we’re all fucked
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Douglas Rushkoff is the author of 10 best selling books and novels on media and popular culture including Media Virus, Playing the Future and Ecstasy Club and his newest book, Testament, is a Torah-sci fi conspiracy graphic novel. He created the hit documentaries Merchants of Cool and the Persuaders. He knows a shit load more about everything than you do, including why you’re poor and probably always will be. I caught up with him in New York to talk money.
Julia: Last year, Bush said the following about America’s economy: “A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy – and that is what we have. … This economy is on the move, and our job is to keep it that way, not with more government, but with more enterprise..” - George W. Bush, State Of The Union Address
A quick glance of the White House’s official economic overview creates a vision of America with a strong economy. It purports that “American workers are finding more jobs and taking home more pay” and that the unemployment rate was dropping. However, we all know that’s bullshit. Since Bush took office, our national debt has soared to over 3 trillion, unemployment rates are up, and college tuition, energy, health care, rent, fuel costs, etc are raping our wallets on a daily basis. What the fuck?
Douglas: Well, there’s two big fallacies on which the pro-market faction is operating, here. The first is that the metrics we use to measure economic growth have something to do with how well people are doing. Economic growth is measured with what they call the GNP, or Gross National Product. This stands for all the economic activity. So if I shoot you and you (or your insurance company) have to pay someone to put your brains back in, that’s economic activity and makes the GNP go up. If a factory comes to a town, puts three small local firms out of business, hires most of the town, pollutes the groundwater making the land unusable for agriculture and then goes out of business putting the entire town out of work, it can still be measured as a positive for GNP. The money spent on mental health, environmental cleanup, and shipping in frozen food all goes into the metrics for growth. Death is growth.
But the real joke here is that the Bush administration, and rightward economics types in general, argue that their policies are somehow less interventionist than those of the let. “Not with more government, but with more enterprise.” What they don’t take into account is that the supposed “deregulation” of the economy is actually a form of extreme regulation. They are not removing the rules - they are changing the rules to favor large, existing, multi-nationals. “Open markets,” for example, means that debtor, developing nations must permit American companies to come in, buy land, set up shop, and wreck things for the indigenous population. It’s as old as Colonialism.
Finally, the money system is itself biased towards moving wealth away from the poor and towards the rich; away from the worker producing value, and to the persons or entities with capital. That’s why we call it capitalism. In an appropriately scaled set of local economies, capitalism might work. That’s what Adam Smith was arguing for. When you make one big mega-economy out of everything, and coordinate fiscal policy from within a single giant bank (the Fed) at the center of it all, you have a giant, centralized bureaucracy. This is as Big Government and tightly controlled as it gets. We are living in something closer to the centralized, bureaucratically controlled economy than anything the Soviets ever dreamed of.
Julia: How much of our current money crisis do you think is our (”the peoples”) fault and how much is effected by outside forces?
Douglas: Well, it depends what you’d consider to be “outside.” I hate taking any responsibility away from “the people” because it can make it seem harder to dig ourselves out. The fact is, the current money crisis was set in motion 400 years ago when centralized currency was developed, and local currencies (and the ability to create value locally) was outlawed. This isn’t conspiracy theory - it’s just fiscal history. There used to be local currencies that functioned alongside centralized ones. This gave local regions a way to trade internally, and keep some of the value for the things they produced. Centralized currency pulls value towards the center; this is why it was created.
The amazing thing is that almost every economist I speak with has little or no knowledge of this basic history. They don’t understand the biases of the money they work with. They can calculated economic activity, but they have no concept of the relationship between this activity and real life. It’s amazing. The people who did understand and implement it are long gone.
So the real problem is that the money we use just doesn’t work - at least not by itself. But it’s the only value we work with, and the only way we currently have of transacting. So every time we transact, we grow poorer. It’s the fault of dead people and the underlying rules of the economic game that everything thinks are simply given circumstances.
Julia: Where do you see our economy/society 10 years from now. 20? 100?
Douglas: Well, things getting worse isn’t necessarily bad. Things might get so bad that people no longer look to the economy or money to work for them. If no one has money, then people will need to create new systems through which to transact. Then it all gets easy again. There’s enough stuff - especially if we don’t need to drive to work and Wal-Mart. There’s just not enough money left in the system after the speculators take their cut for us to do anything anymore. So we’ll learn to transact without the Fed’s money. And it will all get a lot more efficient.
Julia: Is there any current monetary system that works, or comes close to working?
