Nate, I have just a few thoughts on your questions. 1. If the interests of the PTB were to shift from gaining wealth and power thru the aquisition of money to the control of large numbers of workers then the answer is yes. Very shortly the trinket gathering society is due to vanish. 2. I have lived a large per cent of my life (73yrs) in situations free from mass advertising and/or government propaganda. When you are re-exposed to this stuff after 10 or twenty years with out then you become somewhat immune. The internet might be used if the number of available sites can be limited. 3. Crowds have no wisdom. The wisdom of the crowds is conditioned actions by indoctrinated people. (see religion). What is taught in schools, churches and in the homes by like educated people is the wisdom of the crowds.
Having lived in rural and urban centers, among the wealthy elites and the poorest of the poor. The greatest mind control organizations have been the churches for the last 2000+ years. Only the message will changeto conform to the wishes of the PTB.

Regarding Q3:

I would answer your questions with this quote: "Relationships are primary, everything else is derivative." Lobbyists understand this quite well.
It addresses both the "wisdom of the crowd" or sheeple behavior as well as the challenges in "leading by example." In the leading trajectory, you generally need some sort of critical mass--a lone voice may as well exist in a parallel universe. You need a chorus of voices, not everyone singing.

Huh. Earlier this Summer I was thinking about the history of Psychoanalysis, and I found myself wondering if that too was just another highly complex and developed activity, sitting on top of the energy-abundance mountain. Having considered this for a few moments, I quickly pushed this unpleasant thought back out of my mind's repair bay, and shut the garage door.

The interpretive filters of individuals and crowds are largely unchanged, at least going back 150 years and probably longer. Marketing, as you (likely) correctly point out in your recent presentation is one of the greatest of modern technologies.

Built up capital and surpluses allowed privileged classes in Vienna the time to focus and fret on their unhappiness. Thus, modern psychology was born, and obviously formed the basis, over a half century, for myriad insights--some of which were used in modern marketing.

Resource depletion needs a hot ad agency. I would suggest Crispin Porter + Bogusky of Boulder/Miami/Los Angeles. Yes.

G

I have some ideas for the ad industry, related to Freudian ideas of sex (though I know these are incomplete) and this story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata. Only I don't know how this would work because these are so anti-consumption. Who would pay for the following ad slogans and associated visuals?

Now that you’ve sown your seeds, why don’t we go work in the garden?
(picture of two post coital lovers)

On our first date he cooked dinner for me…in a solar oven! I was smitten.
(talking to her girlfriends)

He doesn’t buy me flowers. He grows them for me. That’s hot!
(beautiful woman holding gorgeous bouquet with smiling lover boy in background)

His bike gets great mileage. That’s why I let him ride it all night long.
(man and woman saddled up on same bike together)

Lovers do it best in a raised bed.
(naked gardeners prepping a bed)

I thought he was cute until I saw his big ass truck. What a looser.
(picture of hot babe looking with disgust at big ass truck)

I’ll betcha he’s compensating for something. Creep.
(Woman walking by guy getting into his hummer)

Ever since we downscaled and simplified our lives we have way more time for sex…great sex!
(guy talking to his guy buddy emphatically)

If you think I am that shallow there’s no way are you penetrating.
(woman rebuffing a man offering her a diamond ring)

He returned the ring and brought back solar panels! We had amazing make up sex!
(woman talking to her girl friends)

Even more are easy to think up but they get rather...uh...well...not sure they are appropriate for this venue.

Can 'advertising/marketing' be used to shift us away from a consumer culture?

Not if we are talking about the traditional paradigm of trying to sell "things"! That's like asking the fox to watch the chicken coop!

Advertising and Marketing are the sine qua non of consumerism. Even "anti advertising" is the embodiment of evil (my personal opinion.)
http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/february07/antimarketing.html.

Having said that, the knowledge that the professional advertisers and marketers have at their disposal should be able to be used for shifting the paradigm against consumerism.
We should be able to use the same tools and psychological insights gained from decades of research into how to sell useless crap to people to sell them on the idea that less is more.
Though I very much doubt that the promoters of BAU will sit idly by if this is attempted.

It will be the beginning of an all out psychological war. I fear it may actually get violent and bloody...

If you want to get an explanation from a global scope I suggest reading New Earth from Eckhart Tolle.
It's about the development of human consciousness.

It seems a sad thing that we would want to use the same herding techniques, but for a 'higher cause'. There is a subtle or not so subtle subtext that people need to be manipulated for their own good. As one of the commentators stated, lack of exposure to these manipulative strategies makes one more immune to those blandishments.

Nate's prior discussions of the ratcheting aspect of need for higher and higher doses of status markers just to get the brain juices to flow indicating addiction like aspects. Banning advertising would be more salubrious in the long run. Given that it is a driver in our economy I don't see this happening. Which means to me that we will have to wait until the economy is in tatters before the spell can be broken.

And how are you going to promote the good things that our impending poverty will bring, without specific products to sell? Public service announcements are boring and condescending.

How many in this blogspace are thinking about buying a bright shiny new hybrid or all-electric vehicle and think that by so doing you are leading the way by example? Rather than feeding your own desire to be driving a new car, and rationalizing it in environmental terms?

My worst fears are that this meltdown will bring out the demagogues who will be successful at rousing the disenchanted masses to very unhealthy solutions to our predicament using those unconscious prods so well done by our ad agencies. The demagogues will probably be able to hire the best in the business.

If we unplug ourselves from the barrage of blandishments and become free of their influence, then we can help others to do the same.

Vicky

If Machiavelli were alive, he wouldn't post on this topic lest he blow his cover.

