The Corporate Takeover of Cool

Anybody who watches TV these days knows about the earth-shattering cultural change that's underway. Those who are optimistic about this shift argue that once we all own high-capacity computers, society will become radically decentralized and the nightmares of authoritarian government and soulless mass society, along with the age-old curse of elitism, will be ended for good. But those who are less sanguine see the big change as essentially negative. The sky really is falling, they rail, and civilization is wandering into a cultural catastrophe.

In part, of course, this is a predictable end-of-the-century sentiment, common to every year cursed with a nine as its third digit. But it's also a very real constellation of fears. As a culture, we've lost the ability to tell what's important and what's trivial. And nothing brings it home more concretely than the rise of the "culture trust," the group of media-behemoths like Time Warner, Geffen, Disney, and Westinghouse that have fashioned an industrial entertainment monopoly. What's happening looks like an almost literal realization of previous generations' fears of a totalitarian mass society: ever fewer voices talking to an ever larger and an ever more passive audience.

Both cyber-ecstatics and doomsayers are talking about the same larger phenomenon: the so-called information revolution and the unparalleled rise of corporate power that it seems to be fueling. The defining fact of American life in the 1990s is its complete reorganization around the needs of corporations. The world of business, it seems, is becoming the world, period. The market is politics, the office is society, the brand is equivalent to human identity.