Manufacturing the Cultural Marketplace
Manufacturing the Cultural Marketplace
or, How our society's proprietors decide what's on the menu
More than a few dispatches now from Radio Free Pizza have made some hay over the idea of “social engineering.” In political science, the term refers to the deliberate manipulation of societal structures, norms, and institutions by governments or political actors to achieve specific policy objectives. This can involve strategies aimed at changing public opinion, shaping cultural narratives, or enacting policies that influence the behavior of a society. Social engineering in political science often focuses on the use of propaganda, censorship, and psychological tactics to control or sway the masses, with the ultimate goal of consolidating power or advancing a particular ideological agenda. It is essentially a means of governance through the manipulation of public perception and behavior.
Sounds familiar, right?
Meanwhile, “social engineering” takes on a different connotation in the context of information security. Here, the term refers to strategies for manipulating individuals, or employees within an organization, to divulge sensitive information or to perform actions that compromise the security of their own data or systems, or that of their organization. Social engineers often impersonate trusted associates and employ deceitful psychological techniques to exploit human vulnerabilities, such as trust and curiosity. In addition to impersonation, common tactics also include pretexting (fabricating a false scenario or pretext to obtain information from a target) and baiting (offering something enticing, such as a free download, in exchange for personal information or actions that compromise security), with the aim of tricking individuals into revealing passwords, confidential information, or unwittingly installing malicious software.
The sense in which we use the term at Radio Free Pizza combines the theory of the former with the practice of the latter. Here, social engineering occurs when the capital order (through its corporate apparatuses and its political emissaries) deploys official propaganda, digital censorship, and deceitful psychological techniques—like disseminating false or misleading information (often with cherry-picked data packaged in emotional appeals to reinforce a particular narrative) through mainstream media or other communication channels—to manipulate public opinion, sway elections, or incite social discord.
Social engineering, in this sense, serves as a vector for cultural austerity, or the mass-media subversion of working-class political movements by financial interests. For that reason, I find it noteworthy that its origins date to the same timeframe in which Clara Mattei locates the introduction of the fiscal, monetary, and industrial austerity policies, as Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson cover in Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication (2022), a substantial contribution to research on a phenomenon that’s little more than a century old.
Adapting their account of social engineering’s historic origins into “Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering” for the MIT Press Reader, the pair delve into the development of mass manipulation from the 1920s through the mid-1970s, they begin by describing an interview between Stuart Ewen, a professor of film and media studies, and Edward Bernays, a prominent figure in the field of public relations who helped establish it in the 1920s. In that interview, Bernays discussed his theory that public relations experts, as part of an intellectual elite, shape public attitudes using their knowledge of sociology, psychology, social psychology, and economics, from which naturally follows a hierarchical vision of society with an educated class of opinion-molding experts that guides the less intellectually endowed masses—technocratic propagandists, in other words.
Gehl and Lawson then explore the historical context of Bernays’ mindset, tracing it back to the early 20th century when engineers were seen as saviors of humanity whose expertise could lead to a better society. The term “social engineer” emerged during this period, denoting experts who sought to apply scientific knowledge to shape and control society. They believed that their expertise would lead to societal improvements, such as assimilating immigrants and ensuring labor remained subservient to the capitalist mode of production.
Social reformers aimed to address social problems, while management theorists sought to improve workplace efficiency. However, both faced limitations in their domains of influence and encountered resistance from various quarters, setting the stage for the emergence of Bernays’ public relations as a profession dedicated to the “engineering of consent”—from the title of Bernays’ own 1947 essay and 1955 book on the subject—under which mass social engineers would leverage new communication technologies to exert influence on a broader scale.
Indeed, the mass media introduced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries—telegraphy, radio, cinema, and television, in addition to traditional newspapers—was integral to the nascent phenomenon. These media created the conditions for coordinated, nationwide media campaigns that could now reach a broader audience than ever before, enabling social control on a national level. Public relations adopted the terminology of social engineering, emphasizing its role in shaping and controlling public opinion to address social unrest and to control crowds systematically for constructive purposes, with Bernays and other practitioners viewing themselves as elite leaders capable of guiding the masses.