1. Can 'advertising/marketing' be used to shift us away from a consumer culture?

Yes, probably.

If it could, then how? (it would still require agreement of those pulling the public relations strings to pursue this trajectory - how could that be accomplished?)

It's an interesting fact that describing the "how" in a public forum would be foolish for anyone who actually considered doing it. I don't agree, however, that it is necessary in principle to get the overt buy-in of any participants, or indeed anyone at all.

2. How pervasive is conventional media in shaping our perceptions/aspirations? Will the acceleration of the internet/blogosphere as a news source be able to offset the conventional media messages enough to shift how we use energy/make decisions? If so, will the internet be eventually aggressively policed in OECD nations, like it is in China and other places?

I think it has been quite pervasive in stabilizing the context for our thoughts and perceptions, if by "conventional media" we include all that we've heard through them. Propaganda is still propaganda, and it works very very well.

The internet will eventually be policed in some places, but freedom of thought could easily be lost even if it thrived in cyberspace. Arguably we're there. Indeed, the internet is taking on "opiate of the masses" qualities. Here we are venting our emotions to other statistical outliers and feeling like something has been done... why, if we get exercised enough, we can all start our own blogs! Wow!

It is tempting to think the internet changes everything, but it seems to coincide with a general dumbing-down and shorter attention spans. And the government can keep, index, and compile a list of what every 'radical' says for retroactive prosecution. Why, for the sake of argument, would a repressive government not want to keep it running at all costs?

3. Do you agree that our energy future will be shaped by the 'wisdom' of crowds as opposed to the 'lead by example' trajectory of cooperative individual actors?

The future will be a series of avalanches, generally triggered by other avalanches but occasionally by the volition of informed actors. In most of those latter cases, those actors will remain anonymous. There will be "inspiring" examples to follow since we'll create them as necessary and some will be created artificially, but they won't be the real story I'd say, just entertainment.

4. Any other related insights/comments welcomed.

All rational ends are predominately achieved through irrational support.

(disclaimer: I'm high as a kite after a medical procedure, so do not necessarily agree with myself)

Century of the Self, great show and very insightful, particularly as we enter the period to be known as 'Century of (Every Man for Him) Self'.

Anyway ... what is the power of advertising? I cannot see the world doing without it at the same time it's clear to everyone it's nothing more that irritating lies. So ... you go to the next level where Marshall McLuhan postulated the 'medium is the message'. This is where the action is; where the supposition is that anyone seen on television is presumed to have a better life than all those watching ... simply because they are on television.

That Bernays fellow has a better life than you, even though he's dead, because he is on televsion and you aren't. That fat chick on Springer has a better life than you for the same reason.

How else can reality programming be explained?

In this model, paid advertising is useful because it enables/subsidizes the 'programs' that are the real ads. The programs distribute the idea that TV- land's inhabitants' feet never touch the ground. In TV-landia there is pace, there is excitement, there is drama, there are fast cars and there is always more. More, more, more, even on Italian television ... even on Springer.

Will the internet be policed? It already is. Mainstream sites with large amounts of traffic are tightly regulated as to input, most of which is more advertising, more nonsense or partisan spewage. See NY Times.com or YouTube. Sites like TOD have six or seven users who post and comment under dozens of pseudonyms. Who cares?

Hey! We should get paid! There is a depression on, you know!

Seriously, one problem that Freud and cousin never uncovered was the nature of the subconscious itself. We humans have our 'identity prejudice' which excludes the possibility that the subconscious is collective, which would explain our cumulative willful ignorance- slash- death drive. We want what we want and no individual will be allowed to get in the way.

What will happen is hard to say. Some cross between charlatan and clairvoyant - between a David Koresh and a Charles Manson - might reach the masses and convince them the dream of auto- bliss is extinct and that another future is possible. Hard because the Disney idea of progress is imprinted so deeply. What is desperately needed is another narrative, something uniquely American (that can sell overseas) yet something easy to digest.

Why not seek something equally likely such as a flying hippopotamus?

A sort of intellectual anarchy is likely to prevail around the edges of the energy decline, something that will never allow any possibility of the facts to emerge. I sometimes feel like the US is a version of Germany during the last years of the war, under a mass- hypnotic spell that nothing, not even great losses ... can break. Maybe indeed, the fault lies not in us but in our stars ...

