Technologies of Persuasion – New School Fall 2009

Technologies of Persuasion: Marketing, Politics, and Propaganda in a
Digital Age

Douglas Rushkoff – New School Fall 2009.

This seminar will explore influence techniques from print, graphics,
traditional media and social reality as they migrate to the interactive space.
We will first study the fundamentals of persuasion, influence, and coercion,
and then look at how they have been adapted for use in interactive contexts.
These will include email, the web, and cell phones, as well as integrated
marketing, "one-to-one" communication, viral media, hacktivism and
neuromarketing. We will study a broad range of applications, from simple
marketing through online trading, political campaigns, activism, and satire,
and discuss the relative ethics of using the same techniques for different
purposes.

Readings will include whole books and excerpts from among the following
texts:

Coercion and Media Virus by Rushkoff, Postman’s Technopoly, Cluetrain
Manifesto, and the CIA Interrogation Manual, as well as writings by Adorno,
Barbrook, Caldini, Barthes, Larry Lessig, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, MoveOn,
RtMark, and etoy, We will also watch the documentaries Century of the Self,
Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the Politics of Fear.

Although students with all ranges of interests are welcome to take the
course, be forewarned: the seminar will be structured to allow for a highly
critical analysis of the role that marketing and influence techniques have
played in both online and offline society.

required :

Rushkoff, Douglas. Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say.
1-57322-829

recommended :

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. (intro by Miller) 0-9703125-9-8
Fogg, BJ. Persuasive Technology. 1-55860-643-2
Rushkoff, Douglas Media Virus. 0-345-39774-6
Metzger, Richard. Book of Lies. 0-9713942-7x
Howard, Martin. We Know What You Want. 1-932857-05-2
Postman, Neil. Technopoly.

DO:

            1.
weekly assignments.
Each student will also be responsible for
leading or one week’s discussion.

            2.
One 800-1000-word paper about or inspired by any of the following:           
            Merchants of
Cool (streaming online)

           
            Technopoly
(Postman)
           
            Influence
(Cialdini)
           
            Cluetrain Manifesto
(online)
           
            Century of
the Self, Parts 3 and 4.

            This
paper must have a thesis; you are making a proposition, expressing an argument,
or reaching a conclusion.  

            3.
Field project, conducted in groups of 4 or 5 people:
Disseminate an idea, trend, belief or
fashion throughout the school and, if possible, beyond.
Come up with a way to prove your results. 
Individually, write an 800-word evaluation of your process.

Technologies of Persuasion: by the week.

note: Most of the
movies will be able to be streamed online or viewed in the Fogelman library.

1. (9/3) Intro to course.

2. (9/10) Public Relations and Propaganda
Watch: Century of the Self, parts 1 and 2
- (DVD on reserve)
Reading: Propaganda by Bernays. Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 11.   (HANDOUT)
Do: Find one newspaper article that shows evidence of PR at work.

3. (9/17) Person to Person Persuasion.
Read: Coercion – first
half           
Read (or at least browse): CIA
Interrogation Manual
Do: Tell us about: one live interaction/experience you had this month that you
feel qualifies as persuasion – from either side of the equation.

4. (9/24) Persuading Groups
Read: Coercion – second half
Do: Bring an example of coercive group, subscription, cult with which you have
come in contact.

5. (10/1) Marketing and Technology
Watch: Persuaders (dvd on reserve or
stream from href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/">here)
Read: href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm">Adorno:
The Culture Industry (1944)

Read: Norbert
Weiner, handout. Read:
www.micropersuasion.com/2008/10/ethical-social.html Read and explore:
www.socialmedia.com/

6. (10/8) Captology: Persuasive Computers and the Web
Read: BJ Fogg – Persuasive Technology,
chapters 3 and 5 (HANDOUT)
Do: Find one website using persuasive tactics.

7. (10/15) NLP – hypnosis, pacing, and framing.
Read:  href="http://www.purenlp.com/nlpfaqr.htm">
www.purenlp.com/nlpfaqr.htm - Steve Robbins essay: href="http://www.nlpschedule.com/w_neuro_linguistic_programming_definition.html">http://www.nlpschedule.com/w_neuro_linguistic_programming_definition.html
and the first two lessons in Thom Hartmann’s NLP course at
http://www.thomhartmann.com/TH_NLPwk1.html
http://www.thomhartmann.com/TH_NLPwk2.html
and as many more weeks of this "course" as you’re interested in
after that. (Additional weeks are simply consecutive numbers after the letters
NLPwk_)

Do: Find (or perform) an application of NLP or NLP-like technique elsewhere.

8. (10/22) Total Immersion
Watch:
Power of Nightmares  http://novakeo.com/?p=131
(and DVD on reserve)
Read: Ubiquity of
Advertising
Do: Turn in papers.

9. (10/29)Viral / guerilla
- the activist side
Read: Media Virus, Introduction and Chapter One. (HANDOUT)
Explore: Moveon.org, rtmark.com (watch the promo video), thing.net, etoy.com
Watch: info wars (dvd on reserve)
- the market side
Read article: Seth Godin at
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/37/ideavirus.html

Optional Material:
Read chapter one: Cluetrain Manifesto   href="http://cluetrain.com/book/index.html">http://cluetrain.com/book/index.html
Read Tipping Point , pages 3-14, 193-215 (HANDOUT)

Do: Progress reports on projects

10. (11/5)Hi-Tech, Wireless and Beyond
Read: BJ Fogg – Captology, chapter 8
(Wireless)   (HANDOUT)
Read: We Know What You Want - Technology chapter (HANDOUT)

Do: Find a hi-tech coercive tool (or account of a tool) you think works.

11. (11/12) Sight
and Sound
Sound
Read: NeuroPop
White Paper
Read: Sonic
Weapons
Explore: Neural
Noise Synthesizer
Explore: Neuropop website
Review: Muzak section from Coercion

Listen:   Overload – Sonic intoxicant – copy in E. R.

Sight-
Read (as best you can):
1. McQuarrie and Mick, Visual Rhetoric ( href="http://www.rushkoff.com/itp/MCQ.pdf">PDF link)
2. YouJae Yi, Direct and
Indirect Approaches to Advertising Persuasion ( href="http://www.rushkoff.com/itp/JBR.pdf">PDF link)

Do: Bring in a print or web example of
visual/design intended to influence, and deconstruct the technique.

12. (11/19)
Deep Brain and the Future
Read:
MRI articles
Brain has a
Buy Button?
Science
of Shopping
href="http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuromarketing_nyt_apr20_04.html">Politics
using Neuromarketing
Rushkoff
of Neuromarketing

Explore: Mind Control: Technologies,
Techniques, and Politics website and read at least two of the articles
there.

Do: Progress reports on projects.

11/26 – no class.
Thanksgiving Break

13. (12/3) Magick
Read:
Book of Lies essays: Grant
Morrison, Mark Pesce, Hakim Bey (HANDOUTS)

Do: Tour of floor, online, or wherever field project techniques and progress
can be viewed.

14. (12/10) Final Discussion
Readings to be assigned based on topics raised by class over course of
semester.

15. (12/17) Final Reports
Groups – final presentations of results, in a fashion that persuades us that
you have persuaded others (or, if need be, that persuades us of the real
reasons you failed to).

Individuals –   turn in final analysis.

OTHER READING IDEAS

Aronson, E. (1995). The social animal. Seventh edition. New York: W. H.
Freeman.

Brendl, C. M., Higgins, E. T., Lemm, K. M. (1995). Sensitivity to varying
gains and losses: The role of self-discrepancies and event framing. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 69(6), 1028-1051.

Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M.P. Zanna, J.
M. Olson, & C. P. Herman (Eds.), Social influence: The Ontario Symposium
(Vol. 5, pp. 3-39). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. San Diego: Academic Press.

Cialdini, R. B., Eisenberg, N., Green, B. L., Rhoads, K. v. L., and
Bator, R. (1997). Undermining the undermining effect of reward on sustained
interest. In press, Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Corbett, E. P. J. (1990). Classical rhetoric for the modern student.
Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Degen, C. (1987). Communicator’s guide to marketing. Salem: Sheffield.

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured
paradigm. Special Issue: The future of the field: Between fragmentation and cohesion.
Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58.

Fiske, S. T. & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. New York:
McGraw Hill.

Fiske, S. T. (1980). Attention and weight in person perception: The
impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 38, 889-906.

Ganzach, Y. & Karsahi, N. (1995). Message framing and buying
behavior: A field experiment. Journal of Business Research, 32(1), 11-17.

Hassan, Steven. (1990). Combatting Cult Mind Control. Rochester, Vermont:
Park Street Press. (ISBN 0-89281-311-3)

Hovland, C. I., Janis I. L., & Kelley, H. H. Communication and
persuasion: Psychological studies of opinion change.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An analysis of
decision under risk. Econometirca 4, 362-377; Econometrica 47, 263-291.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The psychology of preferences.
Scientific American, 246, 160-173.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choice, values, and frames.
American Psychologist, 39, 341-350.

Kanouse D. E. & Hanson, L. R. Jr. (1972). Negativity in evaluations.
Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

Krosnick, J. A. & Brannon, L. A. (1993). The media and the
foundations of presidential support: George Bush and the Persian Gulf conflict.
Journal of Social Issues , 49, 167-182.

Krosnick, J. A. & Miller J. M. (1996). News media impact on the
ingredients of presidential evaluations: A program of research on the priming
hypothesis. Chapter 3 of unpublished manuscript.

Langer, E. J., & Rodin, J. (1976). The effects of choice and enhanced
personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional
setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 334, 191-198.

Lanham, R. A. (1983). Analyzing Prose. New York: Scribner’s.

Lepper, M. R., & Greene, D. (Eds.) (1978). The hidden costs of
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Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining
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Levin (1987). Associative effects of information framing. Bulletin of the
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Levin, Chapman & Johnson (1988). Confidence in judgments based on
incomplete information: An investigation using both hypothetical and real
gambles. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 1, 29-41.

Levin, I. P. & Gaeth, G. J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the
framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product.
Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 374-378.

Loke, W. H. (1989). The effects of framing and incomplete information on
judgments. Journal of Economic Psychology, 10 (3) 329-341.

Maheswaran, D. and Meyers-Levy, J. (1990). The influence of message
framing and issue involvement. Journal of Marketing Research, 27, 361-367.

Meyerowitz, BE and Chaiken, S. (1987). The effect of message framing on
breast self-exam attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Journal of Personality
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Meyers, D. G. Social Psychology. (1990). Third edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mulholland, J. (1994). Handbook of persuasive tactics: A practical
language guide. London: Routledge.

Neale, M. A., Huber, V. L., Northcraft, G. B. (1987). The framing of
negotiations: Contextual versus task frames. Organizational Behavior and Human
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Petty, R. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1981). Attitudes and persuasion:
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History

Life Inc. covers over 400 years of human history in just a couple of hundred pages. The chapters often raise as many questions and inquiries as they answer: people really used other kinds of money? The chartered monopoly was created to what? How do we know this? These are the principle resources I used to learn the history of corporatism, the people who thought it would lead to a better way of life, and the process through which it reached diminishing returns.

Renaissance

Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The wheels of commerce

Colonial Era

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Industrial Age

Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village

Public Relations

PR!: A Social History of Spin‘

related media:
Media Squat Radio, August 17th: Stuart Ewen author of PR!

Adam Curtis: amazing documentarian

Century of the Self

The Trap

Full on guns-in-face, old-school Roman oppression

There’s a great take on Life Inc on UK-based site Bookmunch

Unfortunately, the nose dive has also brought to light a whole bushel-load of corporate, business practices that underline, perhaps more pointedly than anyone would’ve expected, how money is the only God big business respects. Perhaps the best example of this is the story about how Goldman Sachs were betting against the long-term future of US corporate giant AIG, making money on their eventual demise and then further recouping from the US government’s bail-out of AIG (when AIG had to pay Goldman Sachs back all the money it owed them). Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc, told Bookmunch that he understands how people can be overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. ‘The problem is just too big,’ he writes in his book. ‘Concern becomes cynicism, cynicism becomes despair and despair becomes self-preservation. Maybe I can insulate my family from the problem.’ But there are things we can do.

more…

Life Inc: Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
ONCE REMOVED: THE CORPORATE LIFE- FORM

Charters and the Disconnect from Commerce

If You Can’t Beat Them…

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Corporatism is something else entirely. Though not completely distinct from commerce or the free market, the corporation is a very specific entity, first chartered by monarchs for reasons that have very little to do with helping people carry out transactions with one another. Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.

This agenda was so well embedded into the philosophy, structure, and practice of the earliest chartered corporations that it still characterizes the activity of both corporations and real people today. The only difference today is that most of us, corporate chiefs included, have no idea of these underlying biases, or how automatically we are compelled by them. That’s why we have to go back to the birth of the corporation itself to understand how the tenets of corporatism established themselves as the default social principles of our age.

There were three main stages in the evolution of the corporation, and each one further imprinted corporatism on the collective human psyche. The corporation was born in the Renaissance, granted personhood in post-Civil War America, and then, in the twentieth century, branded as the benevolent guardian and savior of humankind.

Most history books recount the development of the corporate charter as a natural, almost evolutionary step in the advancement of commerce. To a certain extent, this is true. After the fall of the Roman Empire, early Middle Ages Europe fell into disarray. Europeans lived in isolation from one another, dominated by self- sufficient and self-governing rural manors. Feudalism, as the prevailing political system came to be called, wasn’t a particularly fun way to live–certainly not for the peasants who made up a majority of the continent’s population. Landowning lords gave tracts of land to vassals in return for military allegiance. Vassals, in turn, ruled the peasant farmers, who were usually permitted to subsist on the remnants of their crops. Unlike in the Roman Empire, laws varied widely from place to place.

The lack of an overriding system of commerce left the lords out of a significant but growing business sector: the activity occurring between the people of different manors and beyond. By the 1200s, technological developments such as water mills and windmills as well as increased travel and commerce led to the resurgence of towns and cities outside the lord’s direct control. Towns became centers for the manufacturing, exchange, and circulation of goods, and provided a stark contrast to the to-each- his- own way of life in the manors and villages. In their new urban setting serfs found legal freedom, opportunities for work, and a place to start afresh. Citizens of cities became known as “burghers,” a term that spread throughout medieval Western Europe and provided the basis for the later word “bourgeoisie.”

It was only a matter of time before the burghers would grow wealthier and potentially even more powerful than the aristocracy. Instead of depending on the ownership of a fixed tract of land farmed by peasants and protected by an expensive army of vassals, this new class of merchants and manufacturers could increase production, commerce, and acquisition almost infinitely. The marketplace where they transacted could grow as large as it needed to accommodate more and more trade, simply by spilling outside the city center. The town then naturally expanded around the new location, and this cycle would continue until the town would eventually blossom into a full- fledged city, which would in turn require more goods and commerce, and so on. Lords attempted to regulate all this trade and growth by controlling and taxing local markets, but people always found ways around these boundaries and restrictions.

One such boundary crosser was the merchant, who resurged in about the thirteenth century to serve as an intermediary between town and country, providing the first links in the chain connecting the movement of goods between producer, merchant, and retailer. On non- market days, cobblers, blacksmiths, and artisans were accustomed to selling their wares through the windows of their workshops. By allowing merchants to set up their own shops and sell these items for them, the artisans got more time to do what they did best. Shop owners did not specialize in actually making anything, but in generating profit through selling. Business for business’s sake was born. Over the next few generations, along with the traders, moneylenders, and investors who backed them, these retailers would become the core of the urban bourgeoisie. While the nobility declined in land ownership, finances, and power–as well as numbers–this new class of pure merchants had access to international trade, investment, and an alternative economy.

Worse yet for the aristocracy, as merchants set sail they were to benefit from the vast resources of other territories. While the new bourgeoisie were becoming members of the fledgling global marketplace, the traditional aristocracy was essentially landlocked. What official authority they had left to offer their subjects was diminishing as rapidly as their wealth, influence, and numbers.

The aristocracy longed for a way to participate in the new economy–a way to invest that didn’t put them or their good names at any risk. For their part, the new merchant class had certainly increased the speed and breadth of wealth creation–but this also made for a highly competitive and fluid business environment. Sudden wealth could be followed by a sudden wipeout if a single ship got lost at sea or a fire took down an entire workshop. Merchant businesses were still mostly family run, and rarely operated more than a few voyages before a shipwreck or other calamity took them down. They needed a way to institutionalize their success while they were on top, right after their ship had come in.

This is the landscape on which the Renaissance was to take place and a new way of conducting business was to emerge. The overriding priority was not to promote economic activity, global cooperation, or colonial expansion, but rather to freeze all this development in a particular position, and prevent the cast of characters at the top from changing too much over time. But locking down wealth was a lot harder for everyone now that so much innovation was going on– especially when success tended to come with a loss in competence. In fact, while the Renaissance is often celebrated for its emphasis on specialization and expertise, nothing could be further from the truth.

The division of labor is not the same thing as the specialization of labor. On the surface, it may appear that a society of merchants, managers, and various levels of laborers is more specialized than one of shopkeepers and artisans. But it was not to the manager’s advantage to hire highly specialized laborers who could demand higher wages. Instead, managers standardized processes in order to hire the least qualified and most replaceable laborers around. Far from encouraging specialization, competence, or innovation, all this mercantile and industrial activity actually favored generalization.

As the population grew and the demands for goods increased, open land became privatized. This uprooted rural peasants, forcing them into the generic labor market. Previously, the life of a rural peasant had been below or altogether removed from money and the market found in urban centers. Peasants made do with what they could produce with their own hands and barter locally. It was a life of great limitation, but also of self- sufficiency. As the commercial economy spread, the peasant had to turn the only marketable skill he had— physical labor—into his means of survival. Evidence of this sort of wage labor can be traced all the way back to Portugal in 1253. Just like the Home Depot parking lot where Mexican immigrant laborers gather today, there were designated meeting places, usually a square at sunrise, where a foreman representing an employer would meet with day laborers and hire them right off the street.

Meanwhile, the managerial class sought to diversify itself as quickly as possible, undermining any specialization of its own. Once a low-level shopkeeper or wage earner had saved enough money to make the first step into more advanced levels of commerce, his first move was to commission the very work he used to perform. Then he began diversifying his wares and financial activities. The higher the capitalist was on the economic ladder, the broader and more varied were his investments and enterprises—and the more disconnected he was from his business’s skills and the people performing them.

So both the aristocracy and the most successful of the mercantile class required a new mechanism through which they could invest their almost “generic” capital in the form of pure financial and legal power. This mechanism had to offer the ability to invest in a business with total discretion, anonymity, limited liability, passive participation, and little or no expertise.

Traditional family businesses, which shared labor, risk, and capital by blood ties, were no longer sufficient to the task. New kinds of laws, contracts, and standardized currencies would be required to extend these agreements to people of different families and regions. Florence, with its key location on the Mediterranean (as well as its widely accepted currency, the gold florin), became the birthplace of the first “limited partnership” firms. The precursors to full- fledged corporations, they distinguished between the liability of the firm’s directors and of those who merely contributed capital, who would only be responsible for the amount of their contribution. Furthermore, contributors were not subject to being listed among the business partners, allowing noblemen, and even monarchs, to hide their commercial interests. The concept of the limited partnership quickly spread throughout Europe, funding daring investments from mines and plantations to colonialist adventures. Through this new opportunity for quiet and passive participation, the nobility became mad for investing.

As the operators of these huge projects sought to secure even more capital from a wider range of regions and social classes, they formed a more advanced form of limited partnership called the joint stock company, which could generate investment from shareholders on an open market. This broke business open, allowing for the creation of businesses by virtually anyone capable of getting investors. It almost heralded an era of business meritocracy, which would have generated unprecedented churn in the class structure. The wealthiest merchants were now as vulnerable to upstarts as the aristocracy.
Finally, the monarchy had something it could offer the bourgeoisie who threatened to unseat them.

A Child Is Born

Although monarchs might have lacked the vast financial resources of joint stock companies, they still enjoyed a structural advantage over any of them: central legal authority. Taking a cue from the Church, which had a tradition of “incorporating” groups of monks into single entities, royals exercised their authority to sanction a new kind of chartered body: the corporation. It was genius.

The corporation was not a business or a government entity, but a combination of the two. Its government supporters—the monarchs— had the authority to write the trade laws and grant monopolies; its business participants—the chartered companies—would enjoy the exclusive right to exploit them.

By granting a specific joint stock company a legal charter to do business, monarchs could give it a monopoly control of its business sector. So a shipping company that once competed with others for the resources of a set of islands now enjoyed exclusive, royally mandated control over that domain. No other corporation could do business in that region, and even locals or colonists would be prohibited by law from competing against the corporation extracting their resources or selling them goods. Another corporation would be granted monopoly control over glass production; another would win beer, and so on. By issuing corporate charters, kings could empower those most loyal to them with permanent control over their colonial regions or industries.

The joint stock companies’ problem with competition from rising new businesses or local activity was solved. And in return for granting legally enforceable monopolies over particular industries and regions, monarchs got fiscal support and profit participation far exceeding the worth of any cash investment they could have made. As a Dutch lawyer explained in a letter describing the very first charter of this sort, for Holland’s East India Company, “The state ought to rejoice at the existence of an association which pays it so much money every year that the country derives three times as much profit from trade and navigation in the Indies as the shareholders.”

For merchants whose businesses previously lasted only as long as a single expedition, the arrangement offered a way to earn more permanent status, military protection from the Crown, and the right to exploit new regions and peoples with authority and impunity. Equally important, they could lose no more than their initial investment. The “limited liability” granted in a charter meant that a corporation’s debts died with the bankruptcy of the corporation. And bankruptcy protection was granted by the state.

By inventing this virtual entity—the chartered corporation—the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie entered into a mutual codependency that changed the character of both. Through these first great trade monopolies, such as England’s Muscovy Company of 1555, the British East India Company of 1600, or the Dutch United East India Company of 1602, monarchs found a way to extend their reach without the cost or liability of an official military expedition. Better yet: for the monarchs, the merchants running the corporation would now become loyal subjects, dependent on the Crown for their legitimacy, protection, and escape clauses.
The chartered corporation was a bold grasp for permanent rule and permanent wealth that constituted a stalemate between the two groups. The contracts that monarchs and mercantilists wrote not only stopped their own decline from power; they stopped time, locking in place a set of corporatist priorities that to this day have not significantly changed. Instead, these priorities work to change the world and its people to conform to the rules of corporatism.

