Self-Service and Self-Serving (24 March 2011)

Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation about the many blessings it claims that information technology bestows -- enhancing productivity, tempering the business cycle, making markets more efficient, improving the quality of goods, allowing us to defeat time and space and live forever, and so on. IT, it seems, enables employers to get more productive work per employee by eliminating the jobs of those whose work has been automated out of existence and by "letting" those who remain "do more things at the same time" -- that is, blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork, surreptitiously expanding the working day, and accelerating work processes through multitasking with little regard for the increased stress and irritability this imposes on workers.

What bothered me most is the paper's paean to technology-enabled self-service. Yes, I know, everyone loves checking themselves out at the grocery store and talking to robots on the phone instead of human customer service agents. We all recognize how companies have our best interests in mind when they get us consumers to do things they once had to pay an employee to do. Aware that some of us remain reluctant to rhapsodize over self-service, the paper explores the issue in a dedicated sidebar, which includes this tendentious passage:

Unfortunately, self-service sometimes gets a bad rap. The media routinely portrays the efforts of companies to implement self-service options as creating work for the consumer solely for the benefit of the company. In reality, most self-serve applications don’t cost the consumer more time, they just involve one person (the consumer) doing the work, not two (the consumer and the employee). Granted while some self-service applications (e.g., “press 2 if you are interested in opening an account”) can be maddening and cost consumers more time, overall self-service technologies usually cut overall labor time (for both the worker and consumer). And in some cases, they can save consumers time and add convenience. Even where personal service provides consumers with more value (a chauffeur-driven car is seen as a luxury), it usually costs more (which is why usually why only wealthy people have chauffeurs). Other kinds of personal service are the same. They cost more money to provide than does self-service. However, in the type of competitive markets more companies are facing, savings from self-service are passed back to consumers through lower prices, at least over the moderate to long term. As a result, standards of living go up.

Yes, while quality of living goes down. Notice how the concept of "prosumerism" -- where consumers get to be productive "co-creators" or "innovators" alongside their favorite brand buddies -- is here revealed in its true guise. The company just presumes that the consumer is already an employee, no different from the cashier or stocker. Post-Fordist, immaterial labor and consumption as production is not necessarily about getting to join in with creative-class while they shape social meanings and recast our shared material culture; it's about getting consumers to forgo some of the services they were once accustomed to assume are included and do those things themselves, which add value to the enterprise. When shopping becomes "productive," that means it has become a job you do for them, not yourself. Self-service means "serve the company."

To wash this down, consumers are sold on "convenience" or the ability to skirt human contact that might disrupt their solipsism -- indeed, the paper suggests the idea of personal service is a decadent luxury, not something the firm has implicitly promised in selling services to us ("Only wealthy people have a chauffeur) -- and we are promised that we'll ultimately save money, which after all is the only relevant value in a consumer society. "Standards of living" in this context means exclusively the ability to buy and have more stuff, not to have better experiences or enjoy humanized exchanges in an economy palpably made up of people doing things for one another. Instead we are encouraged to live in a fantasy world where everything is made for our money alone, and naturally we have no choice but to help ourselves to it.

The Accursed Share of Self (11 March 2011)

The most recent issue of the journal Mediations has an interview with Marxist political theorist Paolo Virno, who wrote a short and surprisingly accessible book called A Grammar of the Multitude, which explores the ramifications of "post-Fordist" labor conditions -- that is to say, non-factory employment that emphasizes worker cooperation and flexibility and can involve the production of immaterial goods -- brands, services, experiences, entertainment. (Hence this sort of work is sometimes called "immaterial labor," though that ambiguity of the word immaterial can throw people off.)

Unlike the book, the interview is somewhat forbidding. I'm going to hazard a guess that this interview was not conducted face to face, with such questions as these being asked aloud:

In the contemporary “creative industry,” collective work often takes the paradigmatic form of “brainstorming.” It consists of the discussion and production of both ideas and solutions, even if a considerable part of them are rejected after critical examination, though this work sometimes opens the door for unexpected innovations. In the conditions of Fordism, massive collectivities — organized through a strict disciplinary division of labor — produced the well-known effect of the multiplication of separate productive forces of workers (“the whole is more than the sum of its parts”). Maybe it would be possible to make a (disputable) assumption: under the conditions of post-Fordism, collective work can be organized through “subtraction” when the result of the work is inferior to the sum of the collective effort. This becomes a sort of exception, an unexpected innovation (“the whole is less than the sum of the parts”). On the other hand, if not considered in terms of products, such collective work produces a feeling of strong subjectivity and strength, valorizing each member of the collective. What is your opinion? Would it be possible to connect this “subtractive” mode of functioning with the disappearance of a measure for work in contemporary production?

Stripped of some of the verbiage, there's an interesting point in there, namely, that unlike assembly lines, which paradigmatically maximizes the minimum contribution from workers to make a sophisticated product, creative-class-type work encourages lots of brainstorming, much of which is discarded. The end product is less the than total mental energy poured into it. (This immediately reminds me of when magazine interns are asked to draft huge lists of ideas for various sections only to have most of them summarily rejected, or when dozens of headline ideas are tossed out over the course of interminable meetings.)

Virno's response to this idea is also interesting. He suggests that collective effort doesn't vanish so much as linger and threaten to spoil. It becomes a sort of accursed share that must somehow be expended, or rechanneled.

Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available.... Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action. Also, here we need to bear in mind an essential ambivalence: the same phenomenon can become both a danger and a salvation. The copiousness of collective intelligence is, altogether, heimlich — familiar and propitious — and unheimlich — disturbing and extraneous.

One can see in that response the optimistic view of post-Fordism, the opportunities this cooperative energy represents. But I am more familiar, I guess, with the detriments -- the divisive competitiveness, the ambition gone awry, the depression and defeatedness. I associate most of those negative ramifications with the narcissistic implications of post-Fordism -- the way we are encouraged to position ourselves as personal brands in order to succeed in a decentralized workplace that seeks to reward merit over longevity and loyalty; the way the effort we put into shaping our identity becomes a productive economic force; the way commanding and brokering attention begins to justify any means necessary; the way we are taught to regard our consumption as a mode of symbolic production, making us believe our consumer tastes are highly meaningful and in some ways zero-sum. I sometimes end up feeling that I need certain bands to fail in order to vindicate my indifference; I need certain writers to publish mediocre work because I haven't aligned with their brand. I end up being threatened by people when they seem smart, which makes no sense at all, since I generally want to learn things from the people I talk to or whose work I read.

In short, there is a killing reflexivity, an endless recursiveness, to our behavior that seems to stem from post-Fordism, or late capitalism, or the New Capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. Virno notes the ways this reflexivity manifests itself in impossible commands like: I order you to be spontaneous. He writes, "In our present time, the labor force enriches the capital only if it takes part in a form of social cooperation that is wider than the one presupposed by the factory or the office. In post-Fordism, the efficient worker includes — in the execution of his own labor — attitudes, competences, wisdoms, tastes and inclinations matured somewhere else, outside that time specifically dedicated to the production of goods." Part of social cooperation, I think, is carework and affective labor -- the sort of nonmarket nourishing that we all need to reproduce as a species and not just kill ourselves. But arguably, much of the rest of that effort that we spend outside the workplace is spent on self-fashioning -- on presenting a winning identity to our friends, who are now available to us in theory as a potential audience at all times. We engage in a form of "social cooperation" by sharing through social media, often in order to establish our personal brands and test their reach, measure their equity. (Virno's word for what I call the personal brand is virtuoso -- which admittedly gives it a more positive spin, evoking an unalienated, nonprofessional mastery of something.) Then that anxiety, and the fruit of participating in those social networks, are brought to bear on the brainstorming sessions during official work hours; in effect, then, one is always working, because successful job performance depends on developing the right sort of knowledge and connections throughout the whole of one's personal life. You have to be able to leverage not only the office watercooler talk but the similar ambient information one absorbs outside work. This qualifies you to be a Gladwellian influencer, a certified creative-class meaning-maker, a hipster.

We are always aware of ourselves as a brand, and we have to nourish its equity with entrepreneurial thinking -- how can I get it out there better, and position it properly and make the right sorts of alliances to strengthen the core message I am trying to convey? In some ways this beats working as we traditionally think of it -- working for the Man, doing our deskilled and meaningless task on the endless assembly line of existence. Post-Fordism extends the opportunity to make all our work seem more integrated with the great project of self-actualization, of expressing ourselves more fully.