1. Can 'advertising/marketing' be used to shift us away from a consumer culture? If it could, then how? (it would still require agreement of those pulling the public relations strings to pursue this trajectory - how could that be accomplished?)
Clearly marketing, at least in the West, is essentially tied to capitalism and the profit motive, and its principal message has long been “buy (consume) our product”. But the same marketing technologies are widely used even among greens and more “altruistic” business models like big NGOs. Greenpeace is a business; they sell their feel-good product (membership, generally) by appealing to consumers’ values. Those may be enlightened values, but the average consumer (if there is such a thing?) is merely offsetting the impacts of their deadly lifestyle in part; ten bucks a month to Greenpeace, and $600 to the leased Lexus. So I’d say they can be used, are being used, to generate a marginally different consumer. (Now, who wants to buy what TOD is selling? Seems a growing number!)
Maybe your question is a matter of whether this “difference” could cascade into a mainstream, but that might well asking for the massive cultural shift that greens and others have been advocating for decades. Some of it has caught on, sure, but in the context of a continuous push for even more consumption per capita, even as capita have continued to multiply.
The limits to growth, which we seem to have finally hit (and hard), may put a limit to the profits that can be reaped, but the first wave will probably entail a lot of people dropping their NGO membership to maintain their CD collection. And the best marketing technologies will likely remain in the hands of profit-motivated corporations for some time to come (until the myth of growth is conclusively shattered, perhaps).
But one place that these technologies have already been applied in a less consumer oriented way is in those totalitarian states that have sought to nourish communal sentiments above personal aggrandizement. The collective, the motherland, the party, security: these are consumer items, too, the kind that might never be bought without the outstanding propaganda machines that propagate the facade of justice, equality, freedom, … whatever. (IIRC TCOS does deal with this at some length.) Could a “rational” (and peak oil aware) leadership not use comparable technologies to convince a populace that “low carbon” living – with lower consumption of food and heat and toys, with reduced services, more local participation, etc – was good? Why not? (Look at Heinberg’s recent “Ten Reasons to be Happy” about PO. There is a bright side.)
The association of propaganda with totalitarian states (and “public relations” with free ones) is a misleading generalization, as TCOS shows well. But the major control of opinion in the west is ostensibly in private hands, and (because of the magic of the free market) is given as “freedom”, while in other parts of the world it is in the hands of the state or church, and is hence “repression”. The balance of freedom (or priorities) may look quite different from a Marxist perspective (USSR), or a theological one (Iran), or even a strong nationalist one (Nazi Germany). Here in the liberal democracies, we can’t see that sort of mass manipulation going on – because of our ideological commitment to our own political system, our certainty that we are the free world, and the continuous barrage of confirmation of this “fact”. That is propaganda! (But we call it liberal theory.)
And if it were to come about that the bulk of opinion came to recognize how they were (are) being manipulated (think of the ME wars, or the ongoing rape of America’s future to the tune of “save the system”), would we not strive to fight it? But the key here is the bulk – and the bulk is pretty much at the mercy of those who hold the bread and circuses (and “don’t turn that dial”). That is, it’ll take a revolution – either a political one, or one of consciousness. I’d put my money on the power needing to shift before the (mass) consciousness does (or can).

The human subconscious is composed of many drives that are well delineated by the Madison Ave. group. All one has to do is tether your product to one of the basic drives to get the sales rolling. Sex drive, stature seeking, hunger, fear(s), identity can all be taken advantage of in the marketing effort. "Buy our product and be everything you've ever wanted to be, and have everything you've ever wanted to a have ."Jeans are not for covering your behind, they're for accentuating your sexuality, or making you a part of the in group. Don't just sell jeans, sell sexuality and identity.

My favorite products were those found in the ad sections of The National Geographic. You probably remember them, the Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio, the Rolex Blue Oyster or Mariner, the Nikon camera. These were not just products but identity enhancers. I never owned a Rolex but was a skinny kid with a big Seiko instead and the Sony Earth Orbiter. I felt GOOD with these products, not in their use but in reinforcing a satisfaction in who I was. I also had a scuba tank back in the late sixties and was enthralled with the adventures of Jacque Cousteau who must have been dearly loved by the Dacor people.

Where is the identity formation outside of the marketing barrage. Was the Marlboro man really the Marlboro man? I'm sure there were many Marlboro men RIP, but what would they have become in absence of the marketing. In the National Geographic, I would like to see a large photographic advertisement for a Buddhist temple retreat showing a monk at peace in his/her austere conditions, maybe with a little Kung Fu thrown in for marketing appeal. After all, I never really could understand what they were saying on the short wave bands of that Sony Earth Orbiter.

Q one-

First of all I want to say that anyone not professionally trained in psychology or a closely related field,or a business professional intimately involved in or with advertising on the grand scale,is very unlikely to understand just how pervasive and powerful advertising and pr actually are.

As an undergraduate ,I needed "one more" business class to get my ticket punched and took an advertising class that was a real eye opener.What I expected to be a complete waste of time and tuition money turned out to be a priceless gem.

Over the years I have integrated what I learned there with my reading in other fields,particularly religion,politics and history.

I firmly believe that the practical art/science of mind control has had more influence on the structure of history than any other factor,and more than most.

Physical circumstances (such as climate,geography,and technology)determine the POSSIBLE PATHS that events may follow,but the successful manipulators of our thoughts determine the general PATHS CHOSEN.

Think from Jesus, Gandhi, Marx, Hitler, to the copy writers who sold us everything from A ot z in the yellow pages.

By great good luck we could arrive as a society at a point that it becomes obvious to the vast majority that we have no choice but to give up our profligate ways,possibly as the result of the way that the cards fall in the next few years in a world of declining resources,and partly as the use of these very techniques by coalitions of environmental organizations,the handful of courageous politicans who are foucusing on the hard realities of the near future,possibly some churches,some portions of the medical profession,maybe a few philosophers,people like Nate,Gail, Leanan etc.

I believe something somewhat comparable to this scenario had a lot to do with the collapse of the old USSR.The people from the bottom to the top just finally realized that their system wasn't getting it done,and that as individuals they would be better off as low level workers in a capitalist/ free market/American /Western Europe/socialist society of some sort than as apparatchiks in the communist party.

(Of course they had us to look to as an example before we hit our own wall,so it will be harder for us to make the transition,as we don't have much in the way of palatable examples to emulate.)

But maybe we will be lucky and fortune will send the necessary Pearl Harbor type consciuosness raising events our way.

I can envision such events including another "year withuot a summer",except this time it will probably be a "year without a winter" or an envirnmental catastrophe of some sort such as two or three Katrinas in one year,spread up the coast.

A drought that results in the starvation of few tens of millions in India would of course be a humanitarian catastrophe,but it could also be somewhat of a positive Black Swan if it results an awakening of the general public to the precarious state of the world.

But we may be sure that the entrenched lords of the universe-the multinational corporations,the giant banks, will mass an army comparable to the one ready to march from Mordor to confront Gandalf and his gallant but puny by comparision band ,and that we have about the same chance of success as Frodo and Sam.

The people who stand to benefit the most from change of this sort-workers in industries that are not sustainable over the long run- will turn out to be the ones most easily convinced that it is a conspiracy against them.

So yes theoritically,to q one ,but our COLLECTIVE ship is headed for rocks our COLLECTIVE leaders percieve as no more than figments of the fevered imaginations of a few overexcited passengers-namely folks like us-Oil Drum fanatics, Green Peacers,the climate scientists.

I think the shipwreck is a foregone conclusion-the only real question is when.And how many will make it to shore in the lifeboats.

Q2is partly answered above.I believe that for the forseeable future the internet is reasonably safe from censorship in the US and the rest of the OECD.There is a very strong cultiral trend away from authority in the west,as evidenced by the rejection of traditional thought in treating gays and women as second class citizens,etc.

Althoough some of my liberal friends regard me as a hopeless Nearderthal in some respects,we would have no trouble at all marching together against censorship of any sort.

I could get a crowd of my right wing Bible thumping gun nut acquaintances to march right behind the Gays and Lesbians if I could get every body to agree that for the duration of the day all speeches, signs, and banners would be limited to censorship only.

Of course this could change if some charasmatic leader rises to the top as the result of desperate hard times with the persausive and oratory skills of a Hitler.We are hardwired to close ranks,"us versus "them" at all times and when all the other emotional/intellectual alarms are going like fire truck sirens,this evolutionary trait can come to the fore with such force that the percective individual will understand that even if he has extreme misgivings,he has no practical choice other than to flee or keep his mouth shut.

Whether the internet can change the world's perceptions of reality has to my satisfaction been answered in the affirmative by the success of the O Bama grass roots campaign.

Whether it can succeed in weaning us away from the bau paradigm probably depends on how fast events move.I tend to be a short term pessimist and a long term optimist when speculating about the course of our society.

Major change,such as the such as the success of the civil rights movement and the still only partially completed acceptance of women as political leaders,takes a long time-decades at least.

But change itself is coming at an ever accelerating pace.The internet will move us,is alredy moving us,in the direction of environmental sanity.Whether we "get it" as a society before tshtf is anothe question.I doubt that we will.I am hopeful that there will be enough repairable pieces ,so to speak,left of the environment that we our descendants can live reasonably fulfilling lives.

Q3who knows?We are really more like little sailboats on a big ocean than we like to admit.Little boats can tack,or drop a sea anchor,or run brefore the wind,but when they encounter really big storms,they pretty much go where ever the storm wants them to be.

Maybe we will wash up on the shore of Gilligan's Island,but I'm not holding my breath.

Q four -commentary embedded in 1,2,3

I don't think advertising/marketing can or will be effective at convincing us to consume less. They simply amplify our hardwired tendency to want as much or more than our neighbor. There is no hardwiring in us to want less, hence there are no buttons for advertising to push.

I keep wondering if a new religion with nature as "god", ecological science as "the commandments", our existence as the "wonderous miracle", and DNA as the "afterlife" might be the only path to positive change without major pain. We know religion has been a powerful force throughout our history; we suspect the need for religion is hardwired in our brains; and we know that major new religions have emerged and taken hold rather quickly. Wish I knew how to get a good new one going. Perhaps this might be a topic for a future campfire...

Regulating companies to encourage people to consume less of their products is already done. Think of the tobacco industry, the warnings on packs, and the huge influence this (along with govmnt advertising) has had on the number of people smoking - here in the UK this is now down to below 30%.

Could this regulation, forcing companies to effectively put health warnings on their products, be used more broadly? Put the negative consequences to the consumer at point-of-purchase. So e.g. a car would come with warnings about pollution and the negative consequences not just for the planet but for humans living on the planet - respiratory diseases etc. Basically make people more aware of the damage being done by making companies fly the green flag as well as govmnt. And in a very clear way rather than hidden somewhere as an incomprehensible 'carbon footprint' number. i.e. take a leaf (pardon the pun) from the tobacco industry and start shouting the message.

TW

In my real life, I teach communication theory, so I think I have a pretty good insight into this... Unfortunately, this is a HUGE topic, and my comments will, by necessity, be cursory at best.

CotS by Adam Curtis is a film I use excerpts from in class. (also, The Trap, and I would recommend Kurt Cobb's article here on ToD Here)

I would also recommend the following films:

1. The Merchants of Cool (2001), by Douglas Rushkoff, viewable Here
2. The Persuaders (2004), by Douglas Rushkoff, viewable Here.
3. How to get a head in Advertising (1989), especially the final few minutes, viewable Here.
4. The film Network (1976)
In The Persuaders, a PR expert, one Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille emphasises the importance of the "lizard brain" in marketing. He insightfully points out that the real meaning of the SUV is not transportation, or safety, or prestige. It is a tool and symbol of Domination. That is the lizard brain emotion the SUV taps into, and it is very clear that certain manufacturers (Hummer, Dodge, others) tapped directly into that sensibility and insight that Rapaille talks about.

He then also talks about how a certain French company failed to sell cheese to Americans. In France, cheese is a living breathing thing. You leave it in a cool dark place, but treat it like a living object. They had advertisements of wheels of gooey cheese on wood cutting boards in amber romantic lighting. FAIL. Rapaille pointed out to them that Americans have no understanding of cheese as alive. The Americans, it is dead, inert foodstuff. It is wrapped in a bodybag (plastic wrap, often in individual slices) and left to rot in a drawer in the morgue (in the cheese and meat drawer in the refrigerator). Such treatment of cheese is anathema to the French sensibility, but to americans, cheese left out is simply unclean and unhygienic.

