Marginal Utility Mirror

In the Desert, You Can't Remember Your Name (4 October 2004)

2012-02-19T19:00:00.000-08:00

Casino Crawl

If you’ve been to an American discount store — Macfrugal’s, Factory 2-U, Dee & Dee, any of the thousands of 99-cent stores — then you’ve already experienced many of the dubious thrills of being a Las Vegas tourist. The garish, chintzy products, ranging from the theoretically practical (melon-ballers, liquid-soap dispensers) to the inexplicable (garlic shampoo, hair mayonnaise), and the overt rip-offs of familiar brands (why buy Sony when you can have Coby?) that you find at discount stores are analogous to the ersatz reconstructions of ritzier tourist destinations (Paris, Venice, New York, New Orleans), and the thin veneer of glitz over everything the Las Vegas Strip has to offer. And the gamble you take when you buy a package of “Blooper” T-shirts, hoping they’re not too irregular to wear, is not so different than taking a spin at the nickel slots.

The gaudy, overlit Strip is a monument to second-rate simulation and faux glamour. The displays are calculated and contrived to mark the point where over-the-top hits rock bottom; where perfect naiveté becomes indistinguishable from perfect cynicism. Both 99-cent stores and tourist Las Vegas make no effort to disguise their exuberant tawdriness; it seems to bespeak of a humble wish to please through sheer quantity and brute pandering. In the face of such generous profusion of stimuli, a critical attitude can seem like fussy, uptight caviling.

The downscale, vaguely disreputable shoppers one sees in the narrow, overstocked aisles at the discount store, are much like the people I find in the heart of tourist Las Vegas. One night, as I jostle my way up and across a pedestrian overpass at the intersection of the Strip and Flamingo Road (the latter named for the Flamingo casino, of course), thronged to capacity, buzzing with electricity and the flickering of enormous video screens, I pass the drifters — the desert rats, as they’re known out west, with their leathery tans and deeply etched squints from too much desert sun. Even at night they slit their eyes as if to protect them from the flashing lights. Desert Rats manage to hustle jobs distributing pornographic pamphlets printed with phone numbers of “dancers” and “massage artists”. I squeeze past the overweight women bulging out of their undersized clothes and the men in their customary “eveningwear” of Bermuda shorts and auto racing T-shirts, sipping fruity booze drinks through a straw from giant plastic vessels shaped like the Eiffel Tower or a pyramid or the Empire State Building, depending on where it was purchased.

Amid the tourists, I feel a press of momentum toward no particular destination, despite the superfluity of alleged attractions: the dancing fountains at the Bellagio, the erupting volcano at the Mirage, the pirate-ship battle at Treasure Island, the talking statues inside Caesars Palace. On the street, the cars barely move. And the pedestrians, when they’re not forced off of street level on to overpasses, clot the intersections, hardly trying to pick out traffic signals from the sea of flashing color. They stand in the road, oblivious, taking pictures while horns blare. But most of the drivers are in no hurry. Their glass-packs rumble, the bass booms. Periodically someone yells something incoherently celebratory out of the window, as if driving through the heart of these crowds and the glare of the casino lights makes them feel as though a TV camera has been pointed at them. Sometimes you see a bunch of people drinking on the back of a pickup truck, usually with California plates and tinted windows, and they’ll all start yelling, too, as soon as they feel they are being looked at.

Inside the casinos, which are surprisingly hard to tell apart considering their disparate themes — perhaps proving that as far as American tourists are concerned, there are no essential differences between, say, Ancient Egypt and contemporary New York — there are lines: lines for the buffets, lines for the steakhouses, where the prime rib could be had for under $10; lines for the casino cage and the change window where paper and plastic money is changed to coins and chips; and lines for the ATM (“the only thing paying out”, as one cheerful tourist from Massachusetts tells me). The only place where there is no line is at the slot machines, many featuring tie-ins to television shows. The faces of TV stars rotate on the simulated slot reels while the TV theme songs intermittently play, the music competing with the machine next to it.

With a cacophony of beeps and bells going off all around me, I wander confusedly through the aisles. Much as I do on my sojourns to Macfrugals, I try to reassure myself that I’m not like “them”. I’m not one of those credulous rubes being taken in by phony bargains and bad risks. Rather, I have some ironic reason for being there. Maybe, I think, that self-consciousness exempts me: If I know I’m being taken, I can’t still be a fool, right?

Both the 99-cent store and tourist Las Vegas are microcosms of American consumer capitalism at its most dubious. These are places where the unscrupulous rush to find the maximum profit margin among the desperate, the gullible, and the easily beguiled, and they make no effort to conceal it. What both offer is the chance, no matter how parodic or benighted, to participate in the luxurious joys of the abundance American society never tires of prescribing, the opulent lifestyle portrayed in entertainment and advertisements alike. When you’re selling hope to the hopeless, you can use the cheapest, most vulgar means to evoke their dreams and counterfeit their fulfillment. To go to Vegas is to immerse yourself in that vulgarity and the exploitation it trumpets. Every gleaming hotel tower, every simulacrum of an ancient wonder, was built not through some noble human aspiration for splendor or permanence, but for carefully harvesting the stupidity and cupidity of others. For no other reason than it exists: a fertile field of pure profit that never need lay fallow.

Every effort has been made to streamline the profit-making potential of people’s ignorance. Living here, you can enjoy the prosperity brought on by that harvest, but only in the form it necessarily takes, as quantity over quality, as lures and traps you know enough to selectively avoid. It’s easy to see why some choose to move here. There’s no income tax, there’s a superfluity of well-paid, low-skill jobs in the construction and service industries, and there’s an abundance of cheap, cheap houses — half the price for something twice the size of what one could get in nearby California. You have construction workers who move here to build houses for the other construction workers who have come to build the new hotels or work on the roads that are replacing the twenty-year-old roads. The roads are as methodically torn down as if their obsolescence had been as carefully planned as a make of automobile, soon to go out of style.

As a place where the most resonant tradition is an overwhelming rejection of moralistic meddling, Las Vegas seems to represent a chance at pure freedom. It’s a place that seems to refuse to make judgments and won’t ask questions of you when you suddenly arrive, no matter the hour. Everyone’s invited. And virtually no one’s been rooted in this land long enough to be snobbish about latecomers. The fervent wish of many Americans that maybe are stuck in bad jobs or are married to bad spouses or have perhaps done a few bad things, to “start clean”, forget their past, invent new and better selves for themselves, matches the valley’s own perpetual reconstruction and permanent growth, with no apparent compass to steer it and with no legislation to slow it down. People come to town to take advantage: of the weather, of the libertarian climate, of the affordability, of each other.

Because when you come to live in Las Vegas — lest you become one of the exploited — you’re likely to link arms with the exploiters and gleefully find opportunity in the weakness of others, expressed through their gambling or their insatiable appetite for junk. But all the while that corrosive attitude slowly corrupts your own tastes as it sharpens your sense of advantage. It bedazzles away your ability to see others as humans instead of marks. It erodes away an ethic of compassion. Before you know it, you have the self-serving ethics of a con man. An article in The New York Times on Las Vegas’s growth (“A Life as a Live! Nude! Girl! Has a Few Strings Attached,” 2 June 2004), offers a perfect example of the instrumental rationality the city encourages, through the story of Trixie, a stripper who “is generous about sharing with other dancers . . . the cold science of milking the customers for everything they’ve got. “It’s just like predators, just like in the rest of human nature. . . ,” she says, “You condition them like Pavlov’s dogs.” In other words, you can enjoy the tax-free life and home-owning ease that Las Vegas offers (a new house is built every 20 minutes on average, and even that can’t keep pace with demand), but you must also have no qualms about holding the leash of the slobbering tourists, or about having your own chain pulled.

Getting In On the Action

Gambling is as good a place as any to turn when you’ve lost faith in the idea that your society rewards merit, and one can only muster a belief in the lucky chance. At the craps table, impotence strangely transforms into omnipotence. As I wait for the shooter to throw the dice, listening to the stickman repeat his mantra of proposition bets — “Your C and E’s, your any seven, the horn, the hard ways” — I start to think the outcome will be affected by how rigidly I adhere to my ritual: first sipping my complimentary gin and tonic, then taking a drag of my cigarette and returning it to the ashtray but without letting it settle in a notch, then touching my glasses, and then waiting, taking care never to look the shooter in the face and never to look at the dice when they land.

Anyone who gets seriously involved with gambling knows that for the gambler, it’s not about money or even the feeling of winning. It’s about the “action”, which is the ability to make bets and keep them perpetually unresolved. The more bets you can keep open-ended, the more action you’re seeing. Action reduces the world to a sublimely manageable scale: the next card, the next roll, the next spin of the wheel. Action means things are in motion, but they’re not going anywhere in particular, and that’s just fine. When you have action, you can’t think of the past or the future, only the present moment matters, intensely. As long as you have action, things matter and apathy is impossible.

Beside me a shriveled man, breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank on wheels, writes down every number thrown in a little spiral notebook; he is “clocking the dice”, searching for patterns. Mathematically, this is insane, but at the table, it seems reasonable enough; it’s proactive, he’s just looking for an edge. “Six, corner six, no field six, comes go to six.” I’m off-and-on my come bet for $34 with $30 more still working. Suddenly my most meaningless actions have great portent. Suddenly I am shaping reality with the power of my superstitious thought. Ordinarily, I’m burdened with a sense that nothing I can do matters, that in an increasingly complex world where any individual’s contribution toward solving a problem won’t even register, even if it’s not making the problem inadvertently worse. This creeping nihilism calls the very notion of belief into question, and without belief, one is paralyzed.

At the craps table, however, I forget all that, the same way those thousands who’ve always come to Las Vegas to try to forget their dead-end situations of no options and no future to invest any belief in. For a few escapist hours, I have important options (Bet the Pass or the Don’t Pass? Place the numbers or play the Field?) and I can act decisively, and my decisions contribute directly to how much longer I can stay in the action, and for those hours, action is all there is in the world. When you have limited options, be it from a lack of education or ambition, or the absence of a support system, familial or communal, and you are trained most of your life to be a passive, obedient sponge, whether at the workplace, where you’re expected to do no more than follow procedures, or at leisure, watching television shows that cue you when to laugh and cry, the idea of taking action, of being able to do something, anything, that’s meaningful can take on mythic proportion.

But action is not activity, it’s always something you have and never something you do. You can’t generate it yourself, and it can’t be sustained. Action allows you to feel what it’s like to be active rather than passive. It offers the fantasy of significance without ever really being significant. Except to the casinos, which don’t care at all about action but care very much about money. The gaming industry knows precisely, with verifiable certainty, how many pennies it is going to make for every dollar wagered, and there’s nothing romantic or whimsical about these calculations. Its profits could be measured with the relentless exactitude of a pendulum clock. Despite the celebrity of certain casino builders — Bugsy Siegal, Donald Trump, Steve Wynn — the casino business is not a business for dreamers or visionaries. In reality, gaming is the most zero-sum of industries; there is no win-win, there is no fair trade. The laws of probability are simply leveraged ruthlessly against those too ignorant or ornery or desperate to abide them. With mathematical certainty I should know deep down that the house wins, and I lose; if I can believe in nothing else, I should try to believe in that.

Where the Streets Have No Name

Out in the valley’s foothills, in Henderson, Nevada, the rapidly expanding suburb to the southeast of Las Vegas, it feels like I could be anywhere, or nowhere — like an airport, minus the liminality. There are no historical markers, no monuments, no indigenous plants or trees, nothing that you haven’t seen somewhere else but with more contingencies. Without the shopping centers, the apartment complexes, the tract housing, the casinos, there’s literally nothing; no history out here, just a “now” that never ends.

The ersatz glamour and pandering gaudiness of the Strip seem far away, even though you can still see the row of tall hotel towers from the newly built Interstate 215, nearing completion after several years of construction. At the most recently finished exits of that road, at Windmill Lane and Eastern Avenue, housing developments and retail strips have sprung up as fast as they could be built, and the few vacant lots have enormous signs driven deep into their rocky, inhospitable soil, advertising the coming construction. On this apparent blank slate it seems as if humankind can write its dreams, unhampered by anything but the limits of its own imagination and technology. Perhaps this has been the goal of American history all along, to achieve the tabula rasa promised to colonists by the idea of a “New World”. But surveying the rows of identical houses, replicating with viral efficiency, I wonder how such a dream could have amounted to this.

Before the highway was built, before corporations began taking advantage of what the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce Web site calls a “pro-business environment in which companies do not pay corporate income, franchise, inventory, or unitary taxes”, the idea that anyone would live out in these hills was unthinkable. Located in the hottest desert in North America, this land constitutes a vast emptiness, devoid of all but the most rugged vegetation — low-growing shrubs, cacti and yuccas — as one finds in Death Valley, the shimmering desert just north of town. But now, as the Chamber of Commerce Web site points out, “Every hour, another two acres of Las Vegas land are developed for commercial or residential use”, and “developers of master-planned communities . . . are running out of new street names”.

It takes the full breadth of humankind’s scientific powers to make living out here even conceivable, and perhaps this is a justification in and of itself for doing it, the same way Mount Everest needs to be climbed simply because it’s there. Also, it’s a perfect place for people who regard weather and nature as obstacles to overcome and eliminate, rather than a phenomena to experience. Seasons? Who needs them. Weather does have the unfortunate habit of upsetting plans, just as the natural world has the tendency to intrude upon us at inopportune moments. One of the achievements of modernity is to make nature something we can experience on a tourist basis, on our terms, when we feel up to the aesthetic appreciation we’ve come to feel it deserves. We’ll go to Vail when interested in experiencing winter, we’ll go hiking when we want to think about how pleasant trees can be. Otherwise, we’ll live in Henderson, Nevada, Phoenix, Arizona, or San Jose, California, or any of the other similar sprawl towns that have emerged from the desert in the past few decades.

This kind of landscape constitutes a conservative’s dream. It’s a perfect, airtight marketplace where nothing intrudes with the merciless operation of the market: no local traditions, no environmental concerns, no inclement weather, no government restrictions, no sense of community solidarity. It’s a perfect capitalist laboratory. With such rapid growth, no political constituency has ever had a chance to stabilize; people are overwhelmed or diluted into incoherence before they come to know themselves, let alone identify their own potential power. With little threat of community action, businessmen and politicians can act with impunity, and cooperate with one another in schemes with nothing but the bottom line to answer to. Out here, in the featureless, anonymous desert, inside any of its casinos, all identically beguiling, uniformed employees make the soft count, dumping ten-gallon buckets full of quarters into enormous counting machines while others push wheeled steel cages, full of drab metal boxes stuffed full of money, while still others present to men wearing suits the carbon copies of the receipts that account for it all. Similar people in similar uniforms serve the food in the franchise restaurants, work the registers in the chain clothing stores, stock the shelves of the twenty-four hour convenience stores, wash the SUVs, and sell them. Here, the people all wear name tags but the names are meaningless; behind every uniform there is only the unnamed and faceless profit making of corporate enfranchisement.

