SOFT FOCUS: THE INVISIBLE WAR FOR REALITY

John King

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2021

Committee:

Jeremy Wallach, Advisor

Esther Clinton

Kristen Rudisill

© 2021

John King

All Rights Reserved iii

ABSTRACT

Jeremy Wallach, Advisor

This thesis will explore critically and describe new techniques in cultural persuasion, which I refer to as soft focus, built upon earlier models commonly referred to as soft power or soft war, that were used by national governments to create cultural currency to manipulate domestic and foreign policies. Governments would non-forcibly attempt to attract the public to their value systems through culture. These techniques, sometimes referred to as “soft focus” in the small circles that follow and practice them, are now used in service and sales industries to non-coercively persuade potential clients, often in ways that are not detectable as marketing. In glamor photography, soft focus is a term for the treatment of an image that eliminates blemishes and can give a smooth or dream-like appearance. In the commercial world, soft focus aims to do much the same by presenting a reality that is beautiful and welcoming. The techniques, primarily used on or in tandem with social media, take several different avenues but attempt to move the focus away from traditional advertising by creating a reality that is believable, often in ways that do not seem to be distributed by the marketer; although these attempts are often inviting, some methods create difficult situations, dystopian versions of reality, or give the user no other option than what is presented by the social media platform.

This thesis will not side with or against soft focus, as the aim is to identify and analyze, not to shame or celebrate. Certainly, these techniques are deployed by companies in a capitalist culture, and with it come all the trappings of unfettered capitalism, including monopolizing the marketplace, exploiting labor, and covering up abuse, and this thesis explores these themes, but it also looks at efforts to use these techniques to produce positive social change. iv

Dedicated to Prep D v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge Esther Clinton, Phil Dickinson, Jacqueline Hudson, Mary King, Kristen

Rudisill, and Jeremy Wallach for guidance. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter Outline ...... 4

CHAPTER ONE: CASE STUDIES ...... 7

Entering the Specialized Science of Domination ...... 7

Persons+Product+Place ...... 9

Images+Values+Beliefs and the Butchertown Social Experiment ...... 13

Issues, Abuses, and the Haymarket Whiskey Bar ...... 19

CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY & COMMERCIAL ADAPTATION ...... 21

Building Someone Out of Nothing ...... 21

A Brave New Worldless ...... 23

Blood, Bears, and other Realities ...... 28

CHAPTER THREE: THE INTERNET AGE ...... 38

What Appears is Good ...... 38

The Finger Lickin’ Philosophy ...... 40

Manipulation in the Digital Age ...... 43

Indentured Servitude by Monthly Subscription ...... 49

Corporate Enslavement of Intellectual Property & Monetization of Thoughts ...... 51

Poverty Mills, Woke-Washing, Human Rights Abuse, & Social Capital

in the Digital Age ...... 53

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION ...... 61

So, I’m Signing Off...... 61 vii

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 64 viii

LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page

1 Soft Focus Diagram by the Author ...... 1

2 Persons+Products+Place Diagram ...... 9

3 Persons+Product+Place example at Galaxie Bar. Photo by the Author ...... 12

4 Persons+Product+Place 2nd example at Galaxie Bar. Photo by the Author ...... 12

5 The complete Soft Focus Diagram ...... 13

6 The author with a paid actor posing as his wife at a holiday event and for publicity

photos. Photo by the Butchertown Social ...... 14

7 Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social. Photo by the Author ...... 16

8 Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social. Photo by the Author ...... 17

9 Persons+Product+Place & Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social.

Photo by the author ...... 17

10 Mardi Gras at Butchertown Social. Photo by the Author ...... 18

11 Digital Fashion Model Shudu ...... 21

12 Digital Fashion Model Galaxia ...... 22

13 Digital Model: Virtual Influencer Colonel Sanders ...... 23

14 The Author with The Enigma. Photo by Daniel Sanders/Magnolia Photobooth Co .... 24

15 Digital Musician Miquela Sousa ...... 26

16 Psycho Theater promo Cardboard Cutout ...... 30

17 Movie Still from Lewis' Blood Feast trailer warning ...... 31

18 Newspaper Article supplied in the Promotion Kit for Psych-Out ...... 33

19 The Care Bears Movie 90-Page Promotional Kit ...... 35

20 Nike's 2018 "Black Lives Matter" Ad with NFL Quarterback ix

Colin Kaepernick ...... 56

21 Coca-Cola "Together We Can" Ad ...... 57

22 Coca-Cola "Together We Must" Ad ...... 58

23 Coca-Cola Juneteenth #2 Ad ...... 59 1

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1: Soft Focus diagram by the author

"You can sell people anything if you just sell people the idea they're not being sold to."

- Princess Carolyn, Bojack Horseman.

I was born in a hospital on Broadway in Louisville, Kentucky, back when the term inner- city was used to describe the downtown areas of cities and was raised in the working-class

Butchertown Neighborhood by socialist-leaning parents. Now in my mid-forties, I’ve never lived above the poverty line and nearly a third of my life has been spent in one type of homelessness or another. Whether it’s been sleeping in a van or in basements of family and friends in between bouts of barely habitable low-income housing, it hasn’t been an easy life. From one grueling minimum-wage job to another, I’ve always tried to expand my options, find community, and escape the unescapable trap of poverty. In 2000 I found a community with the Electric Church of 2 the Tambourine, a non-denominational socialist church that works toward helping those marginalized in society and calling attention to the endless roadblocks set up in American society to keep lower-class individuals from moving up in the world. I’ve been a member of the

Prophetic Council of the Poor People’s Campaign for five years and have worn only red shirts for the last fifteen years as a show of solidarity for my socialist brothers and sisters who work tirelessly for equality in the world. So, I can say confidently that it wasn’t easy for me to begin my work in cultural manipulation for commercial purposes, but in a world of limited options it is nearly impossible to turn down gainful employment.

For twenty years, from 2000 until 2020, I ran a regional record label and music archive, aimed at supporting the Louisville music community. Every physical release was made available in local libraries so as to be accessible to anyone. The last five of those years I worked as an independent booking agent and PR manager in the Louisville, Kentucky area to help make ends meet after the demeaning work of serving in restaurants during the day. In the last two years of this arrangement I lacked a stable living environment, as the cost of living in Louisville had skyrocketed due to gentrification and the inner-city was transformed into a playground for the privileged, displacing the rest of us. As an independent PR manager for local bands and venues,

I was introduced to soft focus and could track the effects as well as implement and augment these techniques to benefit my clients. This was not a field I assumed I would find myself in, but as a poor person in a capitalist society, morals (and dignity) are frequently compromised in order to survive. After the events that I will discuss in chapter one I was given the opportunity to enter

Bowling Green State University’s Popular Culture Graduate Program, in which I furthered my research into non-coercive persuasion and the predecessors of soft focus, which I will discuss in chapters two and three. 3

In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the chapter "The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception" critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

discuss popular culture as a tool to manipulate society. Members of the Frankfurt School

(originally associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, a

school of thought connected to social theory and philosophy), Adorno and Horkheimer see the

culture industry as an all-encompassing “machine”1 where the “rationale is the rationale of

domination itself,”2 and where it is impossible for the culture industry to produce positive effects for society. In the introduction of the chapter, Adorno and Horkheimer use the metaphor that buildings in city skylines “in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else,”3 as in capitalism and authoritarianism both aim to control the people. Far be it for a person that belongs to a socialist church and wears red shirts every day to disagree that the capitalist nature of the culture industry causes a great deal of harm, especially to those at the bottom of the socio- economic ladder, but I have also seen the techniques of soft focus used to benefit society, as well as brutally exploiting it. Both sides of the soft focus coin will be discussed here, as this paper is concerned with exploring soft focus techniques, as it is important to the field of Popular Culture studies to examine and understand how culture is used to manipulate society, just as much as it is for the advertising industry to understand popular culture in order to successfully execute their campaigns. Within the capitalist framework of the western world that billions of people have no

choice but to live in, the culture industry affects nearly every aspect of our lives, for better or

worse, and it is important to look at all angles, and not just from an isolated standpoint of good

or bad. Just as it would be detrimental to define slavery in a strict historical sense without further

1 Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Transcribed by Andy Blunden. University of Massachusetts Boston. 1998. 15. 2 Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. 2. 3 Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. 1. 4

examining the different ways in which humans are being enslaved today (which is discussed in

chapter two), so would it be detrimental to label techniques used in capitalist constructs as evil

without understanding how they work or explore the possibility that some of these same

techniques could also be used positively.

Chapter Outline

I will look at soft focus through several theories, including blending mental, material, and

social aspects through cultural sociology, direct marketing, and participatory culture, as well as

the simple idea that we are more likely to believe information given to us by those perceived to

be in our social web rather than outside of it. Although these attempts are often inviting, some

methods create difficult situations, dystopian versions of reality, or give the user no other option

than what is presented by the social media platform, which will be outlined in chapter two.

Using a combination of historical research and primary sources, I dissect the layers and ideologies of soft focus, give examples of its effects—including a case study involving creating a reality in a neighborhood bar using these techniques—and analyze those effects in chapter one.

Primarily involving the work I have done in live entertainment, chapter one identifies three areas

of focus needed for a PR campaign: The brick-and-mortar establishment, the target audience for

the establishment, and the product and/or services provided; what I will refer to in this paper as:

Persons+Product+Place. These three points make a solid foundation to build on. To create a

reality needed to sell the image of an establishment and a community atmosphere, there are three

additional elements needed for soft focus to truly work; values and beliefs that embody the

persona of the establishment and the images used to convey this persona; what I refer to as

Images+Values+Beliefs. For a target audience to not just visit an establishment or use a

product/service, but identify with and become loyal to the brand, the brand needs a personality. 5

Much like how a person needs to have common values and beliefs with a community in order to

become an active member in said community, a brand needs to have beliefs and values that are

regarded by the target audience for there to be a lasting relationship.

Chapter two uses Guy Debord's “The Society of the Spectacle,”4 Jean Baudrillard's theory of constructing shared existences and simulating reality,5 and Louis Althusser's ideology of information dissemination outlined in “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. (Notes for research)” 6 to examine a brief history beginning with the Cold War and early soft power efforts

and relate its adoption by commercial marketers through the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter three

explores the adaption of these techniques in the digital age and the rise of convergence culture,

what Henry Jenkins describes as the “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the

cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences

who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they

wanted.”7 Following this will be an examination of efforts to cover up abuses and negative manipulation using soft focus techniques online.

Although the soft focus theory that I propose acknowledges its capitalist benefits, this essay

will come to a conclusion about the value and validity of creating a reality that is believable and

inviting (without expressly being recognized as marketing) that could possibly harbor some

social benefits as well. The purpose of this paper is not to promote the benefits of, or simply

4 Debord, Guy. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 21, 42, 60, 117, 119. 5 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. 1994. 6 Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. (Notes for research).” La Pensée, no 151, June 1970. 14-15 7 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New York University Press. 2006. 2. 6 highlight the negative effects of soft focus, but to examine these techniques and how they are being used to manipulate our perception of the world we live in. 7

CHAPTER ONE: CASE STUDIES

Entering the Specialized Science of Domination

In the summer of 2018, I was working as an event promoter in Louisville, Kentucky, when I got a call from a potential client, a recently-opened bar called the Butchertown Social. On the PR ladder, in a medium-sized town like Louisville, it generally works like this: there’s one or two big companies that handle 1,000-person events to the 50,000+ giant stadium spectacles, then there’s a few folks that usually have contracts with a couple different smaller venues that handle the 300-1,000 capacity rooms, and on the bottom rung of the ladder there’s the free agents hacking it out at the under-300 capacity rooms for a 10-15% cut of ticket sales at places too small to have full-time agents. I was one of these. Mostly, my clients were the artists themselves and I would shop around to venues and try to work up a relationship, hoping to land a full-time contract with one or two places eventually.