But this self-awareness is the accursed share as well -- the leftover from the competitive workplace-brainstorming sessions, that status-hierarchy battles, the arguments over what music and which movies suck, the experience of checking Facebook and feeling outclassed by what your friends have shared, and so on. It all conjures a certain kind of identity into being, one that is defined by its inadequacy. I suppose Lacanian-leaning types would argue that this is always already inevitably the case, that the self should be constructed around a lack, around desire. But that seems to let the relations of production off the hook, as well as the cultural forces that work to snuff out the optimism that Virno can detect in these forms of cooperation. The self-interested acquisitiveness and insatiability that capitalism encourages are posited as natural conditions, as inescapable human nature, and are allowed to pervert the other side of human nature -- our tendency to get along with one another and combine to achieve things. Our collaborative nature is expropriated, we regard it ourselves as weakness unless we can turn it to account and make it personally advantageous to ourselves alone. Capitalism prompts us to reject the possibility of collective identity -- what Virno talks about here in terms of "a multitude of singularities," of individuality emerging through collectivity -- for something atomized and uncompromisingly individualistic, that relies on forms of recognition that don't rely on interaction with other people, things like money and abstract status.

Hence the structure of Facebook, the exemplary staging ground for post-Fordist subjectivity. It allows for participation in social networks -- it lets us contribute to the "general intellect" or the "social brain" -- but always at our convenience, without messy synchronous interactions with other people, which might compromise our brand or upset our entrepreneurial focus, and always as a strictly discrete identity (as a personal brand) whose value is independently measured and capable of being brokered by and to parties outside the network. At work, we call those parties who capitalize on the value of our sociality and personal creativity our bosses, yet with online social media, our new bosses seem to fade into the background. The revolutionary transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation that the economy increasingly depends upon ends up being neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism.

Anyway, that's the gist of what I would argue at the Post/Autonomia conference, if the organizers end up accepting my paper.

"Rifle-shot Targeting" (7 March 2011)

The Wall Street Journal has been running a series of articles on the data-harvesting and target-advertising industries and the tracking ecosphere: it's called, somewhat ominously, What They Know. Part of what they know, of course, is what we deliberately share, but a great deal of it is deduced by combining what we share with the unintended tracks we leave through our browsing and purchasing behavior.

Most people are far less integrated in their identity than the assumptions of tracking companies and social-media companies like Facebook allow for. By fusing behavior from different aspects of a person's personality and making recommendations or targeting ads accordingly, they can prompt some uncomfortable or embarrassing collisions, and at the same time, they supply a material, external basis for the diminishing of the self, of a reduction of one's messy and complicated being to a neat, computer-assisted synthesis. These companies hold up a mirror that shrinks us and encourages us to become what we see there, a coherent bundle of consumer desires.

A recent development, explained in the latest What They Know piece by Jessica Vascellaro, is that TV advertisers are seeking to retrofit the tracking technologies being perfected online to better target commercials to viewers. Ideally they would be able to show different commercials to different viewers during the same commercial break the way that a website can display different ads according to the information in your browser cookies and so on.

Some in the industry want "rifle-shot targeting," Mr. Morgan says, where people get "only those ads they care about." That's still well in the future, Mr. Morgan says.

I like how the targeting metaphor has been carried one step further to really hammer home how advertisers few us as prey, and would like to line us up in their sites to blow us apart with a perfectly aimed shell. Take that, Laura Archera Huxley!

The tracking methods involve data collected from DVRs and cable boxes; reading through Vascellaro's summary serves as a pertinent reminder that anytime you choose something on a digital network, no matter how banal or insignificant it may seem, it is tracked, and no devices are exempt.

Given a year of viewing data, Simulmedia can almost perfectly predict around 70% of what types of shows a given set-top box is likely to be tuned to, and when, Mr. Morgan says. He likens the process to helping advertisers "choke the shotgun blast and bring it in close," rather than scattering their ad messages widely.

Lovely. Sort of gives the lie to the pretense that advertisers are on our side, trying to help us find things we want. No, they are eager to "blast" us apart with a point-blank gut shot. I wonder whether the ad execs fear getting arterial spray on their suits.

Surveillance and the Social Layer (2 March 2011)

I didn't listen to the interview with the founder of startup company Hashable described in this Silicon Alley Insider post, but a section of the recap caught my attention. It details the thinking process behind a serial entrepreneur's approach to the "social layer" -- the industry jargon for how immaterial labor can be captured in digital form through internet connectivity:

They thought about the gestures that business people and white collared professionals were conducting day after day that were not making it to the Internet.

They recognized that the acts of people meeting with and introducing other people were not making it in a structured way to the Internet. When you have breakfast/lunch/coffee/drinks with friends, that data would be valuable to users if a service would gather it and make it shareable. So, they decided it might be cool to build an application that was fun to use, social, and drives people to create that information and send it to Hashable. While the interface looks a lot like Foursquare, instead of saying “I’m at Starbucks”, you would say “I’m having coffee with Mark”. Hashable is saving very important information for its users and creating a multipurpose address book of the people its users interact with.

Notice how this exchange is structured. What is regarded as in inherently intolerable is that any sort of social behavior could escape digital capture, could slip through the net of commercial surveillance. Innovation has become a matter of perfecting that surveillance, allowing all our behavior to be mediated and translated into marketing data to fuel the engines of consumerism -- perfect the management of demand.

The contemporary tech startup's critical ("cool") task is to somehow entice you to share your private information in a standardized digital form in as close to real time as possible by making it "fun" and "social" and more or less compulsive, if not compulsory. It should find ways to "drive" users to report on themselves without the burden becoming intolerable.

"Fun" and "social" in this sort of context tend to be undefinable; their meanings are presented as obvious common sense, and thus they can only be elaborated through tautology: what is fun is social, and what is social is fun. Behind that screen, gamification tactics are deployed to encourage users to regard the progressive surrender of privacy as individuating accomplishment, a kind of glory that can measured only insofar as we let ourselves be tracked. The surveillance apparatus disguises itself as a giant scoreboard.

The point of all this data collection is, of course, privatized profit.

To the question of how Hashable plans to monetize, Mike answered honestly that “we’re not sure”. Hashable is creating unique data sets. The relationships that users have with people, the strength of those relationships – Hashable may be able to monetize access to that information. Users gain points every time they use Hashable. A certain number of points could be required for certain access, so Hashable might offer an option to pay for points or charge for access if you don’t have points.

It's interesting that though users supply the content, it is Hashable that "creates" the data sets -- a subtle rhetorical move that allows social-media companies to justify the property rights they claim with regard the information they collect. And here we also see that the original purpose of the service -- to "sae very important information for users" has shifted to "monetizing access to that information" by selling it to outside parties. It's also interesting to see how using the service is convertible to currency from the company's perspective -- it extracts more value from users using the service than those users get from being ostensibly served by it. One would have to pay to not use it, presumably after one had invested just enough labor into building a personal network within Hashable's proprietary clutches to not just give it up altogether.

As always with social media, the goal is to get you to invest enough of yourself in someone else's proprietary network so that you become trapped by it. Then the company can hold that part of yourself hostage if you object to the way they whore it out.

From the Commodity Self to the Personal Brand (2 Feb 2011)

Not long ago I read Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson's "Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning" (pdf), a classic piece of 1990s advertising criticism. (Not everything academics did in the 1990s was superficial junk, notwithstanding this diatribe at Dissent's website about how vapid cultural-studies scholars supposedly were.)

The key point I took away from the article: ad discourse dissolves reality into free-floating signifiers and prompts us to adopt them as the language of self, replacing the identity-making role of tradition in a capitalist world that has eroded all traditional ways and demanded flexibility from its subjects. Design ideology makes that shift more palatable, and social media coincides with our taking a more active role circulating signs the way ads do. With social media we can readily represent ourselves as personal brands, and we shape our identity with that inescapable structuring metaphor in mind. We take the way ads may once have seemed to force us into a particular sort of cobbled-together self out of products and their associated signs and turn it into a positive active procedure, in which we build our personal brand and use our consumption as productive labor building our brand equity.