The old idea was the "hypodermic needle" theory - you inject the masses with your message and off they go. This has been proven incorrect. The successor of hypodermic (and the evidence of mass mobilisation in WW2) led to support the hypodermic theory, and led to some brilliant analysis on the left, specifically Gramsci's theories of Hegemony, Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatus, the idea of media as a contested space by Stuart Hall, and the Chomsky/Herman Propaganda Model. All of these are very effective at demonstrating the power of media. It is true SOME people (and sometimes most people) will respond this way to the media, but since then, ideas of contested media have come to the fore, creating a contested space and a multiplicity of audience response levels and values to a given message in the media, especially in more recent developments of online networks (viz works by Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter, Henry Jenkins, and others)

Beyond Rapaille, Rushkoff, Bernays, and Curtis, in contemporary media production, there is no "single" method to get a message across - it has to be done in all media at once with a clear targeting of specific audiences. This is especially true when one uses Henry Jenkin's insights re: convergence culture. Example: The Canadian Television Fund no longer exists. It is now the Canadian Media Fund. If you want to pitch a show to the CBC, you just can't wander in with an elevator pitch and some scripts and headshots. You have to have an integrated multimedia vision in order to even get looked at by the CMF.

So, let's pretend you're going to make the BEST peak oil doc, EVER.

This means you have to think on all levels at once, and have a very clear understanding of who your audience is and what you want them to feel, and how you want them to respond to your product. In fact, your product MUST produce the desired feelings in the audience, otherwise, you will fail.

There is also the issue of aesthetics and expectations by the audience. And if you want to run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch. Simply, the production values must be very high - and this means Really Good Audio in your video. The most important thing in a video is the audio. If the image is shite but the audio is top notch, the mind thinks "OK, it's meant to do this", but if the audio is shite, there is NOTHING the video can do to compensate, as there are fewer dimensions in audio to work with, and the mind will reject it. The more convincing the audio, the better. Adn the best audio is the audio You Don't Notice - your mind completely accepts it. This means using multiple high quality mics with portable mixers going to multiple high quality recorders.

And while I denigrated video in the previous paragraph, you also need high quality video to compete. and those cameras are not cheap. A good one for really top work is the Red Camera. They don't use tape - everything is direct to SATA drives or cards. From there, everything has to be edited. The colour needs to be corrected and made uniform. The audio needs to be processed and mixed. You will need music, and it has to be good. Written, performed, and sung by someone famous is a Big Help.

And that last point brings me to one of the thornier problems, which is the cult of celebrity in contemporary media culture, and the problem of fame itself. Celebrity is just another metric for a commodity in media culture. Celebrity is useful (viz Gore and Climate change) but it also has its downside (viz Gore and Climate change).

Overall, this is what needs to happen:

1, need to identify an audience or audiences and develop work for them. You're not going to give kindergartners the same media you want to give to some clueless hedonistic 20 nothings living in a condo, or some middle aged geezer facing the last few decades with trepidation and concern. so, simple books that glorify the future activities of a localised society could do well if it teaches kids how to read. Making localisation fun, simple, and cool and a way to get laid works well for the narcissistic 20 nothings and 30 somethings. A way to assuage fear and build assurances for the older folks works.

2. each and every point MUST be attractive and empowering.
a. smoking by Women (per Bernays in CotS) was LIBERATION. "They lit their freedom torches".
b. An SUV is a nasty nasty thing - I remember when I was young, the only people who drove those were the camera geeks on "Mutual Of Omaha" as they chased gazelles across africa. You had to dominate the landscape with your vehicle - otherwise the deer outran you. That same sense of power was then transferred to the highway and executed by drivers against other drivers: they bought into the domination because no one wants to feel weak and powerless.

3. the dominant meme is consumption, and comfort, basically: hedonics. People will NOT go for lack of comfort. People will NOT go for "less" or "more work". If that's you're message, you're fucked. However, the long term hedonics of smoking are quite dire. Liberation? Sure: you're now free to die of cancer. However, you're not paying attention to that when you're getting your nicotine injection. Simply what is needed is the inverse. Think of resource and energy depletion as cancer. The behaviour that enables us to survive it is what will be the attractive object you need to sell.

I would HIGHLY recommend looking at the adverts of the late 19th century. Note what is sold, in say, the back pages of Woman's Day or the Saturday Evening Post. Clothes? Yes: but note: there was great fashion, but it was of a different nature. People didn't walk around in diaphanous Star Trek PJs. They wore well built strong clothes that were usually only cleaned once a month. You changed underwear a lot and that was cleaned frequently. Today people wear a shirt once and toss it in the hamper, whether it needs it or not. but if a woman wore some huge hoopy skirt thing, she's not tossing that in the hamper every day. (I'm NOT saying go back to hoops and corseets, I'm simply analysing how the advertising fit with the practice of clothing). The advertisements emphasised fashionability with durability.

also, there are lots of ads for the new "safety bicycle". They are heavy, but well built and durable. durability, longevity, repairability, simplicity, strength, guarantees of these equalities - those were the watchwords of 1895 for ANY consumer item, because there was no consumer culture. Things had to last, because they were expensive.

I'm not saying that we are going back to 1895 (all at once) I am simply noting how the kinds of things we are anticipating were standard operating procedures in other times, and so their notions of advertising were every different. With the knowledge provided by Bernays, Rapaille, et al, and the critical theory provided by Gramsci, Althusser, Hall, Rossiter and Jenkins, and the insights of Rushkoff and Curtis, we can approach the problem with some perspective.

