"Every Person for Themselves" Economy (18 March 2011)

Justin Fox, who doesn't blog enough anymore, wrote a good post about this Democracy article by Andrei Cherny, about the "Individual Age." That's Cherny's phrase for what used to be called "the new capitalism" and what left-leaning types (like me) tend to describe as "precarity" or "post-Fordist labor conditions." The security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state (and secured through labor union activism) were discarded with the rise of neoliberalism, which preached deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility (remember Who Moved My Cheese the 1990s ode to employee servility?). Neoliberal (or post-Fordist or postindustrial) relations of production dispensed with employer-employee loyalty and made most workers free agents, drifting from job to job, perpetually insecure, perpetually having to sell one's usefulness anew to employers always looking for reasons to get rid of you. Fox cites this 1997 Fast Company article, "Free Agent Nation" by Dan Pink, as an early reflection of these changes; Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Corrosion of Character are all about these developments as well, and more recently Tina Brown termed it "the gig economy."

Here's how Cherny explains this change:

The differences between the economy of the 19th century and that of the 21st are too many to list, but today, as in Jefferson’s time of independent farmers and shopkeepers, it is individuals, not large conglomerations, that propel the economy. The number of Americans working for themselves is growing rapidly and most Americans no longer work full-time for someone else. Yet it is not just the self-employed or entrepreneurs who are part of this new world. Every worker is grappling with the Individual Age. Lifetime employment with a single company is largely a thing of the past and the dependable health, retirement, and training benefits such a relationship held are fast disappearing. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44. That trend is accelerating and is much more pronounced among those born in later decades. Untethered from large institutions, bouncing from one job to the next, today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business.

The way Cherny tells it, this "trend" is just sort of happening and no one is driving it or can do anything about it; it's just the world historical process playing itself out. This elides the actual concerted effort (ideological, political, economic, etc.) that has gone into making the neoliberal condition a reality, allowing for the needs of capital to dictate the living conditions of more and more people, subsuming more and more of everyday life.

Cherny hopes that government will change policy to support personal entrepreneurhood: "Health-care and retirement benefits should be made more personalized, portable, affordable, and universal." But as Fox points out, the emergence of the entrepreneurial self undermines the sort of solidarity necessary to lobby the government for this change to be implemented and for fairer tax treatment and the like. "To get us laws that reflect the new workplace reality, Free Agent Nation, by its very nature dispersed and allergic to large organizations, needs to develop a unified voice. Can it?" Fox asks. I'm pretty skeptical that it can; the destruction of such solidarity is almost explicitly the purpose of neoliberal reform, as the attack on public-sector unions' bargaining rights suggests. The goal is to get every person thinking and acting for themselves, which makes them most desperate and vulnerable -- oh, wait, I'm sorry, I meant free and flexible.

Pink, in the Fast Company article, paints a picture of precarity as knowledge workers making a savvy career choice to be independent, outside the corporate box and therefore "authentic." Various interviewees in the article gloat about their blissful work lives, like this serial small-time entrepreneur:

"I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

As Pink stresses, in the neoliberal world, "work is personal" and there are no boundaries separating work and nonwork. This fits with the tendency for our consumption to increasingly serve a productive function in the economy as "immaterial" or "affective" labor, contributing to marketing innovations and enhancing brands' equity and devising new uses for goods, new consumer wants, new ways to get pleasure from spending. As more of our self-presentation can be captured digitally and tracked and amalgamated, particularly through social media and mobile communications, our identities themselves become productive factories of economic value.

Pink assert this sort of thing makes work inseparable from fun. And maybe in a noncapitalist society the disappearance of work-life separation would mean freedom from alienation, pure harmonious praxis, meaningful and recognized work for one's livelihood. But under capitalism, this lack of boundaries yields limitless insecurity, and it leads us to entrepreneurialize ourselves, see ourselves as little firms and work hard to augment our personal brand (which seems to me synonymous with neoliberal subjectivity). Rather than work becoming fun, fun becomes work, and hipsterism in it current guise is born. Our identity work becomes anxious, calculating, inescapably reflexive, the opposite of spontaneous. We become conscious that every little gesture must ideally be turned to account somehow to help us get ahead and protect our standard of living.

I think the rise of social media -- beyond merely mobilizing immaterial labor -- has had a lot to do with structuring, promulgating, and naturalizing the entrepreneurial subjectivity necessary for neoliberalism to function smoothly. They support the concept ideologically and institutionally where government doesn't, giving us a sense that we are capitalizing on ourselves and compensating for the collectivity and security we've lost. So the personal brand supplants the personality or the lifestyle -- terms that horrified earlier generations of social critics worried about commercialized identity. Now we network and self-promote and see this as the extent and purpose of social life. Of course! How else could it be? Why wouldn't we capitalize on our friend quotient, our "social graph" -- why shouldn't we measure ourselves in terms of what we can sell about ourselves? That's now how we discover what is "authentic" about us. It seems that we are approaching a point that only what we can sell or hype about ourselves seems real to ourselves -- only what is retweeted or liked on Facebook speaks to who we really are.

Gentrification and Justification (25 June 2010)

Historian Claude Fischer makes some interesting points about gentrification in this post, a response to a review essay from the Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz, on books about Greenwich Village. Both critique the sentimental idea that certain urban neighborhoods once were really authentic and "had soul" but now have been yuppified with the wrong sort of gentrification that hasn't respected the neighborhoods' special uniqueness and have instead imported suburbanized blandness -- chain stores, class homogeneity, a rigid separation from the world of manufacturing, and so on. It's a version of the golden-age fallacy that posits a time just at the horizon of memory when things were the way they should be, everything and everyone in their proper place. It's not an especially dynamic vision; it regards change as inherently corrupting, even though nothing could be more natural than for neighborhoods to evolve over time.

