Ad Vice. - Brief Article - Review - book review

Reason, April, 2000 by Timothy Virkkala

Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, by Douglas Rushkoff, New York: Riverhead Books, 321 pages, $24.95

Once upon a time, Douglas Rushkoff thought the Internet and other new media were going to unleash the power of individuals over institutions. He wrote books promoting this dream, most famously Media Virus (1994), and made a name for himself as a cyberutopian. Then the Establishment invaded the Net and turned Rushkoff's liberatory tool to its own ends, littering the Web and his beloved e-mail inbox with that ugly thing, commerce. Admen and P.R. flacks even had the gall to try to use him and his ideas for their own nefarious ends.

So in 1998, Rushkoff signed on to the "Technorealist" movement, which aims, in his words, "to support the mindful development of cyberculture beyond the priorities set by business interests" while avoiding "neo-Luddite" hysteria. Dashed hopes and all, Rushkoff remains a prophet, but one closer in spirit to Jeremiah than to Moses. In Coercion, he purports to reveal not a promised land but our most grievous faults. His theme is how professional "coercers" make suckers of us all.

For those of us who use the word coercion in its conventional sense--that is, as the use or threat of force--the questions about Rushkoff's book start with its title. He is actually writing about the many methods of base rhetoric, of unwholesome persuasion: indirection, trickery, deceit. He is not describing systems of social control that carefully conceal the threat of force behind, say, noble-sounding rhetoric; that is, he is not talking about politics. He is talking about commerce. But sellers "threaten" us, at worst, by withholding an enticement.

At one point, amusingly, Rushkoff slips into the standard use of the word, with a reference to the CIA's "noncoercive interrogation" techniques. Why does Rushkoff bring this up? To explain how salespeople use similar techniques as part of their "coercion." Here and elsewhere, Rushkoff demonstrates that his peculiar use of a common word disables him. There is a continuum from coercion proper, through coercion loosely conceived as he thinks of it, to plain, honest persuasion. By misusing one word, he defeats his whole enterprise. "The fact is," he states without irony, "everything is coercive. Except, of course, those CIA interrogation techniques.

So Rushkoff's villains are admen and marketers. They gain our compliance not with threats of jail or death but with jingles, point-of-sale racks, and puff pieces carefully placed in the press. For instance, Rushkoff offers the sad story of "Mort Spivas," a salesman he knows who lies and cheats, the better to bilk his customers. Mort finagles a nice old couple into purchasing an expensive therapeutic bed they don't really need, for more money than advertised, on the poorest terms around. Then Mort has a crisis of conscience, landing in the hospital for a "heart condition" that turns out to be little more than a partial change of heart.

Rushkoff uses Mort's story to introduce the "science" of selling, as developed from Dale Carnegie's day to our own. It is all very interesting stuff. We learn, for example, that the development of "system selling" among car dealers has gone through increasingly slick iterations, one ushered in by a consumer advice book appropriately titled Don't Get Taken Every Time. As the chapter wears on, however, Rushkoff loses his bearings; he seems to suggest that all marketing is as bad as Mort's manipulations. He expends little energy considering what "good" selling might be. Selling itself is suspect.

Consider Rushkoff's take on the easy going atmosphere of the Gap. By "creating an ambiance of customer service and a basic sense of trust," he writes, "companies using the soft sell fool us into believing they have abandoned the cruelest coercive practices of their predecessors, when all they've really done is replaced them with kinder-looking ones and shifted the direct abuse onto their salespeople." Beyond the question of whether "the ambiance of customer service and a basic sense of trust" might actually be real, does Rushkoff really think that pleasant shopping correlates directly with poor working conditions?

It doesn't end with the Gap, of course. "Atmospherics," he explains, is the art and science of influencing behavior through careful design of architecture and interior decor, lighting, sound, and smell. Malls, thus, are carefully planned to induce what those in the trade call the "Gruen transfer," when consumers mutate from shoppers for specific items into impulse buyers for damn near anything. While this argument seems strong at first, Rushkoff then tells us that discount warehouses emerged in response to a rising distaste for the mall environment--and that these are coercive, too. They may not have salespeople tricking us, they may not dazzle us with carefully sculpted point-of-sale displays, they certainly lack glamour and glitz, and they have no comforting aura with which to impart that certain touch of disorientation that mall developers love. But this lack of artfully contrived selling schemes doesn't absolve them in Rushkoff's eyes. After all, he writes, they "rely on our inability to answer" certain questions, such as, "Do you feel truly confident as you try to make sense of in-sink garbage disposal strategies? Do you know whether horsepower or flow rate is the more significant statistic?"