I think one of the more interesting examples of what I am talking about was Kunstler's novel "World Made By Hand". It's a decent book - not a great one. We need a lot more of such works - and movies made of them. for the media informs the dreams our stuff is made of. So our approach to the media must be comprehensive, coherent, and complete. If World Made By Hand (or something like it) had a movie and TV series and website and twitter and facebook and myspace etc. all wrapped into one message, and it all came into the culture at specific and strategic moments, then you will be usingthe media to your advantage.

But if you're going make Yet Another documentary featuring a handful of talking heads that mumble into crappy mics at length, and provide no inspiration or value outside their own gloom, you're screwed and you deserve to be screwed, because the evidence on what to do and how to do is all around you. It's just up to YOU to have the drive to get the money to put it together. People, even hedonistic douchebags, are looking for direction and inspiration.

This whole topic is very ugly. Very disgusting and uninspiring.

I find it extremely distasteful in that it has done more to destroy this country than any other means.
It has destroyed our minds and our way of life. Not too mention our children.

I threw my TV away years ago. I jerked the satellite dish off my roof. I never listen to advertising. I never read the ads on the internet. I block popups. I do all that is necessary to keep this out of my life and out of sight.

I try to live free of lies and bullshit.
I refuse the attempts to control my mind and lifestyle.

Sadly my spouse was consumed by it. She now is paying the price for that. My children followed her into the that void of insane consumerism and rampant fraud. Credit card debt beyond belief. Many illnesses and aliments and mental anguish abound. Finally lose of home and hearth. Lose of a partner and the sharing of a life. Rejected finally by her own parents over the issue of an estate she is now beyond help. She is broke and cannot repay her debts and lives on the fringes. She has no real home now. Its all gone. She still cannot survive without the abusive addiction of the televised make-believe world of consumption and lies.

Their lives have become the lies of what they view. Its that simple. Its that wasteful. Its that onerous. Its that much of a lie.It will control your very life.

Airdale

I think the reason advertising is so successful is that it provides plenty of reasons for people to self-justify.

Examples :
1. I know my SUV is a gas-guzzler BUT I have to carry the kids around and it is *safe* (really ?)
2. I know cutting trees down is bad for the environment BUT I need to keep warm
3. I don't really need a new {enter item of choice here} BUT the old one has some issue (real or imagined)
4. I know I shouldn't eat cheese fries BUT I did work out today

Sales 101 is all about handling the objections. If someone doesn't want to buy something, figure out how to turn the negative into a positive and make them want it enough (child) to overcome the "no" voice (adult).

So all we need to do is figure out how to handle the objections to changing lifestyle and present them as a positive that gives someone the ammo to self-justify.

Examples :
1. I didn't shower this morning, BUT I am saving water. (ok, these things will take a while...)
2. I took the train to work this morning BUT I did save gas (taking the train will need to have some guilty pleasure associated with it)
3. I gave a gift of flowers from my yard BUT I can grow lots more
4. I rode a bike to work BUT look at the muscles I'm getting (contrast muscle dude on bike with weakling getting out of Hummer)

Some of this will need to come from the folks selling the bikes and flower seeds, or the regional transit organizations i.e. an investment of a lot of dollars in media advertising.

btw : I like Jason's ad suggestions....

Only time for a short comment.

The keys to immunizing yourself from propaganda:

1) Be reasonably intelligent. I don't hold out much hope for unintelligent people's ability to distinguish truth from propaganda. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

2) Be reasonably well educated. I am talking about real learning here, not just jumping through the hoops to get credentialed. I am also talking about broad knowledge, what used to be called a liberal education, these days with a larger dose of sciences and social studies than previously. Having an extensive knowledge base is your first line of defense to detect lies and omissions, and is also very helpful in reading between the lines and fillingin the gaps.

3) Cultivate the art of critical thinking and be highly sceptical. This takes a deliberate mindset and focused effort - it does not come naturally. We have evolved to fit in and get along with the group; this innate tendency must be overcome if you are to have any chance of really sorting out truth from propaganda.

4) Do not be too connected to mainstream media. You need to deliberately disconnect yourself to some extent, just to give yourself time to think independently without the messages of propaganda being constantly reinforced.

5) Seek out alternative, and competing, sources of information. These are likely to be propaganda too, but since they are coming from a different direction and have a different agenda, will often supply facets of truth that are missing from the mainstream propaganda organs. The trick is to be sceptical of everything, read between the lines, and piece things together.

6) Be content with being somewhat aloof from the crowd, of marching to your own drumbeat.

IMHO, this is the only way that works for finding something close to the actual truth.

(Haven’t seen that vid. series for some years.)

I’d turn it all around. Advertising, and appealing to desires becomes useful once there is a surplus; that is, when people have money to spend and money to invest in new businesses that compete with others. (Money being derived from cheap energy, to make it short.) The Society of the Self, or whatever one wants to call it, is an outcome of a mercantilistic/capitalistic society, which relies (in part) on individual decisions and competition between individuals. Bernays may have been an innovative handmaiden, surfing on a trend, rather than an instigator or creator - no doubt some of his tricks were original creations, others most likely borrowed from what he saw around him.

Advertising, ‘marketing’ and ‘public relations’, which has a somewhat broader scope, focus on one type of individual decision - buying - and have slowly adjusted to more complex and sophisticated views of what motivates the ‘buying‘ act. The history of advertising, which went from plain descriptions of products, simply making the consumer aware of the existence of something new, to touting its advantages (“best corset”) accompanied with overt directives (“buy now!”) was slowly obliged to incorporate ‘values’ of a symbolic nature, pinned on status, convention, group membership, etc., because of the glut of goods.