The Butchertown Social had been open about six months in a renovated building in the gentrified neighborhood of Butchertown, the neighborhood I grew up in before the transformation, and I wasn’t happy at the idea of working for the people who helped push out my kind (poor folks), but you can’t be too choosy when you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder.

The Butchertown Social opened in the site of the old Johnson’s Beer and Bait, a bar on the edge of Beargrass Creek that (true to its name) sold beer and live bait. I bought nightcrawlers and crickets there as a kid for the various reptiles and fish I pulled out of the creek. It seemed like a perfect backstory for the hipster crowds, and with small-batch bourbon and upscale bar cuisine it seemed like a sure thing, but it wasn’t working. On Fridays and Saturdays it was doing okay, but they began closing on Mondays due to lack of sales and were debating closing Tuesdays as well.

They thought that maybe having a weekly event during mid-week might help, so I told them we 8 should start at the beginning and see if we couldn’t turn Tuesdays around before they had to close down for that day as well.

I had been working for another bar, Galaxie, in another gentrified area just on the edge of

Butchertown, employing a strategy with some success that had less of an emphasis on events and more about creating a personality for the venue. I inherited the contract from another PR firm,

Vectortone, a new company born from two smaller firms, Dopplegang Media and Holy Carp

Productions, who had recently merged. After combining contracts and getting a few more, they felt they had more than they needed and decided to drop one aspect of their business: soft focus.

A few years before, Dopplegang was employed by a popular bar in a tourist area, the

Haymarket Whisky Bar, to deal with the fallout from some negative publicity. While the bar was a hit with tourists for having what was considered the largest selection of bourbon and whiskeys in the world, their secondary market of hosting local music to local people had suffered a hit due to the owner’s erratic behavior and several public instances of verbally and physically abusing staff members. The local music community began boycotting the establishment and taking their business elsewhere. In a very short amount of time Dopplegang was able to double business and convince the locals to return. I hadn’t heard of soft focus before, as it is hardly known even now with its tactics being used more frequently, and certainly even less has been written about it academically.

What Dopplegang did, aside from resuming live music performances, was start several weekly events centered around audience participation like Vinyl Nite, where customers brought in their own records for the DJ to play and discuss, and other events centered around popular culture costume contests. They also employed local musicians and influencers to attend events at Haymarket and then go to other bars and hang out, buy drinks for people they knew, and 9 casually bring up that they had been to an event or two at Haymarket and felt the atmosphere was warm and inviting and that whatever the issue was in the past, it is certainly over now. It wasn’t exactly lying because they indeed had done the things they attested to, even if they were paid by

Dopplegang to attend said events, but it still was a constructed experience for marketing purposes. The use of these influencers to distribute positive testimonials in person to their peer group is key to creating a believable new reality about an established venue. Later in this essay I will discuss the ethical dilemma that presented itself from this specific situation, after I discus the main case study, the Butchertown Social, and explain the layers of soft focus as I employed them.

Figure 2: Persons+Products+Place diagram.

The foundation for Soft Focus

Persons+Product+Place

Using the template Vectortone had bequeathed me before they moved up the ladder, I identified three main categories in order to manufacture an inviting atmosphere, or what I refer to as reality. The three categories are: the people who inhabit that space (Persons), the things that fill the space (Product), and the physical geographic space (Place): Persons+Product+Place [See 10

Figure 2]. These three main ingredients help make a reality believable. French philosopher Jean

Baudrillard, known for his 1981 work involving semiotics, simulation, and hyperreality,

Simulacra and Simulation, called efforts like this, Staging Communication: “More and more

information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this

awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire

of the audience,” (Baudrillard gives the example of the message: "You are concerned, you are

the event, etc.”)8 Most of the time in order to create this illusion I would need at least one of these three elements to already have a foundation in the community; something some people already know and trust, as in the idea that we are more likely to believe what we are told by the people we trust. If potential customers knew some of the people within the space, they would be more likely to trust that the space would be welcoming for them. If they knew the space, maybe they would be more likely to try the product or trust the people in the space. If they knew two or even all three of the elements separately, then together it could be all the easier to convince them of the reality I was selling. If Jean Baudrillard's theories of hyperreality have merit, and our society cannot disassociate reality from symbols, signs, and the fictitious construction of a human experience, then all soft focus is doing is arranging the signs and symbols in a manner that benefits the client. In social media marketing, generating user engagement and encouraging content sharing is a strategic way for advertisers to disseminate information and grow a consumer base. But I wasn’t merely trying to attract consumers through social media by pushing specific products (alcohol, food, live music, etc.) in images in posts, my goal was to sell a reality

8 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. 1994. 80.

11 through social media to get consumers to believe the physical place I was representing would be where they would want to be whenever possible.

When I got the call from Butchertown Social, I was working on the soft focus technique at Galaxie, which was an EDM (Electronic Dance Music) bar that already had a steady clientele.

It was mostly the young college crowd that showed up primarily on the weekends for the EDM, but the bar wanted to expand into other markets. The space was already known, so in order to appeal to other groups of people I had a weekly Vinyl Nite with specific “hosts” who were musicians or influencers from identified target audiences. People could bring records to play but also meet with bands and artists they liked (musical, visual, and otherwise), which also allowed for a second revenue stream; the hosts were often clients needing promotion for themselves, an event, or their products. Each event was also paired with an object, either a sponsored alcohol brand, an album coming out, featured clothing, or giveaways of tickets to an upcoming event.

This also allowed for a third client. It was a complicated juggling act making sure all three clients got the exposure they needed, but it was usually an exact match to a target audience, so the only issue was mostly being able to line up payment methods. Often, one client would pay a sales percentage one week for promoting a product and would be paid another week for helping promote another client’s product. I would be paid a percentage of the bar sales (usually 10-15%), and a featured host (and up to four of their guests) would be paid in comped meals and an open bar tab. A third client might donate an alcohol product, clothing, new album, etc. to be featured at the event. The following week the featured artist might be the product client, donating a product to be featured and the previous week’s client might be the paid guest DJ. They might get free alcohol or other products and they were still getting exposure for themselves, and products they wanted to promote as well. 12

Figure 3: Persons+Product+Place example at Galaxie Bar. Photo by the author. Figure 3 shows an example of Persons+Product+Place within Galaxie bar. This image was not a setup, it captured the real atmosphere at one of our events, and the image was used on social media by the featured artists instead of on Galaxie’s official social media accounts. The image does show the place, a product in the form of a drink, and a live DJ, as well as people enjoying the atmosphere. Woven into the situation is a multicultural, multiracial, and slightly sexual vibe as per the woman’s outfit; these are examples of Images+Values+Beliefs being added. It also shows the DJ holding his own product as a double placement.

Figure 4: Persons+Product+Place 2nd example at Galaxie Bar. Photo by the author.

13

Figure 4 was set up for social media to promote a pride event. The image shows the place

(as per the paid client Galaxie bar) as well as the extensive product selection behind the bar), and

two people playfully having fun and enjoying snacks (persons). It also incorporates images and

colors associated with pride month, signaling that the bar is open and inviting to the LBGTQ+

community and their supporters (values). But this image is still very much noticeable as

advertising; in the next section I will discuss efforts to make this technique less recognizable as

an advertisement and seem more like organic images produced and disseminated by community

members.

Figure 5: the complete Soft Focus Diagram Images+Values+Beliefs and the Butchertown Social Experiment

When people ask about soft focus, I’ll often say it’s the opposite of guerrilla marketing, an advertising strategy designed to surprise or use unconventional interactions with potential customers to create a memorable impression, in that its goal is to market a product without the

target audience knowing they are being sold to. Images created are often (but not always, see

Figure 6) organic and not set up. They are mostly shared on personal social media accounts of 14

musicians, artists, and influencers instead of the official client accounts. If the aim of guerrilla

marketing is to jump in your face and grab your immediate attention towards a product, then soft

focus is playing the long game. The call from the Butchertown Social presented an exciting

prospect as it was a fairly new outlet without a set personality and was a perfect opportunity to

expand the levels of soft focus. I needed to create the environment that would attract customers,

not just pick the right live music to match the personality of the bar, as the personality of the bar

hadn’t yet materialized. To create, and not just build upon, a reality there needed to be more than

just Persons+Product+Place, but also a combining thread of ideas. The bar didn’t just need an

image but also values and a belief system to seem like a full entity. For Butchertown Social I

decided on adding the idea of values and beliefs to help create the image.

Figure 6: The author with a paid actor posing as his wife at a holiday event and for publicity photos.

Photo by the Butchertown Social.

Louis Althusser's Ideology and ideological state apparatuses argues that ideological information is disseminated not just by the press, printed material, and general media outlets, but also by religious institutions, educational institutions, the arts, and family to 15

name a few.9 When speaking on the specialized science of domination, French theorist Guy

Debord, in his seminal 1967 work The Commodity as Spectacle, writes that “social space is

invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities,”10 and that “it is here that the specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process.”11 For soft focus to work it needed to represent as many sociological aspects of the community as possible. The Butchertown Social needed standard music related events, which we booked. We tried several genres until we identified the most successful for that environment. Through trial and error, we learned that country, folk, jazz, and heartland music worked best for live weekend events, while hip hop and electronica worked well during the week.12 To help promote both the music and bar, we had musical artists host Vinyl Nites

(patrons were welcome to bring their own records and play them too), had the artists invite friends to enjoy free bar tabs, did giveaways of records and show tickets, and had a weekly podcast recorded at the bar, in which guests spoke about their craft, daily lives, and how they liked hanging out at the bar. These podcasts were recorded at tables on the patio so that the microphones would pick up pleasant banter from patrons (who even sometimes walked over and joined the conversation). All of these efforts were to help promote a sense of community. The podcast seemed to be more like eavesdropping into a friendly conversation of regular folks having fun at their bar. Influencers and featured artists stood shoulder to shoulder and played

9 Althusser, Louis. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. (Notes for research). La Pensée, no 151, June 1970. 67-125. 10 Debord, Guy. The Commodity as Spectacle. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 21. 11 Debord, Guy. 21. 12 Note: Heartland is a musical genre made popular by Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp and is related to Americana but has a larger emphasis on Rock n’ Roll. 16 records with regular patrons. No one was merely a spectator watching a performance; This was an open inviting community that anyone could join just by stopping into this particular bar.

