Nowadays, work is pretty much inextricable from the rest of life anyway. With an army of telecom companies using world music, Sam Neill and Madonna to sell the 24-hour workday as one big funky global rave party, we have long been moving toward Total Work Culture. But it's an effort like "Newsmakers" that really throws it into sharp relief, with the ads thrown on every device Pharaoh uses to help you through your day at the pyramids: the platform alongside your Metro North train, the side of the bus you connect to at Grand Central, the Metrocard you use to board the bus, the side of the vendor cart you visit before work and the productivity-boosting cup of java you buy there.

Work is play; play is work -- that's just one contradiction of the new prime time. On one hand, the economy, hurtling along at historically low levels of unemployment, depends on tech-driven increases in productivity from its strapped workers. On the other hand, it also demands, for the sake of a tech-driven stock market and a vast Ponzi scheme of Internet investment, that these same workers make online business and content sources a part of their daily lives -- which, of course, they do by spending half the day surfing the Web. Thus too can site creators stimulate the software and telecommunications industries by adding giant applets and Shockwave features to their sites -- not because of the minimal percentage of households who are getting cable modems, but because they know damn well their prime audience is hogging the T1 line downtown.

We have been hearing that, through online trading and index funds, we are all stockholders today. Not only that, though, we're all moonlighters, putting in overtime on the job to service the entire Nasdaq by stoking the Internet economy. It's a classic macro- vs. microeconomic clash: By goofing off on the job, you're stealing from your employer. But like as not, that same employer depends, however tangentially, on the e-conomy you're supporting through your very indolence.

Maybe, in fact, that's the real justification for the Internet stock explosion: The Web is the first mass medium to harness the sloth of the American worker, perhaps the most powerful force known to history. So go ahead: Sound off in that MSNBC chatroom! Play that online trivia game! Download that streaming porn! With every beaver shot you retrieve on the company's dime, you create a job!

Locating the white-hot center of American recreation is the true brilliance of the "Newsmakers" campaign, and one other advertisers would be wise to catch on to. Like, say, the advertiser you're looking at, which is hyping its own relaunch with the tagline "Salon ... Makes You Think." Far be it from me to undercut our hired guns, but if pitching the site as online ginkgo biloba doesn't pan out, we could do worse than learn from ABC and company. "Salon ... Beats the Hell Outta Workin'."
salon.com | April 8, 1999

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