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Down the programmed rabbit hole: Travels through Muzak, Hilton, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and other world empires
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January 14, 2022
Quite the gem, this collection of essays about the dream merchants of corporate America, ca. the early 1970s. Covered, along with the companies in the subtitle, are Reader's Digest; KFC, McDonald's and other fast food chains; Texaco; Penthouse; and Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.
Much of the humour and interest stems from the futuristic, whimsical, hare-brained, and sometimes sinister ways that these companies think about what they're doing. One can perceive a specific 1960s-1970s confluence of hi-tech, space age, American manifest destiny, globalisation, anti-communism, pop culture, and counter-culture. There's also an innocence in how Disney, Hilton et al saw themselves as inventing "the future", whether satellites beaming down Muzak, Hilton hotels on the moon, "cookery will be done by nuclear reactor, and wash-up with a small Laser unit", or the AVAC vacuum-driven rubbish disposal system: "The garbage moves silently, underground, at sixty-five miles per hour" (p.297).
Anthony Haden-Guest, journalist and half-brother of filmmaker Christopher Guest ("This is Spinal Tap"), proves an exemplary guide. He clearly had amazing access to these corporations, getting to chat with Colonel Sanders, Roy Disney, Conrad Hilton and other bigwigs. His commentary is erudite, worldly, and incredulous - skillfully highlighting the bizarre, kitsch, and ironic aspects of America's consumerist fever-dreams. Outright mockery is avoided. Haden-Guest instead leads his subjects to take extended and fascinating soliloquies on the implications of current R&D.
Also interesting is that a few of the wilder ideas on offer in the early 1970s have actually come true. The notion that "computer memory will be a map of your own experience" (p.53), for instance, so as to better programme background music, is more than a little reminiscent of Spotify's streaming algorithms (and of course applies to the gamut of internet data gathering). The concept of an Automatic Monitoring and Control System, too, as proposed for Disney's EPCOT campus, now seems reminiscent of the so-called "Internet of Things".
At a deeper level, Haden-Guest's book is a meditation on the obsolescence-cycle of consumer capitalism: how new products furnish us with hopeful visions of our future selves and lives which, as technology and marketing evolve, are inevitably junked and replaced by new dreams. A fairly timeless topic and certainly relevant for our own post-ironic times.
Much of the humour and interest stems from the futuristic, whimsical, hare-brained, and sometimes sinister ways that these companies think about what they're doing. One can perceive a specific 1960s-1970s confluence of hi-tech, space age, American manifest destiny, globalisation, anti-communism, pop culture, and counter-culture. There's also an innocence in how Disney, Hilton et al saw themselves as inventing "the future", whether satellites beaming down Muzak, Hilton hotels on the moon, "cookery will be done by nuclear reactor, and wash-up with a small Laser unit", or the AVAC vacuum-driven rubbish disposal system: "The garbage moves silently, underground, at sixty-five miles per hour" (p.297).
Anthony Haden-Guest, journalist and half-brother of filmmaker Christopher Guest ("This is Spinal Tap"), proves an exemplary guide. He clearly had amazing access to these corporations, getting to chat with Colonel Sanders, Roy Disney, Conrad Hilton and other bigwigs. His commentary is erudite, worldly, and incredulous - skillfully highlighting the bizarre, kitsch, and ironic aspects of America's consumerist fever-dreams. Outright mockery is avoided. Haden-Guest instead leads his subjects to take extended and fascinating soliloquies on the implications of current R&D.
Also interesting is that a few of the wilder ideas on offer in the early 1970s have actually come true. The notion that "computer memory will be a map of your own experience" (p.53), for instance, so as to better programme background music, is more than a little reminiscent of Spotify's streaming algorithms (and of course applies to the gamut of internet data gathering). The concept of an Automatic Monitoring and Control System, too, as proposed for Disney's EPCOT campus, now seems reminiscent of the so-called "Internet of Things".
At a deeper level, Haden-Guest's book is a meditation on the obsolescence-cycle of consumer capitalism: how new products furnish us with hopeful visions of our future selves and lives which, as technology and marketing evolve, are inevitably junked and replaced by new dreams. A fairly timeless topic and certainly relevant for our own post-ironic times.
Displaying 1 of 1 review