The concept of “consent engineering” first emerged in the 1920s, emphasizing the practical use of communication technologies like newspapers and radio to shape public opinion scientifically—or, at least, with scientific pretensions. Furthermore, as Gehl and Lawson tell us, the early proponents of mass social engineering were eager to exploit discoveries in psychology:
A husband and wife team who began a successful public relations firm together in the 1920s, Bernays and Fleischman argued that consent engineering could take place via communication technologies, particularly newspapers and radio. Their use would be guided by the facts gathered from the emerging social and psychological sciences to understand and target “the group mind.” With “the aid of technicians . . . of communication” deploying the cutting edge, social scientific data collection and analysis techniques of the day — e.g., polls, surveys, interviews, and statistics — they believed that political leaders would be able to achieve the engineering of consent for their programs and to do so “scientifically.” Knowledge of the group mind would allow consent engineers to move beyond the techniques of “the old-fashioned propagandist,” who was not versed in science, to control crowds through systematic engineering.
With thorough analysis, planning, execution, and evaluation, social engineers found their ideas’ applications in various domains of American life, from consumer behavior to support for industry and war efforts. The ultimate goal was to make the ideas conveyed through mass media an integral part of the public’s thinking—with those who crafted these coordinated communications becoming, in effect, an unelected national government.
I wish that were hyperbole, but in fact, Bernays’ model of social engineering via mass media has crafted executive policy in arranging public support for military action. Such was the conspiracy surrounding the American response when Jacobo Arbenz rose to power in Guatemala in 1950 and sought to institute land reforms that would undermine the political influence of the United Fruit Company (known today as Chiquita) in the country, and decrease the profits the company could extract from it.
As Brendran Fischer writes, the United Fruit Company and Bernays “waged a propaganda war and managed to convince the American public and politicians that Arbenz was secretly a dangerous communist who could not be allowed to remain in power.” The former had financed the Middle America Information Bureau (MAIB) since 1943 to “[spin] events in Central America through the filter of United Fruit’s economic and political goals,” as Robert Skvarla puts it. With this organizational infrastructure of this and other media outlets, Lindsay Brown reports how, in 1952, the latter set to work:
Bernays launched a massive effort [in the U.S.] to discredit Guatemala’s government by labeling them communist. He flew reporters of major newspapers and magazines to Guatemala. The hosts then carefully controlled the reporters’ experiences while within the country to portray Guatemala as a communist state. This led to massive publications, including The New York Times, publishing stories exposing Guatemala’s communism.
Fischer goes on to describe how that corporate relations campaign, seeking to curry favor for the private interests of the United Fruit Company, directly informed U.S. international policy toward Guatemala, and cites how E. Howard Hunt “who headed the CIA’s Guatemalan operation (and was later jailed for his role in the Watergate break-in) insisted in later years that lobbying by [United Fruit, now known as] Chiquita persuaded the Eisenhower Administration to get involved in Guatemala.” However, regardless of precisely which individual put the idea in Eisenhower’s head, the deadly results remain horrifying:
President Eisenhower secretly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the democratically elected Arbenz in a 1954 covert operation. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc “Liberation Army” under the command of an exiled Guatemalan army officer, and used them in conjunction with a diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. At the time, the American public was told that Guatemala was undergoing a “revolution;” the CIA’s involvement was long suspected and fully revealed when the agency released thousands of documents in 1997. The overthrow precipitated a 40-year civil war that killed over 200,000 people, and “disappeared” another 100,000.
That civil war between American-supported government forces and anti-imperialist guerrillas lasted from 1960 to 1996, and resulted in significant human rights abuses and loss of life. Though the post-war era brought some stability, Guatemala still grapples with issues like poverty, inequality, and corruption that the country continues working to address today. Nonetheless, we see how these are the fruits of what aims toward which the tactics of social engineering have been deployed.