Not to impugn the motives of preservationists, who don't always seem to be acting in bad faith, but neighborhood-preservation efforts are often attempts to entrench power relations, enhance property values, and widen the gap between well-to-do and struggling areas of the city instead of allowing a more egalitarian equilibrium to emerge -- or at least acknowledging dynamism in urban development. There is no platonic ideal of, say, Greenwich Village, just contested ideas that represent competing visions and interests. Fischer describes how authenticity becomes a stalking horse for less lofty concerns:

Struggles over gentrification, even if rooted in matters like rents and loft space, also entail ideological battle. Spokespersons for the current residents invoke local color; they seek to preserve this moment by investing it with historical authenticity; we, they say, are the traditional people of the neighborhood. (One generation’s “traditional” residents are, of course, usually an earlier generation’s outside “invaders.”) The developers, merchants, and middle-class newcomers may be bringing change, but they also often invoke history, a history that looks back before the current residents. One tactic is to use Historical Preservation, to protect the original architecture of a neighborhood, that is the styles that preceded the current residents, for example, the single-family Victorian gingerbread houses, not the stuccoed-over Victorians divided into three flats for immigrant families.

Schwarz deplores the proposition that "the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience." In other words, it's a way of using aesthetics to disguise a conservative politics, even, perhaps, from the purveyors themselves.

Preservationists, Schwarz argues, try to freeze a particular transitional moment when the gritty aspects of neighborhood have only just begun to give way to revitalization. Fischer points out that struggles over the evolution of a neighborhood often involve competing static visions of its "real" character, all of which should be regarded skeptically. Fischer writes:

Schwartz suggests that this balance of working-class grit and a cleaned-up bohemia was attained only in a few places – the Village most famously – and for just a brief moment before the neighborhoods tipped over into “inauthentic” yuppiedom. (In the Village, that moment came around 1960, just about when Bob Dylan showed up.) Schwartz is impatient with those who, in slamming gentrification, imagine that those thrilling moments could be preserved in “amber.”

These moments shouldn't be privileged over other moments in a neighborhood's life cycle, in part because they can't be artificially constructed -- they are cherished for their organic juxtapositions of unlikely elements. Remove the spontaneity, and these become contrived Urban Outfitters moments.

Gentrification nowadays is more readily experienced and lamented by a broader group of people because, as Schwarz argues, neighborhoods evolve much more quickly than they did when Jane Jacobs was making the case for preserving their organic character. "Indeed, what has changed since Jacobs’s day ... is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression ... and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy."

That acceleration reflects consumerist capitalism's permanent imperative to increase our cultural-consumption throughput, which is achieved on a number of fronts. Digitization and mobile communications make it easier for us to be always consuming and producing new consumer meanings that invalidate the old ones and intensify the need to consume more. More-thorough mediatization makes for faster fashion cycles. Retail outlets start to come and go as if they were art installations. People delay in starting families, extending the period of fashion-conscious adolescence and the period in which they want to live among strangers in an urban environment displaying and "discovering" themselves. And so on.

How does consumption become the "dominant means of self-expression"? The division of labor in modern society is partly responsible, removing the meaningfulness from work. That meaningfulness crops up instead in consumption, the symbolic resonance of what we buy, display, and use. Along with that change, identity becomes provisional and open-ended rather than constrained by traditional limits. Rather than having an identity assigned by the conditions of our birth, we become responsible for creating a series of roles for ourselves. The self becomes a goal we never can quite reach but are always moving toward through various experiments with lifestyles and purchases and attitudes. We seek distinction through the pursuit of novelty and originality, which fill the void left by retreating traditional values (which are ushered out by the creative destruction of capitalism).

And therein lies a contradiction: we want to consume the traditional values of our neighborhoods precisely at the moment that we have become the sorts of selves who can't exist in traditional settings. Just as the authenticity of our identity has become something we feel required or anxious to establish over and over again through careful outward displays, so our neighborhoods begin to be held to the same standards, as they are transformed primarily into settings for our personal narratives expected to reflect our self-image. But at the same time, to cater to our identity needs on a practical level (food, clothes, cafes, bars, tchotchke shops, etc.), neighborhoods lose the local color that supports the idea that we are somehow on the urban frontier, pursuing an edgy lifestyle distinct from the safe, boring, blah lives of our parents who fled cities.

Anyway, it's quite possibly better that gentrification tends to temper the edge of contemporary bohemia in America. Otherwise we might have in the U.S. the "alcoholic agoras" of England that Dragan Klaic mentions in this article -- "where young people get drunk by 10:00 pm, vomit in the streets, get into fights and are taken away by ambulances and police or totter into taxis to get back home. This is the daily reality of the creative city pipe dream."

Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)

Sometimes I feel so uninspired. Or should I say, (Sometimes I Feel so) Uninspired.. Usually what happens when I feel this way is I begin driving myself with ever more relentlessness through posts in my RSS reader, looking for something to spark my interest. But what I always seem to forget in these moods is how many ideas and articles I have already set aside because I was too busy to deal with them at the time. I probably have dozens of things that I have either starred or shared in Google Reader, thinking I would write about them later here. And I have a stack of articles printed out as well that I have been meaning to read and write about. Yet when I am in this mood, I never feel like going back to that stuff. (Once I shelve something for later, I am essentially logged it for permanent limbo.) In fact, the essence of the mood seems to be a weariness with the backlog, a sense of futility, and a craving for some deus ex machina that will crank the wheel of my "creativity" without my having to do much of anything.

So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way -- as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: "So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well." (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that's similar to what I gain after I've thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.

A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won't bother. This also seems like a problem.

Productivity of social media (29 March 2010)

Brendan Koerner has a short Wired piece about how social media enhances productivity. I've been banging the immaterial labor drum so hard that it hadn't really occurred to me that some people would view Twitter and Facebook as time wasters. My view is that participation on social networks is a kind of harvestable work that doesn't feel like work to the people doing it, perhaps because they don't get cash payment for it. Instead they get a fuzzier kind of satisfaction from feeling relevant, for being in "real time." But apparently managers at actual workplaces (not in the "social factory") see social networking as time stolen from the company. It makes sense -- employees are producing value for somebody else on the company's dime.

