Paying for the Internet in Vulnerability (6 Aug 2010)

Often, despite my not infrequent fulminations, as I find myself spending more and more time in front of computer screens, reading and writing and even Twittering with ever more frequency, I start to wonder if I have been too pessimistic about the internet, about its role in accelerating our consumption of culture, the degree to which it more thoroughly saturates our everyday lives with marketing and its associated ideology: the celebration of novelty for its own sake, the embrace of narcissism as a mode of hyperfriendship, the supplanting of knowledge with information and data, the transformation of consumption into meme production, the mobilization of identity into a circulating personal brand that articulates the amount of society's attention one is worth, the disappearance of contemplation in favor of increased mental throughput, the sense that quality, though frequently brandished as a goal, is in truth a liability unless it can serve as an emollient to our alacritous neuroprocessing. (I was going for a sentence of Ruskin-like expansiveness -- how did I do? Perhaps protracted Proustian periods will persuade us all to take the long view now and then.)

But when I read an news item like this WSJ article, by Nick Wingfield, I am reminded all over again that I am not as cynical as I should be. The article details how Microsoft considered developing its internet browser so that user privacy would be better protected as a default, but then decided that such a course would inhibit the true purpose of internet accessibility.

In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.'s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.... In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads.

The internet is ultimately not a commons, and our access to it is conditional on our vulnerability within it. Neither Microsoft nor any other tech company is in business to open our access to free-flowing information or protect our privacy for nothing. (The companies that do want to help you do that are parasites who rely on the others to intentionally endanger it.) Their business, as network architects and technicians, is ultimately surveillance -- to make sure one is connected to the network and appropriately exposed, exploitable as a node. Wingfield points out that "the 50 most-popular U.S. websites, including four run by Microsoft, installed an average of 64 pieces of tracking technology each onto a test computer." We get to use the internet, or rather companies want to make it possible for us to use the internet, because they can reap the rewards from our data processing there -- that's the only reason. And at tech companies that survive, executives are in place to smack down the wild-eyed dreamers among the product developers who think otherwise. This graphic illustrates the way the tracking systems work, and how we, in our lust for information, work to transform ourselves into demographic data

And here's more reason for cynicism: Google's negotiations with Verizon to in effect put an end to net neutrality. They are discussing placing a burden on content creators to pay to have their content distributed efficiently on the internet. This seems like it would ultimately reinstitute the gatekeeping power of the media companies, which would quickly turn such costs into something that mimics the costs of printing and distributing bundles of paper, or pressing grooves into vinyl, or what have you. So any dream of the internet being a democratizing, disintermediating force in the realm of cultural production would be effectively quashed. Amateurs would be on the ham-radio section of the net, with transmissions at lugubrious levels, while the professional media would be on the "real" internet.

Re-editing frenzy (14 Jan 2009)

I generally have my portable MP3 player on shuffle, playing random songs from a 5,000-track grab bag. In effect, this makes my device an ad hoc radio station, and as such, I find that it requires radio edits of songs that will be wrenched out of whatever context they originally garnered from their place on an album. I used to scorn the radio edits of songs -- the truncated version of "Green-Eyed Lady" is especially egregious, as is the radio edit of Fleetwood Mac's "Sara" in the original and disgraceful CD issue of Tusk. But now I am seeing their usefulness. When yo are not listening to the songs in the environment they were designed for, you must adapt them to suit your particular circumstances.

At first, for me, this was a matter of removing things like the tedious sound-clip intros on Wu-Tang Clan songs, and removing unnecessary space from the beginning and end of songs that once were hidden bonus tracks on CDs. (What a horrible trend that was.) Then I found that I had started to remove boring musical intros and long fades -- the sonorous organ solo at the beginning of Led Zeppelin's "Your Time Is Gonna Come," and the drum machine loops at the end of Eric B. and Rakim's "Microphone Fiend," for instance.

Emboldened, I now have even started to remove parts of songs I don't like no matter where they fall -- that pointless drony part in Nirvana's "Drain You," the noise solo in Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and so on. Who has the time? Just give me the hooks.

When I first began doing this, I felt like a philistine tampering with the artistic vision embodied in these songs. Before I could re-edit them, I had to deal with them as they were, as did everyone else. We could only differ in our interpretations and opinions about what we heard. Now we can all make our own customized versions -- the triumph of read/write culture! (Tom Slee makes some skeptical remarks about read/write culture in this review of Lawrence Lessig's Remix -- the key one, I think, is that hobbies in the digital age have become more subject to depersonalized commodification because the internet is eroding face-to-face interaction in localized, hobby-based economies -- what he calls small-scale culture. The internet can entice us with a limitless audience, prompting us to underrate, or worse, ignore, the ready-made audience of friends and family we would have had without it.)

