Going Nucular Page 18

  Consultants like to talk about “building high-performance corporate cultures,” but as with a lot of the things we distinguish as cultures nowadays, the differences between corporations are actually pretty superficial. If they weren’t, people wouldn’t all be using the same jargon and papering their cubicle walls with the same comic strips, nor would top managers find it so easy to move from soft-drink companies to computer firms. But America does have a culture of the corporation, and it is increasingly detached from the values that are touchstones in our personal dealings. Few people nowadays perceive the historical connection between private sector and private life.

  The corporation was created as a legal fiction to reduce personal responsibility. The new language merely acknowledges that function. Reducing your work force to cut costs doesn’t carry the same moral stigma as dismissing an old family retainer. It’s understandable that managers would want to find other words for the process—it’s nothing personal, after all.

  Yet some companies do manage to talk more plainly than others—Deloitte points to Home Depot and Apple Computer—and in fact the evidence suggests that that’s a good indicator of a company’s financial well-being.

  Not that curbing jargon is likely to do much for a company’s bottom line all by itself. But it can’t do any harm to call people on the buzzwords they use. It’s like requiring gang members to leave their colors at home and wear blazers and ties to school—it may not subdue their obstreperous natures, but it makes those cocky poses a little harder to strike.

  Farewell to the Alero

  Detroit’s recent interest in nostalgia isn’t limited to retro designs like the Plymouth Prowler and the Chrysler PT Cruiser—it carries over to naming, as well. Two years ago General Motors successfully revived the Impala name for its full-size Chevrolets, and last month at the Detroit Auto Show the company debuted a new concept convertible that bears the name of the old Chevy Bel Air.

  But it’s one thing to revive a name and another to revive the context that gave it its meaning. As the linguist Mark Aronoff has observed, there has probably been no purer example of semiotic manipulation than the wheel of brands that the Big Three automakers devised in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, every American make of car had several distinct models for each of its lines, full-sized, mid-sized, and compact. In 1958, there were three full-sized Chevrolet models, the deluxe Bel Air, the standard Biscayne, and the economy Delray. The Impala was introduced in that year as a special edition of the Bel Air. Then the next year the Impala became a separate model of its own, and the other models were demoted: the Bel Air became the standard model, the Biscayne became the new economy model, and the old economy Delray was dropped.

  Fresh Air Commentary, February 14, 2002

  The same process was repeated a few years later when Chevy introduced a new deluxe model called the Caprice and demoted the Impala and Bel Air a notch, eliminating the Biscayne name at the bottom. The cycle was the same at Chrysler and Ford. The Fairlane, the Galaxie, the LTD—each of them started out as a limited edition deluxe model, then worked its way gradually down the chain to the economy slot.

  While it lasted, it was the most elaborate and successful experiment ever undertaken in the semantic manipulation of demand. Every few years a new name was introduced, fastened to a rare and desirable object, and then over time the cars it was attached to were made cheaper and more accessible, to the point where anyone could have one. It was as close to a traffic in pure names as any marketer has ever been able to sustain. In 1978, Chevy discontinued selling its Vega compacts, which had been plagued by highly publicized engine defects, but continued selling some of the Vega cars under the Monza line.

  It was also probably the most wasteful marketing strategy ever devised. Companies deliberately degraded their established brand names just to increase the demand for new ones, like a builder who lets an apartment complex go to seed so that tenants will want to move into the one he’s putting up next door.

  What was remarkable was that consumers were willing to buy into the illusions that the system rested on. In fact there was virtually no difference between the models, apart from the options and trim. The main feature that distinguished the deluxe Chevy models from the standard and economy models was that they had three little round tail lights on each side, rather than two, in the same way Buick distinguished its upmarket models by putting an extra porthole on its front fenders. Those were features that the manufacturers tended to maintain even when the rest of the design was radically changed to preserve the illusion that the Bel Air or the Impala was “the same car” from one year to the next.

  But the great wheel of model names could only keep turning so long as the car companies could assume that consumers had nowhere else to go—that people would be willing to spend their entire lives climbing the ladder of GM brands even as the company kept throwing more grease on the rungs. By the mid-1970s, consumers were becoming less willing to replace their cars every few years just so they could own the new model, partly because new car prices were rising much more rapidly than the average family income, and partly because the Japanese and Europeans were grabbing large parts of the U.S. market with brand names that kept their luster over the long haul. By the eighties American carmakers were offering only one model per line.

  All of that led to changes in the kinds of names that manufacturers were putting on their models. The car names of the ’50s and ’60s were based on a few unimaginative patterns—most were taken from the names of exotic destinations, like the Monte Carlo and the Seville; from animals, like the Mustang and Impala; or from vaguely superlative words, like the Regal and the Invicta. But the associations of those names weren’t what mattered—their real connotations came from their place in the constellation of brands, and shifted as they were rotated from deluxe to standard to economy.