Koerner suggests that the social-media time works to replenish professional "creatives":

Your random tweets about Android apps and last night’s Glee are stifling the economic recovery. At least, that’s the buzz among efficiency mavens, who seem to spend all their time adding up microblogging’s fiscal toll. Last year, Nucleus Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office productivity; a Morse survey estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies $2.2 billion a year.
But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into products — whether gadgets, code, or even Wired articles — goofing off isn’t the enemy. In fact, regularly stepping back from the project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind.

That makes sense too -- they go to the well of processed information in social networks and suck out what stuff is useful for the enterprise project they are working on. Koerner points to the unplanned serendipity that can result as well: "According to Don Ambrose, a Rider University professor who studies creative intelligence, incubation is most effective when it involves exposing the mind to entirely novel information rather than just relieving mental pressure. This encourages creative association, the mashing together of seemingly unrelated concepts — a key step in the creative process."

The point here is that social media is a resource, not a distraction. The social relations and associations captured in the various networks and platforms and media are a productive force of their own, a commons. The Italian neo-Marxists talk about this in terms of the general intellect. This is the key line from Marx's Grundrisse (my bolding): "The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it." That's a pretty abstract formulation and allows for a pretty broad range of interpretations. (And it doesn't really matter what Marx happened to write, if you think about it.) But I read that as suggesting the ways in which capitalism captures the work we do to maintain our friendships as a kind of productivity. It used to be a more ephemeral, immaterial thing (hence the associated term "immaterial labor") referring mainly to ways in which people learn to collaborate in workplaces. But networking technology has made it possible to archive the product of this social work and find more capitalist applications for it. Social relations are produced socially; their shape is determined to a degree by social needs, or in other words, the general intellect. The sorts of friendships we have with people are partly dictated by social context; they are not autonomous, or dependent on the unique bond we may believe we are forming. With social networks increasingly becoming the medium of friendship, the purpose of friendship has likewise been affected -- friendship takes the form of all this concrete data-processing labor online, which goes by the benign enough name of "sharing."

The productivity of social networking seems like the cutting-edge manifestation of a tendency Paolo Virno describes, by which the benefits of the "general intellect" -- more free time, for instance -- ultimately get reappropriated by capital:

Marx claims that in a communist society, rather than an amputated worker, the whole individual will produce. That is the individual who has changed as a result of a large amount of free time, cultural consumption and a sort of ‘power to enjoy’. Most of us will recognize that the Post-Fordist laboring process actually takes advantage in its way of this very transformation albeit depriving it of all emancipatory qualities. What is learned, carried out and consumed in the time outside of labor is then utilized in the production of commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labor power and is computed as profitable resource. Even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into laboring task.

This is why it is worth complaining about social networks being private for-profit entities. The general intellect loses its autonomy, its capacity to function as a Habermasian public sphere. Instead, it's just another Mechanical Turk.

The "protocol economy" and the recalculation argument (30 Dec 2009)

In the NYT, David Brooks has a column about what he calls the "protocol economy":

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

That sounds a lot like a conservative take on what Italian Marxists like Virno and Negri call the "post-Fordist economy," which relies not on raw manufacturing capability but on "immaterial labor" produced collaboratively in the "social factory." Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude calls this "the general intellect," drawing on some tentative formulations Marx made in the Grundrisse.

In so-called “second-generation independent labor," but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and “linguistic games.” In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive “machines,” without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve. The general intellect becomes an attribute of living labor when the activity of the latter consists increasingly of linguistic services.

Labor, that is to say, now consists mainly of interpersonal communication and consumption skills. As more-traditional economists would put it, we build various forms of communication skills to reduce transaction costs, increasing the trust between parties to various inter-organizational exchanges. When we have drinks with co-workers, we have an easier time working with them efficiently on the job. To translate into the terms Brooks uses, "a nation has to have a good economic culture ... what really matters [are] attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders." In other words, labor practices in the capitalism we know are often about building the hierarchy, reinforcing the chain of command while disguising the coercion involved. The value of an enterprise more and more lies precisely in that discipline, which promises that the organization can spring into action and work quickly to accommodate demands.

Not only is hierarchical communication important; Brooks claims that "a strong economy needs daring consumers." By working at our consumption, making sure we do it more efficiently, we become more valuable to our employers. When we use computers at home, for instance, we become more efficient users of them at work. And by being "daring" about what we consume, we help sustain the cycle of novelty -- making old but still functional goods seem uncool and thus obsolete. (This seems at odds with the New Austerity position Brooks occasionally pushes, but that's another topic.)

Both of these tenets of "good economic culture" point toward the end of the hard-and-fast division between work and nonwork time, since we are constantly working on building trust and "innovating" in our relationships with people and the products we use. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure then changes what it means to be employed. More and more of us are producing value in our leisure time (filling out customer-satisfaction surveys, writing product reviews online, disseminating information about what trends are hot, file-sharing, mapping out our social networks, etc.) -- and finding ourselves otherwise unemployed, without a traditional wage-paying job. The media industry is particularly implicated in this change -- reporters are being laid off while the work of unpaid "citizen journalists" is being harvested. (See here.)

Among the economists Brooks cites is Arnold Kling, who for some time has been developing the argument (derived from Austrian economists: Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, etc.) at the blog EconLog that the current recession can be explained in terms of "recalculation" (and not in traditional macroeconomic terms as a "lack of aggregate demand" or "liquidity preferences"). Unemployment is thus structural rather than cyclical. The gist is that people can systematically plan their investments poorly, including how they invest their "human capital," as Kling explains coldly:

people take a lot of idiosyncratic risk, particularly in terms of their human capital, which is for most people their biggest asset. I think that in the last 18 months, an unusually high number of people have had their plans go awry. They wish they had made different choices in terms of their education and occupations. Digging out from these mistakes is going to take a long time. A lot of recalculation needs to get done, and the problem is really daunting.

The analysis hinges on the problems incipient in the time lag between production and consumption (the period in which capital is circulating and surplus value is realized, from Marx's point of view -- when the exploited are definitively separated from the exploiters). Producers plan today for uncertain demand tomorrow, without guarantee that what's produced is socially necessary. The future's uncertain and the end is always near, as noted economist Jim Morrison put it. When the planning has gone poorly, the economy will begin to painfully reallocate resources (including labor) by means of the market sending some blunt signals -- i.e. lots of layoffs.

This view has a kind of pitiless frankness going for it; it plays as a promise not to reinflate the same bubbles or protect moribund industries or embedded rent-seekers. It seeks to rid us of unsustainable economic practices -- in our case, perpetual consumer borrowing to sustain a consumerist-driven economy. At the same time, though, it makes a deity of market signals: the divine plan indicated by these signals must be obeyed. But of course the whole recalculation problem arises because we can't reliably discern what we should do from the signals the market conveys. The signals themselves encode various distortions and asymmetries and scams that lead us to misallocate our financial and human capital. There seems to be a need for government industrial policy of some sort to corral those signals, simplify them, supply them with parameters that allow the message they send be more easily interpreted.

In the U.S., the call for industrial policy often ends up being a plea for a return to the glory days of manufacturing -- when America actually made stuff instead of easily copied "protocols;" when we made steel, not software and entertainment goods that can be pirated; when labor was material and delineated, not immaterial and uncompensated in a nebulous service economy. Ryan Avent, at The Economist's Free Exchange blog dismisses this (and articles like this TNR piece) as a liberal-left shibboleth:

What about the question of whether manufacturing ought to make up a set share of output? Think about this. Technological innovation has significantly reduced the cost of many technologies; in real terms (and especially in quality-adjusted real terms), televisions, computers, phones, appliances, and so on are far cheaper than they used to be. One consequence of these reductions in cost is that such products contribute less to measured output.
For many service activities, by contrast, the principal cost factors aren't easily reduced. Many health care services, for instance, are skilled-labour intensive. Until technology can reduce the labour inputs required for such services (or until their is a significant increase in the supply of the necessary skilled labour) it will be hard to cut costs, and meanwhile, demand is steady or increases. As a result, prices go up, as does the value of the contribution to output.

Avent is basically restating the recalculation thesis with a slightly different emphasis: workers need to retrain for the service economy, not ask the government to protect their outmoded, deskilled manufacturing jobs now being exported to countries where labor (and human life) is currently cheap. The U.S. apparently needs to focus even more on education (the customary panacea for economic ills), but this threatens to produce an education arms race instead of increase in the skill set of the workforce. People need higher and higher education degrees to do the same simple office work. (This seems to threaten an education bubble, where people stay in school as long as possible and then graduate to become educators themselves.) (Avent has more worth reading on this subject at his personal blog, looking at the American Prospect's special issue on urbanism.)

The fetishization of education also has the effect of encouraging the plethora of highly educated people to manufacture complexity for its own sake, in order to justify bigger salaries for then managing that complexity. This seems to be what happened in the finance industry, which dropped all pretense of serving an intermediary function (matching investments with spare capital) and nakedly served itself, sullying the market signals that are supposed to aid economic recalculation and ease/prevent structural unemployment in the first place. (See here for a good explanation of why the financial sector's norms are out of whack -- basically bankers care about earnings only, their "mission" precludes an ethic based on the rewards of their work itself.)

It seems like economic/industrial policy should be geared toward fixing the "economic culture" in such a way to prevent the elaboration of "protocols" of self-serving complexity. We need to encourage education while discouraging the abuse and perversion of the advantages and innovations it can supply. Hence the focus on income inequality, arguably the evidence of such perversions -- at least if one holds to the ideal that knowledge is its own reward rather than a mere tool to get money, which is then presumed to be able to buy something better than wisdom.

Maps and legends (20 July 2009)

Recently, as I mentioned before, I re-read the novel Dune, something that felt vaguely shameful to me, so shameful that I feel compelled to mention it again here as a kind of penance. While I was quickly and compulsively working my way through Muad Dib's rise to the godhead, I was too ashamed to take the book on the subway; instead I waited until I got home from work to furtively dive in. Not that the book itself is shameful; it's rightly regarded as a classic. I think my shame came from how much it remind me of myself when I was 12, when I first read it, how much I was indulging a useless nostalgia, as all the innocence was gone from my reading. Whenever I felt myself getting caught up in the story, I found myself adamantly retreating to an analytical distance, seeking in some way to ironize my own engagement.

While I was reading, I found myself frequently and needlessly recurring to the near-incomprehensible map of the planet on which most of the action takes place. It's not like the geography is confusing. But the map is more confusing than anything else, with lots of locations labeled that I don't remember ever being mentioned in the text, with hopelessly geeky names like "the Minor Erg". The glossary, on the other hand, is extremely useful and great for laughs, too. My favorite part is the Pale Fire style references to nonexistent reference works; e.g. the parenthetical in the entry for Krimskell fiber that reads "For a more detailed study, see Holjance Vohnbrook's 'The Strangler Vines of Ecaz.' " I think half the reason you write a science fiction book is to throw in stuff like that. And to produce appendixes that go into utterly gratuitous detail about the fictional universe you've invented. Reading Dune's appendixes made me wonder whether the novel was just an excuse to allow Herbert to publish the appendixes, which seemed to contain the quintessence of his inspiration, still crystalline and impenetrable and inaccessible. Novels like Dune tap into the primordial passion of naming things, or renaming familiar things in some made-up language, and drawing up maps for the sheer pleasure of naive cartography.

What started me thinking about this was a passage in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy -- a survey of differences between oral cultures and cultures that have writing.

For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or 'world,' think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be 'explored.' The ancient oral world knew few 'explorers', though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.