In suburbs like Henderson it’s easy to see what results when the ruthless rationality of the marketplace goes unchecked. The tract housing multiplies, chain stores rush in to rival other chain stores, and the dreams expressed through small businesses or individual entrepreneurship are quietly snuffed. Without anything to restrain it, the psychological compulsion to be always new, the very motor of consumer capitalism with its cycles of fashion and planned obsolescence, is accelerated to the point of absurdity.

Out here where the tourists don’t come, you might expect to find a completely different set of priorities embodied in a wholly different architecture, and a rhythm to life directly opposed to the bustling impatience and endless exhortations to be excited that you see on the Strip. The Strip suggests a squalid decadence, waste for its own sake. And at first glance, the bland homogeneity of Henderson seems to express a kind of streamlined pragmatism. With the tidy concision of a geometric proof, the mixture of new homes and new chain restaurants and grocery stores and enormous parking lots and twenty-four-hour drug stores seem to express the American wish for a quiet life, padded everywhere by unceasing convenience and unsullied cleanliness; the kind of life where you don’t have to talk to anyone outside your family unless that someone is serving you. You can float above the fray, cocoon yourself away from the dog-eat-dog world that Trixie the stripper talks about. The entire desert community is without reference to anything that’s not man-made, and all the nature you see, the tiny, carefully landscaped lawns (which must be watered twice daily to survive) and artfully positioned trees (usually to maximize shade for automobiles) is man-made, engineered, designed, and entirely liberated from the desert’s ecology, with something of the same tactfulness that Target lavishes on a soap dish.

Every few weeks, whenever a new shopping center opens, one more interstate exit stretches further out into the pristine suburb, I feel obliged to go, even though the stores are all basically the same — there might be a Macaroni Grill instead of an Olive Garden, or an Albertsons instead of a Smith’s supermarket, a Borders instead of a Barnes and Noble. But the stores themselves aren’t important; it is more the feeling of having virgin territory to explore that matters. The parking lots are half finished, and if you aren’t careful you could drive right off the edge of the concrete into the desert. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single piece of chewed gum stuck to the pavement anywhere. Even the dumpsters around back emanate a halo of freshness. The rows of SUVs, in parking spots — actually designed to accommodate them — gleam in the sun; I catch blinding reflections off the tinted windows as I scurry for the air-conditioning inside. By comparison, the shopping centers closer to town feel moribund, antiquated, once they’ve become merely functional and are no longer brand new. My fellow residents of Henderson seem to agree. They seem to flock with me to the new centers simply because they are new, the same way we all check out the new casinos when they are built, even though we all agree they are all basically the same.

Though they aspire to a kind of contempt of the tourists who underwrite much of the valley’s growth, the permanent residents of Henderson actually mirror them in mentality, as they are tourists in their everyday lives, seeking the same blend of arbitrary novelty and comfortable familiarity, the same diverse shopping opportunities. Both are blithely untroubled by the lack of a meaningful or authentic context for their actions, both are happily without anything in their environment to attach them to concrete, determined reality, to a sense of necessity — both float in simulacra, technologically separated from nature, whether it’s through elaborately executed reconstructions of fantasy landscapes or through the simple efficacy of air-conditioning. If there is a difference, it’s that Hendersonites seem to side with the House instead of searching for action. They prefer the dreary certainties of a convenient life to a life of dreams and surprises.

The citizens suit themselves perfectly to the chain-store universe: no obstacles impel them to be creative or to seek solace in a community. Nothing leads them beyond themselves, and they are all too happy to fend for themselves. After all, cooperation means inevitable compromise, and that just isn’t all that comfortable.

Las Vegas grows and continues to grow — a giant, thirsty weed reaching farther into the desert — because it can, because our economy fetishizes growth for its own sake. But out in the foothills you can see where the building must stop, you see that the growth must end, and then you wonder what will all those home-owning construction workers do then? Where will they go to next? Or will they just tear it all down and start over? Whatever they do, no one is likely to stop them.

Orwell essay (18 Dec 2008)

2012-02-19T18:41:00.001-08:00

It’s a shame that the word Orwellian now signifies totalitarian surveillance and remodeling reality with lies. Judging by the persona George Orwell establishes in his essays, of which Harcourt has recently issued two new collections, Orwellian could easily have come to mean a bluff impatience with pretentiousness, or the tendency to evoke the ordinary person’s point of view as a defense of one’s own tenacious positions, or the no-nonsense voice he achieves by preferring to risk overstatement rather than waste words.

The two new volumes are a welcome and long overdue overhaul of the earlier A Collection of Essays, which now seems skimpy and inadequate in comparison. By including more of his shorter efforts, reviews and occasional journalistic pieces, editor George Packer, a New Yorker staff writer, gives a more complete picture of Orwell’s preoccupations while making palpable the pressures he wrote under. Not only was he sickly—he was wounded in the throat during his Spanish Civil War stint and long struggled with tuberculosis, which would kill him at age 47—but he was entirely engrossed by the Second World War from its origins to its aftermath.

His acute awareness of the moral crisis into which it cast Western civilization colors every word he wrote, whether he was eviscerating antiwar novels and the politics of literary poetasters, trying to rationalize the popularity of obscene popular culture, or assessing his own war experiences both during the Blitz and as a soldier abroad. Reading these essays, you always have the sense that for Orwell, the end of civilization was palpable, that a fog had settled on the world that he and his peers had all taken for granted, and when it lifted, they would find themselves in unknowable circumstances, wherein no received truths, no former certainties about the inherent goodness of human nature and the benevolence of technological progress, could be taken for granted.

In compiling the two volumes, Packer smartly divides Orwell’s essays into narrative pieces (Facing Unpleasant Facts) and critical pieces (All Art Is Propaganda). This useful arrangement keeps the confrontational bluster of his criticism separate from the occasional sanctimony and grandiosity in the autobiographical material to reveal the underlying consistency of his thinking throughout. The critical essays are anchored in his belief that first-hand experience of misery, war, and despotism is virtually mandatory for a writer to have any credibility in an age such as he wrote in: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot,” he notes in “Inside the Whale”. In his narrative essays, he is often out to demonstrate his own bona fides on this point and show readers just how hot the fires he has known were.

Calling the essays in Facing Unpleasant Facts “narrative” is something of a misnomer, however. It’s not as though he’s telling stories, except in well-known pieces like “Shooting an Elephant”, and even then he is often baldly interested in illustrating a point. Orwell is not an essayist who is content to describe an incident that’s redolent with metaphoric possibility and let readers work it out if they choose. Generally he comes right out and states his purpose, as in “A Hanging”, when he declares, “It is curious but until that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” Even so, what he relates evokes much more than the conclusions he draws or the motives for writing that he shares. He is enamored and mystified enough by things as they are, in and of themselves, that in describing them, he conveys some of that ineluctable mystery that allows human life to persist in the face of wrenching misery and innumerable examples of our unrelenting capacity for cruelty toward our own species.

Rather than tell open-ended tales, Orwell does what essayists since Montaigne have always done—use scraps of personal experience to illustrate concise conclusions, which then are presented as though they are being discovered as the essayist is writing. Whether discussing secondhand bookstores, English cooking, or Luftwaffe bombs raining on London, Orwell will make a sharp point based on a personal hunch and then try to disavow anything unusual in his observation, hoping it will pass as something that would have occurred to anyone with open eyes. He reveals the essence of his method when in his essay about Marrakech he states plainly an attitude that is implicit throughout the book: “I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact.”

Of course, the facts one chooses to point to, the details we decide to acknowledge, are usually comment enough. The essays make plain that Orwell relishes describing corpses, stenches, and squalor, even if he usually refrains from becoming sensationalistic about it. Such things, clearly, seemed indicative to him of the world as it was. But they more clearly indicate what Orwell thinks his audience doesn’t know or accept about their world. “To survive you have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself,” he notes in “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, but the “intelligentsia”—possibly Orwell’s favorite pejorative—prefers not to understand this. “The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down,” Orwell says of his own observation, “shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.”

Considering how concerned Orwell was with clear expression, it’s tricky to write about his work without lapsing into a pastiche of it. You want to follow the guidelines he lays out in his famous “Politics and the English Language”, particularly since he is uncharacteristically optimistic about the chances of saving the language from its devolution into Newspeak. Generally, he’s successful in being his own best example of he thinks writing should be—free of slippery, lazy phrases and showy literary flourishes.

That’s not to suggest his essays are free of rhetorical figure; rather when he deploys a metaphor, you can visualize it immediately and its meaning is always unmistakable. And when he shifts to abstractions, it’s usually with an air of apology. He was constitutionally allergic to all forms of orthodoxy, which he viewed as inherently indicative of the absence of thought. “To write in plain, vigorous language,” he writes in “The Prevention of Literature”, “one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

Thus wary of insufficient boldness, Orwell often favors provocative hyperbole and isn’t afraid to contradict himself, sometimes within the span of a few phrases. He often seems to argue with himself, as if he had too much momentum to go back and cross out something ultimately insupportable. Instead he tries to reason with whatever side of himself could have committed such an idea to paper. What results from all this is an occasionally lumpy but always lively prose with a blunt matter-of-fact rhythm that’s hard to argue with and extremely tempting to imitate.

In his criticism, Orwell’s main concern is to avoid coming across as an effete intellectual, or more particularly, a member of the “pansy left” that he never tires of excoriating. By that epithet, he meant what we might now in the US dub the Kucinich left—pacifists enamored of their own self-righteous ideals and unwilling to recognize the impracticability of peace in the face of undeniable threats. Describing his own era’s left intelligentsia in “England Your England”, Orwell writes, “There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in the position of power.”

Among the critical essays, Orwell’s “No, Not One”, a caustic review of a novel by Alex Comfort, is his most emphatic dismissal of kneejerk pacifism. “Pacifism is only a considerable force in places where people feel themselves very safe,” he declares, arguing that it is tantamount to being “pro-Nazi.” Ultimately, Orwell insists pacifism occurs only on those who “have no experience” of violence and can’t understand its inevitability—a species he typifies as “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism.”

Elsewhere he claims that “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” So vigorous is Orwell in the defense of necessary violence—that “good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up”—that he ends up sounding like a precursor of Colonel Jessup, Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men who apoplectically forwarded “You need me on that wall” line of logic. At times, Orwell seems so flustered with the pansy pacifists he seems to imagine are reading him skeptically, you expect him to declare, “You can’t handle the truth!” (It’s no wonder Orwell was a popular name for neo-conservatives to bandy about in the run-up to the Iraq war; Christopher Hitchens obviously borrowed freely from him.)

Orwell was just as skeptical of technological optimists as he was of pacifists. Of course, 1984makes plain the degree to which he thought technology could be abused by totalitarian power, but skepticism of the benevolence of progress recurs continually in his essays. Though appreciative of modernism, he rejects the idea of literary progress and defends writers who have fallen out of fashion. And in his essay about H.G. Wells, Orwell outlines his own loss of faith in science, which was just as useful to the Nazis as it was for the rest of the world. “The aeroplane,” he writes, “was looked forward to as a civilizing influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs.”

In Orwell’s view, Wells was unable to grasp the same things that eluded the pansy left: “He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.” That’s Orwell at his most pessimistic, certain that Western Civilization has exhausted itself and the high literature it nurtured, and apprehensive about what would rise in its stead.

Orwell’s purpose, then, is rummage through the cultural flotsam and jetsam that has already implausibly managed to survive in search of essential human qualities that will remain when the Götterdämmerung finally concludes. In “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool” Orwell writes, “In reality, there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is ‘good.’… Ultimately there is no test of literary merit but survival, which is itself merely an index to majority opinion.” But he doesn’t scorn majority opinion; he regards it with surprising respect. One of Orwell’s most appealing tendencies as a critic is that he never presumes to improve our tastes. He dispenses with aesthetic appreciation in favor of sociological questions, and he rarely seeks to justify his own preferences. He is pleased to come across as the common man’s representative, delivering common sense to a snob intelligentsia whose contrarian posturing has left it twisted it up with “humbug.”

His interest in what has survived leads him to take popular tastes for what they are, and to take popular culture seriously. In his essay on boy’s weeklies—cheap magazines with formulaic stories for teenagers—he argues that “people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important.” Since what we consume directly affects what we end up believing about the world, Orwell wants to figure out what sort of beliefs derive from “vulgar” popular tastes. What’s striking is that he assumes these beliefs will ultimately be decent and good, whereas the morals of art that fails to win wide approval are inherently suspect.

In “Benefit of Clergy”, his essay on Salvador Dali, he contemptuously dismisses the view that “the artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people.” But he is eager to absolve illustrator Donald McGill, an artist who specialized in ribald postcards of women bending over, and Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller, whose apathy and obscenity Orwell seems to find irresistible. To Orwell, both McGill’s and Miller’s work testify to the enduring Sancho Panza in all of us, that self-serving side of ourselves that prefers survival to heroism or virtue, that would have us slip passively through our particular era by being true to an aspect of our nature that transcends all eras. Enjoying that side of ourselves vicariously through dirty postcards and smutty novels, we reserve the energy it takes for us to live up to civilized society’s stringent demands—as Orwell insists, we generally do.

Whereas Orwell sympathizes with the earthy weaknesses of common folk and excuses the culture that derives from them, he has no such sympathy for the pampered intellectual class. In a review of a Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Orwell goes so far as to declare that “the common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men.” As usual, Orwell posits a kind of instinctual goodness that comes from a simpler, more earthy life. But ordinary people, unlike animals and intellectuals, retain an acute sense of right and wrong. “The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped,” he writes. Though this sometimes leads to common people preferring simplistic fiction, it also testifies to their moral clarity, while the moral compass of most intellectuals, in Orwell’s view, wass completely askew.

In the essay about Tolstoy’s condemnation of Shakespeare, Orwell writes, “Tolstoy was not a saint, but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly.” Shakespeare, who embodies good badness as much as any writer, appeals to the “normal human being” who simply “wants life on earth to continue.” But saintly reformers like Tolstoy (and Gandhi) would prefer to coerce us into the Kingdom of Heaven, and in that attitude, Orwell insists, lies egotism and the “appetite for power.” These are the people who “are convinced of the wickedness of both armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances,” he writes. “They will, if they can, get inside [the normal person’s] brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars.” In other words, the Kucinich left is equivalent to the Thought Police, though it is generally too hypocritical to recognize it.

In general, Orwell forgives and even champions bad art, obscenity, and quietism if it seems honest. Intellectuals, though, are dishonest about their aims, which they obfuscate by abusing language; their ambitions, which they cloak by abjuring the more explicit forms of violence; and their appreciation of popular culture, as they seek to shun their connection to ordinary people. This Orwell finds unforgivable. He assumes that anything the intellectuals hate must have some redeeming qualities. So he’s willing to hold his nose and dig into a bête noire of the Left like Rudyard Kipling, a writer who despite being “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” has enough sense to recognize that “a humanitarian is always a hypocrite.” Since Kipling has the good imperialist’s sense of responsibility, according to Orwell he is able to “create telling phrases” and become a “good bad poet”—that is, one who grasps universal experiences and renders it in easily remembered language. Kipling “dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.”

