The scourge of woke corporations
Hello friends!
In this week’s newsletter:
(1) This past week I spent time in Qatar, the maverick natural gas empire that regularly tops lists of the richest countries in the world on a per capita basis. I’ve got a few observations on the country.
(2) I have a short piece on what to make of how corporations are trying to prove they’re woke to appeal to millennial tastemakers, and what it reveals about the shortcoming of privilege politics.
(3) Reading recommendations.
Doha diaries
Both by instinct and on principle, when I travel to new places I try to understand more than I try to critique. I like to drop into the mindset of a local and spend time thinking about how a different society runs before evaluating what about it seems virtuous or not. But this tendency of mine smashes into a wall every time I visit a new Gulf state in the Middle East. A lot of these countries fuse together many of the ideologies that I find most hateful in this world, and invariably I have to exert great effort to avoid becoming engulfed by either total ennui or rage while I visit.
In terms of cultural conservatism, Doha, the capital and epicenter of life in the tiny nation of Qatar, marks the midway point between the total theocratic authoritarianism of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the caricature of Western decadence that one finds in Dubai, UAE. Locals, who make up just 10 percent of the population, dress in traditional, modest attire but foreigners are not legally required to do so as they are in Saudi Arabia. There is some development of entertainment services and nightlife, but it extremely limited compared to Dubai.
The main emotion I experience in Doha and cities like it in the Gulf is alienation. Society seems to be composed solely of mosques and malls planted near oil and gas drilling rigs in the desert. There is a tremendous distance between the lives of native-born citizens and the guest workers who come to work there, many of them South and Southeast Asians who are effectively indentured servants, some of whom are worked to death. In capitalist economies around the world, people set aside personal fulfillment to make money for themselves and their families. But here the sense of a life deferred seems especially intense — workers toil daily in oven-like heat to send money to families abroad who they never get to see. It simply seems like a punishment.
Doha is building an entire public transportation system in preparation for hosting the World Cup in 2022, but in general everyone gets around in cars. Many roads lack sidewalks. Shopping malls are ubiquitous but the stores seem to outnumber customers. The only place you’re guaranteed to see anything approaching a crowd in a non-religious space is a grocery store — people congregate for the elemental animal experience: feeding. Although there is tremendous diversity in Doha, civil society is largely transactional and the caste system between Qataris, skilled high-income foreign workers, and unskilled foreign workers minimizes cultural cross-pollination. There is something brutally honest about the place. Nobody’s trying to cover up the fact that the reason everyone is there is because Qatar has access to the biggest gas field in the world.
It’s been about two years since Saudi Arabia launched a regional blockade to strangle Qatar’s economy in an attempt to shut down the country’s provocative (and very impressive) media outlet Al Jazeera and force it to transform its foreign policy conduct, which clashes with Riyadh’s interests. Qatar refused to bow to the coercive pressure tactic. Since then, the blockade has taken a toll: tourism has declined, prices of imported goods have gone up, the retail industry and real estate prices have taken a hit. But Qatar is getting by because it’s main money-makers are intact — as long as Qatar can keep selling oil and gas at a decent price, it’s economy is going to be just fine. On a reputational level, the country has spent $1.5 billion on a successful PR campaign to convince the West that it has been wrongly victimized and that Saudi Arabia is the real problem in the Middle East — a narrative that has been buttressed by a series of controversial moves by Saudi Arabia, most notably the sloppy murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
Setting aside the blockade, Qatar can’t rely on oil and gas forever. Supplies are finite and the global economy is quickly moving toward renewable energy. Qatar knows this, but it has been struggling to diversify its economy. Its tiny size makes it hard for it to be competitive in attracting foreign investment in other sectors. Its conservatism, lack of cultural life, and hostility to integrating foreigners (it’s extremely hard to get long-term residency or citizenship) makes it unattractive to high-skilled labor. And its ad hoc and opaque regulatory environment make it very unfriendly to new businesses. The root of those regulations is a testament to how insane Qatar’s economy is. A vast majority of Qatar’s citizens are effectively guaranteed a decent-paying government job, and subsidies for housing and utilities. Many of those government employees also operate private businesses that can get big boosts and favorable treatment from government policy. The math of corruption is pretty simple sometimes.... When I asked a member of the royal family who's in his late 20s about whether he was concerned about Qatar’s struggle to diversify, he said he’d be dead by the time it mattered, shortly before zipping away in a several hundred thousand dollar SUV.
(If you have any interest in this topic, I wrote something at HuffPost about my time in Saudi Arabia several years ago that focused more on culture than economics.)
The scourge of woke corporations
What are we to make of the quest of corporations to prove that they’re just as woke as you and me in their advertising?