Figure 7: Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social. Photo by the author. We hosted events that incorporated the belief that anyone is welcome coupled with values that our bar would be multiracial, ethnically tolerant and LBGTQ+ friendly. Figure 7 shows an event at Butchertown Social that wasn’t specifically identity themed (it was Christmas themed) but the images incorporated these beliefs and values with a positive image. We see a multiracial, and seemingly LBGTQ+ group that is wholesome—and also slightly sexual—that also reflects the positive nature of Christmastime, even though this was a Christmas event in

June, another way to incorporate values all year. Other events were centered around Juneteenth,

Pride Month, and Women’s Day. This image is seemingly devoid enough of

Persons+Product+Place as to go undetected, although it does show the inclusive nature of the place, and two of the three people involved were clients. Keeping the clients, like DJs and other artists, in the spotlight helps promote the owner’s business, and in turn helps promote the bar to those who follow these artists on social media. By sharing these images on social media it helps expand the consumer base by generating user engagement. In this photo fans of the DJ (sitting in the red chair) may start following the woman sitting in her lap who is an employee of the bar. 17

Followers of both of those people my start following the visual artist sitting in the light blue chair. Fans of any of these three people may start following the bar’s social media accounts. Now anytime any of these four entities mentions the bar in a post the information connects to a wider consumer base. Suddenly the bar seems to be connected many elements in one’s social group.

Figure 8: Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social. Photo by the author.

Figure 9: Persons+Product+Place & Images+Values+Beliefs example at Butchertown Social.

Photo by the author. 18

Figure 10: Mardi Gras at Butchertown Social. Photo by the author. Figures 8 and 9 were candid shots used in social media for the bar. While all the people shown are musicians and influencers—and also clients—these images also pushed the values and beliefs of the bar. Fun and affection are central themes as well as live music. Another aspect of creating a welcoming reality is inclusion. Many events welcomed the audience to participate, such as playing the DJ at Vinyl Nites, dressing up for costumed events or competing in tournaments like rock paper scissors, or signing up to win giveaways. Even traditional musical performances would spill into the audience (see Figure 10). The stage has large club chairs so that the audience could sit in them (see Figure 7), the DJ booth was usually mixed in around tables so customers could walk right up and be a part of the musical process, and musicians would often leave the stage and play amongst the crowd. This was important in many ways, especially in helping the bar feel like a community and the paying customers like active members of the community, and not just spectators. This was also extremely important in that the audience would then disseminate information through their own social media to their friend groups. Within a short time, the Butchertown Social went from cutting back on days being open to being booked a month in advance, and not just the prime weekend spots, but every day of the 19

week. While this is a great example of soft focus benefiting not just the establishment, but also

creating a warm and inviting community, the next section will discuss how soft focus techniques

can damage a community in lasting, harmful ways.

Issues, Abuses, and the Haymarket Whiskey Bar

The Butchertown Social is an example of success, and how augmented soft war

techniques of persuading society through culture can be effective, as well as creating a positive

and inclusive environment despite being consumer-minded. But how tools are used is up to who

is using them. This was certainly true during the propaganda era before and during World War II,

it was true during the soft power era during the Cold War, and it is true now, as will be discussed

in the next chapter.

The owner of the Haymarket Whiskey Bar in Louisville had the resources to employ a

firm that was able to effectively change public opinion and convince the community to return to

his place of business. By giving artists and influencers free bar tabs to populate the Haymarket

Whiskey bar and post on social media about it, and by employing paid advocates to go out to

other venues and talk about the good times they had at Haymarket Whiskey bar, they were able

to make the bar successful again. In November 2017, during the groundswell for the #MeToo

movement, several women shared on social media that they had been sexually assaulted by the

owner.13 By the end of the year the number had risen to sixteen.14

By then Dopplegang had merged with Holy Carp to become Vectortone and had cut ties

with Haymarket Whiskey Bar, but the dilemma remained that they had actively worked to

change the image of the bar and, more importantly, the owner, thus possibly encouraging

13 Loosemore, Bailey, and Darcy Costello. “Rape Claim and a Lawsuit: The Latest on Haymarket.” The Courier- Journal. November 30th, 2017. 14 Loosemore, Bailey. “Where the Haymarket Whiskey Bar Lawsuit Stands One Year Later.” The Courier-Journal. November 28th, 2018 20

potential victims into a dangerous situation. Public knowledge of the rape allegations did not

exist at the time, but instances of verbal and physical abuse were not just known, but the reason

for the image reversal campaign. Should they have refused the contract initially due to the

knowledge that the client was abusive? I certainly didn’t refuse when offered work by those

known to have gentrified a working-class area. Is this example enough to say soft focus

shouldn’t be used, or that it should be handled with care, as with any toolset? For Vectortone

Media and victims of the owner of Haymarket Whiskey Bar, this is a reminder that with any

persuasive technique the application has consequences, both positive and negative. The

Haymarket Whiskey Bar is still in operation, potentially still putting people at risk. However,

polarization and inclusion are two sides to the same soft focus coin. The same techniques we see

used to cover up human rights abuses can also be used to promote inclusion and a sense of

community.

The end result of the Butchertown Social campaign was highly lucrative for the business

owner but was also successful in creating a positive environment for the community. In August

of 2019, after working with Butchertown Social for a year, I left for graduate school 400 miles

north in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Butchertown Social remained booked solid a steady month or

more in advance. About two months later I got a call that someone had contacted the bar and

offered nearly three quarters of a million dollars for the business; for a neighborhood bar and

grill with just two years of history this was an offer they could not turn down. Although it was

emotionally hard to see it go, I was given the honor to design and promote the final night of

Butchertown Social’s existence. On December 7th, 2019, I returned home for my final tinkering of soft focus, as well as a completely packed bar enjoying a live band, visual art by three local artists, food, drinks, and tearful, joyful, goodbyes. 21

CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY & COMMERCIAL ADAPTATION

Building Someone Out of Nothing

Figure 11: Digital Fashion Model Shudu In the spring of 2017, a new fashion model named Shudu debuted with some mostly nude

photographs (wearing only jewelry) on Instagram to immediate attention for her striking features

and elongated body [Figure 11]. She soon gained hundreds of thousands of followers and began

modeling everything from upscale dresses to fanny packs and t-shirts. She’s given interviews and

has shared screen time with other fashion models in shoots all over the world, from the

picturesque beaches of Maracas Bay in Trinidad and Tobago, the Weymouth shores in Dorset,

England, and even the Great Salt Lake in the United States.15 It wasn’t until a year later that the news broke of Shudu’s heritage: she was completely digitally created—using a 3D modeling

program—by London-based photographer Cameron-James Wilson.17 While Shudu isn’t real, she is a real supermodel, the “World’s First” digital supermodel, according to her Instagram

15 Shudu (@shudu.Gram) • Instagram Photos and Videos. Accessed 3 Dec. 2019. 17 Rosenstein, Jenna. “People Can’t Tell If This Fenty Model Is Real Or Fake.” Harper’s BAZAAR, 9 Feb. 2018. 22

tagline.18 This is a prime example of what Jean Baudrillard identifies as the “third order”19 in his book simulacra and simulation, in which he argues that society is entirely constructed of signs and symbols, that culture (through media) has created a perceived reality where “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real”20 Knowing that it took a year

before the news broke that Shudu was 100% digitally created, it would be hard to disagree with

Baudrillard, although he assumed that when society reached this point “[reality’s] charm will be

lost,”21 and with it “all seduction”22—hundreds of thousands of Shudu fans might disagree).

Figure 12: Digital Fashion Model Galaxia Shudu is not the only digital model; she is represented by The Diigitals Modeling

Agency, featuring all-digital models of many ethnicities, including Nordic model Dagny and the

green-and-purple-skinned “beyond human” model Galaxia [Figure 12]. Diigitals even did a tie-in

with a buff, tattooed (but still white-haired), digital Colonel Sanders, who peddles everything

18 Shudu (@shudu.Gram) • Instagram Photos and Videos. Accessed 3 Dec. 2019. 19 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. 1994. 21. 20 Baudrillard, Jean. 28. 21 Baudrillard, 105. 22 Baudrillard, 106. 23

from finger-lickin’ fried chicken to Casper mattresses and even Turbotax [Figure 13].29 Internal

documents supplied to the author by KFC showed that the mere two-week promotion of

“Colonel Sanders: Virtual Influencer” garnered nearly twelve million online post impressions.30

Despite the knowledge that these models are not of bone and marrow they still get steady work,

and even get invited to posh, real-world, parties.31 They are “deepfakes” without the negative

connotations of the word fake. 32

Figure 13: Digital Model: Virtual Influencer Colonel Sanders A Brave New Worldless

Models like Shudu, while being completely created by artists, have hundreds of thousands of followers who read her interviews, send her messages, and gush publicly about her beauty. Others, those of flesh and blood, construct and reconstruct themselves to look closer to cartoon and comic book characters as well as fictional creatures such as the sideshow performer known as the Enigma, who has gained worldwide popularity over the last 30 years for his full

29 Kentucky Fried Chicken (@kfc) • Instagram Photos and Videos. 30 Kentucky Fried Chicken. Colonel Sanders: Digital Influencer Internal Assessment Report. 31 The Diigitals website. About. Date Accessed, December, 3rd, 2019. 32 Synthetic media such as video or images of people, places, or events created or altered to be mistaken as reality but are not, in whole or part, factual are referred to as Deepfakes. 24

body modifications including horn implants, ear mutilation, and a full-body tattoo (including the

sclera of his eyes), and has been featured in National Geographic, the X-Files, and Penn &

Teller: Bullshit!, among others. [See Figure 14]. The line between natural and fabricated

continues to blur across the globe and online.

Figure 14: The Author with The Enigma.

Photo by Daniel Sanders/Magnolia Photobooth Co. Predating Shudu is Miquela Sousa, another digital Instagram influencer debuting in 2016

with a backstory of being a robot from Downey, California, that releases music under the name

Lil’ Miquela, and having a Brazilian father [Figure 15]. She posts selfies, models clothes, speaks

out against social injustices, and gets into arguments on Instagram.37 She has 1.8 million followers, 96,000 of whom were excited in October of 2019 when she got back together with her human boyfriend, Angel Boi, after a public breakup.38 While Debord would have almost

certainly believed that in the future we would follow, accept, befriend, and take advice from

people who are not nor have ever been alive, as he believed the spectacle would encompass

37 Billboard Brazil. “Virtual It-Singer Miquela Says ‘Controversy Doesn’t Mean Anything’: Interview.” Date Accessed December 11th, 2019. 38 Miquela (@lilmiquela) • Instagram Photos and Videos. Accessed December, 1st, 2019. 25

everything to the point that the “spectacle” is “not only visible, we no longer see anything

else,”39 he might not have imagined it in the time he wrote The Commodity as Spectacle. In the book Debord was concerned with commodification “totally colonizing social life,” a point when

“the world we see is the world of the commodity.”40 For those coming of age or born since the introduction of the World Wide Web, the thought of a total commodified life, a surrogated society, and avatar representations of people are not just ideas but reality. An April 2021 commercial by Facebook titled “Born in ’96 - Facebook supports updated internet regulations” has social media users born in 1996 give testimonials about growing up in the internet age. Some of the user’s positive comments include “Suddenly online was getting mixed with real life” and

“Now, everything that I do is online.”41 In 1967, Debord wrote, “As specialists of apparent life,

stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the

fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is

to act out various lifestyles or socio-political viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.”47 Fast-

forward five decades and the “stars” or “celebrities” Debord was speaking about have evolved

into digital stars and celebrities specifically designed for commercial use, pushing products and

stimulating prolonged online involvement. Ordinary people seek to gain status as influencers on

social media, which is constructed and mediated by capitalist-driven infrastructures seeking to

monetize every moment. Others recreate themselves physically into a spectacle to seek fame and

profit such as the Enigma.

