Tramp The Dirt Down

If you get the reference in the title without googling, your reward is to feel smug

Paul Bailey reposts an article by Andrew Tenzer on marketing, young people, and individualism.

As you can see in the comments below the post, this seems to have made some people annoyed.

No one:

Absolutely no one:

Me: Why, yes, I will do a lengthy, tediously autobiographical, and pretentiously referenced post on this topic.

So starting with the reaction and working backwards. The main source of annoyance seems to be that Tenzer is unfairly targeting “the youth” as being selfish and ignorant. To give these complainants their due, “young people” are regularly labelled by their elders as “lazy”, “entitled”, or “stupid”. And such complaints are backed up by the hardest evidence of all: data naked prejudice. The current generation are not compared to previous generations at the same age but some imagined memory of greatness. The work of the likes of Bobby Duffy is a powerful corrective to all this (and check out his book on misperception as well while you are at it).

So lets start by saying that we should follow noted sociologists The Who and start from the assumption that “the kids are alright”. I am 50 and let me tell you, we were mostly idiots when we were young (me especially). And our parents were also idiots. So the notion that young people fail to reach the dizzying heights of the past does not pass muster for me.

But I don’t think that’s what Tenzer is saying. However he is saying several things at once that need to be teased apart. And this will come down to education and class as much as age.

Much as you get status in prison by beating up the smallest guy in the yard, let me start with the weakest point in the article. A 25 year old not knowing who Margaret Thatcher is should not be surprising. Most people in my 80s British school could not tell you what Harold Wilson’s policies were or even which party he was leader of. Our only hope would have been Mike Yarwood’s pipe-wielding impression that still lingered on TV. But EU regulations mean that comedians must update their acts more frequently now so the youth are all at sea in that respect.

Going to the other extreme, the point that is easiest to support is that we live in a world shaped by neo-liberal individualism. If that was a tweet* then the creator should immediately banish themselves from the public life for pure basic-ness. I’m sure an AI trained on the works of Mark Fisher could come up with that (except that the next tweet would probably have Mark E Smith doing something unthinkable to Badiou - like reading him).

There are two points in the middle that are worth exploring. The first is about class and continues from the previous research done by Tenzer and Ian Murray. In The Empathy Delusion and The Aspiration Window (which, granted, do sound like rejected work from Astounding Stories of Super-Science**), they dissect how marketers are different from human beings the mainstream population. A lot of what they say applies to other corporate graduate populations - e.g. management consultants, finance and investment banking types, techbros. I suspect (and would welcome evidence to the contrary) that those who go into marketing are more likely to come from an arts/social science background than a business/engineering one. And to be more performatively “left wing”. But the values of marketers are not unique to them, they are shared by their class - ambitious university graduates.

And, by and large, this group of people are individualistic, goal-oriented, and also materialistic (while seeking not to appear so). They are a sizeable minority of the population but a minority nonetheless - which causes the kind of political problems that David Runciman explores here. This group are comfortable championing all kinds of rights about gender, race, sexuality, etc although they are much less comfortable talking about class. We don’t mind how you look on the outside (up to a point) provided you think the same as us. And for god’s sake don’t embarrass us.

Of course, this group are individualistic. Their entire lives until the point of graduation are shaped by individualistic targets and goals - getting good grades, obtaining marks of distinction like sporting awards, etc. As much as some conservatives like to portray universities as Marxist communes, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, we are products of neo-liberalism but via institutions that have been shaped by neo-liberalism to be their most individualistic and competitive. There’s a reason why The Hunger Games was a hit.

A note of autobiography (feel free to skip to the next paragraph). I come from that weird lower middle / upper working class inflection point in UK society where things could go either way. I ended up going to university and getting well paid jobs. A close relative was not so fortunate. As such I encountered the elite institutions of academia and business as an outsider (my social awkwardness didn’t help). I am a product of elite institutions in much the same way that excrement is a product of the human body. A white man not fitting in? Cry me a river. But I speak of these places as someone not wholly inside or outside - which is as comfortable as being caught inside and outside of a moving train.

What I would say is that I have not seen the kind of the sustained attention placed on the worldviews in these other professions. Questions around diversity usually stop at quotas for women or ethnic minorities and a token and opportunistic celebration of Pride month. So marketing is ahead of the game here in some respects. But also these other professions don’t really worry about justifying themselves to the plebs. Beryl in Hull is not signing a $40m contract with them.

The second point they make is specific to marketing. While all of the corporate professions vampirically feast on the blood of the well-credentialed young to keep them going, marketing is unique in its valorization of youth. The Logan’s Run jab is absolutely spot on. Because companies view the young as having disposable income and a uniquely malleable view of brands, it is vital to sell to them. So young people know young people so we should hire young people. Plus they are cheap. And easy to exploit. If you want to read more on the impact of age differences on politics then it is, predictably, David Runciman who has a great introduction. A young profession trying to relate to an older world is totally going to end well for everyone.

So we are left not with the old bashing the young but rather the old shuffling nervously and saying a quiet voice: “Er, yeah, this is the world that we made and now you are stuck in it. Just don’t screw it up as badly as we did”.

*I’m not calling it X, I’m just not.

**Which should be the title of the next book by Byron Sharp.

The title is not a reference to this song. But it hints at a missed opportunity for a collaboration.