Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (22 page)

Employees complained, too, and those at some of the big-box stores were fired for refusing to come in for the overnight Thanksgiving shift. Memories of late-nineteenth-century union fights over workers’ hours were retrieved by the press: “Even though it’s a desperate time doesn’t mean that we should trade all that ground that our fathers and our grandfathers, everyone that came before us, fought really hard for,” a Target worker told the
New York Times
.
¹⁸
JCPenney, in a nod to these sentiments, kept their opening time at a respectable 4 a.m., because “we wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families.”
¹⁹

The extreme overwind has pushed many shoppers and workers over the edge, and even threatened the Christmas shopping season as a whole. What was once a seasonal consumer sport now feels to many like work and an intrusion on the rest of the holiday. Having found a temporal anchor in the limbo of generic, big-box shopping, retailers couldn’t help but spring-load it until it just broke. Starting the Christmas season the day after Thanksgiving was already at the very boundary of spring-loading; pushing into Thanksgiving itself was an overwind. It broke through the patina of holiday spirit, masking this otherwise crude effort to get people to go further into credit card debt by encouraging them to purchase more electronics and other goods manufactured in Chinese plants and sold in big-box stores that kill local business. All this, we must remember, on borrowed money and borrowed time. No wonder our consumer economy went into present shock.

In the process, many consumers and workers alike came to realize the artificiality of the whole affair and simply turned away. Anticonsumerist
Adbusters
magazine’s “Buy Nothing Day” had already morphed into the lifelong commitment to Occupy Wall Street. This new wave of local, presentist values only reinforced the breakdown between people and the consumption they were obligated to be doing to save America’s corporations from peril.

Black Friday is just a more condensed version of the time shifting that characterizes our entire consumer economy and its current crisis. It is incumbent upon businesses to unwind the temporal compression inherent in consumer culture in order to transcend it. In short, we must come to understand where various forms of pressurized time are doing more harm than good.

On its most fundamental level, a consumer society is based on its ability to compress the time of others through mass production. Issues of exploitation and ethics aside, mass production and Industrial Age technologies were, at their core, about compressing the labor of faraway people into the products used at home. While, as we saw, peasants were originally able to lift themselves beyond subsistence farming by learning crafts and trading goods, the Industrial Age took this a step further. Along with their invention of central currency, the waning aristocracy of the late Middle Ages also created the chartered monopoly. The charter was a legal contract between the monarchy and a company, granting it the exclusive right to do business in a particular region or industry. A company that was granted a charter no longer had to worry about competition or going out of business due to an unforeseen setback such as bad weather or a shipwreck. The monopoly enjoyed permanence, by law. In return for this favor, the company would give the king or queen some shares.

So these big companies, with names like British East India Company or the Dutch East India Trading Company, went to the faraway places to which they owned all rights and brought back resources that could then be fabricated into clothes, foods, and other products in local factories. It was a neat trick—which robbed most everyone of the ability to do business in the present. People who once purchased locally produced goods now had to buy them from the chartered monopolies. Moreover, people who once created goods now had to go work for a company instead. The present-based reality of a normal local economy ended up superseded by something else.

This was also a perfect environment for the Industrial Age to take hold. Machines didn’t simply make things faster; they allowed companies to hire less expert labor. Where a skilled shoemaker was once required to cobble a shoe, now shoes could be assembled by machine operators who each needed to know only how to perform one small step in a shoe’s manufacture. Such laborers could be found easily, paid much less, and fired without cost, for they didn’t take any expertise away with them.

The expertise a real cobbler, or any skilled craftsperson, may have accumulated over years of apprenticeships was rendered worthless, as the time formerly invested in human training was now compressed into the mechanical processes of the machine itself. Yes, a skilled shoemaker might be required to help devise the machine in the first place, but after that he is expendable—particularly for a company that has no need to innovate, because its stature is guaranteed by its monopoly. So on the simplest level, the time compression that once allowed a craftsperson to leverage his experience is now transferred to the machine. The worker is always in the present, no more valuable on his hundredth day than on his first.

When looked at in terms of value creation, the whole industrial model starts to break down. American colonists, for example, created value by growing cotton in their fields. They were unable to reap the market value of their product, because they were forbidden by law from selling it to other colonists. They were required instead to sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Company, who shipped it back to England, where it was fabricated into clothes by another monopoly, and then shipped back to the colonists to purchase at a premium. This was not more efficient for anyone; it simply prevented anyone but a chartered monopoly from adding value to (and making money from) the cotton. America’s colonists were cut out of the value-creation equation and subjected instead to a system where their hard labor in the present was simply loaded into the production cycle of a long-term and long-distance corporate product.

America’s white colonists, or at least the educated people who led them, knew better than to accept these terms and fought a war of independence. Britain learned its lesson—but maybe not the one we would have hoped for. What they realized was that their methods of value extraction worked a whole lot better on enslaved indigenous populations who had neither the experience to envision nor the gunpowder to choose otherwise.

By around the time of Queen Victoria, colonial empires had established corporations overseas that both mined resources and fabricated them into products. These were completely closed circuits. Britain sent mechanical weaving looms to India, for example, and maintained their monopoly over production simply by forbidding hand weaving. The only way to weave was to work for one of Britain’s loom owners. While opinions vary today on exactly how this impacted India’s capacity to make money over the long term, we tend to think less about the way this impacted the habits of everyone back at home.