People who had always engaged in business with one another would now be required to do so through monopoly powers. All lateral contact between people and businesses would now be mediated through central authorities. Any creation or exchange of value would have to be run through these centrally mandated companies, in a system enforced by law, controlled by currency, and perpetuated through the erosion of all other connections between people and their world. Moreover, the emphasis of business would shift from the creation of value by people to the extraction of value by corporations.

In the new corporate scheme, the profitability and authority of a company now depended on its centrality. The more powerful the king, the more dominion a chartered company could enjoy. Where successful companies once threatened the authority of the state, now they contributed to it. While earlier companies benefited from a landscape on which value could be created independently of established power structures, these new, chartered corporations were part of the established power structures. The more that currency, law, and belief systems favored trade conducted at a great distance and orchestrated by a central authority, the better off chartered corporations were. Merchants who originally came to power in a bottom- up fashion were now maintaining their positions through borrowed top- down authority. Their power was no longer earned in real time, but mandated by proxy; their business practices were no longer dependent on value created but value extracted.

Meanwhile, and almost certainly unintentionally, the abstract and independent nature of the corporation gave it a life and agenda of its own. The more such corporations came to dominate business and finance, the more that legal and social systems evolved to serve them. Most of the business and finance innovations of the early corporate era—inventions we still look on fondly today—were really just ways of preserving and extending the reach of this new business entity.

The health of a corporation was understood purely in terms of money, as measured by the new accounting technique of double- entry bookkeeping. Any transaction resulted in the debiting of one account and the crediting of another. This made achieving a favorable balance of trade the highest priority, and fostered a zero- sum- game mentality among all participants. International trade became a fierce competition between states for positive balances, which led to wars unlike any seen before.

Where armies and navies had for most countries consisted of temporary forces raised to wage a specific conflict, the emergence of corporations with long- term agendas now necessitated full- time professional armed forces. This, in turn, led monarchs to raise sufficient quantities of hard currency to support their militaries. Corporations were happy to pay the levies for military protection—as long as they gained more influence over state policies protecting them from competition. And thus the cycle reinforced itself.

As businesses and states alike began to see the world through the lens of corporatism, places became “territories,” people became “laborers,” money became “capital,” and laws became “game rules.” For this was the embedded bias of the charter itself: to maintain the central authority of the state while granting monopoly power to the corporation. Corporatism. Real things, such as human beings, land, and resources, only mattered insomuch as they kept the credit side of the balance sheet bigger than the debit side. The underlying bias of corporatism would be that everything, and everyone, could be colonized for a profit. Anything and anyone would be incorporated, as long as they increased the power of a central authority that in turn promoted the monopolies of its chartered corporations.

The rise of European imperialism itself can be attributed to this new perspective. Thanks to the distance and limited liability offered by the new corporate entity, the people enacting policies and making decisions were effectively removed from any personal connection to the repercussions of their actions. The less liable for and connected to their choices, the less responsibility they felt and culpability they incurred. Besides, corporations outlived any human individual or monarch, anyway.

My Oppressor, My Hero

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, monarchs were unflaggingly catering to the merchant corporations that fed them. Whenever state favoritism became too overt and subjects or colonists revolted, monarchs eased restrictions on the people and promoted their favorite corporations’ interests through preferential taxes and duties instead. Everything went through corporations; even the Pilgrims’ famous voyage to America was made on a chartered British East India Company ship, the Mayflower, which was actually on its fourth such trip to the continent. The corporation had already claimed—and been granted—the entire American coast. Successive waves of colonists were appreciated solely for their capacity to enhance the credit column of the ledger back home.

The East India Company lobbied vigorously for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists. This was a particularly easy sell since the royals and governors they were lobbying also happened to be shareholders. Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible. “An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of Pirates” defined the import of tea from anyone other than the Company as smuggling. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 helped the Company unload a surplus of tea accumulated in British warehouses by removing all barriers to trade as well as granting tax exemptions. “No taxation without representation”—the rallying cry that led to the Boston Tea Party—wasn’t about voting as much as about Britain’s passage of tax laws to the exclusive benefit of the East India Company. The American Revolution itself was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws.

This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America. Corporations were to be chartered by states, not by the federal government, so that their actions could be governed locally by those affected. Corporations were also required to demonstrate that they had a specific beneficial purpose other than making money—such as getting a bridge built or a waterway opened. Having fought against a foreign megacorporation, the founders understood the dangers inherent in the kind of centralized economic authority demanded by corporatism. Just like Adam Smith, they hated big government and big corporations alike, envisioning the ideal business landscape characterized by locally scaled firms and farmers, unencumbered by large, dehumanizing monopolies. Thomas Jefferson considered “freedom from monopolies” one of the fundamental human rights. James Madison praised self-sufficiency and appropriately scaled enterprises: “The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety.” It was as if they meant to reverse the effect of the Renaissance- conceived corporate charter.

Still, due largely in part to the tremendous Revolutionary War debt, early American politics was dominated by a division over whether or not the United States, like European nations, should have a strong central government that was also capable of granting corporate charters and running a bank. Jefferson argued unsuccessfully against Federalists George Washington and John Adams for the Bill of Rights to include “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and to forbid the creation of a permanent army. This back- and- forth continued for the next century. One administration or Congress would pass laws favorable to corporations, and then the next would attempt to rescind them. But because they could live on indefinitely, corporations simply waited for conditions to change, made what progress they could, and then waited some more.

The second great phase in the evolution of the corporate life- form would take place under Abraham Lincoln, who had built his legal career fighting on behalf of the Illinois Central Railroad, and then used the privilege of free rail travel the job afforded to keep his presidential-campaign costs low. With Lincoln’s help the railroads won the right to break unions, hire immigrants for up to a year by paying for their passage to America, and—most important—enjoy strong contractual advantages that people didn’t have. According to successive pieces of legislation he signed in the early 1860s, if a corporation broke a contract with another corporation, it was still to be paid for the portion of the contract it had fulfilled. But if a human being broke a contract with a corporation, he was entitled to no payment whatsoever. The playing field itself was changed to give corporations rights that people lacked.

The only privilege corporations were still denied was that of personhood itself. If only corporations could get a court to consider them people, they would be entitled to all the rights that real people got in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The rail companies understood this well, and fought for the “personhood” argument in every court case they entered—whether it applied or not. The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, written to guarantee the rights of citizenship to former slaves, gave corporate lawyers the legal framework to make their cases. For reasons historians can’t quite articulate, the Amendment uses the phrase “persons” instead of “natural persons.” Corporations argued that this was because it was meant to include their own, non- natural personhood. In their opinions, justices repeatedly scolded corporate lawyers for attempting to exploit a law written on behalf of emancipated slaves. But the corporations had patience, and opportunistically sought out every leak and crack in the system.

Finally, in 1886, in a legal maneuver that has yet to be conclusively explained, a Supreme Court clerk with documented affinity for corporate interests incorrectly summarized an opinion in the headnotes of the decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The clerk wrote, “The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution . . . which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” There was no legal basis for this statement, nor any discussion about it from the justices. From then on, however, corporations were free to claim the rights of personhood. The more precedents that were established, the more embedded the law became. Over the next twenty- five years, 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases went before the Supreme Court. Two hundred eighty- eight of them were brought by corporations claiming their rights as natural persons.

The elevation of corporations to personhood was accompanied by a slow, corresponding devolution of human beings to something less than personhood. Corporations were bigger than people, lived longer, had more money and more influence. The biases programmed into them four centuries earlier, however—to thwart local activity, prevent competition, and disconnect people from their resources and competencies—remained the same, regardless of the circumstances. Traditionally, the distance between corporations and the people or territories they exploited was a matter of geography, class, and race. But America was already a colony, and its people had been raised on an ideology of equality, freedom, and agency. The Industrial Age gave corporations a new way to create the illusion of a preordained social order: the machine.

Originally, the steam engine was developed as a means of sucking water out of mine shafts in order to get to the coal beneath. Until the abolition of slavery, American industrialists saw no role for this contraption in agriculture or industry, where the human body was still the primary energy source. When slavery became untenable, a reconfigured steam engine rose to the occasion, accomplishing with coal what used to be done with indentured muscle, and what we now call the Industrial Revolution began. Coal allowed for the mechanized factory, the locomotive, and, perhaps most important, the steamship. With coal- powered boats, newly industrialized Western nations— predominantly Britain—were capable of distributing their manufactured goods to their colonies, as well as enforcing military superiority and the trade policies that went along with them. Legislation required the colonies in India to use mechanized looms, for example, so that the ready availability of human labor in that region could not compete with En gland’s mechanical replacements.

The increased mechanization of labor in the United States, where freedom was supposed to rule, proved a bit more troublesome. Machines now controlled the rate at which people worked, and the assembly line further reduced the autonomy and humanity of workers by relegating them to a single, repetitive task. Early industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and particularly John D. Rockefeller, were constantly on guard for labor unrest, and not averse to resorting to violence when necessary. It was a bad strategy. Union busting only provoked progressive newspapers to attack the industrialists, leading to further unrest, more violence, ugly interventions by the National Guard, and even some legislation against corporate power.

As an alternative to overt repression, the industrialists sought to develop a cultural ethos more simpatico with corporate prosperity. In their new world picture, machines became the model for society, and people were the cogs within it—increasingly disconnected from their own sense of technical expertise or whatever unique contributions they might make to the process of production. They were replaceable. The function of the industrial corporation was to extract value from people’s work, for the economic benefit of the nation. This meant disconnecting people from the wealth they might be creating through their labors, and substituting a less costly sense of satisfaction or, at the very least, compliance.

So leading industrialists funded public schools—at once gifts to the working class and powerful tools for growing a more docile labor force. They hired education reformers, like Stanford’s Ellwood P. Cubberley, to design a public school system based on a Prussian method that sought to produce what he called “mediocre intellects . . . and ensure docile citizens.” Cubberley modeled our public schools after “factories, in which the raw product [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned . . . according to the specifications laid down.”

Still, a public school system alone didn’t guarantee a compliant population—not when intellectuals, artists, philosophers, and labor-union organizers still seemed to emerge from its ranks and so easily foment dissidence wherever they went. Henry Ford, in particular, identified this ability to breed discontent with the Jews—not the real Jews people might know as neighbors, but the more abstract Jews and Jewish ideology thought to be running and ruining the world. The anti- Semitic diatribes Ford published formed the foundation for the anti- Semitism incorporated by Hitler into his book Mein Kampf. Hitler even quoted Ford, with attribution. And though Ford might have been more vocal about the need to eliminate Jews than most of his fellows, he was hardly alone in his support of Nazi- style fascism. American corporations from General Electric to the Brown Brothers Harriman bank either funded the Nazis directly, or set up money-laundering schemes on their behalf. Though well financed, this effort to order the world by force would fail.

While Henry Ford was busy compiling his perverse pamphlets on the power of industry and the Jewish obstacles to corporatism, brighter propagandists with even loftier goals were still working on behalf of government. Although he had run for reelection to the presidency in 1916 on a “peace” platform, Woodrow Wilson eventually decided that America needed to get involved in World War I. With the help of some of the first practitioners of the new science of public relations, including a young Edward Bernays, he formed the Creel Commission, whose job was to change America’s mind. It worked, and it served as the model for what would become known as mass communications.

