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Business2.0 The Business of Fear

"In the aftermath of 9/11 and with each subsequent threat -- from anthrax to dirty bombs to fear of reprisals from the war with Iraq -- firms large and small have responded in an effort to capitalize on the nation's growing sense of insecurity. New venture capital funds are underwriting companies whose technologies now come wrapped in antiterror sales pitches. Trade councils and lobbyists devoted to this new market are appearing. And in the consumer market, sales are increasing on items ranging from "nuke pills" to al Qaeda-proof bomb shelters actually called Apocalypse Houses (see "Be Afraid. Be Very, Profligately Afraid"). The store is open. Call it the business of fear. Ka-ching."

redux [06.13.02]
News.Com Terror concerns spark nuke drug sales
"With the spotlight on terrorism and the U.S. Department of Justice's recent detainment of a suspected Al Qaeda operative who allegedly planned to detonate a dirty bomb in a major city, a cottage industry has formed around the morbid idea of protection against a radioactive blast."

""It's great on a personal level to have something successful, but on the other side I hope to hell no one has to use the products that they're buying," he said. "It's an odd state of mind to be in.""

redux [03.03.02]
Bad Subjects Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism
"Yet if economic fear is a persuasive mode of social coercion, it can also function as a mode of consumption. Preventative consumption is a fear response that seeks to avoid the consequences of unpreparedness or inaction. Consumption itself becomes a defense against fears, rational or irrational. Since September 11, the spectre of Islamic terrorism has generated a market for products that can locate themselves within this conceptual framework of preventative consumption. A product's precise relation to the political phenomenon is irrelevant. Rather, marketability in the fear market relies on associative links. Risk, ever-present in the economic calculus, suddenly has an attributable face. Preventative consumption takes those social risks caused by foreign, alien hatreds, and reduces them into the manageable features of known products."

Reason In Praise of Vulgarity
"In short, the first breath of cultural freedom that Afghans had enjoyed since 1995 was suffused with the stuff of commercially generated popular culture. The people seemed delighted to be able to look like they wanted to, listen to what they wanted to, watch what they wanted to, and generally enjoy themselves again. Who could complain about Afghans filling their lives with pleasure after being coerced for years to adhere to a harshly enforced ascetic code?

The West's liberal, anti-materialist critics, that's who.

"How depressing was it," asked Anna Quindlen in a December Newsweek column, "to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?""

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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