Some of this essay, from 1996, is dated, mainly because it couldn't have anticipated how the internet would change what they call the "commodity self" -- the identity we fashion for ourselves out of signifiers put into play through advertising discourse. Their key point derives from Baudrillard's idea of the code -- ads detach signifiers from some sort of organic, natural constellation of meaning and make them free-floating; ads marshal and mobilize signfiers and make them attachable to any product or idea. They become a kind of flexible language of images and memes that individuals can apply to their own identity construction; in fact, the chief accomplishment of ad discourse (of all the money put into making ads ubiquitous and their discourse and ideology hegemonic) is to make consumers bathe in ads and adopt its discourse as their own. "Advertising has established the premise that the most gratifying social relations are those associated with the confident, discriminating, sign user." You know, the hipster (the good, on-trend consumer). We hate hipsters because the system, ads as a discourse, is making a promise about what it will be like to be a hipster that actual people who seem like hipsters can't live up to. The prevalence of ad discourse generates outsize expectations of those subjectivated by it. We wish they would stop so we could, but it's not them, it's the entire structuring discourse in all its ubiquity.

Omnipresent ads make us think the language of self should also be the language of ads, which seem by their ubiquity to be the surest way of securing social recognition. Social recognition comes from sounding/seeming like ads, which are manifestly the dominant mode of public discourse. The language of power, measured by exposure, is ad discourse (a consequence of money buying exposure, of commercial media and the leasing of public space to private companies); hence to be powerful, we try to speak of ourselves in that discourse. Of course, ad discourse, as Goldman and Papson point out, "tends to further the hegemony of commodity and market relations" without their being any conscious effort on the part of any evil masterminds ruling from the commanding heights. They "reflect the logic of capital" while they "disguise and suppress inequalities, injustices, irrationalities, and contradictions."

The authors argue that advertising was "in crisis" in the mid-1990s, but that seems to have been a misreading of the significance of advertising's reflexivity and self-deprecation. As Thomas Frank pointed out in Conquest of Cool, this has long been a cyclical strategy for replenishing potency of ad's messages. If anything, the language of ads and branding have become more accepted, almost embraced as a model for one's self-concept -- talk of the personal brand is not at all ironic in contemporary culture, and conceiving of personal goals along the lines of building brand equity are also becoming common as social media turns individuals into mini-media companies with logos/avatars of their own. This amateur population working to detach and recirculate signifiers has forestalled the "sign wars" they anticipated in the 1990s. Instead of advertising eating itself, co-creation and Web 2.0 and productive consumption and the like emerged. We have become the meaning makers and appropriators -- separating things from their ordinary context and allowing them to float free in social media and elsewhere through sharing.

Personal branding and actual product brand managers now complement one another -- we work alongside of advertisers to appropriate and reconfigure and remix signifiers, to generate new meaning possibilities that have value. The intermediate step from being subjected to ads to becoming little ad agencies ourselves lies in the promulgation of design ideology, as epitomized by Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, to take one of many possible examples. The insidious creep of design ideology -- that we should choose fonts the express our inner truth, for instance -- works in conjunction with the ideology of advertisements, that magic self-transformation is possible through purchases, no logic required. Both assume that the inner truth can be expressed through manipulation and display of decontextualized signs (in one's appearance, or in one's online presence) rather than through sustained practices. Or rather in replaces all other possible practices with one, the practice of clever sign manipulation. Design ideology rationalizes the overflow of signs pouring in and over us, gives us a protocol for handling the plenitude, for how to slim down and screen some out. It makes the commodity self -- "based on the packaging of self as a collection or ensemble of commodity signs" -- tolerable. Designy-ness is a subjective response to ad culture that accelerates our transformation into a personal brand. It allows us to interpret the ads which saturate our lives as opportunities, as a positive condition, rather than an inescapable blight. Then, armed with design consciousness, we start conceiving of identity explicitly in branding terms.

In a sense, social media is a form of democratized bohemia, extending the design consciousness mentality and the opportunity for commodity-self-nourishing display to everyone, not just hipsters in the right neighborhoods, or not just urban people generally. So social media not only allow for more peacocking personal display (more "sharing") but they also make it more pressing to have more signifiers at the ready, making it expedient to collaborate with advertisers and tolerate them, let them and their detached signifiers into one's intimate life.

Facebook "Sponsored Stories" (26 Jan 2011)

At ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez reports on Facebook's unrepentant new marketing scheme, which it calls, nauseatingly enough, "Sponsored Stories." You, in the course of innocently and eagerly "sharing" updates about the wonderful products and services in your life, craft a magical "story" for your "friends," and advertisers would like to help your "story" reach more of your "friends" by co-opting it and featuring it more prominently on others' home pages. (Sorry for the Carles level of scare quotes, but social media's aggressive transvaluation of the language of intimacy seems to necessitate them.) This ruse allows marketers to indulge one of their favorite creation myths about their business; that ordinary people are always already enthusiastically advertising products to one another, and advertisers emerged to serve as shrewd editors of those conversations, standardizing them and elevating them into a clearer expression of the zeitgeist. We make ad discourse ubiquitous through our free choice. Advertisers just follow our lead.

Facebook's program extends that notion, putting forward the idea that anything we do is best understood as some sort of promotion for something (of course it's always at least self-promotion). Perez explains:

With Facebook's Sponsored Stories, your activity is now up for grabs, available to the advertiser associated with the brand, business or app you interacted with. Just checked in to a restaurant? That's an ad. Just liked a brand? That's an ad. Just shared a news story from the Web? That's an ad.

And naturally, Facebook doesn't allow its users to opt out of this program. You don't control when your endorsement gets adopted and redistributed. Your profile picture just shows up in a sidebar ad as though you're a willing shill.

The lesson here is that Facebook is systematically blurring the line between promotional discourse and nonpromotional discourse -- it acts as though an update and an ad are fundamentally the same, as though context doesn't color your willingness to celebrate a particular product. Arguably, being on Facebook and recapitulating your life there is the process of turning it into one long advertisement -- recasting experience into a media-commodity form. The more time one spends on the site, the more one will structure one's experience in those terms, preconceiving it for its promotional potential. It encourages you to understand yourself as a product requiring advertising, a brand seeking synergies.

The Sponsored Stories program makes that conversion absolutely explicit, and Facebook seems to assume everyone is on board, already accustomed to the idea of marketing discourse being the only relevant sort of public discussion. Facebook already filters potential content from your friends, using algorithms to generate what it thinks you should see. The existence of these algorithms invites efforts to game them, to figure out what will get your update noticed and disseminated the most. Sponsored Stories supplements the algorithms, giving users a chance to jump the line, to craft their updates more like marketing, so they will receive wider play. This then feeds the loop, making personal disclosures seem ever more like marketing, implying that they should be mined even more thoroughly for their advertising potential. Thanks, Zuck!

Benevolent Advertising (7 Dec 2010)

Ezra Klein posted recently about the advertising industry that struck me as wrong in several ways. First, Klein cites an anecdote from Ken Auletta's Googled to make the point that advertising is sort of a scam:

Auletta talks with Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. Karmazin is aghast at Google's campaign to measure the effectiveness of advertising by tallying clicks...: "You don't want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you're selling mystique." It's more evidence that the greatest advertising campaign of all time was for...advertising.

Klein assumes that if something can't be measured, it can't possibly exist -- an empiricist fallacy that sees only scams in every invocation of the ineffable. I'm prone to that fallacy too, since so often the pseudo-ineffable is invoked to discourage investigation into class privilege. It's used by conservatives as a smoke screen to protect the inequities of the status quo. Nevertheless it is arrogantly short-sighted of us, not to mention a sad comment on the hegemony of capitalist modes of instrumental reason, to assume that we have figured out how to measure everything that should count as real. What Karamazin is saying, whether he knows it or not, is that measurement can be a way of reducing the real to what it can capture. It commoditizes "what works," since what is real is only that which is mechanically repeatable through proven procedures rather than the messy complexity, the irresolvable causality, of actual social and human experience. Not all of the effects of advertising can be quantified, not all of them are direct, not all of them are intentional, not all of them desired by the marketers or the businesses whose products are being touted. Advertising establishes a cultural discourse, and promulgates an entire value system, not about specific products alone, but about how value is conferred in consumer society, legitimizing certain forms of recognition and notoriety and delegitimizing others -- it helps convey the idea that identity coheres at the level of goods, and that things that aren't for sale aren't "real," for instance. In other words it promotes the empiricist fallacy, not its own mystique, as Klein argues. It helps to suppress the sort of analysis on the level of signs that must work by intuition, inference, and induction -- the analysis that could constitute the basis of resistance to consumerism.

After dismissing advertising as a giant con, he wants to congratulate the ad industry for supporting the dissemination of information.

The advertising industry was benevolently inefficient. It enabled pretty much every mass information medium we've ever had. Newspapers and radio and television and the Internet (Google, Facebook, etc.) are all brought to you by the advertising industry. There's perhaps no single sector that has done as much to advance human knowledge as the people who sell you soap and cars and soda.

Obviously, what this misses is that ads support only certain kinds of media that correspond with the receptive consumer mind-set they are intended to instill. Not all commercial media is entirely tainted by the patrons paying the bills, but certainly plenty of information has been suppressed because it hasn't suited advertisers, couldn't bring eyeballs to ads, and plenty more information has been distorted to suit advertisers, to attract them. Many a magazine story, for instance, is consciously intended to be ad bait, and on television I imagine that mode of thinking is even more prevalent. So advancing human knowledge? I guess I'll take the education "sector" over marketers.

Even Better Than the Real Thing (8 Nov 2010)

At Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer posts about Mexican Coke (the soda, not the inhalant tainted with cattle-deworming drugs) and concludes its alleged superiority to American Coke, made with high fructose corn syrup, is a "cognitive illusion." No ordinary illusion, mind you, but one that occurs in your brain.

In a passage that would delight Baudrillard, Lehrer cites blind taste tests to explain how when we consume soda, we mainly taste the branding.

Although I can rationalize away that closet full of Mexican Coke bottles (thank you, Costco!), the psychology of taste perception suggests those rationalizations are wrong. Consider this clever study of soft drinks led by Samuel McClure and Read Montague. The experiment was a recreation of the Pepsi Challenge, except this time all the tasting was being done in a brain scanner. Each person swallowed sips of cola from a plastic tube while their brain was being scanned. When Coke and Pepsi were offered unlabeled, the subjects showed no measurable preference for either brand. Most of the time, they couldn’t even tell the two colas apart. But Montague’s second observation was more surprising: subjects overwhelmingly preferred drinks that were labeled as Coke, no matter what cola was actually delivered through the tubes. In other words, brand trumped taste. We cared more about the logo than the actual product.

Let them eat signs! Rob Walker had covered Mexican Coke devotees before in a Consumed column and concluded that people are attracted to it largely for its nostalgia value. He also wrote this memorable line about his own Mexican Coke purchasing: "I do this because I believe it tastes better, and I really don’t care why." No one knows better than he how fragile consumerist joys can be. Sometimes you have to take pleasures where you find them and not let theory destroy the fantasies that goods can nurture.

Lehrer is not content to leave it at that. He links the point about consuming the brand with neuroresearch that explains how various regions light up in the brain and so on in response to logos, etc. The upshot is that people get excited about the brand for sentimental reasons and this translates into subjective taste preferences attributed to the product. Through a profane transubstantiation of an unholy idea into sickly sweet material substance, we eat the marketing: "As the scientists note, Coca-Cola is 'advertising incarnate.' " This makes advertised Coke even better than the "real thing," the naked product with no semiotic associations invested in it.

These findings are of a piece with the research into wine tasting, which has suggested that people think more expensive wines inherently taste better. What this implies is that in general, our sense of what we like is extremely malleable, far more manipulatable than our egos can generally stand to tolerate. Brand loyalty is in some ways a hedge against this depressing fact; we assert allegiance to a brand to mask from ourselves that this loyalty has no traceable basis in our "real self." It's an inarticulate way of saying "I do this, and I don't really care why" that allows us to avoid confronting the full significance of those words.

I always wonder about the sentimental reasons, the nostalgia, that triggers these neurological responses. How malleable are those triggers? Can they be implanted by the advertising as well as stroked by it? My hypothesis has always been that consumerism works systematically to broaden our sentimentality, supplying a language and a bestiary of symbols to allow us to react emotionally to a broader range of stimuli. This lets consumerism seem to deepen our sense of self, making our lives seem emotionally (as well as materially) richer -- though from another perspective the puppet masters are just adding more strings to their marionettes.

Personal information markets and anonymity (18 Oct 2010)

I was reminded by the Generation Bubble twitter feed (@GenBub_tweed; incidentally, mine is @marginalutility, trying to make it worthwhile/getting sucked in to it) of this WSJ article from July, which made a bit of stink at the time but which I was too dismayed and apathetic to address then. It's a story about how companies surreptitiously archive our online behavior, use it to profile us, and then sell it along to marketers looking to target pitches. That's not really news, although most of us probably unconsciously block out that information in order to continue to use the internet comfortably. One of these companies is Lotame:

Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person's name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. [A person's tastes] can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of "50 First Dates").
"We can segment it all the way down to one person," says Eric Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.

I guess at that point, withholding your name doesn't really matter; your name and your profile are the same for all intents and purposes. The ad targeted for you reaches you and only you.

"It is a sea change in the way the industry works," says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. "Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages."

Isn't the pretense of anonymity always already violated? When everything about you is shared but your specific name, is your privacy protected in any meaningful way, especially when that aggregate of preferences can be used to target you? There may be no operative distinction between real name and user ID that holds up. This is part of what makes the recent news that Facebook apps leak user IDs so troubling and also so besides the point. That the entity being sold online on personal information markets is not your actual name but a string of digits is somewhat irrelevant, particularly since your name is the least important piece of information about you to marketers.

I feel like I am struggling to get at what I mean, so I apologize for the redundancy: But if all the contextual information we generate can allow us to be targeted quite specifically, what difference does our name not being attached make? We can still effectively be singled out for our deeds and preferences if need be.

"Profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months," the July article reports. We can be traded precisely because we have been anonymized, abstracted, because our name doesn't mitigate the impact of the data. Our name is the one thing about us that means nothing.

"Engagement Ads" on Facebook (28 Sept 2010)

Brad Stone's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Facebook's advertising strategies gets at several different ways that marketing through social media is nefarious. It's moving beyond the already creepy technique of silently scanning your data trail (far more intimate, presumably, in the Facebook realm) and presenting you with ads that it predicts will be relevant to you. Since it has so much more data on you, it can refine its target on you, hit you square between the eyes.

Facebook takes targeting even further. If you recently got engaged and updated your Facebook status to reflect it, you might start seeing ads from jewelers in your hometown. They've likely used Facebook's automated ad system to target recently engaged couples living in the area. If your profile mentions your appreciation for old-school hip-hop, the right local wedding DJ can find you, too.

Those who are looking to be sold to may enjoy this experience, even though giving in to predictive marketing essentially means closing off certain horizons while having them superficially broadened. If you accept that identity has become a matter of consumer practices and what niche we find ourselves in, then you have to accept the conclusion that the data trail we create online can hem us in and trap us, restricting our ability to deniche-ify ourselves. I can imagine a future service that "likes" a bunch of random things and browses through a bunch of random sites on our behalf to throw off the ad targeting -- in the same way those tags you can put in your Gmail email (words like murder and funeral) can shut down the contextual ads. (One could theoretically browse in "private" mode and eschew social media, but then one risks becoming an outcast. All those people who send out invites to things only through Facebook are dragging all their friends into the marketing cesspool, and normalizing the whole sordid process.) But right now, our past history becomes inescapable, shaping the contours of the online experience we can have, which more and more shapes the kind of life experience we can have generally, limiting what we know about, what we do and how we are seen and what we accomplish.

But it gets even more depressing than that. Facebook wants its ad system work (which, by the way, you cannot opt out of no matter how you jigger its byzantine privacy settings) by making one's friends seem like the marketers rather than the companies buying the ad space.

[Facebook] talks up more ephemeral measures such as recall and brand recognition, which it argues can be boosted by social activity that occurs around an ad. Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

I have a tendency to "share" things in Google Reader when they seem provocative to me, and I suppose that is not that different from "liking" a Nike ad in Facebook. By sharing those posts I think I am trying to extenuate or complicate or further arguments I have written about before that I think anyone who bothers to follow my shared items would also be interested in. But I also have this uncharitable suspicion that people, including me, "like" and "share" things to publicize their gesture of liking and score some general recognition for their good taste. To some degree, they are promoting themselves through these likable things rather than the things in question. This is how social media works to exploit our identity-making process, to extract productive labor out of our ontological insecurity in ways never before possible. The more we construct ourselves in social media (a move becoming more and more necessary), the more we have to rely on liking and sharing as the building blocks of the self, and these building blocks automatically becoming marketing gestures. And the fact that everyone knows they are marketing gestures reflects back on the self we build, commercializing it, opening up to the sort of judgment we reserve for corporations or other strictly profit-seeking entities. That's another way of saying that making a self in social media instrumentalizes it to an unprecedented degree.

Social media generally diminishes what it means to belong to a community. "Likes" for instance are effort-free gestures of faux reciprocity, casually recognizing someone else's sharing, which itself is often automated by the medium itself. As Jodi Dean points out in this post, social networks are "community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when you've moved on!)." Facebook is essentially a "consumer space" where the contacts between people are engineered to be convenient and more or less friction free, and without that friction, there is no true possibility of building solidarity or political engagement -- a point Malcolm Gladwell makes in this New Yorker piece. He argues that the "weak ties" of social media are not conducive to activist commitment, which requires the strong ties of true intimacy. Gladwell:

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

The increasingly commercial and instrumental world of social networks is not likely to inspire you to die for a cause; you won't risk a police beating in hopes that someone will "like" your sacrifice. And someone who "likes" a Nike ad as well as a protest march is unlikely to inspire to many people either. The "like" draws a demeaning and diminishing equivalence between different orders of experience. This is one of Facebook's chief accomplishments, to reduce all sorts of different aspects of social life to a uniform pap that can be liked or unliked. This makes participation trivial enough that people will market for companies for free, because there's an outside chance someone will think they are cooler for doing it. And participation of this sort seems so ephemeral that it does not dent one's social capital at all; it doesn't cost anything. Social media, as Gladwell points out, offers a

form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Activism on social media is indistinguishable from self-promotion and congratulatory participation at a distance. It lowers the bar for that feeling of doing something about some sort of injustice. We all can feel like we're making a difference without looking away from our phone. Individual agency gets supplanted by a collective relay of buck-passing referrals until someone else at some point actually does something about it.

But what depresses me most of all about Facebook's "engagement ads" is how they threaten to shift the modus operandi of advertising practice generally.

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

The ads are meant to be no different than your friend's status updates -- it's all just social-media content. So there is no separation between the edit and ad sides, as they say in the magazine-publishing business -- no suspicion that there is any conflict of interest or pretense of neutrality or objectivity. So to extent what may be a useless metaphor, our identity, as it's constructed in social media, is not "pure edit" content, it's not objective but can be seen as having been co-opted by the advertising it sponsors. The self consists of the same "content" as the ads; there's no wall between the self doing the "liking" and the stuff "liked". Not surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg strongly endorses this approach:

Zuckerberg says that ads, just like videos and news links, make it into the main stream of activity only when friends want to share them. "The most important thing for ads is that they work in the same way as everything else on the site," he says.

In other words, ads should by design be indistinguishable from non-ad content; that is, all content should be subject to the suspicion that it is an ad; that is, everything is an ad and why should that even bother you? It's the attention economy, and everything you do is just a ploy for "earning" more attention. Nothing can be for its own sake anymore. Why waste a good marketing opportunity, a chance for engagement? What else are friends for if not to leverage them?

Eco ego (14 Sept 2010)

More entertainment-ad blogging. On the way up the stairs from my subway stop at 49th St. is a poster for what I guess is a new TV show starring Will Arnett (Gob from Arrested Development) and Keri Russell called Running Wilde -- I know, I know, with a funny pun like that as the title, it couldn't possibly fail -- or fail to be hilarious. This is the poster I am talking about:

It's probably been up for a few weeks, but today was the first day I realized that it does not read "Ego meets ego."

I can't decide whether my misreading is a matter of my believing that promoting one's interest in "eco" is really all about "ego," or if I just see two large head shots of celebrities and automatically assume two big egos. Either way, this show will certainly contribute to the elision of the two by stereotyping eco-consciousness as a personality trait rather than a set of policy positions or political beliefs. Maybe the tagline is meant to be open to a double reading, and this show will illustrate the point at which ego and eco become inseparable.

Eco, we are supposed to assume from this poster, is a lifestyle choice, a potential character flaw marked by carrying a stainless-steel water bottle, which is just as absurd in its way as drinking champagne for no special reason. Arnett is probably putatively the butt of the show's jokes, being an obnoxious and semi-clueless Archie Bunker type whom audiences, the producers hope, will secretly love for his refusal to cave to the PC-obsessed termagant Russell presumably plays. Then the producers get to have ii both ways -- they can claim to be progressive by showing anti-greens to be louts while actually giving succor to those louts and dignifying them with all the laugh lines.

I am always surprised at how often people make a point of saying that they are not "PC," as if anybody really supports the kind of Thought Police fascism that is meant to evoke. Usually they say it precisely when they are trying to be sensitive, when they realize that they are not going to air some lazy stereotype or are even about to argue against one. But PC remains there for them to rebel against and establish themselves to be what passes in much of America as reasonableness -- that is, pretending to not really care about other people's sensitivities. A chief thrust of right-wing ideology is invested in making green and "eco" the heirs to their earlier success with "politically correct," turning them into bywords for phoniness and self-righteousness that "ordinary" people everywhere will strive to define themselves against.

Trader Aldi's (3 Sept 2010)

I am a little bit obsessed with the oft-neglected connection between German hard-discounter Aldi and U.S. lifestyle-grocery Trader Joe's, mainly because most of the Americans who shop at Trader Joe's would never be caught skulking in an Aldi -- many of which are in lower-income, fringe areas in the U.S. -- and a high proportion of Aldi's customers probably don't even know what Trader Joe's is. It's a not so secret vanity of mine to be one of what I imagine to be few people shopping at both stores routinely. I'm not sure what system I think I am beating; I just feel that "they" don't want you to know that the food in both of these chains is of the same quality. (In Germany, Aldi apparently stocks Trader Joe's branded goods on the shelves, something we will never see in the U.S.)

Though both Trader Joe's and Aldi often get unreasonably crowded and entail long waits in line, they offer a stark opportunity to study class difference in America -- the way the same stuff is branded differently to appeal across income brackets; the different kinds of behaviors customers display and the sort of amenities they expect. Aldi is notorious for offering no amenities whatsoever; the food is piled in cardboard boxes on pallets in the store, and you must pack your own groceries, Euro-style, with bags you have to pay for. Trader Joe's has a weird shtick where the employees are dressed as if they were a ship's crew, and they seem instructed to make cheerful small talk with customers. They offer Dixie cups of coffee and free samples of prepared food -- the scramble for which can often become savage, with lots of anarchic pushing and shoving.

My sense is that Aldi treats grocery shopping the way it ought to be treated, as a grim and necessary duty carried out by responsible adults seeking the best prices and not seeking affirmation about what kind of people they are. The families trudging through Aldi, pushing the oversize cart that you must pay a 25-cent deposit for in the parking lot, are generally nonplussed by the goods on offer, a bizarre array of hapless pseudobrands like "Savoritz" and "Fit & Easy" and "Happy Farms." The products confer no status, so affirmation for people buying stuff there can then theoretically come from more appropriate sources connected to practices more integral to our identity than shopping. Whereas at Trader Joe's customers are patronized like children and flattered and cajoled as if they were helpless simps desperate to be told what will make them cool and clever. The food is marketed as if it all were potentially trendy and impressive. The general impression the experience seems designed to leave shoppers with is that they are superior to the ordinary grocery shopper because they are more alert to a veneer of signifiers overlaying the products and can keep up with and decode these signifiers efficiently. But I don't want or expect to be congratulated for buying the "frozen organic foursome" or "Trader Joe's Ultra-dark Bay Blend" -- I just want my figs and coffee beans and to get the hell out of there.

This recent Fortune cover story by Beth Kowitt supplies some confirmation for my nutty views. Kowitt claims that Trader Joe's is "an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience" -- a description that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the chain. (And if you don't think it is a chore to be in TJ's on, say, a weekend afternoon, you're nuts. It's like being at a public pool on the hottest afternoon of the year, only everybody is an entitled prig blathering on a cell phone.) Kowitt then systematically undermines that brand identity by exposing the way the illusion is constructed. She notes that TJ's is owned by Aldi and that "big, well-known companies also make many of Trader Joe's products" though they are packaged to seem localish in provenance. Vendors are sworn to secrecy about their relationship to Trader Joe's, allowing the grocer to maintain total control over the brand. She explains how TJ's shops for its customers by seeing which zip codes subscribe to foodie magazines and have high education levels -- these indicators apparently mark the insecure but trend-setting customers they want to attract, people for whom food is not something you struggle to afford but something you struggle to master and awe others with.