Bernays and his cohorts, just like Ford, honestly believed that the masses were too stupid to make decisions for themselves—particularly when they involved global affairs or economics. Early public-relations specialists were convinced by Freud (Bernays’s uncle) and a century of savage wars that human beings could never overcome their bestial instincts. Instead of letting them rule themselves, an enlightened and informed élite would need to make the decisions, and then “sell” them to the public in the form of faux populist media campaigns. This way, the masses could believe they were coming up with these opinions themselves.

But particularly after the perceived failures of the League of Nations and two world wars to lay the groundwork for a peaceful world order, Bernays and those of his ilk no longer believed that this enlightened élite was to be found in the chambers of government, or that this was even the power center from which to direct the mob. Bernays turned instead to the boardrooms of corporations. If democracy is a sham, why bother to prop up its impotent leaders? Consumers are easier to please than citizens, anyway: simply get people to believe in corporations as the great actors of civilization, and in consumption as the surest path to personal fulfillment.

Besides, the more influential the public- relations industry became in the electoral process, the more corporate funding was required to put anyone in office. By the late 1940s, it was already very clear which way the power was flowing: toward a corporately governed industrial society that had much less to do with politics than it did with commerce and capital. So the public- relations industry eventually turned its back on an already cynical version of democracy, and focused its efforts on supporting an institution it believed really did stand a chance of organizing the savage world with far less messy voter intervention: the corporation.

This was not a devious plan, but a hopeful model for controlling human beings and their unpredictable group behavior, as well as keeping an economic engine in motion without an all- consuming war to motivate our production and resource extraction. As the nation’s best engineers and economists unanimously agreed after World War II, the tremendous strides made in wartime technology simply had to be retooled for a postwar era. Although everyone from computer scientists and the Frankfurt School to President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of a military- industrial complex promoted through mass spectacle, the engines of production could not be slowed for the specious priorities of civically engaged workers or an artwork’s “aura.”

The disconnections inherent in industrialized culture would thus extend beyond the division between management and labor to include the distance between consumer and producer. The rise of factory-made products and a rail system to transport them meant that consumers no longer knew exactly where their goods came from or, more important, the people who made them. The “brand” emerged to serve that function, to put a face on the oats, beverages, and automobiles we bought, and eventually elevating them from commodities to icons. The new corporatism would use television to stoke desires, and factories to fulfill them.

Mass media stimulated the new mass market and created a sense of trust between people and the corporate- created brands that were bidding for their attention. Marketing through media also became a kind of science, ruled by the same principles and ethos as the factory floor. Everything from spokesmodels to theme songs were tested on samples of potential consumers for their efficacy in eliciting a positive response. This made us all, in one sense, parts of the machine. Goods were developed by industrialists, manufactured in factories, shipped via rail or interstate highways, and then sold to consumers whose appetites were already whetted by commercial television. The more dependent Americans and our economy became on this model, the more America remodeled itself to its demands.

Suburbs such as Levittown, New York, guaranteed that each family would own an individual house, car, and entertainment system. And the more individualized consumers became—the more separated in their own suburban homes, isolated from their communities and totally self- reliant—the more stuff they would need to buy. Independence from one another meant increasing dependence on the companies that served us.

For those who might yet remember—or, worse, talk openly about— better times, a new ethos was developed that valued the future over the past, and progress over nostalgia. Public- relations and advertising chiefs borrowed the most persuasive features of the spectacles staged by their Nazi counterparts—and in some cases employed some of the very same architects—to stage new spectacles on behalf of the American corporation.

World’s Fairs in 1939 and again in 1964 offered the experience of a future America where a benevolent corporation would address every need imaginable. AT&T, GM, and the U.S. Rubber Company sponsored utopian pavilions with names such as Pool of Industry and the Avenue of Transportation. Corporations would take us into the automobile age, the space age, and even the computer age. No matter the sponsor, the overarching message was the same: American- style corporatism would create a bright future for us all.

The intelligentsia played along. Former socialist academics and Nazi expatriates alike were finding easy money in the form of research grants from both the military and industry if they recanted their prior socioeconomic theories and promoted the new corporatism. Many of these academics, like James Burnham, professed the benefits of an industry- led “American Empire,” which, like the Roman Empire that conquered Greece, would “be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.” Freshly graduated psychologists, now willingly in the service of marketers, conducted the first “focus groups” to determine how and why people buy things. Slowly but surely a new definition of self as “consumer” penetrated the mass psyche.

The scores of economic, management, urban- planning, and marketing theories to emerge from this effort were almost invariably geared toward making one part or another of the industrial machine work more efficiently: motivate production, stimulate consumption, assimilate impediments. No matter how humanistic in their wording, or how focused on giving people what they really wanted or needed, these techniques were only “creative” in their ability to tweak the great engine of commerce. They all came down to manufacturing, shipping, and selling more stuff for greater profit and in less time.

As a result, our physical, commercial, spiritual, and personal accomplishments came to be valued only insofar as they could serve the market. And while the market may be as good a model as any for human interaction, the corporate terrain did not represent a level playing field or a “free market” in which value might be created from anywhere. Remember—in spite of its individualistic mythology of open competition, the landscape of corporatism was first cultivated during the Renaissance, when local currencies were outlawed in favor of centralized money. In the United States, in an assumption of centralized value creation that reached a crescendo under the Nixon administration, the Federal Reserve won the authority to create money by fiat, based on nothing but faith in its own corporate chutzpah.

The massive potential of computers and networking, technologies developed in many cases by engineers hoping to decentralize the very power structures funding their projects, was quickly recontextualized as a market opportunity—the beginning of a “long boom”—and appropriated as NASDAQ’s stepchild. New rules for a new economy were invented, in which people’s ability to access interactive technology for free or to create value independent of any corporation could be understood as the power of the network to leverage what were formerly “externalities.” The dot- com boosters sought to reconcile the incompatibility of an abundant, decentralized media space with the legacy of a scarce, centralized monetary system. Everything is “open source,” except, of course, money itself.

Instead of serving to reconnect us, our technologies now serve to disconnect us further, reducing our contact to virtual prods and pokes. Meanwhile, corporations are finding online a path toward incarnation: Chase and Coca- Cola build avatars in online environments such as the Second Life “virtual world” that are as real as we are. Sometimes more so, especially as our life and status online dictate or even supersede our life and status in the former real world.

The institutions of last resort, be they religious or nonprofit, are themselves in the thrall of the marketing techniques employed on behalf of their corporate rivals. Instead of presenting alternatives to totalitarian corporatism, they conclude that “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Religions hire consultants to re-brand them in the image of MTV, while charities refashion themselves into for-profit corporations seeking “social- philanthropy” money as sexy to venture capitalists as an Internet IPO (initial public offering of shares). Even those who seek to overturn what they see as the corporate hegemony succumb to the logic of corporatism in their campaigns.

It’s not just that the landscape is sloped toward corporate interests, but that our own beliefs and activities are directed by corporate logic. When those of us alive today have no memory of a world that functioned in any other way, how are we to think otherwise? Like kids with a radio dial that plays nothing but Top 40 songs, we have adapted to the music that we hear, and choose our favorite tunes and pop heroes from the available menagerie.

With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid’s selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care. Our ability to actually do anything about, say, greenhouse- gas emissions is based entirely on the extent to which we can trust Toyota’s claims about developing a car that cleans the air as it drives. Our feedback and participation are managed by customer service, empowering us as consumers by infantilizing us as human beings. This dependency augurs a regression on our part, and a transference of parental authority onto our corporations that recalls our ancestors’ allegiance to emperors and high priests.

While some corporations may serve as our accepted public enemies, others quickly step in to embody our dissent. Ford’s contention that it knew the one right car for every American was countered by GM’s repackaging of its cars in personalized brands for each of us. As much as Microsoft frightens us by echoing the tactics of chartered monopolies, Apple and Google excite us by presenting the illusion of a bottom- up, people- centered alternative. We hate Nike and love Air-walk, hate Hummer and love Mini, hate Nabisco and love Hain, hate A&P and love Whole Foods. Or vice versa.

But we all love corporations.

Role Reversal

The last century of media- enhanced public relations set in motion something the founding fathers simply couldn’t have imagined: a corporate sphere in cahoots not only with a corrupt government, but with the people. We are the new collaborators, engaging with one another and the world at large through these artificial actors. As we do, our behaviors become increasingly predictable, our lives more predetermined, and our awareness of alternatives to corporate- enabled autonomy diminished. It’s just the way things are and—as far as we can tell—have always been.

The more disconnected and predictable we become, of course, the less alive we are by all measures that matter, and the more our corporations take on a life of their own. On the synthetic landscape of corporatism, corporations are the indigenous creatures and we are the aliens. They function better than we can, because our laws—even our roads, neighborhoods, and political processes—are written to favor their activity over our own. We must work through them rather than through each other, which only worsens our disconnected predictability. We surrender our agency, losing the free will that makes us human. We have reversed roles.

The landscape of corporatism favors the selfish over the social, the brand over the product, and the central over the local. This is why our search for solutions has been so stunted; we look for nationally branded answers to problems that can be approached only on a local or a personal level. We are drawn to solutions that offer the same instant gratification as consumption, the same frictionless immediacy as high- end salesmanship. Political leaders have all the emotional power—and insubstantiality—of the tested images on which their campaigns are based. As long as we experience the world from the perspective of its corporate conglomerates, we will remain oblivious to the activity and opportunities still available to us on a human scale. We will continue to fight on a battlefield that was created to benefit corporate actors while disempowering and dehumanizing real people. And the longer we limit our activity to this synthetic sphere, the further we mistake this artificial landscape for the territory on which we are to act.

The corporation is a significant but invented institution—and the impact of its invention on our relationship to one another and the world around us was as significant as the invention of an abstract God. For while it might be said that the invention of monotheism purposefully disconnected us from the forces of nature, the invention of the corporation purposefully disconnected us from one another. And while religious institutions and mythologies may have dominated the social, political, and economic landscapes for the first thousand or so years of civilization, it’s corporations and their mythologies that direct human activity today.

Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self- interested behaviors that erode community and relationships. This makes us more dependent on central authorities for the things we used to get from one another; we cannot create value without centralized currency, meaning without nationally known brands, or leaders without corporate support. This dependency, in turn, makes us more vulnerable to the pathetically overgeneralized and fear- based mythologies of corporatism. Once we accept these new mythologies as the way things really are, we come to believe that our manufactured disconnection is actually a condition of human nature. In short, we disconnect from the real, adapt to our artificial environment by becoming less than human, and finally mistake carefully constructed corporatist mythologies for the natural universe.

By tracing the development of the great disconnect and unearthing the misconceptions supporting it, we will enable ourselves to come to terms with how we reconnected to an artificial landscape sloped in favor of corporations and away from our own agency—or why we behave against our better natures in the name of self- interest. Luckily, if we can call it that, the real world is finally diverging too far from this false model for the illusion to be sustained. The reality in which we actually live is crumbling; the barbarians are at the gates and the muggers are in Park Slope, while the wealthy are still arguing about the impact on property values.

