Revolution of the Self
Some lessons on rioting and marketing from the '70s
During the height of the anti-War movement, the hippies and the Yippies were divided. The old guard San Francisco hippies, led by Allen Ginsberg and Co., believed the revolution took place inside your head. The new wave of Yippies, led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, wanted to stand up to power directly. In his book, Do It!, Jerry Rubin recounts planning meetings for the march on Oakland. Marxists and Yippies wanted to arm themselves and fight back when the police began beating them. Ginsberg suggested everyone carry placards with pictures of fruit and sing “Three Blind Mice.” Rubin writes, “Nobody knew how to handle Ginsberg’s pre-yippie, acid ideas.” The Yippies did believe in the theatre of rebellion, like having exhibitionist sex in Berkeley classrooms and running a pig for president. But they eventually united with the Black Panthers, recognizing that jokes could not stop real violence. The symbol of the Yippie-Panther Pact was a hash pipe crossed by a gun.
But by the late ‘70s, things were different. The War was pretty much over. The hippies dispersed from Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley was no longer an occupied zone. The revolution had not happened politically; everyone was sick of being beaten up by cops and nobody figured out how to levitate the Pentagon. Jerry Rubin became a stone-cold capitalist. Reagan won California twice. But the revolution of the self had happened. The Merry Pranksters, Jerry Garcia, and Owsley acid were absorbed pleasantly into the bloodstream. People were “finding themselves.” Long hair, free love, and Esalen retreats were trendy. The largest generation in American history had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. And while the government and corporations preferred this to a full-scale uprising, they still had a problem: these kids did not want to buy what they were selling.
Up in Menlo Park, a team of rayon-clad, mustachioed scientists were hard at work on this problem in the labs of the Stanford Research Institute. Set up in 1941 by the University trustees, SRI was meant to fulfill a longstanding desire to have a world-class research institute on the West Coast. They did cutting-edge work on air pollution, invented the main ingredient in Tide soap, and helped Walt Disney design his eponymous World. Throughout the 1960s, the SRI invented things like digital computers, LCD screens, and the Internet. These innovations would later be used to create mobile applications for smartphones which, when the device is tilted, simulate a glass of beer being drunk.
In 1970, Stanford cleaved the SRI off like a gangrenous limb to distance the University from the Institute’s military contracts. At this point, the SRI began to get kinda litty with it. Two SRI scientists, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, teamed up to see how many consonants can be squeezed into a surname. Once that was settled, they began working on lasers, then psychic phenomena. (This was a pioneering moment for the use of cannabis in the development of research questions.) Working with the CIA, they experimented on famed psychics to see if ESP was real. NASA hired them to test if telekinesis was possible. The MKUltra project, which took place largely at the Menlo Park Hospital, surreptitiously dosed thousands of people with LSD without their knowledge to see if they would do something funny.
Amidst this far-out research on the mind, corporations arrived looking for help marketing to the radical youth. Arnold Mitchell, an SRI researcher, had an idea. Young people believed wholeheartedly in their own individuality. But, they still bought stuff, even if it was MAD Magazine, skateboards, and bongs instead of beard clippers and collar stays. He posited that people could be marketed to based on their lifestyle. (This word was invented in 1929, but did not develop its current meaning until 1961.) Mitchell developed the VALS survey, which categorizes consumers based on psychographics, as an alternative to demographics. It could accurately identify individualist personalities as “innovators.” Corporations could then market products to these people to edify their own identities, rather than confer access to an ingroup. It proved to be profoundly successful.
The VALS survey classified me and all my close friends as “innovators.” (You can take the survey yourself here.) This is the VALS typology that are “confident enough to experiment,” “receptive to new ideas,” and “self-directed consumers.” VALS detected that my friends and I are all individualistic, and likely are friends because we share that quality. Innovators are “keenly aware of others’ self-interests.” This is the phenomenon Mitchell first detected. A truly unique identity is incredibly rare, because it requires constant comparison to others as a reference frame. According to VALS, my friends and I stick together so we can model individualism off of each other. I’m not a hermit living in the mountains making toenail clipping sculptures (yet). Our sense of individualism derives from constant comparison to the masses. What you buy defines who you are.