None of this is all that shocking, but it just points to the ways in which class gets delineated through consumer practices, as it must in a consumer society that on the surface promises purchasing power for all and equal opportunity to goods. But the class matters at stake in places like Trader Joe's appear to dissolve in an atmosphere of righteousness, of cool, of "quality" being bounced back and forth between customers and products, so that consumers don't believe they are partaking in anything unegalitarian -- they don't see themselves as responsible for reproducing class inequity at all.

Hang the DJ (8 June 2010)

How can this possibly be true?

“Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me.

That's from Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker article about Pandora. I suppose I am blinkered by my own habits. The amount of time I listen to the radio is generally limited to the time I am trapped in environments playing the radio (e.g., the supermarket on the corner near my apartment, the barber shop, etc.). I don't spend much time in cars, which is where I once listened to the radio, mainly on car trips back and forth from Tucson to Phoenix and Las Vegas. That was mainly to alleviate boredom while traveling alone; trying to find a listenable song is a way to stay awake. All of that has made me feel somewhat alienated from the culture in which I live.

What songs DJs play on the radio are the result of a variety of institutional forces -- playlists, payola, personal preferences, radio station formats -- which is what makes those songs listenable, I think. They encode the zeitgeist, balancing various social pressures and contextual factors, expressing market forces as well as advancing certain trends while leaving a window of theoretical possibility for individual expression and taste. The medium of radio posits a collective audience that can be pleasurable to join or judge, or both. It allows for passive participation in something beyond oneself.

Frere-Jones lauds an online music service: "In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio." But that seems backwards -- his assumption that we want more options to suit our individual niche when we listen to the radio seems wrong. I don't think we care as much about hearing something we like than we do about exposing ourselves to what's going on in the world. Listening to the radio feels like cultural participation precisely because the options are limited. If one can choose from a huge number of stations, one doesn't end up with the feeling of participating in culture -- instead one seems to be escaping from it (to where?). The limited number of stations mimics the limits our cultural context puts on our identity. The boundaries are necessary to create a sense of belonging to something, of being something in particular. If "what's on the radio nowadays" becomes an unbounded set of songs, the radio becomes useless as a cultural barometer. And music itself becomes less intrinsic to social life, the more choices there are about what to listen to.

So I am skeptical that DJs will ever be replaced by computer-generated, Pandora-like applications that try to play what you as an individual really want and like. Listening to music is only partially about expressing an individual taste. It also about reading the collective mind, belonging to it, participating in a cultural conversation that one needs DJs (or perhaps other consumers that the Internet could connect us with) to moderate to believe that they exist. The iTunes autofill playlists put me into a conversation with an opaque algorithm that tends to infuriate more than anything else. (Hey, "Genius": Please stop playing Three Dog Night.)

Universal Logins and Social Media (27 May 2010)

Felix Salmon connects some dots in this post about social media and the future of commercial online publishing.

So advertisers, looking to reach a large audience online, are going to have to look past the simple question of whether or not people are paying for content. And they’re going to end up with a much more granular and useful way of working out who’s seeing their ads: social media.

The fact is that if I sign in to a free site using my Twitter login, I’m actually more valuable to advertisers than if I paid to enter that site. That’s because the list of people I follow on Twitter says a huge amount about me, and a smart media-buying organization can target ads at me which are much more narrowly focused than if all they knew about me was that I was paying to read the Times.

We’re not quite there yet. But it seems to me that online publications are making a big mistake if they make subscribers go through a dedicated registration and login process, because the demographic information they can get from that will be less useful and less accurate than if they outsource the reader-identification procedure to Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. And people will definitely enjoy an automatically personalized reading experience, where they can see what their Facebook friends are reading and what the people they follow on Twitter are reading.

Social media is the conduit that connects advertisers to appropriately narrowed audiences, and best of all, the users themselves do all the grunt work of tracing the connections as they busy themselves in elaborating their identity and maintaining the friendships online. The portable login is the key; it becomes the repository and access point for online identity. It's our virtual bar code, communicating our evolving demographic relevance to whomever we reveal it.

This, it seems, is the way social media hopes to make money in the future, by becoming the universal login that allows advertisers to target readers more effectively through the details those readers have willingly volunteered about themselves. This is why Mark Zuckerberg can write in this WaPo op-ed that "We do not give advertisers access to your personal information" -- ultimately it's not Facebook but us who give marketers that information when we use Facebook's login elsewhere.

The ads may enhance our experience of the sort of identity we want to be projecting -- they can serve as confirmation for us of who we think we are and thus be quite welcome. They help us consume ourselves. Just as people explicitly buy certain magazines for the ads, properly targeted marketing could function similarly. That is, we wouldn't want to block online ads, since the ads will have become our most flattering mirror. (Cue the Althusserian spiel from Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements.) And further, we won't necessarily worry about protecting privacy in social media when a wider circulation of this ersatz demographic-construct self is what we actually are after. We won't want privacy restrictions when what we are hoping for is to be surprised with a better version of ourselves in the ads we see.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum makes some similar points here. He likens the portability of social media logins to supermarket loyalty cards, which benefit not consumers or stores, but marketers.

Having thought some more, I think what connects this and the previous post about manufactured "near-misses" in gaming machines is this: We can be manipulated into enjoying what we would not consent to before the fact and would recognize as not being in our best interests, all enjoyment aside. Marketers, gaming machine makers, behavioral nudgers, etc., can structure situations so that we enjoy them when we are in them, catering to our common weaknesses -- our vanity, our laziness, our selfishness, etc. But because we respond doesn't mean we therefore endorse them.

It's pleasurable in the moment to almost win a jackpot, and it's pleasurable to have people respond to something we have indiscreetly shared on Facebook, and it's even pleasurable to have ads pointed directly at us that tell us how cool and important we are. But there's more to what's good for us than pleasure, and none of those manipulations of our momentary experience are necessarily good for us or society.

Boredom Production (17 March 2010)

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis a book from 1979 by Ralph Larkin that is derived from a participant-observation study he conducted in an affluent New Jersey high school. He basically "raps" with teens and then lays a heavy Marcusean trip all over them. Frankly I didn't get much out of that section of the book, but I found his theory-driven conclusion very interesting.

I went into the book with a vague sense that the "cultural crisis" that has been more or less ongoing since the 1970s is the fact that the post-scarcity economy can't easily absorb younger generations and provide them with jobs. (Larkin points to "the necessity for education to act as a surplus absorption device.") Thus society has had to find ways of keeping young people occupied, delaying their entry into the workforce or diverting them entirely. Larkin writes:

The governments of the Western nations, at the writing of this book, are busy wringing their hands over what to do with the children of the baby boom in stagnating economies that are increasingly unable to absorb the younger part of the labor force. Yet these children of post-scarcity society do not necessarily want routinized labor. In addition, since they have been brought up in a televised world, they have been repeatedly told that pleasure is something that commodities provide.

Much of that seems to apply today; just replace "in a televised world" with "with the internet."

The early 20th century solution to this problem was world war and mass killing. (We can only hope that the Tea Partyers and their nihilistic ilk won't take us down that road.) After World War II, consumerism evolved as a way to invent new desires, and authorize wasteful consumption under the guise of self-actualization. Identity becomes a never-ending process, rather than a lived-in fact. More recently, we've seen the extension of adolescence, and the evolution of slacker norms to rationalize people in their 20s living with their parents (cf. Buster Bluth). But it seems the post-postmodern solution to this crisis evolving now involves "hipsters on food stamps" and immaterial labor online in social networks and the like. Consumption becomes a form of free labor, and while young people get acclimated to making the art of being themselves into a full-time job, they come to de-stigmatize the receipt of a social wage in the form of food stamps and pirated entertainment.

In Larkin's pre-internet world, there were far fewer opportunities for immaterial labor for youth, only boredom, which is how my generation tended to experience the "cultural crisis." The production of boredom -- depriving people of the resources by which they can get themselves into flow states -- is a key prerequisite to the consumerist solution to the larger issue of what do to with jobless youth. Pervasive boredom sets up the acceptance of novelty as an ideal. Novelty helps take care of the overproduction problem, creating a situation in which redundant consumption becomes normal. But it merely exacerbates boredom by accelerating its onset. Knowledge of immediate alternatives allows boredom to set in faster. (Hence the ADD epidemic.)