  Only when the system broke down in the late 1970s did car marketers take to using fanciful names, in the fond hope that they could evoke the car’s character all by themselves. That’s when the companies began appropriating random English words or hatching jumbles of nonsense syllables. Inevitably, car names started to sound like the names of other products. A Monte Carlo or Mustang could only be a car. But Prodigy, Protégé, Prizm, Precis, Prius—those could as easily be digital cameras or office productivity software (actually, Prius sounds more like a treatment for erectile dysfunction). And other names sounded like they should be attached to china patterns or cosmetics lines. Korando, Elantra, Vitara, Nubira—they’re words out of some lingua branda of the far future, what we’ll all speak when the last common noun has been trademarked.

  Among the Big Three, names like these started to become anxious incantations, as if the carmakers believed the right string of syllables could somehow conjure a market niche out of nowhere. Long before General Motors announced this year that it was phasing out the Oldsmobile brand, you could tell the division was in trouble just from the desperation of its model names in the late ’90s: Alero, Achieva, Bravada, Ciera. It was a sad dotage for the brand that gave us classic model names like the Rocket 88, the Futuramic 98, the Starfire, and the Toronado. GM may some day bring back the names of some of those vintage Oldsmobiles, particularly if the nostalgia vogue continues. But it’s safe to say we’ve heard the last of Alero.

  100 Percent Solutions

  I got a mail-order catalog the other day from a company that specializes in various home and health-care products. At least they used to call them products, but now that word has been entirely eliminated from their catalog in favor of solutions. You can find seat cushions in the section on “stress relief solutions,” bathrobes in “spa care solutions,” and support bras in “intimate apparel solutions.”

  The solutions game began in the early 1980s, when companies like IBM started using the word to describe the packages of hardware, software, and services they were selling to corporate customers. In a sense it’s just a new way of pitching your offerings as answers to customers’ needs and anxieties, in th
e time-honored tradition of ring-around-the-collar and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Except that solutions makes its point in a proactive way. Time was, when people said, “I’ve got a solution for you” you could assume that somebody had mentioned a problem somewhere along the line. Now the two have come unhitched—solutions aren’t solutions for anything anymore. When you do a search on “solutions” at the Web site of Compaq or Apple Computer, you find that it’s anywhere from two to three times as frequent as “problems.” Business people don’t like to hear someone talk about “problems”—the P-word. It seems to betray a negative mindset—if there are difficulties you absolutely have to mention, you try to find another name for them. As in “We had a number of challenges this quarter,” or “There are several known issues installing the beta release of the printer driver.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, July 13, 2001

  By now there are hundreds of firms that have incorporated solutions into their company names, and by no means all of them are high-tech. There’s the beachwear maker Sun Solutions, which is not to be confused with Solar Solutions, which sells propane ranges and composting toilets. Ondeo Solutions builds sewage-treatment facilities. And then there’s Bright Horizons Family Solutions, an outfit that manages corporate daycare centers, whose portfolio presumably includes story-hour solutions and snack solutions, not to mention nap solutions for clients with crankiness issues.

  It’s hard to think of a company that couldn’t say it was in the solutions business now. (“Smuckers, your toast-coating solutions provider.”) In fact, one reason why so many companies are sticking solutions into their names is that they don’t have to let on as to what they’re actually selling, particularly if they’re still in the slightly embarrassing business of making Things. Things have low margins and high capital costs. They’re expensive to ship, they lead to liability lawsuits, they get you in trouble with the EPA. If you make them domestically you have to deal with unions. If you make them overseas, people get on your back for running sweatshops.

  It’s no wonder the manufacturing sector is a diminishing part of the American economy. In 1950, material goods made up more than half the Gross Domestic Product; now they account for less than a quarter of it. And companies that aren’t in a position to stop making Things altogether can at least re-label them as solutions. It suggests that their products are just an ancillary sideline of their real business, like the terrycloth slippers they throw in when you go for a massage.

  That’s the beauty of solutions—companies don’t have to tip their hands. It’s a perfect complement for those empty corporate names that marketing consultants paste together out of strings of chopped-up syllables. Take the Ohio outfit called Omnova Solutions. What line of work would you say they’re in—client-server applications? healthcare benefits administration? Actually it’s fabric transfers and decorative wall coverings, but the others are just as plausible. These aren’t like those old-fashioned corporate names that were designed to conjure up an image of a real product made by a real company. You feel sorry for the members of a softball team who have to take the field with “Omnova Solutions” written on their uniforms.

  Names like these are attempts to create pure brands, free signifiers that float in the ether ready to light on anything that somebody’s willing to pay for. That’s what the new economy comes down to, in the end—just one big intersection with people at every corner holding signs that say, “Will solve for cash.”

