I don’t normally watch “Antiques Roadshow,” the popular PBS series that travels around the country and invites people to bring out stuff that’s been sitting in the attic and get it appraised by professionals. But the show was recently in Santa Fe, our hometown, so we watched several episodes. We saw the usual range of items, some surprisingly valuable—a mid-19th century Indian beaded jacket, worth an estimated $150000–others interesting but worth next to nothing.
When the estimated price was revealed to the owner, you could often see an internal struggle take place. Maybe the picture had been part of their childhood, or associated with a favorite uncle, or was just beautiful and moving—but now it was ‘worth something.’ What would win out, affection and sweet associations, or money? Would it be kept or sold?
Sometimes the owner would let you know right away, “Oh, I love this, it’s not going anywhere!” Sometimes it was clear it would be sold. But often it was hard to tell; the owner might be flabbergasted that this jewelry piece from her mother was worth thousands of dollars, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Suddenly this thing had changed its meaning, had become something with two faces: the old, comfortable, well-known face and a new face with a dollar sign on it. It had become ‘monetized.’
Monetization is at the heart of modern capitalism. Figuring out how to convert not just things but services and normal human drives and emotions into cash—creating ‘value’—is a process we all know well and have come to take for granted. Thousands of trained, eager experts leap every year out of business schools, looking for some new way to extract yet more ‘value’ and reap the sometimes astronomical rewards. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the epicenters of monetization expertise. Uber lets us convert our cars into cash machines; AirBnb does the same for our houses.
Yesterday I read a story about how private equity now has its eye on childcare—the ‘childcare industry’ (whenever something gets tagged as an ‘industry’ you can be sure monetization is well-advanced)—with predictable results: exaggerated promises of new investment, higher pay, and better results, and the reality of exploitation. People who love children and want to help them are suddenly nothing but inputs and labor costs. People who have struggled to create a small business around something they value and love become roadkill as distant outsiders with zero stake in actually taking care of children work to suck all the ‘value’ out of their new business and then sell the empty husk.
These processes often occur step by step, looking innocuous at first until before we know it things and activities we love have been swallowed. It is well-advanced for sport, which increasingly looks like an adjunct of the sports-betting industry. Sports like baseball that once fought betting like the plague have totally succumbed, and every broadcast now features pitches from Draft Kings and other multi-billion dollar betting platforms. No surprise, this has been abetted by our clueless Supreme Court, which in 2018–influenced by a tremendous lobbying campaign—struck down a statute that had restricted sports betting to Nevada. Colleges and universities are there too, justifying it (of course) as necessary to raise money for education: “College sports betting may have already become too big to fail. Wagering on sports in the Power 5 conferences is now an $11 billion/year industry, according to sports betting watchdog US Integrity”. Today’s students are swamped with ‘free bets’ and other introductory offers designed to get them hooked on sports betting, with problems of gambling addiction and ruined lives not far behind.
All of us have become aware of how social media platforms and search engines have ‘monetized’ our personal data, in order to target us with advertising. Something we used to happily share, such as our name or what city we live in, has become a revenue source.
The world of art has also been thoroughly appropriated. Today’s art ‘investors’ typically buy expensive paintings and statues, then store them in Swiss vaults to keep them safe while their value appreciates. So wonderful pieces (according to one estimate, 1000 Picassos) literally never see the light of day.
An eye-opening new book, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, by Dan Flores, chronicles how North America’s wildlife was monetized during European colonization. While the Spanish and Portuguese to the south saw the New World as mostly a huge lump of gold and silver, the English and French saw it as an endless source of fur and hides and feathers. Native tribes, despite their reverence for the animal world, were quickly and successfully enlisted to get as much as possible as fast as possible, trading enormous quantities of beaver, deer, bison, fox and otter pelts for knives, iron pots, firearms and liquor.
It was essential to act quickly, before someone more ruthless could beat you to it. The Hudson’s Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company pioneered many of capitalism’s most predatory practices. “Move fast and break things” was not invented by Facebook. The result was the extinction and near-extinction of many of the continent’s most iconic species: beaver, passenger pigeons, grizzlies, bison…the list goes on and on. Flores summarizes the result: “Buffalo and passenger pigeons stand today as the premier case study of a core economic principle. Without regulation, free-market forces inevitably drive the species they target to extinction.”
Though Flores is appropriately scathing about the modern European mindset of appropriation and monetization, with its roots in Judaeo-Christian convictions about man’s privileged place in the natural order, he does not spare our earlier ancestors. The first humans to arrive in force in North America, some 13000 years ago, ransacked the place at least as thoroughly as more recent arrivals. Most of the continent’s large animals—horses, mammoths, camels, giant sloths, great bison—were exterminated in what seems to have been a frenzy of slaughter as highly-skilled human hunters found themselves in a cornucopia of tasty beasts with no innate fear of man. Predators like the saber-toothed tiger and dire wolf went too, as their food sources dried up. This is a permanent human dynamic, not something peculiarly modern or Western. Only afterwards, as humans began to realize what they had done, did a new ethos of care and identification with our fellow animals take hold among Native Americans, as it is now taking hold, fitfully, in our own time.
