At the beginning of last year, the musician India.Arie posted a video on her Instagram that caused a lot of headaches for my employer at the time, Spotify. It was a hodgepodge of the many times Spotify’s star podcaster, Joe Rogan, had used a racial slur against black people on his show. I don’t have to tell you what blemish it was. Unsurprisingly, the video quickly went viral and created a huge uproar.
Rogan had already sparked controversy by broadcasting misinformation about Covid and conducting interviews with transphobic speakers. For Spotify, a company based in Sweden (the alleged mecca of social democracy) that provides entertainment to a largely young, socially aware consumer base and employs a young, socially aware workforce, you’d think it would be obvious – if you were to listen to the typical characterization of conservative politicians and ‘heterodox’ pundits – what would happen next. The dictate of “awakened capitalism” would certainly require a ritual sacrifice from Rogan, despite the huge sums Spotify paid to bring his show exclusively to its platform. It wouldn’t matter if he was the company’s No. 1 podcaster. The awake crowd had spoken!
Needless to say, it didn’t go that way. Rogan apologized in a lengthy Instagram video, and Spotify’s response wasn’t to pull the plug on his show and torpedo the interests of the company’s shareholders. Spotify stood by its star (even as several episodes were quietly removed). It also announced a $100 million fund to support underrepresented artists and podcasters. But according to Bloomberg, the company had spent less than 10 percent of the money a year later.
Behold the puny power of awakened capitalism!
I’ve been thinking about this incident as I’ve watched savage campaigns against companies that take even the most milquetoast stances on social and cultural issues, especially those related to gender and sexuality. It peaked last month with Pride, leaving a flurry of social media videos of people outraged by things like rompers and koozies decorated with rainbows.
These battles will not stop with the end of Pride month. It’s just the skirmishes in what is likely to be a long culture war sparked by outrage over everything from the casting of a black actor as Ariel in Disney’s live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” to investment funds, including some concern about diversity and inclusion in the decision of where they invest their billions.
“Awake capital” is already a major theme of the Republican presidential race. The threat is apparently so great that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis quoted Winston Churchill’s famous Dunkirk speech, replacing the Axis powers with “waking up” as Enemy No. 1: “We will make a war against the awakening.” We will fight the vigil in education, we will fight the vigil in the corporate world, we will fight the vigil in the halls of Congress. Vivek Ramaswamy incorporates much of his campaign into the themes of his 2021 book, “Woke, Inc.”, an outcry about so-called awakened capitalism that is somehow responsible not only for America’s social woes, but also for economic problems.
This hype of the power of socially conscious capitalism is understandable given the aggressive way the idea has been marketed to businesses and consumers. Research studies, often conducted by companies that advise companies on corporate social responsibility, have touted the power of “purpose” to drive consumer loyalty.
Color me skeptical. Consumers make choices for many reasons: price, convenience and marketing. Maybe politics. Recently I went to my local Walgreens to buy toothpaste and ended up choosing not my favorite brand, but the only one that wasn’t under lock and key. I didn’t want to wait for an employee to free the Colgate, so Crest was it. Needless to say, I didn’t use Google to find out which brand was more committed to bodily autonomy. What can I say? I was in a hurry.
My slightly jaundiced view of the possibilities and dangers of awakened capitalism was shaped by seeing some of this play out from within the corporate suite, albeit in the narrow context of media and technology companies, running the editorial and business goals of a podcast company at Spotify . and a global news organization, HuffPost, when it was owned by Verizon Media.
I have bad news for fighters on both sides of this war. For those on the left who take solace in seeing big companies take bold stances on issues they care about, I’m here to tell you that those companies care much more about their bottom line than your beloved problem (see Spotify- example above).
And those on the right who feel they have the wind behind them with successful boycotts of “woke” brands are likely to be disappointed for similar reasons. Even this year’s major success — a boycott of Bud Light after it teamed up with a transgender influencer as part of a broader social media campaign that apparently caused brewing giant Anheuser-Busch’s stock to plummet — was a pyrrhic victory: it’s anything but It’s impossible to find beer companies that don’t participate in celebrating Pride, doing exactly what the right accuses them of doing: pushing a liberal agenda that runs counter to conservative mores.