Michael Chabon's essay about childhood in the most recent New York Review of Books touches on a similar idea. Citing the mental maps he made of his neighborhood, replete with personal landmarks unique to him, Chabon claims that "Childhood is a branch of cartography." He connects this with maps in adventure stories:

People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Combine with this Ong's argument about adventurers, and you get something like this: A certain species of books, mainly attractive to young adults, seem designed to re-stage that transition from an oral-dominated world of adventure to text-dominated (i.e. mapped) world on a small scale, in the reader's mind. An epic story unfolds on the oral-tradition model, but it's fused to a battery of maps and glossaries and appendices that engulf the narrative and sap its power away, or at least redirects that narrative's momentum and energy. That is to say, perhaps part of the drama of novels like Dune lies in having the adventuresome oral tradition evoked again for readers while allowing them reader to ultimately and triumphantly reject it in favor of textuality, literacy, maps, dictionaries, and so forth. We master the technologies of text as we're reading these otherwise unnecessarily confusing books -- consulting the maps and the glossary -- and experience ourselves transcending the universe of the story as it unfolds. We end up feeling as though we are alongside the creator of the story, in an "adult" world of total comprehension. Then we confirm it by reading the appendix. Eventually we associate with adulthood the idea that we can do away with the fiction and just stick to the facts, presented in as bare-bones a fashion as possible so we can take in more of them. We skip right to the maps in the back; the stories just get in the way.

Creative writing and crippling self-consciousness (4 June 2009)

In the New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews The Program Era, a book by Mark McGurl about the institutionalization of creative-writing programs. Creative writing classes are an easy target for cynics (including me) who don't believe that "creativity" can be taught or should even be isolated and reified as a concept, yet are also skeptical of the idea of transcendent genius separating the true Wordsworthian artists from the rest of the plebes and philistines. Neither McGurl or Menand seem to be as cynical as that -- McGurl argues (and Menand agrees) that creative-writing programs as an institution are the most important development in the history of American literature since World War II, and in many ways is more significant than any particular author produced by the programs. Menand writes:

As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "serious fiction" -- I assume that means the fiction that most people don't bother to read because it doesn't conform to the expectations generated by popular genres. Though McGurl rejects this idea, creative-writing programs, perhaps, can best be understood as the attempt to standardize that heterogeneous mass of non-genre fiction, codifying it into an identifiable (if still not all that marketable) product known as "literary fiction." They also fortify the walls that separate genre fiction from the precincts of capital-L Literature. This helps protect literature from the sort of economically grounded analysis that best explains the popularity and specific features of mass-market fiction, which is clearly crafted as an entertainment product to appeal to well-delineated audiences. Literature, according to the professors sworn to defend its reputation, is above such craven pandering; it is a matter of geniuses serving the muse, of aesthetic struggle in the name of art, not commerce. But creative-writing programs, though they help stabilize the definition of literature and carry it forward into contemporaneity, seem to be primarily about commerce -- about networking and forming the connections that will allow as-yet-unknown writers to possibly make a living by writing (or teaching others how to write). This, and not a cosmically serendipitous concentration of talent, is what allowed so many renowned writers to all inhabit the same university classrooms, as Menand details.

Lots of fields are essentially networking cliques. What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is not the networking aspect but the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. Menand highlights this aspect of McGurl's anlalysis and renders it in telling metaphors of machines and carpenter ants:

Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. Reflecting on yourself—your experience, your “voice,” your background, your talent or lack of it—is what writing workshops make people do.
McGurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we’re all highly self-conscious ants, because that’s what it means to be a modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program.... So the fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs may appeal to readers because it rehearses topics—“Who am I?” issues—that are already part of their inner lives.

Again, fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs has an extremely limited appeal -- to those hardy few who routinely read The New Yorker, for instance. As Menand notes, "university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace." So when McGurl talks about self-conscious ants, he's really talking about a small slice of well-educated middlebrows who tend toward a certain status anxiety and are also probably prone to the peculiar kind of identity crisis that afflicts those self-selected members of the "creative class." Like the Calvinist elect, the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class's essential self-consciousness, and when it is acute, it becomes hipsterism.

Part of this crusade for recognition involves writing and reading and commenting on literary fiction, which is perhaps the purest materialization of that personal creativity, the ore of hipster selfhood. In literary fiction, plot is often replaced with meticulous observation, a kind of careful surveillance of surfaces that are then subject to a hermeneutics of authenticity or cool. The same spirit that animates identity creation in the various online forums, mediums, and social networks is what has long animated creative writing programs, so it may be that the programs don't reflect identity-obsessed audiences so much as they have fostered them. Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism.

The "habit of self-observation" seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations. Instead there is only workshops, which are rudimentary rough drafts for the sort of reciprocal "sharing" that now takes place in rolling fashion online. We are all creative writers now. Maybe those who come after us will have the lucky chance to be something else.

Sundry music-related matters (29 May 2009)

I just crashed through two weeks of blog posts on my RSS reader and my brain has become a bit scrambled. I feel I must now blog about just about everything in the world in one comprehensive post and find some way to tie the 30 or 40 posts I starred together into one master narrative, one grand theory of everything (and that's not even considering all the HRO Exegesis posts I need to write). Maybe I should put another pot of coffee on.

One thing I discovered was that Richard Florida's newish blog at the Atlantic has been consistently compelling over the past few weeks. He has had a series of posts about evolution in the music industry, positing the theory that the music business is a media-industry canary in the post-internet coalmine. In this post, he notes that in some ways the industry is retreating from forms that had become technologically necessary -- the album, thanks to vinyl, the 74 minute CD, etc. -- to the forms that may arguably be more "natural" to pop music:

But the enormity of the creative destruction sweeping the industry goes far beyond the iPod killing off the CD. The Gang of Four's Dave Allen argues that we are seeing the "end of the album" - a construct initially created by the limitation of vinyl technology in 1930 - as the organizing principle of musical production. He sees this as potentially liberating for musicians - or those musicians that can adapt. Industry veteran Bob Lefsetz predicts a return to the pre-LP era, when artists constantly pumped out singles and toured. He even draws a comparison to the way that Toyota has succeeded by building a reputation for reliability gradually through word of mouth.

