linking consumer research, behaviourism, marketing and advertising psychology to the media industry. Below that, ‘the triangle [of] the media, the government and the lobbying of PR firms’52 operates. This is linked to the second triangle of science, media and consumerism. From that, three key spheres emerged: . the ideological university (ideological training and science), 1 2. consumerism (commercial exchange sphere), and 3. the media industry (hegemonic ideology). This constitutes one of media capitalism’s iron laws. Somewhat similar to Max Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy and Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy, today it is no longer bureaucracy and social organisations that create iron laws. Media capitalism has established its own iron law:53 The iron law of media capitalism (Fig.  5.3) consists of three actors: companies (top), society and the state. Media capitalism’s iron law also includes their relationship ( ). The capital-society relationship is defined by two elements: the selling of commodity as capitalism’s essential lifeblood and the selling of ideology that sustains the entire construct. Inside the capital domain, there are three broad actors: manufacturing companies producing commodities and providing services (e.g. banking), and secondly, marketing corporations that need to advertise these goods and services and convert use-values into capitalism’s all-important exchange-value (i.e. saleability). Thirdly, the sales pitch-ideology—media capitalism’s essential element—is transmitted to society’s three main groups: upper class, middle class and Lumpenpreletariat. The bourgeois remains capitalism’s real representative owning capital, land,54 machinery, shares and so Fig. 5.3  The iron law of media capitalism

manufacturing corporations marketing corporations media corporations

 society: upper- & middle class and Lumpenproletariat





state: legislature state: executive state: judiciary

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on. The petit-bourgeois has been successfully enticed to take on petit-­ consumerism and media capitalism’s ideological belief system. The Lumpenproletariat55 is framed as aspirationals clinging onto the often rather false hope of leaving their precarious employment situations and rented accommodation in the hope of joining the petit-bourgeois.56 Corporate media converts people into consumers and ideology carriers, not through commodities but through system supportive ideologies. Media capitalism also assures that bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and Lumpenproletariat vote in support of capitalism. Under media capitalism, the voting public is merely an ideological appendage.57 The will of the people is simply a media-engineered will, frequently staged through elections. This establishes the iron law of media capitalism as a self-sustaining structure which is further enhanced through auxiliaries such as corporate lobbying.58 In media capitalism’s overall structure, people have two functions: consumer and ideology carrier. Both sustain media capitalism’s iron law indefinitely. Guided by corporate media, even university students ‘do not read social science: they watch TV’ and behind their TV-watching, marketing runs the scientific script of attitude research, pilot-polling, issue sampling aided through advances in consumer psychology and behaviourism. Consequently, communication studies have experienced a stratospheric rise at universities.59 Based on this, universities have redesigned themselves to supply human science of consumer behaviour financed by corporate grants. Universities apply behavioural knowledge gained from human subjects to further media capitalism’s iron law to create: . ideologically conditioned workers, 1 2. ideologically conditioned media audiences, 3. ideologically conditioned consumers, and 4. ideologically conditioned voters.60 This has infiltrated virtually all spheres of society. Today’s ideologically conditioned individuals accept media capitalism’s imperatives and actively support them. Media capitalism has long realised that the best way to create affirmative end-users was through the application of social-­psychological scientific research. What emerged was a scientifically entrenched class structure:

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1. At higher levels, we find those engineering scientific methods and applying them. 2. At lower levels, we find those who are exposed to them. At lower levels, conditioned association—for example, ‘thinking in images’—is applied to those corporate media regards as having ‘extreme mental inferiority’.61 Consequently, ‘underperforming students receive more skill and drill type instructions’.62 Simultaneously, scientific and symbolic association works at advanced educational levels.63 The conditioned-­ versus-­symbolic difference64 can be explained by examining the more widespread conditioned association. ‘It means creating two modes of education: 1. one more for the elite who could rule the country and be the true participants in the democratic process; and the 2. other for the mass, whose education would train them to be spectators rather than participants in shaping democratic life’.65 Conditioned associations are about ‘images [that] are attached to certain words’.66 There are two types of knowledge that is disseminated via institutions to which the public have access: 1. functional knowledge that helps people fill the lower positions and fulfil their tasks,67 and 2. ideology that helps them understand and accept their lower positions and regard the fulfilment of their task (i.e. their functioning) as good for them as well as for the system.68 Universities provide functional and ideological training for the vast majority of their customers.69 But then media capitalism also depends on people trained through highly abstract courses based on symbolic association (e.g. PhDs). This divides higher education into legislators (research, theory, PhD) and interpreters (vocational application, BA, MA).70 At the lower levels, ideological support for media capitalism has reshaped curricula developments towards teaching material, degrees, classes, crypto-­ academic subjects, textbooks and so on.71 This creates ideologically affirmative individuals fully functioning inside media capitalism’s regime. Supporting this, theory-free problem-solving is conducted as applied science that is directly linked to Managerialism’s ideological demands.

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Ideology-driven universities favour so-called useful, practical and applied science rather than basic, critical and theoretical science.72 University managerialists frame this as neutral and ideology-free, accepting positivism as the dominant ideology and presenting it ‘as a mythological, godlike creation presumed omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent’.73 Positivism and empiricism are tailored to support the ideology of instrumental rationality. It sells ideologically determined knowledge to so-called industry partners (read: corporations) and external funding agencies (read: lobbying institutions).74 As such, the ideologically driven ‘great blockbuster myth of…objectivity’ almost always selects the right(!) science—framed as objective science.75 Other than as a smokescreen, it does not need human and ethical values—only industrial-­ managerial applications. Simultaneously, university ethics committees oversee research to avoid positivism’s worst excesses and—more importantly—to avoid any damage to university reputation and brand.76 Academic departments have become extended research departments and laboratories of corporations. Managerialism frames this accordingly, assuring that corporate research receives the universities’ sign-value seal of approval whilst research-for-cash is being conducted. Simultaneously, many public institutions can be utilised for corporate research.77 Guided by media capitalism’s transition ‘from scholarships to propaganda’,78 professorships are linked to highly asymmetrical industry (read: corporate) partnerships in which one side defines what the other side does.79 All this assures what Upton Sinclair once noted as, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.80

The managerialist but always ideological steering of universities is cloaked through the use of distancing codewords that engineer a public appearance of independence, science and objectivity. Yet the fourfold synergy between Managerialism, consumerism, PR universities and media capitalism silently dominates. Meanwhile marginalised and non-applied science is also exposed to Managerialism’s ideological steering powers that define research funding and determine the operation, structure and objectives of research.81 Rather than being untouched by media capitalism’s ideological imperatives, today’s PR universities have become vital parts of media capitalism’s ideological apparatus, manufacturing students inside an educational-industrial-complex82 that entices them through

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advertisements delivered to them through social (read: corporate) media. Student-customers are recruited, selected and processed (photographed, name tagged, ID, barcode, etc.) and conditioned through key learning objectives and standardised textbooks, pressed into corporate designed curricula and measured by examinations accredited by media capitalism’s accreditation agencies that represent Managerialism.83 The full range of mass production and mass consumption ideologies and techniques is applied. The similarities between Taylorism and Fordism and universities are mind-numbing. Both force students and workers into scripted behaviour.84 In the end, their ideologically certified existence is positively reinforced through E→R by the university’s degree with sign-value.85 The hierarchical structures created through degree and university rankings are broadcasted by the corporate media.86 They carry media capitalism’s ideological insignias, neatly paired with university logos.87 Silently the ideological value chain of degree→job→reward→consumerism is established. All this is ideologically framed as universities provide everything you need in life! Meanwhile, the ideologicalisation—turning universities into a carrier of ideology—pushes education ever deeper into media capitalism’s ideology. At the same time, it also creates divisions and inequalities that media capitalism is forced to camouflage.88 Even more than the twentieth century’s simple mass education, the twenty-first century’s ideological education entrenches and disguises class stratification.89 The media-driven PR university enhances already existing educational and economic inequalities.90 Ideological education carried simple mass education to a new level.91 When previous mass universities became ideological PR universities, they heightened already existing immobilities while cementing anti-democratic governing powers.92 This further entrenched the divide between those who rule over those who are ruled. Inside ideological PR universities the exclusion of democracy helps to assure that only a ‘small number of learned men…acknowledge what stands behind this illusion and are able to unmask’ it.93 Achieving the mastery of media capitalism’s ideological systems opens the door to top management of the educational apparatus including ‘CEO-style university presidents’.94 Their managerial workplaces apply ideological education to Managerialism, creating organisational assimilation that is conveniently framed as organisational culture.95 In that respect, ideological education operates as a useful screening device that filters and pre-selects employees based on ideology. The postgraduate labour market is shaped by

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ideological attitudes that have been engineered by PR universities in conjunction with media capitalism. The labour market’s raison d’être is not the participation of all. Apart from being an ideological vehicle, full employment has never existed under capitalism. Its sole raison d’être is ideological support. Labour markets turn attitudes of participants into a sort of hegemonic sameness. Today, virtually all graduates support media capitalism’s ideology. They dress in the same way, read the same newspapers, talk the same language (of Managerialism96), and many have a degree useful to media capitalism.97 Their homogeny—sold through the ideology of individual free choice and diversity—is cloaked through hierarchically differentiated and often meaningless job titles used for equally meaningless bullshit jobs.98 Managerialism creates detailed job descriptions, job titles, differentiating rewards, different entitlements and status symbols, yet it camouflages the fact that all human resources (read: workers) exist under a vertical division of labour, invented and ideologically legitimised by management.99 Management’s rule-and-obedience model is defined by two separated categories: Table 5.1 shows those who invent rules (e.g. corporate policies)—often managers who have undergone substantial ideological conditioning at universities (e.g. MBAs) as well as those who interpret these rules (e.g. middle management). Under management’s hierarchical authoritarianism, rule inventors must be given a higher set of ideological education than simple rule abiders. Rule inventors’ core value is creativity within a given ideological framework. For those down the chain-of-command, it is compliance that is seen as sufficient.100 This division is mirrored by the setup of ideological education as expressed in Fig. 5.4: Figure 5.4 shows how media capitalism’s education system is structurally divided into high-versus-low levels. Both mutually support each other, and both are also supported through the ideological educational triangle of capitalism-conforming ideological values of families, ideological schooling, colleges,101 polytechnics, universities and so on as overseen by media Table 5.1  Rule makers and rule abiders 1 Rule makers 2 Rule abiders

Human resources operating as information-rich rule makers Human resources operating as information-poor rule abiders containing two sub-sets: a) Rule interpreters: at middle management, they explain rules b) Rule appliers: at lower levels, they execute rules

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(i)

high content



ideological and “academic” conditioning



high social status



managerial position

(ii)

low content



ideological and “practical” conditioning



low social status



human resources

Fig. 5.4  The high and low division of ideological education

capitalism. The system incorporates a harsh selection process, usually placed at the end of high-school. The process shows a number of social pathologies such as unfair hierarchies, exposure to an alienating ranking system, examination and testing stresses, anxiety, fear, suicide and so on. Engineered by corporate media, the entire selection process is widely accepted. It divides students into those who enter into ideological-­ academic training and those who attend ideological-practical educational facilities.102 Implanted through corporate media, this leads to high-versus-low status, mirroring respective positions inside corporate hierarchies. At the lower level, ideologically conditioned individuals are turned into simple objects of managerial power (Fig.  5.3). At work, school and university, high-versus-low status selection occurs according to a well-defined formula that is generated by so-called educational experts who invent ideological policies which then create constitutive rules that acquire normative status. These provide a code of conduct for those on the receiving end of the status systems. In short, students enter into a pre-structured world that is designed to create ideology-compliant individuals. It turns players into those being played under the ideological falsehood of a deceptive belief in playing the system. Meanwhile, educational efforts are directed towards those who are being played. But when: • they play badly (non-support for media capitalism’s ideology); or • realise that they are being played with (critique, resistance, emancipatory attitudes); or • refuse to be played with (Hirschman’s exit option)103 they are disciplined, marginalised and excluded.104 Having lost the pre-­ engineered selection game designed by ideologically driven semi-­corporate education managerialists, these educational customers are forced into a lower status and will experience capitalism’s ‘cold intimacies’ even more directly.105 In any case, ‘you cannot play the game and at the same time question the rules [hence] I just play the game’ in fact means being

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compliant or even complicit.106 Successful players experience the full range of media capitalism’s consumerism. The unsuccessful (read: the majority) are framed by corporate media frames as personal failures in media capitalism’s eternal chain of:

birth→child-consumer→school→college/university→work→consump tion→death

The entire ideological system operates with many system internal imperatives based on cybernetic self-evaluation and adjustments, cementing the status quo of a pre-engineered equilibrium that asphyxiates its individuals. It converts non-support back into pure affirmation for media capitalism (Fig. 5.3). Media capitalism’s status ideologies make even the most simple-minded member of media capitalism understand what life expects from you. Simultaneously, media capitalism’s game plan is hidden. But all this also manifests itself in two developments that run opposite to each other. Higher and lower levels of ideological education impact on the ability to understand what is happening. Those at the lower levels are barred from accessing higher—often critical-analytical—levels of understanding.107 An artificial barrier constructed of linguistic abilities has been erected. This creates one of media capitalism’s classical contradictions in the form of a simultaneous movement of expanding and shrinking human vocabulary.108 This development is shown in Fig. 5.5: Figure 5.5 shows how the overall vocabulary used in education increases for those trained in critical-system-analytical and ideological-rational thinking that relies mostly on instrumental rationality, empiricism and positivism.109 Simultaneously, the vocabulary for those confined to practicalities is reduced. In British terms, one reads The Sun—the other The Economist; in US terms, one reads The New York Times, the other watches Forms & Ideology: theoretical-abstract system analysis managerial instrumental rationality monotone manufacturing task-obedience

expanding vocabulary

Society: upper-class

size of vocabulary

 size of population

shrinking vocabulary

middleclass lower-class

Fig. 5.5  The parallel development of expanding and shrinking vocabulary

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Vox; in Sydney (Australia), one reads The Sydney Morning Herald and watches ABC and SBS, the other reads The Daily Telegraph and watches Channel 9. The list is endless. Ideologically driven vocabulary distribution shows two additional movements (Fig. 5.5). Under the twentieth century’s consumer capitalism, a perceived equality in educational outcomes led to an overall rise of vocabulary.110 This was linked to social-democratic welfare states viewing education as a public good. It led to an overall expanding vocabulary in terms of practical and critical vocabulary, aiding potentials for revolt. Media capitalism’s allocation of vocabulary is different from what people experienced under twentieth-century mass education. Media capitalism supports a highly stratified society with hierarchical levels between upper, middle and lower classes while simultaneously making individuals believe in its hegemonic ideology: we are all middle class.111 Sustaining this, media capitalism’s ideology camouflages striking and rising inequalities. This remains a classical ideological task assigned to corporate media.112 It is paralleled by a shrinking vocabulary for lower classes, confining these societal sections to lower educational levels.113 Vocabulary shapes everyday language and thinking.114 Corporate media mirror this by supplying mostly tabloid-level vocabulary to society’s lower sections who occupy lower-level positions. On the other hand, media capitalism’s higher classes experience an ever expanding vocabulary. Their education and conditioned reading habits allow access to more sophisticated forms of media usage to escape the linguistic confinements issued to the lower classes.115 Assistance to the disconnection between functional-ideological knowledge and critical emancipatory theory is provided through intellectually inferior methods. School→work bridging institutions such as low-level business colleges and vocational institutions rely on methods that are useful, practical and often based on case study methods—the Harvard Business School Case Study Method,116 storytelling and invented anecdotes with so-called practical use-value.117 Even at university level, the low scientific value of MBA-training can include case studies. These are functional and ideological and do not depend on theoretical and scientific knowledge.118 These quasi-scientific methods privilege managerial stories, tales of heroic CEOs, great business leaders and made-up cases rather than providing a critical understanding of management and Managerialism.119 Such low-level writings are cluttered with fabricated so-called practical examples to avoid any deeper understanding of capitalism’s systemic pathologies. In this sort of education, the ideology of

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anti-intellectualism120 governs—no need for grand theories here! Self-­ reflection, critique and even theories are painfully avoided.121 In Orwellian terms, customers of ideological education at this level should be able to:122 understand HOW!—but they should never contemplate: WHY!

This sort of education is based on ‘the fetishism of means’.123 Its functionality of an ideologically defined how favours positivist science including technicalities, mechanics, methods, problem-solving and instrumental rationality using a pre-designed appearance of neutrality, objectivity and sound science to cover its ideological tracks while deflecting any critical understanding of media capitalism’s power over its objects—those to-be-­ educated. It smothers all tensions and contradictions inherent in asymmetric power relations inside the iron triangle of media capitalism: (1) ideologically determined universities; (2) media industry; and (3) states still governing higher education.124 University educators with so-called good research credentials and a good track record (e.g. doing the same things for 20+ years) are supported, promoted and favoured.125 It engineers the ideology of legitimacy through an invented seal of scientific approval that conceals the ideological character of the whole operation. In the acute awareness that ‘few ever achieved a PhD by questioning the system that grants PHDs’, crypto-academics trained in ‘intellectual servitude to the powers that be’ remain the true Servants of Power.126 Academics are created in a circular motion of self-referencing, self-­ promoting and self-enhancement. This leads to so-called experts127 capable of judging whether something conforms to the ideology of media capitalism or it is deemed controversial and ideologically non-supportive. Circular self-enhancing motions are of extremely high value to ideological education, unlike critical knowledge of science, theoretical thinking and critical analysis.128 Supportive, useful, functional, value-free, anti-­ theoretical, impartial, natural, neutral, positivist and objective facts and figures have long superseded critical reflection and theoretical thinking. Hence, industry credentials, long lists of functional publications measuring simple and simplistic research outputs129—not content, quality, critique, originality and sophistication—consultancy, impressive titles, industry funding arrangements and ideological conformity have been established.130 This leads to two kinds of academics: the good scientist and the managerial academic. Table 5.2 shows the difference:131 Driven by Managerialism and university managerialists dedicated to present research in a media-adjusted light (read: easy to consume), many academics have internalised the demands of media capitalism and moved

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Table 5.2  The good versus the managerial academic The good scientist

The managerial academic

Remains sceptical about results Interprets conclusions carefully Publishes negative results Ignores social prestige Challenges authority and established research paradigms Novel exiting results are less likely to be true—double checks results

Sells results Highlights and exaggerates importance Publishes strategically Uses impact factors to make publishing decisions Cites authority, networks, supports official paradigms Publishes novel exciting results before s/ he can get scooped

on. They are now considered to be good academics, leaving science behind in order to engage positively with Managerialism and media capitalism. Media capitalism supports them. The media industry and an ideological and corporate business press support the managerial academic by creating an imaginary world of so-called well-regarded institutions and universities defined through and for their ideological support for media capitalism. University league tables—published by the corporate media—are the clearest expression of this.132 Today, corporate hierarchies are mirrored in educational hierarchies, often based on famous for being famous and success breeds success ideologies as disseminated by the media industry. They are designed to support ideological value judgments while claiming to be value-free, independent and objective. These credential inventing and referencing systems for ideological affirmative institutions rank the latter according to self-fulfilling mechanisms. Quite often, it is no more than the bias of inbred peer attitudes and invented league tables based on rumours, hearsay and the infamous old-boys-network.133 This is supported through a perceived reputation rather than scientific measurements and critical reflection.134 But even measured according to—often simply invented—hard facts, books in libraries, quality research, PHD completion rates, teacher-student ratios and so on, those institutions showing compliance to media capitalism’s ideology are richly rewarded and favoured by media capitalism, receiving generous external funding and leading to favourable positions in ranking scales.135 The whole structure mirrors match-fixing rather than scientific measurements.

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These self-fixing university rankings are published by the media industry and are highly supportive of ideology-compliant teaching methods and goals. They are measured on the ultimate measurement: affirmation to media capitalism. Successful institutions have to show to be worthy of the praise of media capitalism.136 Their functional operations need to reflect the complete internalisation and, wherever possible, the invention of even more ideologies supportive of media capitalism. This has infiltrated the entirety of twenty-first-century universities. Historically however, the relevance of universities for capitalism might have started some time during the late nineteenth century when universities were still elite universities, defining the beginning of a three-stage transformation (Fig. 5.6): Figure 5.6 shows nineteenth-century elite universities operating as a collective of academics supported by a minimal number of administrative staff on the left-hand side. On the right (Fig. 5.6), there is the ideological university. The historic elite→ideological development reversed the hierarchical power relationship between administration/management on the one side and academic faculties on the other. Today, the three-stage development is completed that started roughly 150+ years ago: 19th century = top position with strong academic faculties governing universities 

20th century = equal position with academics and administration at equal levels 

21st century = bottom position under Managerialism reducing academics to employees

This development turned former academics into educational-­ideological mass conditioning workers, also called instructors. These semi-academic instruction workers work inside the university’s corporate and business structure reflecting the typical pyramidal top-down organisational chart that defines virtually all business operations.137 Academic faculties that used to engage in curricula development and research have been successfully downgraded and deskilled to be mere recipients of managerially academic faculties  admin. support elite university, 19th C.



academic

administrative 



 

faculties



support

mass universities of 20th century



standard business top, middle & line academic faculties ideological University

structure of management  employee = worker 21st century

Fig. 5.6  The history of academic and non-academic university staff



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created curricula, teaching methods, the deceptively labelled online learning (even though not much actual learning takes place here), asphyxiated in ‘digital silos’ and pre-scribed texts under the supervision of corporate textbook firms.138 Universities have long shifted from academic freedom towards ‘more scholar for the dollar’, selling research and degrees under the ideological imperatives of media capitalism.139 Academic freedom ended with the move from: Academic freedom (ethics)→Managerialism (ideology)

Historically, the managerialisation of universities started in the later part of the twentieth century, changing the relationship between administrative support staff and academic faculty fundamentally. It reflected Tayloristic and Fordist production methods in order to administer mass attendance. Under the guidance of Managerialism, an invented professionalism operates on the formula: professionalism-equals-Managerialism so that faculties can be developed into revenue-neutral and later revenue-­ gaining SBUs (strategic business units) as for-profit business units.140 Managerial accounting methods supply legitimacy for one of Managerialism’s key ideological moves—the so-called restructuring of faculties, degrees and entire universities towards becoming mirror images of corporations.141 These self-budgeting university departments have removed departmental heads—the professor—in favour of managerial division leaders and section supervisors for which managerial knowledge is essential. Academic standing is seen as a hindrance.142 These managerial departments can operate as self-funded institutions connected to universities. In some cases, scholarly professors became budgeting experts and even ‘lackeys to the bourgeois’.143 In other cases, they were seen as remnants of a past era—dinosaurs to be replaced by the willing executioners of Managerialism.144 The ideological university is no longer run by academics dedicated to scholarship. It is a downgraded vocational institution, run commercially by managerialists through the invented ideological imperatives of the invented image of an educational market that leads seamlessly to the PR university.145 The function of faculties, colleges and individual schools inside universities shifted towards revenue raising and industry-like student processing methods.146 The use- and exchange-value of education has long been replaced by mere sign-value, operating on a university logo’s sign-value that is underwritten by university mission statements, business unit budgeting, image consultants, external advertising agencies, marketing and the like.147

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The intended result of this process has been the typical hierarchical business-like structure of ideological universities under the ideological spell of Managerialism (Fig. 5.5). An evermore efficient student processing apparatus has been linked to middle and line management with educational workers and instructors at the bottom of the management hierarchy. Meanwhile top managerialists dedicated to Managerialism have successfully replaced academics, formerly dedicated to scholarship, at the helm of the ideological university. This process included the downgrading of academics to vocational trainers rigidly controlled by management. Even the once dominant syllabus—as an expression of academic freedom—designed by academics on scholarly grounds has been replaced by a car industry like Standard Operation Sheet (SOS). Just like the SOS that pre-defines every single movement of an assembly line worker inside a 55-seconds assembly line cycle, the standardised course outline tells academics which textbook to use, what to teach, when, where, to whom and what student assignments and examinations are to be.148 Under this structure, academic freedom is no more than a reminder of a long bygone past.149 All this has been sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, KPIs, measurable learning outcomes, so-called student attributes, customer service and managerial performance management methods.150 This is operative in virtually all universities, even in those that are still partially state funded but governed through the ideology of Managerialism. This has been a worldwide trend under Managerialism’s ideology of globalisation. Globalisation is the word of the day as engineered by the media industry. It replaced a now out-dated term: imperialism.151 The imperial-global march of Managerialism is paralleled by a simultaneous internalisation of its ideology, flanked by a deregulated and reduced state, leaving space to be filled by Managerialism. This has been camouflaged through the ideology of the university’s independence and neutrality. In short, the more universities are exposed to the imperatives of Managerialism, the more they are ideologically sold as independent, neutral and adhering to science and—most importantly—the more they are integrated into media capitalism. Media capitalism also assists the Orwellian language telling us: • for-profit-universities are independent→ideologically framed as good and • state universities are state-dependent→ideologically framed as bad.

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Dependency on capitalism, markets, Managerialism and industry is portrayed as positive and independent by the media industry. Equally, university professors have been reduced to agents of Managerialism.152 Reduced to educational instructors, they are no longer public intellectuals.153 Their task has moved from being intellectual participants on academic discourse to revenue collectors through a university enforced accumulation of external funding. Professors today write applications to external funding bodies, compete for grants and manage industry/ corporate-­ driven research projects. The organising principles of Managerialism are almost robotically directing teaching and research towards ideological support for media capitalism. In the words of Watson,154 Managerialism came to the universities as the German army came to Poland. Now they talk about achieved learning outcomes, quality assurance mechanisms, and international benchmarking. They throw triple bottom line, customer satisfaction and world class around with the best of them.

Managerialism sets the tone at universities, management schools and training colleges, while instructors simply operationalise the managerially given.155 The original quest for truth and knowledge under Enlightenment has long been converted into an ideologically defined semi-truth156 in support of media capitalism.157 Truth is welcome when it supports media capitalism. Challenging, even when scientifically proven, truth is diminished in order ‘to marginalise an organisation’s impact on public policy debates’.158 In the corporate media sphere, ‘politicians [and] celebrities…have replaced science’.159 In many cases, the conversion of truth towards the satisfaction of corporate funding bodies pre-empts critique by simply funding research through external agencies and so-called industry partnerships. They set the parameters and guide research and truth finding into appropriated directions long before actual research occurs. Sometimes, this is even done by setting pre-designed terms, conditions and objectives before an application process for external funding is started. ‘Truths are manufactured’ and research is guided before it is conducted.160 This engineers ideological outcomes by pre-eliminating critical questions, confining research to the explicit and implicit wishes of corporate funding bodies. It produces ‘a’ version of truth—a truth that supports media capitalism.

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Success in research grant applications and its measurable output produces ideologically shaped truths—sometimes simply by shifting research onto a field supportive of media capitalism (e.g. from sociology to business studies) while neglecting other, more important but less cost-­effective fields.161 This enhances the status of the ideological university and gives access to even more corporate funding. It secures future funding guided by external bodies and raises the visibility of the ideological university through the media industry that tends to report on practical rather than critical, theoretical and emancipatory research. But these funding bodies themselves are guided by the media industry. Some issues that have been allowed access to the public by the media industry are supported by funding allocation panellists who receive their knowledge (!) on relevant research projects from the same media industry. These bodies are stacked with a few academics, large numbers of industry representatives, educational managerialists and self-appointed educational experts. For example, even though breast and prostate cancer kill about the same number of people, breast cancer research is supported manifold because of the popularity given to it by the media industry. Popular research is favoured and funded over unpopular research. Research into weight loss mediation is favoured over malaria preventing drugs. Hence, external research funding often reflects a beauty contest rather than scholarly endeavours. Research that might lead to non-measurable, critical and emancipatory outcomes is labelled negatively and controversial and often rejected, underfunded or marginalised. External and even university internal funding as well as managerial assessment bodies successfully redirect original quests for knowledge and truth towards a quest for funding. In that way, ideological universities are guided by two external agencies: 1. They are exposed to media-engineered images affecting external funding bodies. 2. They are exposed to funding through tuition from students who are making choices based on what they are told by the very same media industry. In that way, the media industry has become somewhat of a determining mediator of ideological images about universities. This directs university funding from research into managerial image consultancy, marketing, PR and advertising. The quest for positive media images to attract students ($) and corporate research funding ($) has become paramount for the

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PR-driven ideological university. As a consequence, universities spend serious amounts of money on marketing. Such positive media images bring in students. In turn, these students assist in the creation of positive media images when employed and even more so when employed by the media industry. Above their—often un- and sub-conscious—training in the ideologies of media capitalism, these students are also versed in the functional and vocational demands set by capitalism. This creates a positive media image of the ideological university that leads to higher student intake (read: $) and increased corporate funding (read: $). It re-enforces the rules of Managerialism in a closed circuit of self-support because it prepares students for success in the corporate world—the world of media capitalism.162 This cybernetic system creates, engineers and administers ideological education inside knowledge factories deceptively labelled universities.163 Their ideological and non-­ controversial knowledge is neatly packaged, easily accessible, supportive and administered.164 One of the most common forms of such a knowledge transfer—lecturing—is frontal top-down education established long before book printing was invented. The usefulness of linear knowledge transfer has survived and is kept alive—now found in what is euphemistically labelled online teaching. Today, training modules constructed through PowerPoint are simply transferred onto websites (e.g. ‘a web of mis-, dis-, and un-information’165) and online lecture-podcasts enhancing linearity and hierarchies of passive top-down instructions. Students do not have to speak, discuss and debate while they passively consume a later tested knowledge. In that way, they learn to accept the given ideology while pro-&-contra thinking has been eliminated and marginalised. Modern lecturing involves media enhancements—ideologically framed as blended learning—through a computerised and graphic-based PowerPoint slideshow presentation.166 While the form of presentation has overtaken content, it quickly became the standard format of much of what is done inside ideological universities. One-dimensionality and hierarchy enshrining processes of knowledge acquisition occur during pre-­formatted lectures, mirroring corporate-designed textbook chapters which are delivered through colourful slideshows in cinematic effects that replicate even seating arrangements. This represents the end of the much acclaimed discourse in academia as it does in post-university management meetings that provide a seamless transferral from one to the other.167 The university PowerPoint and the managerialist PowerPoint are interchangeable. Entertaining technologies supersede educational, discursive

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elite university: start of subject differentiation



state supports mass universities differentiation into ideological & non-ideological acad. subjects



19th Century



20th Century



division between subjects supportive of media capitalism & those who are not

 supportive subjects   university support   non-supportive subjects 

21st Century

Fig. 5.7  The development of ideological crypto-academic subjects

and critical values. Textbooks, lectures and fancy slideshows often come packaged inside pre-arranged containers supplied by your textbook corporation. These so-called lessons are neatly boxed-up by a handful of global educational oligopolies. Educational customers only need to purchase the correct box to condition students for media capitalism. But before students became customers and knowledge became ideology, several steps had to be taken: Figure 5.7 shows the differentiation of academic subjects into ideologically supportive subjects and non-supportive subjects, starting with an early demarcation of academic subjects during the nineteenth century to cope with the rising complexities of liberal capitalism. It resulted in a separation into academic subjects concerned with society (humanities) and subjects for scientific development (natural science). Human and natural science became increasingly included into the productive forces of liberal (nineteenth century), consumptive (twentieth century) and ideological168 arrangements (twenty-first century) that supported capitalism at each stage of its development. This resulted in roughly four crucial developments: 1. Some academic subjects capable of delivering supportive ideologies to capitalism were separated from subjects lacking such capacities (anti-­supportive subjects). 2. Among the remaining subjects, those directed towards mass production needed to be separated from those directed towards mass consumption. 3. The trajectory of liberal→consumerist→media capitalism flanked by elite→mass→ideological universities had to support the subject fragmentations. 4. The separation of ideologically supportive from non-supportive subjects was enhanced and legitimised, perhaps even made possible, through ideologies broadcasted by the media industry that guided students towards ideology supportive academic subjects and away from those that are not supportive of ideology.

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Media-engineered pressures forced universities into establishing the ‘solicitation of the co-operation of its victims’.169 In that way, managerially constructed budgeting methods expose—if not invent—non-revenue supportive subjects, faculties, academics, conferences, journals and schools as not self-funding and loss making.170 Under a move from serving the community towards generating profit, community service—now reframed as corporate social responsibility—became a mere PR exercise.171 This deliberately engineered managerial and ideological process is portrayed as neutral. Its creation relies on scientifically objective tools. An ideologically motivated underfunding manufactured by university managerialists led to cancellations and reformulation of subjects, degrees, schools and faculties. All this delivered the expected results.172 It was legitimised through the free market ideology that was moored deeply in society by the media industry.173 Generously supported through the media industry, ideologically supportive subjects gained in student numbers. This produced results: declining student numbers enrolled in unwarranted subjects and rising student numbers were seen in academic subjects important to media capitalism. This, in turn, was used by the ideological university to further legitimise free market ideologies as broadcasted by the media industry.174 It established a vicious circle set against certain subjects. Ideology had sealed their faith long before the humanist subjects realised what was happening. Increasingly, educational consumer markets became media guided, portraying academic subjects in a useful-versus-useless dichotomy with the hidden transcript of supporting media capitalism. This has been successfully linked to student expectations on future employment. Media guided perceptions of jobs flanked this process.175 Market perceptions rather than science and social needs became the new ideological mantra for jobs with value to media capitalism rather than society (read: fewer nurses and more accountants). Science, critical knowledge, theory and research became just ‘a’ factor inside the mind of educational managerialists. Their main concern became The Real Bottom Line.176 Supported by students’ ideological perceptions of markets as engineered through the media industry, educational managerialists were able to argue that they only carry out what the market demands. The media industry has converted teenagers into objects of power that blindly follow the market.177 Exposed to free choice ideologies, teenagers are enticed into pre-­ constructed preferences set up by educational managerialists and the media industry. The overarching task of both is to portray these

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pre-­engineered and media-guided choices as their choices.178 For a while, the engineering of free choice led to significant increases in student numbers in the relatively marginalised subject of forensic science. Numbers increased 200-fold (!) shortly after the global TV appearance of an American crime show called CSI.179 The media industry’s engineering of free choice had successfully been able to cover contradictions between TV-irrationalities and the labour market inability to absorb hundreds of forensic science graduates. Meanwhile, the media industry has made individuals part of a structure that implicitly makes them support someone else’s ideological imperatives while believing they have a free choice. In other words, the free choice ideology relinquishes the responsibility of the media industry by pushing the take-up of a university subject with limited job prospects back to the educational customer’s free choice. This is what makes a perfect ideology.180 Highly ideological academic degrees and subjects are exchanged through the media industry’s guiding of market mechanisms. Non-­ commercial degrees and subjects no longer register on the educational managerialist’s mind. Reduced to a commodity, ideological universities, ideological academics and their educational overlords produce a product that has market appeal and is easy to consume.181 When sign-value has truly overtaken use-value, educational customers are increasingly asked— and they are evermore willing—to purchase a kind of triple-F knowledge: fast, forward, functional

3F knowledge has next to no private, personal, humanistic and moral meaning.182 It is low on meaning. Meanwhile, its acquisition can occur through intellectually reductionist booklets such as The One-Minute MBA, 10-Steps to Management, A Quick Guide to Mathematics, Economics— Made Easy, HRM for Dummies and so on. Still, 3F knowledge remains accessible only to paying educational customers while its content has been designed for easy training modules out of the functional and ideological toolbox. Constructed in that way, 3F can only really be used by one post-­ university user: media capitalism. Ideologically trained 3F consumers only need to be sufficiently and efficiently conditioned. They are made to internalise the ideologies present in 3F knowledge. Through the purchase of 3F, customers take part in ideological training and adopt a pre-arranged and pre-formatted existence. They are asphyxiated inside the eternal triangle of a meaningless oscillation between:

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managerial (work)  consumptive (buy)  media (watch)

regimes. In that way, individuals are incorporated into media capitalism. At the education level, their university degrees signify their ability to associate names of so-called key writers with so-called key managerial concepts: KPI, BPR, PRP, TQM, MBO, JIT, MRP, CSR and HRM.  The result is a buzzword degree.183 Increasingly ideological training operates via name association. Educational consumers memorise models and names and rehearse their content. Critical studies are eradicated. To a large degree, such training modules are no longer scholarly enterprises. They have been deprived of nearly all theoretical, scholarly, moral and critical values. They are engineered as straight forward, linear and conflict-free 3F knowledge. Such memorising regimes are engineered using Pavlov’s and Skinner’s behaviourist conditioning.184 It is information acquisition for rewards. At the end of each lesson, tutorial, and textbook chapter, and so on, they find easy to memorise summaries, simple checklists, so-called self-evaluations (read: this is never about the self ) and achievement points.185 At the end of each term, module and semester, this is marked by an often rather senseless testing regime with next to no educational value.186 It is designed to test a candidate’s ability to memorise a text in a pre-set sector of 3F knowledge. At the end of each degree a certification of achievement is handed out, assigning sign-value to a candidate’s ability to adapt to a limited range of 3F knowledge. It certifies standardised sign-value: BA, BS, MBA, MA, DBA and PhD—with the P no longer representing philosophy. Standardised, agreed and accepted knowledge mirrors a standardisation of managerial knowledge indicated by signs (MBA). Signifying adaptation and ideological support of capitalism is manifested in benchmarked curricula supporting standardised managerial regimes. This conveniently leads to standardised educational consumers resulting in standardised existences. It is no more than an end product that started long ago with industrialism’s standardisation of everything from car doors to TV screws to bra sizes. This is expressed in marketing, effectiveness, efficiency, mechanisation and functionality. As a true ideology that camouflages contradictions, media capitalism sells the standardisation of everything via its ideology of individualism. Media capitalism has created an obsession with effectiveness, efficiency, standardisation, mechanisation and functionality. It is the fetish of being an efficient learner that carries connotations of being useful. The fetish of

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being useful has been encouraged by an ideologically driven education system based on the imperatives of media capitalism.187 All this also means repression, authoritarianism, fragmentation and domination designed to eliminate critical, reflective and emancipatory education.188 It prohibits any development towards a substantive awareness of oneself. Meaning, critical reflection, emancipatory potentials and fulfilment are exterminated so that training regimes can be geared towards ideological affirmation. End products of such training regimes are ideologically socialised but dehumanised individuals ready for corporate consumption. All of this has to be seen as a seamless enterprise. As a consequence, the ideology of media capitalism builds imaginary bridges rather than outlining the contradictions. Ten bridges are shown here: Table 5.3 shows how media capitalism—as the general overseer of all ideological bridges—and the linkages of ideology to society create a thoroughly ideological society. In such an ideologically determined society, almost all individuals are made to cross bridges to become ideologically supportive individuals in favour of media capitalism. Still, the metaphor of ten invisible bridges does not mean there is a gigantic conspiracy at work. Rather, these bridges exist as an elaborate web of interest symbioses that shape all core institutions of media capitalism. Inside the bridging of ideological support, the intellectually highest level of successful affirmation to media capitalism’s ideology occurs through attending ideologically supportive universities.189 Success rests on the fact that these spheres are all interconnected and supported by a single ideology as broadcasted by the Table 5.3  Building ideological bridges Bridges

From

Links To

1st bridge 2nd bridge 3rd bridge 4th bridge 5th bridge 6th bridge 7th bridge 8th bridge 9th bridge 10th bridge

Peer-based ideological support through Parents Parents Formal schooling Ideologically supportive education Ideologically supportive university Educational customers Managerial regimes Consumerism Managerialism democracy

→ → → → → → → → → →

Ideological schooling and consumerism Media capitalism Work regimes, consumerism and media capitalism Educational industries Managerial regimes The ideology of an educational market Consumerism Media capitalism Media capitalism Media capitalism

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media. Ideological education formats the minds of children through ideological schooling and young adults through ideological universities. Both work as a mirror image of media capitalism. These highly ideologised individuals—made to internalise the ideology—have been converted into useable t(f)ools for an existence inside today’s society that is ideologically governed by media capitalism. How media capitalism governs society is shown in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 44. 2. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 117. 3. Giroux, H. A. 2011. On critical pedagogy, New York: Continuum (p. 48). 4. Braverman, H. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital—the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New  York: Monthly Review Press (p. 85ff.). 5. Trow, M. A. 2010. Twentieth-century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 6. Powell, L. 1971. The Powell Memo/Manifesto (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/, published 23rd August 1971, accessed: 15th December 2019), p. 3. 7. Including the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Holborow, M. 2012. Neoliberal Keywords, in: Block, D., Gray, J. & Holborow, M. (eds.) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics, London: Routledge, p.  51); cf. Holborow, M. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, p. 98. 8. Klikauer, T. 2013. Managerialism—Critique of an Ideology, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Newfield, C. 2008. Unmaking the public university: the fortyyear assault on the middle class, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Johnson, B., Kavanagh, P. & Mattson, K. (eds.) 2003. Steal this university: the rise of the corporate university and the academic labor movement, New York: Routledge. 9. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1331. 10. Abercrombie, N., & Turner, B. S. 1978. The dominant ideology thesis, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, no. 2 (p. 156). 11. O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of math destruction, New York: Crown, p. 130. 12. Fischman, G.  E. & Haas, E. 2010. Framing Higher Education, in: Sandlin, J.  A. & McLaren, P. (eds.) Critical pedagogies of consumption: living and learning in the shadow of the “shopocalypse”, New  York:

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Routledge (p. 111); Henry, C. 2015. Entrepreneurship education evaluation, Education & Training, vol. 57, no. 8/9. 13. Grunig. J.  E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 92; Syvertsen, T. 2017. Media Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 43. 14. Hansen, J., Kutzner, F. & Wänke, M. 2013. Money and thinking: Reminders of money trigger abstract construal and shape consumer judgments, Journal of Consumer Research, 39(6):1154-1166. 15. Sharkey, P. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Biressi A. & Nunn H. 2013. Class and Contemporary British Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; see also: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/social-­mobility-­commission. 16. Yorke, M. (eds). 2013. Capability and quality in higher education, London: Routledge; Flisfeder, M. & Willis, L-P (eds.) 2014. Žižek and media studies: a reader, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Wayne, M. 2003. Marxism and media studies: key concepts and contemporary trends, Oxford: Pluto Press; O’Connor, E. 2011. Creating New Knowledge in Management: Appropriating the Field’s Lost Foundations, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press (p. 2). 17. Inoue, H. 2019. Giants: The Global Power Elite, Journal of World-­ Systems Research, 25(2):518-522. 18. Dussel, E. D. & Vallega, A. A. 2012. Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion, Durham: Duke University Press; Gerrard, J. 2013. Class Analysis & the Emancipatory Potential of Education, Educational Theory, vol. 63, no. 2, p. 185-202. 19. Bageant, J. 2007. Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war, New York: Crown Publishers (internet download), p. 5. 20. Hirschman, A. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 21. Hirschman, A. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 22. Roberts, A. 2013. The End of Protest—How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent, Cornell: Cornell University Press.. 23. wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction; youtube.com/ watch?v=k7jEk_f04pE 24. Bloom, A. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster. 25. Cf. Powell, L. 1971. The Powell Memo/Manifesto (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/, published 23rd August 1971, accessed: 15th December 2019), p. 2. 26. Bauman, Z. 1982. Memories of class: the pre-history and after-life of class, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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27. Cuypers, S. 2004. Critical Thinking, Autonomy and Practical Reason, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 38, no. 1. 28. Donoghue, F. 2008. The last professors: the corporate university and the fate of the humanities, New York: Fordham University Press. 29. Washburn, J. 2005. University, Inc.: the corporate corruption of American higher education, New York: Basic Books. 30. Snyder, B.  R. 1973. The hidden curriculum, Cambridge: MIT Press; Apple, M.  W. 2004. Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.), New  York: Routledge Falmer; Boulding, K. E. 1956. General Systems Theory—The Skeleton of Science, Management Science, vol. 2, no. 3, p.  197-208; Laitsch, D. 2013. Smacked by the invisible hand: the wrong debate at the wrong time with the wrong people, Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, p. 16-27. 31. Wren, D.  A. 2005. The History of Management Thought, 5th edition, Hoboken: Wiley; Witzel, M. 2009. Management History: Text and Cases, London: Routledge; Bader, C. 2014. The evolution of a corporate idealist: when girl meets oil, Brookline: Bibliomotion. 32. Watson, D. 2003. Death Sentence—The Decay of Public Language, Sydney: Knopf, p. 166; Adorno, T. W. 1995. Prisms, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 30. 33. Auerbach, A. J. 2013. Corporate Takeovers: Causes and Consequences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Shlomo, B-H. 2013. The business of corporate learning: insights from practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Almond, P. 2013. Corporate manslaughter and regulatory reform, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan; Colin Mayer, C.  P. 2012. Firm commitment: why the corporation is failing us and how to restore trust in it, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Vakkur, N.  V. & Herrera, Z. J. 2013. Corporate Governance Regulation: How Poor Management Is Destroying the Global Economy, New York: John Wiley & Sons; Lazonick, W. & O’Sullivan, M. 2000. Maximizing shareholder value: a new ideology for corporate governance, Economy and Society, vol. 29, no. 1, p. 13-35. 34. Agyemang, G., & Broadbent, J. 2015. Management control systems and research management in universities: An empirical and conceptual exploration, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 1018-1046. 35. Dasgupta, B. 2013. Non-Mainstream Dimensions of Global Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Sunanda Sen, London: Taylor & Francis; McMurtry, J. 2012. The cancer stage of capitalism: from crisis to cure, London: Pluto; Grant, W. & Wilson, G. K. (eds.) 2012. The consequences of the global financial crisis: the rhetoric of reform and regulation, Oxford:

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Oxford University Press; Strange, S. 1997. Casino capitalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 36. Also known as ‘university-enterprise partnerships’ (Holborow, M. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, p. 107). 37. Watson, D. 2003. Death Sentence—The Decay of Public Language, Sydney: Knopf, p.:29). Watson (p.  166); Veblen, T. 1918. The Higher Learning in America, New  York: The Viking Press (p.  15); Lynd, R.  S. 1939. Knowledge For What?—The Place of Social Science in American Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 8; Deem, R., Hillyard, S. & Reed, M. 2007. Knowledge, higher education, and the new Managerialism: the changing management of UK universities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 38. Sandel, M.  J. 1998. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Oxford: Brasenose College, May 11th and 12th 1998. 39. Callero, P. L. 2012. Myth of individualism: how social forces shape our lives, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 40. This also means, ‘academic commercialisation’ (Holborow, M. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, p. 109). 41. Perlmutter, D. D. 1997. Manufacturing Visions of Society and History in Textbooks, Journal of Communication, vol. 47, no. 3; Harding, N. 2003. The Social Construction of Management—Texts and Identities, London: Routledge; Jobrack, B. 2011. Tyranny of the Textbook: an Insider Exposes how Educational Materials undermine Reforms, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Duffy, M.E. 2000. There’s no two-way symmetric about it: A postmodern examination of public relations textbooks, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3):311; Powell, L. 1971. The Powell Memo (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/, accessed: 30th October 2017), p. 5. 42. Grunig. J. E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 529. 43. Nownes, A.  J. 2013. Interest Groups in American Politics: Pressure and Power, London: Routledge. 44. Pratkanis, A. R. 2007. Social Influence Analysis, in: Pratkanis, A. R. (eds.) The Social Science of Social Influence, New York: Psychology Press, p. 21. 45. Schneider, R. E. 2012. College for sale: the fall and rise of a closed college campus, Bloomington: Indiana Universe Inc 46. Lacalle, D. 2014. Life in the financial markets: how they really work and why they matter to you, Hoboken: Wiley. 47. Powell, L. 1971. The Powell Memo (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/, accessed: 30th October 2017), p. 5. 48. Kikauer, T. 2020. Resisting neoliberal education, Australian Universities’ Review, 62(1):67-69.

