After finishing reading Douglas Rushkoff’s most recent article, An End to Movements, I sat by my window and smoked the very last of my last pack of cigarettes, calmly reflecting on the content of the piece, in which Rushkoff states:

“Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out.”

Cigarettes are enjoyable, but unhealthy and expensive, so I try to smoke as little as possible, less I end up with an empty wallet, a case of smoker’s cough or even worse; an untimely death at the hands of a transnational tobacco coproration. However, managing my addiction is relatively easy due to my favourite brand, Lucky Strike, being unavailable in Canada. But last week a friend came back from Hong Kong and tossed me a couple packs, which I rationed over the following days, the final strike being smoked just minutes before I began writing this post.

I don’t know what it is about Lucky Strike that makes them so appealing to me, it could be the “original recipe” or the fact that they are “toasted”. But more than likely it must be down to the gravitational pull of the brand – as if lighting up a strike does somehow, magically, improve one’s luck.

Lucky Strike is a unique example of highly effective branding, and not just because I’m addicted to them, but because the history of the red dot supplies a relevant counterpoint to Rushkoff’s thesis regarding PR firms and political movements. The success of Lucky Strike can be traced back to Edward Bernays: Sigmund Freud’s American nephew and inventor of the public relations industry. Bernays was one lucky bastard himself, as much of his uncle’s work had yet to be popularized at the time he was testing out his publicity experiments, affording Bernays the opportunity to take his uncle’s unreleased theories and “turn them into little ditties, that housewives and others could relate to.”

One  instance of Bernays’ application of psychoanalysis towards the “engineering of consent” was in 1929 when he successfully marketed Lucky Strike to young women as a symbol of female empowerment. At the time, the smoking of cigarettes was considered improper, even somewhat whorish, so Bernays’ killer idea was to flip this cultural taboo into a vehicle for feminism, which he did through a number of PR stunts wherein the act of smoking a Lucky Strike came to be interpreted as an act of women’s liberation. In less than a year Lucky Strike sales went up threefold.

Of course, none of this in any way explains why I personally prefer Lucky Strike over Marlboro, but it does tell us something about branded political movements, which came into existence long before the Obama effect. While Rushkoff laments the end of real movements, perhaps a much more sinister thought is questioning whether they ever existed.

“Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.” – Edward Bernays

-DH