Instead of using this opportunity to reconnect to our world and our potential to create value from the bottom up, we argue about how to restore and refinance the very corporations whose purpose is to dis-empower us further. If we can forget about the Dow Jones Industrial Average for long enough to remember who we are and what value we might truly bring to this world, we may just be able to take back the world we have ceded to a six- hundred- year- old business deal.

Playing With Fractals

An introdution to the art of Sarah Sze
(from an upcoming book on her work)

I first encountered Sarah Sze – whom I hadn’t yet heard of – at a cocktail party in New York. She was about to leave for Paris to do an installation “with ladders.”

“Ladders you can climb?”I asked. “Like a jungle gym?”

She smiled, politely. No, one couldn’t climb them. Not physically, anyway. For Sze’s sculptural works are, indeed, playgrounds. Monkey bars for the mind. Invitations to play, and, in doing so, to comprehend the nature of play in an entirely new context. These are seductive and deceptively unthreatening vehicles for transformation. They force to re-evaluate the role of play in the evolution of species, culture, and spirit.

We can’t reckon with the implications of Sze’s transformative energy by getting abstract or exploring historical precedents. No, we’d just get lost in the morbidly retrograde cartography that passes for contemporary art criticism these days – a booby prize if ever there was one. Instead, we have to go inside, to our own experience, and trust that what we’re feeling and thinking actually matters. And when we go there – to that place Sze’s work takes us if we let it, something remarkable happens.

Sarah Sze’s work helps us make sense of the world in which we live through the fanciful celebration of the utilitarian. Her pieces allow the manufactured objects of our everyday reality to transcend their intended contexts, and find a new, organismic relationship to one another, and to us. Sze is both discovering and developing the kinds of repetitive patterns that give human beings the reference points they need to resonate playfully rather than strategically with the material and visual world.

Or, to put it much more simply, Sarah is recreating nature out of the unnatural – and beholding these natural systems – these imaginative playscapes – changes us forever.

Perhaps the best metaphor I can use to explain the odd reassurance I feel on encountering one of Sze’s installations is that of a fractal. Fractals are the computer-generated graphic representations of non-linear equations. Unsatisfied with the over-determined and oversimplified techniques of traditional linear math and reductive calculus, new math theorists sought to find ways of representing the genuine complexity of our physical world in the perfect language of numbers. They found that by representing the fractional dimensionality of the real world, they could reckon with the roughness of reality.

Of course the billions of calculations required to iterate fractals must be accomplished using a computer. They are products of the computer age. Yet, surprisingly, they yield forms that exemplify the most natural of living systems.

Fractals are self-similar. This means at one level of magnification, you will be able to see certain shapes that are repeated again at much higher levels of magnification. Just as the shapes of veins in a leaf reflect the shapes of branches in a tree or trees in the forest, computer-generated fractals reflect the self-similarity of numbers. As above, so below. The networked systems that fractals represent also tend to have what are known as “remote high leverage points.”Although these systems might be extremely stable, profound change can come from extremely remote places, if conditions are right.

My own work in cultural analysis has been largely informed by these discoveries and intuitions. Like the ocean and the weather, our society has been networked together through the media, economic, and telecommunications infrastructures. We experience ourselves in a kind of fractal, with our television screens displaying images of television screens with television screens. And our interconnectedness allows for remote high leverage points: a single, tiny media event in a remote location – like a camcorder capturing the beating of a black man by white Los Angeles cops – can lead to full-scale rioting in 12 American cities.

A fractal sensibility helps one orient to the modern, mediated and non-linear landscape. As humans, we strive to find patterns in the world around us – especially in the seeming chaos. Just as the regularity of waves turns a threatening ocean into a reassuring rhythm, our ability to perceive patterns and self-similarity in the manufactured world of cities and objects helps us understand that there is an order to our existence. A plan. A design.

Sze introduces these sensibilities to all who encounter her work. Our only choice is whether to revel in them, or reel back in horror – our critical presumptions about the shortcomings of the man-made forever altered.

For Sze’s pieces are, themselves, fractal in nature. She takes a common household object – something known more for its high frequency than its scarcity – and iterates it with others, thousands of times. Dozens of cotton balls, lined in little rows. Matchsticks, glued together in strands like ladders – no, like DNA helixes, the component codes of cellular reproduction – the genome-based time machines that nature uses to communicate the qualities of her creations through the eons.

Sarah serves as the computer. Instead of churning numbers through equations, however, she arranges objects in sequences. In an ode to obsession that would make HAL proud, Sze constructs fractals out of mankind’s most plastic and mass-produced objects – and then these constructions take on the qualities of natural phenomena.

Consider Still Life with Flowers(1999) Swirling ladders of matchsticks and rulers, interspersed with photos of sharks, mice, monkeys and other species, living twigs, and the tiniest components of artificial plants. We can’t look at the piece without thinking about the artist herself, repeatedly breaking the heads of matchsticks and gluing them together – those hours, days, maybe weeks of cyclical, repetitive tasks.

The result of her toil mirrors the DNA molecule – an evolutionary tree explicated by photos of the various species along its branches. Yet this genomic map is only secondary to fractal, natural, and fertile quality of the installation’s overarching form. This is the primary fruit of Sze’s labor: no matter how manufactured these objects may be, when they are iterated enough times they produce natural meta-forms. Fractals. In a nod to remote high leverage points, Sze places C-clamps or spring clips at critical junctures. These tiny and quite deliberately disclosed lynchpins are what hold the whole world together.

Or take a look at her studio piece, Untitled, 1996. A stepladder-as-skyscraper overlooks an urban grid of everything from Hershey’s Kisses and Lifesavers to photo slides and tennis shoes. Again, chain ladders of matchsticks and toothpicks grow upward from the two-dimensional grid as if groping for three-dimensionality. Climbing up the stepladder and through the air, like creeping ivy.

This delicate, dynamic, and fractional dimensionality; this teetering at the brink between worlds of factory-made and spontaneously alive – this is what we get when we push through chaos to the other side of order.

And, most strikingly, this new order is utterly unrecognizable to those who refuse to play. A cartographer, who can only understand the ocean as a series of longitude and latitude lines, cannot even converse with a young surfer who understands this same water as a pattern of waveforms. In fact, he will assume the surfer is hopelessly lost. Yet the surfer, by immersing in the water, experiencing the waves, and turning this interaction into a game of balance and motion, ends up with a much more intimate and lasting understanding of the ocean’s very personality – its life.

As an artist teasing us into re-examining our relationship to the manufactured physical world, Sze surfs her materials in much the same way. Like a skateboarder re-contextualizing the curbs, banisters, and benches of the urban terrain as an obstacle course, Sze uses the multitude of objects passing through our hands each day as Tinkertoy. And her play – I mean, her work – yields forms that exhibit the repetitive, self-similar, and networked properties of nature. Manufactured objects + iterated play = fractals.

Part automaton, part god, Sarah is both a slave to her taskmaster vision, and the human hand intervening in its mechanized execution. She is the delightfully autonomous being who dares to create worlds within worlds, and the autistic match-gluer who churns out the sorts of iterations most suited to a Pentium chip. As our eyes dance over the results of her labors, forced to retrace the swirling lines and self-similar visual echoes manifesting at every possible level of detail, our only choice is to play along. We are engaged in the interdimensional game, incapable of maintaining our objective vantagepoints, yet rewarded in our surrender with something so much greater: the reassurance of pattern recognition – of nature – in a realm where we’d least expect it.

This is what makes Sarah’s new work on the Bard campus so very compelling. The three excavations sneak up on you, disguised as little work zones marked with cones and protected by disheveled tarps. Yet once you approach and peer inside, you find multi-tiered cities of plastic, wood, tubing, and water. Entire worlds, and worlds within worlds – a seeming infinity of detail, and in each detail, yet another world, and another world still.

No matter how microcosmic these craters of infinitesimal plastic civilizations, it is still impossible for the viewer to stand outside them. For to look down into one of them is to be surrounded by the others. There are three of these tiny meta-cities, each throbbing, pulsing, and gurgling in its own corner of the grassy knoll. Seemingly linked — networked to one another and in constant communication – the replicated plastic galaxies challenge our arbitrarily superior vantage points. Who is the artificial stranger, here, and which is the life form?

Sze’s latest works most directly explore the relationship of the fabricated to the natural, and the utility to the toy. By inverting one for the other, she demonstrates how the manufactured object reaches the realm of the natural when utility is exchanged for play. Play is portal from the lower, survival-based levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs , to the romantic, nurturing, and spiritual realms at its top.

It is play that fuels the marathon iterations of Sze’s labor-intensive creations. Play that transforms matter into life. Play that leads life forms to reproduce, create their cultures, as well as the many artificial and manufactured forms within it. Finally, it is play that – when taken too seriously – recedes from our view as surely as God himself has withdrawn from human affairs. And it is play that returns when we topple the tyranny of utilitarian survival with the dangerously revolutionary spirit of fun. Jokes are what bring down holy empires, because they let everyone see what’s really going on. Playful humor serves as a fractal, adding dimensional perspective – drawing a proscenium arch around a social construction that seemed so very real, and turning it into a divine comedy. Play is the source of life.

Sarah’s hand-made fractals allow us to experience the cogs of our highly artificial culture as the seeds of an entirely natural system. They make us question the foundations of this very distinction. For what, ultimately, is not natural? Bees make honey, beavers make dams, and people make plastic. Why should our structures have any less geometric intention than a honeycomb? Or any less right to a place in the ecosystem of physical reality? Is human culture any different, fundamentally, from a yogurt culture? If there is a difference, it lies in our human ability to see the similarities – to recognize the patterns.

Sze’s creations are not imitations of life, but living forms. Not metaphors, but self-organizing and artfully contagious thought structures. Sze’s work is alive.

Rushkoff on PBS Frontline Tuesday

From PBS:

The Most Wired Place On Earth
Tuesday, April 14
PBS-FRONTLINE/World
9 PM EDT
(check local listings or watch online HERE )

Professional video gamers, “netiquette” for five-year-olds and a rehab camp for Internet-addicted teens: it’s all part of the digital landscape in South Korea. Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff takes a look at this highly wired society tomorrow night as the second segment on PBS’s FRONTLINE/World .

The footage is from our recent trip to South Korea, and it’s part of a larger project we’re producing for FRONTLINE, called Digital Nation

We’re going to be investigating life in the digital age through our website over the upcoming months, and it will culminate in a FRONTLINE documentary broadcast early next year.

—-

Also, for people in NYC this week, my friend Propaganda Anonymous is hosting a panel about the spiritual origins of HipHop. He has been working on this one a long time, and has gathered quite an interesting assortment of people.

Thursday April 16th, Prop Anon and Reality Sandwich present: INFINITY BLESSINGS, a panel event exploring the spiritual and philosophical foundations of hip-hop culture.
Speakers inlcude: Allah B from the Nations of the Gods and Earth’s; Brother Shep from the original Black Panther Party and the Universal Zulu Nation; Dr. Shaka Zulu from the Universal Zulu Nation; Lawyer and Activist, King Downing;Why-G from the Optimus Foundation; and Propaganda Anonymous.
Thursday April 16th, (doors 6pm, talk 7 to 10pm
The Player’s Theater
115 Macdougal St (btw. Bleeker and W. 3rd)
$10
After party at Sutra Lounge, 11pm to 4am
1st and Houston
Free!