How is boredom produced? Larkin has some ideas. Advertising deploys the carrot and stick: it makes goods seem desirable and pleasurable (ads function like drugs in that they mobilize a mode of temporary escape into fantasy), and it instills insecurity about falling behind, or lacking the necessary goods for admittance into acceptable society. And institutions do their part to make social relations seem instrumental. It's normal to be bribed to behave well, and rewards should be materialized as belongings, not as the ongoing experience of well-being. But what I found most interesting in Larkin's account of the production of boredom was his analysis of "packaged experience" and "ersatz success." He develops a long argument based on the example of model airplanes.

Since the process [of building a model airplane from a kit] is reduced to essentially assembling fitted plastic parts and then gluing them, the young person learns nothing of the structure of an airplane while constructing it, only its outer form.

That sounds a lot like a critique of Rock Band, which also denatures a hobby that might have turned into a skill but instead is reduced to escapist distraction. Larkin continues:

By degrading the process by which one can attempt to reconstruct the world, external reality assumes a facile and, at the same time, a mystical quality. Prepackaging allows young people to believe that problem solving is essentially a process of selection the correct combination of alternatives.... The emphasis is altered to focus on quantity rather than on quality. Since the construction of model airplanes has been degraded, advertisers emphasize collections to enhance sales.... Once a hobby or any other endeavor becomes easily quantifiable, it becomes the basis for the accumulation of status and psychological dominance. The degradation of the process of labor teaches the child at an early age to participate in a competitive struggle surrounding commodity consumption.

Digital mediation has only accelerated these processes, making the measurement of the self nearly inescapable, and making the archive the model for the self rather than engaged presence. The present is always shattered by multitasking into fragments, and connectedness promotes a lack of commitment to what is happening in the moment and perpetual fantasizing about the alternatives that are always instantaneously available. ("Boring. Think I'll click off this page to something else. Keep scrolling...")

Larkin sees youth as defeated by the way they are encouraged to be buyers rather than doers. And he ties that into passive consumption of entertainment.

Once a person accepts the superiority of the mystified process of the production over his own abilities, he is reduced to a mechanical entity who chooses among preset alternatives. The same process is revealed in human relations. National talent is continually present on television, i the movies, on recordings and so forth. The disparity between the young person's own rudimentary skills and those of a star may stimulate the emulation of a few, but discourages the many; especially since most young people are aught to desire instant gratification. Contemporary American culture discourages the learning of a discipline, as the average person is reduced to a spectator viewing professionals who are paid for participating in activities which might be intrinsically satisfying to the amateur.

The key question is whether the modes of sharing online alters Larkin's analysis. Does Web 2.0-style participation do anything to change our expectations of instant gratification? Does it offer social rewards for the careful mastery of a particular discipline? Or does it encourage frivolity and narcissism? Does it present an array of choices that we merely click through? Has it diminished the fascination of celebrities as unattainable models?

It's not really an either-or situation, of course, but the tendency does run more one way than the other, I think. The experience of being online has become an amalgam of consumption and production, but it seems more the former than the latter. I'm not sure it has made breaking the habits of boredom and distraction any easier; it seems like it probably reinforces them even as it provides us with all sorts of information and opportunities for engagement and connection.

Indie Rock in Ads (16 Jan 2010)

A quick post, thoughts a bit scattered, so an apology up front. Amanda Marcotte recent wrote a post about advertising, interesting throughout. It touches on indie rock in ads, and whether or not this constitutes a problem. I agree with Marcotte that aesthetic enjoyment and emotional manipulation are not really all that different, and the role of money in the process is nothing new. I would argue that aesthetics and advertising are both about defining class markers, encouraging us to derive pleasure from expressing class in particular ways. Ads enrich our vocabulary for that, as does the cultural capital involved in elaborating a personal taste. When indie rock is used in ads, it exposes the kind of cultural capital now bound up with that music, how effortlessly it evokes a certain class position, and how products want to appropriate that.

I think she misdiagnoses why this bothers people though:

The use of rock music in advertising has always been a point of contention, and I think the reason it gets so ugly and people get so bent out of shape about it is that we still believe that advertisers pick these songs because they have some scientifically demonstrable emotional pull that will make us helpless to resist the charms of the product. We want the experience of being emotionally manipulated, but we want it to be free of ulterior motives, which is as close to a definition of “art” as you get in our capitalist society.

I don't think that people get upset about advertisers manipulating them to buy things with irresistible songs. The problem, it seems to me, is that it makes the songs automatically signify something other than what the listener would have associated them with. Their emotions get shut out preemptively, and they fail to be manipulated. For instance, I can't listen to Feist at all anymore, because all I can think about when I hear her voice is iPods. It's annoying. The same is true for the band Phoenix; I sort of like it, but the music makes me think of commercials, and it ends up turning me off.

Pop music generally needs to be open for us to contextualize it in ways we enjoy; for me the associations with specific products impede that. It's not a problem that a song is "commercial" as long as it is only trying to sell itself, making itself available to us to market ourselves in some way of our own.

I don't blame bands for getting money however they can, but they shouldn't be surprised if some people dismiss them as jingle writers. Most listeners don't seem to care about that though. I wonder if the presence of a band's song in an ad doesn't authorize people to listen to the band, make the band seem more legitimate to them. That is the real danger, as far as I am concerned. The whole process reinforces the idea that advertising is a legitimizing force, an arbiter, an authoritative source for culture. For a good portion of the audience now, a marketing context for a song may actually enhance its listenability rather than impede it -- it may be a precondition. What products go with this song?

That's why I think Marcotte is wrong when she claims this about ads: "it’s not a lot different than other distribution methods" for music. It may that ads are actually more effective at making the music seem pre-endorsed, preapproved by society. It makes them more consumable, but in the specific way we enjoy ads as disposable yet flattering attempts to woo us.

Moronization and the End of Privacy (15 Jan 2010)

After having battled through the critiques of positivism and analytic philosophy in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, I was happy to come across some passages toward the end, which seemed to justify the effort. He is describing the conditions of autonomy within a consumer society, in which industrially instigated "needs" are promulgated socially and to a degree constitute what is "social."

Can you tell I have been reading Marcuse? Contra Marcuse, let me have a crack at that in plainer language: as far as I can tell, Marcuse argues that technological advancement, because it is fixated on exploitation and productivity, has brought with it a false liberty that obscures real freedom, which is a matter of generating autonomous needs and decreasing the amount of domination required to reproduce society. The "sale of [our society's] goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration" rather than by true liberation from the brutalities of nature, necessity and hierarchical oppression. The success of this sick society depends on our being inculcated with the appropriate needs that direct our energy to ends that support the existing social relations; i.e., we chase an idea of identity that depends on consumer goods as signifiers and mass media as a means of articulation. Consumerism seizes a monopoly on the making of social meaning. It provides the system in which a given meaning of a thing, a practice, can transcend one's personal idiosyncratic view and become something we all know will be widely understood and interpreted predictably.

Interestingly, Marcuse regards this as the end of privacy:

Expansion has, in all forms of team-work, community life, and fun, invaded the inner space of privacy and practically eliminated the possibility of that isolation in which the individual, thrown back on himself alone, can think and question and find. This sort of privacy -- the sole condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to freedom and independence of thought -- has long since become the most expensive commodity, available only to the very rich (who don't use it). In this respect, too, "culture" reveals its feudal origins and limitations. It can become democratic only through the abolition of mass democracy, i.e., if society has succeeded in restoring the prerogatives of privacy by granting them to all and protecting them for each.

To the denial of freedom, even of the possibility of freedom, corresponds the granting of liberties where they strengthen the repression. The degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace wherever there still is peace and silence, to be ugly and to uglify things, to ooze familiarity, to offend against good form is frightening. It is frightening because it expresses the lawful and even organized effort to reject the Other in his own right, to prevent autonomy even in a small, reserved sphere of existence. In the overdeveloped countries, an ever-larger part of the population becomes one huge captive audience -- captured not by a totalitarian regime but by the liberties of the citizens whose media of amusement and elevation compel the Other to partake of their sounds, sights, and smells.