These ideas tie in to this related lament, from Rob Cox at the Big Money, for the now moribund live album. After valiantly trying to explain the success of Frampton Comes Alive! he argues that the live album was spawned by a specific and now vanished nexus of record-label needs for product and the corporate rock artist's need to produce that product in the absence of inspiration. Now anyone with a phone can bootleg shows, and the labels are more or less finished, so the live album has no purpose. I always thought the function of the live album was to provoke a more-complete fantasy in pre-teens (mostly) of participating in an impossibly awesome concert experience, back when big bands and tours were relatively rare. I can remember staring at the back cover of Kiss Alive! and wishing I could be one of those burned-out kids holding up that sad homemade banner.

But then at some point, live albums became souvenirs of the show you were presumed to have already seen, rather than a hyperidealized presentation of the experience. (Think of the Stones' 14 live albums since 1990.) Cox suggests that YouTube now fulfills that function of making the effort to go to rock concerts seem worth the trouble.

Elsewhere, Florida revisits, via the excellent Carl Wilson, the findings that popular songs are somewhat paradoxically popular because they are popular. Wilson believes this tends to highlight the power of the music editor, or the critic -- the filtering types who are in a position to establish the pop-culture discussion: Of the investment in liking a particular song or other, he writes, "What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful." I've long argued that pop music has little to do with the intrinsic music quality but with being able to consume the zeitgeist through an emotionally immediate artifact. I was thinking about this a lot on my recent road trip, during which I listened to hours and hours of radio. I heard plenty of oldies and that sort of thing, far too many songs by Boston. The two songs that really stood out to me, that made me feel aware of being alive specifically in 2009, were "Blame It on the Alcohol" by T-Pain and some song whose chorus runs: "I'm so 3008, you're so two thousand and late." That these songs are ridiculous and totally dated right from the get-go is pretty much the point of them. No one would argue that these are "good" songs, but whenever the station-scan stopped on either of them, we didn't change it. (I guess I would have to lump another ludicrous song in with those two, one that goes "You'r hot then you're cold, you're on then you're off," etc., etc.) The fact that these songs of all things out there had made it onto the radio in South Jersey and South Dakota seemed to warrant some kind of response, seemed to demand that we pay attention, that we ignore them at the peril of making ourselves irrelevant. Much as HRO is a blog worth blogging about, I suppose, these were songs worth talking about, if not all that great to listen to in the abstract. But there are no abstract listening conditions; there is always context, and the context is everything, is the whole of the moon.

Wilson (also via Florida) has a good comment about hipsters/hipster bashing -- it involves "bogus ethnography" (sadly one of my specialties) and speaks to a kind of craving for a real leader to come along and put an end to status anxiety once and for all:

There’s also a self-serving decadence narrative where the hipster serves as the negative exaggeration of one’s own apathy, helping to exonerate it. The hipster serves as a locus for fears of lost control, of social disconnection. Yet it’s a hysteria to focus that anxiety on these kids personally rather than on, say, the system of cool and cultural capital, and what’s more the genuine lack of control you have over hypercapitalism, of which their look uncomfortably reminds you. The hipster-monster is the face of a cultural death wish, along the vector of a snarling circle jerk hurtling towards social atomization and collapse.

Analysis along these lines reminds me of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, which was his attempt to figure out what made people embrace authoritarian leaders. Here's what I wrote about Hoffer before:

Hoffer regards the rise of mass movements as the almost inevitable consequence of widespread mediocrity coupled with the unreasonable expectations that democracy generates for the common person. “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of one ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ “ Democratic ideology leaves the impression that all men are equal, whereas it has the effect of making one’s place in the irrepressible hierarchies in society seem entirely the individual’s fault. Thus the frustrated people in a capitalist democracy “want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”

If I am reading Wilson right, he's suggesting that the hipster bogeyman stands in as a symbol of how freedom can weigh as a burden, or rather how consumerism can reduce freedom to a burden of perpetual self-redefinition along aesthetic lines that seem like someone else's whimsy. But the symbol shouldn't be mistaken for the person behind that facade, who is most likely feeling the same way. Wilson puts this elegantly: "There are no hipsters, only anti-hipsters - or at least the ratio is approximately the same as that of actually existing Satanists to anti-Satanists during the heavy-metal and Goth panics of the 1980s and 1990s.The question is what in turn the hipster allows the anti-hipster to deny, and what’s being lost in that continuing deferral."

What I found especially interesting, though, was this: "Flamboyant aesthetic display...still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it. Sites like 'Look at this Fucking Hipster' reek of a paranoid craving for a restoration of social order." I have written my share of reactionary screeds about hipsters and must acknowledge that some of my anger had stemmed from this anguished sense that they still have youth to squander that I don't. Some of the anger came from the larger structural issue, of how evolutions of youth culture are used commercially and how those standards are seemingly foisted on adults with more efficacy now. I suppose there's enough evidence of past generations heaping contempt on youth style to question whether there is really anything new in this, but it seems that an equal amount of evidence can be marshalled to show how the concept of "adult" has rapidly eroded in recent decades.

I also must admit that "flamboyant aesthetic display" has always offended my sense of propriety, my futile adherence to the anonymity ideal. A certain species of ersatz egalitarianism will always yearn to obviate the superficial distinctions of such display in favor of something "deeper" and more intrinsic to uniquely human capabilities -- it's just not clear whether that is an even more dangerous fantasy. Feel depressed now. Maybe need to start wearing a wig.

Slacker security (26 May 2009)

Generation Bubble points to this WSJ article about "youth magnet cities" like Portland, and the lack of jobs therein. The story's opening salvo reminded me strongly of when I was young and utterly clueless about the economy, as though it didn't really apply to me, as if I were exempt:

In October, as the stock market tanked and the economy shed 400,000 jobs, Matt Singer moved from Oxnard, Calif. to Portland, Ore. He didn't have a job, but he was attracted to the city's offbeat culture and hungered for change. Mr. Singer's plan was to get an editing or writing gig at an alternative weekly newspaper, the job he was doing in California.