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180. Picciano, A.  G. & Spring, J. 2013. The Great American Educational-­ Industrial Complex, New York: Routledge; Spivak, G. C. 2012. In Other Worlds: Essays In Cultural Politics, London: Routledge. 181. Hil, R. 2015. Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 182. Marcuse, H. 1966. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies, Boston: Beacon Press (p. 98). 183. Harding, N. 2003. The Social Construction of Management—Texts and Identities, London: Routledge (p. 24); Hart, S. L. 2010. Capitalism at the Crossroads: Next Generation Business Strategies for a Post-Crisis World, London: FT Press; Bowen, H. R. 2013. Social responsibilities of the businessman, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 184. Kohn, A. 1999. Punished By Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin; Stan, E. 2012. The Role of Grades in Motivating Students to Learn? Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 69, p. 1998–2003. 185. Skinner, B.  F. 1953. Science and Human Behaviour, New  York: MacMillan; Chomsky, N. 1959. Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, Language, vol.35, no. 1; Chomsky, N. 1971. The Case against B. F. Skinner, The New York Review of Books, December 30th 1971; Smith, N. 2004. Chomsky—Ideas and Ideals (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (p.  100f.); Hoskins, A. & O’Loughlin, B. 2010. War and Media—The Emergence of Diffused War, Oxford: Polity Press. 186. Gardner, H. 1991. The unschooled mind: how children think and how schools should teach, New York: Basic Books; Gardner, H. 1999. The disciplined mind: what all students should understand, New  York: Simon & Schuster. Bower, J. & Thomas, P.  L. (eds.) 2013. De-testing and de-­ grading schools: authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization, New York: Peter Lang. 187. Mcgettigan, A. 2013. The great university gamble: money, markets and the future of higher education, London: Pluto Press. 188. Macey, D. 2000. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London: Penguin Books (p.  127); Habermas, J. 1973. Theory and Practice, New York: Beacon Press (p. 219f.); Cronin, A. 2004. Advertising Myths— The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities, London: Routledge (p. 3); Adorno, T. W. 1995. Prisms, Cambridge: MIT Press (p. 24). 189. Myers, D. G. 2004. Intuition—Its Powers and Perils, New Haven: Yale University Press (p. 124-125). Roelofs, J. 2003. Foundations and public policy: the mask of pluralism, Albany: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Society of Media Capitalism

The very presumptuousness of moulding or affecting the human mind through the techniques we use has created a deep sense of uneasiness in our minds1 ‘We dictate the food that they shall eat, the clothes the mother shall wear, the way in which the home shall be furnished…our names are unknown’2

The philosophical origins that shape many societies date back to Greek philosophers who were discussing methods for solving societal problems such as what is truth.3 Unlike modern PR’s admission that ‘the most common kind of dirty trick is simply stretching the truth’4 and that ‘you can’t…fight a perception with truth’5 to Greek society truth remained elementary. Antisuperstitious truth-finding methods were a vital part of societies existing beyond simple tribalism. Their methods created truth by examining both sides of an argument.6 Soon, many societies went farther than simple pro-con arguments. In the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology), thesis and antithesis are connected in order to drive towards a higher-level conclusion (synthesis).7 Historically, such truth finding philosophies remained restricted to those in society’s upper echelons.8 For those at the lower levels of society, existence meant sustaining society’s upper levels. To camouflage slavery, ideology became a useful tool in the pursuit of legitimising economic divisions. Such ideologies have been in use to ‘secure [the] acceptance’ of almost every societal order ever established.9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_6

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The ancient Greek world already included such divisions. There was a world of philosophy and the world of necessities expressed in an oikos-­ based slave economy.10 Both worlds were artificially separated but existed parallel to each other—one side supported the other. People of the philosophical upper level saw themselves as free subjects, while those at the economic level were treated as objects of power. For the first time in human history, those free to engage in philosophy developed an admiration of wealth and possessions, termed money loving by Greek philosopher Plato.11 It was a system of stark inequalities—slave-versus-free-men—and it needed to be sustained ideologically.12 Early ideologies were defined by slave-owning elites using less philosophy (e.g. love of wisdom) but more ideology (camouflaging contradictions) to legitimise the ruling over those who spend their entire existence in hardship and suffering, forced to create their own necessities and sustain a relatively small elite of rulers. Upper-level life was one of enjoyment, beauty, leisure, aesthetics, philosophy and culture, while slave existence was constructed as a world of myths, untruths and ugliness. Mysticism and Gods were used to cloak the reality of slave life and to make slaves ideologically support those who ruled and defined the lives of those asphyxiated in surplus delivering and degradation. Occupying the position of definition creation, elites—then as today—could construct the toiling non-elite as slaves (Greece), followed by peasants (feudalism), workers (capitalism) and more recently as human resources, the ‘depersonalised and dehumanised’.13 Today, human beings are converted into human material/resources to be managed by an HRM-sustained ‘division between those who command and those who are compelled to obey’.14 The key to all this has been to create ideologically supportive attitudes in slaves → peasants → workers → human-resources, turning them into self-enslaving entities. With notable exceptions of revolts and rebellions, this made: • slaves →supporting slavery, • peasants →supporting feudalism, • workers →supporting liberal capitalism, and • human resources→supporting twenty-first-century media capitalism. At all stages, most human beings were made to be not much more than an ideologically supportive resource confined to a life as a thing—a commodity. This structure reproduced itself while it provided surplus-­value for the existence of those who defined others. At the work level today, the offsprings of slaves, peasants and workers, that is, human resources, have

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been turned into ideologically affirmative believers through sophisticated HRM techniques used to install a positive attitude. They believe to be the most valued corporate asset.15 Above that, they have been made to support the prevailing imperatives.16 What has changed between the times of slavery and today is not substantial though; it is merely a name change. Economic asymmetries and ideologically asphyxiating ruler-slave relationships in ancient Greece are mirrored in today’s ideologically driven management-employee relationships. On this, George Orwell wrote17: from the point of view of the low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

Names also changed from slave owner to feudal lord, capitalist, employer and manager.18 Despite all this, the basic upstairs-versus-­ downstairs structure remains untouched.19 Substantive changes in Orwell’s low-­versus-high construct have never occurred despite slave society moving to feudalism, to liberal capitalism, to consumer capitalism and to media capitalism. Despite substantial moves towards human freedom (parliamentarian democracy, etc.), today’s labour market, for example, is still structurally reflective of the Greek slave market. Both function in the same basic way—they ‘do not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve’.20 They deliver labour to an exploitative process. Then as today, most people spend most of their time labouring away—slaves in oikos, peasants on fields, workers in factories and human resources on their desks. In their daily lives, they are not engaged in democratic labour processes.21 The difference between then and today is that those who run today’s labour relations are using the most sophisticated apparatus ever invented—corporate media capable of ‘manipulating a population of puppets from behind the scenes’.22 No wonder PR’s modern ‘snake oil liniment’23 salesmen are able to link simple manipulation to ‘persuasion [and] communication’.24 The competition ideology ranges from slave markets to modern labour markets and still forces workers into a fundamentally unchanged position of dependency.25 Orwell’s low’s only sellable object remains their labour power. It was this power that built slave, feudal, early-liberal consumer societies and media capitalism. But in sharp contrast to slavery (myths and Gods) and feudalism (religion and church), today it is media capitalism’s sophisticated machinery that asphyxiates human beings. Apart from the re-appearance of slave markets in Libya in 2017,26 the only other difference between then and now is that slave owners had—and some still

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have—physical possession of labour, the actual person.27 Today, profits are still extracted from individuals.28 Yet all other costs and pathologies are externalised onto society and the environment, for example, strip-mine coal in a wilderness.29 In short, ‘capitalism is not a sane political economy’.30 Then as today, individuals are ideologically made to support the values of the dominant elites of slavery, feudalism, early and media capitalism.31 In the twenty-first century, ideology has truly taken the helm as its impact is elevated to new levels through sophisticated neuro-scientific marketing techniques that render people ‘the victim of an involuntary mental implantation’.32 Today, the ideologification—the conversion of science into ideology—and the use of science against human beings is portrayed as scientific advancement for the benefit of all. The ruling elites of many historical stages have always endeavoured to present their values as being universal and in need to be supported without exception.33 From slavery to media capitalism, these ideas have ‘penetrated [the] public mind’.34 Today’s new quality is the sophistication of technical-ideological-psychological instruments used ‘to seek out time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation’.35 This is a process German philosopher Habermas calls the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’.36 Media capitalism’s colonising power has never had human ends in-itself (enjoyment, happiness, beauty, truth, equality, humanity, etc.).37 Its means are always directed towards specific goals that sustain those in a ruling position. The strengths of current ideologies rest in their ability to conceal nearly all present pathologies and contradictions while legitimising media capitalism whose prime task is to maintain the ideological framework on which everything else is constructed.38 By doing this, today’s individuals have been made to: . accept the ideology of being a commodity inside the labour market; 1 2. see fulfilment in acquiring commodities from consumptive markets; 3. accept the media guided ideologies and goals delusions; and 4. experience social relationships as commodities inside markets.39 This ranges from useful and usable friendships constructed as networking to marriage markets based on use- and exchange-value, all of which is powerfully guided by the prevailing mass ‘deception’40 of TINA and supported by the ‘so-called engineering approach [using] professional research methods [to] get people to adopt and actively support…capitalism’.41 It cements atomisation and creates self-blame rather than focusing on the system of media capitalism.42 All of this sustains and enhances the ideology of formal, legal, moral and political equality while cementing

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socio-economic inequalities.43 Media PR assures that individuals perceive equality in law and democracy. Meanwhile, ‘a world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government’.44 PR— Bernays and Ivy Lee—have long known that:45 those who manipulate [the] unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the ruling power of our country.

Long before Poison Ivy and Bernays, the 19th US President (Rutherford B.  Hayes) wrote in 1887, ‘this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations [while US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted,] we may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both’.46 The fact that ‘the prime source of power remains…media power’ is camouflaged and legitimised through ideology.47 No longer is there any support for modernity’s idea of equality. Media capitalism supports its own ideology, portraying wealth redistribution as a thing of the past. Within limits—‘you can’t polish a turd’48—PR has replaced Orwell’s thought police as ‘truth [is] replaced by believability’.49 Media capitalism is increasingly better equipped to camouflage such contradictions.50 It uses ‘techniques to create an image as a façade to cover the truth’.51 Media capitalism has anchored ‘the perception in the mind’52 of many that diminished state intervention and self-insurance against unforeseeable risks is social progress.53 In reality, the reverse has been the case. Simultaneously, media capitalism has also managed to frame the downgrading of social and state programmes towards privatisation as reform (read: positive). Meanwhile ‘regular access to the public mind’ anchors beliefs in markets. Simultaneously, anti-social reform-roll-backs are implemented.54 Media capitalism makes it possible that reactionary politics becomes progress and reform. The outcome is a highly ideologicalised, individualised, atomised and privatised society in which progress no longer means social progress for all but monetary advances for some paralleled by petty consumption for others. This has been expressed in the ideological formula of: more commodities equals more happiness

In a final insulting pathology, happiness is replaced with fun and ‘culture [is] turned into stunt culture’.55 The media industry has

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manufactured this fun culture and eliminated true happiness as a social issue. To achieve that, it has contrived a fundamentally positive ideology.56 This ideology has been able to transfer essential provisions of existence into the hands of so-called corporate providers—a tautology. Now providers were engineering fun.57 Ideological support to corporate providers has successfully replaced support to social welfare states and social institutions that once provided non-commercial activities such as sport, dances, social gatherings and so on. In the wake of that, media capitalism has used the ideology of neoliberalism to attack social welfare provisions by using PR’s 23 simple steps:58 1. Attack the weakest in their leader’s strength. 2. Attack on the narrowest possible front. 3. Operate from the smallest defendable base. 4. Outflank but do not provoke them. 5. Anticipate hostile attitudes. 6. Examine the constituencies from which they walk away from. 7. Attack their lines at the furthest point. 8. Threaten your adversary’s home base. 9. Divert your adversaries by causing them to doubt the loyalty of their allies. 10. Sabotage your adversary’s timing. 11. Reward early defectors handsomely. 12. Enlist collaborators behind enemy lines. 13. Call up the militia. 14. Attack whenever they fail to innovate. 15. Attack where least expected. 16. Set easy initial goals and then declare victory. 17. Let yourself be portrayed as lazy and unthreatening before launching a major offensive. 18. Keep the opposition anonymous (don’t name them or rename them). 19. Train enemy fire on decoys (‘promotion…of non-issues’59). 20. Demonstrate and pretend compassion. 21. Exploit the dominance of business. 22. ‘Never react. That provides fuel for the opposition; 23. express compassion for the attackers. That defuses their power’.60

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Media capitalism’s overwhelming ideological onslaught linked to PR’s communicative-militaristic strategies assured the successful demise of many state-guaranteed social welfare provisions. These no longer advance individuals by compensating against capitalism’s unpredictable risks. Media capitalism comes with a rise of hyper-individualistic you-are-on-­ your-own ideologies.61 The suffocating stranglehold that individuals experienced under the conditions of asymmetrical labour relations was previously deflected onto the state. Now, media capitalism has turned this onto individuals themselves. Media capitalism’s phenomenal ideological achievements allowed a massive re-regulation that favours capital and started during the late 20th century, culminating in the pro-business regulation of corporate media. The successful incorporation of so-called independent media (read: pro-corporate) regulators (e.g. designed to preserve corporate media) was best described by the FCC chairman Mark Fowler in the early 1980s when he described television as just another appliance. It’s a toaster with pictures.62

Twenty-first century’s media capitalism has moved even further. Protective layers of regulations safeguarding against the harshness of capitalist markets have been removed. Once moved onto the private market, human services no longer provide guiding principles for healthy relationships between individuals and social services. Profits and markets have been successfully installed between both. What counts is what can be quantified and sold under market conditions. A patient  doctor relationship, for example, has been replaced with a patient  finance  doctor relationship in which accounting methods fair as high—if not higher—as patient health. Social services have been massively moved towards Managerialism’s instrumental rationality such as cost-benefit and means-ends.63 Managerialism’s ability to numerically calculate human life has become the norm. The ideology of markets has been used to install new power relationships, secured through the media industry’s successful deepening of media capitalism’s ideology. Humans have been reduced to elements and functions in mathematical cost-benefit equations engineered on managerialist spread sheets. In financially driven markets, human beings have been denigrated to no more than a necessary evil signified as a figure on an excel file.64 For example, the focus on numbers results in costly health services. Expensive medical treatments have to be administered and insurance

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policies have to be paid out. Managerialism deals with such cost incurring units—previously called people—by converting individuals into managerial objects of power, open to manipulation under media capitalism free choice ideology.65 Corporate media’s mass deception is framed as freedom of choice.66 It is no more than ‘we’d like to think we are free to choose’.67 Choices of only cosmetically differentiated health funds, for example, are further framed as your choice and your health fund—both are never yours.68 The core difference between twentieth century’s consumerist welfare capitalism and twenty-first century’s media capitalism is that individuals have been ideologically and successfully shifted onto privatised markets.69 The decisive difference is the acceptance of media capitalism’s ideology that ‘utilises existing material’ like consumerism to sell capitalism’s core ideology.70 Chronologically, this converted human beings: . into objects of market power→nineteenth century (liberal capitalism) 1 2. into objects of bureaucratic power→twentieth century (consumerism) 3. into objects of ideological power→twenty-first century (media capitalism) All of these view individuals exclusively as entities exposed to markets, bureaucracy and ideology. First they created market relations organised by small companies, followed by corporations that became today’s global oligopolies. In health, many of the twentieth century’s state monopolies became twenty-first-century corporate oligopolies.71 Under media capitalism’s ideology of the liberation of individuals from state and social welfare bureaucracies the suppression of individuals by private oligopolies became the norm. It converted Enlightenment’s human freedom into an ideological fiction camouflaged as freedom of consumer choice while creating ‘a “want” for the produced goods and services’ supporting consumer capitalism.72 Today, individuals are ruled through a pre-conceived prisoner dilemma that is used as a weapon. Individuals became objects of corporate power.73 This was made possible through media capitalism’s interest symbiosis— ‘rich men all belong to the same club’74—which encompasses key institutions:75 corporations, media, marketing agencies (‘politics are products to be sold [to] the public’), PR’s ‘slant or spin’ and a political system made dependent on them.76 While ‘the concept of the autonomous consumer

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who is free to choose [is] a modern myth’, the free choice ideology always also needed a real apparatus.77 It works through ‘the creation of psychological conditions so that the desired result seems to come from them naturally’.78 The elimination of true choice has been compensated by the mass deception of a ‘life shaped as a string of consumer choices’.79 These false choices are designed by marketing psychologists following the ‘agenda…to make money’80 while ‘creating a desire for products [also known as] demand engineering’.81 The reduction of life choices to ‘settle down, marry, resign to turn the circle’82 is paralleled by an explosion of irrelevant commodity choices compelling individuals into commodity choice.83 The conversion of human life into life ‘driven by the ever-­ accelerating wheels of consumption’ and its widespread acceptance has been a great achievement.84 Meanwhile, media corporations present themselves as friendly giants and not as orges (PR-talk) helping you to make the right choices. At least partly, this ideological project is signified through rational choice models providing the confinement of individuals inside marketing’s tidily constructed prisoner dilemma to choose from ‘rapidly diminishing product differences’.85 It turns every eventuality of life into a product choice.86 Media capitalism’s prevailing ideology converts, for example, health from being about medicine into a corporate product choice. Health corporations—framed as health funds—offer micro choices that roughly fall into three broad categories: Table 6.1 shows the A-B-C classification of individuals through health insurance corporations resulting in a market-driven continuation of class society that was re-established during the final era when a more equalising structure called social welfare state still prevailed. The new system is enforced by for-profit services camouflaged through the sign-value of your golden health fund access card. The live→market transition closes capitalism’s vicious circle by constructing human beings as health fund recipients. The social welfare state is replaced by capitalism. Media capitalism’s Table 6.1  The airline metaphor and health cover The airline metaphor

Levels of operations

Scope of coverage

First-class provider Business class provider Economy class provider

Upper level Lower level Subsistence level

Full coverage Partial coverage Token coverage

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Table 6.2  From religious ideology to the ideology of media capitalism Religious ideology and its transmission It’s no longer the church It’s no longer the religious mass & prayers It’s no longer the Bible It’s no longer the liturgy It’s no longer the miracle It’s no longer the religious story It’s no longer the daily prayer

Ideology of media capitalism and its transmission → → → → → → →

But the shopping mall But the TV commercial89 But the glossy magazines and trashy journals But the shopping trip (shopping therapy) But the Hollywood movie But engineered best-$ellers But daily exposure to TV-ads and soap operas90

capitalism+media+ideology was not possible under consumerism flanked by welfare states. It only became achievable after the second structural transformation when marketing (selling products via ‘impuls purchasing’87) became PR (selling corporations and capitalism themselves).88 This created media capitalism. No previous socio-economical system has been able to create and use ideology to such an extent and no previous society has ever been able to infiltrate the reproductive sphere so completely. Only after the second structural transformation the media ‘became an integral part of the power structure of monopoly capitalism’ creating an interest symbiosis that unifies all parts of media capitalism.91 While the first transformation of the public sphere simply consolidated media to become mass media in support of consumerism, the second transformation globalised corporate media into worldwide media empires, shifting their focus from simple consumerism (marketing) to media capitalism’s twenty-first-century project of global ideological governance. This resulted in a triple commoditisation: 1. In labour markets: →employee/worker→is the commodity (liberal capitalism). 2. In commodity markets:→consumer product→is the commodity (consumer capitalism). 3. In media markets: →news/infotainment→is the commodity (media capitalism). Once this was underwritten by ideology, the commoditisation of individuals was moved from being a simple commodity under consumerism towards pure ideologification under media capitalism, turning everyone into an object of ideological power. This has a history.92 Early liberal

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capitalism created the commoditisation of individuals for production, leaving individuals inside and outside of the Satanic Mills and Bleak Houses largely unprotected from the ravages of the free market, workplace violence and abuse.93 In his textbook, economist Varoufakis (1998:14) describes this:94 Business Ethics Robert Heilbroner quotes in his book The Worldly Philosophers an article in The Lion circa 1828. The article was about Robert Blincoe, one of eighty pauper children sent off to a factory in Lowdham. Productivity was kept up by continually whipping, day and night, 10-year-old boys and girls. At another factory where they were taken later, they had to wrestle with pigs over scarce food. Sexual abuse and physical violence were also part of the menu. Robert Blincoe would spend the winters almost naked and had his teeth filed down. Although his was the exception rather than the rule, a fourteen hours day for 8 to 10-year olds was standard.

The historic reality95 is not Jane Austin’s hallucination of Mr Darcey of the nineteenth century that media industry ideology likes to present.96 If an Austin-like version of history is presented at all, it is done so under the ideological heading, well, this was 200 years ago, seeking to make misery and child labour disappear.97 Meanwhile in historical terms, social protection against the sheer brutality of capitalism was eventually established through trade union power combined with progressive political parties. Yet this twentieth-century design left the fundamentals of capitalism untouched. The event of media capitalism has not altered this. More than ever before, media capitalism has managed to ideologically nullify the asymmetrical character of human beings asphyxiated inside markets. For example, it has created the appearance that commodity markets equal labour markets. The prevailing ideology is thing-equals-person, while in reality labour markets do not transfer ownership—people are not for sale. Nevertheless, this ideology has assured that these markets need to operate freely for the creation of fictitious equality between buyer and seller. Despite fundamental contradictions between human-labour and non-­ human commodity markets, the media industry has successfully moored sameness in the mind of the public. It has created a general ideological support for labour markets that supersedes the reality of inequality and inherent asymmetries as shown in Fig. 6.1: Figure 6.1 shows the asymmetrical relationship inside labour markets. In general, a company is a singularity positioned in relation to a larger

T. KLIKAUER

Firm = labour buyer



Seller HR (A)

=

Cost to HR (A) = 





Seller HR (B)

≠

Cost to HR (B) =





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Cost to Firm = 0

Fig. 6.1  The asymmetry of cost in human and commodity markets

number of labour sellers. These labour sellers are ideologically labelled as human resources (HR). The cost of not (≠) being employed is high for HR B= , while the cost for the firm to employ A or B is almost zero. The cost of employment is asymmetrically distributed to the disadvantage of workers. The position of labour (HR-sellers) in the labour market remains weak as opposed to the company’s position. Getting or not getting a job is of higher impact compared to selecting A over B. This has been so ever since capitalism has replaced feudalism, creating so-called free labour. Workers are legally free but structurally forced to sell their labour power, that is, we are forced to work. Media capitalism has—more than any other previous form of capitalism—achieved an ideology equalisation expressed in the widely accepted equation of: labour-seller-equals-labour-buyer.98 The main apparatus that led to this achievement has been the media industry. Despite contradictory evidence, the equalisation of non-equals inside labour markets has been strongly supported by Managerialism and its entourage of ideological writers, self-appointed experts, consultants, business schools and crypto-academics. Media capitalism’s most outstanding achievement however is not to be found in the productive but in the reproductive sphere. Media capitalism reaches far beyond simply making people buy things. The consumer as buyer has been given the ideological illusion of choice over an ever-­ increasing variety of goods.99 This is supported by everyday experiences inside the consumptive sphere hiding the existence of a few global corporate monopolies. People and commodities have been equalised through media capitalism’s ideological formula: good-equals-price → consumers pay a fair price for goods just as employers pay fair salaries to employees.100 Based on this ideology, two things are gained from human resources and from consumers. Traditional surplus extraction occurs under managerial regimes. This has been covered by Managerialism into extra profit extraction through serious profit margins at consumptive levels. This fact is nothing new under capitalism. What is new is the total acceptance of this ideology established through media capitalism’s power, while the fact that workers/consumers are in a disadvantaged position in both spheres remains hidden from consumers. Under consumerism, the ideological

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support for managerial and consumptive regimes has been supplied by three ideological regimes: . human resource management →managerial regimes, 1 2. advertisement/marketing →consumptive regimes, and 3. media industry →ideological regimes. The interest symbiosis of all three determines the level of mass support for the overarching ideology of media capitalism. In that, the media industry still provides the most important support for the triadic structure by creating a raft of ideas, attitudes and even ‘status-symbol buying’ designed to camouflage the ‘misery of hierarchical subordination’.101 In short, the long-run impact of the media on the style of perception, the understanding (or, more often, the misunderstanding) of life, the sense of what it means to be…a boy or girl, man or women, old folk, is immense.102

Consumerism’s clearest expression remains the ‘never-ending stream of newness’103 flanked by inventing and perfecting the methods of neuro-­ marketing to engineer sign-values, inventing ever-new(ish) desires and converting them into eternal consumptive dissatisfaction.104 In that way, endlessly dissatisfied consumers constantly seek satisfaction while never experiencing true happiness. Media capitalism converts human needs into commodities by transforming human emotions into usable entities for a marketing apparatus of eternally incomplete fulfilment.105 PR not only admits that ‘the stuff with which we work is the fabric of men’s mind’ but also calls it ‘emotional persuasion [and] winning hearts and minds’.106 The always incomplete: consumption → dissatisfaction → consumption → dissatisfaction

encirclement of consumerism107 is mirrored by an equally incomplete aspiration → promotion → aspiration trajectory of dissatisfaction inside managerial regimes. Pathological emotion-to-commodity links assist always unsatisfied consumption seeking individuals who have been strapped on a perpetual wheel of never-ending emotional substitution, focusing on ‘affect, passion, emotions, etc.’108 Corporate media works with synthetic consumer fun of advertising, kitschy movies and TV-shows109—‘the language of moving image, television’.110 In other words, ‘if it’s not on the Disney Channel, I don’t hear about it’.111

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Fun-seeking customers are good customers. Humans that experience true happiness are content with themselves and the world that surrounds them. There is a marketing-driven illusion of faked happiness that runs under the idea of ‘whoever could compellingly produce and circulate common fantasies would be in a position to define the direction of the collective identity’ of a society:112 fantasy dominates reality, anyone who questions the fantasy will be defensively considered subversive, insane or even criminal.

The fantasy of happiness is forever played out in repeated113 advertisements of commercialised fun that ‘implants thought not by force but by infiltration’.114 These convey consumer shaping ideologies and they are one of media capitalism’s more outstanding achievements. Individuals are made to believe in fun without ever being happy.115 Human longing for human-to-human happiness is simply shifted onto an atomistic ‘pulverisation of the social world’116 and hyper-individualised human-to-commodity relationships.117 It is superficial fun with all its pathological consequences. In such an atomised society, commercially created pathologies of unfulfilled romances are coupled with prudishness. This supports over-­sexualised advertisements based on the well-known sex sells premise.118 It creates an endless over-sexualised and semi-pornographic but always dysfunctional foreplay never to be satisfied. This converts unfulfilled sexual energies into a fun-equals-shopping culture—retail therapy.119 Such a fun culture is sustained through commercialised fun directed towards consuming. Simultaneously, it replaces experiences of real sexual fulfilment into a place where it does not belong. This is not only the basic ingredient for fetishism but the media industry parallels this with sexual repressiveness that prevents real sexual fulfilment.120 At the same time it turns every human being into a sexual commodity. The media industry has sexed-up society while retaining unfulfilled consumers. A sex-seeking consumer is a good consumer. Sexually satisfied human beings tend to pause and rest but the structure of consumption cannot afford pause and rest. It demands endless consumption.121 The oversexed but unfulfilled consumer is ‘safely isolated’, living a life in emotional impoverishment while been de-sexed and sexualised at the same time.122 Rather crudely this has been expressed as oversexed but underfucked123—media-created ‘machine-mediated relationships [that]

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provide the illusion of companionship’.124 Riesman’s Lonely Crowd is incapable of real sexual experience but is plastered with sexualised ad-images.125 To compensate for the atomisation, a faked illusion of human closeness has been engineered, expressed in kitschy movies, hyper-romantic novels and the trashy sentimentalism of consumer products.126 They all convert the human quest for happiness, closeness and sexual fulfilment into monetary outcomes. What is left for individuals is to satisfy their pursuit through an ever greater exposure to the media industry. It delivers an endless stream of sexualised commercial images, constructing simulated private harmony amidst a commercialised world driven by competition and denying any other form of human life. The media’s annihilation of space for human interaction diminishes human-to-human happiness, while ‘public life [is turned] into entertainment’ via tabloid-TV,127 ‘murder is my meat’,128 and ‘entertainment uber alles’.129 Options for human-to-human meeting places are commercialised and privatised leading to ‘the erosion of private life’s perimeter’.130 There are private libraries, private swimming pools, private gyms and commercial dating agencies. Meanwhile, traditional human meeting places have successively been reduced and made off limits for non-paying individuals. All that remains is a privatised world of commercial space.131 This allows for yet another instrument of commercialised existence. The sale of consumer electronics establishes a technical apparatus that connects disconnected human beings with the media industry. Humans are made to pay for this when purchasing machines, software, access-codes and content. The greater the distance between human beings, the more these connecting machines—iPads, iPhones for texting, sexting,132 Skype calls and so on—can be sold. ‘Most of the citizenry never meet 99 per cent of their fellow citizens and the media serve as a kind of proxy’.133 Face-to-­ face interaction has been replaced by non-human interactions reduced to a text on a hand-held apparatus.134 Human emotions are exchanged with virtual people inside artificial worlds constructed as compensatory mechanisms to create illusionary substitutes for actual human contact. Mediated human contacts are kindly supported through your all new consumer electronics superstore. Inside, isolated individuals can obtain contraptions that isolate them even further.135 The de-spacing of human contact is complemented by an equally huge industry of commercial self-help advice and esoteric self-finding businesses.136 In that way, individuals can learn to project emotional demands onto themselves while remaining emotionally crippled but materially affluent.

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Emotionally handicapped individuals are not to be disturbed through critical self-reflection.137 There is a longstanding tradition that favours behaviourism. The illusion of a quick fix offers ‘hallucinatory solutions to actual problems’.138 Any hint of an awareness of social pathologies is avoided by the therapy industry, by the media industry and by media-­ guided commodity-oriented individuals. Their ideological attitudes are established when human contact and desires are converted into consumer products.139 The media industry provides ideology while emotional-­ pathological crypto-satisfaction is gained through consumer goods. Meanwhile, PR’s outsmarting the public can be profitable PR-talk runs in the background. Assuring that, PR sees three types of publics:140 1. a public that does ‘not detect a problem’ (e.g. capitalism)—PR’s preference; 2. a public that ‘recognises a problem’ but is persuaded to do nothing; and 3. an ‘active public’ that needs to be prevented from doing ‘something about a problem’. Locking people into 1+2 means ‘pay no attention to them’141 in PR terms. Unless people move to 3 (PR failure), media capitalism continues to enhance consumerism’s petty affluence with a distraction called infotainment, believing that ‘reality is…boring’.142 There is no need for conspiracy theories143 to explain media capitalism since its interest symbiosis is powerful enough to reach beyond ‘the elite consensus [that assures] the engineering of consent’.144 This interest symbiosis of all participating industries assured the working together of those agencies that manufacture goods, sell them (marketing) and provide the ideological glue (media) that binds the entire structure together (corporate media). It needs Durkheim’s atomistic individuals on the one side.145 On the other side, the following takes place:146 In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business…we are dominated by [a] relatively small number of persons …who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.

Media capitalism needs neither Gemeinschaft nor Gesellschaft—community or society. During liberal capitalism and consumerism, societies were sustained through social organisations such as trade unions, political

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parties, churches, social clubs and others. But media capitalism has all but annihilated such social organisations to create atomised and de-organised individuals open to ideological manipulation.147 It has even replaced traditional communities found, for example, in Catholicism and faked communities based on race and fascist blood-and-soil ideologies. Media capitalism has dissolved almost all communities by transferring human existence into an atomistic existence, creating a thoroughly ideological society that ideologically supports itself. Media capitalism targets the soul over the mind using ‘knowledge against the public interest’148 while believing that ‘people don’t seem to be reasonable…that seems to be the secret of understanding or manipulating people’149—somewhat similar to religion that was never geared towards the mind but always towards the soul. But media capitalism is not an irrational religious institution. It is neither irrational nor anti-rational. Instead, it uses rational means to guide individuals by simultaneously eliminating Kant’s human faculty of critical rationality.150 In the full awareness that ‘propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average men’, media capitalism relies on rational planning and ideologies.151 It uses very rational means for irrational ends, and it splits those who are mass guided by the media industry from those who engineer this process. The former have been asphyxiated inside irrationalities while the latter use rationality for ideological goals.152 Their victims are asphyxiated inside a multitude of different symbols organised in a rational way that uses modern means such as psychology, marketing, communication, behaviourism and sociology. Despite that, media capitalism still carries some connotations to religious liturgies, daily prayers, weekly confessions, church masses, overwhelming and impressive interiors of churches, religious stories, miracles and saints. These are not damaging but ideologically supportive of media capitalism.153 Media capitalism uses similar techniques but in a rational and scientific way: Whilst the vicars of feudalist churches, kings and barons created religious ideological affirmation to feudalism, today’s media industry creates ideological affirmation to media capitalism. Despite televangelists and religious TV, it is no longer religion that is used to ideologically support media capitalism.154 A triangle of religion, ideology and consumption decides what counts and what is deleted from the minds of the many individuals. Today’s ideologically educated individuals demand a somewhat more sophisticated delivery mode compared to the relatively crude delivery of religious ideological messages that were given to medieval peasants.

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The insufficient religious liturgy had to be replaced by modern and scientifically underpinned means of mass deception.155 The media industry had to become a scientific enterprise. Enlightenment’s abolition of God also meant the end of religious ideology and its substantial hegemony that suppressed feudal societies for centuries. In that way, ideological affirmation under media capitalism changed to scientific sophistication and modern mechanisms are used to achieve it.156 Asphyxiating human beings in present society through an oscillation between media capitalism, consumerism and ideology could only be established after several older societal forms had been overcome. Media capitalism marks the pinnacle of this development. Today’s media capitalism with its prime tool of the media industry has reached a point where individuals are thoroughly mass mediated. To achieve this, several historic stages had to be passed as shown in Table 6.3: Table 6.3 shows how societies have developed towards media capitalism by depicting its productive (upper row) and reproductive (middle row) structure as well as the mode of conduct (bottom row). The economy→society link (upper to middle row) was sustained throughout the historical development that occurred in several stages. Historically, this link consisted predominantly of violence and control, using sticks rather than carrots. But at each stage the entire structure was also ideologically sustained. All of this occurred through specific contacts between people and classes. It all started when human beings had left the animal world behind to become the tool-making homo faber. At the early level, direct contact to tribes was enhanced through ideology primarily directed inwards. When humans moved from hunter and gatherer societies towards farming with village settlements, ideological support moved from communal tribes to tribal leaders, priests and Gods. Natural complexities were explained through higher beings. Gods gave ideology while organisational principles became increasingly based on the acquisition of surplus value allowing some to gain a position that permitted others to believe in their superiority. Eventually, tribes created larger structures, at first in Egypt, then throughout the Middle East and eventually in Greece followed by the Roman Empire. Ideological support began to move from tribal chiefs to pharaohs and emperors. But the basic daily form in which humans related to each other remained largely direct (Table 6.3). This was soon to end. As societal organisations started to develop on more sophisticated levels, increased in size and became more complex, direct contact between

Mode of contact

Organisation

Economic

Sirect not mediated

Hunter and gatherer Tribe and group

Tribes →

Direct not mediated

Subsistence farming Chief and gods

Settlements → Slavery economy Pharaoh, emperor, mythology and god Direct and mediated

City states →

Direct and mediated

Feudalism land and rent King, lord, God and monism

Feudalism →

Table 6.3  From individual communication to ideological communication

Technology and mediated

Liberal→consumer capitalism Leaders and workers

Nation →

Ideology and global mediation

Media capitalism Consumption and ideology

Global

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people and leaders became increasingly indirect and direct contact became insufficient for the maintenance of ideological affirmation that stabilised the ruling elite. Slavery and later feudal societies needed a new version of ideological affirmation. With feudalism, complexities continued to expand and, in some cases, they even extended over large areas. As a consequence, direct contact between tribal clan leaders and followers became rare as social entities grew. Direct contact switched more and more towards indirect and mediated contact and for that ideologically affirmative symbols and signs were needed. As indirect and mediated ideological affirmation became more important, visual images, medallions, depictions, icons, statues and paintings of rulers started to mediate attitudes about rulers. This was paralleled by a transition from a multitude of Gods towards a singular monistic God representing the church’s all encompassing ideological power (Table 6.3). By that time, social structures had moved to feudal kingdoms where slavery was replaced by the feudal economic system of soil, rent, serfdom and peasantry (Table 6.3). Direct contact between peasants and the king was increasingly rare. Ideological support was provided through the symbol of God administered through churches ( ). What followed was a completely new form of society. In some cases, it was pushed through by revolutionary change towards a fundamentally new form of economy. Thousands of years of soil, king, peasantry, serfdom and land—ideologically upheld by the main underwriter of feudalism: the church—ended through an economy based on commodities and commercial goods. Again, ideological affirmation changed fundamentally from religion, God and churches towards modern states and capitalist entrepreneurs often portrayed as heroes of the industrial age.157 From this time on, ideological affirmation could only be maintained through the mediating power of a new symbol—$ . Under the conditions of modernity, leaders of relatively large nation states could only establish themselves by creating ideological affirmation for themselves. These rulers created an invented image of themselves that was then locked into the minds of followers by the media. This can be described as ‘ideology recruits individuals as followers’.158 These images were of leaders most people never met. It was the time when images, symbols, nationalistic flags, insignias and signs signified a to-be-followed leader. For PR, ‘the key to leadership in the modern age depends on the ability to manipulate symbols which assemble emotions’.159 This became the concept of early capitalism. Under media capitalism things changed

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dramatically while nationalistic leaders became mere auxiliaries. Today, ideological affirmation to modern societies and capitalism is sustained through the media itself that became a key institution for the entire construct. Mediated ideological support for the leaders of rising capitalism also became a more and more important mode of management-employee engagement at managerial workplaces when direct contact moved to mediated ideological support for management. Historically, workers in early craft workshops often met, knew each other and worked with their immediate boss. With moves towards larger mass manufacturing corporations, workers such as those of Ford’s River Rouge Factory with 100,000 workers could no longer establish direct contact with an owner (Table 6.3). Hence, nationalistic, corporate and state images, metaphors and symbols started to emerge. The subsequent replacement of liberal capitalism with consumerism created even more of such symbols and insignias while enhancing the distance between people and society. It created societies in which individuals could only ever get to know their leaders through mediated images presented to them by mass media. But even this changed as national societies became global societies and consumerism moved towards global and ideologically driven media capitalism. Global markets demanded the invention of global ways to sustain ideological affirmation. With the absence of truly global leaders, ideological images moved towards corporate images representing media capitalism itself. Meanwhile, others like Nelson Mandela, Subcomandante Marcos and so on 160 proved that corporate globalisation and media capitalism can be fought and ‘media malaise among citizens, increasing feelings of ineffectiveness, cynicism, and isolation’ can be overcome.161 At the same time, ideological support to states through nationalistic leaders began to be superseded by ideological affirmation to global brands and media capitalism itself.162 Ultimately, state organised ‘nationalistic propaganda’163 declined. On propaganda, Goebbles once noted, ‘the best propaganda was like gas, it works invisible [and] penetrates the whole of life’164 while Hitler said,165 all propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it. People can be made to perceive paradise as hell, and the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

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After the victory over Nazism, most propaganda began to be replaced by consumerism, PR and corporate mass media, slowly converting marketing into PR and PR into media capitalism.166 The marketing→PR→media-­ capitalism move began. This shifted redundant ideologies towards media capitalism.167 In short, out-dated national leaders were surpassed by the sign-value of global brands used as a vehicle to garner ideological affirmation to media capitalism. It lies in the greatness of media capitalism that it no longer needs to advertise itself through its own symbolism. Its ideology is engraved in global brands and the culture it celebrates and broadcasts.168 This global cultural and, above all, ideological structure depends—more than ever before—on media capitalism shifting outright nationalistic propaganda to ‘the PR voice [that] speaks propaganda’ more cleverly.169 Media capitalism’s ideological triumph lies in global brands.170 Media capitalism has merged ideological affirmation and consumption into a one-dimensional entity, creating individuals with ideologically affirmative attitudes. This arrangement no longer depends on clans, tribes, chiefs, Gods or ‘a’ God, emperors, lords, kings, national leaders and corporate entrepreneurs. Media capitalism only needs two things: an ideology and a method to deliver it. It no longer needs democracy although some have argued that consumption equals democratic expression under the formula: ‘product-market=political-market’.171 While the twentieth century’s mass-mediated consumerism—coupled with social welfare states— relied to some extent on democracy, the twenty-first century’s media industry no longer depends on democratically elected leaders to maintain itself. It has successfully isolated democracy from at least four main spheres of society. Today, we experience the democracy-free but ideological spheres 1. of schooling and higher education governed by educational managerialists;172 2. of employment governed by Managerialism; 3. of consumption with consumers;173 and 4. of public engagement (public sphere) governed by global media corporations. Mass-mediated consumerism started to isolate democracy during the late twentieth century, while the media industry began supporting democracy-­free zones largely for two reasons: as media corporations, they are themselves democracy-free zones; and it serves their own existence and interest to delete democracy from public engagement. This reduced

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democracy to just another reality show with increasingly indifferent political parties and leaders.174 The political leaders are sold on the marketplace for democracy organised under corporate marketing and PR principles.175 They and their parties are sold through political advertisement using the same ploy. Noble Prize winners Akerlof and Shiller explained how ‘rip-offs regarding cars, houses, and credit cards [are extended to] phishing for politics’.176 Product and politician ‘differences are cosmetic’ while advertising methods and the sales pitch remain almost identical.177 In many cases, this is organised through the same advertising agencies and image consultants and broadcasted through the same media industry selling us what to believe in, what to buy and for which party to vote. Once this ‘bombardment of falsehood, distortion and propaganda’ had reached sufficient levels, media capitalism was able to lay claim onto almost everything.178 Its ideology has even managed to reverse the long-held assumption that economic foundations should support society. Today society’s sole existence is to support media capitalism’s economic structure and ideology. Society has been downgraded to being a mere appendix. The media governs the sole exchange sphere for virtually all ideas relevant to society.179 Its level of power and global reach has been able to turn the traditional society→economy arrangement on its head: Figure 6.2 shows a reversal of society→economy relationships and the supportive role society plays under media capitalism. Society has been denigrated to a supplementary function of a sphere that ideologically supports media capitalism. Its simple task is to maintain productive and consumptive structures underwritten by ideology. With the demise of consumerism and the welfare state’s economy=society equation, media capitalism has changed the society-economy equation and has altered the function of ideology.180 Ideology is no longer a simple additive to commodity production (nineteenth century) and mass consumerism (twentieth century). Instead, media capitalism has established ideology as the core

what ought to be

what is

pluralist self-governing society  economy and business

economy and business  ideologically supportive society

economy supports society

society is ideological support function for media capitalism

Fig. 6.2  The society-economy reversal

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support mechanism (twenty-first century) integrating virtually all exchanges into media capitalism’s structure. During liberal capitalism and consumerism, society was seen as a structure above production, guided by democracy, state authority,181 welfare provisions and bureaucracy.182 The economic side of the equation was seen as a base governed by society. Under media capitalism this no longer exists. Media capitalism has truly ended the idea of a division between production and consumption, practice and ideology. It has comprehensively restructured this relationship. This has pathological consequences because only those parts that ideologically contribute positively and supportively to media capitalism are deemed to be of any value. Value adding under media capitalism means adding ideological value to its project. As a consequence, one of the main tasks of media capitalism remains to spread its ideology. Over time, the focus shifted from labour and capital (nineteenth century) to consumerism (twentieth century) and eventually to ideological affirmation (twenty-first century). In other words, by installing its ideology into the general public, media capitalism achieves two vital goals at the same time, namely, to spread its ideology while also creating shareholder value and profit maximisation for corporations. This, of course, demanded the constant integration of society into capitalism (Fig. 6.2): 1. society→to→capitalism→19th century:→human = worker 2. society→to→consumerism→20th century:→human = consumer 3. society→to→ideology→21st century:→human = ideology carrier Stage 1 demanded diligent workers; stage 2, diligent consumers; and in stage 3 ‘the individual must participate in all this from the bottom of his heart…[To achieve this, not only] psychological manipulation’183 was needed but media capitalism also had to complete three elements: assuring that ‘the existing media regime is on stable ground’;184 securing its ideological infiltration into societies; and the creation of a media industry as ideology’s sole transmission belt. Table 6.4 shows how this is organised under media capitalism’s ideology→society model: In strictly economic terms (Table 6.4 left-side), today’s ideological society as shaped by media capitalism is not different to its predecessors: liberal and consumer capitalism. Whatever the prefix, it still remains essentially capitalism, even though capitalism’s core has made a triple shift: from production (nineteenth century) to consumerism (twentieth century) to ideology (twenty-first century). Today, the glue of ideology is engineered and

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Table 6.4  The organisation of ideological mass affirmation Structure

Substance

Democracy

Politics

Constitution

Reproductive-

Law, society,

Media-guided

Parliament

structure

art, politics

democracy

Progressive parties, conservative parties











Productive-

Capital, money185 managerialism

Non-democracy

Capital and management workers

Companies

structure

authoritarianism

law and courts

HR policies

transmitted by the media that provides a vital component to assure production, consumption and the ideological maintenance of society. But media capitalism has not replaced ideology. There is no end of ideology. Rather the very opposite is the case.186 And there is no end to the ideological apparatus that came with it. Instead, media capitalism has integrated almost all parts of society into its very own steering apparatus. With that, media capitalism’s steering function remains untouched by democracy (Table 6.4 middle), while elections are helped along by a handful of media moguls, for example, ‘William Randoph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch, Roberto Marinho, Axel Springer, Silvio Berlusconi’.187 All this testifies to what PR has acknowledged:188 mass audiences no longer make the decisions in our society.