  Tech Talk

  As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation

  You don’t get to be a verb unless you’re doing something right. Do a Google search on “ford,” for example, and the first batch of results includes the pages for the Ford Motor Company, the Ford Foundation, the Betty Ford Center, Harrison Ford, and Gerald R. Ford—all good guesses at what a user would be looking for, particularly considering that Google estimates its index holds more than 16 million pages including the word.

  Google now conducts 55 percent of all searches on the World Wide Web. People have come to trust the service to act as a digital bloodhound—give it a search term to sniff, and it disappears into the cyber wilderness, returning a fraction of a second later with the site you were looking for in its mouth.

  The importance attached to a high Google ranking has led people to try to game the system, arranging to trade links with other high-volume sites or paying other sites to link to them. Commercial sites use those techniques to try to get more traffic, and pranksters and activists have used similar methods to engage in “googlebombing”—a way of hijacking a search term, so that the first result of a search on, say, “Joe’s Garage” will be a page that derogates the firm.

  The New York Times Week in Review, May 18, 2003

  But a high Google ranking can also have a lot of clout in the marketplace of ideas. It seems to confer ownership on a particular word or phrase—deciding, in effect, who gets to define it. It’s easy to read these results as reflecting the consensus of an extended Internet community, with the power to shape opinion and events. As James F. Moore, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, wrote in an article on his blog, the Internet has become a “shared collective mind” that is coming to figure as a “second superpower.”

  Sometimes, though, the deliberations of the collective mind seem to come up short. Take Moore’s use of “second superpower” to refer to the Internet community. Not long ago, an article on the British technology site The Register accused Moore of “googlewashing” that expression—in effect, hijacking the expression and giving it a new meaning.

  The phrase had actually originated in a February 17 article by Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times that referred to the United States and world public opinion as the “two superpowers on the planet.” Shortly after that, “second superpower” was adopted by organizations like Greenpeace and was used by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, to refer to antiwar opinion. But Moore’s article using the phrase to refer to the collective mind of the Internet was linked to by a number of bloggers sympathetic to his ideas, and quickly became the first hit returned when someone searches Google for “second superpower.”

  There was nothing underhanded in Moore’s ability to co-opt ownership of the phrase in the rankings; it follows from the way Google works. Google’s algorithms rank results both by looking at how prominently the search terms figure in the pages that include them and by taking advantage of what Google calls “the uniquely democratic nature of the Web” to estimate the popularity of a site. It gives a higher rank to pages that are linked to by a number of other pages, particularly if the referring pages themselves are frequently linked to. (The other major search engines have adopted similar techniques.)

  When you search for a common item like ford or baseball, the engines naturally give the highest rankings to major sites that are linked to by hundreds or thousands of other pages. But when searches are more specific—whether for “second superpower” or “Sinatra arrangers”—the rankings will mirror the interests of the groups that aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts, activists, hobbyists, or, every so often, the crackpots.

  Not long ago a German friend of mine went to Google for help in refuting a colleague who maintained that American authorities engineered the attacks of September 11, 2001, citing as evidence, among other things, the delay in sending American fighter jets aloft that morning. My friend did searches on a number of obvious strings, like “9/11 scramble jets intercept.” But almost all the pages that came up were the work of conspiracy theorists, with titles like “Guilty for 9—11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers” and “Pentagon surveillance videos—where are the missing frames?” As my friend put it, “To judge from the Google results, there’s plenty of evidence for a conspiracy and little to the contrary.”

  That’s the sort of result that often leads people to complain that the Web is full of junk or that the search engines aren’t working as they should. From the standpoint of the search engines, however,
this is all as it should be. The beauty of the Web, after all, is that it enables us to draw on the expertise of people who take a particular interest in a topic and are willing to take the trouble to set down what they think about it. In that sense, the Web is a tool that enables people who have a life to benefit from the efforts of those who don’t.

  Given the “uniquely democratic” nature of the Web, it shouldn’t be surprising that the votes reported by the search engines have many of the deficiencies of plebiscites in the democracies on the other side of the screen. On topics of general interest, the rankings tend to favor the major sites and marginalize the smaller or newer ones; here, as elsewhere, money and power talk.

  When it comes to more specialized topics, the rankings sometimes give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and enthusiasts that can be at odds with the views of the larger public. It’s as if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: The Swiss get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.

  The outcomes of Google’s popularity contests can be useful to know, but it’s a mistake to believe they reflect the consensus of the “Internet community,” whatever that might be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy—the picture that’s implicit in all the talk of the Internet as a “digital commons” or “collective mind.” Seen from a Google’s eye view, in fact, the Web is less like a piazza than a souk—a jumble of separate spaces, each with its own isolated chatter. The search engines cruise the alleyways to listen in on all of these conversations, locate the people who are talking about the subject we’re interested in, and tell us which of them has earned the most nods from the other confabulators in the room. But just because someone is regarded as a savant in the barbershop doesn’t mean he’ll pass for wise with the people in the other stalls.