Levi's Wokes

The following is a modified excerpt from my upcoming book.

In September of 2017 Saturday Night Live aired a skit titled “Levi’s Wokes.”  

“Introducing Levi’s Wokes. Sizeless, style neutral, gender non-conforming denim for a generation that defies labels. Levi’s heard that if you’re not woke, it’s bad!”

Watch it here.

I laughed. Then I watched it over and over again. Then I laughed some more. I was the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Levi’s at the time and had been for four years. They were making fun of the advertising I was putting out into the ether. They were making fun of me and how I did my job. I didn’t care.

But my phone was blowing up with texts of concern from friends and my marketing team at Levi’s.  Everyone thought we were being mocked and I should be worried, possibly about my job, but I was determined to be in on the joke and not the butt of it. I called the head of Design at Levi’s, my work friend and collaborator. “Let’s make some of those Woke jeans and send them to the cast of SNL.”

We sewed up about 20 pairs and sent them out as quickly as we could, one for every cast member. We were in on the joke, culture creators ourselves. We’ll invert the narrative and come out on top, hip enough to laugh at ourselves, we thought.

Besides, we were sure it wasn’t us that they were making fun of, it was Brooklynites who pride themselves on their re-usable totes and a “buy local” ethos while flying to remote locales twice a year on private jets, to go on exotic vacations on private beaches with private chefs cooking “authentic” local cuisine.

I didn’t feel derided at the time because I hadn’t thought much about wokeness in general or about woke capitalism at all. Mid-2010s wokeness felt like a tiny satellite circling around popular culture, mocking the annoyingly pretentious variety of hipster, not the everyday cool kids who authentically cared about stuff like environmentalism and equality.

Wokeness was a pretense, a posture appropriated by a few guilt-driven middle-aged white people with Priuses. (But only because they hadn’t heard of Teslas yet.)

“Woke” might describe a Hollywood celebrity touting “green” behaviors like recycling and veganism while wearing a new $10,000 outfit to every event and never wearing it again.

They weren’t us. We – Levi’s – made commercially priced jeans sold at places like Kohl’s and Sears, pants with a lifetime guarantee, designed for anyone and everyone for nearly 150 years.

The term “woke” was originally used amongst black folks in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  It referred to being awake to bigotry and prejudice and the coming revolution and racial reckoning. Early on in the 2010s it had a brief moment of earnestness, when it was broadened to apply to progressives of all races who had adopted genuine social consciousness, specifically around issues of inequality. But it quickly shifted to a sarcastic slight, meant for those poser hypocrites in expensive single-use outfits yelling at the rest of us to buy less and use less.

Ok so what about woke capitalism? What’s that?

Ross Douthat coined the phrase in his 2018 op-ed for the New York Times “The Rise of Woke Capital.” He wrote:

“Corporate activism on social issues isn’t in tension with corporate self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks. Rather, the activism increasingly exists to protect the self-interest and the stinginess — to justify the ways of C.E.O.s to cultural power brokers, so that those same power brokers will leave them alone (and forgive their support for Trump’s economic agenda) in realms that matter more to the corporate bottom line.”

“Woke capitalism” is corporate America’s attempt to profit off of Millennial and Gen Z activism, often passive keyboard activism. It exploits social justice politics and transforms it into social justice consumerism. Companies positing to care about “progressive values” are really doing nothing more than striking a superficial pose meant to signal virtue while distracting from any company’s true motive: profit.

All of that is true. But there is more to it, in my opinion.

First, you’ve got a bunch of CEOs and executives who want to distance themselves from the greedy image of business leaders of the past. They want you to know that they are not like the ruthless banking moguls and oil tycoons from years gone by. They aren’t destroying the planet, and they aren’t taking advantage of consumers with sub-prime mortgages. They aren’t stealing or grifting, they’re helping! They aren’t in it for themselves, they care about you!

