Let Them Eat Lifestyle

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Fast Company, one of the most prominent new magazines of recent years, calls this "the business revolution" and argues that business culture is replacing civil society. "Work is personal" and "computing is social" are points one and two in Fast Company's manifesto for the corporate revolution. If there's going to be any social justice in the world, the magazine contends, it will be because the market has decreed that there be social justice. One of the magazine's writers takes the argument all the way: "Corporations have become the dominant institution of our time," he writes, "occupying the position of the church of the Middle Ages and the nation-state of the past two centuries.

To many of us, this summons unpleasant images. It's going to be the triumph of hierarchy, of homogeneity, of spirit-killing order. Right? We're all going to be robots and automatons. We'll have to listen to Muzak all the time. It's going to be like 1984 or one of those dystopic Schwarzenegger films. Right?

Wrong. The corporate takeover of life in fact has already happened, but one of the most salient characteristics of our emerging corporocracyóthis Republic of Businessóis that it doesn't demand order, conformity, gray clothes, and Muzak; it presents itself as an opponent to those very things. The spokesmen and spokeswomen for the new order aren't puritanical: They're hip; they're fully tuned in to youth culture; they listen to alternative rock while they work; they fantasize about smashing convention.

Business theory today is about revolution, not about status or hierarchy; it's about liberation, not order. Business is "fast companies" questioning everything from job duties to pay scales to office furniture. Business is thinking "outside the box," as anyone who has flipped through the latest management best-sellers must be tired of hearing. Business is tattooed executives snowboarding down K2 or shrieking down the halls of the great bureaucracies overturning desks and throwing paper. Business is adman Jay Chiat snipping off his clients' ties.

And all this makes for a peculiar national culture marked by a strange coexistence of, on the one hand, extreme political apathy and, on the other, extreme commercial extremism. Politically speaking, dissent against the market order has never been more negligible. In terms of politicians and political commentators, we are living in a time of greater consensus and conformity than the '50s. But take a look at our advertising. Mainstream commercial America is in love with everything alternative, way beyond anything we saw in the '60s. Even the word extreme itself is everywhere, from Taco Bell's "extreme value combos" to Boston Market's "extreme carver" sandwiches to commercials in which Pontiac announces that it is "taking it to the extreme." Not only can the center not hold; the center ceased to hold about 30 years ago. And nobody cares. Certainly the traditional guardians of order don't care, and certainly the business community doesn't care.

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