THIS is the most disturbing book of the year. No, really, it is.
New York writer Douglas Rushkoff’s “Coercion: Why We Listen To What ‘They’ Say” is the first post-web book. This is not one for the perky dot-commer who dreams of instant riches and uses terms like “add value,” “reach” and “ubiquity.” In tracing the history of sales and marketing from the first Victorian department stores to the “permission marketing” ‘bots of today’s Internet, he paints a chilling picture.
He starts by going over familiar territory: in the hexagonal malls that are designed to get you lost, cookie smells waft to make you feel generous. Car salesmen often play good cop, bad cop with their managers to make you feel they are securing you a deal. Charities send you free address labels and greeting cards to make you feel more guilty about throwing away their pleas for money. (Anyone who saw the movie “Go” will remember the scene in which two boys are lured into the home of their parole officer for a formal dinner with his beautiful wife. His ulterior motive turns out to be unthinkably creepy: Everything in the house, right down to the wine glasses, comes from the same multilevel marketing scheme, and he tries to get them to enlist before he’ll sign their release papers.)
That is disturbing enough (especially when you realize you already knew how the world worked but somehow forgot), but Rushkoff goes further by showing how new technology extends the project to sell.He makes the point that thanks to the Internet, marketing can now be automated. The tracking of consumers has been perfected on the web, with ‘cookies’ and other proprietary tracking devices.
For instance, when DoubleClick, the banner ad network, wanted to get Toyota’s on-line business, it targeted Toyota employees. They were welcomed as members of the Toyota family by banner ads whenever they went to a website in the network. DoubleClick got the gig.
And thanks to voluntary profiling, we are often tempted to give up demographic information in return to deeper access to a website. You are what you consume, and what you consume can be anticipated.
This is all good, most people would think – why should I look at ads aimed at someone else? Why shouldn’t I receive deals on low-fat goods if I’ve revealed I’m dieting?
However, drawing on his favorite metaphors (pyramid schemes, cults and neuro-linguistic programming) Rushkoff shows us where this may be leading: “This designer consumption would amount to a nearly hermetic feedback loop between each customer and his marketers – a form of pacing and leading where the customer’s taste is mirrored and then slowly led toward progressively more extreme manifestations of itself. It is a recipe for technologically induced obsessive-compulsive behavior, as our desires are repeatedly amplified and then fed back to us. The one-to-one future differs from the marketing we’re subjected to today only in its speed and specificity.”
So what are we to do in the face of this pressure, from the overt panhandling of a sports stadium promotion to the subtle mass-customization of web products? Rushkoff’s conclusion is itself disturbingly abstract. He suggests that all that can save us is our sense of doubt, the suspicion that we are being hustled, and the sense of dissatisfaction that comes with being caught up in a short-circuiting cult of consumption.
The ‘they’ we like to talk about is totally dependent on us going along with them.
Be careful where you log on.
Coercion (Riverhead, $24.95)
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