As it turns out, queer consumers and their allies are important to corporate bottom line, and — especially in a tight labor market — companies can hardly afford to alienate queer workers and their families and supporters. Even after being berated by conservative consumers and gay rights activists, Bud Light pledged to continue supporting queer ventures.
These battles obscure a greater truth: Far from dictating the cultural mores of some capitalist Mount Olympus, corporations mirror and co-opt the social trends around them.
In 2018, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, Nike created a controversial ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the black soccer player who knelt during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality towards black citizens. The backlash was huge, but eventually the social tide swung in Nike’s favor: the stock price boomed and the ad campaign was seen as a daring success.
But companies can also change course very seamlessly when the mood changes.
During Cannes Lions, an advertising festival held every June in the South of France, members of the jury that awards advertising campaigns this year were instructed to avoid politics and celebrate work more focused on commercial success, reported Semaphore.
This is a remarkable turnaround. I attended the festival a few times in my years as a media manager, and it often seemed like a competition to see which company could top the rest. It reminded me of a line from the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” in which a tech executive declares, “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is making the world better than we are.”
After the murder of George Floyd, corporations fell all over themselves to embrace black causes. Some actions were gestures that cost nothing, such as music streaming services observing a period of silence. Content companies promised to do more programming for, by and about black people. Many companies have made commitments to diversify hiring, especially in their executive ranks.
But the evidence to date shows little progress on these commitments. Netflix, the once unstoppable juggernaut who would probably eat Hollywood for breakfast, is an interesting example. As growth has slowed and the political climate has changed, it has reportedly shelved a plan to produce an anti-racist video series. A look at the published track record on diversity and inclusion shows a small decline in the share of black employees in general and executives in particular.
Thomas Frank, a historian and journalist who has been chronicling the culture wars for decades, told me that he “always suspected that the backlash politics that rolled across the country in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s stemmed, at least in part, from the way the commercial culture rubbed the noses of Central America in coolness and Central America’s own inadequacy and uncoolness. But the resulting political backlash didn’t hurt the companies at all — on the contrary, they eventually just changed their marketing approach to fit the new mood, then entered a golden age with Reagan and the 1980s.
The centre-left has been lulled to sleep by its apparent cultural power, which supports the belief that progress is inevitable if the time frame is long enough. In a world with “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, “How can we talk about drag queens being locked up?” we pant.
The deeper problem is that our politics do not respond to people’s preferences. Our systems of government increasingly favor electoral minorities — like gerrymandered state legislators in a polarized environment — rather than common sense compromise. This leads to ideological zeal. There are almost no checks on a state legislature bent on maximum brutality.
In this atmosphere it is not surprising that progressive consumers have turned to companies to be a mirror of their concerns. Despite clear majority support for abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, we are increasingly moving towards a system that allows a fanatical minority to enforce their views as law. It is easier for us to hold companies accountable than politicians. We make decisions every day about how we spend our money. At best, you vote for new officials every few years.
But awakened capitalism is a paper tiger. Companies are embracing identity and cultural inclusion as a way to expand market share into new communities while obscuring their raw political power and the ruthless underlying realities of shareholder capitalism. Elites on the right, meanwhile, know full well it’s a paper tiger, but like to play along with a shuck and jive that lets them use “woke” as a bludgeon against the left — and for some voters, it does the vital job of instilling resentment. to wake up.
Following the dictates of plain old capitalism, it was a good business decision that Spotify chose to support Joe Rogan after the company signed him on as an exclusive podcaster. But the decision made business sense for other reasons as well. It meant that if a right-wing mob came out for queer programming on the platform, the company could point to that decision while defending the hosting of podcasts my colleagues created, things like “The Two Princes,” a kids’ fantasy show about two princes fall in love, and “Gay Pride & Prejudice,” a modern take on the Jane Austen classic. A simple policy of consistency about freedom of expression within limits rather than appealing to the extremes of the culture wars is, quite frankly, better for everyone.
Most of all, these partisan squabbles about politics and business serve as a helpful reminder to everyone across the political spectrum: Businesses are not your friends. They do not represent your interests. Yield to their power at your peril.