Overall, Table 6.4 also shows media capitalism’s steering apparatus that remains fundamental to media capitalism well beyond the example of ‘all but one of the 175 newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch around the world supported the war’ against the Iraq (2003).189 Historically, some elements of media capitalism originated in feudalism as both demanded an institutional structure to secure ideological affirmation to its regime. The ideological structure of feudalism consisted of peasants made to affirm to lords, rent and soil through church and religion with the figurative element of God. At feudalism’s end, the Great Transformation190 to modernity, capitalism and Enlightenment crated roughly 150 years of rupture (approximately 1789–1949) during which ideological mass support was temporarily self-directed, resulting in revolutions and the like. Figure 6.3 shows this development:

284  Peasant  support lord soil

T. KLIKAUER  ideology  institutional structure 

Feudalism

God  support cath/pro. church

Rupture ~ 150 years of Revolution Democracy & welfare state

1789 to 1950s

human resources (HR) consumer  support  capital & management mass-prod.-consumption

 ideology  institutional structure 

mass consumption  support  mass-media as media capitalism

ideologically affirmative society = media capitalism

Fig. 6.3  The changing shape of ideological support

Today, institutional structures (Fig.  6.3) have been successfully converted from church to media capitalism. No longer are the prevailing ideologies religion and God but consumerism and sign-value. The first qualitative change occurred with the peasant→worker conversion. But much more important than that was the creation of consumerism (twentieth century). Historically, non-productive—for example, leisure—time during feudalism was covered by religion in order to sustain ideological affirmation for feudalism. Today, media capitalism has colonised non-­ working leisure time in marketing/PR’s conviction that ‘its amazing how much money you can spend relaxing’.191 The key difference between feudalism’s ideological affirmation and modern-ideological affirmation is that ideological affirmation in the former was additional, while for the latter it has become an internal part and a circular motion as shown in Fig. 6.4: Figure 6.4 shows an important opening inside the partially closed structure of feudalism consisting of peasants, soil and lords. This all-­ important opening was necessary because no system-internal element was able to provide sufficient ideological-affirmative powers to sustain feudalism completely. The structure of feudalism was incapable of providing total system-internal ideological support for feudalism. It is for this reason that the ruling elites of feudalism had to rely on a highly non-productive and no use-value creating entity: the church. Church and religion did not contribute economic functionalities to feudalism, but they delivered an important system stabilising ideology: religion. Hence, feudalism’s core institutions—fiefdom, rent, soil, lords and serfdom—were highly dependent on an ideological support mechanism that supplied ideology through an external institution: the church. But the position of this institution remained external rather than internal to feudalism’s economic structure. Viewed from the economic standpoint of production and exchange and in order to relieve themselves from the burden of caring for its main ideology themselves, feudal elites had to rely on an externality: the church. At times, these elites also relied on brutality and force to coerce people into supporting feudalism’s entire structure. It was a combination of naked

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peasants religious support

human resouces/consumer lord

god + church

soil Feudalist Auxiliary Support

285

corporate massmedia

capital & management

mass-consumption ideological system support

rupture period of early and welfare capitalism

Fig. 6.4  From feudalist auxiliary affirmation to system affirmation

violence paired with an externally supplied ideology. Fundamentally, the ideology supplying institution of the church remained outside the economic productive process during the entire course of feudalism. Capitalism started to change this most dramatically. After liberal capitalism became consumerism, the function of workers changed. They were no longer reduced to producing commodities consumed by a small group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elites. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, workers’ function was to consume those mass commodities they produced, indicating one of the most fundamental shifts in human history. For the first time, those who produced wealth had access to these goods which created affluent societies never seen before. With it came ideology that made people believe that supporting capitalism and dedicating a lifetime to the infamous rat race, to the slumdog-to-millionaire, and the dishwasher-to-millionaire ideology leads to material wealth and a petit-bourgeois lifestyle.192 After the liberal capitalism to consumerism conversion, workers were structurally needed as mass consumers. They were converted into functional additives to consumerism. This development created a bipolar system of mass production and mass consumption. In short, Henry Ford’s mass consumption model performed a hit-and-run (pun intended) on Karl Marx’s theory of an ever-increasing proletarian poverty leading to revolution. The exact opposite occurred. Petit-bourgeois mass consumers said Farewell to the Working Class.193 To incorporate workers into consumerism’s structure, instruments needed in mass production were increasingly applied to mass consumption.194 Meanwhile management mutated into its ideological variant of Managerialism. Eventually Managerialism and consumerism merged into media capitalism:

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1) 19th century:→liberal capitalism’s formula was→labour and work + capital and factories→= profit 2) 20th century:→consumerism’s formula was →mass-production + mass-consumption→= profit 3) 21st century:→media capitalism’s formula is →ideology + consumption-­production →= profit The bottom row(3) represents the latest version of capitalism’s profit-­ creating and self-sustaining formula. It occurred when media capitalism realised the full potential of ideology and its capacity to integrate the working class not just into consumerism but into capitalism, thereby guaranteeing its existence through mass affirmation in at least four spheres: education, work, consumerism and democracy. It established a combination of ideology+consumerism guided by the media. This is what creates media capitalism. All this is done because it guarantees profits for corporations. Yet it also creates system imperatives that have to be addressed. They demand the use of sophisticated psychological marketing techniques, delivered through neuro-psychology and behaviourism and capable of guiding the educational sphere, consumerism, work, affirmation to media capitalism, democracy and so on.195 The advancement of today’s system-internal ideological affirmation is much superior when compared to feudalism’s external and rather crude ideological support as detailed in Fig. 6.5 below. Media capitalism has created a sort of double internal structure reflective of a double need. It depends on this in its material exchange sphere for mass consumerism and as an institutionalisation of ideology that supplies mass affirmation to media capitalism. Consequently, media capitalism has fundamentally reorganised what was previously known as the public sphere. Historically, a completely free public sphere might have never existed. It certainly did not exist during feudalism. Medieval courts did not represent the public external 

support

integrated cycle of ideological support 

no public sphere

temp. public sphere

church & religion 

state & democracy 

peasant  lord feudalism

worker  capital early + welfare capitalism

             

 consumptive sphere



media industry

 companies & management

human resources & consumers



media capitalism since ~middle of 20th century

Fig. 6.5  The utilisation of ideological support

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sphere. A partially free public sphere only made a very brief appearance during the period between the end of feudalism and the start of mass consumerism with the creation of corporate media. The structure that followed consumerism sealed the faith of the public sphere when commercial (first) and ideological (later) interests demanded a complete reshaping. Even during the short life span of what might be termed the public sphere,196 it had never been much more than a sub-section of external support as Fig. 6.5 shows: Figure 6.5 illustrates that the historical dividing line is not between feudalism and liberal capitalism with respect to ideology despite the fact that the feudal→capitalism shift marked human history’s most fundamental change. From the viewpoint of media and ideology, the most fundamental event is manifested in a shift from external to internal ideological affirmation (Fig. 6.5). Ideological affirmation during feudalism was external. Ideological support under media capitalism has become internal. The result of this can be summed up as under media capitalism, ‘the media are answerable to the fundamental requirement of capital accumulation and commodity production and function as vital ideological source of reinforcement for the current economic order’.197 While this marks media capitalism’s crowning achievement, ideology’s external→internal transition was not smooth but a complicated, messy, broken and ruptured process that took the better part of roughly 150 years. After that, ideological affirmation had become internal. This new structure-integrated media capitalism’s relevant domains—education, production, consumerism and democracy—eliminating almost all moral questions such as, for example:198 • What is the morality of manipulating children? • What is the morality of exploiting our deepest sensitivities for commercial purpose? • What is the morality of developing in the public an attitude of wastefulness? • What is the morality of subordinating truth to cheerfulness? Instead of reflecting on morality, individuals carry media capitalism’s ideological attitudes and behave supportively towards education, management, consumerism and democracy. This has been achieved through internalising media capitalism’s ideology. It only became possible when capitalism’s development was paralleled by advances in social science, namely, sociology, pedagogics, psychiatry, cognitive behaviour science,

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psychology and behaviourism to be used for ideological mass deception.199 It occured through the application of sophisticated social science. Ideologically affirmative human beings can now be converted into media capitalism’s internal functionaries. Hence, the shaping and manipulating of human behaviour became media capitalism’s new imperative as the next chapter will explain.

Notes 1. W. Howard Chase, president, public relations society of America (1956), quoted in: Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D. McKay Co. p. 231. 2. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New  York: Knopf, p.  128; cf. Facebook as ‘the attention machine’ (Vaidhyanathan, S. 2018. Antisocial Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 77). 3. Today this is circumvented through ‘post-truth [that is] linked to the rise of social media’ (Jack, C. 2017. Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information, https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_ LexiconofLies.pdf, 8th September 2017, accessed: 15th January 2020, p. 11). 4. Dilenschneider, R L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p. 74. 5. Ries, A. & Ries, L. 2002. The fall of advertising and the rise of PR, New York: Harper, p. 199. 6. de Wulf, M. 1907. Scholasticism old and new; an introduction to scholastic philosophy, medieval and modern, Dublin: M.  H. Gill & son, ltd. & New York: Benziger Bros. 7. Adorno, T. 1990. Negative Dialectics, New  York: Psychology Press; Bhaskar, R. 1993. Dialectic – The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso. 8. Dussel, E. D. & Vallega, A. A. 2013. Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion, Durham: Duke University Press. 9. Grunig. J.  E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 105; cf. Boehm, C. 1999. Hierarchy in the forest: the evolution of egalitarian behaviour, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 10. Kofman, M. 1996. Edgar Morin  – From Big Brother to Fraternity, Cambridge: Polity (p.  94); Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 11. Marcuse, H. 1966. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies, Boston: Beacon Press (p. 95). 12. Eidelson, R.  J. 2018. Political mind games, Bala Cynwyd: Green Hall Books, p. 71.

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Cynwyd: Green Hall Books, p. 6; Pomerantsev, P. 2019. This is not propaganda, New York: PublicAffairs (Faber & Faber), p. 128. 145. Durkheim, É. 1897. Suicide - A Study in Sociology (transl. by Spaulding, J.  A. & Simpson, G., 1952), London: Routledge & K.  Paul; Davis, J. B. 2013. The Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value, London: Routledge. 146. Tye, L. 1998. The father of spin, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 92. 147. Gauchet, M. 1997. The Disenchantment of the World – A Political History of Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 148. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I'm lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York : Portfolio, p. 26. 149. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co. p. 42. 150. Younge, G. 2007. Bush can bury his head, but can’t hide, Guardian Weekly, vol. 177, no. 10, August 24-30, 2007 (p.18.). Spigel, L. 2008. TV by design: modern art and the rise of network television, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 151. Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 109; see also: Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 172. 152. Kahneman, D. 1973. Attention and Effort, Englewood: Prentice-Hall; Kahneman, D. 2002. Maps of Bounded Rationality: A Perspective of Intuitive Judgement and Choice, Nobel-Prize Lecture, Dezember 8th, 2002; Mackintosh, N. J. 1983. Conditioning and Associative Learning, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 153. Kintz, L. & Lesage, J. (eds.) 1998. Media, culture, and the religious right, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Lieven, A. 2013. America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 154. Woods, R. 2013. Evangelical Christians and popular culture: pop goes the gospel, Santa Barbara: Praeger; Giroux, H. A. 2011. On critical pedagogy, New York: Continuum (p. 103). 155. Lewis, C. 2014. The Future of Truth: Mass Deception, Information Control, and the Public's Right to Know, New York: Perseus Books Group; Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge. 156. Lenart, S. 1994. Shaping Political Attitudes: The Impact of Interpersonal Communication & Mass-media, London: Sage; Fromm, E. 1957. Man is not a Thing, Saturday Review, vol. 40, p. 9; Horkheimer, 1964. Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum Books (internet download from www.marxists.org, p. 3). 157. ‘Entrepreneurs are the social icons of our neoliberal age’ (Holborow, M. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, p. 72).

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158. Boucher, G. 2016. An Ideological Conception of Politics—Critique of Zizek on Political Theology, Critique, 44(4): p. 454. 159. Lippmann (1927) quoted in: Ewen, S. 1996. PR!: a social history of spin, New York: Basic Books, p. 335. 160. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0-­rPLK5JpA 161. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 962. 162. Adorno, T.  W. 1991. The Cultural Industry, London: Routledge (p.  106); Wheeler, M. 2013. Celebrity Politics, Oxford: Polity; Lim, M. 2015. Global Branding: An International Introduction, London: Routledge; Lindstrom, M. 2016. Desire hunter: discovering the hidden needs of consumers around the world, London: Palgrave; cf. Smythe, D. W. 1977. Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory, 1(3):6. 163. Moore, B. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy - Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Boston: Beacon Press. 164. Robin, C. 2005. Fascism and Counterrevolution, Dissent, 52(3): 113. 165. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 215. 166. Hipes, P. 2019. Watch Sacha Baron Cohen’s ADL Speech Taking On Social Media Giants: “The Greatest Propaganda Machine In History (https://deadline.com/, 21st November 2019, accessed: 15th February 2020). 167. TIP 2009. The Israel Project - 25 Rules for Effective Communication, Journal of Palestine Studies, 38(4): 219-222; https://www.transcend. org/tms/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2014/07/sf-­i srael-­p rojects-­2 009-­ global-­language-­dictionary.pdf. 168. Leigh, R. 2017. Myths of PR, London: Kegan Page, p. 50. 169. Moloney, K. 2000. Rethinking PR, London: Routledge, p. 41; Bernays, E. L. 1923. Chrystalizing Public Opinion, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, p. xvi; cf. Bernays, E. L. P. 1951. Public Relations, Edward L. Bernays and the American Scene, Concord: Rumford Press. 170. Holiday, R. 2012. Trust me, I'm lying: the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator, New York : Portfolio, p. 31. 171. Schumpeter, J. A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York: Harper & Brothers; Lindblom, C. E. 1988. Democracy and market system, Oslo: Norwegian University Press. 172. Rist, R. C. 1973. The urban school: a factory for failure; a study of education in American society, Cambridge: MIT Press; Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New  York: Basic Books; Gardner, H. 1991. The unschooled mind: how children think and how schools should teach, New  York: Basic Books; Ballantine, J.  H. & Spade,

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J. Z. 2012. Getting started – understanding education through sociological theory, in: Ballantine, J. H. & Spade, J. Z. (eds.) Schools and Society – a sociological approach to education, Los Angles: Sage, p. 22f.; Haworth, R.  H. 2012. Introduction, in: Haworth, R, H. (eds.) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collecive Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Oakland: PM Press; Wills, P. 1977. Learning to Labor – how working class kids get working class jobs, New  York: Columbia University Press. 173. Barden, P. 2013. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons 174. Strömbäck, J. & Kiousis, S. (eds.) 2019. Political public relations (2nd ed.), New York: Routledge. 175. Porter, M.  E. 1985. Competitive Advantage, New  York: Free Press; Ambec, S., Cohen, M.  A., Elgie, S., & Lanoie, P. 2013. The Porter hypothesis at 20: can environmental regulation enhance innovation & competitiveness?, Review of Environmental Economics & Policy, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 2-22. 176. Akerlof, G. A. & Shiller, R. J. 2015. Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton: Princeton University Press (p. 42); and Mattelart’s “when advertising becomes politics” in: Mattelart, A. 1979. Multinational corporations and the control of culture: the ideological apparatuses of imperialism, East Sussex: Harvester Press. 177. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 87; cf. Abramson, J. 2019. Merchants of truth, New  York: Simon & Schuster (ebook), p. 664. 178. Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 306. 179. Hardt, H. 2004. Myths for the Masses – An Essay on Mass Communication, Oxford: Blackwell (p. 36). 180. Klikauer, T. 2016. Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism, Critique, 44(4): 527-533. 181. The state ‘commands armies of soldiers, gendarmes, policemen, spies, judges, prison-keepers, tax collectors, executors, etc.’ wrote Johann Most in 1884 (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/johann-­most-­the-­ beast-­of-­property.pdf). 182. Graeber, D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules – On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joy of Bureaucracy, Booklyn: Melville House. 183. Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 119f. 184. McChesney, R.  W. 2013. Digital Disconnect, New  York: The New Press, p. 67. 185. Bonner, W. 2011. Dice have no memory: observations on money moving around the world, Hoboken: Wiley.

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186. Bell, D. 1960. The end of ideology – on the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties, Glencoe: Free Press; Jost, J. T. 2006. The end of the end of ideology, American Psychologist, vol 61, no. 7, p. 651-670; Hatemi, P. K., Lindon, E. & McDermott, R 2012.It’s the end of ideology as we know it, Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 24, no. 3 p. 345-369. 187. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 12. 188. Dilenschneider, R L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p.  109; cf. Smythe, D.  W. 1977. Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory, 1(3):3. 189. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 116. 190. Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation  – The Political and Economical Origins of our Time, New York: Farrar & Rinehart. 191. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 167; Schor, J. 2004. Born to Buy – The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, New  York: Scribner, p.  13ff; Moss, M. 2013. Salt, sugar, fat: how the food giants hooked us, London: WH Allen. 192. Kiyosaki, R.  T. 2012. Escape the rat race: learn how money works and become a rich kid, Scottsdate: Plata Publishing; Ramey, G. & Ramey V. A. 2010. The Rug Rat Race, www.brookings.edu. 193. Gorz, A. 1982. Farewell to the Working Class – An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, London: South End Press; Houtman, S., Achterberg, P. & Derks, A. 2012. Farewell to the Leftist Working Class, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 194. Aronowitz, S. 1999. The Unknown Herbert Marcuse, Social Text, no. 58 (Winter), p. 141. 195. Sigurdsson, V. 2013. Consumer behaviour analysis and ascription of intentionality to the explanation of consumer choice, Marketing Theory, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 133-135. 196. Klikauer, T. 2016. Habermas and Historical Materialism, Capital & Class, 40(2):360-366. 197. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p. 145. 198. Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. p. 233f. 199. Hellings, J. 2013. Precautions against Fan(atic)s: A Reevaluation of Adorno's Uncompromising Philosophy of Popular Culture, New German Critique, vol. 40, no. 1, p.  149-174; Pettit, M. 2013. The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 7

Human Behaviour in Media Capitalism

Our prosperity is based on psychological foundations (Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co. p. 209.)

Capitalism’s ideological powers were greatly supported by the rise of new scientific developments, in particular the social science of human engineering.1 Historically, much of this started in Pavlov’s laboratory.2 Decades later, many were convinced ‘that man’s reflexes are conditioned [through] mutually shared mental templates’.3 Long before ‘behaviourism [became] a great new tool for corporate commerce,4 conditioning audiences for a wide range of maladaptive behaviours’,5 behaviourism travelled from pre-­ revolutionary Russia to the USA.6 The USA was the first country to develop five key elements necessary for the emergence of media capitalism. The first were Frederic Taylor’s and Henry Ford’s output-increasing production methods. Secondly, mass production demanded mass consumers and affluent workers;7 thirdly, media and manufacturing corporations established an early interest symbiosis creating a ‘psycho-industrial complex [as the] industrial market extended its powers and control over thought’;8 fourthly, the USA9 enabled the path-to-follow as it was free from feudalism, welfare states, communism and fascism.10 In the USA, the state always played a minimal role.11 There are not even state—but only pro-­ capital media. Lastly, commercialised social science merged social engineering with consumerism, thereby creating psycho-marketing.12 The latter created its own industry: an ‘oppressively manipulative psycho-­ industrial complex’.13 Meanwhile, technical and scientific advances enabled © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_7

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marketing’s hidden persuaders14 to strengthen so that we ‘don’t even realise that people are being manipulated’.15 Today the word behaviourism16 sounds out-dated—written ‘off…as a defunct academic curiosity’.17 It has been replaced by modern-sounding words such as operant conditioning,18 applied behaviour analysis, organisational behaviour management and so on.19 Nonetheless, behaviourism’s ‘operant conditioning is undeniably powerful’ and continues on.20 It ‘lives on within the collective consciousness through its vocabulary, its logic, its assumptions and its commitment to impact’.21 Behaviourism—even under different names—still provides useful tools for today’s human→consumer conversion.22 ‘Tampering with the human will’23 became ever-more necessary as mass consuming became capitalism’s new imperative: You must study human emotions and all the factors that move people, that persuade men in any line of human activity. Psychology, mob psychology, is one of the important factors that underlay this whole business.24

Behaviourism’s techniques remain used for behaviour adjustment (read: manipulation25) perhaps because they were so often declared dead. Today, behaviourism remains fundamental to capitalism.26 Both believe that ‘man exists to be manipulated’.27 Capitalism depends on such ‘perceptual manipulators’.28 At its most basic level, behaviour manipulation operates on an animal-equals-human29 equation as laboratory testing transfers animalistic stimulus→response30 (S-R) behaviours onto humans no longer seen as humans but as ‘beset by the rat race’.31 Behaviourism sees rats and humans as stimulus-response units.32 Meanwhile, ‘advertising provides a near perfect stimulus-response-reward system’.33 More than Pavlov’s classical conditioning, Watson34 and Skinner’s instrumental conditioning updated what is known as carrot-and-stick.35 What behaviourism knows as ‘operant conditioning chamber [is] now known as the Skinner box’.36 Skinner’s rat=human idea is also founded in the effort→reward model under the ‘we seek out rewards’ belief.37 Alongside a positivist natural=social ideology, humans are viewed and treated as biological entities.38 This is based on knowledge gained from studies on white lab rats, mice and pigeons. According to behaviourists, animals can be conditioned and so can humans. Behaviourism’s S→R is applied to animals(A) and to humans(H) to create S→R for A(animals) = AS→R. In a second step, the animal (A) formula is then transferred to humans (H)

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to create HS+R. Finally, behaviourism treats humans and animals as equals (=). All this leads to the following formula: AS+R = HS+R. Animal and human action is conditioned through carrot-and-stick methods. The conditioning and manipulation became known as human relations. But inside human relations, ever-more sophisticated manipulative methods have been invented, tested and applied. Basically, human relations and behaviourism constitute a scientification of carrot-and-stick. It is a version of Conformist Psychology for the human psyche and psychiatry that engineers responses of nerves.39 The historically somewhat parallel developments of behaviourism and consumer behaviour have been essential for this. Advances in human behaviourism were needed because only people are responding positively to advertising—animals do not. In short, behaviourism and advertising remain ‘the omnipresent background to our culture’.40 This sustained simple consumerism first and media capitalism later.41 Since ‘the difference between an ad-man and a behaviour scientist became only a matter of degree’,42 a behaviourism-marketing interest symbiosis has been established. With this knowledge, individuals became conditionable (science) to consume (marketing) and affirm to capitalism’s hegemony (PR).43 Much is designed to establish behavioural patterns that are conformist. Historically, simple conformity might have worked for consumerism but media capitalism demands much more. It remains the task of media capitalism to ensure that ideologically affirmative individuals are more than conforming consumers.44 Media capitalism depends on active affirmation to its system. Meanwhile, simple consumerism is assured through marketing. This is engineered to ‘constantly find ways to commercialise the smallest particles of our time and attention’45 through ideologically driven media images that ‘have been put in place of reality’.46 Media capitalism’s Attention Merchants47 are acutely aware that ‘meaning largely determines action [and therefore the] manipulation of mental images’ is vital for media capitalism’s success.48 To ensuring this, media capitalism continuously creates supportive behaviours in an endless media⇔individual feedback loop. By the mid-twentieth century, the preferred mode of sustaining consumerism became behaviourist marketing.49 Conditioning methods were applied to the selling of commercial goods, education and training, at workplaces and for the overall ideological affirmation to capitalism. Quite often and not even recognised, behaviourism provides the foundations for much of marketing.50 It has also been applied to education and is found in

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universities, colleges, schools, pre-schools and textbooks. And it is used to train those who manage.51 Those to be educated have been turned into objects of power in a world constructed as laboratory.52 Some learn the hidden trades of instrumental conditioning as they themselves are exposed to them through management textbooks (rewards), HRM (performance), psychology (organisational behaviour), marketing (selling) and PR (ideology).53 Today the methods of behaviourism are applied to media capitalism’s four spheres: education, work, consumption and democracy. Figure 7.1 shows behaviourism’s animal=human foundation and the four spheres of human existence, applying behaviourism to ‘the psycho-seduction of children’ in schools, marketing, work and democracy.54 On the left-hand side, Fig.  7.1left-side shows those to-be-conditioned. Initially, humans show unconditioned actionsUA providing fertile grounds for media capitalism turbo-charged by neuromarketing’s fMRI55 that offers additional tools for ‘manipulation [that] will…become more intense…in the future’.56 It offers the human apparatus to be conditioned in Skinner’s instrumental conditioning: 1. Positive reinforcement57 (including subliminal priming and ‘subconscious and subliminal message reinforcement’ operating ‘beneath our level of awareness’58) while rewarding affirmative behaviourE→R.59 2. Negative reinforcementNR removes something seen as positive by individuals to discourage non-supportive behaviour. 3. PunishmentPU that ends non-affirmative behaviour. These forms of ‘conditioning and association’60 (Fig.  7.1) might be called conditioned associationCA.61 They are applied daily:62 Behaviourism persists partly because of its Banality of Evil and Barbarism of Perfection.63 It is an engineering-like method harnessed to manipulate people. The power of behaviourism’s stimulus→responseS→R is highly useful for effort→rewardE→R structures. Through that, human subjects are conditioned from an early age onwards (Fig. 7.1).64 Children are conditioned in the belief that positive human action is rewarded.65 This has been established through animal testing using food capsules (Fig. 7.1). It establishes scientific proof of behaviourism’s formula.66 Conditioning can be seen working when chocolate and praise is given to children in families already carrying hierarchical conditions. This is extended by good marks, brownie points, stars and so on often rewarded

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Fig. 7.1  Animal→to→human conditioning

at the first major external family conditioning institution: schools. Behaviourist methods continue to influence children when child(ish) consumers purchase goods made attractive through psycho-marketing techniques gained through brain-scansfMRI.67 Marketing that turns children into young consumers (bras for 8-year-olds) while keeping adults childish (toys-for-the-boys) supports media capitalism’s endlessness ideological conditioning.68 Behaviourism and media capitalism favour child marketing by turning children into consuming kids.69 It also assists a school→work

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transition where HRM techniques continue behaviourism’s reward regime as brownie points become wages and bonuses (Fig. 7.1). Behaviourism’s core achievements (Fig.  7.1) rest in the sameness of methods applied at each stage. Beyond that, media capitalism’s common goal—supporting its one-dimensional ideology—creates motivated individuals ready for capitalist exploitation.70 These methods have been applied for more than half a century and continue to be practised daily. Since they work and build media capitalism’s core, they are camouflaged. In the media, they are diminished, belittled and treated in a demeaning way by those who understand their mechanisms and hidden agendas, for example, a semi-critical quasi-academic elite publishing in ‘elite publications’.71 But like all ideologies, behaviourism’s goals and methods have to remain hidden inside a structurally reinforced master-slave relationship in which one part designs systems of domination while the other remains unconsciously trapped inside them.72 One of the key preventative barriers towards understanding behaviourism lies in the fact that intellectual analysis is conducted through: • symbolic association: cognitive learning, ‘controlled attention’73 and a ‘rational system’74 Given that ‘the human mind first believes, then evaluates’,75 it operates as a two-worldly affair or ‘dual system’76 defined by ‘emotional conditioning (how they feel) and cognitive conditioning (what they know)’.77 Symbolic associations (‘semantic or evaluative association’78) are abstract, analytical, critical, reflective and theoretical, carrying Intellectual Self-­ Defence.79 However, the problem is: while being designed in the mode of symbolic association, manipulation using behaviourism operates exclusively on: • conditioned association: behavioural learning, ‘automatic attention’80 and ‘priming’81 Conditioned association functions at or below ‘minimum awareness [often] outside of awareness, intent and even control’.82 Subliminal advertising—as ‘rape of the mind’83—works with the ‘automatic or non-­ conscious influences on choices and behaviours [such as] automatic habits [functioning as] mind manipulation’.84 These eliminate Intellectual Self-­ Defence.85 Often, such ‘messages succeed because consumers do not pay

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critical, conscious attention’.86 Conditioned sign→meaning associations link to ‘cognitive rigidity’87 or cognitive dissonances in three ways: a) They reduce the importance of dissonant/contradicting beliefs. b) They only add more consonant/reaffirming beliefs. c) They change contradicting ideas, fitting them to already established belief systems.88 Occasionally, ‘resistance to rational revision’89 is further fine-tuned to the level of ‘homophone priming’ (words sharing pronunciation, e.g. wait+weight) or when ‘perception itself can be coloured by illusory correlations’, for example, manipulated associations.90 Such manipulations can be ‘subliminal, in which case [they are] not accessible to the person’s awareness, or supra-lineal, in which case the person is aware at that time but not of their potential influences’.91 In this version, ‘people generally cannot believe themselves [to be] so easily manipulated and controlled. This is precisely why they are so easy to manipulate and control’.92 In sharp contrast to conditioned association (manipulating sign → meaning links), intellectual analysis occurs through the mode of symbolic association, creating an abstract symbolic link.93 The system of conditioned and symbolic association operates two different modes of thinking:94 1. Conditioned association:    Kahneman’s system 1: automatically, quickly, effortlessly 2. Symbolic association:      Kahneman’s system 2: deliberate, systematically, painstakingly

Conditioned association relates to Kahneman’s ‘associative activation’.95 It ignores contradictory information, ‘short-circuiting intellectual processes’ and exists as ‘what you see is all there is’.96 It uses behaviourism to manipulate massive numbers of people.97 Understanding behaviourism’s infiltration of society rests also on the philosophical image of mankind or personhood—a humanistic image [Menschenbild]. The Menschenbild shows behaviourism’s inhumanity. Behaviourism’s animal=human equation denigrates human personhood by equating us to rats. It is a false equation. For one, some (by no means all) human beings— unlike animals—can see through behaviourism’s techniques. These are people with the ability to transcend the conditioning impacts that operate on a daily basis. They can free themselves from conditioned associations,

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moving towards symbolic associations. They also develop critical reflection—a form of Intellectual Self-Defence against marketing/PR’s ideology machine that infiltrates all areas of human society. Despite our humans-is-­ not-an-animal awareness, our origins are still animalistic. Evolutionary psychology made us aware that we have not yet lost all animal traces, instincts, emotions,98 sensations, passions, sentiments,99 feelings, intuitions and sensations.100 Behaviourism, marketing and PR ‘masters and manipulates those instincts’.101 As a consequence, ‘much of the mass-­ communication industry depends on the exploitation and manipulation of human weakness’.102 It is precisely the animal⇔human interface that opens up space for behaviourism’s attack on our psyche, targeting our non-rational side by using it as behaviourism’s entry door into human beings. On the downside, some behaviourist techniques have been shown not to function all too well.103 Despite that, behaviourism continues to be applied, although with different degrees of success. Still, Intellectual Self-Defence stands in the way of conditioning mechanisms. Hence, a large number of manipulative and manipulating structures are instituted to ensure that individuals are almost never left un-conditioned (Fig. 7.1). These conditioning structures accompany individuals throughout their life. To a large degree, they operate as conditioned associationsS→R, providing a seamless effort-rewardE→R structure. Starting at school with the eternally rehearsed link of: study-hardeffort→good-marksreward,

it continues with the consumer-goods→status and work→wage linkages.104 All of them demand efforts and all are rewarding. And they all condition people to support behaviourism’s E→R structure. As long as these mechanisms are established through conditioned association, they will work; and as long as they are not exposed to critical rationality in the form of symbolic association, capitalism’s ideologically self-reinforcing structures remain intact.105 Nonetheless, many of those using symbolic association when attacking behaviourism may still be entrapped in a fallacy. Those challenging behaviourism may have committed a miscalculation when projecting their own educational background and cognitive symbolic abilities onto others. Unaware of the psychological pitfalls of projections, projecting their intellectual abilities to see through behaviourism’s methods can give them the—dangerous and often rather unsubstantiated—impression that all

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human beings think in terms of symbolic association. This is not the case. Rather, many have been successfully trapped inside media capitalism’s ideologically driven use of behaviourism. Persistent system stability and support for capitalism shows as much. Today, very few question capitalist pathologies. As with many other things, there is no clear-cut or black and white answer to all this. Many forms of human thinking and behaviour take place somewhere between the symbolic⇔associative continuum. Some are more inclined than others to think towards symbolic associations and developing Intellectual Self-Defence. Others have been successfully asphyxiated inside the mode of conditioned associations. One thing is assured: nobody can totally escape behaviourism’s power of manipulation. Yet nobody can be completely locked into the mode of conditioned operations. Despite the infamous rat race, not all human beings can be downgraded to behaviourism’s rat level. Such a total asphyxiation would indicate an animalistic existence. In short, the error of some critics might come from an unconscious projection that human beings operate at their level of awareness—unfortunately, most do not. For many, the associative links between symbols are not established through abstract, reflective and critical thinking.106 Conditioning can manipulate mental links between largely unrelated items for a specific—marketing or ideological—purpose to establish a false familiarity.107 This sort of familiarity is not natural but artificially constructed. It can be established through words as marketing/PR believes that ‘if you say a thing often enough it stands a good chance of becoming a fact [as Goebbels once said it can be] hammered into the brain of the little man’.108 PR is convinced that ‘the thousand fold’109 ‘repetition is what cements a point of view’.110 A soft drink advertisement, for example, repeats the soft-drink-­ equals-health association endlessly so that an over-sugared soft drink becomes healthy once the message has ‘invaded the privacy of our minds’.111 The mind becomes conditioned. Marketing can override reality based on the continuous exposure to marketing’s artificially conditioned link. It creates a mental soft-drink-equals-health association that supports saleability—not reality. It works well. As does Behaviourism. Otherwise, one would wonder why the global advertising behemoth was spending $400  billion in 2000, whilst by 2015 it was half a trillion US dollars annually.112 Creating an internalised semi-reality works phenomenally well for media perception becoming individual perception. Reality is mediated and manipulated in order to enter deeply into traditional areas such as fairy

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tales and storytelling.113 Media capitalism removes true human experiences derived from human contact and re-packages them into product placement, toy selling and advertisements. Media capitalism’s manipulative Enchantment of the World deliberately infantilises humans through the dumbing-down of adults into childishness.114 This is coupled with a deliberate fast tracking of maturity and sexualisation of children—‘sex sells’.115 The mix of both turns adults into childish adults and children into premature ones. Both have become the sole reality in nearly every child’s play.116 For marketers, children are a perfect target. Unlike adults they have no capacity for Intellectual Self-Defence and are defencelessly exposed to the media industry. Many adults are able to understand the world through symbolic association establishing a critical, abstract and symbolic mental link between different symbols (e.g. words). Meanwhile, conditioned associations create conditioned links between symbol and meaning. Through symbolic association, we create mental links to understand complexities. Externally created conditioned association meanwhile alienates us from such understandings because those mental links are created externally with a hidden media agenda.117 Conditioned (read: manipulated) associations occur largely through three institutions: 1. schooling representing E→R        good marks for certain behaviours; 2.  consumption             rewards and status symbols; and 3.  media capitalism’s overall ideologies   hard-work→rewards.

Media capitalism links schooling to consumption as both are mutually reinforcing. For example, apart from our peers and immediate family, from an early age onwards, we have next to no immediate contacts to the whole of society. We know society largely through what we learn at school (first) and through corporate media (later).118 In that process, mental symbols ( ) and linkages (→) are pre-designed by corporate media119 (e.g. games, movies, TV-shows assuring that ‘audiences stay tuned’120) and schools (e.g. commercial textbooks, software, etc.).121 In that way, individuals are conditioned to make mental associations, for example between and society. This has been used by schools to create ideologically trained students, by marketers to create ideologically trained consumers, by HRM to create ideologically trained workers and by media capitalism to create

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ideological trained subjects for capitalism. This occurs largely in two ways: linguistically (language) and visually (pictures, movies, etc.). In the former, ideological support is created through linguistic manipulation. Language under corporate media is neither neutral nor natural but an ideological tool carefully structured to serve a specific purpose.122 Behaviourists manipulate meaning largely by paralleling or pairing (‘associative bond’) words with specific meanings.123 Over time, these words take on a desired meaning. The term pairing or to pair with is used to describe the process where one word (e.g. strike) appears deliberately in close vicinity to another word (e.g. useless) that it is paired with. This word (useless) is then consistently and consciously paired with the target word (strike) which is targeted for an alteration of meaning—from supporting workers’ income and the protection of rights to being useless, changing its meaning from positive to negative. The new meaning (strikes are useless) is what behavioural language engineers have in mind. Over time, the originally positive word (strike) becomes negative (useless). As use-equals-meaning, strike becomes used negatively—almost all media use of the term strike today shows as much. The media’s use of a word determines its meaning. Strike has been paired over a very long period of time with a specific set of negative words such as working days lost, economic damage, unnecessary, controversial, harmful, destructive and, of course, useless. It has now taken on the meaning of the negative words it has been paired with. The media has extended this to many other capital-threatening words such as trade unionism, class, labour, industrial and labour relations and so on that have been converted from their originally positive meaning (e.g. strike as escape from assembly line work) into a negative one. Meanwhile, corporate media has ensured the exact opposite for pro-managerial and pro-business terms. They have been paired with positive words to create a positive image of business and capitalism’s free market.124 Words like workers and trade unions have been given negative connotations.125 The positive→negative reversal has been successfully established and anchored in the public mind.126 This process has been applied to virtually all terms that are non-supportive of media capitalism. The media’s psychological thinking is indeed Pavlovian:127 millions are exposed to the same stimuli so that all receive identical imprints.

Media images are manufactured.128 ‘News had once been understood as something out there, waiting to be converted, now it is seen as a

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product to be manufactured’.129 In the words of philosopher John Dewey, ‘sentiment can be manufactured by mass methods for almost any person or cause’, especially, if corporate media have an interest in sustaining media capitalism.130 A similar example comes from marketing: most car advertisements show wide, empty, tree-lined country roads.131 The reality of the daily commute on inner city roads is rather different: traffic jams. Manipulative conditioned associations have made us forget about the daily carnage, road rage, traffic jams, no parking and blocked city roads. Framed with the manipulated image, people buy cars as marketing is able ‘to get under the skin of the public’.132 It is false but it sells cars. The triumph of conditioned associations has never been limited to marketing. It operates in all four spheres: education, employment, consumption and democracy.

The Educational Sphere At schools and universities, rafts of curricula, teaching materials, degrees and textbooks have been set up to ensure that certain words are associated with certain meanings. These mentally conditioned links establish specific meaning in the minds of children and students. They are rehearsed over and over again until ideologically affirmative students have been formed and formatted. Perhaps the most crucial element of schooling is the conditioning of mental effort→reward links. Through them, students internalise that compliance is rewarded (stars, points, marks and careers) while system-challenging behaviour is punished (failure, detention, unemployment). Schooling allows a flawless continuation from being a conditioned child to being a conditioned university student, to being a diligent consumer, a hard-working employee and a submissive supporter of media capitalism via democracy.

