New Corporate Idealism and Old Soviet Idealism Is the Same Smiling Face to Me
The image at left is a detail from a screenshot of the AT&T DSL page. This is the fantasy of the ideal worker alive and well in spite of the death of the Soviet propaganda machine. Whenever you pay your bill online these images of ideal workers are there to seep into your subconscious and perhaps make you extra-angry when the “customer service” goes wrong.
The image at right is from the heights of the Soviet era—another smiling, young, female worker tending to Russian wheat. To me, there is not much difference between these two images. But to some model American consumer the difference must be enormous otherwise this look and feel would not be still in vogue. What are these supposed ‘big’ differences? Well:
Today’s AT&T girl is a photograph of a “real” person that old Soviet stuff is just a painting. The same old thing in a flashy new high-tech package is supposed to be the first of its kind in the universe—very appealing to egocentric 30 year-olds with no real sense of history.- That Soviet girl is a blonde while today’s AT&T girl is a more “multi-cultural” brunette—a more conservative multi-cultural image (that appeals to the huge, assimilating “Hispanic” population) than that coco-colored girl with the long wavy hair that is oh-so popular these days. This is a huge difference by traditional American racist tradition.
- The Soviet girl is fondling wheat with her head wrapped in communist red while the AT&T girl is lost in the thoughts of digital headgear. Surely this difference between rural and urban is too far apart, right? To me, they are both wrapped in artifice—one is an agricultural technician while the other is a desk technician. Their technical training comes central authorities—the monopoly of Soviet-era government and the reemerging monopoly of AT&T.