Orwell devotes an entire essay to “good bad books”—“the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished”—but in a sense all of his literary criticism deals with the subject and the messages that redeem whatever vulgar way they happen to be expressed. As the collection’s title suggests, Orwell saw art as essentially propaganda; “good bad” works had the advantage of propagandizing for humble and obvious ideas rather than dangerous, overambitious ones. Good bad books are written by “natural novelists… who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste.”

Good badness thus works as obscenity does in McGill’s postcards, crudely capturing “ordinary” sentiments we all can recognize in ourselves even if we are not quick to acknowledge them. This, for Orwell, ultimately explains which works survive. Like Kipling, good bad writers are unafraid to appeal straightforwardly to a common sensibility that we all are presumed to share, which allows them to survive when more intentionally iconoclastic work ceases to shock and fades away. Most famously, Orwell credits Dickens with the same staying power: Though Dickens is irredeemably bourgeois, he expressed “in a comic, simplified, and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man.”

Appreciating avant-garde art, championing utopian crusades, sneering at plebian entertainments: these are available only to a pampered leisure class. Orwell instead romanticizes an emotional Spartanism that’s open to everyone. “Happiness hitherto has been a byproduct, and for all we know it may always remain so,” he writes in “Can Socialists Be Happy?” The reason to fight for Socialism is not to establish heaven on earth or test the mettle of one’s own commitment but to achieve “human brotherhood,” which he defines as “a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.”

Orwell’s essays testify to the notion that any effort to accomplish that appealingly straightforward ideal will be threatened by intellectual arrogance. But they also remind us that better than our best intentions is our inescapable nature, our shared ordinariness, which will always have the potential to redeem us all if only we will embrace it.

Book Arbitrage (2 July 2008)

2012-02-19T18:39:00.002-08:00

On a shopping-friendly holiday like Memorial Day or Labor Day, when thrift stores were open and likely to have sales, we would travel to an unfamiliar city, with a few empty milk crates in the car and full day to waste. Armed with a page torn out of a pay-phone phone book (this was back when there still were pay phones, with phone books in the booths in bolted-down binders) and a map from the automobile club, we would devise our plan of attack and chart out a route for hitting as many thrift stores as we could as quickly as we could: the big, national names—St. Vincent de Paul, Goodwill, Deseret Industries, Salvation Army, Savers, Value Village—as well as the small-time charities for local hospitals and food banks and woman’s shelters and the like. Sometimes there would be library-sponsored book sales mixed in. We didn’t discriminate. For our purposes, sheer volume was of the essence.

Though we’d give over entire days to spending our money at these charity stores, we didn’t regard ourselves as philanthropists. We saw ourselves more as a clever criminal gang or, if we were less inclined to romanticize ourselves, as savvy arbitrageurs, seizing upon a loophole we uncovered and exploiting it to the farthest degree we could manage. Our goal was straightforward: Get a trove of books to resell at the independent bookstores in the college town where we lived, amassing store credit and magically transmuting such dreck as Barbara Kingsolver and Tony Hillerman novels into the gold we wanted, the abstruse social-theory texts that looked so imposing and impressive on a budding graduate student’s bookshelf.

So in our blitzkrieg assault on a town’s thrift stores, we didn’t bother with the clothes, shoes, or bric-a-brac. We were interested in books, and only books. Working methodically, shelf by shelf through whatever chockablock collection of battered, secondhand bookcases the store had marshaled to house its collection, we would pull out any title that appeared to have value. We coveted trade-size paperbacks the most; we’d buy any of those, particularly since they were usually priced the same as the pocket-size ones and were generally contemporary enough to make for easy resale. Hardcovers were less attractive because they were inexplicably more expensive and impossible to resell unless they were from some collectible niche or about an unusual subject.

It doesn’t take long to train your eye to spot worthy spines—after a few book-scouting trips, you would start to hone in on certain shapes, certain fonts, seemingly arbitrary characteristics that experience had taught us made a book sellable. Often you didn’t need to know the first thing about the title or the author to know that it could be resold.

But the bottom line was typically price. If a thrift store was having a book sale—10 paperbacks for a dollar, maybe—we’d lower our standards accordingly. We would take a chance on some books that might not sell, that might linger in our crates for a while and frustrate and embarrass us. These were books that you wouldn’t want people thinking you actually owned sincerely—Tom Clancy paperbacks, diet books, books from the Left Behind series, that sort of thing. You didn’t want people thinking you actually liked this sort of book.

Sometimes, though we would find a book we intended to keep for ourselves; this was the most triumphant disintermediating achievement of all. This is how I got my copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, at Speedway Outlet in Tucson, Arizona, and an Everyman edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela Volume II at a Savers in Flagstaff.

On these missions, as the day would wear on, our crates would quickly fill up. We took great care to keep our scores separate—we were competing with each other as well as with the bookstores we intended to eventually sell them to. When the crates were close to overflowing and the sun was about to set, we would head home and begin strategizing for the second half of our book-arbitrage scheme.

You wouldn’t think that taking a box of used books to an independent bookstore would be fraught with anxiety. For most people—for ordinary people—this is a once-a-year activity at most, a satisfying moment perhaps of a successful purging, a species of what New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker has called unconsumption. But for us, it was a tactical battle with a wily opponent, the bookstores’ purchasing agent, who was, we imagined, trained to try to thwart renegade book arbitrageurs like ourselves by stonewalling, stalling, or low-balling us on our hard-earned haul.

So we made very precise attack plans, organized the books in our crates carefully to foster the illusion that the stuff throughout was consistently sellable. It was necessary that the sequence of books the buyer would see be well-orchestrated, telling a particular tale about our own curatorial tastes, that they could be trusted implicitly. We wanted to lull the buyer into a comfort zone, build her confidence in our crates, so that she might give the benefit of the doubt to an unfamiliar title, or take a few books merely out of having fallen into a rhythm of pulling out keepers. Nothing was more humiliating than when a buyer passed on what you brought and you had to carry a nearly full crate out of the store. Bearing this burden of shame signaled an open, outright rejection that we felt at a surprisingly personal level. Those crates embodied the deliberate exercise of our judgment, and when they failed to convince, we could only wonder whether we had lost our touch.

Some stores’ buyers were tougher than others, and this led to the establishment of an indie-bookstore hierarchy in our minds. The tougher the buyers were, the scarcer the store credit would be and the more likely it was the store would have special, expensive treasures we yearned for. (Could we have simply bought these books? Well, we were earning a graduate student stipend, which hovers somewhere around minimum wage.) We’d start with the more selective stores, and as our crate dwindled, we’d bring the dregs into Bookman’s, a statewide chain with low standards but which offered notoriously low amounts of credit. And Bookman’s selection was sizeable, but stocked mainly with what we knew were the dregs.

While the bookstores would sometimes quote a cash figure for the books they wanted to buy from us, they always offered far more in store credit. Invariably, we took the credit. We had a lofty notion that we were in this for the knowledge—for more books—not for money. In our rejection of cash, we would even semi-self-deprecatingly quote a line that Joan Didion quoted in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “the hippies scorn money—they call it bread”.

The problem with cash is that it immediately shifted the terms of the game, and how who was winning and who was losing was assessed. When it was a matter of who ended up with the better books, we believed we were the clear victors. I took away all three volumes of Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism for a hodgepodge of forgettable contemporary fiction that I salvaged from a Mormon thrift store: Me 1, Book Haven 0. But looked at from a more bottom-line oriented perspective, it was not so flattering. The bookstores was getting to mark up by at least 100 percent the books we brought them, after hours and hours of unpaid labor, and their employees got to spend their days reading books and judging the likes of us while we were out there doing the grunt work. Our uncompensated labor helped kept their store going, and all we got out of it were some esoteric scraps. And when the culture of independent bookstores were celebrated, none of that glory redounded to us. We had already pitted ourselves against them in our hearts, and we envied them too.

Because book arbitrage had become a demented hobby for us, we didn’t mind being paid in books—that translated into prestige with the right sort of audience. And we enjoyed the work for its own sake, and for the comforting illusions about ourselves we drew from it. But eventually, when we were no longer in the cloistered economy of graduate school and had to make our way in the real world, we discovered that unread books on the shelf don’t offer much sustenance and no one is nearly as impressed with our collections as we were with ourselves. Then the collections slowly get dismantled and sold, for real, and all the chimerical gains from our arbitrage are wiped out for good.

Google and the Production of Curiosity (1 Feb 2012)

2012-02-02T13:12:00.001-08:00

On Twitter, PJ Rey resurrected this August 2010 op-ed by William Gibson that has new currency given the hullaballoo about Google's privacy-policy changes. Gibson argues that Google is an unanticipated form of artificial intelligence, "a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products." But this description sounds less like artificial intelligence and more like Marx's notion of the general intellect. Anticipating the intensification of technology, Marx claimed that machines would eventually subsume "the process of social life" and integrate it as a form of productivity.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

This is pretty obscure even by Marx's standards, but autonomist Marxists (Negri, Lazzaurato, Virno) have extrapolated from this a definition of general intellect that embraces, as Virno puts it, "formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’." Because of the membranous nature of the general intellect, when harnessed and integrated with capital, it can recuperate all social behavior as "immaterial" production -- enriching the valence of signs, producing affects, etc. -- it means that "even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into labouring task." That is, our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production. The general intellect is the sum of all that information circulation.

Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital.

The consequences of that are profound. Our curiosity is no longer a sign of our leisure; it's an enormously important economic factor. To a degree this has always been true. Our willingness to pay attention to things is at the root of consumer demand. But it is now far more productive of informational goods in and of itself, thanks to ubiquitous online surveillance and data-storage capabilities. Much of the way we express our human curiosity can now be recorded and fed into algorithms and plotted on graphs of connections to generate more information, stimulate more curiosity, produce more demand. That's why, as Gibson points out, Google's Eric Schmidt claimed that people "want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Google doesn't end lines of inquiry; it gives users momentum. The point of Google is to try to keep you Googling. Not only does that make their ad space more valuable, but it adds value to their search products; it thickens the membrane. As Gibson notes, "In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."

What that means is that Google's instantiation of the general intellect captures not merely human cooperation and collaboration, as the theorists tend to emphasize when discussing post-Fordist production and the productivity of interpersonal "virtuosity". It also captures and perhaps even emphasizes the lateral surveillance aspect of sociality -- each implementing control on everyone else, recording what they do and annotating it. Human curiosity is intensified and directed at one another. The general intellect becomes a giant spying machine. (Facebook is probably a more explicit example of that than Google, but Google seems more powerful as the received source of answers, the index of approved information.)

Gibson notes how Google makes personal identity a productive factor, a kind of capital it owns. This makes it something we are therefore stuck with. What we have done and would like to have forgotten is part of Google's "fixed capital" that they are loath to relinquish, despite Schmidt's suggestion that teens be issued fresh identities when they become adults. (Gibson ridicules "the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs.") Instead we must adapt our understanding of who we are and what identity consists of. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, before launching into a discussion of the ideological usefulness of the term network, Boltanski and Chiapello discuss our demand for the intelligibility of shared social values.

Young cadres in particular feel a need clearly to identify the new forms of success and the new rules of the game in the economic world, in order to know how to conduct themselves and prepare their children. This demand for intelligibility exerts significant pressure for greater explanation and formalization of the rules of conduct, which will then guide action. In fact, the people tend to conform to these emergent new rules, if only because they confer meaning on what would otherwise merely seem like an arbitrary proliferation of ad hoc mechanisms and locally convenient improvisations.

I don't know about that being a "fact," but it seems plausible that social media have taught us all something about "locally convenient improvisations," for good and ill. And the explosion of Facebook and Google into our lives has disrupted the old version of intelligibility -- prompting new rules that are consistent with the new form of capitalism these media are driving.

So our common sense understanding of what it means to have a self is changing under this pressure. We no longer have the luxury of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals who make themselves as an expression of their iron internal will. Now we have our identities explicitly shaped (or maybe even dictated) by our contingent place in social networks and we can't hide that fact from ourselves. We have to relieve the dissonance of our data trail by surrendering the prerogative of claiming to be self-created and learn to love the self the data tells us we are or should be at any particular moment. We let Google tell us what to do next.

Authenticity Issues and the New Intimacies (31 Jan 2012)

2012-02-02T13:11:00.001-08:00

Tom Slee recently began posting about MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle's recent book Alone Together. Turkle, in some ways, is the chief theorist of digital dualism; her books The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) helped set the terms for talking about virtual selves in cyberspace as projections of some real self that exists outside it and is deleteriously affected by these interactions. Those books are more than a little dated, but in a way that makes their arguments more striking. Just substitute Facebook for MUD in Life on the Screen; after all, what is Facebook if not a MUD in which you create and play the character of yourself.

Turkle's basic point was that computers change the people who use them (they are not neutral tools). Users begin to transfer programming metaphors to their interactions with people and psychological metaphors to the behavior of machines, and so on. This leakage between our conceptions of humans and nonhuman objects for Turkle threatens the integrity of the category of the human; reading her books sometimes feels like reading the anti-Donna Haraway. (I won't even try to relate Turkle to OOO.) Here's a typical declaration, from the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition off The Second Self:

we stand on the boundary between the physical and virtual. And increasingly, we stand on the boundary between worlds we understand through transparent algorithm and worlds we understand by manipulating opaque simulation.

That boundary seems very important to Turkle; her main concern often seems to be holding on to a firm definition of the "real" and bemoaning the encroachment of simulations on the preserves of genuine human experience. This deeply conservative standpoint stems from her theoretical grounding in Freud. In Alone Together she declares (in a quote Slee also highlights), "I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. Both by temperament and profession, I place high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity." But what can be the basis for determining what is authentic? It can often seem arbitrary, even in Turkle's own anecdotes. (Her psychoanalytical background is surely what makes Turkle so interested in stories, the aspect of Alone Together that Slee focuses on in his post. The tendency of her examples to undermine themselves or dissolve into ambiguity is part of what he finds compelling about them.)

It often appears that Turkle is working with a preconceived, somewhat ahistorical notion of what identity and subjectivity must consist of, which leads her to take a condemnatory tone toward what her research unearths about human-machine hybridity. This tone tends to curtail the analysis -- serve as its own conclusion. She can come across as a "What about the children?!" concern troll, deploying all sorts of rhetorical questions to try to persuade us of the psychological harm of technology's current drift. ("In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?" "Are we comfortable with virtual environments that propose themselves not as places for recreation but as new worlds to live in?" "Why am I talking to a robot? and Why do I want this robot to like me?")

Turkle sometimes seems to worry that "real" identity is being thwarted by online sociality, which fosters some sort of inauthentic identity. But I think the concern with authenticity is an expression of nostalgia for a period where it was easier to believe that one had total control over the development of one's personality and that identity came from within. Networked sociality has made that much harder to sustain, and the ideological anchors for identity have also begun to change with the times (hence the legitimization of the data self). Authenticity is a pressing personal issue now for many not because it has been suddenly lost (it's always already irrevocable), but because it has become one of the terms in the accounting system for a different form of mediated selfhood. "Authenticity" is another metric in the attention economy, measuring how believable one is to oneself in the process of broadcasting oneself. I'd expect that soon "authenticity" will be a literal metric, measuring the data trail one produces at one point of time with some earlier point to detect the degree of drift. (I know I should probably spin that out into an analysis of Lana Del Rey, but I'm thinking I'll just let that ship sail without me.)

