Social change as Super Bowl ad

It’s not that Wall Street couldn’t use some occupying. It could. As important as it is to capitalism’s machinery, that neighbourhood has also been home to some of its worst abuses. Wall Street may not have written all those bad mortgages, but once the ball was tossed their way they certainly ran with it. And there, where a statue of George Washington watches over both the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall, the birthplace of America’s Bill of Rights, seems as good a place as any to teach capitalism a lesson about democracy. I wonder, though, if the people behind Occupy Wall Street gave it that much thought. And I doubt the lesson intended will be the one ultimately learned.

Occupy Wall Street hasn’t been the “Tahrir moment” its Vancouver-based creators at Adbusters pitched. Unlike what happened in Egypt, the American media and general public found the whole story eminently resistible for some time before beginning to pay grudging attention. (For some, it happened only when disparate entities like labour unions, Michael Moore and Al Sharpton loaned their agendas to the project. For many others, celebrity walk-throughs did the trick, including an uncomfortable visit from Kanye West, replete with gold jewelry and a security detail.) New York City’s welcome wasn’t especially warm, either, practically or ideologically. The Times captured the mood aptly in describing the gathering as “wish[ing] to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it.” Even getting the NYPD riled up for the cameras didn’t stir the nation from its bourgeois torpor. Occupy Wall Street, despite its punchy logo and Twitter hashtag, hasn’t been the galvanizing turning point its rhetoric promised. At best it’s been a Rorschach for rage. There’s plenty of that in the world, but that’s not the same as a coherent market—nor is getting noticed the same as getting something done.

Therein lies the failure. Occupy Wall Street is social consciousness rendered as a Super Bowl ad, a stunt so obsessed with being seen that it expects nothing else from itself. Adbusters themselves acknowledged as much, though without embarrassment. The July 13 blog post that introduced Occupy Wall Street’s brand evoked heroic parallels to the Arab Spring before concluding with a little crowdsourcing: “Post a comment,” they wrote, “and help each other zero in on what our one demand will be.” Preaching to their own particular choir, to Adbusters the idea of a leaderless, goalless movement based on general discontent must have seemed positively utopian. But the larger audience they’re targeting hasn’t been engaged or inspired. Millions haven’t dashed off demanding e-mails to their elected representatives, or even put bumper stickers on their minivans. Though the occupation has blossomed into a global franchise—including Canadian outlets, with the same decentralized leadership and amorphous message—nobody in the hinterlands is one bit closer to knowing what they’re supposed to do with it. Which means its effect is likely to be as ephemeral as a sock puppet’s.

From Naomi Klein’s No Logo to Adbusters’ own “subvertisements,” the anti-consumerism movement often packages its polemic in the ironic clothes of marketing. They “pantomime” branding in an effort to delight the converted and make the rest of us squirm. This time, it’s not working, and the reason is about as ironic as it gets: in focusing so skillfully on packaging, viral marketing and photo ops—and not at all on leadership or a purpose—Occupy Wall Street has archly played its enemy’s game and is losing simply because there is no product behind the brand. People are angry. We already knew that. Just pointing it out will no more market social change than pointing out thirst will market beer. Those people in Tahrir Square had real skin in the game, even if they didn’t have a logo. That’s the difference. Eventually, even if all you’re pitching is an idea, you have to ask for the order if you want to make a sale.

Bruce Philp is brand consultant, author and blogger at brandcowboy.blogspot.com