39 Debord, Guy. The Commodity as Spectacle. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 42. 40 Debord, Guy. 42. 41 Facebook Commercial “Born in 96 - Facebook supports updated internet regulations.” April 28th, 2021. 47 Debord, Guy. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 60. 26

Figure 15: Digital Musician Miquela Sousa This constructed cultural reality has its roots in the post-WWII western world.

Governmental powers created a social reality based in arts and culture to push western ideals. In true Orwellian fashion, the world Debord knew was awash in constructed realities dreamt up by artists such as fellow Frenchman Albert Camus and even the Englishman George Orwell himself.49

Films, television programs, and periodicals became fertile ground to persuade the public to gravitate toward Western capitalist ideals and away from communist thinking. Even children’s comics featured material such as the serial “This Godless Communism” about an imagined

United States taken over by communists. In it the religious leaders are taken to concentration camps to be killed, all news outlets are now government-run, and the men are shipped off to work in factories. The series was even accompanied by a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, in which he states "Communism represents the most serious threat facing our way of life. The responsibility of protecting and preserving the freedoms we cherish will soon belong to the members of your generation.”50

49 Wilford, Hugh. The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? Routledge, 2003. 28. 50 "This Godless Communism." Treasure Chest. Vol. 17 No. 2. September 28, 1961. 2. 27

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA funded an organization called the Congress for

Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose mission was to “counter the Communist cultural offensive and

uphold the importance of intellectual freedom.”51 Ironically inspired by proposals written and

discussed by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Koestler, and Mary

McCarthy to promote intellectual thought and expression free from oppressive governments, this

CIA covert operation to manipulate and ideologically influence the world “became a major

institutional force in western intellectual life, staging glamorous arts festivals, convening

prestigious academic seminars and publishing high-profile literary magazines.”52 The CIA

funded Encounter Magazine (founded in 1953), "explicitly and consistently linked literary and

artistic modernism to Western ideas of freedom and individualism, and figured Soviet art and

intellectual life as constrained, dishonest, and servile."54 According to Hugh Wilford in The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, “It was, in short, the US's principal weapon in the Cultural Cold War, the superpower struggle for the 'hearts and minds' of the world's intellectuals.”55 The Congress for Cultural Freedom was so successful in infiltrating the cultural world (in 35 countries) that British journalist and historian Frances Hélène Jeanne

Stonor Saunders writes in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and

Letters, "Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise." 56

51 Warner, Michael. “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50.” CIA. Center for the Study of Intelligence. Accessed December, 9th. 2019. 90. 52 Wilford, Hugh. The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? Routledge, 2003.103. 54 Barnhisel, Greg. “Encounter”Magazine and the Twilight of Modernism. ELH , Spring 2014, Vol. 81, No. 1. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 384 55 Wilford, Hugh. 103. 56 Saunders, Frances Hélène Jeanne Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co, 2000. 2. 28

Whether they knew it or not indeed: cultural critic and outspoken political theorist Dwight

Macdonald participated in Congress for Cultural Freedom functions and even edited the CIA- backed literary Encounter for over a year without having any idea that he was a pawn in the game he was so outspoken against.57 Macdonald did reportedly condemn the CIA after he found out, but considering that such well known political critics didn’t realize they were being manipulated to this degree speaks to how effective soft war tactics could be, so it should be no surprise that these tactics are being adapted commercially today.

Blood, Bears, and other Realities

If post-WWII propaganda of the 1950s saw world governments trying to change the

“hearts and minds” of the western world through art and culture, 1960s and 1970s consumerist

America was trying to manipulate the world in an effort to reach potential customers outside of traditional marketing by changing (and even creating) the opinions of consumers with full immersion techniques, panic, child manipulation, and even through law.

An early commercial adopter of these Cold War techniques was Herschell Gordon Lewis who, in 1959, was working as an advertising agent for an agency making commercials and industrial films including “Carving Magic,” a short promotional film which led him into thinking

“The only way to make money in the movie business is to make features.”64 His first feature was a “nudie cutie” (a softcore film, a prelude to full-penetration porn films) called The Prime Time

(1959), and during the promotion of the film, the veteran ad man used every trick he could think of; a magazine contest in which readers could name the film (the winner received a $50 U.S. bond), beard contests at theaters, record release of the soundtrack, and a novelization of the film,

57 Rodden, John. “Dwight and Left.” The American Prospect, 21 Feb. 2006. 64 Lewis, Herschell Gordon and Andrew J. Rausch. The Godfather of Gore Speaks. BearManor Media. 2012. 12. 29

among others.65 Other softcore nudie cuties made by Lewis included the first recognized

“roughie,” a nudie cutie with sexual violence, called Scum of the Earth! (1963). All were shot in

a matter of days on budgets generally under $25,000.66 The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961),

the first nudie cutie shot in color, was made for $7,500.67 The name of the game for Lewis, and his producer David F. Friedman, was to make the cheapest films possible with stuff in them that people normally don’t get to see at the theater and hope for a quick buck. And almost accidentally he created new genres in the process. But, for all his firsts, Lewis’ most widely recognized innovation didn’t occur until he watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and thought it sucked. “I thought it cheated,” Lewis said of the film’s mere implied violence and grey

blood on black and white film, so he and Friedman set off to make the opposite.72 The result was

what many regard as the first splatter film, Blood Feast (1963), a full color bloodbath of women

being ripped end to end by a psychotic chef. The entire film was shot in four days for $24,000.

Organs from animals, including a sheep’s tongue, were used to simulate human organs being

torn from butchered bodies. It was a departure from his sexually exploitive earlier films but still

used taboo themes and shock value to lure in paying customers.

65 Lewis and Rausch, 10 -11. 66 Lewis and Rausch, 12, 18, 60. 67 Lewis and Rausch, 22. 72 Zinoman, Jason. Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. Penguin Press. 2011. 39. 30

Figure 16: Psycho Theater Promo Cardboard Cutout By Lewis’ own account, Blood Feast wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece; he famously stated,

“I've often compared Blood Feast to a Walt Whitman poem; it's no good but it's the first of its

kind.”73 What could be called a masterpiece is the promotion Lewis and Friedman executed surrounding Blood Feast. If Lewis’ attempt was to create the opposite of Psycho the film, the handling of the promotion was also the opposite. Hitchcock’s promotion of Psycho aimed to control how the audience experienced the film; Lewis and Friedman’s promotion aimed to control how the world responded (and to make sure they did respond) to Blood Feast. Trailers for Psycho have Hitchcock walking through the set telling the audience exactly what they should perceive as “harmless” or “sinister” and who is “maniacal” or who should be pitied, and ended with a warning that the film was to be viewed from beginning to end, latecomers would not be

admitted.75 In fact Hitchcock distributed a guidebook and film reel to theaters called “The Care

and Handling of Psycho,” explaining to theater managers how to control the audience, such as

having the audience wait patiently in line to be let into the theater all at once; complete with a

73 Lewis, Herschell Gordon and Andrew J. Rausch. The Godfather of Gore Speaks. BearManor Media. 2012. 60. 75 Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho Theatrical Trailer. 1960. 31

life-size cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock with a stern look and pointing at his watch [see Figure

16], as “this queuing up is good for you, it will make you appreciate the seats inside. It will also

make you appreciate Psycho” as well as reminders to not tell others about the major plot points.76

The Blood Feast trailer [See Figure 17], on the other hand, states the film “should be viewed

under no circumstances by anyone with a heart condition, or anyone who is easily upset” and

implored these people to leave the theater before even watching the rest of the trailer, which

unlike the trailer for Psycho, jumps straight to the murder scenes.77

Figure 17: Movie Still from Lewis' Blood Feast trailer warning

And this was only the beginning: if Hitchcock’s plan was a carefully controlled nanny-

state during the viewing of his film with little to no person-to-person communication about the

film, Lewis and Friedman’s plan was for full on hysteria, outrage, and a maximum amount of

interpersonal communication for theirs. During screenings they employed nurses in the lobby

and ambulances parked out front of the theater with the emergency lights on and handed out

vomit bags that read, “You may need this when you see Blood Feast.” Friedman also took out an

76 Williams, Linda. “Learning to Scream.” Horror, The Film Reader. Edited by Mark Jancovich. Routledge. 2002. 174. 77 Lewis, Herschell Gordon. Blood Feast Theatrical Trailer. 1963. 32

injunction on the film in Sarasota, Florida, which was granted, and the film was banned from

being viewed there. “This got us a lot of press,” said Lewis, “and no one knew that the man who

got the injunction against the film was actually the producer.”78 All of this manipulating of the public in an effort to get them to react to their film worked. The film opened at Stan Kohlberg’s

Bel-Air Drive-In Theater in Peoria, Illinois, on Friday, July 6th, 1963, and by Saturday there were

protesters out front of the theater and more paying customers than there was space for all the

cars. All the commotion caused a car accident on the highway. Lewis said of the opening, “It was

truly an exciting event. And at that moment, we both knew we’d struck gold.”79 And gold indeed

was right. The film brought in $4 million from theaters. Although Psycho brought in $50 million,

that was against a $807,000 initial investment, giving it a return of 6,195%. The return on Blood

Feast was 16,326% over the initial investment, and all for a film the director admitted was “no

good.”80 Before the film was released, Lewis actually feared the film wouldn’t make it past opening weekend.81 It was a small budget film with no-name actors and no reason for anyone to

even notice it, but their multipronged approach of inciting panic, enacting government law, and

even asking potential viewers not to watch their film worked. The use of Images+Values+Beliefs

in the promotion of Blood Feast convinced the public that, good or bad, this film would greatly

affect their community. The trailer jumped straight to the gore, making the images useful in

grabbing attention, the warning that the film could cause health issues and the use of vomit bags,

nurses, and ambulances pushed the belief that there was a cause for concern surrounding the

film, and enacting decency laws to stop the screening of the film caused the community to worry

that their value system was in jeopardy. Whether people watched the film to solidify their

78 Lewis and Rausch, 65. 79 Lewis and Rausch, 65. 80 Lewis, Herschell Gordon and Andrew J. Rausch. The Godfather of Gore Speaks. BearManor Media. 2012. 60. 81 Lewis, Herschell Gordon and Andrew J. Rausch. The Godfather of Gore Speaks. BearManor Media. 2012. 68. 33

concerns that the film was an affront to their community, or they watched the film as a way to

stand apart from the controlling infrastructure of society, or they simply wanted to see what all

the fuss was about, they were all paying customers.

Figure 18: Newspaper Article supplied in the Promotion Kit for Psych-Out

Lewis and Freidman’s promotion worked and had far reaching effects into the future of

PR, as the film world took notice of their approach and other filmmakers followed suit. Films

like 1968’s Psych-Out, a film about counter-culture drug use produced by Dick Clark, came with

an “exploitation” booklet for theater managers with “advertising slants” to promote the film.