You can see why the Frankfurt school theorists are sometimes dismissed as elitist. But this captures something of why critics are horrified at social networks -- it erodes the possibility of privacy even further while all the while making its surrender seem voluntary. (Just have a look at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, proclaiming the end of privacy as a social norm.) And what is lost with privacy is not just safety from prying eyes and identity thieves and surveillance; rather we elect to give up privacy to participate in the "media of amusement and elevation" rather then sit quietly in a room, as Pascal prescribed. And with that we surrender our ability to be self-directed (such as it is), to create our own wants, to think, to be other. Instead we look for distinctions within the social language of commercial objects and activities, and then we look to promote ourselves through them. This is what it means by and large to be social, to interact with other people, particularly through a medium like Facebook, which simultaneously records these exchanges and transforms them into marketing and demographic data. Hence, that data is what we are choosing to reduce ourselves to.

As a result of this ongoing process of needs administration, we can end up feeling helpless when the apparatus is disabled. I always notice this when I travel. Suddenly the system that tells me what to want is opaque to me. Here's how Marcuse puts it:

Massive socialization begins at home and arrests the development of consciousness and conscience. The attainment of autonomy demands conditions in which the repressed dimensions of experience can come to life again; their liberation demands repression of the heteronomous needs and satisfactions which organize life in this society. The more they have become the individual's own needs and satisfactions, the more would their repression appear to be an all but fatal deprivation. But precisely by virtue of this fatal character, it may create the primary subjective prerequisite for qualitative change--namely, the redefinition of needs.

To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.

To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve -- the disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since become part of socially necessary labor -- necessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.

So to call Marcuse an elitist is to miss the point. The critique is not about the "uglification" of pop culture (though he does seem to regard that as a hint to its inadequacy). It's about what manufactured culture accomplishes in the maintenance of the existing relations of production -- how they perpetuate norms of exploitation, oppression, domination, etc., in the name of productivity, understood by consumers as "entertainment" or a lush surfeit of goods, and understood by capitalists as profit and further capital accumulation.

But Marcuse sees hopefulness in this, I think, as he seems to be arguing that the more dependent we become on these media technologies to constitute our desires, our identities, and the more they are centralized, the easier it will be for revolutionaries to know what to disrupt to change society completely. Once the internet supplies all our social needs and let's us become what we are in the sick society, simply destroying the internet will set everybody "free" to build a "real" one -- that's basically the fantasy that The Matrix depicts.

Capitalism hasn't destroyed itself with its rapacity, as Marx predicted. Perhaps, Marcuse seems to imply, unhinged consumerism will do the trick. But he still ends the book on a note of profound pessimism, with the "Great Refusal" that's necessary to stop the one-dimensionalizing of everything unlikely to come from anyone who isn't already beyond the pale of society. "The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concession to the underdog, and their armed forces sufficiently trained and equipped to take care of emergency situations." The absolute refusal that's necessary from the critical-theory point of view "seems the more unreasonable the more the established system develops its productivity and alleviates the burden of life."

So what do we do? Live in a jelly jar? Is this the first step?

Pleasure procrastination (31 Dec 2009)

The best defense for the advertising industry is that it licenses our pleasure. It gives us permission to relax and enjoy things. But that assumes that we need such permission, that our instincts lie elsewhere -- possibly with a different sort of pleasure that doesn't revolve around consumption, around possessions. It's not clear whether by pushing its peculiar form of desire, the ad industry isn't undermining other latent modes of pleasure, leading us to neglect them and let them atrophy. When I travel and escape from advertising, it never fails to startle me how much I miss it in subtle ways, how I need guidance about what I should be wanting. The absence of consumerist desire can seem to hurt. The pleasures of travel, such as they are, sometimes fail to compensate.

The difficulty of desire has long been a staple of French social theory. Virtually all of Lacan is about the subject. Baudrillard begins his essay "Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value" with a memorable anecdote about the difficulty of ridding ourselves of what Bataille called the accursed share: "There was a raid on a U.S. department store several years ago. A group occupied and neutralized the store by surprise, and then invited the crowd by loudspeaker to help themselves. A symbolic action! And the result? Nobody could figure out what to take." The basic idea is that we are strangers in the world our economy has outfitted us with -- we must learn how to be subjects in it, and the adjustment is painful.

Baudrillard claims that "beyond the transparency of economics, where everything is clear because it suffices to 'want something for your money,' man apparently no longer knows what he wants." This is persuasive to me because I often need to see that something is on sale or is a "good deal" in order to permit myself to buy it. (This is why I generally shop at Savers and Goodwill.) I've argued before somewhere (can't find) that ads, as part of their function, promote the market mentality, the neoclassical economist's view of humans as efficient utility calculators for this reason, persuading us we should find pleasure in maximizing utility, in making good deals. In reality, no deals are required for pleasure. It's a free gift that comes with being alive.

The idea that we need external forces urging us to indulge fits well with the findings of market researchers Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy (pdf) about procrastinating pleasure, which John Tierney reports on in the NYT. The researchers claim in the abstract that "the tendency to procrastinate applies not only to aversive tasks but also to positive experiences with immediate benefits." We like deadlines, which make us decisive and prompt us to action. Advertising, marketing, sales -- all these seem to work best when they make it seem like we must "act now!" Maybe the details of the pitch and the dubious emotional associations they cultivate are ultimately irrelevant; maybe only the pressure they put on us forms the real substance of ads. The secret lurking in consumerism may be that we really don't want to spend our time liquidating gift cards and forcing ourselves to the mall -- that this isn't inherently fun, contrary to the pervasive ideology. Free of priming we may find it a hassle to have to want stuff. We postpone consumerist pleasures not out of protestant-ethic guilt but because they actually aren't all that compelling to us when isolated from their marketing.

The assumption that there is something inherently harmful in postponing consumerist pleasure seems a bit dubious to me. There's pleasure in restraint and indulgence both. Tierney sums up the researchers' apparent views this way: "Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be." But doesn't that work both ways -- the longer we wait, the more special the occasion will seem to be when we open it? (Tierney's conclusion sounds the same note.) We can only imagine the nirvana because we are building it around some delay in fulfillment, letting fantasies crystallize around some forestalled moment of truth. Immediate gratification isn't more pleasurable than the circuit of desire, the chase and the capture.

Cultural-jamming as guerrilla marketing (16 Oct 2009)

Metafilter linked to this interview with Andrea Natella, director of Guerrigliamarketing.it, which (I think) pursues culture jamming under the auspices of being an advertising agency. The translation isn't great, but as far as I can tell, the idea behind this is either that ads have become their opposite, or that resistance to ads has become a latter-day form of advertising in itself. (I prefer the far more cynical second interpretation.) In Natella's own words: "Guerrigliamarketing.it was born out of a bet. Is it possible to imagine modalities of radical participation on the universe of brands and at the same time present oneself as an advertising agency? Is it possible for the professionals of communication not to give up their own political ideas in carrying out their job?"

What happens when you make "resistance to marketing" your brand? Is that some sort of parallax approach to advertising? Can you converse in the discourse of brands without tacitly endorsing it? Doing Wacky Package-style art seems to vindicate the power of brands rather than subvert it. I guess I am skeptical of the whole "culture jamming" concept, which seems less like Situationist detournement than borderline-cruel pranksterism (sort of like Improv Everywhere). I know it is supposed to "make us think", but culture jamming often ends up mocking the consumers it purportedly wants to win over.

It strikes me that a strategy of less clever nuisances might be more effective in slowing the juggernaut of thoughtless consumption. When an effort is made to mitigate the inconvenience that inevitably arises from monkeying with the retail market with what can be taken as hipster humor, it alienates the discomfited even further. That makes the subversion of culture jamming into advertising a weird sort of dialectic that ends up vindicating consumers, if you believe Natella, anyway: "What we try to do is to increase the awareness that true value is produced by the consumers." This is a familiar theme in cultural studies, that consuming culture is an underappreciated form of production -- users innovate new techniques to use things, and produce signs and cultural capital with regard to what cultural goods mean. But that doesn't mean marketing is ultimately benign; it just suggests that its modality is depressingly easy for laypeople to adopt. The value we produce is often something that marketers most appreciate; it is our doing their job for them. So while Natella touts the more obvious capacity of guerrilla marketing to be confrontational -- "We made people think that in order to sell a company [the agency] is ready to do anything, also on the border of illegality. We tried to confuse these borders" -- the more radical implication is that we are all being drafted as guerrilla-marketing recruits without especially realizing it. Marketing has so saturated culture -- with people adopting the discourse of branding, with online activity being tracked and parsed by companies to serve ads, with people embracing hype as a conversational strategy, and so on -- that we produce ads simply by virtue of living our lives.

(Incidentally, do not follow the link to thisman.org. It will haunt your nightmares.)