Of course, other examples of social engineering in use have less violent, less obviously harmful consequences. One of the most famous (as Information Liberation puts it) from Bernays’ own career of “systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires” through which “people could be made happy and thus docile” can be found in the 1920s campaign he organized to promote cigarette-smoking among American women by associating the habit with women’s suffrage. However, despite such relative harmlessness, these examples all serve to reinforce the capital order’s influence over both domestic politics and international relations, and to maintain or enhance its ability to extract profit.
In some sense, I suppose, all of the corporate relations campaigns, conducted in mass media under the guise of public discourse, could be considered examples of social engineering deployed to serve the same purposes. In the same sense, one could say too that purchasing any of the products available on nationwide markets to American consumers today advances precisely those same mutually supportive purposes (hence, I’d guess, the contemporary proverb, “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”), and in this light, perhaps social engineering seems less insidious.
“Of course business interests seek profit, and of course profitable businesses gain social and political influence,” some might say, “It’s a natural consequence of their market share. What’s the problem?”
On the contrary: I submit that the psychological domain in which social engineering operates makes it more nefarious than the simple fact that, for example, my nearest grocer only stocks Chiquita bananas. The global capital order, I argue, deploys social engineering with the intent of reconfiguring the opinions and behavior of the masses, and (most malevolently) it operates on both the individual and the collective unconscious.
I concede, however, that this is a natural consequence of multinational corporations under the capitalist mode of production. That’s also to say that cultural austerity, the phenomenon we’ve now spent some months trailblazing, arises within capitalist republics as an inevitable result of their economic structures.
For a closer look at capitalism’s consequences for culture, let’s turn to Marx for Sale: Commodifying Class Struggle (2023), one of the Very Important Documentaries by Peter Coffin, one of the most insightful of the U.S.’s independent commentators today.
At ~0:19:43, Coffin uses anti-capitalist merchandise in corporate retail outlets to offer us a definition of what he calls cultivated identity:
Suppose we’re looking for an American retail chain specializing in counterculture-related clothing and accessories [...] We’re guaranteed to find T-shirts with anarchy symbols, and we’ve all seen so-called radicals wearing these things get made fun of in one way or another. They’re buying anti-capitalist merch from a company that pulls hundreds of millions in revenue yearly! Isn't that hypocritical? [...] Maybe: I mean, it’s definitely unbearable. But it’s not really their fault either. We’re all running around trying to feel good and find meaning in our lives, and it’s not exactly made easy in this postmodern dystopia. It’s hard to develop a sense of self in our detached society. People who read my books and watch my documentaries probably notice I talk a lot about a concept I came up called “cultivated identity” […] I’m referring to the process by which the ruling class conditions people to use consumption as the primary means of constructing and expressing their identities, facilitated by media and advertising that serve the ruling class’s interests. Identity is cultivated through the ruling ideology. We’re seemingly given the choice to be who we want, but it’s only from the options on offer.
Returning customers of Radio Free Pizza will surely note the affinity between Coffin’s cultivated identity, our own menu’s special offering of courses in cultural austerity, and the social engineering we’ve been discussing in this dispatch. Those with impeccable memories will also recognize the similarity between Coffin’s thinking here and Jim McGuigan’s critique of what he called “consumptionist cultural studies,” which attributed an inordinate agency to consumers and neglected the political and economic context, when in fact, as he wrote in “The Coolness of Capitalism Today” (2012), “[i]t is the producers who […] cultivate the tastes and habits of consumers” (emphasis mine).
Adopting a language similar to the targets of McGuigan’s critique, we could say that the Coffin’s phenomenon of cultivated identity results from corporate campaigns of social engineering which have reduced the options available in the cultural marketplace.
Though we’ve used the term a couple times now, we didn’t offer any definition. With it we refer to the metaphorical space in which the various forms of culture—cultural products, ideas, and expressions—are produced, exchanged, consumed, and evaluated within a society or across societies. The concept encompasses a wide range of cultural goods and activities, including literature, music, art, films, fashion, food, and more.
As Phung Thi Thuy Phuong put it in 2022, the cultural marketplace is one in which exchanges take place for goods and services “that meet the cultural and spiritual needs of people”—or, at least, that purport to meet those needs.