Tech companies are well known for their “we’re gonna change the world” cultiness. You don’t just work at Google. You’re facilitating connecting people to information that is life-changing, driving the digital revolution at the end of which we’ll all be so much better off than we are now.

Corporate leaders want us to know that they are do-gooders, not money grubbers. They’ll get rich too, but they don’t want you to think that is their mission. And, more importantly, they don’t want to think that about themselves. They believe they embody the best qualities of Andrew Carnegie (So generous! So benevolent!), Henry Ford (a visionary who cared about his employees!) and Theodore Roosevelt (a progressive man of action!) all rolled into one.

Business executives would have us believe that they are our saviors. Bill Gates is eliminating malaria and saving the children in Africa! Howard Schultz is running for President to save our Democracy! Elon Musk is not only saving the planet with electric vehicles, he is exploring new frontiers in space and defending free speech for the masses!

Big Pharma CEOs – well they’re saving the world from Covid. Never mind the Sacklers profiting off of opioid addiction while disregarding mass death from overdose. These pharmaceutical executives are the most values-led CEOs there are, or so many people somehow now seem to believe.

It is conveniently forgotten that Pfizer paid out the largest criminal fine in history: 2.3 billion dollars for fraudulent marketing. What they really did was bribe doctors to prescribe their pain medicine Bextra for uses unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration. Call it “marketing” if you must.

Somehow someway, business leaders have re-branded themselves as altruists despite all the evidence of greed and corruption. In 2020, CEOs made 351 times more than an average worker in the company they led, up from 21 times more in 1965. Their compensation has grown over 1000% in the last 30 years, but they have burnished an image as well-meaning humanitarians. How? It boggles the mind.

While Steve Jobs may now be known as kind of an asshole, he’s also viewed as a visionary who changed the world. I can’t tell you how many business leaders use his quote “Stay hungry stay foolish” as their email signature sign-off. It lends profundity and meaning to naked capitalism. CEOs and C-suite executives were always rich. But now they’re rich, well-meaning and beloved. It’s not lost on me that I was included in this false idolatry.

The 2008 economic meltdown was brought on by predatory lending practices targeting low-income home buyers and it could have been a major setback for the newly shiny image of today’s CEOs. It led to Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against the influence of money on our political system.  

While this movement took over the headlines for at least a year, it didn’t take long for Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a now defunct Silicon Valley startup, to land on the cover of Forbes, Fortune and Inc where she was billed as “The Next Steve Jobs.” At the height of her popular culture stardom, she was worth 4.5 billion dollars. On paper.

Journalists wrote fawning puff pieces which convinced the public that Holmes was the antidote to the corruption and chicanery exposed in the 2008 economic crisis.  She was also a woman, the antidote to the male-dominated, misogynistic tech culture.

Holmes has now been convicted on 4 counts of fraud for repeatedly lying about her company and product in order to secure more than 1 billion dollars in funding from venture capitalists. These very rich, very greedy funders were also very eager to be viewed as saviors and healthcare heroes. Holmes was their ticket to sainthood.  Alas, she will likely spend ten years in prison for her misdeeds.

Holmes was a greedy corporatist, possibly a malignant narcissist, feigning humility to uphold her “I’m not a craven business lady, I’m a holy redeemer” image. Journalists and the public wanted to believe that she was a hero, restoring our belief in corporate leaders and entrepreneurs as not just good people but near God-like figures, filling the religion-sized gaping hole in our atheist hearts. But all along, she was just a money-hungry swindler. And all too many of us were swindled by her lies.

None of it stops today’s CEOs though. They are still out to position themselves as heroes. Woke capitalism provides the path to convincing us all they’re the good guys and distracts us from their only true intentions: profits for themselves and their cronies.

It also lets those who purchase their products feel that buying stuff is actually activism. You like tee-shirts? Here - buy this organic tee-shirt that also shows you support the LGBTQ+ community because it has our logo but with a rainbow!