The Employment Sphere Inside managerial regimes, the prevailing ideology has long switched working life from its relationship character (industrial relations) to the authoritarian domination of hierarchical-managerial HRM. Managerialism and HRM have created rafts of ideology-laden terms such as performance-­ related pay, corporate social responsibility, business ethics, key performance indicators, organisational culture, corporate citizens and organisational members instead of workers. Many of these new terms are designed to hide management’s pathological reality of deeply

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undemocratic and alienating working environments. This also converts almost all social, political and economic contradictions at work towards pro-­management behaviour.133 The language use has almost totally annihilated those words that might have indicated management challenging behaviours.134 Words such as worker, class struggle, strike, trade union, proletariat, working class, shop steward, general strike, syndicalism, worker commune, workers cooperative,135 exploitation, collective, solidarity, Luddism, industrial and workers’ democracy have been deleted from our minds.136

The Consumption Sphere Marketing’s language use shows similar features. Corporate media are the sole switching station of the truth→purpose conversion—marketing has no truth, just purpose, for example, selling.137 Marketing needs to keep up the appearance of truth while using the language for selling and mass affirmation to consumerism. The corporate media’s ideological task is fivefold: firstly, marketing needs to pretend to be independent from capitalism which is framed as independence from states. Independence is not related to marketing that depends on corporations. Corporate dependency does not relate well to truth. Truth is used when it serves media capitalism’s ideology—if it does not, truth is discarded without hesitation. Secondly, the media industry operates undisturbed by democracy. Media capitalism makes sure that the idea of democratic media has no meaning.138 Thirdly, corporate media converts information into ideological and saleable commodities, knowing that many will read a best-seller—not the best book.139 The media industry is not different from any industry that sells other bestselling commodities. Fourthly, corporate media create an ideological pro-­ business mind-set so that potential advertisers seek their medium to advertise and sell goods.140 Fifthly, corporate media establish and maintain an ideological meaning structure as a mentally conditioned framework inside which individuals are made to understand society. Often, it establishes its ideological framework before individuals receive new information—known in PR as agenda-setting—so that new information is understood inside a pre-fabricated ideological meaning structure. Of course, this impacts on democracy.

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The Democratic Sphere In the democratic sphere, media capitalism’s language is also used as an ideological tool to camouflage contradictions, thereby aiding the appearance of harmony. For PR, language is a means, a mere apparatus and a device to be applied ideologically. In political advertising, language’s task is to deceive the public, herding it towards a pre-designed corral (e.g. voting).141 Language is no longer a Kantian end-in-itself directed towards truth, and it is no longer subscribing to Enlightenment’s critical rationality.142 Virtually the same methods that have been applied to consumerism (marketing) are applied to mass democracy (PR). In both, ideology and saleability are the prime objectives—no matter if it is toothpaste or a political leader. To serve these goals, language has been redirected away from truth and towards political saleability.143 Gaining insights from marketing/PR, the goal is emotional manipulation144—focusing on the six basic emotions:145 fear146 (including FOMO, the fear of missing out147), disgust, surprise, sadness, happiness and anger148 rather than on rational deliberation.149 All this becomes An Assault on Reason.150 PR has largely eliminated political discourse and replaced it with political advertising, image consultancy, spin doctors, PR experts and wordsmiths. Whether voting for party A or B, media capitalism’s important outcome is voters’ ideological support for media capitalism’s version of democracy. Simultaneously, democracy is annihilated from virtually all other human spheres (education, work and consumerism).151 Despite this, it has never been just about the linguistic (mis)use of words. Non-verbal, non-linguistic and visual forms of communication remain relevant as marketing and PR have known for a long time. Images are by far more useful for ideology transmission and emotional advertising than language.152 Behaviourists target the world of perceptions, images, symbols, façades and appearances. Consumer goods, and especially those with little use-value and high sign-value, are not sold through rational thought. Emotions tend to favour egoism. Inside the ‘the icy water of egotistical calculation’, marketing’s sales pitch excludes rational cost-­ benefit thinking. It shifts individuals onto emotions using behaviouristically conditioned association.153 Often, behaviourism’s Banality of Evil ‘over-simplifies issues’ for an equally simple consumer under the belief that ‘the public can be guided to respond to easily recognisable symbols which they can follow’.154 An ‘eye-appealing [and] attention-getting’155 visual

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image of a to-be-purchased good ( ) is paired repeatedly156 with a positive visual symbolic image ( ) so that the customer ( ) associates the good ( ) with a positive visual image—empty country roads ( ).157 The Banality of Evil lies in a simple equation: →

+

=$

Once a conditioned association to a positive visual symbol is established in the minds of consumers, the step from a willingness to watch the ads to the willingness to purchase the good (or vote for a leader) has been made and active consumer/voter behaviour is created.158 Simultaneously, this process disassociates negatively associated images such as traffic jams, car accidents, theft, expensive repairs, speeding tickets, parking fees, environmental damage and so on. In advertising, this process is supported through behaviourist’s positive reinforcement ‘to reinforce the ideas [already] planted in the mind’ of the public.159 Conditioned association creates mental links between a commercial good ( ) and the sign-value of status and feedback (a neighbour’s admiration). In short, unsuspecting consumers are exposed to behaviourism’s triple-trap: The First Trap Consumers and voters are exposed to behaviourism through repeated pairing (conditioning) of pre-designed symbols with goods (marketing) or political ideas (PR). PR/marketing’s core idea is to establish ideological affirmation while simultaneously diminishing critical consciousness and reasoning. Conditioned association can achieve that by targeting intuitions, emotions, attitudes and so on.160 These shape human ideas and behaviours with the goal of individuals acting intuitively without reason and rationality based on pre-induced perceptions using manipulative techniques. The Second Trap This trap is used during purchases in shopping malls, department stores, the internet and supermarkets that are constructed in the form of Skinnerian Mazes. They guide consumers into the direction set up by

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designers, shopping mall architects and behaviourists.161 At supermarkets, sleepers (bad selling products) are visually in front of you while runners (good selling products) are at the back of the shop. The most expensive products are at face level while pester-power works at checkouts. PR knows that it can rely on virtually the same for political manipulation where a voting public is guided by ideologically motivated media through a deliberately invented maze of politics through which only the media can guide people. The Third Trap After intervening in purchasing/voting behaviour, behaviourally trained marketing/PR psychologists make sure that buyers and voters receive positive peer feedback (reinforcement). This is the last instalment of the triple dose. It comes in the form of positive or negative reinforcement.162 Both enhance the frequency of a performed task—marketing’s codeword for sales and PR’s codeword for supporting the right course. Both use social responsiveness in the form of positive peer feedback as a self-enhancing system geared towards selling and ideological support for media capitalism. Behaviourism’s triple-trap encircles individuals by engineering no choice other than supporting a structure that engages them before, during and after purchasing and voting.163 Media capitalism’s key success is neither purchasing nor voting but the creation of a triple affirmation for capitalism shown in Fig. 7.2: Figure 7.2 shows how the behaviourist triple-trap encircles individuals by using Pavlovian behaviourist methods of pairing (A) a previously unconditioned preference, for example, nature ( ) with a to-be-­conditioned preference ( ) to get to → →$. This technique is applied before purchasing (or voting). Secondly, all of this influences the actual spheres of A A A A A

A A A A A

Pavlovian Behaviourismpairing 

C A B  B A C  Pavlov/Skinner 

C C C C C C C Skinnerian BehaviorismER 

Fig. 7.2  The behaviourist triple-trap of ideological support

C C C C C C C

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voting and shopping (B), and thirdly, it uses vital feedback that relies on effort-rewardE→R and positive reinforcement links (C). These three entrapments (A–C) operate through the pairing of positive images with saleable goods to create general support for consumption, capitalism’s social formations and ideologically compliant politicians. In that way, consumptive I-just-­love-it preferences became weapons against individuals, turning these into objects of power.164 The frequently acclaimed free choice has been pre-designed to guarantee a designed marketing (brands) and PR (politics) outcome: purchasing A, not B and voting for A instead of B. Those carrying out free choices have already been converted into objects of power. In any case,165 why is it necessary to spend so much money, creative talent, time, and effort in the management of purchasing behaviour if consumers really think for themselves?

At the second level, consumers of commercial goods and political ideas are constructed as depending on guidance. They are led through an incomprehensible and overwhelming flood of commercial and political advertisements and information with a sheer endless amount of confusing complexity. In reality, these complexities all have one common denominator: ideological affirmation to media capitalism. On the third level, through the E→R link effortsE are rewardedR to create the final level of ideological affirmation. It makes people working towards consuming, and by doing so, they ideologically affirm to capitalism through participating in what everyone does.166 The fourth level is an extension of what has been conditioned through years of schooling. Conditioned through ‘money-­ priming’,167 young adults are made to view the school=marks→work=money transition as natural, having internalised that ‘the performance of a task…is associated with money…triggering self-interest and self-focus’.168 Achieving school tasks turns into performance-related pay structured inside managerial regimes. The underlying E→R structure assures compliance. In order to be successful, a behaviourist education system has been designed that eclipses behaviourism’s hidden mechanisms while simultaneously applying these techniques to those that are being conditioned. During childhood such conditioning is most powerfully reinforced through years of exposure to behaviourist techniques. In the material

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world of human beings, this becomes ISAR: I-deological S-upportive A-ction leads to R-ewards. Private family-based childhood education and formal schooling engineer the child towards ISAR. As a result, early adherence to ideology leads to rewards—from stars at school to money at work. Those who show ideological support are rewarded. The system ends brutalities and violence. Schooling is no longer coercive but an active adaptation to ideology.169 Students conditioned in E→R accept the reward model and show their willingness to internalise the basic modes of ideological affirmation.170 This process is no longer based on human interest, understanding, enjoyment or a quest for knowledge and truth, as it might have been the case during Enlightenment. Today, schooling is almost exclusively based on rewards.171 Educational subjects learn to focus on rewards through years of conditioning. The core message is to achieve pre-set tasks as outlined through key learning objectives (KLO) for pre-set rewards. This will lead to a pre-defined success. Critical reflection on content is just a hindrance: what I do and why I do it becomes irrelevant as long as it leads to a reward. The focus is squarely on outcomes, achievement and success. The key, however, is not only the E→R structure or the fact that human subjects have internalised E→R following it to the letter; it is neither that students have been conditioned and that this negates any quest for truth, enjoyment, happiness, knowledge or understanding. The key is that it creates an ideologically affirmative subject. Focusing on rewards generates ideological support and it allows education to empty the substance of learning in favour of conditioning material. The focus of ideological education has shifted from content and substance to rewards—conveniently termed measurable learning outcomes.172 As an extension of school conditioned structuresE→R, consumers consume. They consume out of marketing driven and artificially created demands for status symbols that display success rather than happiness. This might operate as a zero-sum game: the less content, enjoyment and happiness and the more one is driven towards success and rewards, the more commodities can be sold to status hungry consumers. It is a well-crafted system with fine-tuned instruments that favour status symbols carrying nothing but empty sign-value. Inside managerial regimes meanwhile, humans do not engage in social action directed towards meaningful, enjoyable and fulfilling work activities. They work in expectation of rewards. Under Managerialism, E→R has become the sole guiding principle. It even establishes an ideologically

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affirmative relationship to managerial regimes guided through sophisticated performance management techniques to be found in any HRM textbook.173 This supplies management with the necessary tools to create highly supportive human resources for what HRM calls high performance work systems.174 Beyond that, conditioning towards rewards contains a much more valuable ingredient: its power to create ideological mass affirmation to media capitalism. Conditioned learning, consuming and working are all geared towards rewards while ideological affirmation runs in the background. Every act enshrined in an accomplishment of an externally set task in expectation of a rewardE→R always comes with ideological affirmation. This is the hidden but always present transcript. Twentieth-century consumerism was able to operate almost exclusively at the reward level. By contrast, media capitalism predominantly focuses on the ideological level, fine-­ tuning and cementing society’s hierarchical structures of domination.175 It supports those that show deeper levels of ideological affirmation more than those who only depict surface-level or simple task-oriented support. Those who are found to subscribe to ideological support at a deeper level are made the engineers of ideological affirmation.176 While those who simply act-as-told and only subscribe at the surface level of ideological affirmation are made to support corporate members without access to its guiding systems. Simultaneously, some of those marginal individuals and fringe dwellers may still refuse to depict ideological affirmation. As a consequence, they are isolated, impoverished, marginalised, belittled, declared irrelevant and punished. It is for those few that prisons, punishing welfare systems, panoptical control, surveillance, unemployment, homeless shelters and the like exist.177 Meanwhile, society’s vast majority supports an increasingly hierarchically structured society.178 Hierarchies divide media capitalism’s society. Those at the top show off their ideological affirmation in the form of status symbols. Then there are those at the bottom showing their aspirations to enter the top. Figure  7.3 shows this at the level of social classes (i), mental capacity of human beings (ii), school levels (iii), forms of understanding (iv), system support (v) and finally political orientation and voting behaviours (vi). Figure 7.3 also shows hierarchisation from an upper-, middle- and lower-class perspective. But one also needs to recognise that individual mental capacity might be distributed unevenly throughout society.179 This is not compensated but enhanced through media capitalism. All this begins in schools and has a long history.

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Upper class Middle Class Lower class mental capacity

critical symbolic supportive education

symbolicassociation

symbolic affirmation

practical conditioned supportive education

conditioned association

conditioned affirmation

schooling and educational levels

associative understanding

system affirmation

conservative petty-bourgeoisies & enlightened citoyén conservative political & voting

Fig. 7.3  Social classes and the process of ideological support

Schooling in the nineteenth century was often a forceful adjustment to liberal capitalism as it relied on beatings and punishment, while twentieth-­ century schooling meant adjustment to welfare capitalism. Schooling in the twenty-first century increasingly means private schools for the upper and middle classes focusing on symbolic association and deliberately underfunded state schools for the lower classes relying on conditioned association inside the structural confinements of getting by. Still, the system will run a few tokenistic but cash-starved programmes in disadvantaged schools. Meanwhile, media capitalism has established an increasingly hierarchical society (Fig. 7.3). Schooling provides methods of securing ideological affirmation to one of capitalism’s central mottos: effort leads to rewards. Schooling divides individuals into those who are educated towards symbolic association and those who are trained at the simple level of conditioned association. Similarly, the scientification of instrumental knowledge has resulted in the engineering of additional stabilisers applying their instruments to the political sphere where society is still entertained through routine rituals of affirmative occupation in the form of democracy (Fig. 7.3): Inside schooling only the upper levels—for example, designers, overseers, organisers, creators of ideology and so on—are educated towards an understanding of critical symbolic processes (Fig. 7.3). The middle class of administrators, rule interpreters and middle managers receives a mixture of ideologically affirmative education and practical conditioning. The lower class of conductors, rule appliers, line managers and operators receives almost exclusively conditioned training. These three levels are mirrored in high school, polytechnic, college and university degrees. Schooling is functionally related to the structural imperatives of media capitalism. It represents:

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1. symbolic-system-analytical jobs at the upper level:     software, engineering, research; 2. personal-interactive jobs at the middle level:       managers, accountants, supervisors; 3. monotone-repetitive-manual jobs at the lower level:   labourer and production work.180

At the level of cognitive understanding, the upper and upper-middle classes are educated in symbolic association where mental links are established through the analysis and understanding of complex symbols constructed as mental pictures, models, concepts and theories. The middle and lower classes are largely trained through conditioned association where mental links are not established through critical understanding but instead created through the methods of conditioning as outlined in Pavlovian pairing and Skinnerian enforcement. This links symbols through conditioning commonly called learning-by-heart. Mental links are not theoretically established but through memorising and endless rehearsals.181 At the next level (Fig.  7.3), the upper class shows its relationship to society through symbolic support (cognition), while lower- and middle-­ class relationships to the system are created through conditioned support (non-cognitive).182 At the symbolic level, upper-class individuals understand their position through cognitive symbolic associations. These are rational and analytical. Individuals showing conditioned affirmation do so through less sophisticated means, mainly through ideological support of the private self to consumption and through a conditionedE→R relationship between individual and society.183 At the upper level, individuals tend to be predominantly conservative supporting the ruling of their class. This group also includes some remnants of the Enlightenment period who share an interest in maintaining a society modified through reform when needed.184 The overall ideological support is defined by an implicitly engineered agreement that restricts virtually all political conflicts dealing with them to within capitalism—never about capitalism. Minor forces positioned at the outer fringes of conservative support (e.g. fascists) but more so anti-capitalists are excluded from access to the public sphere. The media has successfully deleted them from the public mind (e.g. anarchists). In turn, the media grants all remaining forces access to the public sphere and thereby secures their political existence following the maxim:185

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if it isn’t on TV, it doesn’t exist.

The media has also engineered a middle class. In some cases, this is split into two groups: a petit-bourgeois and the largely marginalised remnants of an earlier Enlightenment and social welfare period: the citoyén. These citoyéns are still needed as a critical—albeit system stabilising—constituency. They represent token intellectuals with social and civil consciousness and an even smaller cluster of critical writers, marginalised counter-­cultural artists, isolated radical political parties and other non-supportive fringe dwellers. Inside marginal confinements, they still service two vital demands: 1. They supply entertaining amusement for democratic election spectacles (e.g. sensationalism186). 2. They pacify anti-affirmative elements through incorporating anti-­ supportive energies. But both contain social critique. Their existence negates all other forms of anti-support directed against media capitalism. Media capitalism has incorporated anti-affirmative critique in quite a similar way in which feudalism reduced critique to the medieval Casper, jesters, fools or clowns found at medieval courts. Today’s critique formulated as satire, theatre and comedy is—like the medieval jester—kept in the public eye for amusement reasons. It serves as a media spectacle showing everyone that anti-­ affirmation leads to craziness, stupidity, foolishness, ridiculousness, silliness, madness and a fringe existence at the margins of society. By doing so, the media portrays any form of anti-affirmation to media capitalism as pathological, mad, laughable and ludicrous.187 Most intellectuals, artists and comedians—however critical they may be—tend to perceive themselves as being able to influence society, a mere hallucination.188 This remains crucial for media capitalism. Media capitalism maintains such hallucinations as long as its critics believe that they are listened to and they can influence media capitalism. Often, they play their part willingly because they are held in the false belief that they can change media capitalism. The media keeps them alive inside an orbit of wishful thinking and reinforced delusions of relevance. Overall, however, the media has successfully separated an affirmative rational majority of crypto-progressives from the idiotic jaspers. But at the intellectual level, another form of isolation comes into being. The critical anti-supportive attempts by the jasper to engage society have often been

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constructed through symbolic association. As such, they remain largely incomprehensible and inaccessible to the petty-bourgeois majority trained in conditioned association. Intellectual critique often fails when it relies on symbolic association. It is largely inaccessible to people dumbed-down through authoritarian schooling, exposed to tabloid-TV and tabloid-­ websites ‘built on habit-forming technologies [and] seductive integration designs’.189 Behind our backs, manipulative and euphemistically labelled persuasion technology190 includes ‘suggestion technology’191—read: pure manipulation.192 While the relentless and manipulative psycho-technology of the internet never rests and never sleeps, always waiting for an opportune moment for persuasion, to many people persuasion technology’s language, symbols, grammar and intellectual demands of symbolic association are incomprehensible.193 The media has successfully insulated the vast majority against critical thinking. Media capitalism no longer needs an Index of Forbidden Books as it ‘is not censorship and never has been censorship [instead, media capitalism] is a medium of expression’.194 It has made critical books incomprehensible to the vast majority. Anyone can publish anti-­ affirmative books—just like the book in front of you—for two reasons: . The majority of people will never read such books. 1 2. The majority of people has been conditioned not to under stand them. Almost any critique on media capitalism, therefore, remains unable to penetrate the level of conditioned association installed in the minds of the majority through years of schooling, authoritarianism, consumerism, adaptation to managerial regimes and media capitalism.195 Through the conditioning process experienced by non-intellectual classes coupled with ideological affirmation through E→R (based on years of kindergarten → school → college → work transitions), a non(if not outright) anti-intellectual majority has been firmly locked in their assigned place. Years of exposure to conditioned association in conjunction with the media, tabloid-TV and tabloid-websites have done their job towards the success of media capitalism (Fig. 7.3).196 Ideological affirmation to media capitalism is at the core of any post-­ social-­ welfare-state society of the twenty-first century. It constructs a hegemonic ideology that integrates virtually all parts into its ideological structure. The historic slavery→feudalism→capitalism trajectory and the

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Pol-Eco-Forms Social Formation: Mode of Production: Base-Form: Dominant Sphere: Dominant Goal: Dominant Task: Commodity-Value:

Behaviour Forms

Behaviourism & Conditioning: ProductiveStructure: Social-Conflicts: Non-productiveStructure: Social-Conflict:

Liberal Capitalism

Consumerism

Media Capitalism

 Capital versus Working Class Manufacturing & Commodities Capitalist owned Firms Production Maximising Profit Produce Use – Value

 Capital, Management versus Workers Mass-Manufacturing Mass-Consumption Corporation & Investment Consumption Maximising Profit Advertising & Selling Exchange – Value

 Capital, Investment & Management vs. Workers Advertising, Distribution & Service Economy Corp. & Corp-Mass-Media Media industry Maximising Profit Persuasion Support Image Sign – Value

 Behaviour Sanctioned by Punishment Police, Military, Prison, Dictatorship, Fascism Capital+State/Workers +Union Beatings, Coercion, Authoritarian Supervision Boss  Workers/Union

 Positive & Negative Reinforcement Welfare State & Regulation State Reinforcment Personnel Management & Industrial Relations Managers  Workers + Union

 Positive Reinforcement to be supportive Mediated Mass-Consumption Consumption Reinforcment Human Resource Management HRM Techniques

Fig. 7.4  A historical-behaviourist model of capitalism

subsequent liberal→consumerism→media capitalism path indicates transitional points from which one socio-economic form converted into another until it reached the present stage of media capitalism.197 This development can be expressed in two ways: the political-economical forms of the three basic modes of capitalism (liberal capitalism, consumerism and finally, media capitalism) and adjacent human behavioural forms that ideologically support all three stages (Fig. 7.4): Figure 7.4 shows the three core forms of capitalism that developed political-economic structures underwritten by supportive human behaviour. At the political-economic level, all four spheres (education, work, consumption and democracy) have experienced decisive shifts in their economic foundations and adjacent behavioural demands. These moved from production and work to consumption and finally to ideology under media capitalism. Media capitalism’s guiding principles are ideological affirmation and persuasion. Media capitalism has been able to create substantial ideologically persuasive powers that aid the creation of affirmative human resources at work and consumptive-affirmative purchasers outside of work. Supportive signs, symbols and messages that sustain both spheres are transmitted through the media. These are engineered to have maximum ideological impact to underwrite ideological support for media capitalism. Perhaps the level that experiences the most substantial impact of belief and behaviour manipulation through the methods of behaviourism is the

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level of mass conditioning (Fig. 7.4). It has become the dominant mode of ideological domestication. It is followed by an application of behaviourism to non-productive (consuming) and productive spheres (work). Historically, adaptation to capitalism resulted in social conflicts (Fig. 7.4) signified in an application of punishing methods to domesticate former peasants into industrial workers.198 As capitalism moved into the Fordist stage of consumerism, early workers became consumers. Punishment regimes declined as consumerism and ideology grew stronger. But punishment was never totally eliminated and continued as HRM’s disciplinary action, fines and penalties. Nonetheless, the emphasis clearly moved towards ideological affirmation engineered by what is known as the ‘Human Relation School’.199 Not much later it mutated into HRM which uses the Human Relation School’s sophisticated techniques such as incentives, promotions, bonuses, benefits, pay increases, performance related pay and so on as positive reinforcement.200 Simultaneously, it exposed workers to the threat that once granted positives can be withdrawn by management (negative reinforcement). Successively, older domestication structures mutated into ideological supportive structures, focusing less on punishment and more on ideological integration. Managerialism’s ideological integration is mirrored in society. Punishment moves further into the background and features mostly in the parading of marginalised people on tabloid-TV and the WWW.201 Soon, even negative reinforcements started to decline. Simultaneously, the ideology of media capitalism emphasises positive reinforcement, thereby providing the biggest pacifier and support creator in human history: money. All this has occurred largely under a process that is made to appear scientific and therefore logical: hard work is positively reinforced as leading to consumption that is positively reinforced as leading to an affluent middle-­ class life which in turn is constructed as a self-reinforcing ideological mechanism that is supported by the media. This has been very successful. As a consequence, punishing methods of state police started to subside as even states started to support moves from liberal capitalism’s punishment regimes towards pacifying society through mass consumption, middle-­ class affluence and limited social welfare provisions first (consumerism) and ideological means later (media capitalism). It followed a three-stage development: . Punishment was the main pacifier of liberal capitalism. 1 2. Petit-bourgeois affluence was the main pacifier of consumerism.

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3. Ideology is the main pacifier of media capitalism. This allowed punishing regimes to take the backseat. With the growth of media capitalism, ideology was able surpass consumerism, opening up new avenues to reduce welfare. Society under media capitalism is no longer stabilised by punishment even though crime still plays a substantial role for the media by featuring as The Politics of Fear. This remains highly useful to media capitalism.202 But the superseding of punishment regimes, mass consumption, middle-class affluence and social welfare provisions through the ideology of media capitalism did—so far—not eliminate democracy.203 Despite all this, society at all three stages has never been totally free from contradictions (Fig. 7.4) which find their expressions in largely three ways: liberal capitalism’s conflicts escalated between capital and state on the one side and workers and their representative organisations on the other. These eased with consumerism, welfare states and democracy, all of which provided buffers between labour and capital. Conflicts moved from resistance to punishment towards early forms of affirmation to capitalism through consumerism. Through the widespread introduction of mass democracy, an additional level of extra affirmation emerged. With their participation in the spectacle of mass democracy, previously anti-­supportive sections of society could be incorporated into the political apparatus and asphyxiated. The remaining social conflicts between labour and capital were pacified in four ways: . Conflict was marginalised by the media industry. 1 2. Conflict was substantially weakened through consumerism. 3. Conflict moved from being about capitalism to conflict within structures provided by those who rule, giving society’s more reform-­ minded sections the illusion of being able to change things. 4. Labour-versus-capital conflicts were buffered by democracy, bureaucracy, welfare and regulation. In this way, almost all anti-affirmative forces set against capitalism were successfully mollified—which eliminated one of the foremost obstacles that blocked the way towards today’s ideological triumph of media capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, mass consumerism and behaviourism’s positive reinforcements were established. Following this, attention could be diverted away from buffering capital against labour and

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instead could be fully directed towards consumerism (first). Once this had been securely established, attention was directed towards ideology (later). Social conflicts were no longer an issue of the productive sphere (as they were in the nineteenth century) or the state sphere (as they were during the twentieth century). They vanished into thin air under the media’s ideological onslaught.204 In a diminished and largely irrelevant form, labour-­ versus-­capital conflicts were finally moved on towards the consumerist—(e.g. consumer boycotts, anti-shopping and buy nothing days205) and social spheres (e.g. NGOs, environmental rallies, etc.).206 But the two strongest forces that smothered social conflict remained. These are consumerism that was later paired with ideological affirmation and engineered through the media. Both asphyxiated the public inside an eternal work⇔shopping oscillation flanked by ideology. The cheerfulness of twentieth century’s consumerism—petit-bourgeois materialism and middle-class affluence— have been positively reinforced into ideological affirmation to media capitalism. All this removed the productive sphere almost completely from being a sphere of social conflict in the mind of the public.207 In the productive sphere, this has been paralleled by the rise of an equivalent workplace ideology, namely, Managerialism.208 The often violent conflicts of early capitalism soon moved into more structured and non-violent forms of workplace disagreements mediated through organised management and employers on one side and organised (read: incorporated) workers and trade unions on the other.209 Throughout the twentieth century, some of these conflicts still affected the structural core of the productive sphere. Their increasingly distributive (higher wages) rather than substantial character (questioning the wage system) rendered trade unions system integrative rather than system challenging.210 Many of these pacifying strategies became habits of thought211 as HRM techniques offered positive reinforcement through highly fine-tuned behaviourist techniques with the ideological aim of normalisation: to define, support, calculate, recalibrate and reinforce the norms shaping the way people behave inside managerial regimes.212 But more than just trapping human resources in an eternal work⇔consumption oscillation, this also establishes an ideological framework in which individuals are confined. It limits their ability to understand—and hence to change—the world.213 These systems fulfilled the original promises of behaviourism: to understand, predict, manipulate and, most importantly, to control human behaviour.214 These techniques largely control the minds of pupils at school, employees at work, consumers at shopping malls and voters at the

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ballot box.215 They represent the most forceful attack on human understanding. At no time in human history has the shaping of human (non) understanding reached such a perfect stage of complete ideological manipulation. It came with the media-behaviourism-ideology merger supported by media capitalism’s ‘huge industry of manipulation’.216 After decades of system integration—achieved through the methods of behaviourism—the construction of ideologically affirmative knowledge has reached a determining level that allows the successive withdrawal of almost all punishing methods while shifting individuals solely onto ideological affirmation to media capitalism.217 The mechanisms of thought manipulation are used by the media, in schools, in managerial regimes and in the democratic sphere. They create ideologically constructed behaviour and, above all, affirmation.218 Nobody is to escape from the ideological encirclement of media capitalism. The task of disseminating ideology is no longer assigned to the state but to schooling, work, consumptive relations and democracy as guided by the media. Almost every human eventuality is interpreted and understood inside this conditioned ideological framework. Through years of ideological schooling, pre-engineered life experiences, working and voting as guided by the ideology of media capitalism virtually all encounters with society are mediated. The mind of most members of present societies is sufficiently conditioned to go-with-the-flow. Practically all eventualities of life are understood inside an ideological framework that only permits certain understandings while simultaneously disallowing anti-affirmative understandings. Revolt is eliminated before the thought of revolt occurs, except in left-wing hallucinations about Spectres of Revolt.219 It is self-evident that media capitalism decides which understandings are allowed and which are not. Media capitalism simply pre-conditions people’s responses to the system. This is shown in Fig. 7.5: Figure 7.5 shows how reality is understood through a pre-designed ideological framework that allows individuals to no longer understand reality independently, autonomously and critically. Initially, schools

ideological framework for conditioning of responses Schooling Child  Adult



Conditioned Worker  Conditioned Consumer

response framing in society and work sphere 

Work Situation



Conditioned Responses



Consumer Situation



Conditioned Responses

Fig. 7.5  Conditioning of situational framed response

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condition responses. These learned (read: conditioned) responses are transferred to adulthood. In work and consumer situations, responses of the individual are conditioned resulting in affirmative responses to Managerialism and consumerism. Much of this negates critical rational choices because of a pre-set conditioning structure that pre-determines responses. Once a satisfactory level of mass conditioning has been reached and people are ideologically asphyxiated inside a conditioned worldview, media capitalism’s hegemonic ideologies of free choice, rational choice, independent consumers, autonomous agents, homo economicus and homo consumens are able to fall on fruitful grounds: the economist’s view of the person, as it now stands, is that the person is pure stimulus-response machine. The preferences are given; the relative prices are given. The person is completely reactive. We might say that the person’s behaviour is perfectly pre-determined, or pre-designed…homo economicus is really a robot.220

Meanwhile, almost all areas of anti- and non-affirmative thinking have been successfully colonised by the media.221 With the closing of almost all critical options for self-reflection, an ideological frame of reference has been established. This ends human freedom.222 And this is the key to media capitalism. Individuals attend school, work, watch TV and go shopping quite conscious of their actions, but they remain unconscious of the causes that determine their actions. They know the facts but not the factors behind them that create these facts. In that, they remain unconscious of the deep structure ideologies that run behind the surface structure activity of schooling, working, watching TV, consuming and voting. Scott’s hidden transcripts of resistance223 are simply deleted. Many individuals never become aware of the endless ideological programming that is working quietly in the background of everything they see on TV, read in manipulative newspapers, listen to on the radio or see on the internet.224 Manipulating internet clicks225—or as the manipulators call it, ‘a new superpower’226—runs under the deceptive heading of persuasive technology to avoid the word manipulation.227 These operate by stealth so that people remain unconscious of the manipulative techniques used to engineer their thoughts and actions as designed by behaviourism under the ideological imperatives of media capitalism. For it to function, the surface-to-­ background interfaces need to remain hidden so that its mechanics—and the truth—can be concealed.

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These deeply ideological mechanisms mask the truth about the conditioning framework inside which individuals understand their situation. Inside the conditioned ideological frame of reference, almost all conflicts in the form of consumer boycotts or no-shopping-days initiatives occur inside the consumption sphere governed by the media. New information can no longer be understood freely, autonomously and unconditioned. It can only be understood inside a pre-conditioned framework that tells individuals that anti-affirmative behaviour is unwarranted and bad. The rejection of everything anti-affirmative is based on hidden and unconscious—but always conditioned—framing that continuously runs its ideology.228 This framework is created through years of ideological training. Assigning negative images to anti-affirmative forces is no longer the task of the state but the media without needing an Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In fact, the opposite is the case. Everything is allowed as long as people: immovably insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.229

A significant advantage of media capitalism’s ideology lies in its pretended openness, precisely because it can rely on its own ideology that marginalises—if not annihilates—anti-affirmative ideas. Media capitalism has almost completed the Closing of the Human Mind.230 It is achieved when individuals depict conditioned responses to what is experienced inside the public, educational, work and political domains.231 Occasionally, media capitalism runs statistical surveys to double-check on how deep its ideologies have entered society. Once the anchoring of ideology has been achieved, ideological affirmation to media capitalism has established itself as an autopilot-like-self-supportive structure that reproduces itself almost eternally. It only needs marginal adjustments. It works in society and in managerial regimes. How it works inside the economic-managerial sphere of business is discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1. filmsforaction.org/watch/human_resources_social_engineering…2010. 2. Nobel. S. 2010. Human Resources Documentary – Social Engineering In The 20th Century (Canada: release date: 1st November 2010: http:// metanoia-­films.org/human-­resources/, 1h 59min, accessed: 27th November 2017).

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3. Ewen, S. 1996. PR!: a social history of spin, New  York: Basic Books, p. 149; wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov; Parker, I. 2015. Handbook of Critical Psychology, London: Routledge; Bailey, A. (eds.) 2014. Philosophy of mind: the key thinkers, London: Bloomsbury Academic; Farrell, M. 2014. Historical and philosophical foundations of psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co. p. 56; Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 166. 4. Miller M.  C. 2007, Introduction to Packard, V. 1957, The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co. (2007 edition published by Ig Publishing, Brooklyn), p. 20 & Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New York: D. McKay Co. 171. 5. Key, W. B. 1989. The age of manipulation, New York: H. Holt, p. 198; Hood, B. 2012. Self Illusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 203. 6. Baudrillard, J. 1996. The System of Objects, London: Verso (p.  151); Horkheimer, 1964. Critique of Instrumental Reason, New  York: Continuum Books (internet download from www.marxists.org (p. 126); Eysenck, M. 2006. Fundamentals of Cognition, Hove: Psychology Press (p.  52–53); Peter, J.  P. & Olson, J.  C. 2008. Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy, 8th ed., New  York: McGraw-Hill (p.  214); Pettit, M. 2013. The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7. Mills (Mills, C.  W. 1956. The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press (p.  304) Bourdieu, P. 2005. The Social Structure of the Economy, Cambridge: Polity (p. 186). 8. Tiger, L. 1987. The manufacture of evil: ethics, evolution, and the industrial system, New York: Harper & Row, p. 133; McLuhan, M. 2001. The mechanical bride: folklore of industrial man, Berkeley: Gingko Press, p. 21; Schramm, W. & Roberts, D. (eds.) 1971. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, Chicago: University of Illinois Press (p. 579ff.). 9. Lipset, S. M. 1963. The First New Nation – The United States in Historical & Comparative Perspective, New  York: Norton; Tunstall, J. 1977. The media are American: Anglo-American media in the world, London: Constable; Harvey, R. 2005. Culture, capitalism, and democracy in the New America, New Haven: Yale University Press. 10. Heartfield, J. 2012. An unpatriotic history of the Second World War, Winchester: Zero Books. 11. Sombart, W. 1976. Why is there no socialism in the United States?, White Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press; Lipset, S.  M. 1963. The First New Nation  – The United States in Historical & Comparative Perspective, New York: Norton.

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CHAPTER 8

Media Capitalism and the World of Work

The manipulation of the public mind…is a marked characteristic of society today (Bernays, E. L. 1928. Manipulating public opinion: The why and the how, American Journal of Sociology, 33(6):959.) ‘Rarely has there been a time in history when the governors have not attempted to influence the way in which the governed view the world’ (Taylor, P. M. 2003. Munitions of the mind: a history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present era, (3rd ed), Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 14.)

Ideology has a major impact on how we view workplaces and managers and how we see and behave at work. The media’s power to shape ideological perceptions emerged during the nineteenth century when simple factory administration mutated into modern management (twentieth century) and Managerialism (twenty-first century).1 Today’s Managerialism is a version of ‘economic imperialism [as an] extension of economic theory to non-economic disciplines’.2 Just as economic imperialism accompanied capitalism, management also became an ism. Unlike simple management, Managerialism always means ideology combined with an apparatus that transmits its ideological message—corporate media. Hence, corporate media present the ‘viewpoint of management [which has become] an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_8

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essential function of PR’,3 establishing the PR⇔Managerialism interface. Armed with PR, an ‘aggressive managerial penetration of the world’s surface’4 infiltrates many spheres. The media’s ideological power sustains perceived successes, enticing people to imitate rich and powerful CEOs.5 Simultaneously, a war on the poor—not on poverty (e.g. Parasite Street6)—takes place.7 Sustaining stratospheric wealth and poverty, corporate media obscure socio-economic classes, favouring the nation8 as this generates ‘the mass production of ignorance’ when corporate media either9: • ignores the poor, • equates being poor with being worthless, • frames the poor as undeserving and makes us believe that • the poor are an eyesore, • the poor have only themselves to blame, and • the poor are just unlucky. In media capitalism, poverty is to be accepted as a fact of life10 as PR sells aggressively the benefits of capitalism.11 It assures that positive images of the wealthy (e.g. CEOs) are making us believe that they are deserving of their wealth; negative images of the poor and the working poor may make us believe that they deserve their wretched condition.12 For the media, CEOs and others, this is a good deal. Being the lord in the media realm and elsewhere comes with very profitable rewards.13 Unlike the negatively portrayed unionists—called bosses even though they are not bosses at all—real bosses are called CEOs.14 These CEOs, media kings and corporations15 are ideologically landscaped16 as blameless as the manipulation on behalf of business17 camouflages corporate criminality by using corporate PR’s preferred bad apple ideology.18 Apart from the occasional wrongdoing—for example, Nestle, the baby killer,19 was quickly reframed by PR into an Infant-Formula Controversy—corporate criminality largely disappears as business success becomes admired.20 Inside work, Managerialism’s ideology of work→reward→consume is shaping our attitude formation.21 Work is not fulfilling but a way that leads to consuming. PR calls this money priming.22 Money priming is aided by ‘television that promotes hedonistic consumerism [and a] culture in which money is the measure of value’.23 As a consequence, we no longer buy the

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things we need, but we also buy things we don’t need with money we do not have to impress people we do not even like.24 Historically, much of this dates back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx who emphasised that wealth creation and labour-capital relationships are shaped by contradictory forces.25 From capitalism’s very beginning, labour-versus-capital contradictions shaped a brutal relationship of domination, found in Dickensian workshops in capitalism’s centre first and in its periphery later.26 The media flanked these developments. Eventually, the global commercial media system started to regard corporate domination as natural and compassionate, framing capitalism as responsible capitalism with effective and generous giants.27 Despite its focus on efficiency, efficiency isn’t really a democratic denomination.28 Perhaps management’s semi-official history begins with Frederic Taylor who—as management’s very own ideology tells us—single-handedly invented Scientific Management,29 even though Taylor never conducted a single scientific experiment.30 Still, management over labour domination was legitimised.31 Soon, Taylor’s management methods were turbo-­ charged by Fordist mass production.32 Labour’s opposing agency became management—capital’s henchmen—rather than capital itself. Dominating labour became the task of so-called personnel management and later human resource management (HRM) just as Orwell foresaw:33 from the point of view of the low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

In the belief that man had to be guided from above, what followed was several name changes of the leaders and the to be led, agents and simple spectators, and for those to-be-ruled-over.34 Ideologically, today’s HRM carries connotations to natural resources as it converts humans into resources using people as tools to realise so-called organisational goals (read: profits) under capitalism’s eternal mantra: profits are sought.35 Just as the global media-mogul Rupert Murdoch once noted,36 all newspapers are run to make profits. I don’t run anything for respectability.

The Managerialism-media-PR merger always included infotainment and the tabloidisation of business news. In some cases, media capitalism’s more aggressive mind-set37 included the creation of entirely newsless but

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highly commercial programming.38 Today, news editors function primarily as businessmen.39 As selling and branding merged into PR, emotive lures were used as an effective implement for business to increase its profits.40 Capital’s profit-making merged with profits and audiences as the ideological pressure from advertisers increasingly defines what is reported and what is not. It comes with PR’s Alice-in-Wonderland principle: if the audience watches, the public interest is served.41 In reality, PR reinforces themes such as business is good, government is bad and labour is very bad. This is done in the awareness that PR is successful if done surreptitiously.42 It follows a narrative that needs corporate heroes (CEOs) and villains (trade unions and victims, e.g. the public) to be saved.43 While apparatchiks never do PR for its own sake, they do it to sustain corporate profits.44 Media ideology claims PR serves the public even though ‘a British think tank calculated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7  in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution and debt’.45 Perhaps the worst example of PR sustained profit-making remains smoking and how to protect the advertiser from the human carnage it created and orchestrated under PR’s deny, deny, deny strategy.46 Media capitalism’s profit⇔PR interface pays handsomely—for some. The Managerialism/PR era reaches beyond simple product marketing. Today, PR sustains entire corporations ideologically. In short, this is the PR era.47 PR as propaganda works at two levels:48 1. through mass media to maintain support for capitalism from the public, and 2. through the corporate lobbying of government for favourable pro-­ business policies. PR’s lobbying operates on ‘a 1,300-to-1 ratio’49 in favour of business and against NGOs, unions, workers and society. Not surprisingly, corporate PR avoids terms like working class and as a consequence, class, class groupings and class differences are seldom reported.50 The term business experiences the exact opposite. It is heavily used in ‘manipulative communication to promote business interests’.51 Just one example shows this. The news agency ‘Reuters earns more than 90% of its revenue from selling news to the world of finance [and therefore it] is far more likely to cover the price of cotton than the life of the cotton worker’.52 This is called newsworthy.53 Largely, the working population is not worthy of attention.