Douglas: As for current monetary system that works, I’d look at Fourth Corner Exchange - a sustainable community currency in the Pacific Northwest. They’re getting the furthest with complementary currency in the US. There was also a huge effort in Japan, to get care for people’s elders with alternative currency. No one had any money, but everyone had time during the big recession/depression there. So people earned Eldercare credits by taking care of an old person. They could later spend them to get someone to take care of an elder in their own family, many miles away. People still use the system because the care ends up better, and cheaper, to do this way than to involve expensive centralized currency (which you have to go borrow).
Julia: What’s the easiest way to make money? What’s the easiest way to ensure you’ll stay poor?
Douglas: It depends what kind of money you want to make. The easiest way to make *their* money is to speculate. Speculate through the stock market or commodities markets. In most cases, this means betting against companies and industries through “short” selling. It’s mean-spirited, but it works in a volatile BS economy like ours. The stock market is just a pyramid scheme. All you need to do is figure out which pyramids have reached their limits.
The easiest way to ensure you’ll stay poor is probably to get a job. Pay rates are calculated to keep you striving. Really. Look in any Human Resources textbook of the past ten years. They believe if you pay someone just a bit less than they need to get by, they’ll hang onto the job most steadfastly.
Julia: What’s this plan you speak of and what type of people fall into it and lose their integrity? What are they giving up to adhere to the Plan?
Douglas: Oh, I guess I mean doing something like taking a job you don’t want and then internalizing the values of the place you’re working for. Or believing that you need the things - the trappings - of life. They’re all stupid and don’t make any difference. In almost every career there are external symbols of success that attract us, but have nothing to do with our real experience or ability. When I was a kid, I used to be able to tell how bad a fellow teenage guitar player would be by the quality of his instrument: the more expensive the guitar, the worse the guitarist.
I don’t mind people doing commercial crap if it’s what they love. I mean, Spielberg loves what he does. He’s not a sellout in the least.
The “plan” comes into play whenever a major life change happens. You get married, there’s companies ready with the Plan. You have a kid, an industry ready to get you into the Plan comes calling. And it could look like old school parenting, or like the new “hip” parenting that tries to make today’s parents feel less like sold out parents by selling them even more expensive hip parenting gear. The UnPlan Plan.
As I see it, the object of the game for real people is to steer clear of these ordained plans contrived to make you spend, get a job you don’t like to have the money to spend, and sacrifice your life to them.
Julia: Do you see any integrity in the whole remaining starving artist vs sellout artist? Is there a happy medium?
Douglas: I think it’s important to remove oneself from that balance, lest it become obsessive. Businesspeople and advertisers are better at making people feel like they have integrity than real integrity is. Making or not making money at the art one creates is almost irrelevant. So *not* making money doesn’t mean you aren’t in the system. If you make no money with your art but then have to freelance at Ogilvy making banner ads at night, how good is that? Or if you’re a starving guitarist who spends all his money buying Chinese-made gear at NASDAQ-listed Guitar Center, what’s really going on?
On a certain level, as a former student of mine Heather Dewey-Hagborg argued in a paper, once you take any money at all for your art it’s already corrupted. Art and commerce are two separate activities, particularly when art’s job is to wake people up. The thing it’s waking people up from is the market. To become *part* of the market means that the art is energizing the very thing it is supposed to be ending. Warhol pulled it off because his art was about that very thing. But now “pop” artists do it as an excuse to get rich while making a meaningless cheeky wink to the fact that they’re participating in the thing they’re supposed to be dismantling.
I used to feel like Gary Panter, who wrote a manifesto arguing that the Bohemian Artist meme is dead, and that we should just sell out and infect the corporate system with our work. But I no longer feel that way. We just give them our best and most virulent stuff, and the market neutralizes its effect. It can digest almost anything. So far, the only ways to remain counter-cultural are to break laws, do drugs, etc. It’s the only undigestible activity.
Julia: I’m telling my mom you said that. And then I’m gonna go do some crimes. What do you define as “real” art and where do you think it belongs or is being created?
Douglas: I’m bad at that. I went to art school and saw stuff I thought was “art” that got critiqued as “not art,” and stuff that was just stupid called “real art.” Like badly drawn letters on canvasses saying stupid shit like “Your Mother.” That would get good grades, and some totally gripping painting of a bleeding duck drawn in the style of the great masters would get failed. I mean, I love John Cage and all, but some people just copy that do-nothing stuff to be lazy. Or trendy, which is even worse.