Suicide Jews

NEWS & COLUMNS
Vol 16 – Issue 25 – June 11-17, 2003

The self-imposed death of institutional Judaism.
By Douglas Rushkoff

I’m a Jew. Or, at least I was last time I checked.

But New York’s official institutions of Judaism would say that I’m not, and, most likely, neither are you. No, it’s not because my mom’s not Jewish (the usual, racist, excuse), but because–like so many other intelligent, engaged people on this bagel-fueled island–I don’t happen to belong to a synagogue. As a result, they label me “lapsed” or, in the optimistic language of the market researchers charged with saving Judaism, “a latent Jew.”

Actually, these days they’re calling me an atheist, an Israel hater and an anti-Semite. Not because I’m saying anything bad about God, Israel or Judaism, but merely because I’m asking that we be allowed to discuss these ideas, together.

We all know that there are some sticking points to being Jewish in America today–particularly with what’s going on in Israel. Luckily, Judaism has a wealth of built-in mechanisms for confronting the lure of fundamentalism, nationalism and tribalism. But in my effort to show Jews some of what is so very progressive and relevant about their dwindling religion, I have instead provoked their most paranoid, regressive wrath.

What I’m learning is that today’s Jewish institutions have more to fear from Judaism than they have to gain. That’s why they’re going out of their way to keep Judaism from actually happening.

I’ve written about media and culture for the past ten years. Interactivity has always been my passion–especially the way the internet turned a passive mediaspace into a freewheeling conversation. Instead of depending on the newscaster or sponsor for our stories, we were free to tell our own. I wrote eight well-received books about what was happening to our culture, and how to navigate its new “do-it-yourself” terrains.

Then, just a few years ago, it occurred to me that Judaism had attempted to do the same thing to religion. The mythical Israelites of the Torah left their idols behind in order to forge a new way of life–one in which they weren’t dependent upon the gods to do everything for them. Judaism abstracted God so that people could become thinking, active adults. What made Judaism so radical–so sacrilegious in its day–was the proclamation that people can actually make the world a better place. God may have given us great hints on how to be holy people, but the rest is up to us.

The reason Jews have such a hard time explaining Judaism, “the religion,” is that we aren’t about beliefs. All we really have is a process–an ongoing conversation. You get initiated, a bar or bat mitzvah, by proving you can read the Torah and speak somewhat intelligently about it. No statements of faith required–just literacy and an opinion about what you’ve read earn you a place at the table. Then you get to argue with the old guys.

That’s right: Judaism boils down to a 3500-year-old debate about what happened on Mount Sinai and what we’re supposed to do about it. Judaism is not set in stone; it is to be reinterpreted by each generation. All that’s required is a continual smashing of your false idols (iconoclasm), a refusal to pretend you know who or what God is (abstract monotheism) and being nice to people (social justice). In a sense, Judaism isn’t a religion at all, but a way human beings can get over religion and into caring about one another.

Sounds good, anyway.

But like so many latent Jews in America today (we account for more than 50 percent of the total), I had a hard time finding places where this sort of Judaism is still practiced. They exist, but more likely in an apartment living room or school basement than a sanctuary. The vast majority of messages coming out of mainstream Judaism concern post-Holocaust issues such as the dangers of intermarriage, the threat of assimilation and the need to protect Israel.

Worst of all, as I’m learning, these subjects are not up for discussion.

Jewish philanthropies spend millions of dollars and hours counting Jews and conducting marketing research on how to get young people to stop marrying goys and start supporting Israel. If they were to spend even half this effort actually doing Judaism, they might find that they’d attract a whole lot more people to their cause. In an era in which spirituality is about breaking the illusion of self, who wants to be part of a religion or a people that is turned so inward? Judaism’s greatest concern, these days, is itself.

Most of my friends abandoned Judaism as soon as they were allowed to for precisely these reasons. Having found some useful truths in there, however, I was loath to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I figured I owed it to myself, and to Judaism, to revive the conversation. “Can we talk?” I’ve been asking in my lectures, articles and even a book. Apparently not.

Don’t get me wrong: A great majority of the people to whom I’ve been speaking in synagogues and bookstores around the nation agree with what I have to say. Even the rabbis.

“If that’s Judaism,” I’ve been told many times, “then count me in!”

A half dozen Torah discussion groups have formed among people who met at my bookstore appearances. But the people running Judaism’s more established institutions–the philanthropies, federations and periodicals that speak for the Jewish people in America today–are so threatened by the notion of an open conversation about Judaism that they can’t help but go on the attack.

“Along comes Douglas Rushkoff,” announced one of my intellectual role models, Anne Roiphe, after I wrote a New York Times op-ed about organized Judaism’s self-defeating obsession with race and numbers. Treating Jews as an endangered species in dire need of a breeding program, I argued, was hardly a good strategy for attracting more young, successful and universal-minded people into the fold, if that’s even the object of the game.

She called me “silly” and cited the existence of Tay Sachs disease as evidence of a Jewish “race” that requires protection. Why couldn’t she have spoken to one geneticist before making such an unfounded remark, in print, no less? (Throw a few thousand people in a ghetto for a few dozen centuries and they’ll develop some diseases. Most scientists have abandoned the concept of race altogether.) She went on to cite the Jewish concern with “the degree of Jewishness of one’s parents” as proof that Judaism is a race.

I’ve been amazed as I’ve watched otherwise rational, well-spoken people revert to childlike circularity when confronted by the inconsistencies in their own religious outlooks. I know, I know: That’s why they call it religion. Judaism was supposed to be a smarter solution, a thinking person’s answer to religiosity. A conversation. That’s why, more than their inane remarks or beliefs, what disturbs me about the reaction of Judaism’s gatekeepers is their refusal to make a place for me–and the majority of American Jewry–at the Jewish table.

I do feel for these people, and can understand the wish to believe that we are direct descendents of the mythical characters described in the Torah. But, 42 years circumcised, I refuse to be treated as an outsider for seeing the great benefits of contending otherwise–as Judaism, itself, suggests we do.

They’re not budging. The first major review of my book in a Jewish publication, the Bronfman Philanthropy-funded Jerusalem Report, called me a “yoga-practicing atheist Jew from New York’s East Village,” right in the lead paragraph! I’m an atheist because, like most thinking adults, I don’t believe in an all-powerful creature with the white beard who rejoices in animal sacrifice. I get that. But the yoga-practicing and East Village part? Is that supposed to be evidence of how far I’ve strayed–in neighborhood and exercise regime–from the Upper West Side where Jews belong?

Just two weeks ago, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York–headquarters of the biggest, most central Jewish organization in America–yanked an interview that one of their writers conducted with me from their website, along with all mention in their calendar of a benefit I’m doing in their auditorium for a Jewish social justice charity. All because, according to the editor, “a heightened sensitivity to some of the topics we discussed emerged here at UJA-Federation once it was actually posted.”

Gotta love the internet: The entire interview was immediately reposted to a webzine called Jewsweek, along with an account of the whole fiasco. A week later, the excised text reappeared on the UJA site, albeit with a new title and a framing paragraph about how “Douglas Rushkoff likes to sound off.” A UJA representative now says that the only problem with the original interview was the title.

I’m not the only one who is facing such knee-jerk reactions from the institutions dominating public Jewish discourse. Rabbi David Wolpe, a respected and published rabbinic scholar now on the pulpit at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, made the headlines for daring to suggest to his congregation that the Exodus may not really have happened the way it was described in the Bible. Or at all. Though this question has been pondered out loud by rabbis ever since there were rabbis, today it is too dangerous a topic, and Wolpe is decried as a “silver-tongued devil.”

Why?

Because Jews are afraid, and the institutions that should be helping them conquer their ignorance are instead stoking it to further solidify their grasp on Judaism’s future. The darker picture they paint of Judaism’s plight–the further synagogue membership dwindles, the greater Israel’s peril–the more money they raise. Every suicide attack on Israel and each negative report on intermarriage statistics lead to a surge in donations.

So it’s in the fundraisers’ interest to foster panic instead of discussion, and to turn their agendas into inviolably sacred truths. Yet they are not entirely to blame. It is we who must challenge these holy assumptions if we’re going to break free from top-down religion and start to think for ourselves again–the way Judaism demands.

The first forbidden topic is race. The Jews’ crucial error has been accepting our enemies’ contention that we are a race. We are not. The first character in the Torah to mention an “Israeli people” was Pharaoh, and he was looking for an excuse to kill off those he feared wouldn’t support him in a war. The
concept of “Jewish blood” was invented during the Spanish Inquisition, so that they would still have an excuse to slaughter former Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Best yet, it was Hitler, gently reworking a bit of Jung, who claimed that Jews’ “genetic memory” would keep them from ever fully
accepting the natural German order.

Two millennia of being treated as a despised race might convince any people that it’s true. Ironically, Jews were being persecuted, at least in part, for their very refusal to accept such false boundaries. Local gods, ethnic purity and national religions meant nothing to this amalgamation of formerly disparate tribes. Moses’ wife was black, for God’s sake. How much clearer can the story get about race not being the issue here?

By hanging on to racehood, Jews get to hang on to an immature understanding of chosenness. (“I like knowing that God loves us the best,” a woman told me after a recent talk.) Along with being God’s chosen people, however, come the racism and elitism that undermine our ethics, but empower our central authorities. If Judaism is not a race, then who exactly are we not supposed to intermarry with? They won’t tell you that this whole matrilineal descent business isn’t part of Judaism, at all, but a remnant of the Roman census conducted in the second century. Assimilation has always been the Jews’ best strategy. Our mandate in Torah is not to protect ourselves from others, but to “share our light” with them.

Part of the reason we don’t know any of this is that we’ve relegated our Judaism to our authorities. The Reform movement was a great idea when it arose in the 1800s in Germany. Judaism was built to be reformed. Problem is, some of the reforms were designed for little purpose other than to make Jewish worship look less weird to any Christians who might happen to drop by. So a spirited, participatory free-for-all was turned into Jewish church: Rabbis put on robes, stood on a stage in front of the room and engaged in boring, monotone responsive readings with the congregation. All the atrophied dullness of Christianity, only without the salvation.

Worse, this induced what Freud would call “regression and transference.” The audience of spectators regressed to a childlike state and transferred parental authority onto their rabbis, who became more like priests administering the religion to their congregants.

No matter. Reform Jews figured someone wearing a black hat, probably somewhere in Israel, was doing the “real thing.” And so checkbook Judaism was born, through which Americans could practice their religion by proxy. Little did they know their money was going to some of the most stridently Zionist sects around and forcing the Israeli government to cow even further to their bizarre demands.

Which brings us to the real reason we can’t talk about Judaism today: Israel. Note–I’m not suggesting that Israel shouldn’t exist, but many readers will already think I’ve just said that. They cannot even see these words that say otherwise. Our problem is not with the Israelis, but our insistence–as Americans–in justifying a nation’s existence with our religion. By forcing the Torah to serve as an accurate historical chronicle of the Jewish claim to disputed territories, Jews turn themselves into fundamentalists who have no choice but to interpret their texts literally. “Abraham got this piece from God in Genesis, and Jacob got this piece from the Pharaoh…” The transdimensional nature of Jewish myth–as profound as that of any Eastern religion–is reduced to a real estate deed.