While people may not have been particularly concerned about Britain’s exploitative trading practices, they were not accustomed to purchasing outsourced goods. In 1851 Queen Victoria and the corporations she sponsored held the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, in a high-tech, million-square-foot glass pavilion called the Crystal Palace. It was like a world’s fair for the Industrial Revolution, where fourteen thousand exhibitors demonstrated their factory-made wares and the machines that created them. Spectators marveled at the steam hammers, hydraulic presses, barometers, and diving suits of this new, mechanized era.

As I argued in my book
Life Inc.
, the Great Exhibition’s primary intent was to distract the domestic public from the dark underbelly of international industrial modernity. Through this spectacle, Queen Victoria and the corporations she sponsored disconnected these technologies from the human toll they inflicted on their operators. As if in a shopping mall, people gawked, their jaws dropping, at the steam pipes and gears, utterly unaware of the faces and hands the machines burned and mauled. People saw products and production, but never the producers themselves. If anything, industrial modernity was simpler and cleaner than manual labor. As much a welcome step back as a daring leap forward.
²⁰

The Great Exhibition was designed to convey precisely this sensibility and to help the British contend with the shock of the new. Organizers cleverly promoted and organized the event as a celebration of faux-medieval design and dedicated the central hall to an exhibit on Gothic revival architecture. This was part of a larger effort to disguise the industrialization of Victorian England as a throwback to feudal tradition. The era of the high-tech factory would be rebranded as the romantic revival of medieval monarchy. The Great Exhibition mythologized both free trade and the Industrial Age as a return to the best of pre–Renaissance Europe, when it was actually the extension of its very opposite. Instead of promoting a present-based, peer-to-peer economy, the spectacle was reinforcing the time-delayed, long-distance economics of international monopolies.

For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. People walking through the Crystal Palace were living in a different temporal reality than those working the looms of Delhi. This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time—that of the consumer.

The consumer lives in a present made possible by the temporal compression of others. He can consume something in minutes that may have taken months to manufacture and transport. While he may have a job himself during which the clock ticks normally, when he is in the store he is in a different time zone altogether, one that leverages the time of production into a frozen present of shopping. This new relationship between people and products no longer depended exclusively on international trade. Items manufactured three thousand miles across the country embodied the same invisible labor and time as those made overseas.

The more companies excelled at mechanized mass production, however, the more consumption needed to be done. Supply easily outstripped demand. By the early twentieth century, decorators such as Frank Baum (later the author of
The Wizard of Oz
) were being employed to stoke consumer desire with store displays. Baum was responsible for what we now think of as the store window, where an entire aspirational lifestyle would be represented in a single, frozen scene. Baum also devised the notion of using themes to denote different departments of the store. In the employ of John Wanamaker, Baum developed the first true bridal department, a stage set through which he defined an entire wedding aesthetic. Once a bride-to-be had ventured into this world, the only way to feel like a true participant was to purchase every item in the ensemble. Anything less would feel incomplete.

What Baum and his counterparts at other department stores realized was that they needed to tell stories and to create feelings instantaneously. Remember, even though the items for sale may have taken time to produce, the consumer exists in no-time. In a store window, there is no linear time in which to convey a narrative. Instead, store windows must communicate through a still image—like the Nativity scene in front of a church at Christmas. Similarly, the individual departments pushed customers to act by making them feel out of place at that very moment. After World War II, these efforts focused almost entirely on women, who were being counted on to consume enough to keep returning veterans at the plants, churning out merchandise. By the 1950s, the need to consume and participate in these fantasy worlds became so highly pressurized that women began stealing compulsively—a condition called kleptomania, which was finally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1960s. (Interestingly, women were the only identified sufferers of the condition in the 1950s and ’60s. However, after women went back to work in the 1970s and marketers turned their attention to children, teenagers became the primary sufferers of kleptomania in America.) Kleptomania is just a symptom of this chronically induced inferiority—another way of expressing overwind. In the short forever of retail shopping, we are always out of step, hoping to buy our way into these worlds.

Mass media reinforced the perpetual and insatiable sense of longing, presenting consumers with imaginary landscapes of happiness. While mass production may have disconnected the worker from the value of his skill set, mass marketing disconnected the consumer from the producer. Instead of buying products from the person who made them, consumers were now purchasing them from companies thousands of miles away. In order to re-create the real-time human relationships that people had with their local millers, druggists, and butchers, long-distance sellers developed brands. The face of the Quaker on an otherwise plain box was meant to instill the sense of kinship one used to feel with the miller.

Mass media arose, at least in part, to forge that relationship in advance. Advertisements in print and commercials on television feed us the mythology of a brand so that it is spring-loaded into our psyche—ready to emerge fully formed when we see the label in the store. Our shopping experience—just like the experience of the attendees at the Crystal Palace—is no longer occurring on a normally flowing timeline, but is instead a series of decompressions. Each label we see recalls and unpacks advertisements and commercials, which in turn unpack the cultural mythologies they have appropriated.

Of course, the consumer must never be allowed to reach his goal, for then his consumption would cease. The consumer must never feel completely at home in his present, or he will stop striving toward a more fully satisfied future. Since consumption makes up about half of all economic activity in America, a happy consumer would spell disaster. Fashion must change, and products must be upgraded and updated. In order for the economy to grow, this must keep happening faster.