Crisis: Part Two: The Hermes Handbag of Total Control

Wei Ning took me to a screening of Goddard’s film WEEKEND at the Cinematheque on our third or fourth date. Honestly I couldn’t tell you what it was about. It was French people being French in the 1960’s. But there was one part that stood out where one of the main characters gets in a car accident and for some reason one of the Bronte sisters is in the car (even though this was totally anachronistic) and as the Bronte sister goes up in the flames of the wreckage, the character screams over the loss of her beloved Hermes handbag. Wei Ning told me that she had a theory about Hermes, having seen how effective it was as way of controlling societies. Basically it came down to this: people don’t really want liberty or freedom. They just want to be able to buy a Hermes handbag. They’ll sell out any value so long as the handbag can be seen somewhere in a shop window. Take away the Hermes handbag and it all goes to hell. People don’t even have to know what a Hermes handbag is for this to work – because the ruling class will always know what a Hermes handbag is and they will always be the ones who can afford it. Of course the poor Hermes corporation has no role in any of this. Yes, they make absurd but beautifully crafted leather goods, but their ability to manufacture exclusivity and desire is more exquisite than that. These intangibles are what actually keep people in order. She’d seen this at work in China – where post-Tienamen, no one was particularly interested in liberty. What had changed? Certainly not the government. The arrival of luxury consumer goods in the centralized economy. The ruling class had something more meaningful than ideology to keep them in line: the Hermes Handbag of total control. And it worked. On my first trip to Shanghai with her, she took me to a Mexican restaurant where we had margaritas beneath a building-sized video screen advertising AUDI. So, this is communism, I thought. It seems like Seattle but slightly nicer. No unhoused folks, and the streets were unnervingly clean.

That is how we’re waging the peace. Not much changed after the war. Everything looked the same in the US with some minor changes. DC was no longer habitable so the capitol moved to the other Washington. It was sold as a way of preserving continuity and streamlining things. Washington State was the seat of the American government and Seattle, sometimes now referred to as New Jing by the more cynical, was where most government workers lived. It made sense because the tech industry was here, and the West Coast already had a lot of forward-looking thinkers. As the newly appointed head of Data Analytics for the State Department, I found myself suddenly thrust into a world at once completely familiar and, at the same time, distressingly meaningful. At Rainforest, my work felt stupid and I liked it that way. What I did was figure out from data patterns how to get people to buy more stuff. We did broad categorization of consumer shopping habits then from there created a portrait of our customers. It could be incredibly granular, to the point where we could anticipate with 99% certainty the actions a consumer might take in the next five minutes. We had a crystal ball that could see into the future what anyone would do, but the problem was that it was limited to five minutes. This is great for online shopping. You figure out what someone is thinking and you push the stuff at them that hits their prefrontal cortex in just the right way and BOOM! Suddenly they’re the owner of a trampoline despite not really wanting one and having nowhere to put it. What I was doing now was a bit more complex. I had to find a way to expand that window to five days. Also, I was tasked with figuring out how to push content that wasn’t so much about getting consumers to buy things but rather about getting citizens to do things – things we wanted them to do or not do.

For her fortieth birthday, I met Wei Ning after work at Nobu in Queen Anne and presented her with an Hermes Birken bag. I’d been working with a broker for nearly a year and a half to secure the right credentialing and permission structures from the Hermes corporation. As an official within the government, I was “their type of client” never customer, client was what they called me. She thanked me for the gift. It would raise problems for her at work, but she was thrilled. “I’ll take it on our trip to Dubai next month. It will just be a normal purse there.”