In Alone Together, Turkle fuses a section about sociable robots with a section about social media usage to basically argue this: social media accustom us to instrumentalized friendship, and once we are used to that, we are open to crypto-relationships with robots (the "new intimacies"), since they offer nothing more than instrumental value. Since we don't want the "drama" of reciprocal real-time sociality anyway, there is basically no difference from our point of view between relating to another person and a robot. They are both merely mirrors for ourselves anyway. To a narcissist, every other person is always already a robot.

My favorite of Turkle's anecdotal subjects is "Brad," who talks about quitting Facebook and is highly articulate about the suffocating, stultifying reflexivity that social media induce. "Online life is about premeditation," he tells Turkle. This is also true about any concern for authenticity -- it involves a sort of deciding in advance what sort of spontaneous behavior to indulge in. We try to judge ourselves in terms of some ideal that is not supposed to be an ideal at all but one's natural, revealed self. But there is nothing natural about checking in with yourself on how natural you are being. Direct experience of one's authentic self is impossible, once it's conceived as something that can be known in the abstract -- as something fungible, malleable, deployable -- rather than as a process, a mode of action. Assessing one's authenticity, therefore is impossible too. It either makes no sense to ask (everything I do, I'm doing, and is thus authentic to me by definition) or involves paradoxes of reflexivity and observer bias (every time I try to see myself doing authentic things, my self-consciousness changes my behavior). Nevertheless, social media set themselves up (or, to be fair, are taken as) forums for authentic-self-assessment -- one' can't judge the authenticity of the unmediated self in real time, but one can certainly evaluate the authenticity of one's online profile or the impression others seem to have of you. That is the narcissistic trap social media sets out for us.

But it is a trap also to imagine one can have some sort of direct experience of others, as if you could see the "real" person outside social media. We can't access the other's consciousness; it is always an objective performance from the outside. Nobody can ever show you their "real" self.

Slee brings up one of Turkle's anecdotes that gets at a different way of viewing things outside of authenticity:

Visiting Japan in the early 1990s, Turkle heard tales of adult children who, too distant and too busy to visit their aging and infirm parents, hired actors to visit in their stead, playing the part of the adult child. What's more, the parents appreciated and enjoyed the gesture. It's slightly shocking to western sensibilities, but once we hear a little more context it becomes more understandable.
First, the actors are not (in all cases, at least) a deception: the parents recognize them for what they are. Yet the parents "enjoyed the company and played the game". In Japan, being elderly is a role, being a child is a role, and parental visits have a strong dose of ritual to them: the recital of scripts by each party. While the child may not be able to act out their role, at least this way the parent gets to enact theirs, and so to reinforce their identity as an elderly, respected person.

Traditional rituals of social interaction allow people a certain measure of ontological security with regard of their place in society and within familial networks. That relatively secure identity still had to be performed to be felt, but the performance is explicitly understood as a performance. The reality of the identity is guaranteed by the rootedness of traditions. Such role-playing doesn't fit with the ideology of individual existential freedom and the glories of unrestricted personal consumer choice and living like a stranger among strangers in urban settings and so forth. And while I certainly wouldn't want to be saddled with that sort of ritualized social life and have an identity assigned to me even more on the basis of the circumstances of my birth, I do wonder what it would be like to feel intrinsically the basis of my identity was secure and my "authenticity" could never be sullied by missteps of taste.

In social media there is a material basis for an alternative to ingrained tradition in anchoring identity; a networked self could have some solidity that renders the performative nature of identity operate beyond questions of genuineness or authenticity. From a resister's perspective, this all looks as odd and mechanical as the idea of sending actors to love your parents for you. But adopters can take solace in sending out their "Profile" (to use Nathan Jurgenson's term for aggrgate online presence) to perform our cemented identity within various social networks. Once you accept that Facebook's data collection roots you, you are "free" to be absent from social rituals but be present nonetheless. Welcome to the new intimacy.

What's dangerous about this is not that it has ruined some previous form of intimacy that was especially precious. The problem is that we believe that we construct this social-media identity autonomously and that it is therefore our responsibility, our fault if it's limited. The social-media companies have largely succeeded in persuading users of their platforms' neutrality. What we fail to see is that these new identities are no less contingent and dictated to us then the ones circumscribed by tradition; only now the constraints are imposed by for-profit companies in explicit service of gain.

Data Self redux (30 Jan 2012)

2012-02-02T13:10:00.001-08:00

Nathan Jurgenson has some good constructive criticism of my data self posts from last week. He points out that it is not enough to talk about how social media captures some preexisting self but also "how the individual, in all of their offline experience, behavior and existence, is simultaneously being created by this very online data."

Since I often tend to depict identity as a residual experiential illusion left over after capitalism subjectivizes us, I was admittedly surprised to see Jurgenson cite me as an example of what he calls "agentic bias" -- "the tendency to conceptually grant too much power to individuals to create their online Profiles by neglecting the ways in which individuals are simultaneously being created by their digital presence." Social media doesn't simply capture what we do online, it shapes what we do and also what we do offline -- as Jurgenson has argued elsewhere, once social media makes you aware of the ability to document your life as it is happening, it changes what you experience; you begin directing your life as if it were a documentary, choosing what to do in part on the basis of how it can be represented later.

My dialectics certainly need sharpening, but I definitely agree with Jurgenson that social media shape identity rather than merely expressing it. If I underplay the degree to which this is true, it may be because I take it for granted too much in my thinking: of course it's true that having media at one's disposal to share things renders those things subordinate to the process of sharing. Once we have a channel, we live so as to fill it with content, and that content is more self-consciously molded to suit desired audiences and enhance one's watchability -- it's "curated" with an eye to make oneself more followable. more relevant. Once you have Spotify, you have to groom what you listen to and what others see you listening to, and that reflexive grooming cancels out any preceding “innocent” or “authentic” listening behavior. Basically, the ongoing fretting about “authenticity” is a reflection of an ideologically induced blindness to our own agentic bias with regards to ourselves.

Identity has long worked in our particular ideological climate by masking its constructed origins, making it seem as though the profile (our self-directed identity, in Jurgenson's terms) is always making the Profile (the online representation). The stake is our status as a unique individual; other people may be products of the system but not us; we are self-created. So when the Profile begins to change my way of perceiving the world — when I begin to shape my behavior in terms of what social media captures or what I can share — I strive also to disavow that change. I think some of the disavowal is built into the services and the rhetoric of personal sharing they are bathed in. (Apparently, if Jurgenson is right, it has colored my own rhetoric as well.) We don't want to admit that we are being determined to a degree by our media use, so we instead struggle to do the impossible and deliberately communicate authenticity, try to communicate in such a way -- communicate something so genuine and real and uncompromising perhaps -- that can make ourselves believe that it's not totally obvious that we are posing for the cameras we've pointed at ourselves. Because if we admit to and foreground our "inauthentic" curatorial impulses -- doing things just to tweet them -- then we surrender the old ideal of our having a self-actualized identity, a unique internal self that we discover inside ourselves and then share with the world.

Social media has laid siege to that concept of identity, and the assumptions of privacy it relies on. It is trying to obviate that private self's pleasures and make pleasure derive instead from sharing, from comparing our data with others', from seeing what sort of quantifiable influence we can have as we build out networks. This is what I was calling the "data self," which may not make a whole lot of sense as a term, but there it is. With this self-concept in place, we don't worry about that disavowal of our constructedness so much; perhaps we think we can outrun it with further sharing, reaping further rewards. If we keep screaming out our attempts to self-brand, it still seems like we are controlling the process. I think this helps explain that particular desperate urgency of social-media use; we have to monitor and control the spin about ourselves before any of the many facets of our network come to own the narrative about us. That pleasant Pavolovian buzz of seeing that someone has responded to something I have posted somewhere is not merely pleasure at having gained some attention; it is also a moment that feels like control over an identity that has slipped away into the permanently public realm.

Anyway, that shift is what I was trying to get at in those posts about the “data self” -- that changes were happening at the level of the institutions that determine our concept of who we are, teach us what sort of things go into that. Capitalist subjectivity was once anchored in consumerist “authenticity” — consumerism allows us to discover the unique individual we really are and express it. But social media and smart-phone conduits are changing what anchors capitalist subjectivity to something outlined by data profiling and “sharing.” That is, the pleasures of identity are less about discovering, owning, and operating a particular unique self (as they were, mainly, under consumerism pre-social media); they are becoming more about mircoaffirmations available through social-media use: we are matched with the people who can affirm us, we see a reflection of ourselves in the data that makes us feel recognized, we are told what to want in a way that assures us we will be doing what is right and normal if we follow automated yet socially derived recommendations, etc. The data self knows itself only to the degree that it shares data and exists within media that can guide it toward various satisfying experiences and allow it to display its satisfactions dependably in formatted and readily circulatable ways. The data self doesn't really exist until social media use has gotten well under way. What may start as a yearning to express the authentic interior self in some new way ends up, as Jurgenson is arguing, obliterating the plausibility and satisfaction of having in interior self. Of course, for people who have had no sense of self that precedes social media, this analysis may make no sense. They can't conceive of authenticity as anything but a rumor.

The threat to this new “data self” sort of subjectivity is not inauthenticity -- the threat that tends to afflict people my age (phoniness as a moral category) -- but lack of access. The threat is being disconnected, having the information flow disrupted. And that threat stems from an underlying terror at the possibility that there's something crucial about our lives that can’t actually be expressed -- integral things about which we can say nothing, as Wittgenstein says. The danger to our identity is not that it will be exposed as a fake, but that endless sharing of it will make it feel increasingly inexpressible, that the key thing is escaping our attempts to tell all.

But I also think that Interaction with Facebook, etc., reshapes subjectivity to make reject the possibility of that inexpressibility. We are only what we express and share; the possibility that something could be meaningful and unshared becomes unthinkable, unfeelable. What measures the "real" about ourselves is not some internal ability to think or feel something but the ability to externalize it as processable data. Social media becomes the media of identity -- not recording it but constituting it. The data self is not just a matter of the data we supply (actively or passively), but also the data and metadata the social-media companies return to us. We increasingly stabilize our self-concept in terms of what social media makes possible, what sorts of rewards it can supply, and what garners those rewards.

I think the logical extension of the data self -- the self that is secure with itself only to the extent that it is constituted in social media as manipulatable data -- will be for Twitter to come preloaded with plausible friends, Facebook preloaded with life experiences, or at least preordained slots of experiences a user is supposed to have. Our self-recording vision of ourselves, as shaped by social media, may not alienate us from some "genuine" experience we would have otherwise had, but it is also not autonomous either, not freed of the ideological dispositions companies have built into their platforms. As much as we may come to see our lives as documentaries that we are always in the process of making, we still are typically reliant on someone else's storyboard.

(Note to self: Remember that the work of identity construction for any given individual is always collective. One's identity is not the product of the identity-bearer's labor only, but is also the product of those whose work sustains institutions and expressive codes and everything else that contributes to substantiating and expressing identity.)

Existential Liberalism As Ideological Fog (27 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

This, from "Reflections on the Call" by Leon de Mattis, in Communization and Its Discontents (pdf), is a good point:

It is certain that the division of society into classes would be infinitely more visible if inter-individual relations were the brute and unreserved translation of relations of production. The proletarian would doff his cap in passing to the capitalist with his top hat and cigar, and there would be nothing more to say. But unfortunately things are a little more complicated, and ‘existential liberalism’ is not the unique translation of the effect of relations of production in everyday life...

Class relations disguise themselves at the personal level, and dissolve into "existential liberalism." Capitalists in general are bad, but each individual capitalist seems like a nice enough person, doing their philanthropy and what not, recycling like a good citizen, etc. The same is true of middle class/creative class types, whose personal congeniality and sympathy for proles at the personal level hides from them (read: me) their systemic role in oppression.

This is how ideological mystification at the level of everyday life proceeds; inequality is out there, we know, but for those above a certain level of impoverishment and disenfranchisement, it is not experienced as such as a personal problem. No one wants to be proletarianized in their own subjectivity, in their own concept of themselves. So they explain the ways inequality affects them in terms of personal failings or bad luck -- not as: the system can and has declassed me despite my efforts to abide the rules of its game.

Part of our energy is thus spent reproducing in our everyday encounters the ideological fog in which we are all supposedly equal (the 99%). (Consumerist relations in "democratic" marketplaces where everybody's dollar spends are a big part of this, but not all of it.) We actually have to work to reproduce the illusion that "existential liberalism" coheres, that the deviations we experience are anomalies. It's shocking, then, when we experience something we can't resolve through this kind of work — say, when you get subjected to "unfair" police violence or are insulted through some bald piece of snobbery. But it may be that we prefer the ongoing work of sustaining our class-based sense of dignity to refusing the work and living in the full, intolerable glare of the naked relations of power. Who wants to unmask those nice people who mean so well? Who wants to look in that kind of mirror?

Everyone's a modernist (26 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:36:00.001-08:00

Irving Howe's 1967 Commentary essay "The Culture of Modernism" (here's a gated link for all you Commentary subscribers in the audience) is the sort of thing I usually don't have much time for: a lot of fretting about nomenclature (what is modernism?), a preoccupation with literature qua literature, some contempt for the contemporary generation's aesthetic shortcomings masquerading as concern for the future of humanism, and so on — the Great Critics doing Criticism. But I found it interesting that much of what Howe argues modernists were striving for is what internet culture, in the eyes of its boosters anyway, has achieved. Howe writes, "Modernism keeps approaching — sometimes even penetrating — the limits of solipsism, the view expressed by the German poet Gottfried Benn when he writes that 'there is no outer reality, there is only human consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new worlds out of its own creativity.' " That sounds a lot like a paean to virtuality, to humans freed from biological constraints to exist as pure (digital) expression. When critics say online sociality is solipsistic, they don't recognize that we must "penetrate" solipsism to reach some sort of apotheosis of intersubjectivity. The modernists paved the way, responding to cultural sterility (their "end of history") with unremitting commitment to innovation for its own sake. Howe cites Lukács (though it may as well have been Schumpeter), claiming that modernists are "committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and re-creation." It actually sounds a bit like neoliberal economics.

Later, Howe declares that:

In modernist literature, one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and the limiting assumption of rationality. Mind comes to be seen as an enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. There is a hunger to break past the bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture, toward a form of absolute personal speech, a literature deprived of ceremony and stripped to revelation.

That sort of sounds like a status update or a tweet, or a Tumblr reblog — all of which espouse expediency as a kind of sincerity. The accelerated nature of online discourse, in social media especially, lays a privileged claim to the real. The participation in the group mind of social networks allows one to move beyond the limits of individual rationality (and the outdated depth psychology that depended on it); the abolishment of privacy online permits us to discard "bourgeois proprieties."

