April 16, 2001 Table of Contents Home Back Issues       Resurrecting Reality by Stephanie Hiller                 The ultimate irony of our attempt to master all of nature, and save our own human nature, could be achieved in the digital near-future, where the only things left are a dead, depleted world, and one all-too-real virtual machine. In an article published in the current issue of AdBusters, Richard DeGrandpre argues that as we become more habituated to relating to the world through digital media, we unconsciously modify our sense of reality to fit the screen. As a result, our relationships with each other and with the natural world become secondary. "With everyone in the family wired, not a single social interaction need take place. Dad can finally get some rest." Is that the direction our lives are taking? Despite the temporary decline of dot.com prosperity, there's no question that our shared reality is beginning to look like a set of bleeps projected upon a screen. And it all began with television. In the 50s, shows like "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" presented models of family life by which we measured our own lives. We thought "normal" families were like the ones on TV while our own families, with their problems and conflicts, were the painful exception. So televised reality began to supersede our lived experience. In our circle this month, one woman told of how her mother became so involved with her soap operas that when the family went away on vacation she wrote letters home to keep up with the "lives" of the characters. When her husband read one of these letters, he asked,. "Who are these people?" We all know people at work who spend their lunch breaks discussing events in the latest television series. Children, with toys matching television characters, invest these figures with all the vitality that their young imaginations can summon. My stepdaughter told me one day that she used to wonder "how all those people could fit inside the tv set." To her, they were real. As television established itself as the virtual altar on which our ideals were embodied, commercials became progressively more sophisticated, employing the information gleaned from behavioral psychology to get that viewer to buy the product. Now shows as well as commercials are cleverly manipulated to promote the values and products of the corporate world. In her recent book, Can't Buy Me Love, Jean Kilbourne examines in detail how advertisers control the content of magazines and television to encourage the purchase of things we don't really want and certainly don't need -- gas-guzzling cars, cosmetics, diet programs, toxic household cleaners, cigarettes and alcohol, to name a few -- substituting material goods for the love and happiness our hearts desire. Now we have a plethora of ads that suggest that relationships with these objects are actually more satisfying than relationships with families and lovers. "We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products, that objectify people and trivialize our most heartfelt moments and relationships." She quotes dozens of ads, beginning with an ad for Charmin toilet paper: "Bath tissue is like marriage. The longer it lasts, the better it is." Some are truly horrifying, like an image of a baby on a leash with the words, "A child is the ultimate pet" or an ad for a sport utility vehicle that comes with a TV/video cassette player: "Quiet kids. How's that for a product benefit?" Kilbourne writes, "More often, sentimental images of children are used to evoke deep feelings of love and protectiveness, which are then connected to a product." "What makes this room so cosy?" is the caption of an ad in which a child strokes her mother's air; it's an ad for room freshener! These ads get our attention by toying with our deepest needs for comfort and love &endash; and offer us products instead, leaving us with the aching bundle of our unfulfilled human needs. The crisis experienced by our affluent children proves the point. Suicide is a major cause of adolescent deaths. It's kids from affluent suburbs that go out and shoot their classmates, leaving the pundits "wondering why". Advertisers have done a good job of persuading us that image is All, yet the depression and alienation experienced by youth who have bought into the program shows how hollow that image can be. As consumers, we have become products ourselves. It is we who are bought and sold by the advertisers. "Magazines, newspapers, and radio and television programs round us up rather like cattle, and producers and publishers then sell us to advertisers, usually through ads placed in advertising and industry publications. 'The people you want, we've got all wrapped up for you,' declares The Chicago Tribune in an ad placed in Advertising Age, the major publication of the advertising industry." It's all about demographics. If black people have the money to buy what companies want to sell, then black people will be used to promote those products. Ads now include gay people too, though they're relationship is carefully downplayed so as not to offend the homophobic consumer. Values are arbitrary, utterly relative to the rule of the marketplace; in the world of sales, integrity can be bought and sold, and so can women. "A report by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women named advertising the worst offender in perpetuating the image of women as sex symbols and an inferior class of human being." (From the website www.jeankilbourne.com) The images in Kilbourne's chapter "Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt" confirm that the Commission was right. Sexuality, violence and alcohol are all linked in ads for anything from Old Spice to Smirnoff, and yes, "Bitch Skateboards." If, like me, you haven't been thumbing through magazines or watching television lately, you'll be shocked by the blatant eroticism of nearly naked female bodies and aggressive males in pursuit of them. "Sometimes women are shown dead or in the process of being killed. 