Now the second piece of the puzzle. These CEOs have Gen Z kids who have been attending woke schools their entire lives. These kids have been coddled and inculcated into critical race theory while denouncing white supremacy at their mostly white, and rich, fancy private schools. They go on to colleges - places like Yale and, for the less accomplished or the less connected, Evergreen State College or Syracuse University, to further this orthodoxy.

Today’s CEOs want to impress their woke kids with their progressive bone fides while at the same time giving them every commercial good that any child could ever dream of wanting. This sometimes includes paying someone to take the SAT for them if they can’t get in to a socially acceptable college.

These kids are graduating from college after four years of building safe spaces and protesting “micro-aggressions”. Many believe that whenever they feel slightly unhappy it is obviously the result of some grave injustice. And they are taking this attitude with them, as they enter the work force. Many of them, approximately half, are entering the corporate workforce.

These young people have lived their lives under the impression that their every utterance matters and that older people need to listen to them. Whether or not the youngsters have the life experience or wisdom that should merit such attention is irrelevant.

They lay claim to inscrutable labels, like demisexual and recipromantic (you guessed it, you only like someone after knowing they like you), which demand we all listen to them because they know things we don’t. They have lived lives of oppression that we stodgy cisgender oldsters would never understand.

Today’s executives reared these kids and are anxious for their approval. The Boomer and older Gen X moms and dads want to be cool - peers not parents - in the eyes of their offspring.

Thirdly and lastly, these kids are social media pros. They grew up with phones in their pockets, generating moment to moment likes on TikTok, Snap and YouTube. The CEO dads (yes 95% of CEOs are men) are not social media experts. Their Corporate Communications leads manage their LinkedIn accounts and they scan their wives’ Facebook accounts on occasion to check out what the kids are up to. And that’s the extent of their social media prowess.

These kids know that they can tweet from a classroom if a professor looks at them funny and garner not only peer attention but launch university investigations into tenured professors’ classroom practices. They can post a picture of their boss on Instagram, calling her out for using the gendered term “guys”. They can generate outrage with a finger tap.

And it’s real, the outrage. But it also isn’t. It passes quickly for the most part if you can hunker down and bear it. Because, as Dave Chappelle says, Twitter’s not a real place.

But the CEOs don’t know that. They get presented with tweets and comments by their harried communications leaders and they have no sense of context. It’s words on a “page”. Could be in the New York Times or on CNN for all they know. It’s bad stuff on the screen, with the potential to prompt reputational harm, causing the stock price to plummet. And they panic. Or most of them do.

Some do not. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said to employees in an internal memo:

“If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

This line in the sand was drawn in response to the employee dust up over Dave Chappelle’s 2021 comedy special “The Closer” in which he declared himself a TERF – a trans exclusionary radical feminist. He tackled the controversy surrounding gender ideology by stating that he’s a feminist, he supports women’s equality, he believes biological sex is real, AND he also supports trans rights. The assertion: these two things - being pro-women’s rights and pro-trans’ rights - are not in conflict.

In response to Chappelle’s stand-up special, tens of employees protested at the Netflix headquarters, threatening to quit if the comedian’s specials were not taken off the platform.  Sarandos stood his ground, saying “I think it’s very important to the American culture generally to have free expression.”  And that was that.

Most CEOs lack the moral courage to do this. Because they know, deep down, they aren’t do-gooders but they don’t want that curtain lifted. So they kowtow to the very vocal minority – the tens of employees emailing the head of Human Resources. These CEOs are frauds and have no actual courage. The gutsy stance is just a persona, a façade, a wealth-generating marketing strategy.

I didn’t know about Ross Douthat’s column when it came out in 2018. I was busy as the Chief Marketing Officer at Levi’s making ads about voting. I was woke capitalism. And as is often the case, you can’t see it when you’re in it.

But I’d wise up pretty soon due to a head-on collision with the unrelenting, ever-righteous woke mob…