A good, and timely, article. Especially considering ad campaigns like Gillette, who after decades of pushing women to believe that body hair is taboo so they can sell women razors, very successfully and quickly got the masses to pardon them with a bit of sappy TV. Similarly, Nike's continued use of oppressive sweatshop labor is forgiven with a bit of sentimental disposable drama.
Years ago the idea of corporate person-hood was a laughable concept by anyone remotely left of center. Now it is fully embraced. In modern, bourgeois, image obsessed consumer culture your actual behavior is inconsequential, what matters is how you identify and market yourself. The message is true even if the behavior contradicts it.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/believe-in-something-nair
Years ago the idea of corporate person-hood was a laughable concept by anyone remotely left of center. Now it is fully embraced. In modern, bourgeois, image obsessed consumer culture your actual behavior is inconsequential, what matters is how you identify and market yourself. The message is true even if the behavior contradicts it.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/believe-in-something-nair
CONSIDER THE VERY LAST SCENE OF MAD MEN, and that scheming smile that slowly stretches across the otherwise inscrutable face of adman extraordinaire Don Draper as, trying hard to fit into a sect of yoga-performing hippies, he closes his eyes and mutters a sonorous "Om." We are made to believe that perhaps this is the transcendent moment that enables him to dream up the now-famous 1971 "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" jingle and the accompanying visuals of a multinational, multiethnic, and harmonious crowd of people atop a hill. Did Draper smile because he had found enlightenment? Or was he feeling inwardly beatific because he had, yet again, found a way to dupe people into believing that a commercial product held meaning beyond the slight buzz provided by a combination of sugar and carbonated water?
Capital has always projected itself as being on our side, as caring about the world. Even if we swallowed the message and the jingles, the great enabling fiction came wrapped in commercials for consumer products—providing some sense that there was a nod-and-a-wink hidden in these signature cultural transactions.
On its face, this campaign seemed like a huge gamble on Nike's part—and it further looked to be a gamble that paid off when share prices soared. But, as a searching New York Times investigative report makes clear, the corporation in fact went through a series of behind-the-scenes discussions and even considered dropping Kaepernick altogether, nervous—terrified, more likely—that it would face mass boycotts from consumers. When it became clear that the NFL supporters—largely white, male, and older—were outnumbered by the corporation's brand loyalists—more diverse and younger—Nike went ahead and now even claims that it inaugurated the campaign because it believes that Kaepernick "is one of the most inspirational athletes of his generation."
Woke left critiques can, at times, point out structural and historical inequalities, but too often they ignore the lived reality of vast swaths of people who don't live in, say, New York or Chicago. We might broadly critique patriarchal ideas about marriage and women, sure, or the xenophobia and racism generated by anti-immigrant rhetoric, but we forget, in the space of an ad, that the anxieties around marriage and immiration are both structural and social—with consequences both global and local.
In the ad campaigns of corporations like Nike and Apple, the brands' wokeness purports to function as a mode of resistance. Of course, many on the left can see that for the cynical move it is. We're expected to ignore the fact that all of this is actually proving to be enormously successful for the corporations. Woke campaigns aren't focused on repairing structural inequities, but on amassing profit for corporate players who continue to do harm. For but one deeply revealing example, look at what the tech industry has done to San Francisco over the past two decades, via massive gentrification campaigns and anti-poor initiatives that include removing services for the homeless in an effort to stamp them out of the city. In lieu of combating the underlying efforts to engineer inequality as a permanent condition of public life, wokeness overwhelmingly dotes on matters of image