Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
particularly good. For the most part that’s because of the reassertion of hard rather than soft power: of military force rather than covert ideology. But the transience of those events has also demonstrated the dangers of getting too mesmerised by the spectacle of demonstrations and Facebook campaigns, and of not concentrating on long-term overt ideological vision: on the kind of societies people want to create.
The wholesale rejection of ideological contestation has left a vacuum into which has leapt the rhetoric of people-power marketing that surrounds us today. As far as the West is concerned, politics used to be a relatively straightforward business of cause and effect. First work out what you believe in; then support a party that stands for those beliefs and will put them into action. Now that’s considered ‘tribalism’. The only hope for voters seems to lie with process and technique, with electoral reform and new media gimmicks for staging electoral contests. But changing the system is pointless without distinct options to choose from.
Because it echoes Communism, ‘people power’ sounds like a political project. But since parties are too scared to set out their stalls, it has no political meaning. We’re left with the hollowed-out post-Fukuyama tokens of Communist idealism. People power may be back in style, but there’s a curious lack of substance. Glastonbury may ape Woodstock, but we’re a world away from Black Power or the birth of Women’s Liberation. Politicians make use of the rousing connotations of Communism, but the idealism inherent in that project is gone. People power sounds left-wing, but as the Tea Party has shown, it can very easily blur into right-wing populism; just as the language of liberation can easily be recruited to the cause of free-market capitalism. In fact people power has become associated not with Communism but with its rejection: Berlin in 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests and the ‘colour revolutions’ that followed across Eastern Europe. Because people power is an empty signifier, it can be co-opted by a range of political ideologies. Political affiliation, on the other hand, has the advantage of being real.
The rhetoric of people power does in fact perform a political purpose, but it’s the opposite of what it seems. It denies and therefore preserves inequality by claiming that the masses are now in charge; and if you do not succeed in life, well, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. This is a gift to those who would like to preserve their wealth and status undisturbed. The result is a world where citizens have less and less influence, but where there’s a constant, craven and ultimately empty pandering to a symbolic populace; a world full of the false belief that everything has changed, everyone is equal, and our destiny is in our own hands. It’s a dream-like world where we are given a platform from which to speak, but the words don’t come out. I’m not sure whether we’ve become passive or just powerless. It could be that people know perfectly well what’s going on, they’re just unable to do anything about it. But what’s clear is that although a lot of left-wing ink has been spilt bemoaning the erosion of political accountability, all that outrage somehow fails to capture the surreal and paradoxical quality of the situation. It’s surreal because at the very moment our power as citizens is draining away, we’re being told that we’ve never had it so good.
Astroturf
Those who conceal their influence through fictional deferral to the public now have a handy new trick at their disposal. ‘Astroturf’ campaigns – fake grassroots movements – were developed in the nineties by tobacco firms keen to create the impression of widespread resistance to smoking bans. In 1993, the PR giant Burson-Marsteller created the National Smokers Alliance, a manufactured smokers’ rights group, on behalf of Philip Morris, the home of Marlboro. The rest of the commercial world was quick to adopt this radical alternative to traditional advertising, and the theatre of artificial activism was soon populated by a cast of ‘sock puppets’ and ‘meat puppets’: fictional personas enlisted to big up your own products, or do down the competition. Employees of Sony, L’Oréal and Walmart have all posed as puppets; and even the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, has found time to lurk pseudonymously on online messageboards.
As co-editors of PR Watch John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton describe, politicians caught on too. At a 1994 conference called ‘Shaping Public Opinion: If You Don’t Do It, Someone Else Will’, John Davies, CEO of Davies Communications and one of the earliest astroturfing experts, explained how his political letter-writing campaigns worked. ‘We handwrite it on little kitty-cat stationery if it’s an old lady. If it’s a business we take it over to be photocopied on someone’s letterhead. [We] use different stamps, different envelopes … Getting a pile of personalized letters that have a different look to them is what you want to strive for.’ Feather Larson & Synhorst, a telemarketing company which was Scott Brown’s ‘partner’ in his campaign to become Massachusetts’ senator, offers a similarly retro-authentic ‘letter desk’ service. Its website assures potential clients that ‘personal letters from constituents are proving to be increasingly effective in swaying legislators’ opinions on hot issues. FLS can economically generate hundreds or thousands of letters on your behalf … each letter is personalized, individually signed and often includes a handwritten postscript from the constituent.’
Today’s astroturfers still use snail mail when they want that grubby tang of authenticity, but the internet provides the perfect artificial ground for fake grass. A service called DomainsByProxy camouflages political and corporate identities online, and a plethora of books teach the art of building ‘bottom-up’ and ‘viral’ campaigns: from Steven Holzner’s Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business to Joel Comm and Ken Burge’s Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. ‘There are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved,’ explains an article on the website of a PR firm called the Bivings Group with the rather ominous title ‘Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World’. ‘In cases such as this, it is important to first “listen” to what is being said online … once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party.’
The fresh green lawns of political activism are being replaced by plastic grass. In 2009, the then deputy prime minister John Prescott launched an online campaign to galvanise popular protest against bankers’ bonuses. It looked like a real Robin Hood initiative, with liberal use of the phrase ‘power to the people’. Prescott himself, the archetypal Northern working-class man, gave a series of rousing, iconoclastic media interviews. But what the coverage neglected to mention was that the campaign was hosted by GoFourth.co.uk, an organisation set up with the aim of helping to return the Labour government to a fourth term in office, and run by the party’s comms chief Alastair Campbell. Prescott is a vocal fan of Twitter, and has regularly emphasised the endearing irony of himself as a former trade-union leader who can’t type but is au fait with new technology. But he has seamlessly merged his shop-floor pedigree with being down with the kids. This is highly skilled image management, not ramshackle incongruity. Prescott’s ‘Tweets’ were in fact co-written by his son David, the director of Gamechanger, a digital PR agency. From David Prescott to David Cameron to David Axelrod – Obama’s top adviser and an astroturfing supremo – PR men with an ear for the demotic have wormed their way into the heart of government.
And although America has been transfixed in recent years by the incongruous spectacle of a right-wing street-protest movement, all is not as it seems. In fact, the town-hall meetings and Tea Party demonstrations against public health insurance and climate-change legislation have been carefully orchestrated from above. Thomas Frank has described how the American Right has deliberately engineered a shift in public attitudes, so that the traditional association between Republicans and blue-blood elites has switched to liberal Democrats. The Republicans are now associated with salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk. Astroturfing gives this fairy tale a new twist. This time it’s medical insurance companies and energy firms that have been pulling the strings alongside Republican hard liners. And the theatricals are more sophisticated. The Republican candidate in the 2010 West Virginia US Senate race, right-wing businessman John Raese, presented himself as being on the side of workers, although he opposed the minimum wage. His election ads were peopled by actors pretending to be real voters. ‘We are going for a “Hicky” Blue Collar look,’ read the talent agency’s casting call. ‘These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.’