Agave parryi truncate / Parry’s agave
Desert Botanical Garden
Phoenix, Arizona
People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!
What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?
This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.
It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.
Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.