These “slants” included the idea to hire hippies to loiter in front of the theater, and came with

slanderous fake news articles aimed at generating gossip that managers could run in local papers

suggesting Clark and the film’s actors were almost arrested by police who mistook them for

actual loitering hippies [see Figure 18].82 By the early 1970s Herschell Gordon Lewis thought the splatter film market was oversaturated and returned to the advertising world, publishing the industry book The Businessman's Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion in 1974.83 More

82 Psych-Out Promotional Booklet. 1968. 83 Lewis, Herschell Gordon. The Businessman's Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion. McGraw-Hill. 1974. 34

than 20 other books on advertising and promotion would follow over the next three decades, as

well as a very profitable career as a consultant.84

If the name of the game in the 1960s and 1970s was to create an atmosphere--albeit of

concern or panic--surrounding a product to get people thinking about said product, the 1980s

plan was full immersion; creating a situation where not thinking about the product was

impossible. The Care Bears Movie hit the theaters on March 29th, 1985, grossing $34 million

over a $4 million budget. The film was based on characters featured on greeting cards and was

funded by American Greetings Corporation, General Mills, Kenner Products, LBS

Communications, and Nelvana Ltd.85 The radical difference of this film from previous film

promotions, besides being a film inspired by greeting cards, was that the film’s distributor, the

Samuel Goldwyn Company, spent an estimated $24 million on promotion, the largest ever spent

at that date.86 And the marketing plan wasn’t merely to get children to ask their parents to take them to see the film, or to get parents thinking about taking their children to the movies, it was to saturate every facet of daily life of every age demographic so that no one could escape seeing, hearing, or thinking about Care Bears.

84 Lewis, Herschell Gordon and Andrew J. Rausch. The Godfather of Gore Speaks. BearManor Media. 2012. 85 Engelhardt, Tom. "Children's Television: The Shortcake Strategy". Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. Edited by Todd Gitlin. Pantheon Books. 1986. 82. 86 Robertson, Patrick. "The Industry: Publicity". Guinness Film Facts and Feats. Guinness Books. 1985. 27. 35

Figure 19: The Care Bears Movie 90-Page Promotional Kit The Samuel Goldwyn Company sent out a 90-page promotion kit outlining their

“Massive Merchandising” campaign [see Figure 19].87 Their “Care Bears Everywhere” strategy

stated that “when shoppers come into stores they find Care Bears sitting on countertops,

welcoming them at store entrances or peering down from shelf displays.” The techniques listed

in the “Massive Merchandising” campaign promised to generate “great word-of-mouth in more

ways than one.”88 Herschell Gordon Lewis merely wanted people to think about his product, the

Care Bears strategy made sure no one could not think about it; everywhere you looked a Care

Bear was looking back. Through the lens of the three foundations of soft focus,

Persons+Product+Place, the persons are everyone, the product is everywhere, and the place is nearly every place. There was cross-promotion with Kenner Toys, Pizza Hut, Macy’s, and Trix cereal. Two Care Bears books were published by Parker Brothers. There were contests and events at schools, day care centers, shopping malls, department stores, zoos, and radio stations.

87 The Care Bears Movie Promotion Kit. “Kenner Cares Massive Merchandising.” Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1985. Section 1, page 2. 88 The Care Bears Movie Promotion Kit. “Kenner Cares Massive Merchandising.” Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1985. Section 3, page 3. 36

Cash prizes were given to retailers with the most elaborate displays; theater managers could get

$1,000 for having the most eye-catching Care Bears three-dimensional displays.89

It wasn’t merely a campaign for a film, the “Massive Merchandising” campaign set out to

make the Care Bears an unavoidable fact of everyone’s life. In Henry Jenkins’ world of media

convergence, “every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets

courted across multiple media platforms.”90 Multi-page ads in magazines reached 64 million

readers and commercials ran for a month straight on all three major television networks.91 1,200

J.C. Penny stores and 2,000 music stores ran special promotions. Pizza Hut sponsored premiere

screenings of the film with tie-ins from the Special Olympics. Care Bears products were made by

57 companies including Avon, Kimberly Clark, and Turtle Wax. The Care Bears products were

not just manufactured for children; there were shirts, pants, gym shoes, swimsuits, raincoats,

jewelry, and undergarments. For the home there were tables, chairs, lamps, dishes, blankets,

pillows, bicycles, trashcans, and even electronics. They made Care Bears beauty products,

snacks, car air fresheners, and even wallpaper. Nearly anything a consumer needed in day-to-day

life could be found in the Care Bear product line. And this full immersion strategy worked; Care

Bears product sales exceeded $1 billion before the film was even released in theaters.97

In pre-internet commercialism we have seen soft power attempts augmented for

Ccommercial use, whether it be by causing panic to massage person-to-person communication

surrounding a product, as seen with Blood Feast and Psych-Out, or to infiltrate nearly every

89 The Care Bears Movie Promotion Kit. Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1985. 90 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New York University Press. 2006. 3. 91 The Care Bears Movie Promotion Kit. “The Care Bears Family.” Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1985, 17. 97 The Care Bears Movie Promotion Kit. “Introducing… The Care Bears Movie.” Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1985, 1. 37 aspect of daily life as with the Care Bears Movie. Chapter Three will explore how these techniques have been adapted in the internet age, as well as the negative impact it has caused.

38

CHAPTER THREE: INTERNET AGE

What Appears is Good

Guy Debord saw the western world in 1967 as a place where “all of life presents itself as

an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into

a representation.”98 This was written at a time when the bluntness of World War II propaganda

had given way to the covert manipulating tactics of the Cold War. Debord’s fears of this

manipulation taking over every aspect of our lives were not unfounded; in the Society of the

Spectacle, Debord goes on to say “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously

positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good,

that which is good appears.’”99 Debord saw this as a new level of exploitation of the working

class, where “social space is blanketed with ever-new layers of commodities.” Previously,

capitalism “consider[ed] the proletarian only as a worker," who “only needs to be allotted the

indispensable minimum for maintaining his labour power, and never considers him ‘in his leisure

and humanity," but this perspective is “revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level

that requires an additional collaboration from him.”100 Therefore every aspect of a worker’s life

is commodified, every layer becomes a commercialized spectacle.

But fast forward half a century and we have acknowledged this spectacle, it represents us,

our society, our own personalities, our values and beliefs. It begins to not feel like a negative, as

we are aware of its place in our world. It is not hidden, it has weight; These things, as it were,

represent who we are as a society, so is the representation not real at this point? In his time,

Debord saw this as an infiltration into every segment of society, the "specialized science of

98 Debord, Guy. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 117. 99 Debord, 119. 100 Debord, Guy. 21. 39

domination" as he put it.104 But for the generations that have followed, complete saturation and commodification is a reality. The virtual robot influencer from Downey, California, Miquela

Sousa speaks for, and embodies, the morals Western cultures value; her followers are empathetic when she gets her heart broken or when she’s excited about a new song she’s recorded. She is a commodity peddling clothes and music but in a vehicle that looks and feels like an individual sharing her cherished items to a friend wrapped up in simulated experiences with human emotions as a theme: love, joy, heartbreak, social and political leanings and personal triumphs.

There are images, values, and beliefs that legitimatize the product being sold.

Like Miquela and others of her hereditary line, Virtual Colonel Sanders says

inspirational things that help people through the day like “It’s important never to lose sight of the

things that make you who you are.”105 If followers of Virtual Colonel Sanders on social media can relate on an emotional level, perhaps they will try the products he is pictured to enjoy, like

Casper Mattresses.106 Also, he posts images of himself with other influencers such as imma

(virtual) and Lexi Hensler (human), publishes selfies with comedian Tom Green, and floats rumors of being in a relationship with virtual supermodel Dagny, adding to Louis

Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses theory that information is disseminated socially as well as within the media. Unlike what Althusser calls the Repressive State Apparatus, such as the police and military, that control through force, Ideological State Apparatuses

(such as church, family, and other institutions) control the individual through “ideology

104 Debord, Guy. The Commodity as Spectacle. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, editors. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed, Blackwell, 2006. 21. 105 Kentucky Fried Chicken (@kfc) • Instagram Photos and Videos. https://www.instagram.com/p/BwDCzv6Acey/ 106 Kentucky Fried Chicken (@kfc) • Instagram Photos and Videos. 40

both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the ‘values’ they

propound externally.”107 Except here we see the companies creating the social circles that people are willfully joining, whether through social media platforms or through completely fabricated virtual entities designed to emulate individuals with full mental agency, and transmitting ideology through those informal channels.108

The Finger Lickin’ Philosophy

The “Colonel Sanders: Virtual Influencer” campaign poked fun at the far reach of digital

manipulation while at the same time showing KFC’s mastery of social media and was incredibly

popular and highly successful, says Steve Kelly, Director of Media and Digital at KFC from

2008 until March of 2021. Kelly says the campaign wasn’t only about poking fun at digital

influencers and getting post likes, it was a highly successful digital influencer representation,

garnering hundreds of thousands of dollars in its two-week lifespan from the companies who

paid KFC to have digital Colonel Sanders showcase their products.109 The Virtual Colonel

Sanders was able to poke fun at digital influencers while still making a profit because society is fully aware that the primary goal of digital influencers is to convince you to buy in to what they are selling, while also acting as a unique entity with the same hopes and concerns as people.

When the public can relate emotionally, they create a bond to the avatar and the brand it represents.

KFC’s marketing philosophy is sales overnight, brand over time; “meaning you do have

restaurants that you've got to drive traffic [to] and sell chicken, that's what we do.” Says Kelly,

107 Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. (Notes for research).” La Pensée, no 151, June 1970. 17. 108 Wright, Matthew. "KFC unveils hot 'virtual influencer' Colonel Sanders who comes with model girlfriend and recipe tattooed on his chiseled abs." Daily Mail. April 13th, 2019. 109 Kelly, Steve. Director of Media and Digital at KFC. Personal Communication. February 12th, 2021. 41

“That's why we have TV [commercials]. That's why we have hard-hitting digital. But a brand is

what people are loyal to. And if you don't have a brand, you know, they [customers] may come

in every once in a while. But it's going to have to be way more compelling. There's also not a

KFC on every corner, like there's a McDonald's. So just from a physical availability standpoint,

you have to pass a lot of competitors to get to us. So, you’ve got to have some type of love or

connection if we're going to grow our consumer base. And so that's what this work is meant to

do, is to come in, have moments where we're showing up in people's conversation more

organically, so shares from other friends or reading articles, not with an advocate that got paid to

be put in front of you.”113

A product showing up in people’s lives organically has been the key to KFC’s marketing

campaign since the beginning; trying to tie the brand to anything and everything popular. In

recent years, KFC has published a romance novel featuring the Colonel, created comic books

with DC comics, designed a dating simulator, and produced an original mini-movie for the

Lifetime channel called A Recipe for Seduction starring Mario Lopez, of Saved by the Bell fame,

as Colonel Sanders.114 They have also made a television commercial marketing a fictitious sequel to the 1993 cult film Rudy (about a teenager realizing his goal of becoming a football player), with actor Sean Astin returning as Rudy with a new goal: to become Colonel Sanders.115

During the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Royal Rumble in 2016, professional wrestler

Dolph Ziggler entered the ring as Colonel Sanders for the “Colonel Rumble” crushing fake

competitors such as the Puppers Cluckers chicken. This is a great example of an ad campaign

using Persons+Product+Place as well as images and values to connect with wrestling fans; and

113 Kelly, Personal Communication. February 12th, 2021. 114 Kelly, Steve. Director of Media and Digital at KFC. Personal Communication. February 12th, 2021. 115 "The best KFC ads we’ve had over the years to promote the brand." Design Your Way. Date Accessed May 12th, 2021. https://www.designyourway.net/blog/advertisements/kfc-ads/ 42

WWE programming alone reaches over 650 million homes worldwide.116 All of these KFC moments that pop up in people’s day are attached to events and products that people hold dear, creating a long lasting bond with the consumer, and hopefully causing the consumer to share with others. Audience members at the Royal Rumble can share video and pictures of the Colonel in the ring on Instagram, fans of romance novels and films might share articles of the colonel romance book or mini-movie on Facebook, fans of the film Rudy might share the KFC Rudy commercial on social media and so on.