A Louis Vuitton bag may be a serviceable object, but it is first and foremost a badge of class. (As in Marxist class, not class in the sense of classy.)

In the case of ideas and world views etc. we speak of Persuasion and Propaganda (see the drum up to the Iraq war for ex.), always addressed to groups or large swatches of the population, not pointed to an individual act.

So:

1) No. One might imagine State-Run Propaganda having some effect; but that would have a different tonality, and would be tantamount to ‘orders’...backed up by legislation and ‘guns’...Would Obama ever sneakily advocate not buying a car or skipping the nail-salon?

2) So far the internet/bloggers/forums/people’s power through this channel has had very little effect on our abysmally stupid and greedy, democratically elected, rulers. (See Iraq war, biggest demos in the history of the world; 9/11 objections, simply ignored by the PTB.)

3) ordinary citizens can do nothing but react to events.

Gloomy for sure, one side of the coin, more could be said.

Burgundy wrote: Certain tools and techniques are inherently corrupt in themselves. Lobbying, PR, propaganda being examples. They corrupt not only those they're used upon, but also those that utilise them. Yes.

I think advertising is so effective is because we are not in charge of our subconscious. We are a combined effect of our self and our passive environmental training from day 1. Everyone is influenced by their environment, that is how, among many things, poverty exists. Very few can break away from our culture and training, and the effort required is often greater than the time we have available. If our environment has carefully placed commercial information then we passively absorb it with the obvious consequences. I call it stupifaction for fun.

Over the last 11 years I have worked on a project to uncouple my self from my environmental training, more out of need than anything else but it has given me a very good understanding of the trap humans are presently in. We presently have enough intelligence to get by but not enough collective intention to overcome our environment.

I believe the best answer to why we are in this predicament is that the subconscious 'fight or flight' mechanism which has provided our backup survival mode historically is still functioning within all of us, even though we don't really need it. This mechanism is part of our mind and is what ties us to our environment. It also makes us irrational, angry, annoyed and many other mis-emotions that we often mistake for our personality. With the right training, it also makes us good little consumers. While this mechanism runs part of our lives we can't be fully in charge and hence why we can't have our full intelligence and capabilities available. A super intelligent being who is not fully in charge of their world would be very counter-survival!

Over the last few years I have worked very closely with a person to remove their environmental training. It is a long slow process but the results are beginning to show now. We have seen the capabilities of the un-corrupted human mind and they are pretty amazing.

The reason I post this as a comment on the topic of advertising is that I am convinced the only way to unhook ourselves from commercialism is to be more intelligent than it, then it can't affect our subconscious. A world largely free of people who can be influenced by advertising is the beginning of the end for commercialism and what I see as a "new dawn" of society where people are free from their environment. Where anorexia, anger, intolerance, indifference, consumerism and a whole wide range of seemingly unrelated things we don't understand today are all recognised as effects of our past environment and are removable from the individual. I can't wait.

Andy.

You are fighting against a few forces.

1) The desire for higher status is innate.

2) The desire for more stuff is innate as well as rational.

3) Advertisers who are pursuing profits will outnumber those not pursuing profits as long as we live in a fairly market-driven system. I'm not expecting communism to make a come-back. So advertising aimed at shaping aspirations and desires toward specific products and services will continue.

4) Advertisements are not the only channel via which the media encourages consumption. TV shows and movies that will be watched for decades to come also encourage consumption. What was the TV show Dallas But one long paen to higher status? Or more recently check out Gossil Girl. Higher status and higher consumption are glorified in these shows and people love to watch this sort of stuff.

My bottom line: People who think we can adjust to declining natural resources by lowering human desire on a mass scale are dreaming. Nothing short of genetic engineering will do that.

The only ray of hope I can offer: Once the decline sets in some people who lower their living standards will preach the virtue of necessity. They will pose as having higher status by trumpeting their lowered consumption. Some of them will hide the necessity of their lowered living standards and preach how environmentally superior their choices are to use less energy and buy less stuff. Political leaders could chime in and praise these people and make it easier for people to pretend to have higher status even as they have fewer status symbols.

Community Based Social Marketing demonstrates how marketing techniques can be used to foster sustainable behavior. My wife and I have been using CBSM ideas in our neighborhood watch and neighborhood association groups with some success.

It's astounding how people who do this stuff consistently confuse the issue. This hasn't been the century of the self. It's been the century of the sponsor, the corporate capitalist. The self has been a mere tool for exploitation. Couldn't they at least get the title right? It's The Century of the Sponsor.

As to turning big business marketing to "good" use -- that's a profoundly technocratic and rather scary question. It also misses the central point that marketing is the largest industry in the world, absorbing $2 trillion a year in the US alone. How are we going to lay hands on anything like that amount of money?

Democracy and politics are the way forward.

Here are a few quick general comments.

I'm not impressed with Adam Curtis -- he seems to need to create conspiratorial evil villains to make his points (he doesn't need them).

First he attacks Freud in "The Century of the Self." Breaking news: many of Freud's theories have been empirically falsified, and few scientific psychologists take him seriously today. Advertising campaigns relying on Oedipal or electra complexes, oral fixation, etc. would fare poorly because the underlying theory is faulty. Freud did get one important thing correct -- the vast majority of our mental processing is unconscious. Generally, we really don't know why we do what we do, or why we feel what we feel.