So maybe when you sign up for Facebook, you automatically become Samuel Beckett. Social media makes modernists of us all. They democratize the "genius" of modernism and make its "terrible freedom" and the smashing the humbug of bourgeois order everyone's prerogative. We can all document the self in a spirit of uncompromising full disclosure to deal with the "problem of belief" and the crisis of authenticity in the absence of transcendental truths and radically innovate with language and form. That is, we can build our personal brands on Facebook and tweet all day in LOLspeak.

Basically what aggrieved the modernists in Howe's view — the crisis of identity and truth; the ceaseless striving for real expression — is what we now tend to celebrate as fun and freedom. Much as management consultants represent precarious work conditions as liberating free agency, the modernist crises of the subject are fun opportunities for self-expression, like some of the postmoderninsts insisted. Howe seems to conclude that the modernists were a bunch of nihilists who end up tormented by their achievements: "The lean youth has grown heavy; he chokes with the approval of the world he had dismissed; he cannot find the pure air of neglect." That is, in their search for the genuine, modernists sought the "right to be forgotten" but failed. They ended up being liked too much. It will be different for us. We have forfeited that right in advance and tally the likes up to keep score in the grand game that selfhood has become. In our world, we celebrate the quantified self. To have measured out one's life with coffee spoons is an unmitigated triumph.

The Rise of the Data Self (25 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:35:00.001-08:00

This Smithsonian post (via 3QD) offers some more support for my fledgling thesis from Monday's post that "normal" identity is becoming explicitly data-based -- that it's natural to think about who we "really" are in terms of statistics-driven self-surveillance rather than depth psychology or self-actualization quests or anything like that. Freud is out, Facebook et al. is in. For example, we try things that seem self-expressive using media that can give us quantified feedback, and only when the results come back do we decide whether what was expressed was "true." We can convert ourselves in the same way into data, that can make us into a statistical profile and return to us what other people with similar data profiles are doing, and hence what we ourselves should be doing.

Recommendation engines are perhaps the most explicit form of this: "Customers Who Bought Items in Your Recent History Also Bought..." Data-driven micro-marketing approaches are another form. The Smithsonian piece offers other examples derived from "quantified self" initiatives that have people monitoring their vital statistics and uploading them for analysis and aggrgation.

Consider the possibilities in health care. In the past, anyone analyzing who gets ill and why had to rely on data skewed heavily toward sick people–statistics from hospitals, info from doctors. But now, with more and more healthy people collecting daily stats on everything from their blood pressure to their calorie consumption to how many hours of REM sleep they get a night, there’s potentially a trove of new health data that could reshape what experts analyze. As Shamus Husheer, CEO of the British firm Cambridge Temperature Concepts, told the Wall Street Journal, “You can compare sleep patterns from normal people with, say, pain sufferers. If you don’t know what normal sleep looks like, how do you tease out the data?”

What a dream come true! We can collect enough data to create the profile of the ultimate superbeing: the perfectly average human. And then we can use health-insurance protocols to force everyone to become this or else.

But my suspicion is that this runs deeper — that data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self — what we regard as the real self. Data is the authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society; the other means are suspicious, deluded or outmoded. This is not just a matter of the evergreen appeal of naive empiricism. (It has numbers; it can be graphed; ergo, it's true! Numbers don't lie! Who cares how they are contextualized?) Since interactions within social networks are now easily captured and standardized, the quantifiable data thereby produced have become far more constitutive of identity. Just read this article about the designers of Facebook's Timeline function. As the post explains, the user interface is what is supposed to dictate the self as you navigate through your own data heap. With Facebook's organizational help, you muck around in there looking to build the real you.

The assumption is that by letting Facebook capture and process everything, a more reliable version of the self than our own memory can give us will be produced. As the post's title suggests, the UI has "soul"; you do not. Or, as a subheading in the piece claims, life should be seen as having a UI. There is no direct experience of life; it's entirely a data network that we need mediated for us. In one of the more disturbing hubristic-techie quotes I've read in a while, one of the designers tells us what Facebook Timeline lets us do: "You gently consume time.” Rage, rage against the dying of the light, etc.

And though Facebook wants "the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about," it has provided a tightly controlled and highly formatted medium for it that emphasizes standardization (echoing the old Facebook vs. MySpace distinction; Facebook was "clean" because it retained aesthetic control). It imposes the metaphor of life and memory as a stream, which, as Eric Harvey notes, is not some natural, neutral reflection of how we remember but a reshaping of life into narrative, which suits Facebook's ends. The more work we put into making a coherent story out of the data Facebook collects, the more useful, marketable information we give them.

It makes little sense to look within for the true self when we have available immediate (and processable) reactions from and comparisons with masses of other people to help sketch out our contours, when we have an enormous data trail we have created incidentally to be reprocessed by outside parties as self-revelation. Our filters are who we are; the "social graph" is not something on which we are merely one point, but it's instead a map of our identity (or at least what capital wants us to think of as our identity). We become more of a person the more we build out this graph, let the flows of information it facilitates constitute us.

As Nicholas Carr pointed out here, the "right to be forgotten" by tech companies that want to own our memories and even the process by which we remember, may be in danger, despite the E.U.'s effort to institutionalize it. The degree to which the data self is naturalized for us will determine how much such a right will seem beside the point.

Facebook's False Frame of Reference (24 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:34:00.000-08:00

At the Cyborgology blog, Jenny Davis raises good points about this recent study, titled " 'They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am': The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives." The media takeaway from this study, as Davis notes, is to report that Facebook makes us feel bad about ourselves because on the site we see other people mainly at their best and happiest, as people work to present themselves in the most flattering and enviable light. That fits with what my experience with Facebook was: It made me all too aware that people I knew had lives that went on without me. They had the temerity to seem perfectly happy without any reference to me. I thought we were friends!

In other words, using Facebook made me feel acutely narcissistic, not because it got me to boast about myself, but because it brought home to me just how much I expect other people's lives to revolve around me. And using Facebook more did nothing to acclimate me to this. I didn't get used to the invitations to be envious. Eventually I stopped using Facebook altogether. I didn't want the false frame of reference with my friends and am admittedly too self-centered to be bothered to be voyeuristic toward friended acquaintances.

The study's findings echo a complaint that has long been made about television: that it gives us a false intimacy with people from outside our accustomed sphere and habitus and makes us dissatisfied with ourselves and our lot. Davis wants to argue that this false-frame-of-reference problem "rests not in the platform itself, but in the potentially unhealthy ways that some people engage with it." As Davis explains, the study found that "feelings of relative inadequacy are amplified for those with large numbers of Facebook Friends who they do not personally know. These relationships are less about interactivity and more about surveillance. They are less about mutual growth, depth, and closeness, and more about looking, judging, and comparative self-evaluation." The less outside context we have for another person's Facebook page, the less able we are to read between the lines, take it for the heightened version of reality that it probably is.

If we rely on Facebook as primarily a surveillance device, unable to incorporate any information not put forth on the Facebook page, then the measuring stick against which we judge ourselves will represent an unattainably fulfilling existence—making us feel bad. This is an unhealthy way to use Facebook. And yes, the architecture of Facebook facilitates this kind of use.

I'll say it does. There is no need to use Facebook to engage in actual communication with actual friends. If anything, Facebook can make such communication seem trivial or tactical by making it take place in front of an audience. Facebook seems premised on the idea that it makes friendship more convenient, which seems to run counter to the essence of strong ties: Facebook can start to make it seem that some people are communicating with you only because it is convenient; otherwise they couldn't be bothered. Friends shouldn't let friends Facebook-message them.

I think Facebook is in the business of making strong ties feel like weak ties, to turn friends into audiences, and to turn the conversation among friends into gossip. The company doesn't exist to help friends feel friendly. There is no money in that, no money in secure and stable relationships. As a cursory survey of advertisements should suffice to prove, insecurity is what sells products, and Facebook is in the business of selling communication as a product (and selling audiences to advertisers and data to marketers based on that intercepted communication). Thus, as Davis suggests, Facebook is engineered for gossip and invidious comparison, not friendship or intimacy. Its business model is about destroying intimacy in favor of the loneliness of spying and the desperation of sharing as quantified attention-seeking.

I agree with Davis that one could in theory subvert the site's architecture and use it in a way that is not corrosive to one's social life; it can help sustain ties across geographic distances. It helps you crowdsource various questions and allows you to reap the benefits of weak ties. It lets you find someone to play Scrabble with. And so on. If you really did limit Facebook use to such things, it might not be so deleterious, might not alter the way one frames friendship and self-esteem and what amount of recognition one should expect. But as Facebook is a social network, we don't get to determine how we use it in isolation. Our use is governed to a degree by how others expect we will use it. (This makes it an effective conductor of ideology -- an institution for interpellation, to get all Althusserian. It hails us.) Using Facebook comes with an entire set of social norms, and these norms (about who to friend, what to share, how to reciprocate, what privacy should consist of, what identity consists of, etc.) are precisely where the dangers with Facebook lie. It seems to me you can't have a Facebook profile without being drawn centripetally into these norms' orbit.

The new strategies of desire (23 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:33:00.001-08:00

The Economist's holiday double issue a few weeks ago had an article about 1950s motivational-research guru Ernest Dichter (author of The Strategy of Desire) that argued that newfangled behavioral economics marks a kind of return to his approach to consumer behavior -- that most of it is "irrational" and dictated by unconscious impulses and emotional needs, not by the perceived usefulness of a particular commodity. For a few decades, those assumptions were regarded as dubious -- rejected as being patronizing toward consumers, refusing to grant them agency or the sophistication to desire things for complicated yet still conscious reasons. Motivational research and hysteria about consumer manipulation at the hands of evil corporations were based on assumptions that consumers are passive saps who are brainwashed into wanting this and that, whereas it had become more politically expedient for the left and the right both to begin to argue that consumers exercised real power over and in their deliberate shopping choices. Consumerism was touted as a genuine forum for self-expression, an arena in which the identity-enriching fruits of capitalism could be harvested. Or it was a place where consumers could genuinely subvert the hegemonic order, repurposing consumer goods to suit their own "revolutionary" purposes and undermine systems of control.

In reality, both of those interpretations of consumer behavior reinforced one another: individualistic identity projects became hard to distinguish from subversive detournement of goods, and squabbling over fashion-derived hierarchies leeched energy away from the confronting institutionalized economic ones. That is part of what makes consumer capitalism so durable. It commodfies identity and thereby makes it seem more powerful, the key to solving all of capitalism's other inequities. It starts to seem plausible that the problems with capitalism are simply problems of self-expression.

So what then to make of the return of the irrational consumer? Here's how the Economist article synthesizes recent behavioral research:

Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free.

In Dichter's time, figuring out how to manipulate consumers beneath the level of consciousness was a matter of applying Freudian theory in what seemed to be intuitive, arbitrary ways ("To elevate typewriter sales, [Dichter] suggested the machines be modelled on the female body, 'making the keyboard more receptive, more concave,' " the article notes). Now it's more a matter of Paco Underhill-style applied surveillance, where retailers spy on their consumers, amass data on the ir aggregate behavior and draw conclusions that no individual consumer would have been able to explain -- what kind of music leads to more purchases, how wide the aisles should be, which products should be placed at eye level, and so on.

This suggests how our improved capacity for quantification and data processing has changed the way we think of the "true self": It's no longer about depth psychology or the formation of a unique unconscious on the basis of universalized childhood experiences or what have you. Instead, we are starting to think the truth about ourselves is hidden from us not by our defense mechanisms but by our lack of computing power. We only have so much data in our memory (mainly our own limited personal experience) to process with our minuscule capacity to determine what is going on around us or why we are acting in such a way. Whereas computers aggregating the behavior of thousands or millions can reveal the genuine, normal response. Computers are our best analysts, not Freudians. We understand our irrationality not in reference to childhood trauma but to some composite of normal behavior built from masses of collected "shared" data and fed back to us under the guise of automated recommendations, superior filtering technology, influencing power within networks, augmented reality, etc. The empirical sheen to the computated conclusions about "ordinary" human behavior in the contrived situations being measured make them seem all the more incontrovertible. We begin to believe for expediency's sake that the recommendation engines know the real us better than we could ever know ourselves. It makes it easy to fit into our world to accept that.

I wonder if capitalism's system of control is evolving in a similar way. The ways capitalism offers subjects the opportunity to elaborate a unique identity are perhaps becoming either insufficient or irrelevant. They are being supplanted by improved surveillance, autosurveillance, constant confessions of the self. The politically useful concept of the unique personal identity is giving way to the more productive networked self, a disseminated identity normed through exhaustive data aggregation. The exhortation to "be ourselves" and discover the authentic self is steadily giving way to the soft commands to always be measuring ourselves, and sharing more information as a means to take that measure.

UPDATE: this All Things Digital post says basically the same thing: "The 'Mad Men' Years Are Giving Way to the 'Math Men' Era," i.e. data is more important than creativity in intuiting what will manipulate people.

Assorted thoughts on social mobility (18 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:32:00.002-08:00

Economic mobility is a different thing from social mobility, as any number of nouveau-riche tales of ostracized woe can testify to. Measuring whether one goes from one arbitrarily determined income bracket to another doesn't tell us much about experiential changes; it doesn't tell us whether one's social circuit had changed, whether one's children now go to a more elite school, with greater opportunities for sycophancy. Social mobility is often about establishing opportunities to be taken seriously by people with more status — or with more cultural capital, if you prefer — rather than raw income levels. Judging mainly by Victorian novels, it takes a lot of income to buy your way out of seeming like a striver when you begin hobnobbing with your betters.

But the difference between economic and social mobility is easy to lose sight of in policy discussions. Once the charts and graphs are trotted out, it's easy to fixate on income differences that can be measured and varying rates of income change over time, with the idea that these comprehensively index the misery suffered through inequality. (More rumination, from Elias Isquith, about social mobility and whether it distracts us from inequality can be found here.)

Class and hierarchy and the ingrained sense of inferiority are not merely matters of money; they are more matters of power and assumed privilege. (That sentence felt a little tautological. I hope it makes some sense.) At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen offered a few notes on why he thinks measures of economic mobility are "overrated." This is the one that started me thinking about this:

For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects.

Much of that is econospeak for "knowing your place makes you feel better." It's long been a right-wing critique that increased socioeconomic mobility yields only chaos — that liberals are too quick to forget that mobility can approach a zero-sum game: when some go up, others must go down. (Cowen suggests this is why economic growth matters more than mobility qua mobility.) Conspicuous-consumption and hedonic-treadmill theories similarly assume that any symbolic gains in status will be offset when those with the power to determine which symbols have status change the rules. Once the "wrong" people are doing something, the "right" people move on to something else, propelling the wheel of fashions.

But what does that mean for the value of novelty? Novelty is sometimes regarded neutrally as simple innovation, an expansion of the possibilities offered to consumers and thus enhancing their sense of power (which some argue derives meaningfully from the exercise of choice in markets). But a lot of novelty is fashion change driven by status panic. It is meant to be exclusionary; it is meant to cause misery as much as pleasure, as the pleasure is rooted in some else's being rejected.

