Hypnotizing Chickens

Artist Notes

This graphical essay was inspired by an April 26, 2010 article in The New York Times titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint” by Elisabeth Bumiller. The article describes how military culture, communications, and decision-making strategy have been affected by the widespread use of PowerPoint graphic presentation software. The communicative sensibility afforded by PowerPoint generally results in descriptions of interconnected economic, political, cultural, and strategic factors being reduced to bullet-pointed phrases and framed in graphics. This reductionist aesthetic decreases the potential for critical thought and analysis. General Stanley McCrystal, when looking at an unimaginably complicated organizational chart in the summer of 2009, is reported to have said, “When we understand this slide, we’ll have won the war.” The military has allegedly come to rely on PowerPoint decks for their “hierarchal ordering of a confused world,” a panacea for some problems, which in turn has created others.¹ The title of this graphical essay is taken from the United States military tactic of filling up press briefings with extremely dull PowerPoint presentations to intentionally bore media correspondents, and thus avoid providing any real information to the public. As Bumiller puts it, little information is transmitted, and even less time is left for questions. This tactic is known within the military as “hypnotizing chickens”; the chickens, in this instance, being the press.

This poses a paradox: the same form of communication that the military uses to confuse, or “hypnotize” the press—PowerPoint presentations—has also come to dominate and reshape their own internal communication. In particular, high-level decision makers now make more decisions in less time, based on less information. Military decision-making papers were formerly three- to four-page analytic essays that were researched, contextualized, considered overnight, discussed, and decided upon later in group settings. As a result of PowerPoint, the schedules of high-level personnel are now broken up into half-hour time slots so they can make decisions every thirty minutes, following a standard twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation.

Because bullet points are by nature short and general, they are both open to interpretation and dependent on an accompanying explanation. When orders have been delivered in PowerPoint form without a verbal explanation, it has resulted in confusion and frustration. In his book Fiasco, Thomas Ricks writes that while planning the invasion of Iraq, instead of issuing clear orders, General Tommy Franks relied on sending the PowerPoint decks he had cleared with Donald Rumsfeld to his subordinates, who were baffled as to how to interpret them.²

The viral potential for PowerPoint decks is a byproduct of their digital format, contributing to this confusion and frustration. As Dr. T.X. Hammes observed in his article “Dumb-dumb Bullets” in the Armed Forces Journal, “It is an accepted reality that PowerPoint presentations—particularly important ones—inevitably are disseminated to a much wider audience than those attending the brief. We have created huge staffs and they are all hungry for information. This means most of the people who actually see the brief get an incomplete picture of the ideas presented.”³

Upon further research into the military’s leadership strategy, I discovered that several branches of the armed services have contracted with the Walt Disney Company to provide leadership training.⁴ Disney, which enjoys high customer satisfaction and low employee turnover rates, bases its strategy on providing all of its employees, no matter the rank, with leadership opportunities, and fostering trust among the community.⁵ I found it ironic that the military was receiving...