'Great hair never dies,' says an ad featuring a female corpse lying on a bed, her breasts exposed." It's pornography, and not merely for the pleasure of it. The lust so-generated is for the product. And when the stuff doesn't satisfy the desire &endash; or when real women don't behave -- well then, you force them into it. Or reach for a cigarette or a beer. Or a gun… Children, too, are employed for erotic stimulation of this kind. Bombarded with such images, it becomes unsurprising that our society is riddled with abuse. It's just a short step from flipping through the pages of a magazine to creeping into a child's bedroom in the middle of the night. Advertising reinforces the worst stereotypes in our culture, holding up docile women and tough males for us to emulate. In her new book Salvation, bell hooks shows how racism is perpetuated by our virtual culture, which contributes to the profound despair experienced by black youth. To hooks, the exploitation of blacks in the media is more destructive to black self-esteem than the segregation she experienced growing up. At least segregation offered tight-knit communities of black people determined to survive despite the hatred that surrounded them. Televised images of successful and affluent blacks creates the illusion that black people really have achieved equality -- if they look and act like whites. As a result, "black folks of all classes began to buy into capitalist consumer thinking, which equated worth with material status and spread the message that 'you are what you buy.'… More than racial assault, which black folks were quick to recognize and resist, this type of thinking was demoralizing. It was also terribly dangerous. It helped create a social climate in poor and destitute black communities where individuals were willing to rob, beat, and kill one another for material items. It helped lay the groundwork for the acceptance of a drug-based, capitalist, dog-eat-dog culture in poor communities where non-market values like sharing resources and neighborliness, which were once the norm, have been ridiculed, mocked, and all but erased." Ghetto gangsterism, she makes clear, is not the product of poverty, but of the media's devaluation of people, especially black people. As virtual reality spreads throughout the world on the wings of the global economy, it cuts deep gashes in ancient indigenous cultures that had endured for centuries on the strength of their spiritual values. When television came to the Gwich'in people of Alaska, they found that their young people no longer cared to fish or hunt or listen to the stories of their people. They'd rather drink cokes. The free trade treaties of the last decade have enabled the tentacles of corporate salesmanship to reach into the deepest recesses of the jungle, broadcasting the same virtual propaganda we receive at home to people who will never get closer to the American dream than the nearest Macdonald's. The control now exercised by global corporations over governments and the people they were designed to represent is the ultimate threat to human value. Invoking the First Amendments, companies are now entitled to sue governments if they should attempt to restrict commerce that threatens the environment or the public welfare. Firmly in control of our own government and the media, global corporations are the authors of the virtual reality to which we cling. Is there no turning back? Says DeGrandpre, "If the advancing digital revolution were brought to a halt today, we'd all be caught in an existential limbo, torn between the artificial dreams of simulated reality and the unplugged world in which we try to fulfil them." In his view, those of us who enjoy the material benefits of our affluent society are already too dependent on the techno toys of our robotic age to contemplate living without them. Sales of the hugely popular robotic toy Furby certainly indicate the public's willingness to be seduced. Now Tiger Electronics is about to release I-Cybie, a fully motorized robotic dog that can bark, walk, lie down and respond to voice commands for the stunning price of $200. No hairs to clog up the vacuum cleaner with this virtual dog. Still, our messy emotions are our own, aren't they? Of course. But as DeGrandpre points out, our emotions, especially the disruptive ones, are increasingly monitored by drugs like Prozac. Feelings, when they do arise, are so threatening to the fragile mechanical reality to which we adhere that we find ourselves at their mercy. With so little grounding in community and relationship, and under threat of planetary annihilation, our emotions are bursting the container that once held them. The expectation of instant gratification further erodes the sense of discipline that would allow us the self control to hold our pain without medication. Regulated by psychiatric drugs and surrounded by a pseudo-reality engineered for us by corporations who now keep track of all our movements in cyberspace, with genetic engineering and the prospect of human clones ahead, and nuclear waste quietly seeping, seeping into the water table, we seem to have entered the Brave New World while we were sleeping, a science fiction nightmare more surreal than virtual, in which &endash; unlike in Startrek &endash; we, the Americans, are the enemy. But it's not too late to snap out of this trance. Kilbourne offers a wide range of suggestions for beating back the onslaught of advertising, including lifestyle changes like shutting off the tv and voluntarily simplifying our lives. She also suggests many avenues for activism against the insidious thrall of commercialized values. Protest works. When the public balks, corporations and governments do back down. Bush's recent attempt to eliminate protections against salmonella poisoning in school cafeterias is a heart-warming example. The opposition was so intense that the proposal was dropped the next day. The yearning to regain control of our lives has stimulated thousands of American youth to protest the latest trade treaty dreamed up by the