Seven months later, the 26-year-old is still without a steady job -- and still here. "I wasn't really aware of how bad the job situation was at the time," says Mr. Singer.

Not to go all reactionary here, but one can assume that Singer is unencumbered by such adult responsibilities as raising a family or caring for elderly parents and therefore can make life choices based on whims about where it might be cool to live. (I'm tempted to do the same sort of thing now and move to Europe.) And then the lifestyle choices reinforce the impossibility of ever assuming those adult responsibilities, because one is always too broke. Perhaps true hipster cities must always hover on the brink of economic irrelevance; too much success and opportunity might prompt hipsters to become yuppies, which are profoundly uncool, as anyone who has been through Park Slope in Brooklyn lately could attest. Economic opportunity ultimately means a chance to invest effort in something other than identity maintenance. For those who haven't found a way to commercialize cool, this means a chance to finally leave cool behind, however reluctantly.

But when one moves to an economically stagnant place like Portland, one is never confronted with this dilemma. This quote, from one of the twentysomethings interviewed for the story, sums up the sense of slacker security pretty succinctly: ""I know I'm underemployed and if it bothered me more, I guess I'd do more to change it."

So these cities may become stagnation valleys, economically speaking -- deadbeat magnets. But the inhabitants perhaps can feel as though they are liberated from the rat race and embracing bohemian values of creativity and environmental consciousness. I would love to embrace the idea that one can opt out of capitalistic ambitiousness and retreat into these urban oases of higher consciousness, only the intense self-consciousness of hipsterdom is so repellent. The ambitiousness has simply been displaced to a more parochial and pointless sphere, where the stakes are entirely personal and socially useless. Ordinary greed becomes a greed for attention, perfectly suitable for the so-called attention economy, which, unlike the real economy, seems to be thriving particularly in "youth magnet cities."

Generation Bubble's take is slightly different. Cities like Portland have managed to find a way to use cool to hoard educated labor that can then be sold for cheap.

Overextended and underemployed in creative-class Xanadu is probably not how many hipsters envisioned their post-collegiate years, but such is the sobering reality for many of them. Which can come as nothing but good news for local employers, who stand to acquire specialized labor at bargain-basement wages, as well as for landlords, the ultimate winners in all such demographic trends.

And meanwhile, as the WSJ article notes, the unemployed youth soak up city services and adopt a kind of laissez-faire approach to getting by.

If he doesn’t find work soon, Mr. DeGrush says he and his girlfriend will probably just move to Portland over the summer and hope for the best. “We’re debating just trying to find part-time stuff and scrounging by until something more permanent opens up,” he says.

This prompts a priceless peroration from GB:

We at Generation Bubble are heartened by this contemporary expression of the very can-do attitude that made America great, and we delight in imagining great caravans of fixed-gear bicycles crossing valley and plain on their way to a manifest destiny of occasional employment, inadequate health coverage, warmed-over indie rock and crowded brew pubs.
Go West, young men and women!

The craven creative class (18 Feb 2009)

If you are familiar with Richard Florida, much of his engaging essay in the new Atlantic, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," will not surprise you -- those in cities lucky enough to be populated by the creative class will only be mildly discomfitted by the recession, while those Rust Belt unfortunates are basically doomed. As Florida points out, "innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant," and New York will continue to innovate in the vital fields represented by these creatives: "fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and—yes—psychiatrists."

My reaction to this is similar to Arnold Kling's: "I don't think that the arts are all that important. To me, creative innovation that matters is somebody in a lab at MIT coming up with a more efficient battery or solar cell. It is somebody at Stanford coming up with a way to make computers smarter or cancer more preventable. I just can't get excited about some frou-frou fashion designers and the magazines that feature their creations."

Even though it makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I tend to adopt that same skeptical sneer for pseudo-innovations of the fashion cycle, for casual abuse of the word innovative and creative. When Florida writes about cities incubating "idea-driven creative industries" I wonder what he means specifically. Obviously he doesn't mean the swell financial innovation conjured up by the creative class of Wall Street bankers that helped put us into this recession that, as Florida rightly notes, will dump misery mainly in other parts of the country. But I can never grasp in my noncreative mind what is so beneficial about ideas as ideas, regardless of whether they are good or bad; about innovation for its own sake. Florida is undoubtedly right that cities allow ambitious people with money to find more easily other ambitious people full of conviction in their own ideas; they can then socialize in such a way that they can puff each other up with that right amount of trust and nepotistic networking confidence that's necessary to launch implausible startups. They can be intimate enough to truly believe each other's bullshit and craft an excellent marketing plan for it. And they can fashion a richer culture of social signifiers (the art world, etc.) that can alienate and put at a disadvantage those not fortunate enough to breathe in that rarefied air.

But when Florida writes of people "in the intangible sector—what I call the 'creative class' of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals," it's hard not to wonder, what are they engineering? What are they managing? Isn't their creative success ultimately contingent on the poor rubes doing the dirty work under them? Doesn't their white-collar creativity at some point touch something tangible, a level at which actual human needs are being fulfilled through socially necessary labor? Felix Salmon remonstrates Kling with the implied point that libertarian economist types can't go around judging businesses in moral terms, as long as they are generating jobs and income. But it seems a fair question to ask whether the fashion industry's "value added" is more socially useful than a Las Vegas construction worker's. Florida argues that the Sun Belt building boom, frighteningly efficient and innovative and "highly metabolic" as it was during the bubble, was built on a kind of lie, but I wonder if the same isn't true of the dubious innovation coming from the media and fashion industries favored by the creative class. It all seems vulnerable to a more rigorous accounting of what is truly socially necessary.

Florida's core argument is this:

The economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism.

But what are ideas about if not things? Ultimately, any idea must find tangible expression in human labor reworking some piece of material in a way that deemed socially necessary. Otherwise it never gets realized; it never enters the economy. Is haute couture any more necessary than McMansion developments in Mesa, Arizona?