This literalism is a problem. Fundamentalists believe that Jews must be in control of the entirety of biblical Israel in order for the messiah to return to Earth. This is why orthodox extremists from Brooklyn race–guns in hand–to settle the West Bank. It is also why the American Christian fundamentalists are responsible for funding a majority of Jewish immigration from Russia to Israel. They want to bring on the End of Days and get to Armageddon already.

But because many Jews refuse to look a gift horse in the mouth, everyone from Bush to Falwell becomes our allies. Fear, desperation and a history of persecution make for strange bedfellows.

To free ourselves from this self-defeating conundrum, American Jews must understand our unwitting complicity in this pact with, well, the devil. We must entertain the possibility that Israel, the nation, may not be the ultimate realization of Jewish ideals as much as a necessary compromise. Israelis get this; New Yorkers seem to have a little more trouble because we insist on seeing Jerusalem as somehow more sacred than Manhattan.

There are better arguments to be made for a Jewish homeland than the assertion that the “one and true God” gave it to us. (That’s not what abstract monotheism was invented for, anyway. She’s not just our God–she’s everyone’s.) After centuries of exile or worse by nation states with their own official religions, one Jewish strategy was to create our own nation, with its own official religion. Although long characterized by an independence from territory and local gods, Judaism might not be completely wrecked by the temporary suspension of these values for the greater priority.

Israel may indeed be important to the Jewish people and, as a potential laboratory in ethical nation-building, to the whole world, but its current and inappropriate centrality to the Jewish faith makes it a topic that cannot be approached or discussed openly. Like the synagogue and the Jewish bloodline, Israel has become an idol.

As a result, many American Jews feel that to question the religious or political authority of Israel–to suggest, as I have, that God might not have invented the nation state–is akin to blaspheming Judaism or forgetting the Holocaust. So, as the Jewish authorities have made abundantly clear to me, we are to remain silent.

Life for Jews in New York in 2003 is as good as it has ever been–anywhere. Only by reviving the inquiry and activism that are truly central to Judaism can we serve as antagonists rather than passive supporters of everything from blind fundamentalism to the Bush regime’s designs on the Middle East and the world. Just because the Jews will inevitably be blamed for provoking these crusades doesn’t mean we have to make the accusation true.

Resistance is our tradition, and it’s worth fighting for. At this point, it’s more important to me that I do Judaism than that I get to call myself Jewish.

Rushkoff is the author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (Crown, 2003).

All God’s Children, They Got Vings

The New Kabbalah
Originally published in Paper Magazine

The web site flashes images of a fetus, the mysterious face on the surface of Mars, and a ball of fire. Beneath the images, promises of the mysteries lying in wait for all comers:

The Origins of Humanity! Spiritual Energy! Reincarnation! Parallel Universes! Resurrection of the Dead!

No, this is not the Internet site for a new branch of Scientology but an old branch of Judaism, revived most recently (or at least most controversially) by a charismatic rabbi and trickling down (or up, depending on your point of view), with the help of some show-biz celebrities including Rosanne, Barbra Steisand, and Courtney Love, to the hippest and trendiest denizens of America’s most decadent coastal cities.

Remember the Nam Yoho Renge Kyo craze of the late 80′s, which saw out-of-work actors lighting incense and chanting Asian phrases they didn’t understand towards an expensive scroll in a wooden box, in the hopes of winning jobs, money, and romance? Well, the Kabbalah movement of the late 90′s has much the same flavor. Tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews now stare at pages of (expensive) ancient texts and scan their eyes over the printed Aramaic glyphs, believing that the energy of these symbols will be transmitted off the page and into their lives. They pay to have red string tied around their wrists in order to ward off the evil eye. And, with Madonna wearing one to the VH1 Fashion Awards, they get to do all this in style — or even *as* style.

At the self-proclaimed center of this cultural phenomenon is an organization calling itself, fittingly, The Kabbalah Learning Center. Established in Jerusalem in the 1920′s as a quiet but distinguished facility for scholarly research, it was taken over after its founder’s death by an ex-insurance salesman, Rabbi Philip Berg, who claimed to have been hand picked for the succession. But the original founder’s descendents argue that Berg has no claim to this lineage, and most of the world’s Rabbis shudder at the thought that people might confuse this trendy and mind-numbingly coercive New Age network with anything remotely Kabbalistic or even Jewish.

Traditional Kabbalah is a quite extensive system of Jewish mysticism that came to the attention of a wide circle of academics and scholars when it was unearthed and explained by Professor Gershom Scholem earlier this century. Most Kabbalists sit around discussing the ancient texts, analyzing numerical or other relationships between names or places, and occasionally meditating on God’s divinity. It’s difficult reading, and entirely un-sexy, but what it lacks in marketability it makes up for in Zen koan-like density.

Berg’s centers provide modern audiences with a colorful and experiential set of Cliff Notes to the basic tenets of Kabbalah. Thanks to Berg’s efforts and the attention of a cadre of movie stars that rivals even the Dalai Lama’s crew, his movement has expanded to over 60 centers worldwide, including a brand new five-story HQ in Manhattan.

“The Rav,” as his devotees affectionately refer to their 70-year-old leader, broke with tradition by deciding that the more mystical Jewish texts and theology should be available to all — not just those who had studied the Torah for several decades as was traditionally mandated. His books, most notably “Kabbalah For the Layman,” seek to explain phenomena ranging from the unified field theory to life after death by deconstructing ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts for their clues and prophecies. According to his students, the Rav also transmits the essence of Kabbalah by sharing his own divine light with others.

“When you go away on a holiday with The Rav, it’s like a little mini-trip to heaven” explains Karen Erikson of Showroom Seven, a leading fashion agency that hosts what is probably New York’s most fabulous Kabbalah gathering, started by comedienne Sandra Bernhardt. Students attend classes, visit the Queens Centre on Shabbat, and, most inspiringly, go on weekend retreats with the Rav himself. “You come back flying,” says Erikson. “Your feet do not touch the ground.”

At the Showroom Seven gathering, Sandra’s names is invoked as frequently as the Rav’s. One of Sandra’s make-up artists says she came to Kabbalah after seeing the “improvement” in Sandra’s coping strategies. After a single meeting, she was hooked: “I think I took to it so quickly because my soul recognized an aspect that had been missing for me. It was from looking at the Hebrew letters.” For her, the goal of Kabbalah is “breaking your nature, rising above your nature, and sharing.”

Of course all this breaking, rising, and sharing costs money. Although classes are only ten dollars a pop, the audio tapes, books, paraphernalia, and retreats do add up. (I wasn’t asked to pay for anything except the class I attended, but my phone number was written down on three separate occasions.) The Zohar — the multi-volume Aramaic text on which most of Kabbalah is based and an essentially mandatory purchase for all students — costs about $350 to buy from the Centre, yet lists for only a third of that at any regular bookstore. But what else are devotees to do when the text itself emanates divine light, and the Rav’s center only sells one edition?

The Kabbalah Centre may sound pretty much like any other New Age self-help group that has come and gone over these bizarre millennium-ending decades, but unlike EST, The Course in Miracles, or most of today’s fashionable spiritual pyramid schemes, this one is run by descendants of the folks who built the original pyramids back in Egypt. In other words, where going through spiritual hoops are concerned, the Jews got game.

Historically speaking, the Jewish religion began as human beings evolved from the hunter-gatherer stage to a tent and farming society. Judaism was characterized by the elimination of ritual human sacrifice and idol worship from one’s life. It marked a break from tribal pantheism to the worship of a more unknowable and abstract single god, along with the adoption of a set of textual laws governing ethics and action. The Torah can be seen as the first great argument for a less barbaric way of life.

But interwoven into the stories and laws of these ancient texts were many reminders of what the Jews had left behind — back in the Garden of Eden and before. Kabbalists have been busy for centuries mining the Torah and other sacred writings for their hidden references to existence before the “big bang”, the reasons why a perfect God bothered to create matter, evil, or pain.

So why, after the Sufis, Buddhists, Native Americans, Hindus, and Siddha Yogis have all staked their turf in the Spiritual Renaissance, should the pop-Kabbalist movement stand a chance of gaining a reasonable market share so late in the game? Because the Jews have a trump card: Western respectability.

It’s a lot easier for a cynical New Yorker to accept spiritual explanations for the Unified Field Theory from a 70-year-old wearing a yarmulke than a bald-headed yogi in a robe. With an odd mix of conservative integrity and outlandish prophecy, the pop-Kabbalists mine stories out of the daily paper for confirmation of the Zohar and Berg’s many predictions. They give trendy New Agers a way to hang onto their astrology and tarot cards while doing something that satisfies the superego as much as the need for an immediate, god-confirming rush.

At the Showroom Seven class I attended, a friendly, and yarmulke-capped 40-something teacher from the Kabbalah Center named Abe Hardoon sat amidst racks of pink sheath dresses, speaking in what I could only assume was an at-least-partially affected Yiddish accent. He held up the Science section of the *New York Times* with the headline “Immortality of a Sort Beckons to Biologists” and then proceeded to use the report on genetic engineering as a springboard to a tale about how The Rav once considered resurrecting a young man who had been killed in an accent (we didn’t find out if he succeeded), and from there to a discussion about how achieve immortality in this lifetime. On the back cover of the Science section from which he read was a full-page ad for J&R Computer World — yet another Jewish business that has discovered the key to eternal life: location location location!

But at least the appliance and electronics store is giving its customers something tangible for their money. The Kabbalah Learning Centre solicits so many donations from students, and under such extreme emotional and spiritual pressure, that it has come to the attention of several cult networks. Many ex-students report being told that if they donated tens of thousands of dollars, they would literally be bathed in light, and “chaos” — which takes the form of disease, poverty, or general unhappiness — would be eradicated.

For a generation that grew up learning to demand its MTV, this consumer-friendly brand of Judaism offers an immediate fix. In addition to ecstatic experiences that rival those achieved on LSD, students believe they are getting rid of the confusing and debilitating thoughts and energies trapped within them. “Why do we study Kabbalah?” offers Erikson. “To get chaos out of our lives. We’ve got a good percentage of gay people, fashion people. Our lives are filled with chaos and terror. And Kabbalah is to eliminate those things.” This might also explain why the cult has proved so popular with movie stars and other wealthy victims of the instant celebrity that our hypermediated popular culture bestows. Surely what the Lord giveth, he can just as easily — and arbitrarily — take away. This version of Kabbalah offers Rosanne and Courtney a rationale for how they achieved God’s favor, and how to prevent chaos from altering the status quo.

Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Fund, a leading Kabbalah scholar who teaches his own classes at temples and universities in New York, is delighted that people are finding new reasons to explore Judaism, but guarded about any approach that involves money or superstition. “Any time you bring money into Kabbalah, you have permanently driven the spirit out of it.”

Fund is particularly suspect of organizations — he was careful not to implicate the Centre — that use the word “Kabbalah” as a rationale for profit or brainwashing. “I’m not aware of any reason in the world why people in the name of Kabbalah should be asked to spend hundreds of dollars on books that are worth a fraction of that amount. I’m not aware of any practice in Kabbalah that has people — as you describe — passing their fingers over words they don’t understand.”

Hardoon doesn’t deny his sect’s somewhat sensationalist bias. “Look in the bible. They did mass circumcision. They wiped the doorposts with blood. Yes we chant, we scream. We scan the text with our eyes. There are ways of awakening the spiritual within us. We’re open about it, and we tell people where it’s at.”