multinationals, the FTAA. The use of puppets, street theatre and ritual in these protests indicates how deep is the urge to embrace a more colorful and vibrant community of souls. Unrest has returned to the American campus, Prozac or no. It's possible that revolution is in the air. These young people understand that the antidote to the toxic onslaught of virtual surreality is to resist it. Resistance &endash; massive, concerted resistance, as well as focused personal resistance &endash; is the only hope. And we must have hope, for "Without hope, people are easy to control," as the wise and wonderful dragon said in the Never Ending Story. The struggle against the tyranny of the global corporation is a struggle for life itself. Said one protestor at a recent demonstration: In the world proposed by the FTAA, every basic element of life and community is up for sale, including the health of the environment, the safety of workers, and the whole spectrum of efforts we citizens have made to provide education for our children, care for the sick, hope for the poor and all basic services of government. We say that our lives, our communities, the health of the earth's ecosystems, the cultures of indigenous peoples, the dreams of children are too important to be subsumed to profit. Another world is possible: a world of justice, freedom, ecological balance and true abundance, and we will make it real. (my emphasis) But activism will die for lack of fuel if we are not in possession of an alternative to this crass culture of commerce. We must LIVE our lives from heart and soul, fortifying our nests so that our children will develop immunity to the tantalizing messages of advertising, simplifying our lives so that we do not depend on technoreality, and strengthening the deep roots that anchor us in the natural world. Change must begin with ourselves. Writes hooks, "To return to love, making it a central issue in our efforts for collective recovery and healing, is not a move away from political action. Unless love is force undergirding our efforts to transform society, we lose our way." But this is not some New Agey turn-the-other cheek type of love. "Without changing structures of domination, we leave in place the culture of lovelessness." In her essay, "Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism," Paula Gunn Allen argues that white people have learned more than we realize from the First Americans: "the very qualities that marked Indian life in the sixteenth century have, over the centuries since contact between the two worlds occurred, come to mark much of contemporary American life," she says, pointing to "informality in social relations, egalitarianism, and the rearing of women who value autonomy, strength, freedom, and personal dignity -- and who are often derided by European, Asian, and Middle Eastern men for those qualities. Contemporary Americans value leisure almost as must as tribal people do," but it's certainly harder and harder to come by since the publication of the Sacred Hoop in 1986. But, she adds, we missed two crucial points: the tribal system is "spirit-based" and women are honored. If American society judiciously modelled the traditions of the various Native Nations, the place of women in society would become central, the distribution of goods and power would be egalitarian, the elderly would be respected, honored, and protected as a primary social and cultural resource, the ideals of physical beauty would be considerably enlarged (to include "fat," strong-featured women, gray-haired, and wrinkled individuals, and others who in contemporary American culture are viewed as "ugly"). Additionally, the destruction of the biota, the life sphere, and the natural resources of the planet would be curtailed, and the spiritual nature of human and nonhuman life would become a primary organizing principle of human society. And if the traditional tribal systems that are emulated included pacifist ones, war would cease to be a major method of human problem solving. For Kilbourne, for hooks, for Gunn Allen, and for all pagans who circle under the moon, there is an alternative to the virtual surreality described by DeGrandpre, and it's the earth. "By the simple expedient of shifting the view back to its original and rightful position, the whole picture changes, and it becomes clear that our heart is in the sky," concludes The Sacred Hoop. "We understand that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is mother; she is thought, Wisdom, Dream, Tradition, Memory, Deity, and Life itself. Nos vemos." It takes practice, but we can go there. And as the Hopi tell us, it is the indigenous way that will survive the imminent destruction of this, the fourth, and the virtual, world.   Jean Kilbourne is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on alcohol and tobacco advertising and the image of women in advertising. A widely published writer and speaker, she is best known for her award-winning documentaries Killing Us Softly, Slim Hopes, and Pack of Lies. Visit her website at jeankilbourne.com/ Her latest book, Can't Buy Me Love, can be ordered from Powell's. bell hooks is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Bone Black: Memories of girlhood; and Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and a Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. Salvation is her latest work. Order it from Powells! Richard DeGrandpre is an Associate Editor of Adbusters magazine, in which the article quoted here first appeared. "The Great Escape" is excerpted from Digitopia: The Look of the New Digital You, just published by Random House and also available from Powell's. Paula Gunn Allen is a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux Indian and one the author of many books including the novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Grandmothers of the Light and Sacred Hoop, which may be ordered from Powell's.  For regular updates on the FTAA: http://sf.indymedia.org/features/ftaa http://www.ftaa-alca.org/ http://stopftaa.org/sf/#april21