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PR has almost an internal anti-labour predisposition that is deeply embedded in much of the media culture.54 PR and managerialist ideologies conceal what you know (PR-talk) in favour of what PR wants you to believe.55 As such, PR hides the profit motive and the human→resource conversion. Even today, capitalism turns individuals—so-called self-made men—into useable resources.56 This is done through the creation of institutionalised individuals constructed as free agents. To a significant extent, this belief is established in the non-work sphere.57 The media’s moulding of public opinion necessarily includes the free employment ideology, pretending labour equals capital.58 It signals to capital that labour remains a commodity, blurring the line between what is real and what is not.59 In reality, labour remains a living entity that carries three core values: . Labour does not exist for the purpose of saleability. 1 2. Labour can never be separated from its owner. 3. Labour power can only be set in motion by its owner. By camouflaging this, Managerialism worked hard to assure that labour became an agency of ideology that is seamlessly integrated into asymmetrical power structures.60 Historically, this was anything but the case as workers and children were forced into factories, making capitalism possible. Managerial (read: dictatorial) rule-making legitimised management while it controlled labour.61 Media capitalism’s ideology lives on the fact that the news upholds the legitimacy of the holders of authority.62 Combining forces, Managerialism and PR seek to make labour support four central ideologies:63 . consenting to the division of labour as a rational mechanism; 1 2. supporting management’s legitimacy; 3. accepting organisational hierarchies and managerial cultures;64 and 4. recognising non-democratic management. Initially, labour hotly contested all four. By the twentieth century, the arrival of Managerialism marked a significant transition from violence, brutalities and punishment towards ideological internalisation. Ideology is seen by Managerialism as an important mechanism of social control. It is far better than the rather risky option of using force.65 The brutalty→ideology transition was, however, harshly interrupted between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, bringing elementary

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dangers—revolutions—to capitalism. The loss of personal freedom66 came when the coldness of capital’s cost-benefit rationality forced itself onto labour. This created a rationality of irrationality—rational means for irrational goals.67 Still, capitalism crowned itself as the pinnacle of inhumanity.68 Rational means for irrational ends were further enhanced during the control→ideology conversion.69 On capitalism’s control→ideology continuum, one system represented the single most extreme form of prediction and control over human life.70 British philosopher Bauman71 has described the height of the loss of freedom through techno-managerial bureaucratic means. Bauman argues that the Nazi Holocaust has not been a monstrous abnormality of modernity committed by hideous brutes.72 Instead, it was the application of at least four modern principles: These principles (Table 8.1) form an essential part of Managerialism. Today, many organisations operate under these principles whenever the application of inhuman rationality to irrational ends is required. Some elements of the Holocaust’s planning may even signify modern business techniques applied in many humanised corporations (PR-talk).73 The Holocaust was rule without regard for persons in extremis, creating modernity’s core problem: the dehumanisation of people (e.g. human resources) remains one of management’s core principles with corporate media legitimising the acceptance of managerial dehumanisation. Today, managerial regimes operate largely without Discipline and Punishment, The Prison or Bentham’s Panopticon.74 Instead, today’s work regimes are ideologically complemented by corporate media. Work, consumption (including conspicuous consumption75) and society itself represent nothing that even remotely resembles a panoptical-prison-punishment regime. Instead, an ideological Managerialism-consumerism-media triangle has been established. As a consequence, managerial regimes became ideologically defined, quite similar to consumption. Both follow a single unifying hegemony. The rise and success of today’s pro-business hegemony allowed Managerialism to remove many control and surveillance methods in favour of ideology.76 Managerialism’s precursor was consumerism’s ability to ideologically integrate labour.77 During the twentieth century, management began to replace its old direct→technical→bureaucratic control trajectory by moving towards ideology.78 This process was possible through developments in behaviourism that were successfully applied to work. It gave rise to organisational psychology.79 With organisational psychology, management

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Table 8.1  The most inhuman pre-supportive work regime Descriptions 1.  Humans are no longer treated as individuals but as objects converted into calculable entities seen as items of a power relationship. It dehumanises in order to process people as objects. 2.  Rationality replaces human links between social actors with spatial separation.a Social distance is created intentionally, disconnecting actions and consequences by defining rule operators as technical entities and those to be ruled as dehumanised quantifiable objects. It separates human-to-human connections through mechanical rules. 3.  Morality is converted into formal rational-logical systems and applied routinely in computable procedures. Immoral but goal-achieving systems are directed strategically towards means-ends rationalities producing rules and regulations. It removes substantial or subjective rationality in favour of objective and purely rational systems. 4.  An administrative object is forced into a position of false choices.b Such pre-set objects are given choices that allow involvement in pre-organised sets of options.c Whatever option the individual chooses has an adverse effect. Those to-be-ruled-over are manipulated when these options are presented to them. They become objects of power. By participating in such processes, the dehumanised and de-individualised human supports a structure that works against them. Rational choice is the preferred weapon of the ruler, leaving the victim with faked choices such as to kill a few is less abhorrent than to kill many or sacrifice some in order to save many.d It opens up choices inside its pre-set framework organised by a system that is structured against the individual while claiming to support individualism. a Blass, T. 1999. The Milgram Paradigm after 35 years: Some Things we now know about Obedience to Authority. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29(5):955–978; cf. Blass, T. 2002. The Man Who Shocked the World. Psychology Today, March/April): 68–74 b

Styron, W. 1979. Sophie’s Choice – A Novel, New York: Random House

Abella, A. 2008. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. New York: Harcourt c

d

Cf. Kamm, F. M. 2015. The trolley problem mysteries, Oxford: Oxford University Press

became able to anticipate labour’s reaction to managerial initiatives and take workers’ behavioural responses into account.80 Much of these response mechanisms came from Pavlovian stimulus-responseS→R and Skinner’s behaviour→consequenceB→C linkages. These fitted neatly into managerial effort-rewardE→R structures.81 Today management relies strongly on effort→reward structures whether one calls them82: • S→R (classical conditioning), • B→C (behaviourism), or • E→R (organisational psychology).

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Significant is that this moves human action onto an effort→reward structure under ‘reap the rewards of hard work’ ideologies.83 Simultaneously, this empties work’s content by shifting the focus from sense-making, fulfilment and happiness towards a reward symbol like money, a bigger desk, a new office and so on.84 To camouflage this, Managerialism’s writers remain obsessed with sense-making as alienating work makes increasingly less sense.85 The sense of work has been overtaken by what is my reward— what you do is irrelevant as long as it leads to rewards, Managerialism’s mantra. HRM’s reward management seeks automatons as ‘self-­ programmable labour’.86 Any reflection on what one does has been sidelined in favour of rewards.87 Supported by such ideologies, media capitalism’s central task remains profit maximisation. It is ideologically camouflaged through a strong reliance on effort→reward ideologies designed to disguise exploitative88 and alienating work.89 As a consequence, those who manage increasingly rely on Managerialism’s ideology that extends to anti-democracy and even militarism. Managerialist PR strongly believes that the army provides ‘the’ role model for business:90 Table 8.2 shows the transformation of real war into corporate wars and management’s use of military strategy to legitimise strategic management. Managerialism’s militarist-science link resulted in a scientific capability to wage real and business wars.91 Adopting militarist ideologies,92 management convinced itself that military-strategic thinking leads to success.93 The competitive war against other corporations became the ‘ideology of global corporate capital’94 or corporate PR’s war-making ideology of black-versus-white and ingroup-versus-outgroup.95 It also enforces microscopic business regulation—camouflaged as deregulation—and anti-­ unionism feeding PR’s well-crafted paranoia that large corporations make attractive targets as well as semi-paranoid hallucinations like labour attacks Table 8.2  Science, military and management Original ideas Warfare Scientific warfare Management Strategic management

Quasi-science input + + + +

Science Strategic planning Military strategy Science

Results = = = =

Scientific warfare Strategic warfare using science to win Strategic management Strategic management using science to win

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business.96 It feeds Managerialism’s self-re-assuring (mis)convictions that there cannot possibly be something wrong with business. At best, capitalism’s salesmen of ideas97 are shrewd and astute manipulators who use corporate PR to organise mass deception.98 This is disingenuous untruthfulness.99 PR serves as a buffer with the task to prevent the truth from getting out.100 This is directed against the public as much as against trade unions. Managerialism’s hired media often assure that TV, for example, emphasises the pettiness or foolishness of unions and that the invented corporate enemy is made to appear as more than a hazard.101 Such PR offensives can be seen as:102 what is socially responsible serves and legitimates the existing power structure by damping dissent, engineering agreement with corporate values, creating a favourable selling environment, and encouraging a tranquil social setting for corporate activities.

In line with all this, the ideology of the aforementioned strategic management flourishes despite grand failures103 as the war-equals-business ideology remains standard business school folklore.104 Like ‘the power of the press [that] comes from continuous repetition’, it is constantly repeated in business schools.105 But this ideology also reaches deep into today’s corporations. As Managerialism says, yes, some of us must play on the business battlefield.106 Historically, the anti-human war→management transfer may well be as old as management itself. Indeed, management’s origins can still be traced back to the manége—the location where horse trainers (now: managers) domesticated (now: manage) horses (now: labour) with sticks (now: power) and carrots (now: money).107 The horse-management similarities are striking as their etymology— Italian for maneggiare—shows. To disguise its real meaning, management presents itself as being value-free,108 by hiding its strong anti-democratic stance. As management remains anti-democratic, its PR pushes the common deception that trade unions are undemocratic.109 Similarly, Managerialism’s main ideology-creating setup (e.g. business schools) also remains anti-democratic broadcasting anti-democratic values. Managerialism’s Servants of Power and Willing Executors110 advance anti-­ democracy further. This links up rather neatly with the anti-democratic tendencies of marketing.111 To mask the fact that ‘whenever it comes to the show-down between labour and capital, the press is openly or secretly for capital’,112

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Managerialism’s spin doctors never grow tired of seeking to humanise businessmen and to cast business in a positive light.113 Managerialist PR‘s assumption is that business needs to be defended against trade unions and governments. As a consequence, ‘the corporation is cast as struggling against a monolithic and menacing government…as David taking on the Goliath of oppressive government’.114 PR-men—also known as Junkmen115—have developed an ideologically laden buzzword-driven language.116 It comes with the motto that profits are no longer called profits. Today, we talk of organisational goals and shareholder value. Conveniently, profit-making corporations are just called organisations. It sounds so much more neutral and value-free than corporations implying ruthless profit-making, corporate and white-collar crime or outright evildoing.117 The term organisation—Greek’s organon—portrays companies as value free techno-neutral tools.118 Managerialism has extended this to organisational members and business clients when defending and advocating capitalist interests, associates (read: workers) and public associations (read: corporate lobbying).119 These carry positive connotations designed to hide the fact that corporations exist to exclusively benefit their owners over the so-called organisational members. This is conveniently masked as friendly capitalism’s CSR (corporate social responsibility).120 PR claimed to own CSR right after CSR made it into the corporate PR agenda.121 PR’s CSR works best ‘when both the source and intent of the propaganda are disguised’.122 CSR and PR’s true victory comes—as always in propaganda—when the enemy talks your language, that is, when unionists talk about CSR.123 For PR, CSR is inexpensive and straightforward. It is a sort of manipulative prosthesis that is readily attached to corporate PR. Its greatness lies in the fact that it repairs appearance but does not change the actual conduct of companies and corporations.124 In any case, CSR gives PR something new and exiting to sell to corporate clients.125 On much of this, Bernays, who is considered by most to be the father of modern public relations, thought that businesses should be divided into four categories:126 . The first is unabashedly dominated by profits. 1 2. The second includes businesses which break laws. 3. The third proceeds under the assumption that the public interest and private interest harmonise. 4. The fourth includes those businesses that use social responsibility cosmetically but do not act in responsible ways.

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Many businesses adhere to 1+2 while others favour 3+4. These follow PR’s dictum that any perceptive communicator can easily fabricate a façade of business ethics when uniting the goal of all four of Bernays profit-­making businesses.127 Today, the obscuring CSR-ideology—a mere window dressing—is part of Managerialism’s hegemonic canon.128 This, of course, includes PR operatives working as a branch of propaganda.129 Many PR-men are not much more than ‘moral cowards, intellectual quislings, boot-lickers, buttkissers and natural born liars. Some of them are drunks’.130 In workplaces, Managerialism’s ideologies are visible when ideas such as management must take over and perform much of the work are used. Taylor’s (un-)Scientific Management (1911) that described workers as stupid, ox and gorilla is seen as a classic.131 Instead of being scientific and value-free, Taylor’s gorilla exposes management’s concept of technical reason as ideological.132 The universally accepted Scientific Management ideology is that management must take over, pretend to be value-free, while a worker is seen as an ox. Beyond that, Taylor’s real relevance came at a time when capitalism’s ideology moved from manufacturing to the service industry.133 Table 8.3 shows this through the application of eight key PR/propaganda elements: Table 8.3  Eight communicative elements of technical domination Communication

To be achieved forms of ideological support

Decontextualisation Decontextualisation occurs when a subject becomes an ideologically supportive object of an ideological process, hiding work asymmetries while stabilising them. Systematisation Managerial regimes are presented as rational and unchangeable—a self-regulatory system with an in-&-output seeking equilibrium. Reductionism Workers are reduced to be exchangeable, qualities and quantities functions in a dehumanising process directed towards productivity. Mediation Worker-production interfaces are mediated through a techno-­ managerial process that communicatively establishes a system support for capitalism. Automatisation Capitalism’s trajectory of factory automation (robots)→offices (IT)→internet of things communicates a worker-is-functional-­ additive-to-automation ideology.a Vocationalism Vocational training is constructed as domination, hiding its system supporting services that exclude most ethical qualities. Positioning Domination is established by positioning labour in pre-designed work regimes, setting strict and alienating boundaries. Initiative Managerial domination demands ideological support beyond passivity as system supportive initiatives lead to self-support. World Bank 2016. Development Report (documents.worldbank.org), doc-no: 102725, p. 126

a

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Table 8.3 shows some of the mechanisms that establish managerial support by turning engineering technologies into ideologies.134 Managerial techno-ideologies are designed to create supportive objects of managerial power—the very opposite of ‘fully automated luxury communism’.135 Ideological engineering uses specific techniques that lead to a technification of previously social and human processes. These turn social and human elements into a technical apparatus. Human acts become technified. With this, ideologically manipulated individuals are made to perform technical tasks detached from the meaning of work, signifying a de-­ meaning of work. Meanwhile corporate media flank de-meaning through an externally induced ideological perception of work. Corporate media have an acute awareness of its own ideological power. PR’s alertness of prime-time propaganda comes from the fact that some are watching TV for up to nine years over a lifetime.136 To camouflage work’s meaninglessness, PR shifted meaning towards consumption, crowd-pleasing movies, romantic novels, trivial dramas and reality TV sold as free television and offered in exchange for mind-numbing TV commercials.137 There are silly TV-shows and sentimental kitsch shown on TV, in cinemas, on YouTube and elsewhere. It occurs in an awareness that non-­ educational TV arouses desire and that drama can be a powerful tool of propagandistic persuasion.138 This aims to ideologically construct affirmative individuals as functional additives to the pre-designed work→earn→consume eternity. Media capitalism’s ideological achievements make it possible that individuals can no longer recognise their own alienation, life’s emptiness, capitalism’s pathologies and environmental destruction with crimes of the less powerful (theft, violence, etc.) and crimes of the powerful (profit motive related to climate change) and the Anthropocene’s rises.139 The freedom of alternatives is diminished as PR is convinced that freedom is a splendid principle, but it’s rather unworkable.140 As a consequence, people are offered a manipulated crypto-freedom to participate in consumerism with homogenised mass taste—‘eat the same food, listen to the same music…watch the same movies’.141 On the internet they can access websites that have been pre-designed by ‘corporate internet controllers’142 to see what media capitalism wants us to see as ‘capitalism shapes the Internet far more than vice versa’.143 Early childhood conditioning, masterfully supported through so-called child-TV, remains imperative. Later in life, management continues the conditioned home-tasks-for-chocolate → school-tasks-for-stars →

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management-­tasks-for-wages trajectory.144 Managerialism’s ideology-­ engineers construct this as TINA.145 It even cloaks work’s contradictions and the reality of:146 a) education as domestication for work regimes, b) management’s hierarchical domination, c) consumerism’s pathologies (‘glorifying of shopping causes depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints’); and d) the skilled mass-manipulator of publicity sold as democracy. It begins at school with a clear division between school and workplace socialisation. This has been working for generations. After years of behavioural inheritance through families, individuals have internalised domination and are behaving accordingly. Building on internalised domination, Managerialism’s psycho-ideological machinery convinces with ease.147 People are rendered unable to see capitalism’s contradictions while watching soap operas and game shows. Thinking has been (re)moved, while an eternal work→consume oscillation robs us of free time, leaving next to no room for critical reflection.148 In any case, thinking too deeply is not rewarded—success is. Hence, effort→rewardE→R is framed as eternal, while Managerialism highlights its naturalness and inevitability.149 A seamless media exposure to ever shallower entertainment and the infamous lowest common denominator150 assures the success of non-thinking. Crucially, corporate media prevent almost any critical reflection on work and consumerism and the profit-making reason driving both. To achieve sufficient levels of anti-intellectual asphyxiation, almost all ideological support structures at work enhance the anaesthetised Organization Men.151 Managerialism creates ideologically conditioned employees who have been institutionalised from an early age onwards—a fact that has to be camouflaged.152 Its school→work process is framed as natural as the transition appears as ‘relative mobility (equality of opportunity) or absolute or structural mobility (actual class movement)’ that is seen to be upward even though it remains linear: working class children become workers.153 The upward mobility ideology is communicated through E→R structures based on cosmetically differentiated status symbols and labels used in kindergarten and schools and from college to university to the workplace.154 Media engineers support this through brand hierarchies and league tables.155 Managerialism uses it to build loyalty to the firm.156

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In today’s workplaces, ideology combines external social relations (e.g. school and consumerism), communicative relations (e.g media capitalism’s ideology of individualism, egoism, anti-state, anti-tax ideology and free enterprise) with workplace relations (Managerialism).157 This triangle directs individuals towards organisational one-dimensionality.158 Historically, liberal capitalism’s direct control over labour enforced obedience while accepting a pro-capitalist way of life (Table 8.3).159 Originally supported by external institutions (police, armies and militaristic schooling for the working class), obedience to capitalism was enforced through the authoritarian states. By the mid-twentieth century, direct state action (sending in the army against revolts) moved towards manufacturing consent.160 Limited levels of democracy paired with mass consumerism supported mass consent.161 Existence was made comfortable by appearing as the good life.162 Increasingly, it had become obvious that consumer capitalism was able to supply workers with a lifestyle far beyond the dreams of Marx.163 At work, control was increasingly administered through in-person communication.164 Since Managerialism knows that persuade is a softer word often substituted for manipulate, Managerialism’s persuasion (read: manipulation) methods gained from non-work spheres (read: behaviourism) began to be used in managerial regimes.165 Next to its ideological offensive, Managerialism also uses the quasi-mythical competitive market166 to legitimise itself and its managerial agenda-setting, often euthemistically labelled restructuring (read: you are fired!).167 This is used to increase Managerialism’s own power as direct supervisory control was successively replaced through capitalism’s twin evils of consumerism and ideology cementing free-market values.168 It created ideologically engineered individuals ready for Managerialism, while the control→to→compliance ideology ran in the background (Fig.  8.1). A skilful combination of

media capitalism

workplace control from liberal capitalism to consumerism Form: (i) atwork: (ii) offwork:

(A) Direct





Personal/Agency Communication  Police, Military, Dictatorial State

(B) Technology





 

 

Techno-Structural Communication  Manufactured Consent/Fordism

(C) Bureaucracy





 

 

Formalised Communication  Laws, Rules, Procedures

(D) Concertive 

 

 

Interpersonal Communication  Intra-Personal Persuasion

liberal democratic societies: from open public sphere to the transformation of the public sphere

Fig. 8.1  From control at work to managerial ideology

(E) Ideology media capitalism links work to ideology  ideological link to consumerism the media industry

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Managerialism’s prime economic ideology of market-neoliberalism (external) and internal ideology (HRM, performance management, etc.) now structures workplace relations.169 Externally, markets-know-best ideologies extend deep into workplaces and even into democracy.170 Here, political marketing converts political parties into sales-oriented parties and market-oriented parties where political marketing decides what to offer an unsuspecting public.171 Political PR frames winner-take-all markets as a given sold to us as a freedom.172 For employees this creates a vicious cycle. For management, it reduces the need for control. With Managerialism’s control→ideology transition, the all-­ encompassing E→R structure remains used, linking mass production to mass consumption. By linking consumerism to Managerialism, decades of harsh control could be replaced with ideology. Towards the mid-twentieth century, ideologically driven consumerism eventually bore fruit inside companies in the form of ideologically affirmative employees. Around that time, the second structural transformation of the public sphere was completed, ‘weakening of the public sphere’ further.173 From here onward, media capitalism was able to colonise almost all spheres of human life even more aggressively.174 Meanwhile, highly ideological forms of mass communication became increasingly corporatised and ideological. At work, these were used instrumentally, linking the off-work sphere (entertainment and consumerism) to Managerialism. At the final stage (Fig.  8.1), mass-mediated ideology combined with system adaptive forces was integrated into the overall framework. Figure  8.1 shows this development. It depicts the two domains: production (work) and reproduction (consumption). These domains have a complementary linkage to stabilise consumerism, Managerialism and media capitalism as a whole. Increasingly, media capitalism demanded both domains to move towards its combined goal of ideological system integration supporting the control→ideology move shown in Fig. 8.1: Crucial to Fig. 8.1 is a clear control-ideology division (Fig. 8.1A→D&E). Inside A→D, four forms of control were established. These converted into four ideological managerial regimes(E). Essential was a direct→technical→ bureaucratic→concertive control movement. Supporting relations from the off-work domain are indicated via an upward pointing arrow(↑). The broken line between (i) and (ii) indicates the work domain’s openness towards externally invented ideologies. Both(i+ii) have always supported each other’s development. Under media capitalism, both domains have

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become totally integrated while they no longer need to rely on control. Ideology, as supported by corporate media, reduced the need for control. To achieve this level of managerial ideology, all previous forms of control(A→D) were necessary steps. They created generations of workers who, over time, have internalised managerial ideologies. This has been one of the single most important achievements of media capitalism. It aided the process of ideologification, largely established by three elements: 1. There has been a 200+ year-long history of generational adaptation of managerial regimes. 2. The media has anchored Managerialism deeply into our minds. 3. Primary (schooling) and secondary (work) internationalisation have been linked. Through this process, labour has been made to support capitalism’s four key ideologies (owner-management separation, mechanical-technical structures, managerially formalised rules, managerially set hierarchies). These are used by management to encircle labour, thereby guaranteeing employee support. All this has been supported by the media anchoring Managerialism as capitalism’s overall ideology. After decades of exposure to the media’s ideology, employees are sufficiently conditioned to accept and enhance twenty-first century’s Managerialism. Key is media capitalism’s equation: E→R=consumption=social-status

Managerialism has linked this equation to performance management and complex remuneration devices that were invented by organisational behaviourists and psychologically trained HR-managerialists. These ‘footsoldiers of corporate power’ issue share options, bonus payments and golden parachutes for top management and CEOs.175 In an additional twist, top managers and CEOs secure golden parachutes that are glorified by the media even when they are accused of wrongdoing.176 Pretending to run companies, top managerialists have invented what became known as ‘corporate governance [that] is simply a case of keeping up the appearances. The most important rule is don’t get caught’.177 Capitalism’s footsoldiers at top and middle management operate on what became known as impression management. As an organisational group, managers (those who actually manage) and managerialists (those who spread ideology) perfect

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our image rather than ourselves.178 Today, the corporate hero is the CEO as media-manipulated images have taken over reality—in just the same way we are made to accept that any Wild Western cowboy is no more than an inferior imitation of John Wayne.179 What counts is image perfection.180 Much of this reaches back to the pre-school toddler as media capitalism engineers the childhood→adulthood processes by providing an ideology apparatus that bridges the last remaining gaps in the human resources value chain. The daily conditioned E→R link sustains media capitalism and vice versa. It has to be constantly reinforced. Media capitalism’s ideology apparatus can never let the self-identity of an autonomous ‘I’ be free from ideological conditioning.181 Simultaneously, management converts individuals into useful human resources in an I-to-it shift ideologically cloaked as we. Corporate socialisation’s—for example, HRM’s—first task is to link a me-myself-and-I conditioned link to organisational selfishness and egoism, now framed as entrepreneurship.182 This is framed as individualism—man himself is the only master of his life—while it creates men in their utter isolation in the knowledge that individuals left to themselves are defenceless and thus becoming easy prey for corporate propaganda.183 All of this supports the semi-dictatorial actualities of managerialist regimes.184 Simultaneously, management needs to mediate individualism vis-à-vis a corporate we. Individuals longing for a solidaristic we are skilfully exploited by Managerialism. Managerialists habituate human beings to an alien regime, while managerial socialisation converts an individual’s pining for social interaction in an I→(corporate)we transformation while maintaining a manipulated we.185 Simultaneously, Managerialism also has to prevent a corporate-we from becoming a solidaristic-we, potentially turning into solidarity.186 For Managerialism to work, the we must be a corporate-we that nurtures corporate loyalty—not human⇔human loyalty.187 To achieve that, Managerialism creates an ideologically established identification of its objects. In the meantime, corporate PR smothers most remaining critical capacities by establishing a favourable climate that is skilfully linked to TINA.188 Alternative frames are eliminated.189 Tellingly, corporate PR believes ‘it is not necessary for an ideology to be loved to be hegemonic. It is merely necessary that it has no serious rival’.190 Trade unionism was the last remaining rival. Managerialism’s anti-union propaganda often sticks because it is plausible as PR’s propaganda offers ready-­ made opinions for the thoughtless herd.191 In addition, PR’s conviction is

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that the high ground is the only position from which to wage a battle.192 It uses attack agendas of companies and corporations for fending off environmental groups and trade unions. Standard PR engineers anti-union stance through the management of targeted anti-union rumours, for example.193 Often this means getting the corporate story to the public first so that the corporate interpretation of events becomes the widely accepted one.194 The media⇔capital interface has achieved a near total obliteration of unions whilst assuring that:195 . There is no alternative—not even an alternative viewpoint. 1 2. ‘most people know labour unions primarily through media representations’ (read: the corporate side of the story). 3. Trouble-makers can be managed. Its intended task is to eliminate collective solidarity, a communal we, critical alternatives and utopian speculations.196 This ‘inhibits, indeed implicitly prohibits any widespread systematic critique of capitalism’.197 At work, the to-be ideologised individual experiences a new corporate identity.198 Managerialism provides the ideology while HRM offers the apparatus.199 It inducts an already socialised person into the world of work.200 Only by partaking in capitalist processes do individuals become worthy to management. Without work (read: contributing to profits) individuals are unworthy and undeserving. The media’s framing power substantially influences how people make sense of the world of work.201 Those excluded from work—non-processable human beings who cannot be deformed to fit into capitalism’s for-profit organisations—are framed as asocial, useless, sluggish, welfare cheats, con-artists, swindlers, job seekers, lazy, parasites and unemployable.202 Meanwhile, the upper class receives a quite different framing by the media. The framing of class (Table 8.4) establishes several lenses to assure the stability of media capitalism:203 Table 8.4 shows how the media frames wealth, class, poverty and unions—designed to stabilise media capitalism. Media framing makes class vanish into thin air by shifting the focus from class-based relations to relations based on taste, fashion, culture and lifestyle, thus making people believe that societies are organised not around class per se but rather around non-economic- and non-class-based issues. This includes ethnicity, gender, value-commitment, lifestyle, consumption and so on.204 It renders people egoistic hyper-individuals aspiring to personal wealth while presenting unions—a collective—negatively. Over time, media’s structural

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Table 8.4  Framing wealth, poverty, class and unions Media frame Wealth and the Wealthy The consensus frame The admiration frame The emulation frame The price-tag frame The sour-grapes frame The issue frame The confirmation frame The bad-apple frame Workers and the Poor The thematic frame The negative-image frame The exceptionalism frame The episode frame The charitable frame The historical frame I The historical frame II The shady frame The caricatures frame I The caricature frame II The fading blue-collar frame Trade Unions The senseless frame The offer frame The wage-bonus frame The impact frame The harm frame

Explanation

The wealthy are like everyone else The wealthy are generous and caring people; it glorifies wealth The wealthy personify something to emulate The wealthy believe in the gospel of materialism Some of the wealthy are unhappy and dysfunctional Information is presented inside an accepted frame (individual→success) New information confirms already established attitudes about the rich Some wealthy people are scoundrels (some are bad—majority is good) The poor are statistics—not real people The poor are deviant, welfare dependent, shamed and suspiciousa ‘if this person can escape poverty, you can do likewise’ Poverty is a short episode in life disconnected from structural reasons It provides media audiences with a way to feel good about themselves The working class is an out-dated concept—we are all middle class now Trade unions are no longer necessary—they are a historical relic Greedy workers, unions and organised crime White-trashing the working class (trailer park trash) TV’s buffoons, bigots and slobs Out of work or unhappy at work (derogatory depictions of work) Trade union and workers’ struggles are senseless, selfish, avoidable and so on Not taking management’s wage offer makes unions appear greedy Focus on workers’ wages but not on management’s bonusb Focus on strike impact not on reason for strikes Non-representing the harm done to workers when giving up striking (continued)

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Table 8.4 (continued) Media frame

Explanation

The anti-solidarity frame Unwillingness to cover workers/union solidarity and mutual support The attribute frame A single aspect is framed positively or negatively, for example, union corruption The structure frame Information is fragmented [in sequences] to avoid the whole picture The goal frame A union goal is framed as unachievable and detrimental to society The neutrality frame Presents the state, police, courts, army and so on as neutral and independent a Bregman, R. 2017. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, New York: Little Brown & Co., p. 111 b

Cf. Eidelson, R. J. 2018. Political mind games, Bala Cynwyd: Green Hall Books, p. 134

negativity towards unions has shown impact. Flanked by attacks and negativity towards the union movement, labour news began to decline.205 Labour and trade unions are framed negatively or they simply vanish from the news. To camouflage the simultaneous vanishing of social mobility, key ideologies such as: • from dishwasher-to-millionaire, • hard work always pays off,206 • everyone-has-the-same-opportunity, • you are responsible for your own life, and • if you fail, you only have yourself to blame, and so on. are maintained.207 Corporate media’s framing power blames the poor and working poor for their situation208 through the blame-the-victim ideology. The poor are presented as undesirable (surplus labour).209 For PR, the latter means to neutralise counterforces with signals of inclusion and (re) structure people’s behaviour in a pre-designed process, rendering individuals adaptive to corporate needs.210 Manipulation targets communicatively established identities, creating at least four new different corporate identities (Table 8.5) designed for organisationally useable human resources: Table 8.5A–D shows the use of four identities that create mechanisms that convert human identities into corporate identities. Managerial-­ instrumental communication sets up clearly defined goals and targets for

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Table 8.5  Establishing corporate identities #

Identity

Target

A Individual

Human interests placing individuals above the profit interest have to be defeated—human beings have to be turned into profitable use. Target I Conversion of non-ideological attitudes into organisational attitudes Target II (profit). Conversion of individual identity into goal (profit)-achieving identity. B Work Any group identity originating in non-conditioned ex-work experiences Group (solidarity) has to be converted into work-related group experiences that replace ex-work leaders with work-related leaders (from team leader to CEOs). Target B-I Conversion of identities such as group members (school team, sport, Target B-II social) into work-group members. Conversion of obedience to work leader (team leader, supervisor) is to appear natural. C Corporate Identities originating in primary socialisation through voluntary (e.g sports club) or involuntary organisations (school, family) will be converted into corporate identities. Target C-I Conversion of voluntary and involuntary ‘institutional’ identities into Target C-II corporate identities. Conversion into corporate identity through camouflaging its involuntary character. D Professional The creation of previously established identities through professional association needs to be carried over into the corporate framework. Target D-I Conversion of professional into corporate identities supporting the Target D-II: corporation. Conversion of goals of professional associations into corporate (profit-achieving) goals.

ideological system integration.211 It defines the world symbolically for other people.212 Corporate PR relies on primary socialisation (schools) to adjust new human resources (workers) to managerial regimes (Table 8.5). This adjustment process targets individuality using the ideology of individualism when converting individual attitudes into corporate attitudes.213 The philosophical concept of personhood disappears.214 Highly individualistic attitudes are directed towards managerially constructed so-called natural work environments—a term used to hide managerial domination. The same is achieved by deceptively labelling managerially established and controlled work groups as self-managed.215 These work groups are never self-managed. Management manages them while allowing severely limited

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access to so-called involvement that excludes true self-management and, of course, workplace democracy. Under Managerialism, involvement means nothing more than the exclusion of all issues that have any significance for workers while assisting anti-democratic management regimes. The modern anti-democratic managerial regime is often composed of pre-defined clusters of human resources and groups.216 Newly recruited human resources are converted into ideologically motivated team players.217 Contradictions such as being a team player versus HRM’s individualism (e.g. individual performance management, balanced scorecards, etc.) remain unquestioned.218 The same applies to being a team player while simultaneously showing leadership qualities to increase self-­promote-­ ability.219 These contradictions are ideologically masked. The broadcasted ideology of Managerialism tells everyone to adapt to management. All institutional arrangements deemed anti-affirmative to corporate identity have to be diluted and diminished. Managerialism’s instructors seek to delete these or (ideally) convert them into positive ideologically determined organisational identities. Often the ideological onslaught is labelled organisational culture.220 Such an organisational-ideological and, above all, one-dimensional identity is directed towards the corporation. This is useful to a corporate-professional identity. Meanwhile, some individuals are made to belong to ideology affirmative professional associations that support Managerialism. Simultaneously, all critical associations like trade unions receive media’s delegitimising and marginalising frame—if mentioned at all.221 Some trade unions were converted into so-­ called—always management compliant—‘professional associations’ that never act against management.222 Long before the incorporation of workers into its apparatus, capitalism started to combat the organised power of workers. It all started when capitalism’s propaganda and public relations— the selling of opinion-making services to corporations—furnished one of capitalism’s core PR projects: the aim of the total annihilation of trade unions.223 In the USA and the UK, for example, two historic dates remain noteworthy: USA-1914:   when the Rockefeller corporation’s henchmen killed 19 miners and their families (including 12 children) during the infamous Ludlow Massacre, PR’s star of propaganda and Adolf Hitler advisor Ivy Lee, known as poison Ivy, won a propaganda victory over trade unions;224 and

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UK-1926:  when corporate PR won an equally important victory over British workers and their trade unions during the General Strike.225

Armed with such victories, corporate PR sold its repugnant wares to companies. Meanwhile, pro-capital and corporate media started to portray trade unions, workers and strikes negatively, largely through conditioning associations such as strike-equals-riot-equals-violence themes often linked to invented themes such as protest rally turns dreadful and strikers are gluttonous narcissists.226 Apart from extremely rare and isolated pro-strike reports (e.g. UPS-strike in 1997227), media’s ‘carnivalesque eye-­catching’228 sensationalist framing prevails: ‘workers are seen, when they are seen at all, as faces in a crowd [when the] emphasis [is] on problems caused by striking workers’.229 Hardly shown are the reasons for a strike230 or uneventful dispute resolution that does not contribute to a negative image of labour unions.231 What is reported is ‘labour’s…posturing [and] the longest [and] most bitter strikes’.232 Overall, corporate media focuses on the downstream impact of strike, outlining the consequences of strike action on so-called innocent victims. The upstream elements of a strike (e.g. reasons for strikes) are avoided or presented in a distorted view. Media behaviour also testifies to the disappearance of newspapers of record, while bad news about organised labour is publicised and labour successes are ignored.233 This is the mass production of ignorance.234 Historically, early anti-union experience convinced PR’s opinion-­ moulding tacticians that they can pull the strings that control the public’s mind.235 Anti-union-PR established the infamous Mohawk Valley Formula—a blueprint for union busting.236 Anti-union PR also uses prefabricated pieces for its offensives that engineer the businesses’ hallucination of an overwhelming power of trade unions that—unlike business—these never had.237 Commonly, PR which produces capitalist and corporate legitimacy quickly became a flourishing management occupation238 sharing a few basic convictions:239 . The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support. 1 2. KISS—keep it simple, stupid! 3. Use cloaked news and news leaks as a pseudo-event par excellence.

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4. Mushroom management—keep them in the dark and feed them shit. 5. Make sure there is no ambiguity about whom the public is to loathe: trade unions. With this, management understood the ideologic value of a PR-isation of the media as useful against unions.240 Meanwhile, propaganda and corporate PR have become a permanent feature and are one of the most powerful instruments in the world.241 Tellingly, media capitalism’s ideological power has assured that the debate on propaganda and PR have more or less disappeared.242 Historically, PR’s behind-the-scene activities showed management that PR’s manipulative instruments are useful.243 PR and media implicitly agree on an overall portrayal of labor unions that is likely to be negative.244 PR’s unions=negative+business=positive formula gives management a clear advantage over trade unions.245 Media capitalism is aware that a pro-business atmosphere delivers a useful cohort of human beings into workplaces, ready for the human-being→human-­ resource transition.246 Pro-business PR consists of agents of organised businesses selling to the general public the corporate enterprise system, social harmony and eternal class collaboration.247 Its double task is:248 . to counteract public unfriendliness to corporate activities; and 1 2. to foster the values of the corporate free enterprise Managerialism’s human-being→HR conversion remains directed towards pre-set targets, seeking to integrate human beings through an extension of once learned behaviours. Corporate support uses early socialisation as a platform to re-construct new identities adjusted to company interests. Behavioural adjustments, behaviour modification and identity conversions are common tools to achieve this. They turn an individual into someone who continues to achieve corporate profits. For that, Managerialism has developed goal-achieving mechanisms that are guided by its invented instrumentality and rationality. These are developed strategically as they set targets for the realisation of secondary socialisation and ideological indoctrination. This is applied largely through two strategies: 1. informal ideological support occurs on the job through communicative devices such as replacing an individual identity with a corporate identity; while

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2. formal ideological support processes manipulate new human resources through formally and officially structured socialisation programmes. Both are ideological processes geared towards the creation of a fake— organisational—identity. Often, this is communicated through simple ideology laden statements such as we are one big family, we are all in the same boat and this is how things are done around here.249 Particularly, the all-in-­ one-boat ideology camouflages divergent labour(L)-versus-management(M) interests: wages=L↑+M↓, working-time=L↓+M↑ and working ↑ ↓ conditions=L +M . Beyond such realities, the all-in-one-boat ideology hides that some do the rowing while others enjoy upper deck seating. The boat metaphor is a typical half-truth as the infamous wool that is pulled over the public’s eyes.250 In any case, PR does ‘not always feel obligated to present a complete picture’.251 In other words, it hides half of the truth while working for capitalism’s smooth ordering of society.252 Such natural-­ order ideologies remain an implicit construction of public relations which is done to create the acceptance of corporations as acting in the same way as a natural person would do.253 Worse, it internalises une idée fixe that business is the proper steward of society and the environment.254 Much of this is engineered through a sectarian-universal interest reversal:255 • capital’s sectarian interest is presented as being universal while • labour’s universal interest is presented as sectarian. To create a willing person suitable to row the corporate boat, formal sequential socialisation moves newcomers through clearly defined stages of accomplishment that measure the success of ideological conditioning. But non-sequential and unstructured strategies are also applied in a complementary way. Both are vital parts of any transitional induction period of processing labour. Often, organisational assimilation through sequential, non-sequential, formal and informal processes is transmitted through official company messages. Formal processes start when new human resources are issued with a staff ID-number, a barcode or a password. They identify new human resources inside a pre-constructed code system that resembles the individuality-of-a-number on a corporate plastic ID-swipe-card. The photo-ID card signifies ideology with a corporate logo as a sign-value indicating officiality. Like cattle’s metal earmarks, these are hung around the necks of human resources to complete Nietzsche’s herd metaphor.256

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Individual identity has become a corporate number and an ideology indicating sign. This completes the process of formal assimilation. The task of all this is to engineer ideological support to a company. Such ideological strategies are instrumental and rational using communicative tools directed towards managerial goals. Full affirmation is achieved when newcomers have become integral parts of a corporation and an organisational identity has been accomplished. Common to all ideological strategies is that they are communicated by management, thereby establishing corporate-­ based meaning and understanding. This creates ideological affirmation—the few at the corporate top must keep the masses at the bottom compliant.257 Managerialism’s motto is, if management deals in baloney buck-passing and double-talk, employees learn one thing: that’s the way they do things around here.258 In achieving that, managers rely on powerful media support when converting newcomers. Figure 8.2 shows this: Figure 8.2 depicts the two external spheres that support corporate identity creation: external ideology (media) and internal institutions (management). The top of Fig. 8.2 shows the media’s external ideological support. In the middle (Fig. 8.2shaded), the first box shows the school phase. At the same level, this is followed by employment through induction and subsequent working. The upper sphere of the media supports the entire process. Human resources are made to switch from pre-work to work through ideological induction programmes. Inside work, Managerialism takes over the to-be-ideologically induced individual and continues the process through building on the pre-conditioned individual. The media flanks this through E→R codes. These are often reformulated to appear in rafts of TV-shows (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?259), TV-movies and the national news factory260 where news promotes everything that does not threaten the bottom line261. Once the induction phase has been successfully completed, the next phase is defined through performance management, reward and promotion structures, KPIs and several behaviour modification devices called manipulatables.262 All this, however, is no longer done through brutal in your face methods. Managerial regimes rely on ideological conditioning (Fig. 8.2) that became possible only after the total restructuring of the two spheres of school and work. In both spheres, older forms of existence have been successfully overcome. In contrast to the twentieth century’s education, today’s human resources are no longer allowed to be simply educated— now they are ideologically conditioned. Education as a public good is increasingly made to appear alien. Today’s students in private, privatised

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external ideological conditioning through corporate media   child/pupil/student induction of new workers pre-conditioned workers   internal programmes internal: management  external support: Employment Sphere schooling/college

Fig. 8.2  The two forces that create a supportive employee

and corporatised conditioning facilities are geared towards media capitalism’s needs by inserting profit and commodity imperatives into the education-­student relationship.263 Media capitalism makes individuals believe that these are needed in a commercialised affluent society that always combines structural excess and structural poverty.264 Under media capitalism’s consumerism, this has mutated into Affluenza.265 Today’s individuals are conditioned through PPC: • Private—private ownership; • Privatised—previously public converted into private, and • Corporatised—publicly run under the ideology of Managerialism. All of them communicate virtually the same message: privatisation is good, private industry is good, private consumption is good and private corporations are good. To disguise this, business has even set up a crypto-­ academic field deceptively labelled business ethics.266 It can be best understood through one of its key writers—Norman E.  Bowie. In his own words, writing about the purpose of business ethics, he described it as:267 using ethics to increase profits Business ethics (read: business rather than ethics) relies heavily on so-­ called ethics codes or codes of conduct. At least four reasons why corporations have adopted codes of conduct are:268 . to increase public confidence, 1 2. to stem the tide of regulation, 3. to improve internal operations, and 4. to respond to transgressions.