Pepsi cares about protesters. Gillette thinks toxic masculinity is problematic. Nike believes Colin Kaepernick is an alright guy, and that women and refugees should be serious athletes. Levi Strauss wants you to know that it supports gun control. Heineken hosted a conversation between a transphobic man and a transgender woman.
Most recently, I saw this Burger King ad, a catchy music video-like spot that manages to pack in nods to mental health awareness, sexual harassment, student loans, slut-shaming, and digital alienation. The ad is tied to the restaurant's new "Real Meals" menu, which includes a Blue meal, a Salty Meal, a YAAS Meal and a DGAF Meal.
Something that's been interesting to me is that some millennials — even some of the savvy, taste-making Internet set — seem to respect these advertising campaigns and take them seriously. I looked around on Twitter, and found that with the Burger King ad, a non-trivial number of people were ambivalent about the ad or simply thought it was good for society, arguing that it "felt sincere" and that we need to "find our opportunities to start conversations wherever we can."
When it comes to tactics for changing society, I'm a pluralist, and, despite my inclination for radically changing our political economy, I can appreciate incremental changes in certain spheres. But it should be crystal clear that there's absolutely nothing good about corporations are beginning to act like they gave a damn about "social issues."
One cannot judge the sincerity of a corporation to a cause by how slick an ad looks or their willingness to acknowledge the existence of social problems. The sincerity can be judged by considering the actions of the corporation. The average hourly rate for a Burger King employee is $8.26 an hour, and employees who get health care from their jobs — some of them don't— complain that coverage is terrible and that their plans are too expensive to make use of. The company that owns Burger King makes hundreds of millions of dollars annually — what percentage of that goes to mental health counseling for employees or support those suffering from mental illness around the world? It's safe to guess virtually none of it. But most importantly of all, Burger King is in the business of destroying people's health, not bettering it. Fast food isn't just atrocious for your physical well-being, but also your mental health — many studies show that its consumption is linked to depression.
This should be very simple: Corporations are profit-maximizing machines and everything they do is in service of that goal. If they wade into an explicitly political topic, it it based solely on the calculation that the action will help them maximize profits, because that is what is demanded by investors. Any move that appears like it could be risky is also driven by that logic. When Nike embraced cultural lightning rod Colin Kaepernick, it accurately predicted that more sales to their core customer demographic — young people in cities — would offset attrition among their non-core buyers. Indeed, the brand saw record engagement and a huge boom in sales. (They also clearly knew that their hegemony as an athletic brand would make long-term boycotts virtually impossible.)
If the millennial zeitgeist was moving toward kicking homeless people, every single one of these companies would be running ads calling for that.
But there's also something else that young liberal millennials should take away from this. If apolitical organizations can so easily mimic your politics, then maybe your politics aren't all that edgy. These companies are able to camouflage among real purveyors of privilege politics — people who talk about being aware of white privilege, male privilege, etc. — because its easy and its costless for them. It is precisely because advocates for looking at the world through the prism of privilege tend to focus on awareness, representation, recognition and learning to talk a certain way about inclusivity, that it is easy for corporations to not only look that they share these values, but also appear as if they're engaged in actual activism on that front.
This isn't to say privilege politics doesn't have merit — a lot of it is right as far as it goes. But talking about privilege without talking about power — where it resides, and how to wrest control of it — makes it toothless outside of the cultural sphere. Talking about power requires a reckoning with the distribution of material resources in society, which is something capital will never want to talk about. You're never going to see Nike talking about organized labor, reparations, workers' rights, forcing men to take as much parental leave as women, affordable housing, state-backed childcare, tax havens, or desegregating the education system, because those things could actually put a dent in their bottom line.
Corporations are not your friends, and they never will be. If they're happy to be associated with a project of yours, it should be a sign that you need to set the bar higher.
What I'm reading
Climate change is quickly taking over as the top 2020 issue for Democratic voters.
The man who made architecture amoral.
Why is Bill de Blasio’s presidential dream a sad joke?
Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time.
It will likely take millions of years for the Earth to recover from the biodiversity crisis.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Melting sea ice presents 'new opportunities for trade'
America’s obsession with beef was born of conquest and exploitation.
I love swimming, but I’m sick of the sexist behavior in British pools.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this newsletter, please feel free to forward it to others or share it online. (You can find a permalink for sharing the latest post through social media on this page.)
If you want to give me any feedback or just want to share some thoughts, you can reply directly to this email and I'll be able to read it — and respond.
If this was forwarded to you or you caught this online: Hello! I'm a journalist and I publish notes on politics and society through this newsletter on Tuesdays. You can sign up here and check out a partial archive here.