We adopt the habitus of a particular social status (which to a degree is based on our income) and evaluate our condition mainly with respect to others we see as sharing that status. When downward economic mobility means we can no longer afford to hang out with our class peers and buy appropriate status symbols and amenities, that upsets us, and Cowen suggests that this upset outweighs any gains others might experience from moving up and getting to experience new nice things. That is a sort of paleo-conservative attitude, one that runs counter to the "all novelty is experienced as good" assumption that often animates discussion of consumer behavior today. It turns out that some novelty is experienced as confusion (i.e., me holding an iPhone) and not enhanced utility or pleasure, and class is the index governing this. Given consumer society's hegemony, it may be that once novelty is felt to be threatening, we translate it into a class mobility issue -- we are uncomfortable not because the newness is alienating in itself but because we are now conscious of moving up or down, or testing the boundaries of class habitus.

Concern with mobility is of particular concern to Americans; it's an integral aspect of its founding myths: a country without an aristocracy, where merit is rewarded and no one is born to a caste. Of course, the U.S. falls ludicrously short of that ideal, but that remains a huge part of American exceptionalism. So often mobility statistics are ginned up to compare the U.S. with Europe, the ancestral bastion of inherited privilege. If the U.S. falls behind Europe, it suggests that we are failing at our national mission. Cowen has what struck me as an odd explanation of why Europeans have experienced more economic mobility: "Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on." I wonder to what degree one can decide not to be ambitious, as if that aspect of the self is voluntaristic. "I thought about being ambitious, but the hell with it. PlayStation time."

Cowen claims that European parents don't inspire their children to achieve: " 'High intergenerational mobility' is sometimes a synonym for 'lots of parental underachievers.' " That seems to take a systemic social problem and individualize it: society has lots of opportunities if parents would just force their kids to pursue them more doggedly. This fits with an economistic line of thinking that views the habitus as the sum total of one's response to personal incentives rather than something produced by broader social conditions. If you are not ambitious, it's not because of what RIchard Sennett called the "hidden injuries of class" but because of a personal choice. You just didn't want to be ambitious badly enough. Maybe your parents or your schools failed to motivate you as much as they could have, but the failing is still yours.

The underlying assumption appears to be that mobility is mainly a matter of will, which is really the main idea at stake in arguments about it. Conservatives like to overlook inherited privilege to argue that those who stagnate in poverty do so out of choice; others see class boundaries as institutionalized and carefully policed, not a matter of choice at all.

Facebook as echo chamber (17 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

At All Things Digital, WSJ's tech blog, Peter Kafka notes that Facebook really doesn't want its users to think of it as an echo chamber. It is promoting this post by Eytan Bakshy to support its claim that users have their horizons broadened rather than narrowed by using Facebook as their portal for news and information. Bakshy draws on Mark Granovetter's idea of the "strength of weak ties" and argues that Facebook facilitates their formation and their usefulness. Perhaps it's more clarifying to say that Facebook has succeeded in commodifying the production of weak ties and extracting their tithe from our taking advantage of them.

This is how Kafka summarizes the post:

The big takeaway here is that while most people on Facebook spend most of their time sharing stuff with a small group of like-minded friends, Facebook is so big — 800 million users! — that Facebook users end up learning lots of stuff from people they barely know: “The information we consume and share on Facebook is actually much more diverse in nature than conventional wisdom might suggest.”

That claim is extremely important to Facebook's business strategy of being able to index its users' online activity and make it available to advertisers so that they can target their ads. (The ACLU has some chilling information about that here.) So naturally Facebook wants to stifle any arguments that using Facebook to do everything would be anything less than enlightening. Kafka urges us to keep in mind that "Facebook thinks you’re getting a whole lot of signal out of that noise" of proliferating updates and "frictionless sharing," but that's almost too generous. Facebook almost certainly knows that information overload is a danger to its prospects and seems desperate here to spin that problem away. The Bakshy post acknowledges that strong ties drive sharing on Facebook, but argues that content from weak ties has the most novelty value, and is more sharable within the cluster of strong ties. "In short, weak ties have the greatest potential to expose their friends to information that they would not have otherwise discovered." This is the basis of Facebook's usefulness as a marketing tool. As Bakshy concludes, in considerably more anodyne language, "online social networks can serve as an important medium for sharing new perspectives, products and world events."

Facebook would thus like to change what we recognize as "signal" and what we experience as "noise" to suit its purposes: getting us to stay logged on and using its apps, and prompting us to authorize more data provision and collection. Signal equals novelty, which equals an opportunity to improve status in the quantitative realm of online social networks. It hopes that we will make more of the random information that comes at us through frictionless sharing and the like go viral within our smaller networks. It would like us to think of sociality and friendship as the potlatch-like exchange of whimsical novelties in a public contest of who can spread more information the furthest. In other words, it hopes to become a more data-rich form of Twitter. Facebook would like us to feel obliged to perform for our close friends on its stage as a way of staying salient to them. It wants our response to information overload to be a fear that we will be forgotten, and that we will respond by distributing more information, worsening the problem for us while improving the metrics for Facebook. Facebook is not an echo chamber but a negative feedback loop.

Return of the managerial demiurge (11 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:31:00.001-08:00

It sort of veers in a different direction by the end, but Žižek's new LRB essay is actually a pretty lucid explanation of the terminology from autonomist Marxism, sewing the jargon together in a cohesive whole. Here's his quick summary of Hardt and Negri's Multitude argument:

Only with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘commons’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Žižek argues that profit in contemporary capitalism comes not from commodity production and circulation but from being able to privatize the commons by force and extract rents through regimes of intellectual property enforcement and that sort of thing. He offers Microsoft as an example, but for me the paradigmatic example is Facebook, which collects rents (indirectly, from advertisers and data collectors) for hosting our "social graph" and tries to embed itself into our everyday social practices.

Later in the article Žižek sounds less like Negri and more like Wright Mills when he starts describing the disappearance of the 19th century entrepreneurs and the emergence of the white collar classes, the salarymen, the managerial demiurge. Since immaterial production is a collective thing, different salaries for different people can't be justified by their differing levels of productivity or the relative rarity of their skills, as neoclassical economists would have it. Instead, wage levels are determined by preexisting status, which tends to be arbitrary.

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency.

So much for meritocracy. The middle class, then, consists not of a bunch of hard-working burghers but of people who inherited their political privilege (winners of the family lottery) and learned how to leverage it or learned how to adapt themselves so they could serve as ideologically useful token success stories. They pull in "surplus wage" -- a term that doesn't seem very useful to me, but which is supposed to mean the amount over the sustenance wage that capitalism presumably would drive everyone's wages to, ceteris paribus. The "surplus" idea seems to muddy the water; the point is that pre-existing class status determines pay in corporate structures, which try to calibrate the size of the middle class relative to the potential for mass unrest. Make as few middle managers as necessary to forestall revolt, and pay them enough to feel special and indebted to the status quo system.

What's more, Žižek, drawing on Jean-Pierre Dupuy, claims that success has to seem arbitrary to us, basically to make us to depressed to rebel. If success could be deserved, earned, we would have reason to be outraged when hard work doesn't beat status. As it is, we can always mistake privilege for luck. Žižek interprets the rise in protests recently as partly attributable to would-be meritocrats discovering there is no meritocracy and their modicum of inherited privilege no longer makes the grade. They won't get their "surplus wage" but will be precarious like everyone else.

Wages Versus Progress (10 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:30:00.002-08:00

In what is ostensibly a news article on the Wall Street Journal front page today ("Revitalized Detroit Makes Bold Bets on New Models") this sentence jumped out at me as being a clear example of ideology in action:

Instead of having to spend a lot on labor costs and retiree benefits, they are pouring money into engineering and designing cars that can go head-to-head with the best in the industry.

This proposition is not so much a fact as a story about how auto companies compete and innovate; it represents as factual the either-or choice that management supposedly faces: either the companies pay these (obviously extortionate) labor costs -- never mind that they are the result of contract negotiations -- or they contribute to technological progress that benefits us all. When money is capital -- allegedly reinvested in the company rather than distributed to shareholders -- it works magic; when money is wages, it forces society to stagnate. It doesn't say, feed families or obviate want or improve lives and opportunities for wage earners. The idea that fair wages should be a normal part of the calculation for capitalist enterprise is written out of the equation, instead represented as an anomaly, an ingratitude, a covert economic crime being perpetrated by labor in their covetousness and greed. The companies aren't greedy, nor are their shareholders; they just want to make new, cool cars. But labor, as ever, wants to spoil the party. Of course the idea that investment in labor could also lead to innovation is out of the question. It's a zero-sum situation.

The degree to which that sentence is true -- and I think you can find many like it even if you limited yourself to the rest of the WSJ -- is also the degree to which capitalism is riven with contradiction. Labor is fundamental to transforming capital into profit, wages for the efficient circulation of commodities. You can't do without labor, yet capitalist ideology also relies on an unremitting rhetoric of labor's parasitism on capital, hampering entrepreneurs and the imagination and creation of new and better products. It seems unsustainable to drive for the elimination of labor costs and the expansion of markets for commodities. It seems impossible to produce value without workers. But articles like these work to make it equally impossible to imagine an alternative way to organize production so that honoring labor's right to bargain and receive higher wages is not seen as fundamentally incompatible with the possibility of innovation and competitiveness. Creative destruction may wreak havoc on some firms but it relegates all workers to a kind of economic afterthought, an obstacle on the playing field of entrepreneurs.

The Truth Is Accidental (3 Jan 2012)

2012-01-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

In response to Nick Bilton's resolution to schedule some "unplugged" time and program some "daydreaming" into his daily life, Nicholas Carr has coined the phrase "the industrialization of the ineffable." I'm pretty sympathetic to Carr's complaint here (and in his previous post) and to the idea that the technological capture of larger and larger swaths of everyday life is eradicating the space in which our experience can feel genuine to ourselves. What we process as "genuine" seems to depend on what is socially structured as "spontaneous," which may be the currently most salient version of what defines the authentic.

"Industrialization" is a fitting word in this context, as the advent of mass-produced culture and consumer goods in the late 18th century seemed to spark the concerns with spontaneity and "true feelings" that cropped up with the sensibility cult and the Romantic movement that succeeded it. The fabric of everyday life was no longer woven by local relations and traditions; suddenly its constructed nature was foregrounded as it was being made at a distance, and the motives for it couldn't be attributed to a desire to preserve the established way of things but were clearly connected to capitalist profit-seeking. (In other words, capital's formal subsumption of the traditional local economy generated a specific form of nostalgic resistance; see Noys's introduction to Communization and Its Discontents pdf.) It suddenly became important to posit a subjectivity that was not a residual effect of the schemes and scams of the industrialists who suddenly had a remarkable amount of control over how life would be lived and felt. A ideological counteroffensive sought to define a sphere that was truly disinterested, where the real self as opposed to the strategic one could be experienced -- a space where one could know oneself as something other than a consumer, a mass man, despite the evident and irresistible satisfaction people were taking in participating in the new economy and amassing the new goods. Never mind that this spontaneous real self is always a retroactive fiction.

With the 18th century sensibility cult, this manifested in part in the paradoxical procedure of consuming novels (an early mass-produced, mass-distributed good) in such a way as to experience "spontaneous" emotional reactions. If the book made you cry, you proved to yourself that you had an emotional core that was untouched by the rising shopkeeperization of everyday life, while at the same time you got to partake in the novel experience of reified novelty, of keeping up to date through exposing oneself to material things (as opposed to, say, local gossip). Hence it was a kind of programmed spontaneity, a industrialized ineffability. But the novelty of vicarious participation in emotional life always contained within it a critique of itself, a hope that each specific instance of it was an exception to a general rule of how false the whole process was: My experience of A Sentimental Journey was real and integral and shows what a solid person I am, but all those other people crying over books? What is wrong with them? Shouldn't they get a real life? Aren't they robbing their loved ones of their emotional facilities?

Something similar seems to be happening with social media, which inspire a similar ambivalence. It is an exciting arena in which to perform for social recognition, but it bears with it a sense of self-alienation and phoniness, a surrender of the true self in the eagerness to share it. So there are efforts to participate in social media in ways that repudiate it (blogging about not blogging; tweeting about how we have to stop tweeting so much, etc.) or that seem to evince our spontaneity (the spurious Like; the fascination with being the first commenter on a thread; the narratives of serendipity that some social network appears to have fostered). Taking that a step further though, one might take a more aggressive posture toward withdrawing from social media and recommendation engines and the entire filtering ecosystem in order to pursue some lost truth about oneself. This sets up algorithmic deductions of what might be relevant to us as the enemy, and makes the truth only that which seems accidental, whimsical. The pretense is that there can be nothing deliberate about the emotional life, that it consists of pure reaction or else it is a sign that we are being manipulated, controlled by cultural industries or by the tech companies trying to subsume our identity and program it for their purposes. If we unplug from the internet, we will once again have real emotions, not convenient or marketable or marketed ones.

But a certain amount of our emotional life needs to be structured deliberately, I think. We need to be able to construct a plan for what we choose to invest our emotional energy into. In a certain sense, "programming our daydreams" is a fundamental step toward controlling how we spend our time and how we proceed toward the goals we set for ourselves. If goals are to have much meaning, if identity is to be more than a brand, we need to credibly assert to ourselves the belief of our own agency in determining the truth of any given situation and of ourselves, rather than surrendering it to chance. This may constitute a form of resistance to the "real subsumption" of everyday life -- the remaking of the process of identity making along capitalistic lines -- not serendipity. Serendipity is just mystified manipulation, a narrative overlay of superstition and imputed destiny over a mundane story of the cold grind of probabilities in action.

Thoughts on "Use Somebody," Simon Reynolds's Retromania, and Danny Kirwan (20 Dec 2011)

2011-12-22T11:51:00.001-08:00

I've been bothered lately by this. Why do I know this song "Use Somebody" so well when I never ever have chosen to hear it and have never heard it straight through in its entirety? It has been out there in my everyday life, ambiently, and I have somehow absorbed enough of it from a myriad of sources to reconstruct the entire thing, like a cognitive Bit Torrent. For me it is part of a pop-culture background that I think I ignore but which actually forms an important backdrop, the ground against which the things I choose to care about can stand out. If I notice this backdrop at all, I usually find myself thinking, Who's this for? Who wants this? Not me. Sometimes I sit through entire movies -- most recently, Drive -- with this feeling, as if the whole point of the experience is to make me believe that I am uniquely superior to the implied audience of the thing.

What that induced sense of superiority hides from me is how this background made of "Use Somebody"s is imposed upon me and affects what I actually choose to hear, choose to value. That dumb song and others like it are shaping my reactionary aesthetics and defining the sort of self-definitional moves I can make to try to retain a sense of myself (albeit a degraged self, a subject limited to cultural consumption) as apart from that background, as someone special who has not yet been washed into the gutter of the mainstream. So "Use Somebody" has shaped me against my will; in its small way, it's an integral part of what it means for me to be a part of this time and place. The inescapable is what defines the cultural moment and to an extent, it defines us. But what I think my relationship to "Use Somebody" suggests is that we don't know what is inescapable directly. It's not what is obvious. It's not what springs immediately to our consciousness when we think of what we are into, or even what others are into. Instead it seeps in, bearing untold ideological poisons.