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In other words and in terms of ‘PR [and] propaganda…social responsibility is not an ethical ideal for businesses…it is another management function which must be performed to reduce risk and maximise profits’.269 This occurs under the assumption that bad CSR means bad business. Essentially, all this happens with the idea that corporations and management should decide what ethics is and how it is performed, while business ethics’ primary PR function remains the legitimisation of corporations and media capitalism. Beyond that, key ideologies like CSR, business ethics, codes of conduct and so on are used to assure that media capitalism appears legitimate. Simultaneously, these ideologies also make media capitalism, firms, companies and corporations appear legitimate and normal. This shapes our perception of workplaces. Corporate workplaces and corporate profits are made to appear natural, unchangeable, unchallengeable and even ethical—a necessity of life.270 What is portrayed is an unbroken chain of institutions that asphyxiate the individual. The uninterrupted chain is shown in Fig. 8.3: Figure 8.3 shows how individuals go through primary and secondary institutions and working life without having to receive any form of true public education inside a not-for-profit institution. The experience that education can be anything but a functional entity to Managerialism and media capitalism can be annihilated. When contrasted to public education, these P/P/C (private, privatised and corporatised) training and ideological conditioning facilities rank high in standard testing regimes. What is tested is not maturity, independent and self-reflective thinking and critical analysis, but test scores are allocated to the functionalities of Managerialism and media capitalism. The media portrays domesticating, disciplinary and ideologically affirmative institutions as good, while all others receive labels such as violent, undisciplined, underfunded, low ranking, destructive and bad. This supports the ideology of the privatisation of everything. This ideology has been linked to the fact that a student’s real existence inside of P/P/C training institutions is based on the ideology of media capitalism. It delivers pre-designed ideology that is made to appear factual.271 Media

~20 years P/P/C kindergarten

»

P/P/C pre-school

»

P/P/C school

primary affirmation

~40 years »

P/P/C college

»

P/P/C university

»

privately owned companies secondary support

working life 

Fig. 8.3  The uninterrupted chain of private and supportive institutions

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capitalism’s ideology-evidence merger is of utmost importance because it delivers supporting evidence for media capitalism. Still, creating ideologically conditioned human resources takes the better part of 20  years of pre-work socialisation (Fig.  8.3). The process of corporate secondary socialisation takes no more than a few weeks or months at most. Perhaps because of such an extended primary socialisation period, so-called in-house (corporate) induction can be relatively short. Most socialisation to managerial regimes has been done beforehand. This enables end-user companies to off-load expensive training costs to a pre-work sphere where they are financed by educational customers (read: students) paying for their own training (read: ideological indoctrination) based on the user-pay ideology.272 Having undergone minor secondary adjustment processes, human resources work for 40+ years and are made to support Managerialism with virtually no other choice attached. This 20+40 trajectory is sold as free choice. To camouflage media capitalism’s reality of not-having-a-choice, individuals are made to believe to have free educational choices—often reduced to school A or school B down the road. The reality is no more than a rather insignificant A-versus-B choice where both facilitate the ideology of media capitalism. It is Sophie’s choice with all the outcomes to be expected.273 Inside our choice-without-real-choices—marketing psychology knows that our apparently individualistic choice is a misapprehension274—individuals are ideologically conditioned so that they readily support the ideological imperatives of media capitalism for a predictable future. The media industry presents this as a fact of life to ensure an unconditional surrender of individuals in front of an overwhelming ideological apparatus. All that remains is to invite(!) individuals to managerial regimes after successfully completing primary socialisation. Inside managerial regimes, some are conditioned to conduct routine and monotonous work, while others are being accustomed to the managerial echelons. Sophisticated HRM techniques are used to adjust those two groups to the pre-constructed apparatus. The first group has been sufficiently prepared through monotonous routine-ised primary socialisation to conduct their assigned and equally monotonous and routine work tasks:275 eighty per cent of us are presently taught in schools to endure boredom and to take orders, because that’s what capitalism needs from its workers

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The second group usually receives somewhat higher-level conditioning as many newcomers to the managerial class have completed some sort of tertiary formal training.276 What combines both groups is that both need to fit into managerial regimes made under FIFO: fit in or F*** Off! relentlessly enforcing the aforementioned mushroom management.277 Individuals remain asphyxiated inside managerially constructed hierarchies.278 Corporate hierarchies are an extension of hierarchies enshrined in previous educational institutions. Years of living and supporting hierarchies have created hierarchy affirmative identities who believe that life means to live inside hierarchies as virtually all of their socially constructed institutions of training and work have been operating in this way.279 Media capitalism has made this appear natural, camouflaging the fact that it has been managerially constructed. Hierarchies turn human beings into hierarchical-­ functional beings—under the Harvard Business Review’s motto of kicking downwards and kissing upwards.280 They asphyxiate individuals in power relations as defined through two ideological links: . one links hierarchies to functions and ideology while the other 1 2. makes individuals believe that their status depends on a hierarchical function. Such hierarchical-functional identities are the core of management’s existence that is completed with the individual→corporate identity conversion that creates a bureau-like identity. Simultaneously, a corporate-­ bureaucratic identity depends on a bureau, a position and an office rather than personhood. The office=power attachment merges a personality and position inside managerial hierarchies.281 Position holders have been given power as long as they support management and adhere to Managerialism. Once the office-power link is broken, the power of the holder ceases. It makes people dependent on top managerialists who grant offices and withdraw them at will. The establishment of authoritarian organisational individuals who are powerful as office holders remains the task of Managerialism that turns power-holders into affirmative instruments of managerial prerogatives.282 Obviously, anyone inside lower managerial hierarchies should never become aware of this process. Office holding should be perceived as something that will never be taken away by those higher in the hierarchy

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as long as those in lower positions support Managerialism. This ideological support allows those higher up to rule over the carriers of corporate ideologies lower down the infamous chain-of-command. Such ideological structures give support to Managerialism by creating individuals as ideology carriers who work diligently. Most importantly, however, they affirm to Managerialism without ever linking management to what is claimed to be the guiding principle of our society: democracy. Democracyfree organisation should never be perceived as such. The next chapter will show how media capitalism achieves the belief that media capitalism equals democracy.

Notes 1. Wing, C. 1837. Evils of the Factory System Demonstrated by Parliamentary Evidence, London: Frank Cass; Simmons, J. R. (eds.) 2004. Factory lives: four Nineteenth-Century working class autobiographies, Ontario: Broadview Press; Roberson, J. 2012. Japanese Working Class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers, London: Routledge; Quirke, C. 2012. Eyes on labour: news photography and America’s working class, New York: Oxford University Press. 2. Brauer, J. & van Tuyll, 2008. Castlews, Battles & Bombs – how Economics explains Military History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (p.5); Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. 3. Grunig. J. E. & Hunt, T.1984. Managing PR, Belmont: Thomson, p. 42. 4. Tiger, L. 1987. The manufacture of evil: ethics, evolution, and the industrial system, New York: Harper & Row, p. 1. 5. Cirino, R. 1972. Don’t blame the people, New York: Random House; cf. Agle, B. R., Mitchell, R. K. & Sonnenfeld, J. A. 1999. Who matters to Ceos?, Academy of Management Journal, 42(5):507–525; Eidelson, R. J. 2018. Political mind games, Bala Cynwyd: Green Hall Books, p. 80. 6. Bregman, R. 2017. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, New York: Little Brown & Co., p. 214; cf. Freedman, D. 2014. The contradictions of media power, London: Bloomsbury, p.  141f.; Eidelson, R.  J. 2018. Political mind games, Bala Cynwyd: Green Hall Books, p. 71. 7. Lakoff, G. 2004. Don’t think of an elephant!, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Pub. p. 87. 8. Cheyfitz, E. 2017. The Disinformation Age, New York: Routledge, p. 36.

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262. Arnold, J. 2005. Work Psychology – Understanding Human Behaviour in the Workplace (4th ed.), London: Prentice-Hall (p. 291). 263. Gehl, R. W. 2014. Reverse engineering social media, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, p. 90. 264. Baudrillard, J. 1998. The Consumer Society  – Myths and Structures, London: Sage, p. 2. 265. Galbraith, J. K. 1958. The Affluent Society, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; de Graaf, J., Wann, D. & Naylor, T. H. 2005. Affluenza: the all-consuming epidemic, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler; Ehrenreich, B. 1989. Fear of falling: the inner life of the middle class, New York: Pantheon Books. 266. Klikauer, T. 2017. Business Ethics as Ideology?, Critique, vol. 45, no. 1–2, p. 81–100. 267. Bowie, N.  E. & Schneider, M. 2011. Business Ethics for Dummies, Hoboken: John Wiley, p. 21. 268. Duffy, M.E. 2000. There’s no two-way symmetric about it: A postmodern examination of public relations textbooks, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3):305. 269. Duffy, M.E. 2000. There’s no two-way symmetric about it: A postmodern examination of public relations textbooks, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3):305. 270. Cebul, B. 2016. Liberated as Hell: The Autonomous Worker and the Hollowed Workplace, Hedgehog Review, 18(1): 1–5. 271. Searle, J.  R. 1996. The Construction of Social Reality, London: Penguin Press. 272. Klikauer, T. 2020. Bullshit Jobs, Australian Universities’ Review, 61(1):70–73. 273. Joseph, J.  E. 2006. Language and Politics, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press (p. 119ff.); Styron, W. 1979. Sophie’s Choice – A Novel, New York: Random House. 274. Belk, R. 2016. The Self and Consumption, in: Jansson-Boyd, C.  V. & Zawisza, M.  J. (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, London: Routledge, p. 168. 275. Albert, M 2006. Realizing Hope – Life beyond Capitalism, London: Zed Books (p. 96). 276. Locke, R. R. & Spender, J. C. 2011. Confronting Managerialism: how the Business Elite and their Schools threw our Lives out of Balance, London: Zed Books.

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277. forum.top-­c onsultant.com/UK/39882/3/FIFO-­F it-­I n-­O r-­F -­O ff-­ Was-­His-­R esponse; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_ managementk. 278. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/586000/Social_Mobility_-­_The_class_pay_gap_and_ intergenerational_worklessness.pdf. 279. Diefenbach, T. 2013. Hierarchy and Organization, London: Routledge. 280. https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-­to-­handle-­a-­colleague-­whos-­a-­jerk-­ when-­the-­boss-­isnt-­around. 281. Diefenbach, T. 2013. Hierarchy and Organization, London: Routledge. 282. Storey, J. 1983. Managerial Prerogative and the Question of Control, London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 9

Democracy Under Media Capitalism

we have entered an era of a plutocracy… for the wealthy few, a democracy of minimums for everyone else —Giroux, H. A. (2017). America at War with Itself. New York: City Lights Press, p. 8 it is no longer possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy —Walter Lippmann quoted in Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 116cf. Taylor, P. M. (2003). Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda (3rd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 320

During democracy’s 2000+ years of existence, democratic ruling first became prominent in Greek city states. With the arrival of the Dark Ages, democracy was buried.1 Its modern resuscitation came with Enlightenment in England, Haiti2 and the USA and the French Revolution of 14 July 1789. For the better part of the nineteenth century, large sections of the population, ranging from American slaves, European peasants, women (everywhere) and all those the ruling elite considered undesirables, were excluded from participating in democracy.3 For the rest—mostly property-­ owning white adult men–—democratic ‘elections [were] limited to [a] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_9

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selection of individuals [to] reduce the problem of participation to its simplest form’.4 Public relations or PR knows that ‘you could say different things to different people and win them all’.5 It works like a political bestseller—whatever sells best6 with the exception of a few outsiders. The semi-official idea of democracy assumes that non-participation in democracy equates to non-participation in political affairs.7 Parliamentarian democracy is constructed as TINA. It excludes those who fail to ‘build a favourable image’ for leadership.8 While it is ‘difficult to overstate the centrality of the media’9 in democracy, the media can marginalise those who disagree with media guided ‘horse-race politics’—or democracy as competition.10 Whenever corporate media ‘glorify…rulers’,11 it is nothing else than leadership competition camouflaging PR’s reduction of democracy to the mere effectiveness of PR’s marketing strategies.12 Under these rules, some are welcomed into the democratic process and therefore into the political arena. They are selected after having shown ideological affirmation to the way media capitalism runs democracy. Historically, the centrality of leadership selection may date back to early homosapiens. After leaving the animal kingdom, leadership selection became more sophisticated. Up-right walking and tool-making humans started to use language, syntax and semiotics. Often, the strong became the leaders. Today’s pre-historic fighting clubs have been replaced by the pen. This stick→to→pen move marks an inconsequential change that ossifies democracy’s key element. Today’s leader is a ‘media-worthy leader’.13 Media capitalism’s focus on leaders assumes ‘leadership has credibility’,14 eliminating nearly all conflicts about democracy while focusing on conflict resolution within a pre-set frame.15 To a large extent, this solves surface issues (the traditional media focus) while it leaves substantial issues largely unchanged (e.g. global poverty and environmental vandalism).16 With this, democracy became one of society’s key pacifiers. Its ability to contain political conflict turned democracy into one of the remotest ideological instruments ever devised.17 Containing conflict while simultaneously directing attention to leadership selection has had a long history. Figure 9.1 shows democratic leadership selection in the historical perspective, focusing on the stick→pen move. Once ‘social control posing as democracy’ had been safely established as mass affirmation to capitalism, rulers were able to ease harsher forms of control (e.g. brutality, torture and executions).18 Input controls (who votes), procedural controls (electoral systems) and ‘skilled organisers of opinion…create majorities on election day’ as guided by media

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Support to leader Method of support Reaching support Hierarchy/support Supportive group

 stick & bat strength  men only

Historical period

early humans

 open vote     free& ownership slave society



feudal Dark Ages



407

 secret ballot   & newspapers   later  

/ secret ballot   & mass-media  all  / 

/ secret ballot  fully integrated     all  / 

liberal capitalism

mass mediated society

media capitalism

Fig. 9.1  Democracy’s history and leader selection

capitalism’s main hegemony.19 To reach this level of hegemonic guidance, brutal combats for leadership were replaced as bodily battles moved to rhetoric and ideology. During democracy’s modern re-establishment period of Enlightenment, open debates flourished with newsletters, newspapers,20 pamphlets, in meetings places, café houses, debates in pubs, public announcements, bourgeois salons and so on providing a forum for the exchange of ideas.21 But soon, democratic individual↔society22 mediation became guided by corporate media flanked by technical progresses. This covered larger mass audiences in a newspapers→radio→TV→web23 succession, resulting in the current state of tabloid-TV/websites.24 Already during the twentieth century, ideological mass guidance had started to shift. It first shifted onto privatised media corporations.25 Today, these ‘large corporations have immense political power’.26 They are mostly privately owned with a few state institutions run like corporations under Neoliberalism and Managerialism.27 Meanwhile, ideology’s rise came with significant advances in behaviourism,28 ‘modern propaganda techniques’,29 an ‘increasing importance of public relations in the world of politics’,30 statistical analysis, marketing, consumer psychology and so on. This resulted in the consumer-­marketing-equals-political-marketing31 equation. In PR-talk: ‘we target voters the way that Visa targets credit-card customers’.32 Soon, behaviourism-&-technology was combined with democracy’s leadership selection—sophisticated mass manipulation was refined. Figure 9.1 shows all this as an historical development: Figure 9.1right-hand shows media capitalism’s fully integrated ideology sphere based on two twentieth-century developments: behaviourism and technology aiding media capitalism’s rise.33 Its power rests on a corporate interest symbiosis between manufacturing (products) and media corporations (ideology).34 This colonised the free public sphere. The steering of society is no longer open to the general public. Today, media capitalism is steering societies under two key dictums:35

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1. To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them. 2. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our county.36 The manipulation and governing of people might well be the result of a capital-media interest symbiosis. This inextricable link is camouflaged through the ideology of media independence which pretends that commercial corporations, media corporations and the democratic realm are not connected. Worse, media capitalism has transformed democracy into a mere appendix to mass media so that it is ‘able to control the air [and hence have] tremendous political [and ideological] power’.37 Media capitalism’s interest symbiosis is unthinkable without consumerism, corporations and capitalism. Viewed from that point, democracy is an auxiliary—a supplementary structure. Democracy becomes an additional affirmation apparatus when commercial exchange instruments (marketing/PR/Spin38) and their manipulative powers are applied to democracy. Marketing and consumer psychology are utilised to sell democratic commodities (policies, political parties, party leaders, etc.).39 For PR’s spin doctors, it became the business of selling ‘politicians…like toothpaste’.40 As their marketing/manipulative methods merged, traditionally separated commodity and ideas marketplaces merged.41 This established a commodit ies+ideologies+democracy triangle.42 In addition, hidden as well as open ‘anti-democratic propaganda’43—and its crypto-scientific appearance as instrumental rationality—became reflected in themes such as: • means over ends, • persuasion44 over discussion,45 • sales pitch over truth,46 • emotions over reflection,47 • affirmation over critical thinking, • irrationalities over rationalities,48 • goal-achieving strategies over substance, • cost-benefit and transaction analyses over human considerations, and so on.49 ‘From the moment a democratic regime establishes itself, propaganda establishes itself alongside’50 next to its ideological purveyors: PR, spin

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doctors, focus groups, research teams, ‘persuasion profiling [and] sentiment analysis’,51 push polling (‘a moment in the reproduction of hegemony [and] opinion surveys’,52 marketing firms, ‘influence peddling [and] corridor creeping [corporate lobbyists] pushing at an open door’,53 think-­tanks,54 fake news,55 fake ‘front groups’,56 astro57 and astroturfing,58 ‘image-making’59 consultants (‘perception is everything’60) selling products and ‘manufacture a candidate’61 alike.62 What sells well becomes a product/political bestseller with emotional appeal.63 It operates in PR’s awareness that ‘the political brain is an emotional brain’.64 Crucial is that: Consumers are made: . to consume mass-advertised products65 1 2. to believe to have a consumer choice66 3. to believe to have a democratic choice67

This includes virtually everyone in any given society. Once democracy had been securely established through advances in mass manipulation, nobody was excluded. The wider democracy’s scope, the more media capitalism can be legitimised. Like marketing, democracy’s all-inclusive maxim is: we have something for everyone!68 To achieve sufficient levels of system security for capitalism, democracy as Rousseau’s true volonté générale can no longer be allowed—the heads of the ruling elite can no longer be placed in danger. Free, autonomous and non-manipulated voting can— potentially—be very dangerous for capitalism.69 Unguided voting can have unpredictable outcomes.70 Hence, there is ‘voter supression’71 and the invention of ‘the free will [which is] the great myth that underlies democratic ideology’.72 Historically, capitalism’s system stability was secured through PR’s psycho-­techniques mutating one-person-one-vote into one-dollar-one-vote with the acute PR awareness that voting is ‘frequently manipulated’.73 This is supported by voting behaviour manipulation, scientific evaluation, measuring mass media effects and audience research at scientifically advanced levels. On ‘the targeted citizens of civic life’74 psycho-PR and marketing secures voters’ affirmation to democracy resulting in ‘a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom [that] prevails in advanced industrial civilisation’.75

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Media Democracy and Corporate States Historically, democracy’s origins—liberty, constituencies, direct voter↔candidate interaction, volonté générale and free speech—made limited appearances during the nineteenth century. Democracy included some men as a relatively free public sphere almost flourished. Media capitalism truly ended this. Today, corporate media is the exclusive mediator between what is euphemistically labelled the people, political institutions, parties, leaders and states. The original direct person↔politician interface has been replaced by a ‘cult of personality’ often simply invented and sustained by PR:76 ‘We in public relations are manipulators of mass man’.77 PR knows that what ‘people can identify the most is the human face’,78 hence the cult of personalities. But PR also creates and exploits scandals and ‘malicious gossip [as] an everyday tool’.79 Even without all this, corporate media inserts itself into the democratic process (Fig. 9.2): Figure 9.2 shows the difference between democracy’s assumed ideal and media capitalism’s version of democracy. Corporate media (Fig. 9.2shaded) have inserted themselves between a voting public, political institutions and parties.80 Almost nobody meets face-to-face. People’s image of politics is a TV-image defined by PR’s motto, ‘if you see it, it must be true’.81 Truth and politics are mediated.82 Not surprisingly, we hold elections, but we do not listen to one another; we have a parliament but there is little dialogue…most governments seek economic and social stability—they have no collective project, define no goals for humanity, and avoid as much as they can, well-being, justice, and fairness as issues.83

In Fig. 9.3, media capitalism’s version of democracy is shown as a self-­ supporting circularity in which media-guided voters occupy just one position. Figure 9.3 also includes the increasingly corporatised state. Together with neoliberalism’s relentless privatisation84 and deregulation, deliberate

Parliament    Voter



 Party/Leader

democracy under enlightenment

Media  Voter 

Parliament   Media

Media



 Party/Leader

ideological democracy under media capitalism

Fig. 9.2  From public sphere to media democracy

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Democratic Parties

Democratic Voter 



Democratic Parliament Democratic State



Pre-Media Capitalism Democracy

411

  Media-Steered Parties MassMassMediated Mediated Voter Parliament Managerial State  

Media Capitalism’s Democracy

Fig. 9.3  Media capitalism and democracy

underfunding and declining civic institutions, states remain active players. However, as The Privatization of Everything advances even more, voters’ scope erodes as democratic state institutions shrink.85 Today, many state functions have been corporatised. They are organised through non-­ democratic management flanked by the media’s trumpeting of Managerialism. Inside increasingly confined spaces, voters can still have marginal influences on limited state affairs but the governing of those spaces is media manipulated. The power of the public sphere to shape voters’ influence has been reorganised by corporate media featuring a much-­ diminished role for corporatised public broadcasting.86 Under media capitalism, most of what was once a public sphere is securely run by corporate media.87 Society’s socio-economic steering is no longer left to democracy—if it ever was. Still, media capitalism has established a circular structure largely independent of democracy. Figure 9.3 compares democracy before and after media capitalism: Figure 9.3 shows the media’s successful insertion as the sole mediator between democracy’s core institutions. After the second structural transformation of the public sphere, all previous links were no longer direct. Such indirect links became manipulate-able (first) and manipulated (later). Media capitalism not only mediates but also manipulates and steers society, thereby marking a mediation→manipulation→steering trajectory. Media’s role is no longer the transmission of news and information between democratic actors.88 Democracy has moved from politics↔voters to politics↔ media↔voters (Fig.  9.3).89 Successively, corporate media developed self-awareness, allowing it to develop and broadcast ideology. It is this ideology that directs society towards the ultimate raison d’être of profits ideologically secured through the media. Ideological mass appeal had to become the common currency. Often, the most crowd-pleasing denominator is used to entertain ‘the dream-locked majority’ established through the tabloidisation of everything.90

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By 2020, the internet and free-to-air-TV flanked the traditional transmission belt of for-profit tabloid-TV/websites.91 Corporate media’s revenue source is the sale of audiences to advertisers. Free-TV means an audience is sold while its pro-capital ideology runs in the background. This structure camouflages the myth that editorials and advertising are separated.92 The ossification of the editor↔revenue interface creates a mutually reinforcing profit↔ideology symbiosis. This resulted in an asphyxiating hegemony supportive of media capitalism’s mind-set (worldview) that underwrites editorials. The monetary investment into media capitalism’s ideology yields real rewards. These profits are ideologically camouflaged as shareholder value. This follows a six-step process: 1. Ideologically affirmative news and programming lead to an ideologically affirmative public sphere. 2. This creates affirmative voters. 3. Voters vote for pre-defined parties resulting in supportive leaders and outcomes. 4. Supportive politics leads to ideologically motivated regulations sympathetic to media capitalism. 5. In turn, commercial markets create advertising revenue for the media industry. 6. To close the circle, an increase in profits means the ability to broadcast even more ideology (Fig. 9.3). Hence, ideological policy-makers ‘mislead people [by engineering] the penetration of falsehood deep into the foundations of our collective thinking’ while promoting media capitalism’s ideology.93 Figure  9.3 shows media capitalism’s circular self-reinforcing framework.94 Historically, this process started at the top (Fig. 9.3) with political parties of the pre-mass media period. These parties had real connections to real people through real meetings, real party newspapers and a real proletarian milieu.95 Soon, direct political party↔member interactions changed from membership towards being ‘less dependent upon members [and more on external] funding’96 to enter the marketplace of ideas via mass media.97 By the twenty-first century, a marked decline in party membership, party meetings and party newspapers opened enough space for the media to establish themselves as the only party↔membership mediating agency, moving a bilateral party↔membership relationship into a circular party↔media↔member relationship. Meanwhile, capitalism supported

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the proletarian-milieu→petit-bourgeois conversion. Likewise, it established itself as the sole party↔voter mediating power. Today, parties depend solely on the media. Party members know more about their own party and their candidates through the media than through individual contact. This manifests media capitalism’s triumph over party-based democracy.

Parliamentarian Democracy as Media Spectacle Corporate media has inserted itself into the traditional parties-voters-­ parliaments triangle98 that used to legitimise classical state agencies (judiciary, administration). These remain democracy-free zones as people hardly elect judges or heads of police and bureaucracies directly. Nonetheless, they impact on people’s lives from collecting taxes99 to court judgements.100 Non-democracy zones are camouflaged through the ideology of parliaments. The media legitimises the entire system. Individuals are made to believe they live in a democracy even though many institutions are democratic exclusion zones. The remoteness of parliament is symbolised through the physical resemblance of parliaments as ‘fortified bunkers’.101 This is legitimised under the invented communist (twentieth century) and terrorist (twenty-­ first century) threats. It is the ‘socially constructed, manipulated and media cultivated’ Politics of Fear102 in the succinct PR awareness that ‘too much tension can produce panic [and] too little tension [can produce] complacency and passivity’.103 Many crypto-democratic institutions are closed-off as a ‘gatekeeping democracy’104 prevails granting access only to invited guests (business, VIPs, etc.) and lobbyists105 ‘who want to influence legislative behaviour’,106 operating under lobbying’s ‘Three Bs: ‘booze, blondes and bribes’.107 In this structure, voters are given a TV-mediated experience in which parliamentarians deliver a reality TV-show-like performance featuring a ‘handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandals, hatred’.108 Elected representatives no longer discuss issues as a truth finding mission—a rather obscene notion under media capitalism. What counts are catchy headlines, attacks, and to be a winner. It mirrors the Roman circus rather than serious policy discourse. Much of this functions under PR’s motto: ‘the truth is something that can be merchandised to the public’.109 Once truth is for sale, media capitalism has won.110 The media can highlight, deny and manufacture almost any content it deems to have

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propagandistic value.111 Today, ‘news is a way of making money, just as selling bread is a way of making money. No one believes that news and journalism are simply a service to democracy’.112 Not surprisingly, the media tends to focus on:113 if it bleeds, it leads—if it thinks, it stinks.

Apart from the fact that ‘attitudes can [be] developed via classical conditioning’ and through the media, actions of a state’s executive apparatus are solely experienced through the media.114 The state↔people interface only occurs through the media as an exclusive manipulating agency. As a result, state actions have become geared towards pleasing the media rather than engaging with people. Democracy has been converted from being a feedback model↔ to being a linear sender→manipulator→receiver model. What is important for elected ministers, for example, is not good public policy but a good appearance in newspapers and on news.com.115 In a 1966 UK election, for example, ‘only one newspaper, the “Sunday Citizen” with a circulation of 232,000 was unreservedly on the …side [of the] Labour Government, while the rest of the press (38,000,000)’ supported conservative forces’:116 a 164-to-1 ratio against a mildly progressive party. As a consequence of media capitalism’s ingenious setup, politicians support the media because only the media makes them visible. It is the media that decides what is reported and what is not and whether it is framed positive or negative.117

Media Capitalism’s Political Parties Media capitalism’s democracy is manipulated through the only institution that provides a party↔society link: corporate media. Media and PR know that ‘from our desk we sway millions’,118 that ‘public opinion can be moved, directed and formed’119 and that ‘changing public opinion [can be done] through manipulation of the press’.120 In the age of ‘fabricated and fictitious public opinion’,121 many capital challenging opinions no longer exist—TINA is holding sway. Democracy’s supposedly independent parts (e.g. parties, parliaments, etc.) are fully integrated into media capitalism’s apparatus. Figure 9.4 shows how this works: As an overview, Fig.  9.4 reduces the rather substantial—albeit often cosmetic–—variety of political parties to three basics122 that represent a somewhat shrunken ‘political spectrum of radical, soft and conservative’ parties.123 Pre-media capitalism structures already shaped many of these.

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Political Parties



Support: Economy-Relations Economy-Impact Economy-Access Media-Relations Media-Image Media-Ownership Educational System Democratic Ideology Time in Government Societal Policy Rich-Poor Divide124

          

415

 Media Supported Political Parties  progressive conservative

Excluded Parties radical

Moderate Conservative Indirect Supportive Direct Supportive Weak/Regulative Accommodating Weak Strong to Commonalities Moderate Mutually Supportive Critical but Accepted Supportive & Good Small to None Substantial or overlapping Critical but Supportive Fully Supported End in Itself Means to Power Occasionally Generally Social Justice Winner takes all  )( secured frame of ideological support through media

Non-Supportive Negative & Against Inconvenience No Access Isolated/Negative Negative & Evil None Critical Emancipatory Democracy = ideology Never End of Domination non- & unsupported

Fig. 9.4  Media capitalism’s preferred party system

These parties had a threefold task: to secure capitalism; to contain anti-­ capitalist movements; and to direct critical energies towards improving capitalism. The prevailing ‘image of conservatism’124 was to conserve capitalism, while radical parties sought to revolutionise society with moderate (often social-democratic) policies.125 Media capitalism has altered these traditional distinctions, moving parties towards their new role of supporting capitalism as measured by their support for corporate media.126 The media categorises parties in terms of their service to media capitalism. Explaining Fig.  9.4 further, media capitalism’s ideological project converted many parties into three basic groups: Cluster 1: MMCPs—Moderate Pro-Media-Capitalism Parties These are political parties with remnants of progressiveness—formerly known as social, socialist and communist parties. They are now adjusted to media capitalism’s main mildly progressive ideology: social-­ democratic policies.127 Cluster 2: CMCPs—Conservative Pro-Media-Capitalism Parties These are conservative and reactionary political parties highly supportive of media capitalism and its ideology (Tories, neo-cons, republicans, liberal, neoliberal, extremist and radical right-wing, populist, nationalistic, etc.128). Cluster 3: NMCPs—Non-Media-Capitalism Parties These are non-supportive political parties (refusing to go along) or anti-­ capitalist parties (against media capitalism, showing active resistance).

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Cluster 1+2 shows media capitalism’s main playground consisting of cosmetically differentiated parties that are asphyxiated through a stationary centre-left-versus-centre-right ideology (MMCP-vs.-CMCP). This creates a centre that is static129 but always supportive of media capitalism. Corporate media exclude most NMCPs since they fail to support media capitalism.130 Support for media capitalism determines a party’s public existence as access to the public sphere is granted to those who support media capitalism. ‘One can say that propaganda almost inevitably leads to a two-party system’131—MMCP-versus-CMCP.  The two wings of the same bird are made up of moderate-pro-capital parties (MMCPs) and conservative-pro-capital parties (CMCPs132). Both are granted visibility under the maxim:133 if you are not on TV, you do not exist! Media capitalism has created an overall structure for the CMCP-cluster and the MMCP-cluster in which some are supported by the media while others receive little or no media support. This creates a two-against-one structure:134 the CMCP-cluster can rely on party+media when competing with the MMCP-cluster. Meanwhile NMCPs are largely on their own, experiencing little media support. This structure advantages CMCPs over MMCPs. Hence CMCPs are in power in most countries most of the time. The same structure largely excludes NMCPs (no-media-support). All of this is not a clear-cut black-&-white affair but an issue of degrees. In sum, corporate media show ‘their passionate hostility to anything further to the left than the milder forms of social democracy’.135 From this, a threefold political party-and-media structure has emerged: Figure 9.5bottom shows that the three parties can rely on three kinds of media: the CMCP-cluster relies on corporate media; the MMCP-cluster relies on marginalised and neutralised state media; and the NMCP-cluster is left with largely irrelevant so-called independent media. Corporate media occupy by far the largest media space (Fig.  9.3left-box). This is the space that guarantees political existence on talkback radio, tabloid-TV, tabloid-newspapers and tabloid-websites. Meanwhile, corporatised state-­ run or state-owned media outlets are successfully neutralised (made neutral), marginalised and strictly controlled. Finally, there are the isolated alternative media confined to a fringe existence (e.g. unknown CMCP-Cluster mainstream corporate media

MMCP-Cluster largely neutralised state-run media

Fig. 9.5  Political parties and media space

NMCP-Cluster isolated independent media

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newspapers, newsletters, midnight TV-shows with almost no audiences, strange websites and blogs).136 It is the playground for a small cohort of critical citoyéns. The corporate media box (Fig.  9.5)—deliberately mis-labelled independent—support mildly critical viewpoints framed as balanced and measured PR-talk: ‘cranking up the facts’.137 On rare and very special occasions, NMCPs are also included. Their contribution is ideologically packaged to show that their sharp critique runs empty. Preferably, they are framed as a danger to everyone. Meanwhile, the CMCP-cluster and to some extent the MMCP-cluster have learned not to attack capitalism, never to violate the don’t threaten capitalism maxim. CMCPs and at times MMCPs have learned to ‘couch things in the self-interest of the audience’.138 Overall, the three parties are categorised as:139 1. The radical NMCP-cluster is to be isolated and marginalised—limited or no access to public. 2. The idealist MMCP-cluster is to be nurtured and incorporated— some access to public. 3. The realist CMCP-cluster is to be supported and financed—full access to public. While the CMCP-cluster is most in tune with media capitalism, virtually all others are framed as challengers. Conditioned by media capitalism, the audience rejects the often thought-provoking debating style of NMCPs. They are forced into attacking capitalism that—in turn—is presented as TINA.  The media pretends to protect the audience from NMCPs’ threats representing NMCPs as safely locked inside an ideological frame that the media has created.140 As NMCPs challenge media capitalism, they are framed as being ideological. Meanwhile some MMCPs and virtually all CMCPs are presented as being part of media capitalism’s worldviews and providing ‘a framework in which…information can be put in order…giving man an all-embracing view of the world’.141 Media capitalism’s status-quo-maintenance system is sustained through a diversity-­ and-­open-debate ideology based on the asphyxiating dictum of:142 never get more than 10 degrees ahead of the public and you can be assured of a steady 10 per cent profit

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All this explains the CMCP-cluster’s overwhelming TV presence (Fig. 9.5box). This ingenious system of mass manipulation demands skilful manipulators. Hence, there are well-paid moderators, talkshow/radio hosts and political presenters. Meanwhile, the NMCP-cluster is blended into the background confining their leaders to being noticed as troublemakers. The CMCP-cluster and the MMCP-cluster fair rather differently: • CMCP leaders are framed positively as good and down to earth and shown as Mr Average. • MMCP leaders are framed negatively associated with scandals (the juicy bits), aloof, elite and so on. In any case, private lives, invented affairs and drummed up scandals are more suitable to the tabloid-TV and tabloid-websites than party programmes.143 PR is fully aware of ‘dirt campaigning’144 because ‘negative or dirty political campaign advertising [is] quite effective’.145 Beyond that, the media=public-sphere structure forces all parties to go through tabloid-­ media. Meanwhile, this reduces democracy to scandals, tabloid-media-­ spectacles and leadership contests.146 It is a televised ‘mass spectator sport’147 conducted between two ideological variations with both being supportive of media capitalism in order to enter the ring. CMCP-versus-­ MMCP leader contests are choreographed as spectacles over rather insignificant issues none of which ever challenge media capitalism.148 Apart from the occasional alibi-creating token appearance, almost all NMCP leaders remain excluded from such ‘political engineering’.149 At times, NMCPs’ marginal electoral successes are seen by the global left as a triumph. For media capitalism, it merely testifies to their irrelevance.150 Sufficiently sidelined, NMCPs are reduced to a slight inconvenience. Their relationship to media capitalism remains largely negative for four reasons: 1. NMCPs do not own any media outlets and there is no social engagement with media owners, 2. NMCPs have almost no access to the public and therefore no influence, 3. NMCPs do not share media capitalism’s ideology but reject it, and 4. NMCPs are not part of media capitalism’s interest-symbiosis.151

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Because of their outside position, the media can portray NMCPs as anti-democratic as they tend to be outside of parliaments while the media has made parliamentarianism synonym to democracy. To maintain the ideology of a democratic free speech society, media capitalism can even afford to allow alternative media sites152 as these represent no threats to media capitalism:153 • www.alternet.org • www.braveneweurope.com • www.buzzflash.com • www.billmoyers.com • www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk • www.coldtype.net • www.commondreams.org • www.consortiumnews.com • www.corporatewatch.org • www.countercurrents.org • www.counterpunch.org • www.dcreport.org • www.democraticaudit.com • www.democracyjournal.org • www.democracynow.org • www.fair.org (fairness&reporting) • www.foreignpolicyjournal.com • www.freepress.net • www.guernicamag.com • www.guerrillanews.com • human-­wrongs-­watch.net • https://independentaustralia.net • www.indymedia.org • www.inthesetimes.com • https://leftfootforward.org • www.libcom.org • www.mediachannel.org • www.medialens.org • www.mediamatters.org • www.motherjones.com • www.nakedcapitalism.com • www.nationofchange.org

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• www.newmatilda.com • www.opendemocracy.net • www.opensecrets.org • www.pacificfreepress.com • www.palmerreport.com • www.politico.com • www.popularresistance.org • www.portside.org • www.propublica.org • www.prospect.org • www.prwatch.org • www.rawstory.com • www.redpepper.org.uk • www.salon.com • www.socialistproject.ca • www.socialmediacollective.org • www.spinwatch.org • www.thedailybeast.com • www.theintercept.com • www.therealnews.com • www.thinkprogress.org • www.tomdispatch.com • www.truth-­out.org • www.truthdig.com • www.unz.com • www.voiceofaction.org • www.watchingamerica.com • www.worldpoliticsreview.com • www.wsws.org • www.yesmagazine.org • www.zcomm.org These websites are unwanted by media capitalism and often receive exclusion and negative framing—‘risky choice framing’154– by the self-­ appointed mainstream. Occasionally, these websites and NMCPs are slightly discomforting to media capitalism’s well-established circularity of overall ideological support for a democracy run by ideologically conditioned MMCPs/CMCPs. In that way, corporate media can stabilise media capitalism.

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In sharp contrast to media capitalism’s self-sustaining circularity, NMCPs seek to end media capitalism’s domination. To media capitalism, NMCP’s claim to end domination constitutes a demand to end the ideological guidance of democracy organised by the media. Not surprisingly, their access to political power is kept close to zero—NMCP rule could – potentially– constitute a real threat to media capitalism. This could result in a domination free society with a fundamental re-distribution of media and corporate power. Hence claims towards a domination free society, for example, are smothered by the media. Meanwhile, social progress is reframed as individual advancement and as affirmation to capitalism. Anything else could potentially indicate the ending of media capitalism and theoretically eliminate media capitalism’s all-important money and power code155 that can be expressed through two key equations: . money: equals(=) advertising revenue and 1 2. power: equals(=) ideological support for capitalism. Based on self-interest and survival, media capitalism has been successful in establishing and sustaining this dual code through 1. knowing that ‘political battles [can be] framed’, capitalism is framed as TINA;156 2. a fatalistic ideologically created ‘learned helplessness’;157 3. the ideology of ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must’.158 With this established, the MMCP-cluster and the CMCP-cluster are allowed to operate more (CMCP) or less (MMCP) freely. Meanwhile individuals are made to interpret any new policy inside the media’s given ideological frame.159 On the party-side of the equation, the media frames party policies. On the receiver-side of the equation, the media frames how individuals make sense of these policies. Beyond that, it frames virtually everything that occurs in media capitalism’s four spheres of education, work, consumerism and democracy. Media capitalism adjusts people to its ideological project. Sufficient levels of affirmation to media capitalism are achieved neither by progressive nor conservative parties but by an overall ideological apparatus that is unifying politics. While political parties are presented as being in competition and on the political spectrum’s opposing end, in reality they have been

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forced to subscribe to media capitalism’s one-dimensional ideology. Media capitalism’s dichotomy captures almost the remaining voting population: 1. the MMCP-cluster collects substantial parts of the democratic citoyén and some sections of the working class still seeing capitalism’s pathologies; 2. the CMCP-cluster collects the core of the bourgeois, the petit-­ bourgeois and ever larger sections of the lower classes reaching downward to the Lumpenproletariat.160 The entire structure gives a 2:1 advantage to the CMCP-cluster (party+media) against the MMCP-cluster (party-no-media). As a consequence, CMCPs govern while MMCPs are in opposition. The much more visible CMCPs can collect more people, guiding them into the media’s ideological orbit and into the voting booth. These sections of society have been made highly representative of media capitalism’s interests and ideology. The upper crust of this section tends to have better and more direct links to the economic sphere while the lower level is kept hoping for a better life defined as aspirationals and kept on site through rising-boat ideologies.161 Meanwhile slight cosmetic but largely inconsequential MMCP-versus-­ CMCP differences are pretended. Voters are kept in the illusion that a MMCP-versus-CMCP choice really matters. This is a vital ideology that stabilises media capitalism. As ornamental as MMCP/CMCP (in)difference is, it must be kept up. This pretending of difference even allows both to differ in regard to, for example, the overall consumptive regime with a favouring, for example, of unhindered consumption (CMCP) and regulated consumption (MMCP). As long as corporate media is forced to keep up the democratic appearance, MMCP/CMCP will maintain microscopic (in)differences. MMCPs might be slightly stronger than CMCPs in preventing the tabloid-media’s worst excesses. MMCPs might even be better in pretending outrage over all too obvious media abuses.162 Occasionally, MMCPs still identify some of capitalism’s pathologies, while CMCPs follow the media’s bad apple ideology. Overall, CMCPs represent media capitalism’s interest marginally better than MMCPs. In return, corporate media favour CMCPs through ‘images (visual or not) in our brains’ so that CMCPs look good.163 The unsuspecting media customer always receives a better and more favourable picture of CMCPs.

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This also paves the way for young media consumers to accept the way-the-­ world-works ideologies aligned to CMCPs and media capitalism. Core political values are incorporated into a deliberate ‘race to the bottom’,164 skilfully linked to tabloidisation and commercialisation of child-TV (toy ads) and later adult-TV (toys-for-the-boys).165 With TV-advertised sales of toys comes the ideological affirmation to a sales process, the importance of commodities in a child’s life,166 monetary exchange mechanisms, effort→reward structures and above all the naturalness of media capitalism. At the end of childhood, well-adjusted consumers have been turned into diligent followers of media capitalism, voting for CMCPs rather than MMCPs, while NMCPs remain excluded. From children, the media demand early ideological affirmation. From political parties it demands to be given almost unhindered access to the child in the form of deceptively framed Child-TV shows, featuring mindless movies, boys and girls specified televised bedroom stories, ideologically supportive fairy-tale books and magazines, ideologically driven school textbooks and corporate curricular assistance. Children are of high value to media capitalism. The commercialisation of children and teenagers’ lives is relentlessly enhanced by CMCPs. Meanwhile MMCPs seek to—at least marginally—protect children from all too overt commercialisation. The media has assured that the danger for a child does not come from media capitalism but from the illusive stranger in the playground, thus diverting attention away from fast-food advertising, mindless TV-shows and so on.167 The media’s tough-on-crime ideology wins twice: . it shifts attention away from media capitalism 1 2. while simultaneously favouring CMCPs. MMCPs may still include critical attempts towards human-centred education and childhood, but CMCPs’ educational policies are geared towards ideologically supporting consumptive (child) and later managerial regimes (worker) under the hard-work→rewards ideology. Meanwhile, CMCPs are favouring unhindered mass consumption (e.g. sign-value equals status). This has led to ‘the rise of image-thinking and its displacement of ideals’ (e.g. democracy).168 For CMCPs democracy has always played a minor role that was downgraded to achieve and sustain power and stabilise capitalism through media capitalism’s consumer-ideology double link.169 For media capitalism and CMCPs, democracy is merely an

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add-on that occasionally interrupts media capitalism’s established consumerism↔ideology interface.170 Meanwhile, for middle-class citoyéns democracy’s Enlightenment ideals are kept alive. Under corporate media, even CMCPs have moved on to an instrumental attitude towards democracy. For MMCPs, democracy is an end in itself—a democratic (read: capitalist) society. For CMCPs democracy has always been a means to the end. It is a tool to achieve and sustain power. Next to a coup d’état, corruption, election fixing and so on, it has always been one way to power. CMCPs’ equation is democracy=power. For MMCPs it is democracy=society.171 Meanwhile, media capitalism’s assigned place for CMCPs is being in power—for MMCPs, it is being in opposition—their usual position in most advanced countries most of the time.172 Accepting their opposition role, MMCPs are well incorporated within democracy. MMCPs—more so than CMCPs–—are made to believe that being in opposition means being inside the system while serving society— often framed as loyal opposition.173 The question of being in power or not becomes increasingly irrelevant as both parties differ only marginally in their overall politics towards capitalism. MMCPs are slightly stronger on social justice—not economic justice with real economic equality.174 Economic justice and economic equality were once part of NMCPs until media capitalism eliminated most of these parties.175 Subscribing to neoliberalism, many CMCPs propagate the ever-illusive free market in a Winner Takes it All ideology.176 For the media and CMCPs, this is prescriptive—not descriptive. The outcome of all this is that the media favour those in power—not those over which it rules. The media supports this by transmitting a belief system that favours market differentiation.177 It serves the market ideology paralleled by an imaginary we enshrined in our we-live-in-a-democracy ideology. Market and we ideologies work under the unmentioned motto: affluence for us— poverty for others.178 On the other side, MMCPs still carry an—albeit increasingly challenged—egalitarian image of society with perhaps the year 1976 showing the most equality that ever existed in human society.179 In an increasingly unequal society stratified by money and paywalls,180 access to the public sphere is almost as important as a favourable treatment by those who de facto own it.181 CMCPs are advantaged over MMCPs, while NMCPs play their part as harlequin-like entertainment jokers.182 For the CMCP/MMCP/NMCP triage, the media assigns different access and different treatment. This is shown in Fig. 9.6:

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Fig. 9.6  Political parties, the media industry and the public sphere

media  CMCP

 

MMCP

  

425

NMCP

Figure 9.6 shows media capitalism’s power distribution and political parties. Having and holding power depends on access to the public sphere. Inside the public sphere there are three actors: media, CMCPs and MMCPs (Fig. 9.6light-grey). There is a relative closeness, interest symbiosis and commonality in ideological orientation inside the public sphere (Fig.  9.6dark-grey) shown as media↔CMCPs relationship which results in more electoral wins for CMCPs. Well financed by corporations, CMCPs buy better PR agencies that create ‘catchy phrases’, ‘slogans, buzzwords’ and ‘sound bites [that are] striking and as short as possible’.183 Media, PR and mostly the CMCP-cluster alternate in ‘agenda-setting’,184 and thereby establish a highly beneficial relationship.185 In addition to agenda-setting,186 much of this works as the politics of symbols.187 Setting symbols pushes relatively insignificant issues (e.g. terrorism) while neglecting significant issues (e.g. global poverty). Media-­ CMCP cooperation assures that side issues become main issues—the proverbial mainstream.188 Media capitalism’s CMCP-media coalition uses this to their advantage while MMCPs are forced into a double fight against invented side issues and agenda-setting. In a 2:1 fight, MMCPs face CMCPs+media. Media capitalism stacks the cards against MMCPs with CMCPs as ruler and MMCPs as opposition. NMCPs remain isolated facing three opponents:189 . corporate media as media capitalism’s dominant player, 1 2. CMCPs as media capitalism’s junior assistant, and 3. MMCPs as media capitalism’s loyal opposition. This assures a 3:1 contest that NMCPs can never win. Meanwhile, inside the media’s public sphere, things are not that different. It also depicts the media’s conversion of political interests into ideological interests.190 This is vital because without such a conversion media capitalism can—potentially—be damaged during the still to be performed voting rituals.