The idea behind this type of marketing, and the key to soft focus in general, is to

organically shoehorn into people’s lives, outside of traditional and transparent marketing. Henry

Jenkins defines participatory culture as consumers taking an active role in disseminating the

media information they consume: “Because there is more information on any given topic than

anyone can store in their head, there is an added incentive for us to talk among ourselves about

the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz that is increasingly valued by the media

industry.”117 The things a consumer enjoys in their personal lives like books, movies, live entertainment, etc., are now associated with the brand. But this concept is not new, says Kelly; it was something the actual Colonel Sanders worked on tirelessly during the early years of the

Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Whatever seemed to be beloved at the time Sanders found a way to attach it to Kentucky Fried Chicken. “He was onto it early,” says Kelly, “I've got pictures of him in parades, where he's riding the Death Star. He's got a throne on top of the Death Star because Star Wars was big at the time, and there's a Tie Fighter behind him. He created these massive hot air balloons that were shaped like chickens for the [Kentucky] Derby Festival,

116 "WWE Superstar Dolph Ziggler becomes KFC’s new Colonel Sanders" Miami Herald. August 24th, 2016. 117 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press. 2006. 3. 43 created go-karts that were shaped like drumsticks and would race them beforehand at some of the racetracks.”119

As with the pre-internet marketing campaigns discussed with Blood Feast, Psych-Out, and the Care Bears Movie, the efforts by KFC are designed to travel across multiple communication avenues, including inter-personal communication, to reach as many consumers as possible. When people attend festivals, races, wrestling matches and see something unique or unexpected, like Colonel Sanders riding a Death Star or pummeling a man in a chicken outfit they will share this information with friends, co-workers, their church group, and share the images, persons, places and products across social media, further associating them with their values and beliefs. Some of these techniques can be seen as guerrilla marketing, but, the main element of soft focus is connecting values and a sense of community to a brand. Much of the work in persuading the public that a company or product is working toward the public good (or even deflecting bad publicity) is done online, as will be further discussed in the rest of this chapter.

Manipulation in the Digital Age

As Steve Kelly points out, the digital landscape is now the prime battleground for reaching and manipulating consumers. This wasn’t always the case, the early part of this century held an optimism that the internet would be an equalizer and give an outlet to all; not only in freedom to choose content, but also as creators of content, artistic discourse, and an economic freedom of not just choice, but the opportunity for fair competition for all in the marketplace.

Blogs, podcasts, and message boards not only gave a creative voice to anyone wanting to be involved in the conversation, but could lead to social change, as seen with Occupy Wall Street

119 Kelly, Steve. Director of Media and Digital at KFC. Personal Communication. February 12th, 2021. 44

and the Arab Spring. The idea of a global right to free speech was born on the internet as a

vehicle for ethical, civic, and political discourse.122 French historian and sociologist Pierre

Rosanvallon said of this time, from his 2008 book Counter-Democracy, “It is better to say that

citizenship has changed in nature rather than declined. There has been simultaneous

diversification of the range, forms, and targets of political expression. As political parties eroded,

various types of advocacy groups and associations developed. Major institutions of

representation and bargaining saw their roles diminish as ad hoc organizations proliferated.”123

However, as a new citizenry formed and traditional political institutions began to lose

power, new controlling entities rose. In the last decade a steady decline in options and freedoms

online has paved the way for a handful of private entities to gain control far greater than any

government, in sheer numbers of people affected. In this new era, multinational companies hold

the power to control the flow of communication and wealth.124 The idea of Net-Neutrality (that all internet communications are given equal rights and opportunity, therefore one cannot block content or degrade network performance of others) became the target of powerful companies in order to gain control of the world's communication system. National governments can edit discourse and turn total internet access off at will, such as those of North Korea, Saudi Arabia,

China, Vietnam, Iran, Belarus, and Cuba (among others), despite Article 19 of the 1948 United

Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which declares everyone has the right to seek and receive news and express opinions.127 But now publicly traded companies like Google have the power to push certain information and suppress others, especially negative information about

122Thompson, Tok. “Netizens, Revolutionaries, and the Inalienable Right to the Internet.” in Folk Culture in the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction, ed. by Trevor J. Blank (Utah State University Press, 2012), 47 123 Pierre Rosanvallon. Counter-Democracy. Cambridge University Press. 2008, 33. 124Tony Romm. “Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google grilled on Capitol Hill over their market power.” Washington Post, July 29, 2020. 127Committee to Protect Journalists. 10 Most Censored Countries. Date accessed June 23rd, 2021. 45 themselves or paid advertisers, and platforms like Facebook can suppress political discourse. We must now look at multinational corporations as a great threat against global rights and suppressors of human rights.128

Beyond the power to suppress or alter information, these companies have the power and funds of governments and are actively taking measures to create and maintain a lower-class base in order to exploit control over intellectual property. The move away from purchasing content like music and films has led to streaming subscriptions, rewriting notions of commerce and ownership. Collections of downloaded purchased content that can be accessed at will on personal devices have been replaced by streaming services that require continual payment to access content.129 For creators of audio, visual, and other creative content it is even worse. The move of programs from such companies as Microsoft and Adobe to online platforms require creators to continually pay monthly fees to access their own work or risk erasure. On top of this, creators must pay more fees to online outlets to make their work accessible to the public, making a divide between those who can afford to express themselves creatively, politically, and socially, and those who cannot.

In “Netizens, Revolutionaries, and the Inalienable Right to the Internet” in Folk Culture in the

Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction, Tok Thompson looks at oppressive governments trying to control criticisms on social networks, writing, “Many nation-states have attempted to tighten controls on the Internet, perhaps nowhere more famously than in China, where the ‘great firewall of China’ illustrates the enormous effort to exert state control over their

128 Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin “Trump signs order that could punish social media companies for how they police content, drawing criticism and doubts of legality.” Washington Post, May 28, 2020. 129 Andrew Flanagan and Jasmine Garsd. "iTunes' Death Is All About How We Listen To Music Today" National Public Radio. June 3rd, 2019. 46

citizens’ digital discourses.”134 Thompson’s work was published in 2012, a time shortly after the

Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street events when groups like Anonymous were using the

internet to combat oppressive governments and multinational companies. Thompson saw

accessing and sharing information on the web as a human right that could usher in a new era of

democracy by using the internet as a way to bring positive change that supersedes borders and

governments with "the inclusion of global networks in participatory culture and participatory

social networks, the creation of a truly global discourse, and the birth of the postnational

citizen."135 Within this postnational citizenry comes a new global right: "the right to free speech

in a global discourse of the net, the right of the netizen—may be the new ethical, civic, and

political demand of our time."136 Henry Jenkins, in 2016’s By Any Media Necessary, agrees,

“political change is being forged through social and political networks that come together online and in physical space to explore new possibilities.”137 listing movements like Arab Spring and

Occupy Wall Street as “grassroots expression and networked communication to construct a new

political imaginary.”138 A dissenting voice during this time was Tech engineer and author Jaron

Lanier, who, in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future?, saw the rise of power in tech companies to control information at the expense of laymen: “The Greatest fortunes in history have been

134 Thompson, Tok. “Netizens, Revolutionaries, and the Inalienable Right to the Internet.” Folk Culture in the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction. Edited by Trevor J. Blank. Utah State University Press; 1st edition, 2012. 49. 135 Thompson, Tok. 47. 136 Thompson, Tok. 48. 137 Jenkins, Henry, Shresthova, Sangita, Gamber-Thompson, Liana, Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta, Zimmerman, Arely M. By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. New York University Press, 2016. 138 Jenkins, Henry, Shresthova, Sangita, Gamber-Thompson, Liana, Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta, Zimmerman, Arely M. 3. 47 created recently by using network technology as a way to concentrate information and therefore wealth and power,” because “the more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools.”139

However, Jenkins and Thompson saw a brave new world where borders are as thin as lines on a map, and ideas stronger than armies: "We may be witnessing for the first time the development of a truly new sense of citizenry, pointing the way for future global (or glocal) governance. Yet this would suggest a vastly different structure than the United Nations, a group built on the predominance of the nation-state in world affairs." said Thompson, but adding, “This is not to say that the nation-state will likely disappear overnight.”140

It was a time of hope, of possible change, and perhaps one could not fault either of them for being too idealistic regarding the idea of a nationless culture growing within the ones and zeros of the internet. However, as with all efforts to understand online culture, a nanosecond is all it takes to make fools of us who try, and there has been a swift cultural and economic deterioration since the 2010s, and a new era of international companies now hold the power to control the flow of communication and wealth as well as controlling workers’ and consumer rights; they are now as powerful as many nations. Soon after 2012, Net-Neutrality became the target of powerful companies in order to gain control of the world's communication system. When a publicly traded company like Google has the power to push certain information and suppress others we must now look beyond nations as the main threat against global rights, but multinationalism as a new enemy. When Facebook decides who can and who cannot post about political views or which

139 Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? Simon and Schuster. 2013. 31. 140 Tok Thompson. “Netizens, Revolutionaries, and the Inalienable Right to the Internet.” Folk Culture in the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction. Edited by Trevor J. Blank. Utah State University Press; 1st edition, 2012, 56. 48

political views are valid, then oppositional voices are quickly shut down.143 When the world

increasingly relies on a single source, Wikipedia (which relies on volunteer-generated content)

for the facts and those facts can be influenced by a special partnership with the world’s largest

search engine, Google, we have a homogenized power controlling the world’s information.144

Thompson notes that "In ancient Egypt, the rulers would periodically enforce a retroactive

censorship, removing all evidence of a particular ruler, or even of whole historical periods."145

With Wikipedia and Google now in a paid partnership, retroactive rewriting of history has never

been easier.

Tech companies operate transnationally with little oversight and bring in more annually than

the GDP of some G20 nations.146 The largest of these companies are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, worth $5 trillion combined.147 How have they grown this big? Lanier, in Who Owns

the Future?, states “Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees

are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the

network without being paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them

to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid.