Many more traditional Rabbis are concerned that by masquerading as a branch of Judaism, this cult will lull its victims into a state of false security where they can be more easily programmed into submission. But — like Scientology’s critics — these same rabbis are worried for their own safety, and hesitant to criticize Berg in public. The Centre sued Toronto Rabbi Immanuel Schochet for 4.5 million dollars when he called Berg’s people “fakers.” Los Angeles Rabbi Avrohom Union once considered issuing a letter stating that he did not endorse the Kabbalah cult, but a goat’s head hanging in a grocery bag over his doorknob convinced him otherwise.

When I told him about this now-famous incident, Hardoon countered with the fact that several young women selling the Kabbalah Centre’s books were themselves assaulted by a group of Lubavich boys. “Does that make me think less of their Rabbi? No.”

The real shame here is that, from what I can tell, genuine Kabbalah study does offer a tremendous opportunity for Jews and others to discover what this religion has to offer those looking for some answers to life’s great mysteries. “It seems to me there’s much more to be gained from studying words you do understand than dancing with your fingers over words that you don’t,” explains Fund, whose classes I’ve decided to attend on a regular basis.

But how are we to tell the difference between a genuinely enriching Kabbalah class and a dangerous cult? Hardoon acts as if the question is immaterial. “We *are* a cult, okay? I don’t even know what a cult is. There’s so many cults out there — we’re a good cult, though. Of course we ask people for money. We ask them to volunteer. But we don’t force people to stay at the center. They are free to come and go.”

Fund offers a simple test: “First of all, wherever you are, you’re already moving in the right direction. What’s important is if you are made to feel by the teacher or the spirit of the place that the truth only lies within the four walls of where you are, then you know that this is not for you. If it is an experience that opens you to make you want to go beyond where you are, then you’re on your way.”

Alas, not even the Jews have a quick fix for the perils of modernity — and teachers who claim to offer one, whether they wear yarmulkes or not, are most likely charlatans. As another Kabbalah teacher and rabbi (who requested to remain nameless) explained after listening to my tapes of the Showroom Seven class, “It seems to be nothing more than some kind of trendy imitation of what people might want to hear. It’s short on what we would call Kabbalah.”

Hardoon believes such condemnations are at the heart of the world’s current spiritual crisis. “All Rabbi Berg has ever taught people is that, in the end, there’s no need for Rabbis. Rabbis are supposed to be teachers — not people who control people for the sake of religion. According to the Zohar, in our generation the rabbis will be responsible for the spiritual decline of the people. *They* are responsible for the shape that the world is in.”

The only question is, which rabbis are “they?”

Welcoming One Another

Special To The Jewish Week, April 25 2003

So just who is allowed to participate in the conversation that is Judaism, anyway? Is it a blood test, a history of contributions to the right philanthropies, or a working knowledge of the Talmud that earns one a place at the table?

Sure, I spent the 15 years after my bar mitzvah engaged in the secular world fighting for media literacy and social justice, with nary a High Holy Days service to keep myself in the correct column of the ledger in the U’Nesaneh Tokef.

Does that make me “lapsed,” or worse, turn me into an “outsider”? Because, ironically, the further away I got from what most of us think of as Judaism, the more I could see how my choices, even my career and books, were informed by the religion’s values. I was more surprised than anyone to realize that in spite of my efforts to the contrary, I wasn’t truly “lapsed” at all.

So I decided to re-explore Judaism directly by reading texts and attending services at a Conservative synagogue. I even wrote a couple of mainstream articles hinting at some of Judaism’s best fruits, such as the Sabbath or an emphasis on literacy and community-based learning.

But the further “in” I got, the more disheartened I was by what I found. Jewish institutions appeared frozen in a protective crouch, desperately counting their remaining constituents and wondering why young people were intermarrying and “assimilating” at such alarming rates. Instead of offering the opportunity to engage in the Jewish process of inquiry and engagement, most places I went were obsessed with saving Judaism from its many internal and external threats.

And instead of seeing engaged, secular Jews as success stories, we were mourned as the religion’s failures.

Yeah, I took it personally. I decided to write a book about Judaism’s core insights of iconoclasm, abstract monotheism and social justice, as well as the many reasons why these ideas have taken a back seat to self-preservation. Some of them are very understandable: We’ve been persecuted for centuries. But others, such as the false conception of a chosen Jewish “race” and the inability to parse messianic fantasy from the reality of Israeli national security, seem ripe for revision. I’d welcome everyone to the table to reach a new consensus about what Judaism could be for the future.

The National Jewish Population Study provided an excellent opportunity for me to test some of these ideas in a secular forum, so I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times chastising the organized Jewish world for obsessing with numbers. Treating Jews as an endangered species in dire need of a breeding program was hardly a good strategy for attracting more young, successful and universal-minded people into the fold, I suggested, if that’s even the object of the game.

I received several thousand e-mails — the vast majority extremely supportive. “If that’s Judaism, count me in!” most of the so-called lapsed Jews wrote me. Jews of choice were elated, and told me of the various trials associated with conversion, as well as their continuing sense of exclusion. Even the philanthropies I criticized seemed to welcome the attention from a member of their latest target market and invited me to advise them on how to focus on Judaism’s many offerings rather than its imminent demise — and still raise money.

Dishearteningly, the vast majority of negative response came from rabbis and Jewish pundits who feared that I was reducing Judaism to tikkun olam (which I wasn’t). For some reason, they couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a participatory, welcoming Judaism that emphasizes what it can do for the world rather than how many descendents of the mythical generation at Mount Sinai remain on the roster. Social justice might be the most tangible way to extend our truth, but it’s not the only light we can share with all peoples.

As a historically persecuted bunch (“for you were slaves in Egypt …”), we should understand better than anyone the sin of exclusion. In the Torah, God doesn’t tell his people to be Jews — he tells them to be holy. But too many in the organized Jewish world still think self-preservation is the right course for us as a people, thank you very much, and that we’re in no need of secular outsiders with big ideas.

“Along comes Douglas Rushkoff,” griped one of my role models, Anne Roiphe, in the Jerusalem Report. She wrote as if I were an unwelcome foreigner to the scene, and unaware that “fixing the world is not an idea that has been waiting around for Mr. Rushkoff to discover.” Roiphe’s main problem with emphasizing ethics was that “so do many other religions and people.” She labeled as “silly” my effort to rescue Judaism’s core insights from ethnocentrism, and used the evidence of Jewish disease (such as Tay-Sachs) as proof of a Jewish race.

I can understand the wish to believe that we are direct descendents of the people described in the Torah, and it’s not my purpose to challenge Ms. Roiphe’s faith. But, 42 years circumcised, I refuse to be treated as an outsider for seeing the great benefits of contending otherwise, and beseech Jews of all denominations to consider whether our need for particularism undermines the universalism — the Shema — at the very core of our belief system.

If we’re ever going to welcome in — or be welcomed by — the world’s many communities, we must first learn to welcome one another. n

Douglas Rushkoff is the author most recently of “Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism” (Crown, April 2003).

They Call Me Cyberboy

Originally published in TIME DIGITAL

Not so long ago, I could freak people out by talking about cyberculture. It was fun. They’d laugh nervously when I’d say they’d be using email someday. They’d call me “cyberboy” and mean it as an insult. I felt like a renegade.

However frustrating it was to be an Internet evangelist in the late 1980′s, it beat what I’m feeling now having won the battle. A journey into cyberspace is about as paradigm-threatening as an afternoon at the mall. The Internet is better, bigger, faster, and brighter, but the buzz is gone.

I remember when following Internet culture or, better, actually participating in it, meant witnessing the birth of a movement as radically novel as psychedelia, punk, or, I liked to imagine, the Renaissance itself.

Here was a ragtag collection of idealistic Californians, bent on wiring up the global brain, one node at a time. Every new account on the WELL – the Bay Area’s pre-eminent online bulletin board, Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link – meant another convert to the great digital hot tub. The struggle of obtaining the computer, the modem, the software, the phone number and the appropriate protocol was a journey of Arthurian proportion. The community you’d find when you’d got there was as political, high-minded, and tightly knit as the Round Table. No wonder “universal access” became our Holy Grail.

Conceived on the bongwater-stained rugs of Reid College dorm rooms, the Apple personal computer bent over backwards to bring even the most stoned of us into the mix. The Macintosh soon became the central metaphor for our collective challenge to God himself. We held more than a forbidden fruit: we had the whole world in our hands. Access was power.

Our arrogance was only matched by our naivete. Like hippies scheming to dose the city’s reservoir with LSD, Internet enthusiasts took a by-any-means-necessary attitude towards digital enlightenment. Getting a friend to participate in a USENET group was as rewarding to us as scoring a convert is to a Mormon.

And the beauty of it was that we were the freaks! Not just nerds, but deeply and beautifully twisted people from the very fringes of culture had finally found a home. We all had the sense that we were the first settlers of a remote frontier. We had migrated online together in order to create a new society from the ground up.

Cyberculture was hard to describe – and a good number of us got book contracts paying us to try – but it was undeniably real when experienced first hand. It was characterized by Californian idealism, do-it-yourselfer ingenuity, and an ethic of tolerance above all else. You couldn’t go to a hip party in San Francisco without someone switching on a computer and demonstrating the brand new Mosaic browser for the fledgling World Wide Web. The patience with which experienced hackers walked newbies through their virgin hypertext voyages would make a sexual surrogate ashamed.

Coaxing businesses online was simply an extension of this need to share. It was less an act of profiteering than an effort to acquire some long-awaited credibility. Somehow it seemed like the revolution was taking too long; so our best-spoken advocates loaded up their laptops and made presentations to the Fortune 500. Then something happened on NASDAQ, and cyberculture was turned upside down.

It should have come as no surprise that big corporations, whose bottom line depends on public relations, direct selling, and “staying ahead of the curve,” would eventually become the driving force behind cyberculture’s evolution. Once the conversation itself was no longer the highest priority, marketing took its place. Though the diehards protested with the fervor of Christ ejecting moneychangers from the temple, the Internet became the domain of businessmen.

To be sure, commercial interests have taken this technology a long way. Thanks to Internet Explorer 4.0, America Online, and banner advertisements, the holy grail of universal access is within our reach. But universal access to what? Direct marketing, movies-on-demand, and up-to-the-second stock quotes?

Even if the Internet has not yet been rendered ubiquitous, it has certainly been absorbed the same mainstream culture that denied its existence and resisted its ethos for an awfully long time. True, cyberculture has inalterably changed its co-opter, but in the process has become indistinguishable from it as well.

Every day, more people conduct their daily business online. The Internet makes their lives more convenient.

I can’t bring myself to see mere convenience as a victory. Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it’s which browser we’ll be using to buy products from the same old world.

The only way I can soothe myself is to imagine that the essentially individualistic and countercultural vibe of the Internet I once knew has simply gone into remission. Corporate money is needed to build the infrastructure that will allow the real world to get access to networking technology. By the time Microsoft and the others learn that the Web is not the direct marketing paradise they’re envisioning, it will be too late. They’ll have put the tools in our hands that allow us to create the interactive world we were dreaming of.

In the meantime, I now get paid for saying the same sorts of things that got me teased before. But I preferred tweaking people for free. That’s why they called me cyberboy.