In the cultural marketplace, individuals, creators, artists, and cultural producers interact with audiences as consumers. It’s a space where cultural preferences and tastes are shaped, and where cultural trends and innovations emerge. The cultural marketplace is influenced by various factors, including: economic forces; technological advancements; globalization; and social dynamics. It plays a crucial role in shaping a society’s identity, values, and shared experiences, making the cultural marketplace a central concept in cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology.
Taking that one step further, the International Delphic Council proposes the advent of what it calls the cultural market economy to denote “the interaction of politics, economy, art, culture and education.” As the IDC explains:
Art & culture have already become strong elements of our economy. Mobility, technical innovations and digitalization reflect their economic potential and contribute to the constant change in the traditional understanding of art & culture. The cultural and creative industries are now a common term, encompassing marketing and demonstrating the marketability of arts & culture [...] The Cultural Market Economy has the potential to initiate a restructuring of the arts, thereby becoming a form of investment and balancing sport in its diversity [...] Art & Culture have become part of the entertainment industry, which raises the question of how they present themselves in the global media market and what they focus on. In order to be on a par with sport, a minimum of manageable, uniform structures and rules are required to successfully address a global audience and innovative partners.
Immediate beneficiaries, we’re told, likely include the tourism and hospitality, communications and media, and arts and entertainment industries. While the IDC also mentions benefits to “the citizens” (without saying how), to “Arts & Culture & Education,” and to the “Environment & Cultural Heritage,” their emphasis on the fiscal benefits of participating in and cultivating a globalized cultural market economy doesn’t just demonstrate the IDC’s priorities, but reveals how the organization expects the public to benefit: increased investment in and financing of the cultural market economy, they believe, will result in higher-quality products becoming available in the cultural marketplace, making all of us more satisfied cultural consumers.
However, what we’ve discussed today about social engineering gives us excellent reason to question the IDC’s premises. The profound impact of social engineering on our society—employed at various times to shape public opinion, influence mass behavior, and even craft diplomatic policy and military actions—even operates on the level of individual psychology, as Coffin’s cultivated identity indicates, conditioning the everyday citizen to identify with (and adopt an ideology associated with) what one chooses to consume.
The cultural market economy, then, formalizes in some sense that intricate web of influences that surrounds us in our consumer-driven society. While this provides a further means of capitalizing on the economic potential of arts and culture in our world today (with some increase in the quantity of cultural products available likely to result), the role that social engineering has played just in the retail consumer marketplace in shaping our tastes, preferences, and even our sense of self gives us cause for suspicion. Those products commodified or securitized in the cultural market economy would then become the next generation of tools used in social engineering campaigns to manipulate public opinion, consolidate political power, and advance the interests of the capital order.
Of course, we have in this dispatch only taken account of social engineering’s origins. Surely, much more can be written on how it has operated in the United States’s post-industrial economy during the 21st century: indeed, in a sense we’ve briefly touched on this in our discussion of the guiding philosophy behind BuzzFeed—in which individuals establish their personal identities according to what they consume, and feel inclined to consume and support brands that promote their identities.
“[P]ersonal identity has become a product selected from those available to consumers on the cultural marketplace,” I wrote then, and argued further that the trend of identity politics in political discourse has produced “division and essentialism while overshadowing broader social issues and undermining a sense of solidarity or shared struggle among the working class.” With this in mind, that guiding philosophy for digital media looks in hindsight like the epitome of Coffin’s phenomenon of cultivated identity, under which the private interests controlling the means of production only make available to consumers those “cultural products” that serve the ruling class’s agenda.
Certainly, then, the increasing exchange and dissemination of cultural content have become even more dynamic and far-reaching in the digital age, making social engineering an even more potent force in the culture of contemporary capitalist republics. This development certainly leaves us no shortage of occasions for examining the far-reaching implications of social engineering, cultural austerity, and personal and collective identity, and how mainstream media shapes our perceptions and behaviors within the confines of a consumer-driven society. Stay tuned, therefore, for further dispatches examining the phenomenon of social engineering in the 21st century, and exploring means through which the public can address it.