The VALS survey proved extremely successful, and abetted the triumph of corporate power over the hippie philosophy. The psychographic technology of VALS has now been supercharged, nitro-boosted, and put into turbo mode through social media algorithms. Instead of eight VALS types, we are now sorted into millions of subgroups. They know not only our interests and disinterests, but our fears and hopes. Have you ever noticed how good the algorithms are at predicting your love life? Because Facebook recommends friends based on proximity and Instagram tracks whose erogenous zones you’ve been zooming in on, the apps are shockingly good at identifying who you have a crush on. This is before the invention of TikTok, the Manhattan Project of weaponized horniness. Now, we are all algosexuals, with our love lives predicted and actualized using psychographic techniques advanced by SRI in the 1970s.
With large demonstrations and rampant police violence in the streets, a national moment of reckoning on race, and intractably divided politics, 2020 looks a lot like 1968. I think we can find some lessons in the psychological consequences of the 60s as we chart a path forward. It was a disaster that the Peace and Love movement resigned itself to liberating minds. Killing the policeman inside your head was clearly not enough, since we still need to abolish the police. We have concrete structures to chip away at today: police funding, police unions, qualified immunity, the prison-industrial complex, mandatory sentencing, drug criminalization, residential segregation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But dismantling those is hard, just as stopping the war in Vietnam was hard. Up against the strength of the state once again, we are already seeing attempts to turn the revolution inward.
Public opinion on BLM is now overwhelmingly positive. And where the public goes, the brands follow like a swarm of locusts. Even NASCAR issued a firm statement and banned the Confederate flag. This is VALS and algorithmic marketing: passion of any kind can be targeted, farmed for clicks, and converted into sales. The commodification of the movement has occurred even more powerfully at the individual level. “Buy Black,” while well-intentioned, is just another attempt to turn politics into purchases. It is a direct descendent of psychographic marketing: by buying the right things, you can express your politics, while making life even easier for the powers that be.
The same goes for sensitivity training, diversity initiatives, and obsession with C-suite demographics. Once again, these projects have good intentions and produce important outcomes. Offices should be hospitable and all and hiring must be racially inclusive. But choosing these as primary responses to the most forceful outcry for racial justice in a half century would be a failure. We must not concede the workplace as the primary locus of revolution. Robin DiAngelo and her powerpoints teach white people how to moderate their behavior so they can’t be fired and, more importantly, the company is not exposed to liability. But white people don’t need to be not racist at work; we need to be vigorously, vocally opposed to racism and working to dismantle the structures which perpetuate it. Looking to sensitivity training to save us concedes that speech, not systems, is the mechanism of racism. This is a false and dangerous idea.
Diversity initiatives in the workplace are another example of well-meaning but limited activism. It is clear that racism is rampant in hiring, promotion, and compensation. But we should be looking to dismantle the corporations which use prison slave labor, fund police foundations, and profit off oppression, not climb the ranks within them. Using careers as the barometer of progress binds us more strongly to systems we should eradicate. LinkedIn bios will never be a measure of justice. Making more CEOs of color a primary demand is the same neoliberal logic that leads to “the first openly queer Secretary of Defense.” Black people belong in leadership roles everywhere. But confining our imaginations to workplace issues puts us in an even more futile position than hippies protesting with pictures of fruit. Worse than a revolution of the mind is a revolution of the office.
This moment is a precious and beautiful one. The American public has reached critical mass in its rejection of racism and its demand for permanent, deep change. But looking back to the 1960s, we see the danger of movements which turn to introspection when faced with the brutality of state power. We must refuse to make this a revolution of the self, to believe that we can make more change looking inward than outward. We must direct our rage at the companies, people, and the government which benefit from subjugation. Resist the urge to retreat inside your mind, where they want you. The answer is not deeper within your psyche. Strength comes from numbers, unity, and devoted solidarity. This fight will be longer and more bitter than the last, because we will not concede the battleground of our minds.
Note: Much of this week’s missive draws from Adam Curtis’s incredible documentary series The Century of the Self, available here.