That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth. Instead of

enlarging our overall economy by creating more value that is on the books, the rise of digital

networking is enriching a relative few while moving the value created by the many off the

143 Donie O'Sullivan, and Brian Fung. “Facebook will limit some advertising in the week before the US election -- but it will let politicians run ads with lies.” CNN Business., Sept 3, 2020. 144 Lisa Seitz-Gruwell. “Google and Wikimedia Foundation partner to increase knowledge equity online.” Wikimedia Foundation. Jan, 22nd, 2019. 145 Thompson, Tok. “Netizens, Revolutionaries, and the Inalienable Right to the Internet.” Folk Culture in the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction. Edited by Trevor J. Blank. Utah State University Press; 1st edition, 2012. 52. 146 Starr, Graham. “The Big 4 tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, worth $5 trillion combined — just crushed their earnings reports.” Tech Insider. July, 31st, 2020. 147 Starr, Graham. “The Big 4 tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, worth $5 trillion combined — just crushed their earnings reports.” Tech Insider. July, 31st, 2020. 49

books.”148 With this amount of power, we see companies like Facebook (owner of Instagram)

taking on the roles of oppressive governments by controlling information, especially political

information, and moving wealth away from the middle and lower classes into their own pockets.

Indentured Servitude by Monthly Subscription

In her 2019 blog post “Information Literacy’s Third Wave,” Barbara Fister argues that “a small number of very large companies… have colonized the internet” as a capital-producing

engine.149 Dave Ellenwood in “Information Has Value: The Political Economy of Information

Capitalism” takes this argument further by looking at those who own the means of communication (as the means of production) and those who do not.150 Ellenwood looks

specifically at the sale of academic journals versus the conditions the content was created under,

specifically as academic journals move to a monthly subscription fee. However, the move

towards subscriptions is not limited to the academic world but quickly engulfing every corner of

the internet. Ellenwood argues, “the process of exchange appears as though it creates profit for

capitalists instead of the exploitation of workers. This false notion allows capitalists to claim to

be the creators of profit because they circulate commodities. Instead, workers created the

surplus-value and profit, and are paid less than what they produced, if at all. They also have no

democratic say over the fruits of their labor.”153 We are seeing a new era of borderless robber

barons pilfer billions of dollars by owning the means of communication, not having to pay for

content, and instead charging the people who are creating the content via digital indentured

servitude on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. In The McDonaldization of Society

148 Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? Simon and Schuster. 2013. Prelude. 149 Fister, Barbara. “Information Literacy’s Third Wave.” Inside Higher Ed. February 14, 2019. 150 Ellenwood, Dave. “Information Has Value: The Political Economy of Information Capitalism.” In The Library With The Lead Pipe. August 19th, 2020. 153 Ellenwood, Dave. “Information Has Value: The Political Economy of Information Capitalism.” In The Library With The Lead Pipe. August 19th, 2020. 50

Into the Digital Age, sociologist George Ritzer speaks of the rise of the Prosumer, one who is

paying to produce while consuming. An easy example of this would be a paying customer at a

fast food restaurant who also acts as his or her own waiter and busser. While this process enables

such “brick-and-mortar” businesses to employ fewer people, in turn creating more capital, for

online businesses the ability “to turn consumers into prosumers is almost unlimited” as online the

individual is not only purchasing goods and services without aid of a paid sales staff, they often

are creating free or cheap content for online business.154 “While this might well be seen as

inefficient from the perspective of the consumer,” says Ritzer, “it is highly efficient from the

point of view of online sites, which are able to greatly reduce the number of paid employees and

increase profits, as well as capital, for shareholders.”155

As an example, Instagram, the online media sharing app, currently has on average 500

million daily active users, but it only had 13 employees when sold to Facebook in 2013 for $1

billion.156 In preparation for the sale, Instagram updated its terms of service in December of

2012, stating “To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree

that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with

any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content

or promotions, without any compensation to you,” also stating that Instagram "may not always

identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such."157 Instagram

now has over one billion users that supply free content for the site, over one million paid

154 Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age. SAGE Publications, 2018. 15. 155 Ritzer, George. 15. 156 Dean, Brian. "Instagram Demographic Statistics: How Many People Use Instagram in 2021?" Backlinko. April 5th, 2021 157Patel, Nilay. "No, Instagram can't sell your photos: what the new terms of service really mean." The Verge. December 18th, 2012. https://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-terms-of-service-what-they- really-mean 51

advertisers, and only about 450 employees.158 159 As Lanier points out, “We've decided not to

pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest

technologies. Ordinary people ‘share’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented

fortunes."160

Corporate Enslavement of Intellectual Property & Monetization of Thoughts

Writer Ian F. Svenonius, in the 2015 book Censorship Now!!, equates the ultimate power and

control of these companies to totalitarian governments: “If there’s anything the antiprivacy,

vulgar-transparency ideology of ‘connectedness’ and rampant spying (via Facebook, Google,

Carnivore, et al) of the Internet paradigm resembles, it would be Stalinist Russia.”161 Svenonius lays out a convincing argument that tech companies are actively creating an atmosphere devoid of material objects in order to control information, history, and perception of reality, and creating an atmosphere of isolation. These companies, writes Svenonius, want “to control everything, and central to controlling all things is controlling perception. Perception of the way things are, the way things work, and what’s happened in history so that they can frame their version of events and control the narrative; mind-controlling the masses to make them into better, more compliant consumer/servants.”162 Crucial to this is creating “nefarious effects on domestic life,” breeding

misery for the consumer.163 By pushing a sleek image devoid of books, records, and personal

objects, with everything instead being only accessed online, these tech giants not only control all

aspects of life, but push a lifestyle where things and personal relationships are surrogated online,

eschewing objects and corporeal relationships.

158 Dean, Brian. "Instagram Demographic Statistics: How Many People Use Instagram in 2021?" Backlinko. April 5th, 2021 159 Peterson, Tim. "Instagram now has more than 1M advertisers, doubling in past 6 months." March 22nd, 2017. 160 Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? Simon and Schuster. 2013. 30. 161Ian F. Svenonius, . Censorship Now!!. Akashic Books. Kindle Edition. 2015. 101. 162 Svenonius, Ian F. Censorship Now!!. Akashic Books. Kindle Edition. 2015. 46-47. 163 Svenonius, Ian F. 49. 52

In the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, several tech company creators and

executives are interviewed for an inside perspective on how isolating users on these platforms

and creating misery gains the largest amount of revenue. Keeping users isolated from real world

interactions means more time online which means more revenue from post impressions. “We’ve

created a world in which online perception has become primary, especially for younger

generations” says Jaron Lanier, who was interviewed, “And yet, in that world, anytime two

people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to

manipulate those two people. So, we’ve created an entire global generation of people who are

raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture,

is manipulation.”164 And it turns out that creating a scary reality keeps users connected far longer than positive information. A former engineer at YouTube, Guillaume Chaslot, states “It worries me that an algorithm I worked on is actually increasing polarization in society. But from the point of view of watch-time this polarization is extremely efficient at keeping people online.”165

A 2021 psychological study by Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden at the Department of

Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and Jay J. Van Bavel at the Department of

Psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University has backed up these

claims, finding that on the sites Facebook and Twitter negative political posts (both conservative

and liberal) “increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%.”166 Postings being

shared organically is key to validating the information, and as was previously mentioned,

polarizing and distressing information is key to keeping users engaged online. Although political

polarization and fear project a dystopian reality for users it is still appealing to users’ values and

164 Orlowski, Jeff, director. The Social Dilemma. Netflix. 2020. 165 Orlowski, Jeff. 166 Rathje, Steve; van der Linden, Sander; J. Van Bavel, Jay. "Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. June 29th, 2021. 53

beliefs in order to keep users engaged online. It also promotes information sharing and building a

reality of fear and anger disseminated online that is key to bringing in advertising dollars. In the

rest of this chapter I will discuss specific techniques used to appeal to values and beliefs in order

to cover up bad press and human rights abuses on social media, to deflect bad press and even

garner monetary gain.

Poverty Mills, Woke-Washing, Human Rights Abuse, & Social Capital

in the Digital Age

Destitute and psychologically distressed users of social media are a positive revenue stream not just for advertisers, but for social media developers as well. A lucrative side effect that comes out of creating a large class of poverty-stricken, miserable, and isolated people is the

personal charity market. Facebook has figured out what the American government is well aware

of: 40% Americans cannot afford a surprise bill at or over $400, 167 and that poorer Americans

donate the largest percentage of their incomes to charities.169 In the last five years, over 45 million people have donated over $3 billion through Facebook fundraisers.170 While Facebook

does not collect fees from donations to charitable organizations, it does collect fees from

personal fundraisers, to the tune of 2.60% + $0.30 per donation in the United States (percentages

vary per nation).171 GoFundMe, a similar fundraising platform launched in 2010, charges 2.9% +

$.030 per donation.172 People have donated over $9 billion on the GoFundMe platform since its

inception.173 Keeping users miserable isn’t difficult, says Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff;

167 “Dealing with Unexpected Expenses.” Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. May 2018. 169 Korndörfer, Martin; Egloff, Boris; Schmuckle, Stefan C. Espinosa, MariaPaz; editor. “A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” National Institutes of Health. US National Library of Medicine. July, 20th, 2015. 170 “People Raise Over $2 Billion for Causes on Facebook.” Facebook. February 6th, 2020. 171 “Are there fees for donations made on Facebook?” Facebook Help Center. Accessed September 27, 2020. 172 “Everything You Need to Know About GoFundMe’s Fees.” Gofundme.com. Accessed September 27, 2020.. 173 “About GoFundMe.” Gofundme.com. Accessed September 27, 2020. 54

“Facebook conducted what they called ‘massive scale-contagion experiments’… One thing that they concluded is that we now know we can affect real-world behavior and emotions without ever triggering the user’s awareness.” A world without poverty is bad for tech companies, but creating a world of disenfranchised people is easy when you have all the capital and all the means of communication.

Through a Marxist lens it is not hard to guess what happens when billions of people create the means of production (the means of content creation in the world of Surveillance Capitalism) for only a handful of people. With the vast fortunes these individuals have amassed they are able to acquire control like many dictators. They decide which charitable organizations get funding and which parts of society are left in the dark. Does Bill Gates get to decide the health and well- being of the world’s population? The lower classes may spend higher percentages of their income on charitable funding, but those efforts are overshadowed by a tiny minority who can make or break charitable organizations in one action. “Are we always going to defer to the richest most powerful people? Or are we ever going to say ‘You know, there are times when there is a national interest. There are times when the actions of people, of users, is actually more important than the profits of someone who is already a billionaire’?”180 says Roger McNamee, an early investor of Facebook.