Let’s turn now to another field that has become a lucrative site of monetization—politics. Yes Virginia, there is now a multi-billion dollar ‘politics industry.’ Of course politicians are part of it, but they are the tip of a gigantic iceberg that includes pollsters, consultants, fund-raisers, pundits, and every type of media that benefits from political advertising. (Media includes not just egregious cases like Rush Limbaugh, who got $85 million a year for his politico-cultural rubbish, but the full range of newspapers, TV, radio, and online platforms). All of these actors are interested first and foremost, not in actual policy, but in keeping the politics industry lucrative and growing. What this means in practice is nurturing features that ensure more elections with more fund-raising, more advertising, more polarization, more, more, more.
The United States already has the longest election season in the developed world. Presidential campaigns in the US often begin with candidates declaring years ahead of time, while in Canada campaigns are limited by law to 78 days, and Mexico 147 days. In Japan it’s 11 days. These constraints mean that political advertising, for instance, can only be conducted during limited periods. Such restrictions here in the US are considered out of bounds, a violation of unimpeded free speech. The longer the campaign, the more opportunities for the politics industry to fatten its bank account.
Of course the US is the unchallenged kingpin when it comes to political donations, otherwise known as political corruption. Our Supreme Court has again helped out by a series of decisions, most recently Citizen’s United, that make it almost impossible to regulate and limit the amount of money that can be given, or to make this giving open and transparent. Money is speech, and speech is subject to First Amendment freedoms. This helps make fund-raising the central feature of American politics. Members of Congress spend more time fund-raising than any other activity, paying for many things but above all advertising, which flows to TV and radio and newspapers and makes American media complicit in keeping the politics industry going.
Our primary system is another feather in the politics industry cap. It means that all the money-making opportunities afforded by elections can be duplicated, if not triplicated or quadrupled, in the run-up to the election. The more candidates, the more money that needs to be raised and spent, and the industry grows.
With America’s federal system and its 50 separate states, there are always elections somewhere. And nowadays there are always consultants and direct-mail companies and radio personalities ready to argue that every election, everywhere, is Very Important and must be invested in with money and polls and the full paraphernalia of industrialized politics. While in the dim past all politics was local, now all politics has been nationalized, that is, become part of the national politics industry.
I think I speak for most Americans who are confused, exhausted, frustrated and, if they have any energy left, outraged at this system. They know that it no longer exists to make actual policy or to serve the interests of voters. They know it battens on anger and outrage, the better to obscure the ways it serves the interests of the rich and powerful. It has become a self-licking ice cream cone, dominated by wealthy interests and professionals who can afford the time and money to master the machinery, and who live directly and indirectly by the process itself, not the results.
We could of course fix some important elements. Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, authors of the 2020 book The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, recognize the nature of the problem:
The problem is not specifically a politician problem, a policy problem, or a polarization problem: It is a systems problem. Far from being “broken,” our political system is doing precisely what it’s designed to do. It wasn’t built to deliver results in the public interest or to foster policy innovation, nor does it demand accountability for failure to do so. Instead, most of the rules that shape day-to-day behavior and outcomes have been perversely optimized—or even expressly created—by and for the benefit of the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.
They recommend some excellent fixes, especially two: ranked-choice voting, and top-5 primaries. These reforms would produce better results, more reflective of what voters actually want, while reducing some of the wasted effort generated by the politics industry (ranked-choice voting would, for instance, make it unnecessary for Georgia to hold the enormously expensive follow-on Senate elections it has been required by law to conduct in 2020 and 2022). Alaska recently adopted both reforms via referendum and in its 2022 elections voted in more moderate candidates, sending Sarah Palin to the dustbin of history where she belongs.
But I don’t think this is radical enough. We need to stop looking to elections as the best or only way to run a democracy. I know, I know—we have been taught to think of elections and democracy as one and the same. But they aren’t. An alternative model is to use sortition and pick our legislatures by lot, as we pick juries, rather than by voting. This method would create Citizen’s Assemblies and at one stroke eliminate the advertising, the polling, the primaries, all the fund-raising and professional jockeying. And it would, if done well, give us decision-making bodies that are far more representative and closer to the people than we have now. The politics industry would deflate like a pin-pricked balloon.
Sounds crazy and utopian. But it isn’t. It’s been done and is being done, here, in Europe, around the world. Disillusionment with the present functioning of democracy is so strong that we must address it now, before the tidal wave of populism and authoritarianism becomes irresistible. If you aren’t familiar with how Citizen’s Assemblies work, please start here.
Monetization should always be viewed skeptically. Sometimes it is trivial, sometimes annoying, sometimes even useful. But when it takes hold of critical areas of human life, it needs to be exposed and resisted. The monetization of democratic politics is clearly one of those areas. It is weakening and delegitimizing the core institutions of our country. Let’s not go down without a fight.