In Curtis' "The Trap" (2007) he has a new villain, Richard Dawkins. There he makes the egregious error that Dawkin's use of the term "selfish gene" was not simply a shorthand, a metaphor. Naturalistic fallacies then predictably follow.
Lightweight and sophomoric.

We are affected by the media primarily because our caveman ancestors did not have TV or films, and, thus our emotional brains can be fooled by the psychological illusions created by the artificial reality of TV, photos, music, and films.

IMHO, it is really a shame that Curtis needed to rely on conspiratorial villains to make his points. I cringe when I see these errors in his films.

Had Curtis done his homework, many of his points could have been grounded on a more solid foundation of more current psychological research and theory.

I had a post awhile back about how "virtual reality" can create psychological illusions due to an evolutionary mismatch. Those who are interested can find it here:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5511/512820

1. Can 'advertising/marketing' be used to shift us away from a consumer culture? If it could, then how? (it would still require agreement of those pulling the public relations strings to pursue this trajectory - how could that be accomplished?)

It could be useful to consider how propaganda (for, as Bernays makes clear, this is exactly what "advertising/marketing" is) has been used in other, non-commercial contexts (i.e, for purposes other than to promote consumption).

One example that immediately comes to mind is the use of propaganda by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. There are various uses: to demonize external and internal "enemies"; to encourage general support for and trust of the regime; and - most relevant to our purposes here - to spur the population on to heroic and sacrificial acts in behalf of the regime. Both the Nazi and Communist regimes used propaganda for this last purpose to a very great extent, constantly urging their people on to produce more and consume less. This might have had some effectiveness in the early days of the regime, when everything was new and everyone was excited and energized. However, there definitely appears to be a law of diminishing returns at work on this particular species of propaganda. The longer the message drones on, the less motivating it seems to be. This is especially when the regime overdoes the propaganda, and especially when it starts to prove to be so obviously dishonest that all credibility is lost.

I am guessing that, if a regime wished to promote sacrificial non-consumption amongst its population, a better route would be to use real-life examples of people doing what the regime wanted everybody to do. Keep it totally real, and totally truthful. I don't know if that would "work", but it should at least do better than the totally bogus propaganda that the totalitarian regimes unloaded by the shovel full.

Another example that comes to mind is wartime America and Britain. We all know about the home front rationing programs. Most of us have also seen some of the many classic posters from that era promoting compliance with the rationing programs, and encouraging sacrificially frugal behavior. Posters were not the only medium utilized, all media were; posters are just the best preserved and most accessible artifacts that remain today. These propaganda efforts were at least somewhat effective. It helped that they were short term; were they to go on for decades, I suspect that they would eventually have become totally ignored by a weary populace. Thus, I'm not sure this is a good tool for something that is going to have to go on pretty much forever. It also helped that there was a war on and everyone realized that these were emergency measures. When it is just a matter of "normal life", that is different; again, people would tend to get weary of it pretty fast.

Thus, I think it would be best to roll out such an anti-consumption propaganda effort just as a short-term measure, and in the midst of a major crisis. For example, the time to push car-pooling is right when there has been a major curtailment of oil supplies and motor fuel rationing is implemented.

This all suggests to me that anti-consumption propaganda can best be employed in short-term, highly focused campaigns to promote specific incremental changes of behavior. This, not surprisingly, very closely matches the pattern used by the commercial advertising industry.

2. How pervasive is conventional media in shaping our perceptions/aspirations? Will the acceleration of the internet/blogosphere as a news source be able to offset the conventional media messages enough to shift how we use energy/make decisions? If so, will the internet be eventually aggressively policed in OECD nations, like it is in China and other places?

Actually, I fear that we are close to Peak Internet. That is not to suggest that it is going away entirely any time soon. However, I have yet to see any credible suggestion as to how all of the free content that we presently enjoy will be sustainable in an economy that is in long-term decline. Surely, as the years drag on and the economy gets worse and worse, more and more free content is going to have to be abandoned. Because most people will be getting poorer and having to cut back, most content that requires payment will be going away as well. As the content available on the internet shrinks, more and more people will find less and less reason to continue to access the internet. The numbers of users and IP addresses will drop. Slowly at first, homes and businesses and institutions that were on the internet will disconnect. Then, especially in the poorest and most remote areas, entire patches of territory will cease being served and will "go dark". Eventually, entire countries will disconnect and be shut off forever. I don't know if the entire globe will ever "go dark", but it could very well shrink back down to just a few localized networks in a few major urban areas, interconnected with just a few transoceanic cables - as long as we can keep those up and running. When those go, then so does all international traffic, and there are only national internets, no global one.

All I have time for right now.

Adam Curtis authored the "The Power of Nightmares", which was complete and utter b. A total exercise in propaganda deceit. He conveyed a large amount of true information arranged to put across the whopping falsehood that Islamic terrorism originated in the 1950s with Kutb. He slightly forgot to mention the truth that it had existed for 1300 years before, since the time of the founder of Islam, as indicated in (for instance) Qur'an 59:2-7, where "Allah" can be seen enthusing about the expulsion into destitution of peaceful Jewish civilians, Mohammed's ingenious innovation of eco-terrorism to drive them out, and theft of the destitute victims' property by the Muslims as approved by "Allah".

I question the merits of spending time on any other output of Mr Curtis given that there are so many more worthy less deceitful authors more deserving of our time.

I was finally able to finish watching the series. It first took a while to download, and then I needed to find spare time when nobody was bugging me that I could actually watch it.

I suggest that if we are going to have similar things in the future, that a sort of "pre-announcement" of the campfire topic be made so that people have a chance to see the thing before the discussion.

Sort of like a book club, I guess..