The full-on assault by major corporations is not just creating digital indentured servitude online by creating a monthly payment structure for users to create free content, but powering up the immemorial trade of flesh and blood slavery as well. On November 29th, 2020, Ana

Swanson reported in the New York Times that 82 companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and

Google, benefited from “abusive labor transfer programs” from forced labor camps in China’s

180 Orlowski, Jeff, director. The Social Dilemma. Netflix. 2020. 55

Xinjiang region.181 Companies and business groups, including Apple, have been lobbying to

weaken a bill in Congress called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, that would “ban

imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region.”182 The focus of the bill is to

stop “China’s vast campaign of suppressing and forcibly assimilating Uyghurs and other

minorities in Xinjiang.” 183 To say China is forcing the Uyghur Muslim minority groups to work

in factories as well as “forcibly assimilating” them to “‘understand the Party’s blessing, feel

gratitude toward the Party, and contribute to stability”184 is like saying a man was arrested for

having sex with an underage prostitute, when in reality the man was raping a child held in

slavery. Forcing someone to work against their will is slavery and forcible assimilation is torture.

A February 2020 report filed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute titled "Uyghurs for sale:

‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang" found that O-Film Technology,

a contractor for Apple, Microsoft, Google and others, received at least 700 Uyghur workers in a

program that was expected to “gradually alter their ideology.”186 Again, the terminology dilutes the devastating impact these companies have both mentally and physically on the world’s population, and seemingly in all aspects of life. And it isn’t just tech companies tied to the

Uyghur slave camps, the New York Times also reported companies like Nike, Adidas, and Coca-

Cola used Uyghur “forced labor.” The Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that one factory

181 Swanson, Ana. Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill; “Business groups and major companies like Apple have been pressing Congress to alter legislation cracking down on imports of goods made with forced labor from persecuted Muslim minorities in China.” New York Times. November 29th, 2020. 182 Swanson, Ana. 183 Swanson, Ana. Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill; “Business groups and major companies like Apple have been pressing Congress to alter legislation cracking down on imports of goods made with forced labor from persecuted Muslim minorities in China.” New York Times. November 29th, 2020. 184 Xiuzhong Xu, Vicky, Cave, Danielle, Leibold, James, Munro, Kelsey, Ruser, Nathan. "Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re- education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang" Australian Strategic Policy Institute. February 2020. 186 Xu, et al. 56 held around 800 Uyghur workers that “produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike each year” and that local Coca-Cola bottling facilities used sugar from these camps.187

Figure 20: Nike's 2018 "Black Lives Matter" Ad with NFL Quarterback Colin Kaepernick If it seems like these corporations are not worried about the connection of their brand to slavery, it is because they are not. Like governments and news outlets that purposefully or inadvertently dilute the severity of slavery by calling it “forced labor,” or torture by calling it

“forceful assimilation,” corporations use techniques, called woke advertising, to alter the public’s perception. Woke advertising is when a corporation ties in socially conscious messaging into their advertisements, such as Nike’s Black Lives Matter ads in 2018 with NFL quarterback Colin

Kaepernick [see Figure 20], using the slogan, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”194 Advertising like this can garner woke capitalism for companies, as a Forbes

187 Swanson, Ana. Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill; “Business groups and major companies like Apple have been pressing Congress to alter legislation cracking down on imports of goods made with forced labor from persecuted Muslim minorities in China.” New York Times. November 29th, 2020. 194 Mirzaei, Abas. "Are You Woking?!! Why Brands Are So Obsessed with Woke Advertising." The Startup. Sep 3, 2019. 57 survey found that 70% of millennials “actively consider company values when making a purchase.”195

Woke capitalism like this can not only bring up market shares but shield against negative press such as being affiliated with slave labor camps. “Will Americans remember the spurt of articles on the lobbying efforts to dilute the Uyghur bill? Or will they remember the nonstop jet of advertisements, marketing ploys, and studies that promote buzzword-laden concepts about every kind of ‘equity’ imaginable?” asks John Loftus in an article in the National Review on

December 1st, 2020, “Because our largest multinational corporations, such as Apple, Coca-Cola, and Nike (to name a few) have devised the greatest, if not the most effective and cynical, public relations strategy to protect themselves from legitimate criticism: going — and staying — woke.”198

Figure 21: Coca-Cola "Together We Can" Ad

195 Lai, Anjali. "Millennials Call For Values-Driven Companies, But They're Not The Only Ones Interested" Forbes. May 23, 2018. 198 Loftus, John. “The Corporate-Woke Complex.” National Review. December 1st, 2020. 58

Figure 22: Coca-Cola "Together We Must" Ad Less than two months after the Australian Strategic Policy linked 82 companies to the

Uyghur prison camps, Coca-Cola began the “Together We Can” advertising campaign, using

slogans including “Together we can unite for the common good” [See Figure 21].199 Some videos were dedicated to those who have died from the coronavirus, pushing a connection of values and beliefs with their brand.200 By June “Together We Can” advertising turned into

“Together We Must,”201 using terminology such as “Together we must start change; demand justice; admit we can do more; stand as one; right wrongs; listen and create a better future; end racism. And together we will” [See Figure 22].202 Juneteenth was a common theme, with

advertising campaigns listing facts about racial injustice and slavery in America, such as

“African Americans in Texas weren’t freed until June 19th, 1865, 2 ½ years after the

Emancipation Proclamation.” [See Figure 23]. A barrage of posts publicly decrying slavery

online seemed to be a useful, albeit tasteless, strategy to deflect public backlash while being

linked to using slave labor. Also, during these campaigns Coca-Cola announced it would be

199 “Together We Can” Image. Coca-Cola. Twitter. April 6th, 2020. 200 “Together We Can” commercial. Coca-Cola. May 8th, 2020. 201 “Together We Must” Image. Coca-Cola. June 3rd, 2020. 202 “Together We Must” Image. Coca-Cola. June 3rd, 2020. 59 cutting 2,200 jobs due to revenue losses during the Covid-19 pandemic, including 1,200 in the

United States, about 12% of the workforce.203

Figure 23 Coca-Cola Juneteenth #2 ad As part of the “Together We Must” advertising campaign, Coca-Cola partnered with organizations like the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and held virtual “dinner conversations” on “various social justice topics designed to encourage people to listen, connect and take action together.”204

“Woke advertising is not just an insurance policy for the times when shady practices are illuminated,” says Loftus, “It is also insurance against cancel-culture juntas, who will boycott a product if it does not sufficiently pander to minority identity groups.” But, is it working? If market value is an indicator, then yes, it is. “There was blowback but there was also massive online and offline engagement with and about Nike,” says Dr. Abas Mirzaei, a Lecturer in the

Department of Marketing at Macquarie Business School in Sydney, Australia, about Nike’s

Black Lives Matter campaign, “Engagement that came at the expense of competitors such as

203 Wiener-Bronner, Danielle. “Coca-Cola is cutting 2,200 jobs.” CNN Business. December 17, 2020 204 “Together” Campaign. Coca-Cola. Retrieved January 9, 2021. 60

Adidas. Sales jumped and Nike’s share price surged, adding nearly US$6 billion to the company’s market value.”205

Efforts by Nike and Coca Cola and others to cover up their involvement in the human slave trade may seem to be in poor taste, but to hundreds of thousands of Uyghur slaves it is a harsh reality being covered up by virtue signaling campaigns and other techniques meant to keep meaningful change from occurring that could disrupt sales. The messages and images of these campaigns are designed to appeal to a consumer’s values and belief system to help push the person, product, or place that is being sold. Much like the KFC campaigns they are meant to embed a brand firmly within the social structure of a community and promote interpersonal sharing, yet it can have real and brutal consequences for the marginalized groups being exploited if a campaign is successful in covering up corporate wrongdoing. While this kind of virtue signaling can create real capital for companies in the immediate term, the tide may turn as consumers become more aware of these techniques. As Joah Spearman, founder and CEO of

Localeur, a PR strategy firm, mentioned on National Public Radio’s 1A, these campaigns could cause problems for these brands in the future, saying “a lot of people I think are skeptical if that is really meaningful change within a company” and adding “because the problem with the virtue signaling is that now you have future accountability.”206

205 Mirzaei, Abas. "Are You Woking?!! Why Brands Are So Obsessed With Woke Advertising." The Startup. Sep 3, 2019. 206 Simons, Sasha Ann. Can Companies Fight For Social Justice? 1A. NPR. June 13th, 2020. 61

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION

So, I’m Signing Off

When the KFC Digital Influencer campaign ended, virtual Colonel Sanders issued a statement on the online forum Medium titled “Social Media Is an Illusion, So I’m Signing Off.”

In it he touched on the issues with our realized hyperreality in saying “I begin to think that social media isn’t real. Well, I mean, of course it’s real. How is it not real? It exists on the internet, and our phones, and we all participate in it, it’s as real as anything else.” The virtual Colonel expands this thought to include our entire existence in a way that would make Jean Baudrillard proud by saying “Also, if I take this even further, to be totally honest, sometimes I think everything we perceive is a simulation.”207 Adorno and Horkheimer saw this as a machine of total domination intruding upon every platform available, in what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture. It is true that the media industry has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, an overlapping construct of society as an ocean of competing forces pushing laws, norms, beliefs, culture, and style. It is inescapable, but it is not enough to call it a byproduct of a capitalist prison and close the book.

Capitalism comes in many forms and so does resistance. If everyone in the Western world has to live within this construct, then perhaps creating a small island within that ocean that best represents one community’s values while using these techniques can be a small act of positive resistance.

History has long been filled with examples of the few exploiting the masses, and the 21st

century is no different. Manipulation of information and coercion affecting how we perceive the

world around us has expanded in the last century beyond government forces and into the

commercial realm. In some cases, it is to incite outrage (in the case of Blood Feast), in others it

207 Virtual Colonel Sanders. [Fake people are not listed the same way real authors are]“Social Media Is an Illusion, so I’m Signing Off.” Medium, 23 Apr. 2019. 62 is to circumvent outrage, as we have seen with Nike and Coca Cola. Sometimes it is to hold people mentally (or in some cases physically) hostage in order to control every monetary transaction possible. Sometimes it is simply to make consumers accept something as a normal part of their personal realities, like cute teddy bears and the avalanche of products that they appear on. In the area I worked in, live entertainment, it was to convince consumers that their lives would be better if they joined our community, a community of good values and positive energy. The campaign was so convincing that the end result was that it attracted the people who wanted to belong to such a positive community such that we actually created it, and for a time, there was an oasis where people could be free to be who they wanted to be, and to be active in the process and not just spectators.

I entered the soft focus game by accident, handed to me by a firm cutting a segment of their operations. Until that point, I had kept to traditional promoting; advertisements, articles, online post impressions, public appearances, product tie-ins and the like. I had not agreed with some of the outright manipulation of the public by employing others to disseminate what seemed like personal thoughts and opinions but were in reality carefully crafted by a PR firm. But when looking to promote relatively small and independent clients in a world dominated by the power of large conglomerates, some aspects of soft focus really worked in shifting attention away from those with more capital and influence, as well as cutting through the digital noise of blatant advertising across social media, creating a world that was actually fun and inviting for everyone.

A world relatively free from blaring traditional advertising, and not covered in logos and branding was an escape from the reality of the real world and held the values that are increasingly disappearing from it. 63

The long game of soft focus, and the manipulation of how consumers perceive reality, is that we will continue to see companies manipulate the public in new, creative, and often deplorable ways. Without consumer education and government regulation these companies will continue to consolidate power and marginalize vulnerable groups for monetary gain. But, as we have also seen, the techniques of soft focus can also be used to push back on these forces to create positive moments and benefit communities, however small, for the betterment the public good.

64

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