Political Products is an evidence file in The Outlast Trials.
It is an entry in the "Politics" folder.
Content[]
"Murkoff Minutes
1960.05.20
COPY
TRANSCRIPTION FROM TAPE OF CONFERENCE BETWEEN H.J. EASTERMAN AND MOSES SCARFIOTTI
EDITED FOR CLARITY
[Minutes 9-13]
SCARFIOTTI: I'll admit it's taking me a moment to see the connection.
EASTERMAN: We've had more pressing matters. Our own disagreements.
SCARFIOTTI: I thought you'd gone insane.
EASTERMAN: You don't need to apologize to me, Moses. The mall is gift enough, it's beautiful.
SCARFIOTTI: It's perfect for a Trial. An enclosed shopping mall is already a synthetic environment. A diorama of a downtown shopping experience. It gives the suburbanite a sanitized experience of city life. Shopping downtown, but without all the poverty and unfortunate ethnicity. It's the political angle that escapes me.
EASTERMAN: They're going to televise the presidential debates on CBS. it's going to change everything.
SCARFIOTTI: Sorry?
EASTERMAN: Anything you put in a store window is for sale. Television will turn politicians into products. Just like anything else. But commercial television also reverses the consumer relationship. It's like an economic mirror. Viewers don't buy the programs they watch on the television; networks rent viewer's eyeballs to their advertisers.
SCARFIOTTI: Slow down, you're getting...
EASTERMAN: It can be a perfect economic cycle, an, an upward funnel of money and power. But it needs a gyre, a constant engine of consumption. They can never leave the enclosed mall, this cathedral to consumerism, this brutalist concrete box functioning as cradle. It's beautiful, Moses, truly."