Gradually, I ceased to have any qualms about my song re-editing. Now I wonder if I am going to end up in Girl Talk territory, composing my own Stars on 45 mashups, or somewhere even more radical. And I wonder if this is a good thing, a liberation from top-down, culture-industry domination. I wonder if I am making laudable strides toward making my consumption more like production.

Consumption always is production, in the sense that we are reproducing ourselves (reconstituting our labor power, as Marx would have it). The problem is that even though I am being "productive," I reproduce myself precisely as a consumer, an identity I alternately dread and wallow in. That's not what I'm usually hoping to accomplish when I exhibit a bias toward "being productive": I'm thinking instead about trying not being passive in the face of the onslaught of data and products and messages and images and such, but trying to engage it actively -- usually in a doomed-to-fail attempt to manage it all. (Hence so much of my "leisure" time is spent on organizational tasks.)

But the problem with consumerism may lie specifically in that kind of engagement with cultural goods, particularly when it fails to bring the pleasure that it seems to promise or delivers the pleasure in addictive microdoses that create prolonged interludes of suffering want. In such productive "creative" activity, I am still reproducing myself with consumerism's preferred tools and reinforcing in myself the desires that it suits consumerism for me to have -- though I am not sure if I have any alternative.

This is the problem with the Situationist approach of detournement. Derivative by definition, it seems neutered, forced, circumscribed. Its subversiveness never actually registers on the level it would need to in order to fundamentally alter social relations or capitalism; for all its confrontationalism, it's not actually disruptive. It just permits those subjected to capitalism feel as though they are struggling if they choose to; it permits us to redecorate our cages with more individualistic creativity, with signs of our unbroken but ineffectual spirit.

The future of the music business (20 Nov 2008)

Via Barry Ritholtz comes this transcript of the keynote speech by Ian Rogers, who runs Topspin, an online music distributor, at the Northwest MusicTech Summit. He cites some interesting data with regard to the future of music: Media companies are making less money from music sales, but music consumers are as eager as ever to consume music.

Rogers argues that power in the music business has shifted to artists: "when I talk to managers and artists they feel it, they feel an ability to take their careers into their own hands, to redefine what success means for them, and that is the emergence of the new music business." The redefinition of success seems to me the pivotal idea -- the idea that success is less a matter of money than what it is to most working artists, to be able to make a living through their art and not have to treat it as a passionate hobby. The trouble begins when ambitions begin to exceed that horizon -- art is denatured and brokers seize control. Right now, technology is disintermediating the brokers (from the A&R people down to the record-store clerks), which has given musicians across the board a chance to recalibrate their ambitions on a sustainable scale, rather than going into it for the stardom and the cash.

That's not to say the essence of Rogers argument is an appeal to making art for art's sake. His point is the new music industry promises to remunerate artists more directly, since there is next to no overhead with regard to production and distribution costs. "When your costs are low, your royalty rate high, and your channel direct, the marginal profitability from the artist's perspective can be far different than in the old model, to be sure." Key to the marketing plan Rogers outlines, though, is something I instinctively cringe at -- price discrimination, or letting people decide what they will pay in return for the same product.

fundamentally I believe the model is shifting from mass-marketed (via radio and TV) and one-size-fits-all (one $15 CD suits fans of all levels of commitment) to a target-marketed approach where fans can self-select where they fit on the scale (when Trent [Reznor] offered Ghosts at five price points he was really asking, “How big a fan are you?”).

I don't why this bothers me so much, since this is the essence of what's probably the oldest form of commercial interaction, bartering. The idea that a fair price for a product is established and applied uniformly is a relatively new phenomenon, a response to the massive problems of information asymmetry that larger-scale production brings on. Still, the idea that someone else can get the same thing for cheaper fires my competitive spirit. It makes me feel like a chump. In other words, I won't be on of the superfans volunteering to pay musicians as much as possible for their music so that I can prove my fidelity or earn their gratitude or whatever the rationale is. When I read about volunteer spenders, I end up thinking that those people are under the sway of some kind of irrational personality cult with regard to the artists they are supporting. Am I really supposed to believe that Trent Reznor gives a single shit about how big of a fan I might be? (Not a fan at all, for the record.) I suppose the idea is that you can prove to other fans that you are more in love with the leader by spending more, but that seems almost worse than the pre-digital star system in which we were told which mass artists were acceptable by A&R people, and at least had to be creative or much more dedicated if we wanted to manifest our superfandom. So when Rogers claims that consumers are "more satisfied" in today's music market, I have to assume he means that we can let our money testify to our devotion -- as opposed to the fact that anyone can get anything they want for free. But since I play music myself (in a total amateur way) I always want trends in the music business to lead away from creating more fans and toward creating more garage bands. I can't tell if the game Rock Band is the beginning or the end of that dream.

The End of A&R (14 Oct 2008)

This Economist article updates the music business's evolving relationship with the subscription model, in which users could have all the music they wanted indiscriminately, as long as they paid a regular fee. For a while it has seemed to me that such a model was inevitable, given the ease of digital distribution and the fact that music can no longer be played without being, in a sense, copied. But reading this article I started to wonder how it's possible for record companies to compete with each other if all their goods are available for one lump sum. I suppose the intermediaries who run the subscription service would track which songs were acquired and pay the companies accordingly, or one would need to subscribe to each record companies library individually, in which case it would be easier to go on pirating.

But overall, does the existence of all-you-can-eat subscription services eliminate the record companies' incentive to pick and choose the best music to try and sell? Can't they overwhelm us with quantity rather than work for quality, since we end up getting it all anyway? It seems like the fruits of A&R efforts accrue to the artists themselves, who can leverage their brand better, rather than the companies themselves. I wonder if the record companies, recognizing the hopelessness of their moribund business, will effectively give up, become a cabal that collects residuals on its past accomplishments -- just collect the steady income that can be had leasing the use rights to recorded music, 1900 to 2008.

Of course, someone will have to take over the promotional duties for pop music, otherwise it will cease to perform its function of uniting people in the excitement of hype and giving fresh and relevant-seeming expression to common and quotidian feelings. Not sure if individual bands will be up to it, given their tradition of fueling their fires by complaining about commercialism, though they will learn if they want to make money. But maybe if we are lucky, the world will revert to a culture of amateurism with regard to music.

Crowdsourced art (17 Jan 2008)

I've been reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch, which argues that computing power has become a centralized utility, like electricity, and the consequences of this will be nothing like what such utopians as Kevin Kelly, et al., have predicted. It won't be a force for unleashing innovation and personal freedom; instead it will enact a more thorough state surveillance capability and be a powerful disincentive for creating intellectual property, leaving our culture awash in dilettante-produced mediocrity. Rather than pay an elite group of talented content-creators, companies can instead draw from the pool of free, user-generated content, a boon of unpaid labor, and monetize it in a way the individual workers can't. (Management consultant types call this crowdsourcing. In a blog post, Carr called it digital sharecropping.)

Carr acknowledges that people have good reasons for donating their labor -- namely, they are paid in recognition and the work is usually a creative outlet. But you still get the sense that it annoys him that amateurs are able to amuse and inform one another, that they are taking bread out of the mouths of anointed media professionals. Carr quotes a photojournalist who says that "the internet 'economy' has devastated my sector." And presumably we are supposed to feel sorry for him, though what this means is that more people are sharing more images documenting more of the world's activity for people to make use of as they see fit than ever before. Photojournalism is no longer strictly a matter of having the privileged connections to get work publicized and have one's talent sanctified. If photojournalists feel threatened, its because they are being made aware how much of their distinction is a matter of access to travel and equipment and high-profile places to publish their work. If their work was so far superior to the work of amateurs, wouldn't publishers and collectors be willing to pay for it, since everyone would see the difference and it would be something that could be marketed? The difference in talent may not equal the savings, and may never again. That seems to be what Carr is arguing, and lamenting: "Many cultural goods remain expensive to create or the painstaking work of talented professionals and it's worth considering how the changing economics of media will affect them." Hmm. I've considered it, and I'm inclined to say good riddance.

Being an obscure nobody, I'm strongly tempted (it probably already shows in my tone) to revel in schadenfreude and gloat about the misery of established artists or creative workers. How one feels about the fate of the poor photojournalist may be a litmus test for what one believes overall about talent. I've tended to think talent is far more subjective and ineffective that it's generally held to be -- that is, that it has no measurable value in mometary terms, but can only be assigned an approximate dollar value residually after other explanations for art market variances are accounted for -- and that determination and connections are more important to success. And maybe, since these are somewhat destructive attributes to have, despoiling most personal relationships and making everyday life somewhat of a prod and a torment, they deserve to be amply compensated; those who are cursed with them are driven to produce the stuff we in our leisure can happily consume, while we enjoy things like family life and interpersonal relationships. We may need an airtight system of intellectual property rights to entice these miserably ambitious people to make commercial art, but that art, cherish it now though we may, is not the best or only art there is. It just happens to be what our economic system privileged and yielded and lauded, with a whole adjunct commercial system of reviewers and appraisers and collectors with a vested interest in it. If such work is "crowded out of the Web's teeming bazaar" that may not be such a crushing loss. It may simply mean we need to recalibrate our aesthetic understanding of what we dub to be brilliant art to be something other than that which is created by an individual and possessed by a wealthy collector. We may have to accept art that is made collectively, distributed for free, and is never quite in a finished form. We may have to understand creative work as a process rather than a product. Horrible, I know.

Everyone an outsider artist (8 Feb 2007)

At academic blog the Valve, Joseph Kugelmass has a post that seems relevant to what I was trying to get at yesterday -- the problem of having to seem unaware of your calculating signaling in order to for these signals to seem authentic and succeed. For this, Kugelmass cites master semiotician Björk (emphasis below is mine):

"I don’t really know why I’m obsessed with swans but, as I said, everything about my new album is about winter and they’re a white, sort of winter, bird. And obviously very romantic, being monogamous. It’s one of those things that maybe I’m too much in the middle of to describe. When you’re obsessed with something, you can explain it five years later, but in the moment, you don’t know exactly why. Right now, swans seem to sort of stand for a lot of things. I see a picture of a swan now and I go [takes a deep gasping breath], but two years ago it didn’t do that to me." —from an interview with Bjork by Donna Karan, Interview, Sept. 2001
Bjork contradicts herself remarkably here. She begins by giving a series of revealing, thoughtful interpretations of her own decision to wear an ungainly swan dress to the Oscars, after decorating her album Vespertine with images of swans. She then immediately disowns these interpretations by claiming that she’s “too much in the middle of” the phenomenon to describe it. In other words, she does what she can to preserve the aura of the symbol of the swan, by protecting it against the corrosive process of becoming conscious of its meanings. However, by doing this, she is actually giving in to us. As everybody knows, the dress Bjork wore to the Oscars was criticized far and wide for being incredibly ugly. It did not look like a dress—it looked like a ridiculous swan costume.

If I interpret this right, Kugelmass argues that we demand a dog-and-pony show from artists in which they disavow their own awareness of what they are doing so that we can all believe they are doing it for reasons both we and the artists would like to assume are real. We want them all to fit the stereotype of outsider artists, working from an untutored and ambition-free impetus. This keeps the artist's ego and career investments from spoiling our aesthetic experience.

Kugelmass cites this in response to a debate amid academic blogs about the invocation of theory in blogging, and his post nicely performs the method it simultaneously intends to scrutinize. (He invokes some pop culture references -- Björk and Daniel Johnston -- to elucidate some high-theory-like insights about praxis.) I like it when the form an argument takes reinforces its content, even though it can sometimes seem like a flashy trick -- which brings us back to the question of how calculation and spontaneity play into the perception of sincerity. Should academics work like Daniel Johnston, whose mental instability frees him from the accusation that he is being too calculating in his choice of motifs and topics, and allows us to appreciate them without fretting about how clever Johnston must think he is for coming up with them? (Kugelmass seems to argue that just as we don't discredit Johnston for logical inconsistency, heterodox use of tropes or choosing ideas that don't entirely cohere, so we should not dismiss theory for similar sins but seize such criticism as opportunity for clarification. That he can imagine a comparison between what he does and the art Johnston makes implies an equation of criticism with art itself, another can of worms.)

I found Kugelmass's conclusion a bit unhelpful: "As somebody who does theory, I’m obliged to respond that the success of the performance is the truth of the author’s faith." But what about when the success is being measured in terms of how truthful it seems? The nature of the problem is that we have a hard time separating success from the good or bad faith of the performer -- this has been true since moral virtue became a spectator sport in the 18th century. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Something other than the ideas themselves always seem to be at stake in discussions of capital-T theory, namely what it is that humanities study is supposed to accomplish. Upon coming across an lit-crit article that foregrounds "trendy" social or literary theory, some reactionaries (me included, at times) assume that it has been forced in to show what a smarty-pants the author thinks he is, that it is not organic to the argument, and thus the writer is making a "bad-faith" argument and is engaged in an intellectual exercise rather than a sincere, impassioned argument. But trying to assess how organic the rhetorical elements of an argument are seems impossible to determine, if not beside the point -- it's applying a piece of critical dogma (literary works should be unified and "organic"; evaluating organic beauty is what we should do in English class) to something it's not equipped to process. If that line of attack seems too facile, a skeptic will perhaps provoke a definitional skirmish (e.g. what "real" feminism is, what counts as a novel, when the consumer revolution really occurred, etc.) that is less about the subject of the paper than it is about policing academic turf and perpetuating the professional viability of a particular interpretive approach. Perhaps the scariest thing that every graduate student in literature must confront is that, given how subjective the parameters and goals of the field are, every disagreement can be seen as a kind of ego-bruising, academic turf war -- how one continues to fight the good fight after having stared into that abyss is the mystery that separates PhDs from ABDs.

The demise of niche marketing (20 October 2006)

Via Mark Thoma comes this essay by economist and frequent NY Times contributor Hal Varian about the effects the ease of video production and distribution will have on entrenched old-media interests. Obviously YouTube makes it easy to distribute videos, made with increasingly cheap DV technology, to anyone who might be interested, and the fact that Google now owns YouTube implies that searching the morass of clips will only become easier. Such clips are at the far, far end of the long tail, sometimes produced and distributed for an audience of friends and family. Those who make these clips of themselves lip synching or of family birthday parties or what have you probably don't expect to make a living doing it, so the practice wouldn't seem to have any impact on commercial video producers.

But Varian explains the impact in terms of Ricardo's notion of economic rents: He points out that the salary of such stars as Tom Cruise "depend on the fact that large numbers of people will pay to see his movies. If, in the future, these people spend more time on YouTube and less time going to movies, Mr. Cruise’s compensation will probably fall." In other words, Cruise's salary doesn't determine the cost of producing movies any more than land rent determines the cost of producing agricultural products; it's vice versa. And what YouTube does is provide an easily accessed alternative that redirects some of our attention away from Hollywood and toward (for better or worse) videos of our friends' children and pets, or toward amateur filmmakers doing things so outrageous or clever that our friends forward them to us. Writes Varian: "Economic rent comes from scarcity. It is true that there is only one Tom Cruise, but it is equally true that there are only 24 hours in a day. The more time young people spend watching Lonelygirl15, the less time they will have to watch Mr. Cruise."

The same seems to apply to music -- the easier it is to make music with computer recording and editing software and distribute it via social networking tools like MySpace, the less pressing it is to consume Vivendi Universal's product. Social networks among youth are often knit by shared tastes in mass-media product, but the technological infrastructure is falling into place to permit them to become self-sustaining communities in terms of culture, to become virtual equivalents of what you used to see with small-town hardcore scenes (the kind of thing Maximum Rock and Roll once chronicled).

That's not likely to happen, however, since participation in mass events seems to provide a vicarious satisfaction of the yearning for massive amounts of attention -- the same function that network reality TV seems to serve. (We also seem to want to belong to a zeitgeist that transcends our small communities; perhaps this could change.) Varian suggests something similar when he echoes the prediction that the effects long-tail distribution will ultimately squeeze semipopular, middling culture: "Those actors, writers and directors who do not command the big audiences may well find it hard to compete for attention with the video blogs. True, the videos available there are often sophomoric. But there will always be sophomores to watch them."

What this may indicate is that the middlebrow, not-quite-popular stuff had been serving a placeholder function, it served to replace the community feeling that was decimated with the spread of television and the atomization of suburban America. In other words, semicommercial indie rock, independent film, literary fiction, little magazines and the bookstores and concert halls and coffee shops which supported and distributed such materials were the product of alienation within a specific sociohistorical formation. The niche such stuff served may be vanishing, as niches themselves become so specific as to dissolve into wholly sui generis idiosyncratic scenes made up of friends connected technologically.

The Internet (perhaps only in my Utopian fantasies, and in the face of the reality that in consigns individuals to sit alone facing a screen) is militating against that isolation, offering people sophisticated means to connect and to produce the kind of cultural material with which to facilitate bonds unique to the group they are in the process of creating with one another. Bands, writers, directors who might have broken out to small-time success may now never escape from the small group of personal friends they work to please, unless they manage to convince mass marketers that they can take their productions to that level, and make the sacrifices and compromises of impersonality and ideological conformity that such a leap requires.