I think real art has to have two things. It has to say something, wake people, serve as more than ornament. And it has to demonstrate some virtuosity - some skill. The skill and mastery is what makes people preserve the thing in the first place. That’s what the artist wants. People - even stupid people - preserve the thing because it demonstrates skill/technique/talent. And once it’s preserved, it can sit and wait until someone receives its message.
Julia: Williamsburg (trendy, high priced neighborhood is Brooklyn) used to be a haven for poor artists in the 70’s who were forced out of Manhattan. Now poor artists are forced out of Williamsburg and the neighborhood seems to be a vapid cesspool of high falutin’ fashion with a facade of an artistic community. Granted there are still some amazing things happening in that area, the fact that Williamsburg has become like a brand has definitely made it, as you’ve said is “anti-art.” Explain.
Douglas: Yeah, well, there’s an awful lot of kids out there spending more energy on their artistic lifestyle than their art. And it may pass muster on the L train, but they end up taking a job at Uncle Seymour’s investment firm, anyway. Yes, they have artsier clothes, beards, tattoos and piercings than we ever will. And they probably fucked better looking people. But that’s about all. Sometimes I think you have to choose between living like you think an artist lives and actually doing what it is an artist does. You don’t need a cool loft for that.
Williamsburg used to be cheap. And scary. That’s why artists moved there: because Manhattan just cost too much. You’d have to actually *work* to keep an apartment in Manhattan. Now, Williamsburg is super expensive, so I just don’t see the point. If I was a college kid with rich parents, then sure - it’s a totally cool place to walk around, get a yoga class and a haircut, and meet hot partners.
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September 23rd, 2008 at 3:41 pm
oh shit! I saw this on boingboing.
Julia you have made it to KING OF THE NERDS
congrats.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:07 pm
How did this go from a critique of our economic policies to a discussion about “selling out” as an artist? Granted our money system is flawed and there are plenty of problems with the “rich get richer, poor get poorer” capitalism we have right now but work shouldn’t be looked at as something dirty and to be avoided. Is it completely unreasonable that people are expected to contribute to society while drawing on its benefits?
September 24th, 2008 at 5:58 am
[...] did a really fun interview with (my favorite indie comic) Fart Party creator Julia Wertz this week, and she posted it on her blog simultaneously with its publication in Vice Magazine. [...]
September 25th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Smart, incisive stuff, Julia. Always nice to see this side of you, much as I like the foul mouthed drunken side.
May 28th, 2009 at 6:47 am
As much as I like your site and the comic, parts of this are just plain old bullshit.
DR: The money system is itself biased towards moving wealth away from the poor and towards the rich; away from the worker producing value, and to the persons or entities with capital. That’s why we call it capitalism.
Bullshit. If I am a worker “producing value” (and therefore “poor”, obviously), and I work for a company, how exactly does it “move wealth away” from me? No really, how? Also, the wording itself suggests there is a given, fixed amount of “wealth” in the world (despite the fact I just “produced value”) that just gets moved away from me, namely by me working. WTF?
Example: say I am a software engineer for a software company. I make very nice money.
The company then (over)prices the software I wrote, finds a buyer, and makes shitloads, thus
accumulating capital (THAT’s why we call it capitalism). Now, exactly which amount of wealth
was moved from me? Hm?
(What does the money system, ie. the (centralized, yes) system of using a common currency
have to do with that is beyond me.)
DR: We are living in something closer to the centralized, bureaucratically controlled economy than anything the Soviets ever dreamed of.
Listen, I am from Czechoslovakia, born 1978, and I just love hearing this kind of crap from
people living in a free market economy all their lives.
Example: if there is not enough toilet paper on the market, what happens in the “centralized, bureaucratically controlled” economy that you are forced to live in? Somebody starts making and selling it, and makes money. What happens in an actual centralized, bureaucratically controlled economy where there is one, 100% state-owned paper company in the country, which just happened
to screw up the production plan for that year? People wipe their asses with newspaper.
The stock market is just a pyramid scheme. All you need to do is figure out which pyramids have reached their limits.
Bullshit. The stock market is just a trading floor, where one guys buys what other guy sells,
and that’s all there is to it. How exactly is that a pyramid scheme? No really, HOW?
And if you buy wothless crap on the trading floor, you do that because you yourself decided to do that, right? Also, it’s not a consequence ofthe mere fact somebody organizes a common trading floor.
(There are also points are totally agree with, but I just couldn’t let the above go uncommented.)