In his novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, David Foster Wallace imagined a near future in which the Organization of North American Nations—a single nation-state comprised of the former Mexico, United States, and Canada—had for various reasons adopted a policy known as “Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized Time.” In this scheme, calendar years are sponsored by corporations; as a result, they are no longer identified by sequential numerals but instead by product names. Subsidized time began with the “Year of the Whopper.” The action of the novel takes place several product sponsorships later, in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which came after the “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” and before the “Year of Glad.”
Wallace’s novel was prophetic in all kinds of ways (one example is its prescience about the rise of personalized entertainment viewed in private)—but it was this outlandish satire about the calendar that came to mind recently, when the Times reported on the cash-strapped city of Brazil, Indiana (a name that sounds like one of Wallace’s post-national composites), which recently sold the naming rights of failing fire hydrants in need of repair. For the past month in Brazil, arson victims and overheated children alike have gotten their water delivered by hydrants brought to them by KFC Fiery Grilled Wings.
We’re surely a ways from a nationally recognized Year of the Fiery Grilled Wings, but maybe not as far as we might hope. The Times story notes other examples of local governments turning to advertising to help cover widening budget shortfalls: Baltimore is considering turning its fire engines into mobile billboards; Cleveland has renamed its entire bus system the HealthLine, after getting millions of dollars in sponsorship from the Cleveland Clinic; Chicago and Boston are selling naming rights to train stations; and even though the new Barclays Center isn’t scheduled to open until the fall, New Yorkers can already take the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q, or R trains to the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center stop in Brooklyn. (New recorded message: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please—and sorry that we messed with those lending rates.”) And cities are thinking of moving beyond such examples of obvious synergy to selling the naming rights to parks and municipal buildings.
If this all seems inevitable—if we’re resigned to the fact that people of some subsequent generation will take their grandchildren to see the Southwest Airlines Grand Canyon or the Lincoln Financial Lincoln Memorial—it is partly due to the fact that these kinds of civic-corporate overlaps have long been a part of the culture. American sports fans, for example, long ago accepted that their favorite teams are doomed not only to play in such venues as Heinz Field, but in places with crushingly, almost provocatively absurd names, like PETCO Park (San Diego), O.co Coliseum (Oakland), or Jobing.com Arena (Glendale, Arizona). Such names are not just modern developments, however, as many of our public spaces bear names that point to their corporate pasts. Times Square was known as Longacre Square until Adolph Ochs moved his newspaper there at the beginning of the twentieth century and strong-armed city officials into changing its name. The persistence of marketers and mapmakers made it stick, and the creep of time de-commodified it, turning what was once a business deal into a civic landmark. (Times Square, of course, has always been a laboratory for the American capitalist experiment, host through the years of everything from horse stables to topless bars to the American Girl store.)
Reading about Indiana’s “fiery” hydrants elicited one of those slightly eerie moments when it feels as though we are living in the future. While the slow drift toward the corporate end times may have a long backstory, we are drawing closer to a cultural relationship with products and mass entertainment that once existed only in speculative fiction. (Of course, this is natural: as time progresses, the world rightly, and often unfortunately, begins to resemble what was predicted by the most brilliant and imaginative artists of the past.) In “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s wry and, at times, cloying repetition (often in the form of acronyms) of all those goofy year titles is one of the many ways in which he uses a hyperbolic marketing-crazed future to satirize his marketing-crazed present. The book’s most memorable argument—that entertainment will eventually become so captivating as to be debilitating, and even deadly—is of a kind with many moments in fiction in which people of the future destroy themselves through their urges to consume. It is a key element in literature ranging from science fiction to literary theory that as the barriers of individual consciousness degrade we absorb a kind of shared cultural consciousness full of corporate junk. In this version of dystopia, advertising becomes more pervasive, consumer culture supplants traditional culture, and language itself, from place names to common nouns, is subsumed by the things we buy and sell.
by Ian Crouch, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum
