Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading The Occupy Handbook, edited by Janet Byrne. You can expect a review when I finish the piece, but given that it is actually just a collection of lots of small essays, I am going to do some posts on the pieces that stand out to me.
Today I’m going to start with Arjun Appadurai’s piece, A Nation of Business Junkies. In A Nation of Business Junkies Arjun Appadurai takes a quick look at the nature of ‘business news’ in modern media. I think the best way to think about this is to think about the Finance Section in daily newscasts. For years, the Finance Section has been the way to present business news – in one clearly defined area at the end of the main news stories. There are similar sections in most forms of media – the business section in newspapers is another great example. Appadurai posits however that the Finance Section of the news is really a relic of the past. ‘Business news’, as he would describe it, has taken over to consume our entire news world view.
In 4 short pages Appadurai goes through different news agencies, indicating how business news, the news of company take overs, hirings and firings, economic policies etc. now dominates every section of our news coverage. As he explains:
“Business news was a specialised affair in the late 1960s, confined to a few magazines such as Money and Fortune, and to newspapers and TV reporters (not channels). Now it is hard to find anything but business as the topic of news in the media.”
What does this mean? Appadurai argues:
“…we were always told that the business of America is business. But now we are gradually moving to a society in which the business of American life is also business. Who are we now? We have become (in our fantasies) entrepreneurs, start-up heroes, small investors, consumers, homeowners, day traders, and a gallery of supporting business types, and no longer fathers, mothers, friends or neighbours. Our very citizenship is now defined by business whether we are winners or losers
It’s a piece like this makes me step back and realise how all-consuming capitalism has become. Look around now and everything you see is business. Now, of course, I understand, and agree that the news of people’s jobs and livelihoods is important. But business news has become so consuming that it is now how we define our lives. How much money do we have, how much profit are we making, how wealthy will we be at the end of our lives?
For me, I have to ask the question, isn’t there something more to life?
For Appadurai however, there is one other, potentially more important issue at stake. Appadurai argues that you would think that with all this knowledge and all this coverage, we would be able to start to investigate and question dodgy practices. The coverage would lead to to proper investigation where we can identify and stop events like the Global Financial Crisis. Not so though:
“The avalance of business knowledge and information dropping on the American middle class ought to have helped us predict – or avoid – the recent economic meltdown, based on crazy credit schemes, vulgar scams and lousy regulations. Instead it has made us business junkies, ready to be led like sheep to our own slaughter by Wall St, the big banks, and corrupt politicians.”
“The growing hegemony of business news and knowledge in the popular media over the past few decades has produced a collective silence of the lambs. It is time for a bleat or two.”
And this is a major consequence of modern capitalism. With the so called end of the great philosophical debates in the early nineties, and with the agreed assumption that capitalism is now the only answer, we seem have stopped really questioning any of its underlying assumptions. We are being bombarded with business news, but we are assuming that it is all natural – it is what has to happen for any system to work.
In doing so, we are being left in the dark when the system is failing – being led like sheep to our own slaughter.