Culture from the darker side

American Psycho was a good reflection on the 1980s, a highlight clearly was the “business card duel” in the middle of the book, highlighting the obsessiveness of the main character, not to mention his analysis of the brands everybody was choosing.

In the 1990s in Germany I started to notice a trend where brand names became part of the design, and in fact you had to start wearing certain brands to be “in”. As I never was “in” I never bothered and actually I didn’t care.

In 2004 Pattern Recognition was published and it had a strong “anti-brand” message in the midst of a story about Branding.

But in 2003 a book was published that brought our consumer culture to a somewhat logic conclusion: Jennifer Government.

Jennifer Government is set in the not to distant future, and Max Barry doesn’t pull any punches. Most of the world is part of the US now, by proxy more or less. The Government has been privatized, no more taxes and companies “rule” the world. There are two groups fiercely competing for market-share, the US Alliance and the Team Advantage loyalty programs.

At the core of the story a handful of individuals that by coincidence get drawn into the battle, Violet a “freelance” Programmer who thinks she is making the deal of her lifetime only to realize that if you swim with the sharks you better be one; Jennifer Government a former Ad executive who now works as a Government Watchdog and who has to find her financing before she can go after the bad guys; Hack Nike, a guy who works in Merchandising who one day makes the fateful decision to get a cup of water from the Marketing floor only to be drawn into the plot by a Marketing executive John Nike who has big plans for a new shoe that Nike is going to introduce, even if it means he has to kill people to give the shoe some cred. Then there is Billy NRA who just wants to go skiing in New Zealand only to find himself employed as a killer with the NRA and US Alliance, despite the qualms he has and then there is Buy Mitsui, a guy who is at the wrong time at the wrong place and after seeing a girl die after buying some brand new Nike’s finds his life changed forever.

All of these people act in a world in which consumerism is tops and “Old Europe” is seen as archaic, those savages after all still pay Taxes and the Government is standing in the way of corporate profits, now if John get’s his way there will be no more Government at all. After all, without the corporations people would still live in Caves.

“Jennifer Government” is a wonderfully biting satire that takes a shot at today’s consumerism and may be even more true today than it was three years ago when it was first published. The idea that privatization is the answer to everything that ails North America society is still a strong message in the US (and by extend the rest of the world) right now, and it probably won’t go away.

Corporations have taken charge of large parts of our lives, the small companies hardly exist anymore, even brands that we may think of being small probably belong to a larger conglomerate. So Jennifer Government is not only a satire but also a commentary on consumerism without becoming preachy.

Of course the world of “Jennifer Government” isn’t really all that new, the idea exists since at least the earliest notions of Cyberspace (Neuromancer), the omnipotent corporation always being a fixture. The role playing game Shadowrun comes to mind as an example on how the world can be described as segregated between the “corp have’s” and “non-corp have not’s”.

The book is an entertaining, easy read, Barry jumps between the different characters on a regular basis telling their stories in parallel, my only gripe with this is that the time frame in which these events happen is not always clear, at times it feels like just a day has passed, but then references are made that seem to indicate it may have been months.

Other than that: A nice, funny and entertaining read that may give one something to think the next time you see someone decked out in all gear from one company or whooning over the newest merchandise from brand X.

Rating: 4/5