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Media Capitalism and Voting The media’s mediator position between democratic parties and democratic customers (voters) assures much of CMCPs’ power. Media capitalism’s ideology is so powerfully transmitted that nobody can withdraw from the underlying ideological values of media capitalism. This results in a strong fourfold interest symbiosis between CMCPs, mass production, mass consumption and the media’s commercial-ideological exchange sphere. It is the media that, for example, allows the conversion of CMCPs’ sectarian interest into a common interest.191 Simultaneously, MMCPs’ social and universal interests are converted into a special and sectarian interest. The media’s secular→common and common→secular conversion is shown in Fig. 9.7: Figure 9.7 highlights the two main parties’ clusters on the outer edges; it also shows the two conversions (Fig. 9.7box), conducted almost at a daily level, that sustain media capitalism’s ideological structure; and it shows the target boxshaded, that is, democracy. CMCPs’ sectarian interest is to be converted into a common interest to appear to the democratic customers as supporting society. On the opposing end, MMCPs’ interests are the other way around. Their universal interest is made to appear as sectarianism and favouring a special interest. Corporate media achieves both with perfection as the media’s commercial interests reflect what is broadcasted. Beyond the realisation that ‘the notion that business and editorial decisions in the press and media are totally separate is largely a myth’,192 the above outlined conversion makes the work of newspapers and TV-news editors easy while they rely on a rather simple formula: . CMCP-cluster = sectarian interest becomes a common interest. 1 2. MMCP-cluster = common interest becomes a sectarian interest. This ensures that one party is portrayed as being more supportive of society than the other, cementing media capitalism’s ideological existence and the stability of democracy (read: media capitalism). Today, voting can Media’s Conversion Task:

Party: CMCP- Interest Sectarian Interest Special Groups

 

Common Good Serves All

Media’s Conversion Task:

Democratic Process



 

Ritualised Voting

Party: MMCP-Interest



 

Sectarian Interest Special Groups

 

Common Good Serves All

Fig. 9.7  The party-message-conversion model of mediated democracy

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hardly upset ideological affirmation to media capitalism. Instead, democratic rituals have become valuable forms of additional affirmation. They are confined to a political exchange sphere while simultaneously leaving capitalism untouched. The original idea of democracy as mass affirmation to rulers has been further manipulated towards favourable outcomes for CMCPs over MMCPs (Fig. 9.7bottom). In the past, MMCPs’ less favourable media treatment could be compensated by strong party organisations that traditionally favoured MMCP-over-CMCP. Media’s rise ensured that CMCPs’ traditional organisational disadvantages mutated into political advantages. As more and more political information exchanges shifted towards the media, the importance of organisational structures declined. This process was flanked by the conversion of the social milieu to petit-bourgeois individualism. Today, corporate media have largely and successfully replaced the power of party organisations, for example, grassroots movements have been replaced by the money and power code (e.g. campaign finances193 and lobbying194). It created ‘corporatocracy’.195 Now it is CMCP↔media↔capitalism’s interest symbiosis that governs. This is shown in Fig. 9.8: Figure 9.8 shows the organisational and mobilising needs of traditional MMCP parties during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Media capitalism’s version of democracy has shifted organisational capacities towards media capacities, resulting in a marked decline in MMCPs’ traditional strength of mass mobilisation.196 This occurred despite the need for the exact opposite. Lacking media support, the MMCP-cluster depends on strong party organisations and grassroots support.197 To compensate the media-engineered decline of party organisations, there are attempts to rectify this through social media,198 crowd funding and so on. The MMCP-cluster tends to celebrate itself as direct, democratic and even revolutionary. Meanwhile, these parties remain mostly at media capitalism’s fringes, favouring sound bites and catchy slogans—not party programmes, policies or philosophies. CMCPCluster



media industry

MMCPCluster



organisational structures



election on base of money and power

election on base of social  organisation and convictions



organisational & mobilisation need

=

low



organisational & mobilisation need

=

high

Fig. 9.8  Voting mobilisation: media-vs.-organisations

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Electoral successes no longer depend on a party’s political philosophy which the media has mostly eliminated. The politics-equals-product success hinges on the media’s creation of de-politicised consumers ready to buy party product A over B.199 Politics no longer comes through political organisations but through the media in the form of marketing.200 Purchasing success is guaranteed for those with easy consumable, tabloid-­ style emotional 20-second-blitzes designed for apolitical swing voters that are known as ‘emotional…and situational voters [who are] switching for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate’s wife’.201 Politics has been transformed from Plato’s polis into saleability defined by crowd-­ pleasing products and attractive packaging. Media capitalism’s democracy diminishes politico-philosophical awareness, ‘selling soft drinks or a political philosophy’ alike.202 Non-political consumerism is engineered as a Coca-Cola-like approach that favours a thin, sugar-watery, unhealthy politician with maximum consumptive appeal. Perhaps ever since Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal masterpiece Democracy in America, democracy has been associated with a crowd that can be manipulated.203 Indeed, there has been an ever-increasing tendency to move democracy onto crowd conformity. By the mid-twentieth century, crowd pleasing started to be engineered by using newly developed manipulative tools. On the negative side, PR uses ‘character assassination’,204 while on the positive side, it is simply ‘fabricating a personality’.205 Acceptable political parties need to show three things: 1. Reject radical and anti-capitalist ideals for destination.206 2. Conform to media-engineered ideologies. 3. Support media capitalism’s values and ideologies.

a

progressive

An acceptable media-certified leadership personality needs the capability to anticipate whatever corporate media wants—the flavour of the day. PR calls this agenda-setting while politics follows. Successful candidates are allowed inside media-set parameters and gain airtime.207 Media access hinges on who best represents media capitalism’s ideology. Meanwhile a personality’s mass appeal becomes a guiding principle for the crowd-­ pleasing McDonaldisation of democracy shown in Fig. 9.9:208 Figure 9.9 shows the MMCP-CMCP-cluster and engineered voters’ attitudes in each electoral environment as the McDonaldisation of democracy—catering to the lowest mass taste—tends to favour CMCPs over

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Political Party

Voters’ Consciousness

The Media Industry

429

Election Outcome

MMCPs



Critical citoyén

= High 



Low 

CMCPs



Uncritical petit-bourgeois

= Low 



High 

Fig. 9.9  The McDonaldisation of voters

MMCPs. Generally, the better-educated city-based middle class of citoyéns tends to hold critical attitudes—a minority that supports MMCPs. The uncritical petit-bourgeois supports CMCPs. The CMCPs’ task is to appeal to a Lumpenproletariat that is kept in the restrictive mode of conditioned association susceptible to the electoral engineering of ‘feelings, sensations and attitudes’.209 Meanwhile, the media also supports a class conscious bourgeois. Securing capitalism’s upper class, media democracy’s substantial CMCP voter reservoir is sustained by The Politics of Fear flanked by tough leadership for the petit-bourgeois Lumpenproletariat.210 These have mass appeal, offering something for everyone. They are easy to consume while simultaneously they demise intellectual critique. The media’s task, therefore, is to weaken critique.211 The outcome of the media’s rational application of political marketing is its own rise to power with the capability to favour CMCPs over MMCPs. Usually, the media can prevent many undesirable electoral outcomes through ideological engineering. Already during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, democracy had installed a number of regulative instruments—–the electoral-political system–—that secured ideologically warranted outcomes. These created a much wanted distance between the voting public and the political apparatus that supports capitalism. During the twentieth century, democracy became increasingly acceptable to the elite, while non-democratic, dictatorial, authoritarian and military ways to power began to be seen as unacceptable and, above all, as unnecessary. Eventually, media capitalism shifted its power towards ideology. Open authoritarianism was no longer needed as media capitalism’s version of democracy secured capitalism. Under media capitalism, the means of achieving and securing power through dictatorship have become unnecessary. As a consequence, military coup d’états became increasingly rare. Dictatorial means as a way to power declined proportionally to the rise of media capitalism. With the media being able to secure mass support to capitalism, even a perceived danger to the existence of capitalism has largely ceased to exist. From that

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historical moment onwards, ideological mass support was handed over to ruling via democracy as guided by the media, with the media’s guidance of the will of the people having eliminated virtually all dangers to capitalism. Once firmly established, media capitalism delivered the exact same outcomes as authoritarianism did—but this time, it rules via democracy. This was highly welcomed. The so-called will of the people—volonté générale—had been safely converted into an ideological will that supports capitalism. The beauty of the entire structure is that it prevents virtually all anti-capitalist forces.212 Today’s ideologically engineered democracies have created methods that sustain a safe distance between a–—potentially still dangerous–—will of the people and electoral outcomes wanted by media capitalism. Figure 9.10 shows these distancing mechanisms: Figure 9.10 contrasts the ideal of democracy with media capitalism’s democracy. The introduction of several institutions brought additional system stability over and above the media’s comprehensive steering capacities. These institutions have significantly increased the security of desirable and predictable outcomes.213 Overall however, media capitalism’s democracy depends less on institutions (Fig. 9.9). Most risks have already been eliminated long before it comes to voting. Still, these institutions provide an additional level of safety (Fig.  9.9) through a number of elements installed into the voter→democracy chain. By the twenty-first century, media capitalism had succeeded in installing its version of democracy. Media democracy was ‘etched in (everyone’s) brain’ underwritten by TINA.214 As a result, multi-divisional political ideas, political philosophies, policy debates and political parties have increasingly been confined to minor disagreements within the political structure. Parties are forced to accept media capitalism’s basic ideological principles that are implicitly and explicitly framed as a given.215 They have The Ideal



People

People

The reality of supportive democracy mediated through institutions  

The Media Industry



public relations



think tanks



bills



party factions



parliament



none-imperative mandates



party discipline



laws



 Democracy

bureaucracy 





People

lobbyists



Fig. 9.10  The democratic idea and the reality of democracy

Voting  political system people

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to perform on the political stage in a carefully choreographed show representing minor variations of a grand theme—the theme of media capitalism.216 The shift from a multi-party to a predominantly 2+some-minor-parties party main structure is shown in Fig. 9.11: Figure 9.11 shows that some parties are still displaying discontent with media capitalism’s ideology. However, by refusing total incorporation into the orbit of media capitalism, these parties have largely ceased to exist (Fig. 9.11). During the twentieth century, many nationalistic, chauvinistic and reactionary parties have been successfully absorbed into the CMCP-­ cluster. Meanwhile, media capitalism welcomes the MMCP-cluster because it serves six purposes. MMCPs allow the media to: . present the entire system as balanced and even fair; 1 2. present themselves as a neutral, independent and honest brokers; 3. confine parties to their assigned role: supporting media capitalism; 4. simulate that media capitalism’s political structure is multi-dimensional; 5. keep CMCPs in line reminding them of the holder of true power (media); and 6. pretend that the media supports democracy. Meanwhile, for CMCPs things are rather different. Historically, most of the CMCP-cluster was staunchly anti-democratic (read: fascist). Some of these parties that did not manage to convert to media capitalism’s concept of ruling via democracy simply ceased to exist. The successful authoritarianism→democracy converters became part of an all-inclusive framework. This has worked well despite a recent rise of some populist

Political Parties

MMCPs

CMCPs

Open Public Domain 19th to Mid 20th Century Anti-Supportive NMCPs Media Capitalist Supportive MMCPs Media Capitalist Supportive CMCPs Pro-Capitalist Non-Dem. Parties

Fig. 9.11  From multi to 2+ party system

The Media Industry’s Domain Mid 20th to 21st Century and beyond Pro-Media capitalism = Economics + Progressive Social Welfare Strong ideological Support of all Political Parties Media Capitalism = Economics + Conservative Social Welfare

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parties.217 With the exclusion of some and the inclusion of other parties, an almost global party cluster had been established and engineered as a bipartisan support for the media invented centre that became one of media capitalism’s main ideologies: voters are given a free choice over whichever centre party they prefer. Miraculously, most societies for most of the time are ruled by a party that supports what media capitalism defines as the centre. To achieve this level of ideological support, three core issues had to be solved: 1. The exclusion of anti-affirmative parties had to be established and made acceptable. 2. Occasional CMCP+MMCP power sharing had to be institutionalised. 3. The ruling of those parties that are most conducive to media capitalism had to be secured. Figure 9.11 shows how this was achieved. Anti-supportive parties such as communists and counter-capitalist organisations were either eliminated or converted into parties that support media capitalism. In the past, many of these parties supported brutality, torture, prisons, massacres, death squads, Kafkaesque penal colonies, concentration camps, political murders, assassinations, secret police, surveillance,218 threats, killings, destruction, decimation, marginalisation, exclusion and so on. Despite all these punishing regimes invented by capitalism and used to shore up capitalism, the latter was still forced to install two buffers to secure its long-term existence: . a semi-democratic and/or authoritarian bureaucratic state and 1 2. a punishment/surveillance system of police, courts and secret services.219 Protected by these buffers, anti-supportive forces could work themselves up against capitalism’s buffering institutions—the state—without ever touching capitalism’s core. The brutality→ideology transition of dealing with anti-supportive forces was largely achieved through punishment regimes first and the media’s ideological offensive later—eventually securing media capitalism’s semi-democratic centre that is largely defined by a two+minor-parties party system.

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Media Capitalism’s Two-Party System Eventually, direct repressive regimes were replaced by the use of psychology (e.g. behaviourism’s positive reinforcement) paralleled by mass consumption secured through the media. Mass consumption and media ideology remain the most decisive factors that allow an alienated and suffering working class to be converted into a capitalism supportive petit-­ bourgeois middle class. The media’s consumerism+ideology merger resulted in the same outcome: a diminished role of anti-supportive parties flanked by ‘a terrible silence [that] had fallen upon the working class’ and its organisations.220 Eventually media capitalism secured its system as shown in Fig. 9.12: Figure 9.12 shows media capitalism’s arrangement of politics. Figure 9.12top-shaded-in-gray shows the zone of power. This is the area where the media tends to place those parties that show support for media capitalism: CMCPs largely fill this space. This is indicated by CMCPs, shown in the grey-shaded area. Below this are those parties that are not directly supportive of media capitalism. These parties—some MMCPs but mostly NMCPs—are mostly excluded from holding power. Only very occasionally, they manage to infiltrate the realm of power. In some cases, the media allows these parties into government when CMCP rule becomes—often only temporarily—–unsustainable (e.g. through scandals, open nepotism, too obvious corruption, etc.). This also occurs when the media deems a—albeit always short term—–change of government necessary to assist its Class Support by Bourgeois/Market CMCPs

Elite Democracy

Support by: Citoyen/Civil Rights MMCPs

Media Democracy

CMCPs Occasional Infiltration into Power Social-

Anti-Support by: Revolutionary Working Class Feudalism Until 1789

Mass Democracy

Conservatives (strong state) Neo-Liberal Parties Nationalistic Parties

Power Power in office & gov’t largely no power

MMCPs Democracy Exclusion Sphere

Liberal capitalism 19th Century

Anti-Supportive and Anti-Capitalist Parties Late Capitalism 20th Century

Fig. 9.12  The end of anti-capitalist parties

Media Capitalism 21st Century

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we-live-in-a-democracy ideology. Figure  9.12bottom is divided through a triple line. Below this line there are parties deemed unsupportive of media capitalism. They are excluded from power and office holding. In most cases, however, the media has completely destroyed this cluster by eliminating them from the public sphere. To remove such unwanted political parties, media capitalism also relies on the state which is mostly governed by three only cosmetically differentiated CMCPs:221 1. Classical CMCP-Cluster Conservative parties supporting media capitalism by status quo conservation favouring a strong state—a cluster traditionally found in continental Europe and in countries with a strong feudalist past. 2. Anti-reform CMCP-Cluster Some neoliberal and populist parties resembling reactionary tendencies favouring roll back politics. With media support, these parties have converted reform’s original meaning (e.g. Luther’s reformation) into a winding back of previous social welfare provisions. 3. Free-Market CMCP-Cluster Driven by neoliberalism’s free market ideology, it is a propaganda offensive as a reaction to mid-twentieth-century social democracy.222 These parties often merge free market with enemy ideology—an enemy must be destroyed.223 Figure 9.12left-hand-side shows MMCPs below CMCPs as these operate inside media capitalism’s accepted ideological framework. Below that are anti-supportive political parties that have largely been excluded from the public sphere. On rare incidences, these were directly excluded, but more commonly, they have largely been framed negatively (e.g. out of date, anti-society, dangerous, etc.) resulting in a de facto exclusion. Media capitalism’s important media↔party interface allows the media to organise its support into three large groupings (pro-, non- and anti-capitalism). Figure 9.12bottom shows historical timelines that started with feudalism in which ideological support was still established through church and religion. Media capitalism’s interest symbiosis makes MMCP challenges to CMCPs’ ruling increasingly less frequent (Fig. 9.12zigzag-line). They became less notable as MMCPs’ ideological self-adjustment increased.224 Meanwhile, the dividing line runs between CMCPs+MMCPs on the one hand and NMCPs (Fig. 9.12far-left) on the other.

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The fate of being an anti-supportive opposition means that one is almost totally excluded from power and, more importantly, from access to the public sphere (Fig.  9.12right-hand). Above that, the media has also installed an increasingly hardening dividing line between system-­supportive oppositional MMCPs and anti-media-capitalist parties. The latter are almost totally excluded from accessing the public sphere. Occasionally, the media grants them highly pre-framed access.225 This occurs largely for two reasons: . Anti-establishment parties legitimise media capitalism (rare). 1 2. They provide entertainment with a medieval court jasper effect (common). Meanwhile Fig.  9.12’s entirety is in itself a marginalised domain as democracy is largely irrelevant for media capitalism’s proper functioning. Media capitalism is sustained through consumerism and ideology—not democracy. Inside media capitalism’s democratic domain, the iron law of media capitalism is established through the media, democracy and media-­ guided voters.226 Inside this, democracy is a sideshow with ‘pseudo-­ solutions’.227 The success of herding voters into the right direction is checked through sophisticated feedback systems (e.g. polling, surveys). With input (voting) engineered and output (ideological attitudes) checked, voters are just one element in this sophisticated system. With voters securely asphyxiated, democracy is routinely rehearsed as a media spectacle that is largely irrelevant for work and consumerism.

Separating Democracy from Work and Consuming To media capitalism, democracy is no more than an interruption of its standard work↔consume↔entertainment oscillation, yet democracy offers additional ideological affirmation. In people’s daily life, it is not democracy but managerial regimes, consumption and the media’s ideological hegemony that secures media capitalism.228 Today’s democracy-free life takes place largely in three non-democratic spheres: 1. managerial regimes (Managerialism as ideology plus authoritar ian rules); 2. mass consumption (media-engineered mass taste); 3. entertainment (non-democratic spectacles).

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Apart from consumption and self-exposure to the media, most people’s daily engagement is with a 9-to-5-for-40-years-of life sphere (read: work)— an existence inside managerial regimes. Managerial regimes remained untouched by democracy even though these systems undertook several changes from early craft shop manufacturing to industrial production, to Fordist mass production, service and eventually the knowledge industry— a codeword for media capitalism, none of which were ever guided by democracy. Figure 9.13 show this: Figure 9.13 compresses Fig. 9.12’s upper section in which CMCPs and MMCPs converged towards media capitalism in a self-adjustment process. In the public sphere (Fig. 9.12upper-level), ideological mass support has been created through a choreographed democratic process—known as parliamentarian democracy. In capitalism’s non-democratic realm (work), democracy’s exclusion was never altered. The hope inducing idea of industrial democracy remained a working-class pacifying hallucination.229 Any democratisation of work was successfully prevented through the shifting of democracy onto parliamentarian democracy, making ‘the world safe from democracy’.230 This diverted political energies away from production. Meanwhile, corporate media keep up the appearance of a neat work-democracy separation. Any awareness that democracy belongs to production has been successfully eliminated as the ruling elite always had strong incentives to prevent democracy (Fig. 9.13low+upper-sphere). Whether at work or not, democracy is largely rendered irrelevant and camouflaged by the we-live-in-a-democracy ideology. Figure 9.14 shows how this works:

capitalism

MMCPs: from non-support to ideological support for media

CMCPs: support of system directed to media capitalism mass-consumption sphere: support through participation in democratic mass legitimating processes mass production sphere: ideological support through participation in labour market and work regimes Democracy Free Zone: Managerial Prerogative & Corporate Property Rights

ideological support

The coming and going of the hope for industrial democracy 19th Century

20th Century

21st Century

Fig. 9.13  Excluding democracy from productive and consumptive sphere

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Three to Five Years Three to Five Years Electoral Electoral Electoral Election Free Period Election Free Period Support Support Support Democratic Sphere of Ideological Support through Frequent Electoral Rituals

democracy-free consumptive sphere run through ideology & democracy-free productive sphere run through ideology

Fig. 9.14  The workings of media democracy

Figure 9.14 shows democracy’s overall role in media capitalism. Media capitalism’s ideological support is largely defined by two dominant spheres: democracy-free productive and consumptive spheres (Fig. 9.14bottom) and above both the sphere of democracy. ‘Crowd moulding’ takes place as a non-democratic act in managerial and consumptive regimes and via mass-­ guided elections in the democratic sphere.231 The separation between both is made plausible largely through media capitalism’s manipulative framing power. This allowed democracy’s elimination from work and consumption. Simultaneously, the appearance of democracy is kept up even though its societal steering is mastered by corporate media. During election-free intervals—most of the time—media capitalism remains the sole apparatus that guarantees the continuous functioning of managerial and consumptive regimes (Fig. 9.14)—undisturbed by democracy.232 Here rests the triumph of media capitalism.

Notes 1. Beerbohm, E. 2012. In our name: the ethics of democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Honneth, A. 2013. Freedom′s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Cambridge: Polity Press. 2. http://library.brown.edu/haitihistory/11.html. 3. Phillips, P. 2018. Giants: The Global Power Elite, New  York: Seven Story Press. 4. Ellul, J. 1973. Propaganda, New York: Vintage Books, p. 139. 5. Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants, New York: Knopf, p. 418. 6. Shermer, M. 2007. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, New  York: Macmillan (p. xiv); McGinniss, J. 1969. The selling of the President, New  York: Trident Press; Packard, V. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders, New  York: D.  McKay Co., p.  176; Abramson, J. 2019. Merchants of truth, New York: Simon & Schuster (ebook), p. 77.

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Borden, S.  L. (eds.) 2010. Ethics and Entertainment: Essays on Media Culture and Media Morality, Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers; Skoll, G. R. 2010. Social Theory of Fear: Terror, Torture, and Death in a Post-Capitalist World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 222. See also: white-, gray, and black propaganda (Jack, C. 2017. Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information, https://datasociety.net/pubs/ oh/DataAndSociety_LexiconofLies.pdf, 8 September 2017, accessed: 15th January 2020, p. 7) 223. McAdams, D. P. 2016. The Mind of Donald Trump, The Atlantic (www. theatlantic.com, June issue, p. 16). 224. ‘In “Socialism and Revolution” (1973) Gorz warned the social democratic parties that buying into corporatist partnerships was a doomed and dangerous strategy’ (counterpunch.org, 9 Sepember 2016). 225. Boykoff, J. 2013. The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements, London: Routledge. 226. See also: Dilenschneider, R L. 1990. Power and influence: mastering the art of persuasion, London: Prentice-Hall, p. 219. 227. Davies, N. 2008. Flat earth news, London: Chatto & Windus, p.  81; Tanner, L. 2012. Sideshow: dumbing down democracy Brunswick: Scribe Publications. 228. Martin, J. 2013. Chantel Mouffe: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, London: Routledge; Keohane, R.  O. 2001. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Artz, L. & Kamalipour, Y. R. 2003. The globalization of corporate media hegemony, Albany: State University of New York Press. 229. Dahl, R. A. 1985. A preface to economic democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rocker, R. 2004. Anarcho-syndicalism (preface by Noam Chomsky; introduction by Nicolas Walter), Edinburgh, Scotland & Oakland: AK Press; Darlington, R. 2013. Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism, Chicago: Haymarket Books; Guillamon, A. 2014. Ready for revolution: the CNT defense committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938, Edinburgh, Scotland & Oakland: AK Press. 230. Stauber, J. C. & Rampton, S. 1995. Toxic sludge is good for you, Monroe: Common Courage Press, p. 14. 231. Tagliavia, F. M. 2016. The Imagination of Crowds: The efficacy of a false hypothesis, Re-visiones (http://www.re-­visiones.net), (no. 3), p. 8. 232. Vaidhyanathan, S. 2018. Antisocial Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 164.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Media Capitalism

we, the people, are routinely and successfully manipulated —Miller M. C. 2007, Introduction to Packard, V. 1957, The Hidden Persuaders. New York: D. McKay Co. (2007 edition published by Ig Publishing, Brooklyn), p. 17 many of us are being influenced and manipulated far more than we realise —Wu, T. 2016. The Attention Merchants. New York: Knopf, p. 353

Before developing a few rudimentary fragments for a possible communicative-­emancipatory theory set against media capitalism in the later part of this section, a small number of brief and concluding notes might highlight core elements of media capitalism.1 This book argues the following: 1. There has been a traditional capitalism to media capitalism shift Today’s media relevance demands to overcome traditional notions of capitalism (e.g. liberal, consumer, etc.). Capitalism needs to be conceptualised as media capitalism as it no longer functions without corporate media.2 Media-free capitalism is no longer p ­ ossible. The media↔capitalism interface has not created conspiracies but a ‘web of interests’, a ‘club nature of media power elites’, a ‘media elite’, ‘a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7_10

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symbiotic relationship’ or, as this book argues, an interest symbiosis between:3 ( a) non-media corporations (Nike, Nestle, Nokia, etc.) and (b) ‘the mass media [that] is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer giant megamedia corporations’ extending to PR, propaganda, spin and lobbying firms and ‘lavishly funded by pro-­ corporate think tanks’ (e.g. ‘a network of more than 100 free market think tanks around the world’ with the task to make ‘grassroots citizen’ groups look inconsequential’).4 2. Media capitalism depends on ideology5 Since ‘the global media play a central economic role’, the media↔capitalism interface depends not just on the ‘interlocking directorate’6 of key players but also on a well-developed body of hegemonic ideologies capable to camouflage the ‘badness of the present conditions’.7 Ideology stabilises media capitalism’s entire structure. Not surprisingly, ‘the commercial media system is the ideological linchpin of the globalised market economy’.8 3. Media capitalism shapes life When media capitalism’s ‘ideologues peruse their objectives [in sustaining an] ideological environment that helps sustain the political economy’,9 they do so by infiltrating and defining capitalism’s four key domains: education, work, consumption and democracy. Shown as a simplified process model, it works like this: The process model (Fig.  10.1) starts with media capitalism’s interest symbiosis between media corporations (news, shows, etc.), companies directly responsible for the ideological well-being of capitalism (PR/spin, lobbying, think tanks, etc.) and corporations still making commodities (even though often outsourced). The first group provides direct ideology interest symbiosis

media capitalism

media corporations (direct ideology) corporations+marketing (indirect ideology)

scientific input communication studies sociology, political science behaviourism+psychology medicine+neuro-science economics pedagogics cultural studies

Fig. 10.1  Media capitalism’s process model

four domains of engagement education work ideology

media capitalism consumerism democracy

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(newspapers: ‘the more extreme a headline, the longer participants spend processing it, and the more likely they are to believe it’;10 radio and TV: ‘the electronic bondage of television’,11 internet,12 etc.). The second group provides indirect ideology through the marketing of products and services (ideology is the by-product). The next step shows the input of science on which media capitalism relies. All of this leads to hegemonic ideologies (e.g. free market, individualism, etc.) shaping and directing media capitalism’s four domains (education, work, consumerism, democracy, cf. Fig. 10.1) and stabilising media capitalism. Historically, it was a long, drawn-out process that took the better part of around 300 years. One might nominate the year 1712 as the starting date of capitalism as an arbitrary point in time—there is no official birth year of capitalism.13 But capitalism was never just signified by technical inventions such as Thomas Newcomen’s steam water pump of 1712. Instead, capitalism’s economic development was paralleled by a rise of mass-manufactured commodities and, what is even more important for the development of media capitalism, advances and transitions of the media sphere. These changed some of capitalism’s justification ideologies. With the rise of nation states, for example, new ideological tools became available, for example, the national interest which pretends there is something like ‘the nation as a unit’14 with the hidden meaning: rally behind your nation (read: capitalism). Transmitting such ideologies depended on what became known as the public sphere.15 Originally, early capitalism and even more so early Enlightenment demanded the free exchange of ideas to, as an example, shift out-dated religion towards a new ideology that stabilised a new economic form: capitalism.16 All this however, was not as smooth as often pretended. The feudalism→capitalism transition resulted in a period of intense rupture in the ideological apparatus where ‘the meta-physicians of the banal’ were still running a ‘propaganda machine’.17 In short, the economic feudalism→capitalism shift was flanked by a legitimising religion→ideology shift. The rupture between both led to a series of revolts, mass strikes and even revolutions culminating in the French Revolution (1789) and perhaps ending with two last great anti-capitalist revolutions: the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Revolution in China (1945/1949). The 1789-to-1945/1949 rupture period marked a comprehensive breakdown of the ideological cover that secured feudalism first and capitalism later. Eventually, capitalism became stabilised in the form of a modern hegemony.18

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The 1789–1945/1949 rupture period constituted a break between the pre-1789 ‘bread and circus’ tradition, the feudalist court-jasper amusement at local markets, churches, religion and so on and today’s consumerism and mass entertainment.19 The latter includes ‘infotainment’, cheap escapism (‘mediascapes’20), ‘docudramas, infomertials, advertorials’ (‘blurring the line between news and advertising’), ‘agenda-setting, consensus-­journalism [and] the celebrity-worship-syndrome’21 as well as the ‘celebrifying [of] ordinary people’.22 These signify media capitalism’s hegemony.23 In assuring media capitalism’s overall hegemony, propaganda relied less on ‘black propaganda’ (e.g. when lies are planted) and more on ‘white propaganda’ engineered through the aforementioned capital↔media interest symbiosis as well as PR’s manipulation of journalists and news organisations.24 Hence, ‘hegemony [became] a central system of practices, meanings and values saturating the consciousness of a society at a much deeper level than ordinary notions of ideology’.25 Such a deep level of manipulation has a long history. Hegemonic propaganda started ‘when the Romans created an empire and, to quell unrest, used brute force abroad and “bread and circus” at home’.26 Later, propaganda received a new impetus when the Catholic Church’s Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith) of 1622 sought to stabilise faith. With modernity’s rise, propaganda became supported through psychological warfare.27 Post-World War II, propaganda’s non-military use mutated into public relations believing that ‘there are three ways to encourage people to do what you want them to do: power, patronage (a polite term for bribery) and persuasion’.28 One of the main instigators of propaganda’s military→public move was Ivy Lee, often recognised as ‘the father of modern public relations’.29 Known as Poison Ivy, Lee worked for Germany’s IG Farben (the producer of Zyklon-B that was used in concentration camps) while also being the media advisor of ‘Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler’.30 Together with Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann and Harold Lasswell, Lee converted propaganda into the ‘PR-isation of the media’.31 Much of these activities centre around World Wars I and II when the ‘elite political agenda’32 started to shift after politicians realised that: if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.33

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With the end of World War II, psychological warfare started to decline in relevance albeit it was never abandoned as the KAL-versus-IA case shows: ‘in the first incident, in 1983, a Soviet fighter plane, shot down a Korean Airlines (KAL) passenger plane killing 269 passengers and crew. In the second, 5 years later, an Iran Air (IA) passenger plane was shot down by a US Navy ship—again, all (290) on board were killed…the KAL incident became part of a moral discourse whereas the IA incident became part of a technical discourse’.34 Even though the USA’s action killed more people, US cold war propaganda framed the US killings as a technical, not a moral, issue: The Evil Empire.35 On the whole however, media interest shifted from the Cold War36 and real wars (e.g. Korean War, Vietnam, invasions, etc.) towards consumerism: Public relations propaganda [seeks] to gain maximum freedom to operate, free of government constraints…suppress competition [and] to promulgate corporate cultural values, particularly capitalism, acceptance of multi-­ national corporations, and encouragement of social stability and the status quo [in sum,] the business of public relations is business. The clients are employers. The goal is to increase net income for a profit.37

In the wake of ‘ensuring continued exploitation’, growing media corporations started to consolidate their affairs to such a degree that their ideological apparatus had to grow in size and sophistication.38 Increasingly, corporate media not only operated simply as marketing transmission but to sustain consumerism ideologically. Simultaneously, it smothered virtually all revolts directed against capitalism.39 By the middle of the twentieth century, capitalism was secured—no longer seriously challenged—in a great number of advanced countries. Critique on capitalism—if raised at all—was successfully confined to the sphere of democracy. Successively, the corporate media apparatus had ‘taken the risk out of democracy’, for example, by assuring capital-conform ‘outcomes [and] changes in voting intentions [seen by PR as] perfect proof that PR has worked’.40 This eliminated virtually all of capitalism’s traditional enemies. Corporate media’s ideological power assured, for example, that capitalism remains associated with ‘self-regulating markets’,41 free enterprise and so on. Media capitalism also assures that democracy’s key players of ‘right and left share the same rhetoric of democracy’.42 Media capitalism’s democracy stabilising ideologies pacified progressives. These are kept in the belief that there is democracy even though PR knows that to see

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‘citizens as democrats [is an] exaggeration’.43 In reality, democracy (read: PR-firm A vs. PR-firm B) has long become the ultimate synonym for capitalism. In short, the reality—and pathology—of capitalism is camouflaged through the ideology of democracy. As a consequence, corporate ‘media reinforce the hegemony of democratic rhetoric’.44 Democracy is for those who still need to be kept in the belief that we live in a democracy. Under media capitalism’s prime ideology, democracy (read: capitalism) expands globally. Indeed, ‘democracy has spread, but so have election irregularities’, as the World Bank notes on those cases where the media capitalism apparatus has not yet been able to introduce its hegemony to a sufficient level.45 Nevertheless, the historical realities of introducing democracy have always been flanked by the rise of mass media. Only very slowly was democracy extended to what we have today. In its original form democracy simply ‘left out the majority of the population. Women, slaves, foreigners, labourers, merchants and farmers were implicitly or explicitly excluded [by issuing] limits to voting privilege’.46 Meanwhile, the word democracy means capitalism for those who understand media capitalism’s ideology as ‘the standards of a finance- and consumptive-­driven entertainment culture [that sets] the very terms of democratic governance today’.47 With a democracy=capitalism understanding, a common announcement like we will bring democracy to country XYZ starts to make sense beyond the simple wording. It means we will bring capitalism to country XYZ. Many still believe that it is democracy that is talked about. Media capitalism often ‘sells unrepresentative democracy [as well as a specific version of] democracy that talks without responding’.48 Whether democratic or non-democratic, eliminating threats to media capitalism has a long history. Figure  10.2 shows this elimination process as a six-step overview: Loosely related to Martin Niemöller’s famous quote, first they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. 1 anarchist

2 

communists

3 

socialists



4 trade unions

Fig. 10.2  The elimination of threats



5 socialdemocrats



6  radical  democrats  

small “l” liberals

 today  big “L” liberals

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Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.49 Figure  10.2shaded shows the progressive elimination of threats. Meanwhile, democracy too became less threatening as it was moved from volonté générale and deliberative democracy towards a media-guided parliamentarian democracy. ‘Taking the risk out of democracy, [meaning] the risk to big business’ was a significant achievement for media capitalism.50 Historically, democracy meant a ‘civilisation…without stability, and [being] at the mercy of every chance. The populace is sovereign’.51 This was an unbearable thought for the ruling power elite. As a consequence, democracy had to be converted so it would stabilise capitalism. It had to be non-threatening. This became capitalism’s main project but it also dealt with its enemies—perceived and real. The media mostly defined who these enemies were and are ‘the media do not simply mirror society, rather, they help to shape it and to create…perceptions’ on enemies.52 This elimination process (Fig. 10.2) may have started with anarchists. Next in line where the much stronger communists. For capitalism and its PR-firms, ‘fighting communism was their idealistic cover. The chance to make money was their reward’.53 The elimination process might have ended with radical democrats. But it also included social democrats. Media capitalism has dealt with social democracy mainly in two ways: anti-­ capitalist social democracy was eliminated; the rest was converted into parties that carry media capitalism’s ‘taken-for-grantedness of neoliberal ideology’54 forward.55 These small-L or social-conscious liberals are also exposed to corporate media’s good-press-versus-bad-press dictum: 1. Bad Press If a party seeks to regulate media capitalism or simply criticise media capitalism, they get what is known as a bad press leading to decreased ‘media coverage’56 and negative reporting. This renders them almost unelectable, assuring electoral defeat. 2. Good Press If a party plays media capitalism’s game, it gets a good press rendering the party electable; yet once elected, it still has to support media capitalism that in turn helps the party to get re-elected. Within the media’s power to ‘control opinions on politics [and the fact that] modern politics is mainly mediated politics’,57 the social democrats and all other remaining political parties are granted relative access to the public sphere. Needless to say, all have to adjust their political messages

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and electoral TV-ads to ‘the defining medium of the age’,58—corporate media power. Their messages are adjusted to the media’s ‘15–30 second’ sound bites in the acute awareness that attention spans are shortening, starting from shorter books to shorter ads: ‘in 2000, Microsoft Canada found that our average attention span was 12 seconds long. By 2013, it was eight seconds long. An ordinary goldfish (carassius auratus), by comparison, can go nine seconds’, testifying to a ‘shrinking attention span’.59 More important, however, is that ‘man is capable of absorbing all these news items…but it is impossible for him to make any meaningful order out of the never-ending kaleidoscope’ of info-flashes.60 Meanwhile, corporate media also focuses on ‘ceaselessly drumming [these SoundBits] into the ears’ of the public under the conviction that ‘there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition’.61 Media capitalism also forces almost all to ‘go downmarket [which] means [reporting on] scandals, sex and splashy crime to appeal to the lowest level of human interest’.62 Quite often ‘dumbing down’63 is linked to equally ‘simple propaganda messages [as] propaganda cannot permit time for thought or reflection’.64 This phenomenon became known as ‘tabloid news takes over’ (starting with ‘penny papers…featuring stories about grisly crimes and illicit sex’); it is also known as ‘tabloidization of the news’ intended to create ‘the disappearance of politics’ while ossifying the money-news link (PR-talk: monetarise news items) via the sale of audiences (bums on seats) to advertisers as ‘advertising pays’.65 As a consequence, the media is not only likely to focus on those issues that bring in revenue, but also favours the ‘dumbing down’.66 It occurs through the still popular application of a very old—but critical—PR belief that ‘men are ruled by ideas, sentiments and customs’.67 Ideas like these were originally introduced to PR through Le Bon’s seminal study on how to denigrate people to a mass, a crowd or ‘the mob’.68 Early propaganda—–and later PR—became convinced that ‘the part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense and that played by reason [is] very small’.69 The moulding of the mass means that ‘an important part of public relations is lies and deceit [and being] economical with the truth’.70 Much of this remains necessary to camouflage capitalism’s pathologies. As a consequence, PR is ‘the special force of capitalism [and hence it] has always been associated with big business’.71 The image many have of PR is the pro-business propaganda image. ‘In a world of commercialised propaganda’, there is a relentless focus on images as the ‘image is privileged over dialogue’ using the ‘agency of

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sight [while] relying heavily on visuals’.72 These media images are skilfully linked to simple ideas and sound bites ‘limiting the application of thought’.73 PR that ‘works for capitalism’74 believes that manipulations operate ‘independent of the measure of truth [thinking] what is true is what works’.75 It is KISS in action—keep it simple, stupid!76—often relying on ‘images…attached to certain words: the word is merely…the button of an electrical bell that calls them up’.77 Through general propaganda, simplistic messaging and the sheer ideological power of the media, media capitalism has almost completely eliminated the next group in line (Fig. 10.2): radical democrats who sought a direct volonté générale of the people, seen by media capitalism as potentially dangerous.78 With ‘taming and moulding the mass mind’79 and the volonté générale came the small-versus-large-L-liberals ideology. Today, media capitalism manages these inside a special domain. It is the ‘propaganda-­managed democracy’ domain in which ‘candidates for major political office no longer plan campaign speeches; [they] plan and produce commercials’.80 This links them to the PR-engineered ‘death of political philosophy and the rise of single issues’.81 The outcome of this is shown in Fig. 10.2right-hand. As indicated by Fig.  10.2(↑) and the double line, today’s democracy position is shown in which politics (Fig. 10.2right) is basically divided into two political directions framed as an asphyxiating left-versus-right spectrum.82 The dynamic progressive-conservative-reactionary typology is avoided—democratic politics comes to a standstill. The perceived dual system locks its affiliated political parties into a media-guided dichotomy of a Coke-versus-Pepsi choice.83 The media-engineered system assures cosmetically differentiated parties and de-politicisation. Not surprisingly, ‘electoral turnout has decreased [and there is] a trend towards decreased party identification [while] political distrust has increased’.84 De-politicised voters are securely locked inside the media’s de-political system. As a consequence, some political parties are left in existence as long as they subscribe to media capitalism’s ideology. Since ‘mass media can affect the way you vote and the way you spend your money’, the democracy↔money exchange remains important.85 Aligned to that, ‘politics as…salesmanship’ offers presentable leaders with pretended ‘integrity, reliability, competency, charisma [and other] personal aspects’86 favouring top-down (Read: you-vote-they-rule) parliamentarian democracy under the long-established PR belief that:

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a crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.87

As a consequence, today’s democratic spectacle is ‘between elites rather than between elites and the public at large’.88 Electoral contests are horizontal (eliteA-vs.-eliteB) rather than vertical (labour-vs.-capital). Horizontal groups subscribe to media capitalism’s hegemony while many support media capitalism. They and the media frame their views as mainstream. Media framing ‘embodies a stimulus subtly directing attention to particular [media defined] reference points’.89 Inside media framing, both horizontal groups (e.g. smallL-vs.-largeL liberals) are allowed to compete (Fig. 10.2right). One needs to keep in mind that media capitalism is secured through consumerism and ideology—not democracy. Still, for media capitalism, forced to engage in democracy, democracy’s electoral spectacle is a mere disruption. Democratic elections are maintained because elections assure that ‘propagandist mass media [can] create a compliant society in its image’.90 Keeping democracy alive even aided one of capitalism’s most fundamental shifts: the move from Marx’s proletarian capitalism to mass consumer capitalism.91 Ideologically, this change marked a shift from: control + censorship → ideology + hegemony.

Capitalism was increasingly ‘adopting techniques for manipulating mass publics through propaganda in place of more direct means of control’.92 All this has a very long history and is based on three revolutions: 1st revolution: phonetic writing 3.500BC—limited public sphere 2nd revolution: book printing/Gutenberg—public sphere 3rd revolution: radio-TV-internet93—corporate public sphere94 Apart from these technological changes, media capitalism consolidated its own affairs through two more recent transformations of the public sphere: 1. The First Transformation converted a multitude of small media outlets into an oligarchy of a few large media organisations supporting consumerism. The ­commercialisation and ‘concentration of the media [resulted in the] displacement of the public sphere with entertainment’.95

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2. The Second Transformation of the public sphere converted an array of media corporations into oligopolies consisting of a handful of global ‘monopoly news organisations [with] transterritorial capitalist goals [and] oligopolistic market control strategies’.96 This sort of targeted ‘monopoly creation’97 justifies the term ‘megamedia.’98 It created an interest symbiosis between media (ideology, hegemony, PR/spin) and non-media corporations (consumer products). These megamedia have expanded the previous sideshow of ideology into its core, creating media capitalism’s key duality: consumerism+ideology. During the twentieth century, corporate media realised that its apparatus can do more than simply assist consumerism via marketing, seen as ‘the ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things’.99 As consumerism consolidated, corporate media shifted attention towards organisational consolidation, creating global mega-corporations as well as spreading media capitalism’s ideology. One of these ideologies used to be called imperialism. Somewhat foretelling the future, Adam Smith (1776) described it as ‘the plundering of the defenceless natives’.100 To eliminate the truth about today’s imperialism, the media simply replaced the term with the more friendly term globalisation. Both ‘have been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that [globalisation is framed as] not [being] imperialism’.101 Many adjacent ideologies can be traced to the aristocratic pair of Ludwig Heinrich Edler (nobleman) von Mises and his offsider Herr von Hayek.102 Corporate media was happy to widely spread their ideology during the last four decades.103 Simultaneously, the media also kept corporate PR’s core belief—political and commercial consumers ‘resemble primitive beings’—alive.104 Later, consumerism’s formula of consumerism+marketing became media capitalism’s new formula: consumerism+ideology. With that, the following change occurred: • Consumer capitalism = consumerism+marketing = twentieth century • Media capitalism = consumerism+ideology = twenty-first century This, of course, it not to say, that under consumer capitalism ideology did not exist; it did! What is new though is that ideology moved centre stage. Media capitalism’s economic foundation remains consumerism. Concurrently, ideology became the new imperative that indicates a marketing→PR shift.105 Media capitalism uses the media’s

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quasi-ownership of the public sphere to create a hegemonic pro-capitalism climate (i.e. PR) that hides capitalism’s ugly truths. Capitalism’s legitimising ideology was once exposed by Nobel Prize winner Anatole who said: “in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread”,106 ↓ media capitalism has modified this to today’s legitimising ideology: ↓ “everyone in a democratic society should have an equal right to be heard”,107 those who seep under bridges and those who own PR companies and run corporations.

The media realised that consumer attitudes (I like Nike!108) can be fixed as much as political attitudes (I like Donald Trump). Coca Cola’s success can be engineered in the same way as electoral success once marketing and propaganda methods—‘ideas are implanted in the midst of crowds’109— are applied to political processes.110 Consumerist marketing manipulates our perception.111 PR manipulates the context of our perceptions as information and ideas are always understood within a known context.112 It is this context that PR seeks to control. Marketing engineers the actual ‘words [that are] embedded into the victuals’ fabric of advertising’.113 Political PR does the same thing in the democratic realm. Crucially, ideology combined with the media’s ability to imprint its version of capitalism in the general public provides a unifying glue that stabilises the entire system.114 It fosters ‘collaborationism’ as an interest symbiosis cultivated between virtually all corporations of media capitalism.115 The interest symbiosis includes ‘on a world-wide basis, six, seven, or eight integrated media and entertainment conglomerates’ and many non-media corporations.116 As a side effect, this interest symbiosis also assisted the transition of big business from evil monsters like ogres to gracious giants.117 Media capitalism pretends that corporations are benevolent and good for society. This serves the interest of all corporations. With this, media capitalism has achieved something similar to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex:118 it created an Industrial-Media Complex as an informal interest symbiosis. This is highly beneficial for ‘profit-­ maximising news organisations’ and PR to create a pro-business climate.119 By and large, this became media capitalism’s twenty-first century project. Under media capitalism, corporations reach well beyond advertising’s traditional 4-NOs:120

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. no motivation to seek the improvement of the individual; 1 2. no social usefulness; 3. no social goals, and 4. no social responsibility Instead of simply advertising commodities, advertising became an internal part of capitalism’s entire economic structure with its new double function: supporting consumerism and supplying a hegemonic ideology. The consumerism→ideology move signifies the second transformation of the media, changing it into a media-driven consumerism+ideology sphere. Through its hegemonic ideologies, it supplies five key elements to media capitalism: . educational customer: willingly enhancing the ideology of schooling; 1 2. educational customers: willingly enhancing the ideology of ‘the PR University’;121 3. job-seeking customers: willingly enhancing the ideology of Managerialism; 4. shopping customers: willingly enhancing the ideology of con sumerism; and 5. democratic customers: willingly enhancing the ideology of the democratic spectacle. Media capitalism shapes all five spheres. In the educational domain, its ideological success is signified through the fact that ‘children believe rich people are more competent [and] that the wealthy have earned their right to rule’ (over us).122 Attitudes like these shape schooling and later university. They shape consumerism and Managerialism’s domain as well as democracy under ‘the fantasies of democratic participation’.123 Work and democracy just as education and consumerism are exposed to media capitalism’s henchmen. Media capitalism’s PR will…124 say and do anything if it will serve the interest of their clients they…will even act ethical if needed.

In media capitalism, it is only the media that can—through an implicit or explicit (Davos, Bilderberg, etc.125) interest symbiosis—link all domains to media capitalism’s overall ideological project of guiding virtually all eventualities of society. To manipulate societies to such a level,

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sophisticated methods are required. With advances in social science in the form of Pavlov’s classical behaviourism and Skinner’s reinforcement models, behaviourism126 was applied to marketing first and to PR later.127 What followed was a rational application of psychology to unlock and guide seemingly irrational forms of human behaviour. Marketing and later PR became aware that the ‘irrational behaviours of ours are neither random nor senseless…they are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable’.128 With this kind of knowledge, PR became a very special kind of WMD: weapon of mass deception.129 In that way, ‘weapons of automatic influence [were able to] set an automatic behaviour tape rolling within us’, unlocking forms of behaviours that evolution had enshrined deep in us.130 PR knows that these can be used for ideological purposes. This had advanced to a point where behaviourism’s psycho-­manipulative methods were applied to consumerism (twentieth century) and later in the form of a ‘psycho-industrial complex’131 to all other spheres (twenty-first century). Today, these manipulative methods shape large parts of our knowledge and attitudes. They shape our ‘predisposition to respond in a consistent manner to a stimulus’.132 This assures that we have an affective reaction (e.g. pro-business) to an ideologically framed stimulus (e.g. tax cuts). It shifted our willingness to engage with consumerism (marketing) towards our PR-driven willingness to attend a certain school, to do a certain job for years on end and to ‘make a cross on a piece of paper’ for a certain party.133 With that, media capitalism has established itself as the sole ideological purveyor of capitalism. It even solidified what sociologists call the structure-versus-agency theme which occurs when structures (e.g. capitalism) collide with human agency, for example, people’s free will expressed as volonté générale (Rousseau), a desire to end domination, fighting against capitalism and so on. Shifting towards agency can potentially mean

S

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rupture

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socialwelfare

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capitalism

S = structure (shaded) and A = agency (blank)

Fig. 10.3  Structure-versus-Agency



S

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moving towards resistance and emancipation set against structures of domination.134 Shifting towards structure might indicate a shift towards the current structures of domination. Figure 10.3 shows such a shift from structure-equals-domination towards agency-equals-emancipation. It also shows the feudalism→capitalism→media capitalism transition and the structure-versus-agency relationship that has altered several times to arrive at its current state. Much of this can be shown as an historical overview with the column size indicating the relative power (Fig. 10.3shaded) of either structure(S) or agency(A): Figure 10.3 shows the changes in the structure/domination versus agency/emancipation relationship beginning with feudalism’s domineering structure of an economics of soil, serfdom, rent, religion and God. The rupture period between feudalism and capitalism reversed the structure-­agency relationship temporarily, leading to a rise of Rousseau’s volonté générale and expressed foremost in two European highlights: the French and the Russian Revolution. During the rupture period, agency uncontrolled by religion (past) or media ideology (future) made the most significant moves towards emancipation, pushing back structures of domination. But soon capitalism established new structures of domination over agency. This occurred first in France (early nineteenth century135) and later in the Soviet Union under Stalinism.136 Meanwhile many countries simply continued on the feudalism→capitalism trajectory showing only minor revolts, strikes, uprisings and so on that capital—together with a strong state—was able to contain before it reached the stage of a fully grown revolution.137 Virtually all this ended with the rise of consumerism flanked by social welfare states—at least partly and temporarily (Fig. 10.3). The ending of the agency’s temporary victory over structures of domination during the period of welfare capitalism and consumerism was marked by capitalism’s ideological offensive found in neoliberalism. It was flanked by significant advances in psychological manipulation—PR-talk: ‘psy-ops’ (psychological operations of mass manipulation).138 This strengthened capitalism’s overall structure by offering ideological assurance in markets and a plenitude of commercial petit-bourgeois goods. PR’s psy-ops created social engineering’s manipulation of voters through spin.139 More and more, the human agency became encircled through managerial-ideological regimes (Managerialism) at work flanked by relentless advertising and PR in the off-work domain. Once capitalism became aware of marketing’s ideological powers, it sought to extend these towards guiding society, strengthening the structural side of the agency↔structure

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interface. From this point on, the agency was successively weakened as media capitalism’s well-targeted entrapment of people in four areas (education, work, consumerism, democracy) strengthened the structural determinacy of its system. Unlike feudalism’s rather crude methods, modern psy-ops render human agencies weaker. In education, educational managerialists apply PR-guided market pressure to schools and universities; at work, managerial regimes increase their ideological powers through Managerialism; in consumerism, marketing develops evermore sophisticated techniques (e.g. behaviourism and neuromarketing);140 and in the democratic realm, the political apparatus has been fine-tuned through the society-guiding democracy-media mega-machine.

Fragments of a Theory of Media Capitalism Seeking to reach beyond merely analysing media capitalism, out of all what has been said so far, a few rudimentary theoretical fragments can be established. At its most basic point, theory can be seen as a contemplative, reflective and rational type of abstraction carrying connotations to generalising and critical thinking.141 In the context of media capitalism, this includes generalised explanations of its key elements. The origins of theory lie, as is so often the case, in ancient Greece with its modern use having developed further since then. In general, today’s understanding of theory is more than just a hypothesis providing an explanatory framework, in this case for media capitalism. From this framework, general assumptions about media capitalism and possible hypotheses can be developed. These can be tested empirically and normatively providing support for or against capitalism. Alternatively, they may challenge established theories and well-­ known paradigms of capitalism.142 In that, a theory about media capitalism always represents a body of knowledge as the preceding chapters have shown. This knowledge is associated with particular explanatory models such as, for example, in the aforementioned Iron Law of Media Capitalism. Among many things in this book, the previous chapters can be used to theorise and develop a body of conceptual knowledge on media capitalism. As Greek philosopher Aristotle reminds us, a theory is very often contrasted to practice (Greek: praxis). As a consequence, this book is not so much about the praxis of media capitalism but about the development of general theoretical knowledge and perhaps even preliminary fragments of such a theory.

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To achieve that, the term theory, as used here, refers to social science theories seeking to fulfil the basic criteria required by modern social science. Rudimentary fragments of a theory of media capitalism theorise this new version of capitalism in such a way that any social scientists in their respective fields can understand such a theory of media capitalism. Therefore, any theory of media capitalism should deliver the most reliable, rigorous and comprehensive form of knowledge about media capitalism that can be mustered. It needs to be designed to be more than just an unproven and speculative investigation. But such early fragments of a possible theory of media capitalism are also distinguished from mere hypotheses that, at a later stage of future research, might be used to develop a framework to empirically test, for example, for The Iron Law of Media Capitalism. This comes in connection with our understanding of communication, the political economy of the media, general media theory, social science (sociology, political science, etc.), hegemony and the ideology of media capitalism. To complete such an initial project and to adhere to Kant’s what is and what ought to be, a theory of media capitalism might imagine that theoretical fragments can—and should—carry connotations to having predictive value. But before reaching this, a few basic parameters of such early fragments of a theory of media capitalism should be outlined in summary form. Media capitalism is fundamentally different from all previous forms of capitalism. Unlike many of its noteworthy predecessors, media capitalism has internalised the media as a key part of its own structure. Media and capitalism can no longer be thought of as separate entities. The media↔capitalism interface, or perhaps even merger, depends on an integrated media apparatus. It works in two ways: 1. it continues to secure traditional consumerism as established during the twentieth century; while 2. it also transmits media capitalism’s hegemonic ideology, securing media capitalism’s entire system. Media capitalism’s ideological infiltration guides people whether there is democracy in a particular domain of society (Europe, USA, etc.) or not (China) or a bit (Russia). Media capitalism has never and perhaps will never depend on democracy. In short, whether in its democratic or not-so democratic form, media capitalism guides society’s four domains:

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Education Work Consumption Democracy

No democracy No democracy No democracy

Media capitalism’s ideology guides education without being disturbed by democracy Media capitalism’s ideology guides work without being disturbed by democracy Media capitalism’s ideology guides consumption without being disturbed by democracy

democracy

Media capitalism’s ideology guides democracy so that it is not disturbed by democracy

Fig. 10.4  Society’s democratic and non-democratic areas

Figure 10.4 shows that media capitalism has successfully eliminated democracy, confining it to just one domain of society. Quite miraculously, it protected three domains from being molested by democracy. Media capitalism has even annihilated the potentially disturbing threat of democracy from almost all its core domains except for the domain of parliamentarian democracy (Fig.  10.4shaded). The running of societies largely without democracy is ideologically camouflaged through the rather hegemonic we-­ live-­in-a-democracy ideology. Apart from three domains of human life in which democracy plays virtually no role (Fig. 10.4education-work-consumption), it is only the democratic domain in which democracy still exists—albeit highly organised, media-manipulated and orchestrated and reduced to an auxiliary mechanism for corporate media. In the three non-democratic domains, media capitalism spends considerable ideological effort to assure that the functionalities of capitalism remain largely undisturbed. As a consequence, media capitalism’s steering capacity of societies is immediate and direct in the three domains of education, work and consumption and indirect in one—democracy. Whether direct or indirect, virtually all of societal steering in all four domains is done through the media. From these theoretical premises of media capitalism eight key predictive and rather hypothetical propositions can be issued: 1. Media capitalism will continue to strengthen and solidify its affairs— including its already successfully established interest symbiosis—for the foreseeable future.143 2. Media capitalism will expand geographically, developing into an all-­ inclusive global system.144 3. Media capitalism’s corporations will increasingly concentrate, ossifying its global media apparatus but—most likely—without ever becoming one single global corporate monopoly.145 4. Media capitalism will intensify its ideological-hegemonic powers, colonising all spheres of life and developing its steering potentials and thereby strengthening the Iron Law of Media Capitalism.

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5. Media capitalism will carry forward its project of ideologically unifying all four domains that will, as a result, become more similar. 6. Media capitalism will strengthen its ideological-manipulative camouflaging powers capable of masking media capitalism’s global pathologies (poverty and environmental destruction146) while continuously producing new pathologies in education (compliant individuals), work (alienation), politics (authoritarianism camouflaged as democracy) and the destruction of our living planet (necrocene147 and ecocide).148 7. Media capitalism will incorporate new communication technology (soft and hardware) utilising its new communicative potentials to strengthen media capitalism. 8. Media capitalism will utilise new social science (sociological and psychological) research, using advances in manipulative engineered neuromarketing through merging behaviourism with neuro-science, sharpening its manipulative instruments.149 All this may indicate a pessimistic, if not miserablist150 and rather dystopian notion on which no other than Joseph Pulitzer once noted, ‘a cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself’.151 Still, a positive image of the future can be kept alive even in seemingly dire circumstances. Notwithstanding, the purveyors of dystopia often generate ‘a media-induced state of apathy…promoting junk culture…anti-intellectualism [while] reducing adults to the level of 11-year-­ olds [as well as favouring] learned helplessness’.152 Not surprisingly, just as… • people under slavery were (and still are) made to think that slavery is eternal;153 and • people under feudalism were made to think that feudalism’s God given order is eternal; • so are media capitalism’s people made to think that it is eternal and ‘history has ended’.154 Nonetheless, history has not and will not end as long as domination (e.g. slavery, bonded-labour capitalism and media capitalism) depended and continues to depend on ideological-manipulative techniques that camouflage capitalism’s pathologies.155 As a consequence, media capitalism’s raison d’être is to ‘support an ideological environment in which

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capitalism and consumerism [are made to] appear as the ideal’ world.156 This is linked to TINA: there is no alternative,157 securing capitalism and making sure that democracy no longer challenges media capitalism, while radicals are eliminated under PR’s media frame of:158 trivialisation, polarisation, marginalisation.

emphasis

on

internal

dissension

and

If one understands the methods through which this is achieved and that media capitalism depends—perhaps like no other form of capitalism before—on ideology, then this, in turn, might just indicate media capitalism’s weak spot.159 For the analysis of media capitalism and a resulting theory of it, ideology has largely been understood as a threefold definition: it camouflages contradictions; it cements domination and it prevents emancipation. Media capitalism uses all three forms to legitimise its existence, to cement the current status quo that is ‘beneficial to the top of the socio-­ economic pyramid’ and to camouflage its pathologies.160 As a consequence, media capitalism seeks to ‘legitimise capitalism through the control and dissemination of ideas’.161 Unless media capitalism includes an auto-destruction mechanism that implodes under the weight of its own contradictions and pathologies, it might just continue as Le Bon once predicted, assuring that its own existence is ‘held in popular detestation … [but will] last for five centuries [as these ideologies are] implanted [as] a lasting belief’.162 Rather than waiting for either self-destruction (necrocene) or 500 years, people might be better off working towards an ideology free and, above all, media-capitalism-free society. American sociologist Wright has dedicated considerable time on this, developing a threefold concept. He suggests:163 1. Diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live. 2. The theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go. 3. The theory of transformation tells us how to make viable alternatives achievable. What has been said so far in this book reflects on Wright’s first concept (diagnosis and critique). The final and concluding part is dedicated to Wright’s second and third concepts (alternatives and transformation). If and how a transition to a post-media-capitalist society might be achieved is outlined in the closing part of this conclusion.

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Creating a Post-Media-Capitalist Society On the basis of the aforementioned Kantian what is (media capitalism) and what ought to be164 (post-media-capitalism), even the hegemonic victory of media capitalism is not set in concrete. Instead, any ‘hegemony involves struggle, not seamless domination’.165 Media capitalism can only ever exist in sharp contrasts to what ought to be. Images of a post-media world represent a biting opposition in which ideology creation is no longer the goal as the ideological ‘doctors of commerce’ (PR) cease to exist.166 ‘Propaganda by news [and] positioning the corporate interest’167 no longer dominate while the media no longer show ‘crimes, scandals, national ceremonies, [and] victims of unusual activities’.168 A post-media-capitalist society would include a shift back from sign-/ exchange-value to use-value as brands and even ‘corporate branding’ disappear.169 All of this indicates a severe departure from media capitalism. For such a departure, the differences between media capitalism and what might be termed emancipated people media should be outlined. This has been done in Table 10.1: Table 10.1  Media capitalism versus people media Media Capitalism’s Ideological Media

Emancipated People Media

Centrally controlled programming One transmitter →many receivers Immobilisation of atomised and isolated individuals Passive mass-consumer behaviour Destruction of politics → ideologically guided herd Fordist mass production under managerial regimes Reports and news produced by specialists

Decentralised programming Each receiver = potential transmitter Mobilisation of critical individuals as social members Interaction of those involved in feedback Critical political learning processes

Motto: what bleeds leads, what thinks stinks170 Dominance of simplified images, easy to digest171 Associated conditioning (linking images) Property owner’s control: media industry

Socially organised production by community Democratic specialists ↔ community interaction Motto: what thinks leads, what bleeds stinks Conceptual and critical thinking Symbolic conditioning (linking abstract symbols) Social control of self-organised autonomous units

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A post-media-capitalist society has to radically alter media capitalism and its media as a whole (Table 10.1). Once the core has been reorganised, this will impact positively on the four domains because media capitalism’s ideological steering powers would have been removed. The idea behind that is that this works the exact opposite way from how media capitalism works today. Media capitalism’s key is monopolistic media corporations and their adjacent institutions (PR agencies, marketing firms, think tanks, etc.) from which virtually all manipulative powers flow. Against that, the target of emancipatory forces should be media capitalism’s core apparatus—not just its auxiliary domains of education, work, consumerism and democracy. These are merely media capitalism’s sub-spheres and superstructures.172 Today, they are guided by media capitalism. Changing these sub-spheres will not alter media capitalism. It will change the periphery—not the core. Nonetheless, changes in media capitalism’s core will impact on all four domains. Once corporate media’s ideological and manipulative powers are removed, we might again ‘fill our lives…with experience [rather than] with the images of…experience’ as the stratospheric rise of Facebook,173 YouTube, Google,174 Twitter175 and so on testifies.176 Instead of merely creating images of experiences and allowing ‘the social world [to be] filtered to the individual’,177 post-media individuals will partake in society’s affairs through liberated democracy and real participation in schooling, work, media and democracy. Students will be freed from having to undergo years of ideologically driven schooling dedicated to behaviourism’s apparatus that favours strict E→R conditioning.178 Similar impacts will be felt in work, consumption and democracy. In this way, schooling just as much as work, consumption and democracy can be reshaped. In the media domain in particular but also in the four domains of society, post-ideological living beyond media capitalism demands the establishment of social, universally grounded and ethical discourse.179 One way of achieving this might be through Habermas’ socially based theory of communicative action and ideal speech.180 This theory represents free speech in action and in reality. This means ‘freedom of the press [is no longer] guaranteed only to those who own one’.181 The end product of such a communicatively established move away from media capitalism and towards living might be called something like communicative non-state socialism or communicative anarchism.182 Post-­ media capitalism living might be reflective of, for example, Honneth’s recent idea of socialism.183 This post-media-capitalism living is a

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non-­Hegelian anti-state project in which communicative action rather than the state governs society.184 Post-media capitalism living means people rather than bureaucracies, communalisation and nationalisation.185 Nonetheless, setting up social parameters that assist the formation of ethical discourse for communicative action depends on what Fichte, Hegel, Kropotkin, Taylor and Honneth have correctly noted as mutual and equal recognition.186 In order to give all societal participants access to mutual and equal recognition and the option of engaging in dialogue directed towards mutual understanding, communal discussion forums based on ideal speech need to be set up. These forums no longer consist of ‘atomised individuals [often seen as] people-as-consumers, [and] units of consumption’.187 Instead, these are mature citizens furnished with communicative competencies. Communicative competence demands the creation of participants that conduct all speech acts under conditions that reflect interpersonal and ethical relationships among all actors in a social situation.188 It consists of the ability to follow socially constructed rules that are not external but internal to communicative processes. These rules are not those that govern syntax but rules that govern speech in an ethical setting. Of prime relevance is the fact that communicative competence stresses the ability to construct well-formed sentences that relate to reality. This is expressed as the creation of a prepositional sentence directed towards truth and the ability to express intentions as a linguistic expression of what is intended. Finally, this also needs to include communicative performances that conform to recognised ethics, norms and values as accepted by society and the members of such a free speech forum. To achieve these provisions, three conditions have to be met: Table 10.2 presents competent, thematic and cogent arguments. These are seen as core conditions for communicative action and create a systematic way of reasoning. They form the basis for statements that are connected to validity claims. Put simply, one cannot engage in argumentation unless one is willing to argue sincerely. Willingness to be sincere and honest and the pursuit of truth support each other. When such forms of arguments are put forward, discourses strive towards universalistic and ethical ideals. In this context, discourse can be seen as an ideal version of communication. Discourses are events under which rationally motivated arguments—targeted at reaching agreement and common understanding—are exchanged.

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Table 10.2  Three conditions for ideal speech Conditions

Description

Competency General symmetric conditions have to be established so that every competent speaker can enter into argumentation. Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features described in purely formal terms, excludes all forces—whether they arise from within the process of reaching understanding or influence it from the outside—except for the force of the better argument (and that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for the truth) Thematise Participants are free to thematise a problematic validity claim and are relieved of the pressure of action and experience in a hypothetical attitude and only with reasons—whether the claim defended by the proponents rightfully stands or not Cogency Participants have to produce cogent arguments that are convincing in virtue of their intrinsic properties and with which validity claims can be redeemed or rejected

Such discourses take on three forms of argumentation. Firstly, they are constructed as theoretical discourse. Here, problematic arguments on controversial truth claims are thematised. The second version constructs practical discourse. As outlined in Greek philosophy, practicality and ethics are one and the same. What is practical has to be ethical and what is ethical has to be practical. If this link is broken, pathologies are the inevitable outcome. In practical ethics and ethical practice, the issue of normative rightness is the basis for argumentation. The third version is constructed as explicative discourse. It demands comprehensibility, well-formed-ness, and rule-correctness of symbolic expressions that have been thematised. All arguments can either be accepted or rejected. The issuing (sending) and receiving (positive/negative) of these arguments lead to acceptance and agreement on the part of the receiver. This is equivalent to recognition of a validity claim raised by the speaker. In sum, arguments issued by participants take on at least one of the three forms of argumentation shown below: Table 10.3 shows the theoretical, practical and aesthetic discourse relating to problematic expressions. These are cognitive forms of communication that relate to learning from mistakes and failure. They also relate to moral-practical forms of communication that deal with normative conflicts and issues being disputed from a moral viewpoint. Finally, explicative

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Table 10.3  Three forms of arguments Argument

Description

Theoretical If they are asserted and justified solely with a view to whether they are true Practical If they are asserted and justified with a view to granting what is said; validity as reason for action, the practical justification is the justification of a reason Aesthetic If they are asserted and justified with an aim to lending the object of these statements validity as a reason for adopting world-shaping views

Test/target Truth Action and reason World-­ shaping view

Table 10.4  Sentence formulation for discourses Sentences

Forms

Descriptive Descriptive sentences, which serve to ascertain facts in the broadest sense, can be accepted or rejected from the standpoint of the truth of a proposition. Normative Normative sentences (or ought-sentences), which serve to regulate actions, can be accepted or rejected from the standpoint of the rightness (or justice) of a way of acting. Evaluating Evaluating sentences (or value judgments), which serve to appraise something, can be accepted or rejected from the standpoint of the appropriateness or adequacy of value standards (or the ‘good’). Explication Explications, which serve to explain operations like speaking, classifying, calculating, deducing, judging and so on, can be accepted or rejected from the standpoint of the comprehensibility of well-formedness of symbolic expressions.

discourses relate to understanding, linguistic rules, the meaning of expressions, the interpretation of language and the practice of translation. The use of such discourse language reflects Rousseau’s art of communicating our thoughts.189 It takes a central role. The way in which we communicate becomes the central medium through which actors communicate. These forms of argumentation are mostly expressed through speaking and through the construction of sentences. There are four forms of sentences that are related to discourse:190 The four forms of sentences in Table 10.4 are linked to four validity claims that are required in order to establish communicative action.191 Communicative action based on validity claims can only be established

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when both—speaker and listener—accept the truth of an assertion without doubting each other’s sincerity. Once this condition is established, meaning can be ascribed on the basis that a sentence is considered to be truthful. This reflects the positioning of something like a desire to tell the truth. It governs all speech acts. Therefore, telling the truth becomes constitutive for linguistic meaning.192 Truth is of vital importance to ideal speech. Anyone who is fully capable of communicating in a language has at least some implicit grasp of the concept of truth. Theories on truth have been categorised into four key levels:193 Table 10.5 shows that ideal speech can only be established when a speaker accepts the normative validity of a statement. It cannot develop when the listener doubts the seriousness of the other agent’s intention. Essential to the communicative relationship directed towards ideal speech is the acceptance of truthfulness. Once the above outlined conditions are established, ideal speech’s four key elements of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness and rightness become reality. These are the basic conditions for the establishment of an ideal speech situation. These conditions can be divided into external conditions that have to be met from the outside of a speech situation and internal conditions that guide communication once the frame of ideal speech is established. In the outer area, social and non-linguistic conditions for ideal speech have to be met. In the inner area, validity claims are based on four

Table 10.5  Four theories of truth Theory

Description

Correspondence True sentences are those that correspond to or are true in virtue of Theory some actual states of affairs in the world. Coherence theory Those sentences are true that cohere with or entail are entailed by or are consistent with our beliefs. Pragmatic-­ Habermas’ pragmatic-consensus theory of truth asserts that the consensus theory meaning of truth must be established in terms of value claims about the truth of statements. Truth is established through the application of communicative action under conditions of ideal speech, tested under Habermas’ four value claims. Ultimately, truth can only be established socially. Semantic theory Truth is a semantic device for staging a sentence as a material equivalence between the original and other sentences in the meta-language.

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general symmetric conditions

produce cogent arguments

Comprehensibility Truthfulness   Ideal Speech Situation   Truth Rightness

validity claims can be redeemed or rejected

participants are free to thematise a problematic validity claim

Fig. 10.5  The structure of ideal speech

elements that guide a dialogue. Each actor participating in ideal speech discussions has to meet all four conditions that are shown below: Figure 10.5 displays a clear picture of a complete framework for communication.194 Its completeness must be established in full and without any damage. Communication will be seen as disturbed when one condition for ideal speech is missing. Furthermore, when communication among societal members is not directed towards reaching understanding, a vital condition is not satisfied. In this case, communication becomes an instrument of system integration195 that structures communicative exchanges under conditions of deception and distortion. This leads to an objectively false consciousness that gives rise to structural violence.196 The prevention of violations of structural elements is of utmost relevance for ideal speech. Otherwise they create systematic restrictions on communication. Once such violations have been permitted, distortions become established in formal conditions of speech acts. Inevitably, this leads to communicative practices that are distorted and prejudiced. They distort the social and subjective assertions of communicative societal members. In such cases, the domain in which ideal speech was supposed to take place has been degenerated by media capitalism into a forum of manipulation. The mere perception of communication enables those in a powerful position to manipulate others against their own interest.197 In media capitalism’s falsehood that ‘the masses have never thirsted after truth’,198 media validity claims turn into illusions of non-truthfulness, recently framed as alternative facts199 and fake news.200 This has to stop. ‘Arguing for better television [and mass media] is like trying to cure alcoholism by switching to better whiskey’.201

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Inside corporate mass media, ideal speech and communicative action cannot be established. In other words, ideal speech acts and communicative action cannot be instrumentally guided towards externally defined strategic goals. Instead, they need to fulfil conditions that free communication from system interferences. Only an unhindered environment free of domination allows the flourishing of ideal speech and communicative action directed towards positive social change.202 Once communicative action is applied, domination-free speech faces a dramatic challenge because it has a fundamentally different logic upon which post-ideological societies are created. Ideal speech is directed towards critical rationality. In stark contrast, media capitalism’s ideological communication focuses on the ideology of rationalities such as means→ends. Ideal speech and communicative action pose one of the most serious challenges to such externally driven ideology because they locate human communication away from the imperatives of media capitalism. Only when media capitalism’s sustained grip that governs the central sphere of today’s society is replaced by human↔human interaction can people develop alternatives to media capitalism. In other words, the key to dissolving media capitalism’s pathologies does not lie in waiting for the aforementioned self-destructive modes that are inherent in media capitalism.203 What is demanded is an active change that ends its pathological modes through the creation of a communicative forum disconnected from the imperatives of media capitalism. Only then can the vicious circle of engineered ideology and its pathological outcomes be broken. Even though media capitalism’s ideological powers may appear overwhelming and Frederic Jameson may be correct when noting, ‘it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’204 there are nonetheless alternatives to media capitalism.205 A society that lies beyond current pathologies is within the reach of human action. The possibility of achieving a post-media-capitalist society is not without merit once human beings have overcome the ideological cage that is currently in operation. Once the apparently crushing powers of media capitalism have ended, individuals can come together in a freed-up sphere for a free exchange of free ideas about human society. In such communicative forums the shape of a post-media-capitalist society takes on a primary role. Social dialogues are no longer externally defined by media capitalism’s money and power code. In this way, humans can move from being externally manipulated to support a pathological and commercialised society towards building their own society. In the negation of and emancipation

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from media capitalism rests the hope for post-media-capitalist living. Any critical inquiry into ending the ideological domination of media capitalism as part of critical theory remains loyal to those who live in hope.206 Others have given, and continue to give, their life to the great refusal set against slavery, feudalism, liberal capitalism and today’s media capitalism. This is no longer a hopeless enterprise as:207 it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

Notes 1. The concept of “media capitalism” is distinctively different from “communicative capitalism” (Dean, J., 2005. Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1): 51–74; Dean, J. 2009. Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics, Durham: Duke University Press) that has been seen as a concept ‘to capture…and analyse the current conjuncture of economics, politics, meaning and identity’ (Mumby, D.  K. 2016. Organizing beyond organization: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism, Organization, 23(6): 891). 2. There is also the use of corporate press releases measured in “lev” (0-to-1, the higher the number, the higher the overlap), i.e. the ‘number of edits that are required’ to convert a press release into a journalistic article (Boumans, J., 2018. Subsidizing the News? Organizational press releases’ influence on news media’s agenda and content, Journalism Studies, 19(15): 2270). 3. Miller, D. & Dinan, W. 2008. A century of spin, London: Pluto Press, p. 80f.; Marchand, R. 1998. Creating the corporate soul: the rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 4; Freedman, D. 2015. Media Moguls and Elite Power, PERC papers no. 2, February 2015 (downloaded: http://www.perc.org.uk/perc/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2015/04/ PERC-­2-­Freedman-­Elites.pdf), pp.  2, 6; Rothman, S. & Lichter, S. R. 1985. Personality, ideology and world view: A comparison of media and business elites, British Journal of Political Science, 15(1): 45; Rothman, S. & Lichter, S.R. 1982. Media and business elites: Two classes in conflict?, The Public Interest, (69): 117; http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/participants2013.html; Morris, T. & Goldsworthy, S. 2008. PR – a persuasive industry, Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 55.

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Index1

A Adorno, T. W., 9 Adults, 176 Affluent Society, 84 Affluenza, 70 Agency, 470 Age of Manipulation, 3 Age of Television, 177 Akerlof, G. A., 281 Al Gore, 19 Alice-in-Wonderland principle, 354 Alternative facts, 483 Alternative media sites, 419 Amazon, 6 Anatole, France, 468 Anti-democratic propaganda, 408 Anti-intellectualism, 475 Anti-union propaganda, 367 Apple, 6 Apple-Foxconn, 3 Aristotle, 21 Astroturfing, 409

Attention Merchants, 305 Austen, Jane, 76 Australian, 16 Axel Springer, 283 B Banality of Evil, 316 Berlusconi, Silvio, 283 Bernays, E. L., 360, 361 Bertelsmann, 16 Bestselling commodities, 315 Big Brother, 1 Black propaganda, 460 Blogs, 14 Boot-lickers, 361 Bosses, 352 Bottom Line, 10 Bowie, Norman E., 377 Brandeis, Louis, 263 Brecht, Berthold, 78 Bruston-Marteller, 3

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Klikauer, Media Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87958-7

501

502 

INDEX

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 11 Burger King, 13 Burson, Harold, 3 Buzzwords, 425 C Camus, Albert, 2 Catchwords, 192 Catchy phrases, 425 Catholic Church, 3 Celebrification, 146 Chain-of-command, 381 Character assassination, 428 Cheney, Dick, 3 Chicago School, 84 Child TV, 178 China, 65 Chomsky, N., 9 Christian symbols, 63 Citizen Kane, 12 Citoyén, 128 CNN, 23, 216 Coca Cola, 140 Coke-vs-Pepsi, 465 Cold intimacies, 227 Colleges, 226 Conditioned association, 223 Conformist Psychology, 305 Converted, 466 Corporate social responsibility (CSR), 5 Cracker-jack PR, 145 Crisis PR, 4 Critical theory, 32 CSI, 240 D Dark Ages, 405 Darwin, C., 62 Defoe, D., 62

Democracy in America, 428 Democrat, 13 Deny strategy, 354 Destutt de Tracy, 8 Dickensian workshops, 353 Digital silos, 233 Disney, 16 Divide-and-rule, 190 Doctored image, 141 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 64 Dshwasher-to-millionaire, 285 Dumping-down, 145 Du Pont, 4 Durkheim, Emile, 175 Durruti, Buenaventura, 75 Dutschke, Rudi, 75 E Editorials, 412 Electoral spectacles, 149 Elite universities, 28 Emotional Capitalism, 69 England, 405 Entrepreneurship, 214 Enzensberger, H. G., 9 Ethics, 142 Europe, 63 The Evil Empire, 461 Excel file, 265 Exxon, 22 F Facebook, 6 Fake news, 483 Fascism, 1, 72 FCC, 265 Feedback systems, 435 Feudalism, 22 Fichte, 479 FIFO, 380

 INDEX 

fMRI, 178 FOMO, 316 Fordism, 11, 67 Formal education, 171 Foucault, Michel, 152, 156n30 Fowler, Mark, 265 Fox, 129 Franco, Francisco, 72 Frankfurt School, 32 Free speech, 132 Free-to-air-TV, 412 French Revolution, 64 Freud, Sigmund, 30 G Gemeinschaft, 274 General Motors, 139 General Strike, 373 Germany, 186 Global south, 70 GM, 22 Gods, 62 Goebbels, Joseph, 279 Goldfish, 464 Goldman, Emma, 175 Google, 6 Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM), 6, 135 Gossip journalism, 11 Greece, 219 Greek philosophers, 259 Greek society, 259 Gucci, 88 Guernica, 72 Guevara, Che, 75 Gutenberg, Johannes, 11 H Habermas, J., 16 Habits of thought, 329

Haiti, 405 Harley-Davidson, 141 Harvard Business Review, 134 Harvard Business School, 229 Hayek, F. A., 84 Hayes, Rutherford B., 263 Headmaster, 192 Hearst, William Randoph, 283 Hebrew Bibles, 64 Hegel, G. W. F., 26 Heilbroner, Robert, 269 Herman, E. S., 9 Hidden persuaders, 304 Hill and Knowlton, 3 Hippy, 180 Hirschman, A.O., 227 Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 67 Hollywood, 145 Holocaust, N., 356 Homo consumens, 331 Homo economicus, 331 Homo faber, 276 Honneth, A., 479 Horkheimer, M., 9 Houses, Bleak, 269 HRM, 77 HR-managers, 185 Human Relation School, 327 I Ideal speech, 479 Idiot box, 172 IG Farben, 460 Impression management, 366 Impuls purchasing, 268 Index of Forbidden Books, 325 Industrial age, 278 Industrial-Media Complex, 468 Infotainment, 274 Intellectuals, 128 Intellectual Self-Defence, 308

503

504 

INDEX

Internet, 362 iPad, 148 Iran Air (IA), 461 Iron law of oligarchy, 221 J Jasper, 324 Jefferson, Thomas, 10 Judiciary, 413 Junk culture, 475 Junkmen, 360 K Kahneman, D., 309 Kant, Immanuel, 73 Key learning objectives (KLO), 320 Kindergarten, 185 Kitschy movies, 271 Klein, Naomi, 129 Korean Airlines (KAL), 461 KPIs, 234 Kropotkin, 479 L Labour Government, 414 Lasswell, Harold, 6 Latin language, 126 Law and order, 66 Le Bon, G., 464 Learning-by-heart, 323 Learning outcomes, 320 Lecture-podcasts, 237 Lennon, John, 172 Libya, 261 LinkedIn, 11, 14 Lippmann, Walter, 133 Lobbying, 354 Lockheed Martin, 5

Lowdham, 269 Loyal opposition, 424 Lucy, 61 Ludlow massacre, 4 Lumpenproletariat, 87 Luther, Martin, 71 Luxemburg, Rosa, 75 M Magretta, Joan, 134 Malcolm X, 75 Mandela, Nelson, 279 Manége, 359 Marcos, Subcomandante, 75 Marinho, Roberto, 283 Marketization, 189 Marsteller, Bill, 3 Marx, K., 9 Mass universities, 28 Mausfeld, Rainer, 134 MBA, 194 McDonalds, 13 Mead, G. H., 15 Media-guided democracy, 26 Media oligarchies, 16 Merchants of Death, 4 Michels, Robert, 221 Micro-fascism, 176 Microsoft, 6 Mills, C. W., 7 Mills, Satanic, 269 Mind, Self, and Society, 15 Money, 185 Money Never Sleeps, 90 Mont Pelerin Society, 84 Moore, Michael, 129 Mouse, Mickey, 190 Münzer, Thomas, 71 Murdoch, Rupert, 16, 283 Muslim, 87

 INDEX 

N Nazi-Germany, 67 Nazism, 72 Nestle, 4 Neuromarketing, 144 Newcomen, Thomas, 64 News.Corp, 16 New Testament, 64 New York Times, 228 NGOs, 329 Nickelodeon, 172 Nietzsche, F., 375 Nike, 22 Nintendo, 180 Noble Prize, 281 O Occupy Wall Street, 76 Oikos, 125 Online teaching, 237 Opinion manipulation, 92 Organization Men, 363 Orwell, George, 1, 12 Orwellian society, 147 P Pagan symbols, 63 Pairing, 313 Panopticon, 356 Paris Communé, 72 Parliamentarian democracy, 261 Pavlov, Ivan, 30 Peasantry, 125 Peasant Wars, 71 Penal colonies, 432 Penny papers, 464 Performance related pay (PRP), 193 Persuasion technology, 325 Petty-consumer ideology, 184 PhD, 194

505

Picasso, Pablo, 72 Plato, 125 Pluralism, 138 Plutocracy, 125 Pocket-money, 174 Poison Ivy, 4 Polis, 125 The Politics of Fear, 87 Polytechnics, 226 PowerPoint, 237 Privatization of Everything, 18, 411 PR-man, 10 Procter & Gamble, 12 PR-talk, 16 PR universities, 219 Psycho-technologies, 2 Psy-Ops, 148 Public Relations Handbook, 147 Q Qur’an, 64 R Rags-to-riches, 87 Rationality of irrationality, 356 Rat-race, 185 Reformation, 71 Religious TV, 275 Republican, 13 Research, 215 Restructuring, 220 Reuters, 354 Revolution in China, 459 Right to manage, 69 River Rouge Factory, 279 Robespierre, Maximilien, 75 Robinson Crusoe, 62 Rockefeller, John D., 4 Rocker, Rudolf, 75 Rolls Royce, 68

506 

INDEX

Roman Empire, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31 Routine work tasks, 379 Russell, Bertrand, 28 Russia, 65 Russian Revolution, 72

Steam engine, 64 Strauss, Leo, 7 Sunday schools, 213 Surface structure, 331 Surveillance, 153 Symbolic association, 223

S Sacco, Nicola, 75 Schiller, H. I., 9 Schools, 28 Scientification, 322 Scientific management, 214 Scott, D., 336n51 Scott, J. C., 331, 349n223 Self-help industry, 189 Serfdom, 126 Servants of Power, 81 Sex Life, 197 Sex-seeking consumer, 272 Sex sells, 312 Sexting, 273 Sexual abuse, 269 Sexual fulfilment, 272 Shareholder value, 412 Shiller, R. J., 281 Simpson, Bart, 190 Sinclair, Upton, 224 Skinner, B. F., 30 Sky News, 140 Skype, 11 Slamdog-millionaire, 87 Slavery, 125 Smith, Adam, 10 Smythe, D. W., 9 Social mobility, 370 Soviet Union, 87 Spencer, Herbert, 61 Staff ID-number, 375 Stalinism, 1 Standard Operation Sheet (SOS), 234

T Tabloidisation of everything, 411 Tabloidization, 136 Tabloid-TV, 325 Talkback radio, 14 Taylor, Frederick, 172 Telescreen, 144 Televangelists, 275 Terrorism, 87 Textbooks, 187 Think-tanks, 409 Thirty Years War, 71 Tittytainment, 11 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 428 Toy ads, 423 Trade unionism, 313 Trivialisation, 476 Trump, Donald, 148 TV-advertising, 20 TV-Turnoff Week, 179 TV-watching, 222 Twitter, 14 U Unionisation, 218 United Kingdom (UK), 372 United States of America (USA), 72 UPS-strike, 373 V Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 75 Varoufakis, 269

 INDEX 

Viacom, 16 Vivendi, 16 Vocational training, 171 Volonté générale, 409 Von Mises, 467 Voter supression, 409 W War-equals-business, 359 Watson, D., 235 Wayne, John, 367 Weapon of mass deception, 470 Wikipedia, 135 Wild West, 135

Working-class, 217 World Bank, 462 World War I, 72 Wright, E. O., 476 WWI propaganda, 141 Y YouTube, 14 Z Zoom, 11 Zucker, Jeff, 23 Zyklon-B, 460

507