In an obscure way I haven't yet entirely clarified for myself, Simon Reynolds's recent book Retromania seems to be about this. On its face, the book is an open-ended examination of how digitization of pop's past is affecting its contemporary development. (Kurt Andersen adopted a similar theme in this Vanity Fair piece about the dearth of cultural innovation and how nothing becomes dated anymore. He also admits to mistaking Josh Ritter for Bob Dylan in the piece, which sort of invalidates his credentials for writing about culture.) But it's also about nostalgia as a mode of control, a way of trying to more thoroughly reject the backdrop of "Use Somebody" and exempt oneself from the zeitgeist. Of course, Reynolds's point is that collective rejection is the current zeitgeist. And what's more, I think, it makes repressed or disavowed material like "Use Somebody" even more insidious and potent.

Reynolds, who wrote the postpunk history Rip It Up, focuses mainly on music, detailing the various ramifications of consuming music as information rather than sound. The broad outlines of the argument are fairly familiar: digitization floods the world with MP3s and destroys the music market which once ordered and limited the pop sphere. Faced with the surfeit of music goods to experience and conditioned to appreciate novelty over immersive experience, consumers develop shortcuts for consuming it: collecting rather than listening being one of the main ones.

So many of the consumer-friendly advances of the digital era relate to time management: the freedom to be inattentive or interrupted during a television programme (pause, rewind ), to reschedule the viewing of programmes to when it's more convenient and to stockpile televisual time for a rainy day ( recordable DVDs, TiVo ).... The CD remote, essentially the same device as a TV remote, brought music under the sway of channel-surfing logic. This was the dawn of a new digital-era way of experiencing time, something we've since become totally familiar with. And every gain in consumer-empowering convenience has come at the cost of disempowering the power of art to dominate our attention, to induce a state of aesthetic surrender.

This is music to my ears, as it fits with my longstanding jihad against convenience as a value.

But the key issue is to think about why we choose novelty over immersion. Why do choose convenience -- the speed of consumption -- over the sensory qualities of a consumption experience? Occasionally I see arguments that claim we have some evolutionarily conditioned bias toward novelty, but these seem less convincing to me than analyses that link it to capitalism's need, in order to reproduce itself as a system, to secure steadily growing consumer demand. People must feel the impulse to always need more and to see shopping as fulfillment in its own right, as entirely natural. The prerogatives embedded in consumer capitalism have assured that technological innovation will focus chiefly on convenience, on increasing how much a consumer can consume given unalterable time constraints. Ideology has followed suit, and we end up thinking quantity is a better kind of quality rather than its antithesis.

What Reynolds dubs retromania seems a paradoxical way for capital to proceed to secure the ideological dominance of , but it makes a diabolical sort of sense: get novelty and innovation on the cheap by recycling the ready-at-hand past. This has the added bonus of fusing the new with the familiar, so consumers can appease two contradictory longings simultaneously. Nostalgia and novelty fuse in a new kind of cultural artifact, which Reynolds spends a lot of time cataloging: stuff like I Love the ___'s, reunion tours, bands playing their old albums in sequence, Web 2.0 music like Flying Lotus, Girt Talk, etc. This new artifact flatters us for previous cultural knowledge, which abets the need to approach culture as a kind of archivist and to view cultural consumption as a kind of inner encyclopedia-making process. And it also makes our compendium of sheer trivia about pop culture into genuine cultural capital, giving us incentive to protect the system that lends value to our memory hoard. And as a result, I end up reading things like this exhaustive post about Falco. (You don't know Falco? Well, I am glad you asked...)

Consequently, we start to feel cluttered in her heads with information that feels both useless and useful at the same time. It seems like a waste of brain space for me, for example, to be maintaining a list of black-metal bands in my head; I don't even like that music. But I've actually drawn on that list dozens of times in random conversations to make jokes or to surprise people with an incongruous reference or to unsettle their assumptions about my cultural range, etc.

How do we resist this? Should we bother? For me, that question has provoked another seemingly unrelated question: Why do Danny Kirwan solo albums exist?

Not to pick on Kirwan, one of the several guitarists who had a stint fronting Fleetwood Mac in the pre–Buckingham Nicks era -- Bare Trees was released during his watch and is a pretty great album -- but the fact he was given the opportunity to issue solo albums in the 1970s on a major label after getting himself kicked out of Fleetwood Mac seems indicative of how Big Culture once had an insatiable appetite for new cultural product from sources that they had come to trust as "professional." Before digitization and the internet upended models of cultural distribution, the flow of cultural product and the instigation of cultural demand could be much more carefully managed from the commanding heights. Consumers had some amount of money they were willing to spend to experience the novel, and the culture industry manufactured enough new product to fill the shelves accordingly, usually in a weekly rhythm.

Some or even most of that stuff went the way of Danny Kirwan solo albums, but the logic of the business was still such that it was more lucrative to tolerate the flops of the Kirwans of the industry than to open the floodgates to unvetted or less polished talent. Because the product being sold was not the records themselves so much as novelty qua novelty, the rate of new material entering the pipeline was far more important than the quality of any particular album. So there was no special incentive to discover new geniuses. Danny Kirwan was fine. He had a foothold in the business, proved himself to be someone who could deliver a product on time, so he got hired to do more records. (In other media, it works the same way; professionalization trumps raw talent. The same magazine writers get assignments because they have proved to be serviceable and reliable; the same actors show up over and over again because they establish their bland acceptability; and so on.)

As Reynolds points out, digitization changed the equation for record companies. It offered them the temptation to reissue old product in new form rather than continue to cultivate new product from its stable of acceptable performers. The selling point was the convenience of CDs -- they were easier to care for, easier to store, and easier to play in a customized way. This marketing emphasis moves the process of music listening ahead of the music itself and ahead of managed novelty. The problem for the music business is that this same convenience became a weapon against them -- it allowed consumers to circumvent the system of managed novelty and expect more. It allowed to redistribute music themselves. And it it sanctified the idea that what was old wan't just old but classic, and broadened that view beyond the hard-core collectors and music nerds.

The internet completes the destruction of the old system by democratizing distribution and the A&R functions. You don't have to go to the record store and contemplate Danny Kirwan's album because it is one of the few new things on the new releases wall. Instead a blend of new and old things get circulated within a dynamic online ecosystem that is tailored to each individual user on the basis of their social networks and so on. So the music business can no longer extort value through their ability to control the flow of professionally produced novelty; the flow is now a surfeit coming at consumers from all sorts of directions. And anyone (including me) can pass themselves off as a culture producer and inject content into the internet, leveraging their networks to get it exposure.

Value now is captured by harnessing the filtering that consumers perform for one another, monitoring the lateral cultural chatter and trying to time the implied markets. This is another aspect of the retromania phenomenon. Amateur bricoleurs sort through the digitized detritus of the past (Danny Kirwan solo albums, Falco, etc.), trying to make cultural capital out of it.

How one feels about the question of resistance probably depends on how successful one is at that task.

Algorithmic cures for gift anxiety (1 Dec 2011)

2011-12-22T11:50:00.001-08:00

With the "social graph" ramping up, it was only a matter of time before recommendation engines would stop suggesting to us merely what we might be interested in and start telling us what our friends want. It certainly seems to make more sense and is far less epistemologically threatening. Rather than implicitly suggesting that we don't really know ourselves and that we are machine parse-able despite all our deep interiority, the recommendation engine for friends merely lifts the burden of having to pay enough attention to them to get them a gift that's not completely inappropriate. The WSJ's All Things Digital blog has details about one of Walmart's algorithmic holiday solutions, called Shopycat:

Since gifting is a practice humans naturally struggle with, maybe algorithms can do a better job. After using Shopycat, Harinarayan learned his wife was a fan of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series on HBO. She has posted several times on Facebook about the show, but he hadn’t noticed. “Facebook is so transient and things flow by. Here’s a way to aggregate it all and put it in one place,” he said.

This seems to be the application that Facebook was made for. The "keeping in touch" and whatnot is all so much cover for the core functionality: allowing for the translation of the self into a shopping list.

I'm sure this should probably be hailed as an economistic victory against the deadweight loss of Christmas. More people will get what they want, and less time and money will be "wasted" figuring it out. But in an algorithmically airless world of perfect emotional efficiency, where every gift given is the right one and the risk of social faux pas are eliminated, I'm not sure what will be left of the holiday spirit, which seems to hinge ultimately on a generous amount of familial forgiveness. Bad gifts measure the distance we're trying to close with more important gestures than bequeathing gifts.

Microlabor and Pure Precarity (28 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:49:00.001-08:00

Today's WSJ has a story by Emily Glazer about p2p personal-servitude sites like TaskRabbit (slogan: "Get just about anything done by safe, reliable, awesome people") that allow people to post request for odd jobs and services. Need a latte but don't feel like waiting in line? Need someone to bring you In N Out? Need someone to inflate hundreds of balloons for a birthday party? These services can help you find the most desperate person out there (or the sort of servant who suits your prejudices best) for a one-off job. Watching the scrolling feed of new jobs at TaskRabbit is like getting to hear the tentative commands of emerging petty tyrants in real time, people taking the plunge and indulging the fantasy of ad hoc aristocracy.

But the request for someone to "Bring some In N Out" seem to capture the spirit of the enterprise -- a desire to find someone else to do something already designed to be expedient, but something that also has some inexplicable brand cachet. I want to eat a burger from In N Out, but it's cool to like In N Out, so I want other people to know I am getting it -- if I advertise on this site, then lots more people will get to know just how into In N Out I am! This is not so much about buying personal service -- the site's users almost certainly don't have the habitus of a person who inherently expects to be waited on and would not likely feel that comfortable casting people more or less like themselves into some inferior caste -- but rather about identity display. It's a means to make consumption of personal service more conspicuous, which is probably a chief reason for TaskRabbit's clients to be doing it.

Noted labor expert Ashton Kutcher, an investor in another online labor market, Zaarly, approves of these sites: " 'Companies like this are really tackling things like unemployment in an efficient, viable way,' Mr. Kutcher says." Yes, what could be more efficient than to hire labor on an as-needed basis without any having to take any sort of responsibility for workplace safety or worker well-being? It is the reductio ad absurdem of the points Doug Henwood raises here about small businesses.

people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess: the experience of actually existing small businesses show that they’re not great employers, with poor pay, cheesier benefits and more dangerous workplaces. Bigger firms are easier to regulate, more open to public scrutiny, friendlier to affirmative action programs and more vulnerable to union organizing.

What these online microlabor sites posit is a kind of pure precarity, in which labor is entirely disembedded from ongoing social relations and is purely exploitative; it defines the relation between worker and boss as a kind of unbridgeable chasm. Though Glazer points out how longer-term working relationships sometimes evolve out of microlabor encounters, the premise is still anchored in hire and fire at will, at literally the first moment it is convenient.

It reminds me of something Angela Mitropoulos argues in this essay:

The regular work, or regular pay, or the 'normal working day' that is regarded as typical of Fordism is an exception in the history of capitalism.[1] Outside a small number of countries for a brief historical moment, and outside particular occupations in specific industries, the experience of work in capitalism has, for the most part, been intermittent, without guarantee of a future income, without punctual limit and, oftentimes, without any income at all. Indeed, regular, full-time and secure work, where it did exist, depended upon the organisation and maintenance of precarious conditions for the vast majority of the world's populations.

It may be that technology in thus instance is not allowing us to progress but is being implemented to strip capitalism to its essentials, to return it to its core principles. The exemption from precariousness may once have been a first-world prerogative, as Mitropoulos suggests, but now the technological elaboration of microlabor markets may mean that everyone around the world can look forward to being equally immiserated.

Dialectic of Horkheimer and Adorno (11 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:48:00.002-08:00

I'm not usually much of a fan of theater, but I would love to see this dialogue between Horkheimer and Adorno, which ran in the New Left Review last year, be made into a comedic play. Dork that I am, it made me laugh repeatedly as I was reading, especially when Horkheimer first refers to Adorno as "Teddie." I can't tell when they are making fun of each other, but I suspect, probably wrongly, that it is often. Consider this exchange:

Adorno: The Utopians were actually not very utopian at all. But we must not provide a picture of a positive utopia.
Horkheimer: Especially when one is so close to despair.

I always thought that the distinctively compressed, nonlinear rhetoric of Dialectic of Enlightenment was achieved through careful addition-through-subtraction-style editing that removed all the transitions between ideas, but apparently Horkheimer and Adorno actually spoke that way to one another, trading gnomic non sequiturs in a spirit of stubborn one-upmanship. (Or maybe Gretel Adorno, who transcribed the dialogue, did some editing on the fly.)

There are many highlights -- Adorno claiming he'd be happy to work as a lift operator in the post-revolutionary utopia; Horkheimer's defense of being "inflamed by desire to touch a woman's body;" Adorno's intuition that American voters "would refuse to tolerate Richard Nixon as Vice President;" Horkheimer denouncing consensus as "repellent"; their weird fixation with riding motorbikes; the importance of preserving American drug stores -- but much of it is about the necessity of work and whether people are simply deluded if they find any sort of work fulfilling under capitalism. They often seem to be debating what it is that freedom's supposed to make people free to do. It's not simply to consume more. Horkheimer mentions that "the opposite of work is regarded as nothing more than consumption," which I take to mean that these are opposites that define each other in consumer capitalism -- that the value of consumption (beyond subsistence) has no positive quality; it is only measurable in terms of the absence of work. And anyway, consumption has collapsed into production thanks to its ready transformation into circulatable signs. Adorno notes that "the enjoyment of speed is a proxy for the enjoyment of work," which I think is borne out by the irresistibility of accelerating consumption to the point of information overload

If consumption is only "regarded" as the opposite of work, what would actually constitute nonwork under the best of conditions? And is work fetishization actually impeding the possibility for solidarity? Do we want to universalize work or overcome it or pass through one to the other? There is a lot to unpack in this passage:

Horkheimer: It is not just a matter of ideology, but is also influenced by the fact that a shaft of light from the telos falls onto labour. Basically, people are too short-sighted. They misinterpret the light that falls on labour from ultimate goals. Instead, they take labour qua labour as the telos and hence see their personal work success as that purpose. That is the secret. If they did not do that, such a thing as solidarity would be possible. A shaft of light from the telos falls on the means to achieve it. It is just as if instead of worshipping their lover they worship the house in which she dwells. That, incidentally, is the source of all poetry.

I love that "incidentally". But is that the secret, that people get caught up in their personal pursuit of flow and neglect the possibilities, the necessity, of collectivity?

This is reminiscent of the passage in Marx's Economic Manuscripts where he mulls over species being.

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

He is struggling with the same issue here, what to make of work's necessity, and to what degree "making one's life activity" means seizing upon oneself as a kind of property, an object for oneself. Alienated work means that our life activity has been turned into labor we sell for survival. But unalienated work still implies a kind of self-ownership. What is the ultimate goal that Horkheimer evokes, the telos? Obviously it's not poetry, that's for sure.

