Life Inc by Douglas Rushkoff

Author:Douglas Rushkoff [Rushkoff, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Non-Fiction, Business, History, Sociology, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781400066896
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Real World

Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram was horrified and inspired by the trial of Adolf

Eichmann, who engineered the transport of Jews to Nazi death camps. Milgram wanted to know if

German war criminals could have been simply “following orders,” as they claimed, and not truly

complicit in the death-camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would

not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up a now famous experiment in which

subjects were instructed by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to

victims who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be

halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks

to seemingly lethal levels. (Although the shocks were not real and the victims were only actors, such

experiments were declared unethical by the American Psychological Association in 1973.)

Reality TV, at its emotional core, is an ongoing experiment in interpersonal torture that picks up where

Milgram left off. Although usually unscripted, reality shows are nonetheless as purposefully constructed

as psych experiments: they are setups with clear hypotheses, designed to maximize the probability of

conflict and embarrassment.

America’s Next Top Model is not really about who wins a modeling contract, but rather about

observing what young anorexics are willing to do to one another under the sanctioning authority of

supermodel Tyra Banks. Will they steal food, sabotage another contestant’s makeup, or play particularly

vicious mind games on one another? Survivor has never been about human ingenuity in the face of nature,

but instead about human scheming, betrayal, and selfishness in the course of competition. Joe Millionaire

was about the moment that an aspiring millionairess learns, under the glare of the television lights, that

the man on whom she performed oral sex isn’t really a millionaire at all. Even Oprah Winfrey’s feel-good

offering, Your Money or Your Life, features a family in a terrible crisis, and then offers an “expert action

team” to fix up whichever toothless crack addict or obese divorcée begs the most pathetically.

By sitting still for the elaborately staged social experiments we call reality TV, we are supplying

further evidence for Milgram’s main conclusion: “Ordinary people . . . without any particular hostility on

their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” But who is the authority figure in the lab

coat granting us permission to delight in the pain of others? Who absolves us of the attendant guilt? Why,

it’s the sponsor, whose ad for a national, wholesome brand interrupts the proceedings at just the right

moment and bestows on them its seal of approval. It’s a powerful tool for social programming that was

recognized as far back as ancient Rome, where gladiatorial contests fought to the death were forbidden

within a month of any election. Lawmakers understood how a governor’s “thumbs down” execution of a

fallen fighter assumed authority for an entire coliseum’s urge to see violence committed. He took ultimate

responsibility for the mob’s desire to see blood. The greater the transference of guilt and shame to the

incumbent ruler’s authority, the greater the power he seized.

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