Loyalty Programs and Dystopia (7 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

As these articles from the latest Economist point out, retail loyalty programs -- where you give a name and address in exchange for a card you present to get point-of-sale discounts -- aren't about loyalty at all. Instead they are a convoluted way for retailers to purchase consumer data so that they can use it to discriminate among them, targeting specific groups with ads and deals. Customers basically give retailers the ammunition they need to manipulate them better; perhaps shoppers enjoy such manipulation in the end, the game of discounts and the phony sense of "beating the system" that is in fact the system itself. As Karl Smith suggests in this post about the sorting effects of Super Walmart on a retail ecology, we want our shopping experiences to affirm our sense of our status: When Super Wal-Mart attracts the poorer customers, the shopping experience for those customers of the stores the poor people used to go to becomes more distinctive and satisfying.

Retailers can also potentially resell it to other clients or even start some new lines of business themselves. From the Economist article:

If only insurers could stealthily gather a few titbits about their potential policyholders’ consumption habits. Such hints might help them more accurately target those customers least likely to make claims, and attract them with better rates. As it happens, Tesco routinely collects such information from holders of its Clubcard loyalty card. As it bulks up in financial services, that may give Britain’s largest supermarket chain an edge over traditional insurers.

At risk of seeming paranoid, I think that this seems only a few steps away from the dystopian scenario wherein everyone must consciously manage their various credit ratings by weighing the impact of virtually every action, online or off. This would be a society in which you would have to hire someone to purchase booze and cigarettes for you, lest you price yourself out of affordable insurance rates. You would want to increase the density of your connections to wealthy or well-placed friends for access to better deals, and disavow those who are dangerous to your purchasing power. YOu would need to build Potemkin identities, perhaps, to qualify for various bargains or to prevent being excluded.

The distinction between public and private would complete its evolution, with private meaning "worthless data" rather than something withheld from public life, which will be a space of competing personal brands intermingling and networking with corporate ones. You would generate a steady stream of advertorial enthusiasm on various social media to secure various discounts, but live with the sense that you can't express a social self outside of that, because it would threaten the economic benefits that being a sellout has brought.

Eventually every behavior would come with an actuarial sense of its risk, determined through the mesh of surveillance networks, both voluntary and involuntary, lateral and vertical. Then we will all get to live like the caricature of Soviet-era citizens, always mouthing official platitudes while reporting on one another for political deviance out of a desperate need for self-protection. Only the platitudes we will mouth will be marketing slogans and the deviance we will report will be our own, recast as attempts at stylistic innovation.

What Is a Middle-Class Job? (4 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:47:00.001-08:00

I started reading this essay, "What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?" by economist Arnold Kling, in which he argues his case for structural unemployment and the jobless recovery as a reflection of the economy's need to "recalculate" how best to use its resources. He writes, "The economy is in a state of transition, in which the middle-class jobs that emerged after World War II have begun to decline."

But what constitutes a "middle-class job"? How you frame the answer to that will dictate whether or not you would bother to care whether they disappear. (I suspect Peter Frase probably wouldn't mind.) The question becomes more pertinent when you consider how much political rhetoric and policy revolves around helping the "struggling middle class" and when, as Kling suggests, the sorts of skills associated with the established middle classes are being increasingly automated. Some pundits argue that if certain "middle-class" skills are automated, new ones will become valuable, or at least valued in the market. Someone recently -- I can't find the link; damn you, new Google Reader! -- was imagining we will in the future hire plumbers on the basis of how well they know philosophy. Matt Yglesias often makes this point too that increased productivity should lead to people developing ever more recondite and self-actualizing marketable skills: fewer cashiers, more cognitarians; that sort of thing.

But is a middle-class job one whose work marks the employee with a certain class status, or is it one whose income affords the employee a certain lifestyle?

Is a middle-class job one which guarantees one an income that places one in the middle class statistically? Do we expect everyone to belong to the middle class (at which point it would no longer be in the "middle" of anything -- "class" would disappear for real into something like the 99 percent vs. 1 percent construct)? Or do we expect middle-class jobs to serve as a marker of class distinction that preserves the status hierarchy, and the sense that some workers, some people, are more significant to society than others. That is, should middle-class job betoken the professional class, or the creative class, or some other euphemism?

Another way of framing this question is: What are jobs for? The obvious answer from the point of view of the worker is to get money, but there is obviously a lot more bound up with employment status and who is allowed to do what sort of work and what sort of credentials are required and how one qualifies to be credentialed. Sorting jobs into low and middle and high-class is not simply about pay, but about habitus. So are jobs a system that justifies the unequal distribution of shares of the social surplus? Are they a way to allow society to be sorted into winners and losers while still seeming fair and/or just? There is obviously often a discrepancy between skills and wages, between working hard and earning a lot. Middle-class job is often another way of saying, white collar, which was a semipolite way of saying "not working class," for whom the arduousness of the labor has nothing to do with the expected rewards and work discipline (the threat of firing, of being yelled out, etc.) is the chief incentive.

"Middle-class job," it seems to me, implies certain prerogatives more than a certain wage. You will be spared the drudge work; your work will be socially respected such that you will be granted some autonomy in performing it. You will not be bullied because you have been vetted and proved a reliable self-starter. You will discipline yourself and will feel sufficiently guilty about stealing time, or your stealing time will actually constitute productive work, virtuosic in Virno's sense. Are these jobs disappearing? That is, is capital increasingly having to eschew its neoliberal "you're a creative free agent entrepreneur" shtick and bully and threaten workers to continue to make its profits?

The Evisceration of Google Reader (2 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:46:00.003-08:00

I know that for some unfathomable reason, many people don't take advantage of RSS capabilities -- presumably such people don't read blogs with any regularity, because I don't know how you would do it without an RSS reader. And I know also that some ridiculously small percentage of Google's customers use Google Reader, and an even smaller percentage used the sharing functions that were embedded within it up until a few days ago. So it's completely fruitless to complain about the elimination of those functions. Google could care less, and most people probably won't even know what I am talking about.

Nevertheless I will proceed undeterred, because Google Reader's model of sharing was one I could get behind, unlike the ideal of "frictionless sharing" Facebook is trying to push on its users. In Reader, all you could share was other blog posts, glossed with a comment if you chose. And if you followed someone's shared items, they appeared seamlessly among the content you are already using Reader to gather and access. This sort of sharing didn't exactly make reading social, and it didn't make me feel like reading blog posts was supposed to be a performative social activity -- where I felt obliged to share cool things to try to impress anyone who was following me. It didn't turn the space of Google Reader into something I imagined as crowded with other people, the way I visualize entering the Twittersphere; instead I felt sequestered with the stuff I was trying to read (or, too often, simply process), only there would be these additional items that wouldn't have ordinarily been there that I'd generally appreciate. I got to read the best of many blogs I don't follow, and I learned about many new blogs to start following. It suited my idea of the contemporary public sphere: an exchange of the best pieces of writing about the issues and current events worth deliberating over.

It felt peculiarly tactful that links and only links could be shared. I liked that the full text of these links would generally be immediately available, so it would encourage me to start reading things that I wouldn't have clicked through to on Twitter. Links are pretty much all I care about when I am online; I don't want to be "ambiently aware" of other people, or feel the constant pressure of the presence of a potential audience. I just want to read good posts. The limits on sharing in Reader seemed to institutionalize a respectful divide between the public and private; it helped delineate a sphere of intimacy by banishing it, and opened a space for me to connect to people online in a way that made sense, not necessarily as friends or contacts but as interested peers and fellow citizens.

By killing Reader's sharing functions, Google is endorsing a vision of sharing as an amalgam of the full range of narcissistic impulses, as well as the idea that oversharing "friendship" should be allowed to trivialize the prerogatives of public-sphere discourse. (I am at this point making a ham-fisted attempt to transpose half-remembered bits of Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man into this argument.) With the services Google seems to want to emulate -- Facebook, Twitter -- you can't just get links; you have to sort through the full garbage dump of what people put online, which makes sense for those companies because that sorting work creates valuable data for them. There is nothing for those companies in a public sphere that is cordoned off from the private self, as the dreams and insecurities and interpersonal connections of the private self is usually where the marketing action is.

Google, like the rest of the online companies, would like to destroy the idea that you would separate any of your online behaviors from any of the others. Such separation is no way to create a rich data set. So we are increasingly having this ideology foisted on us: You aren't supposed to read online; you are supposed to live there.

UPDATE: Brian Shih, who was at one time a Google Reader project manager, offers a critique of the new Reader (via MR).

NGDP Targeting (2 Nov 2011)

2011-12-22T11:46:00.001-08:00

The continuing economic slump has brought some heretofore heterodox economic ideas about how to manage central banks and the money supply increasing attention. One of those gaining increasingly high-profile endorsement is NGDP targeting: the idea that the Federal Reserve should use nominal GDP as the benchmark in making monetary policy rather than targeting the rate of inflation. Steve Waldman has many links here to economists championing the idea; I found this National Affairs article by Scott Sumner, a longtime apostle for NGDP targeting, to be the best exposition of the pro argument.

Sumner presents NGDP targeting as an approach that might appease Fed critics on the left, who want central bankers to do more to curb unemployment, and the right, who want to protect their rentier-class patrons from inflation, which reduces the value of their wealth. Sumner notes that has become politically unfeasible for the Fed to deliberately stoke a rise in inflation, which can stimulate growth and generate jobs: "Americans view inflation as a process that reduces their living standards, because they take their own nominal incomes as a given when thinking about the impact of higher prices." (This raises the question of what has led Americans to have this view, which well suits the interests of the creditor classes but often masquerades as a matter of common sense or human instinct.)

NGDP targeting, Sumner argues, "offers a single target that effectively combines both facets of the Fed's dual mandate, and so should be attractive to those on both the left and the right who argue that the requirement to simultaneously address inflation and unemployment makes it impossible for the Fed to tackle either very well." This unified metric also would sideline the argument between those who think unemployment is mainly structural (people have the wrong skills for the available jobs in a transforming economy) and those who think is cyclical (economic shocks have created a downward spiral in effective demand): "Advocates of the structural view sometimes lose sight of the fact that we do not have enough nominal spending to launch a real recovery even if the economy had no structural problems at all. Whatever our long-term problem, our immediate problem is poor NGDP growth."

Sumner covers some of the wonkish ins and outs of the debate over monetary policy, but arguably the most controversial thing he writes is something anyone can understand: "When real shocks occur, it is only fair that debtors and creditors share the loss." That sounds eminently reasonable: Insofar as these shocks are no one's fault, society should bear their burden collectively, ideally in ways that distribute the suffering to those that can most bear it. But our society's bankruptcy law, as Mike Konczal suggests in this post, tend to be a "creditors' bargain":

In this idea, the rules should only exist to the extent that they benefit the creditor’s ability to collect money. It’s simple: if a law, custom, norm, or rule helps creditors collect when things go wrong, it is a good one. If it takes into account concerns other than creditors’ return — say, destroyed neighborhoods, whether banks follow the rules, etc. — they are worthless.... The law is just there to protect creditors against the difficulty of collecting on debtors, not to provide a level playing field for those with debt.

The underlying moral idea is that creditors are not responsible for misallocations of capital -- they are not required to be diligent about lending or be perspicacious in managing risk. The creditors' bargain takes care of all that. Debtors are held to be de facto criminals, and creditors can hope for the state's cooperation in enforcing their ill-conceived contracts, regardless of the realities of economic circumstances. Running the Fed so as to prevent inflation is a kind of creditors' bargain of monetary policy: preserve the value of the creditors' claims at all costs, regardless the ramifications for economic growth or the labor market.

But as Waldman argues, NGDP targeting conveys a different set of morals:

It is creditors, not debtors, whom we must hold accountable for patterns of aggregate investment. There always have been and always will be foolish or predatory borrowers willing to accept loans that they will not repay. We rely upon discriminating creditors to ensure that funds and resources will be placed in hands that will use them well. Creditors allocate capital by selecting the worthy from innumerable unworthy petitioners. An economic downturn reflects a failure of selection by creditors as a group. It is essential, if we want the high-quality real investment in good times, that creditors bear losses when they allocate funds poorly. When creditors in aggregate have misjudged, we must have some means of imposing losses without the logistical hell of endless bankruptcies. Our least disruptive means of doing so is via inflation.... NGDP targeting, despite the stench of sugar-high money games that Austrians perceive in it, might actually increase our ability to impose losses on foolish creditors via default and bankruptcy. This would pay a huge moral dividend, in terms of our ability to avoid the unfairness of arbitrary bail-outs.

Banks would not be too big to fail while the little people are driven to fail like crazy.

Music and metrics (28 Oct 2011)

2011-12-22T11:45:00.003-08:00

It's been obvious for years now that digital media has forced the music industry to restructure. Some, like Toure in this Salon essay, believe this is sad, depriving us of the pleasures of monoculture, such as they were. I naively hoped that a crippled culture industry might diminish the significance of music as an identity signifier. At one point I thought a decentralized music business might lead to local scenes thriving again and perhaps more people making music instead of consuming it. I'm less optimistic about that now. It appears that success in pop music is still structured by the same forces -- the labels, the press, radio stations, concert promoters; with the dynamics of power among them always shifting. And social media seem to have made the use of music as an identity token more ubiquitous. In some instances, such appropriation leads to proximate acts of creativity by consumers -- ingenious playlists or remixes, homemade videos, etc. The possibility that anyone can commandeer an audience raises the stakes on cultural consumption, at once breeding both innovation and alienation from the act of listening itself.

The existence of social media has also made online self-promotion a more or less fundamental aspect of forming a band, no matter how modest its ambitions may be. This initially played out as bands becoming weirdly continuous with their MySpace pages. The site Hipster Runoff has served as a more or less continuous commentary on how indie bands are obliged to play online media as one of their instruments, suggesting that their music is basically by-product, subordinate to the real performance: the band's orchestration of online image and hype. The subversive implication of HRO, I think, is that most bands are better enjoyed as Barnumesque image mongers. The multimedia identity spectacle they manage is a newer, more comprehensive kind of art. In fact, this is the sort of art that the logic of social media would inspire us all to enjoy and to make ourselves -- the managing of different audiences and leaks of information to project a fluid yet coherent self as a masterwork. Any of us can be just as much of a microcelebrity as a band is. (This Rhizome essay about camgirls is suggestive on that front, how monitoring the flux of online attention can become a medium, an art.)

Anyway, even in the traditional music industry, the need for bands to self-promote and build a "platform" has become institutionalized, which has to a degree crowdsourced the A&R function. This article from last week's Economist gets at the dialectics of this shift:

A&R men used to be alchemists, discovering base talent and turning it into gold.... These days they are venture capitalists. Particularly at big labels such as Universal, A&R executives increasingly expect acts to have built a self-sustaining, if modest, business before they offer them a recording contract. Large numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers help show that a band has traction. But record labels have become wary of social-media indicators. They know that desperate bands may chatter about themselves or hire marketing firms to inflate their online metrics.

Bands are less artists than entrepreneurial startups, manipulating online social networks to gain leverage with potential investors. The product they sell doesn't need to be good if the market for it can be posited, and the structure of the industry encourages musicians to focus their talents on that sort of market making. As certain social media metrics get corrupted, new ones will be established, because they serve as an essential proxy for the one metric that will never be perfected, the one that quantifies talent in the abstract.