Maybe there is a way for the ideas not to yield things, but an overarching ideology that's not tangible but is nonetheless very valuable for those it protects. The ideas that are generated by that density of creative people working with fast-moving ideas are perhaps merely those that establish the hierarchy by which they seek to be judged, and the means for putting it over on the people who would otherwise prefer to play by different rules. The velocity is a matter of keeping the fashion cycle one step ahead of the populace they seek to dominate. As long as they succeed it putting this cycle over on outsiders, they "thrive," because they then get to manufacture the ideas that make them gatekeepers to modern identity.

So much of the New York creative class may amount to no more than an entrenched group of ideological workers, manufacturing tokens of prestige to preserve the class structure while those in the noncreative classes suffer without recompense. So no wonder it won't be such hard times for us here. The class structure is likely to need more propping up than ever. But I think this dooms Florida's prediction that creative-class cities will assimilate the economy's losers; these cities may thrive precisely by preventing those people out from peeking behind the curtain.

The enduring creative class and the myth of samizdat (9 August 2008)

In a riposte to tech pessimists like Nicholas Carr, media blogger Jeff Jarvis argues that "the myth of the creative class" is in the process of being extinguished by the internet.

The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

Pretty to think so. This is internet ideology at its most inspirational: the Web allows us to be individuals rather than part of a mass addressed by media monoliths, and it allows meritocracy to at last become a reality, and no one will be any more famous than he or she deserves.

The playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

A look back at the history of internet fads makes one skeptical though. And it seems that the power networks of the offline media replicate themselves online -- the commercial media has a more vested interest in drumming up traffic and integrating content production with advertising support, so they invest money and effort accordingly, with the effect of reproducing the offline mode of production online. Independent bloggers are adopted by national publications, and their content is branded by the big media companies, and the power of branding to confer authority begins to exert itself over the once-wide-open sphere of communication. It becomes harder to be some random person with a blogger account and still get discovered and linked to -- it can happen, but then so could my letter to the editor be published as a column on the NYT opinion page. It's just not very likely.

As Jarvis would have it, Web space has replaced the hip urban centers celebrated by Richard Florida as the site where inspired minds congregate to inspire one another.

This link ecology does potentially change the nature of creativity. It makes it more collaborative, not just in the act but in the inspiration. Coelho’s Witch of Portobello is the spark that leads to a movie made by its readers. Same with Stern, LonelyGirl, Colbert. Perhaps the role of the creative class is not so much to make finished products but to inspire more to be made. It is the flint of creativity. It’s the internet - Google, Flickr, YouTube, and old, mass media as their accessories - that bring flint and spark together.

This sort of thing plays out as the much heralded "remix culture" -- consumers become producers by using digital cultural products as a language for their own creative expressions. This undermines the old allegiances that paved the way for subcultures anchored in various nexuses of music and fashion and zines and so on, and introduces a more motley pastiche form of culture that is at the same time more homogeneous than ever. The internet -- the link economy, the amateur parodies and homages of culture industry product, etc. -- becomes a hegemonic form for cultural expression even as it become more heterogeneous in its composite parts. You might make a steampunk rap video with snippets of sitcoms mixed in, but it will still be posted on YouTube in the end. It has become so much easier to publish samizdat that samizdat now no longer has any meaning as a form.

I'm not sure this more democratic access to the means of distribution ultimately frees up an abundance of heretofore suppressed talent or shifts anything away from the established creative class -- the anointed ones who shape the culture that consumers remix. Yes, the internet provides uncolonized space for cultural activity, a space that is ever expanding. You never reach the Western shore. There is always more room for "creative" pioneers to stake claims. But the majority of cultural consumers aren't interested in lighting out for the territories, and the creative class continues to run what is recognized socially as the civilized portion of that vast online space, and it is slowly expanding its control assimilating the more promising outliers. This seems no different from how things have always worked in the culture industries; if anything the dependence on the law-giving creative class strengthens with so much chaos lurking at the fringes.

Anecdote of Boalsberg Memorial Day Festival (27 May 2008)

By coincidence, I spent Memorial Day in the town where the holiday was born: Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, which is in Centre County a few miles from State College. The town naturally tries to milk this designation for all its worth and holds a day-long festival with Civil War reenactments, a maypole dance, local school kids reading patriotic essays, folk music (we heard "Roll Out the Barrel," a Pennsyl-tucky favorite), and a parade that culminates at the cemetery where Memorial Day first occurred. (The festival also coincided with the Boalsburg Firehouse Carnival, where I played 25-cent Bingo and ate funnel cake. I steered clear of the deep-fried dill pickle.)

Along with the festivities were booths lining the town's two main streets from which people (local artisans mostly) sold a variety of tchotchkes. Much of this was what you'd expect -- quilts, soaps, candles, Penn State toilet-seat covers, homemade scrubbies, salad-dressing kits, wrought-iron garden ornaments, caricature drawings, hand-lettered wooden plaques with such slogans as "What happens in the Hot Tub stays in the Hot Tub" and "It's hard to be pretentious in flip-flops," bird feeders, wooden jewelry and whatnot. A lot of it was reminiscent of faintly discreditable stuff you'd see advertised on late-night TV or home-shopping channels, products that seem novel for a moment, before you realize how unnecessary or how unlikely to deliver on their promises they are. I end up feeling skeptical, thinking that the stuff would be sold in "real stores" if it were any good -- you see how the retailers have me right where they want me. (The aura of authenticity that retail stores cast over their merchandise is of course a carefully calibrated accomplishment akin to the brand equity produced for products through advertising.)

Craft fairs don't rely on bargain pricing, an approach the TV hucksters sometimes try. With the merchandise at craft fairs, room for bartering is typically built into the prices of the doodads on offer, but they also include what might be considered an anti-tariff, a fee meant to remind buyers that these are artisan-made goods, built by craftspeople and local artists and not Chinese factory workers (even when the goods are in fact Chinese imports, as was the case at a few booths). The extra expense (which in theory would drive consumers to choose cheaper foreign-made alternatives) serves as a kind of guarantee of that, it reinforces the feeling one gets in shopping at craft fairs in the first place: "I'm supporting local people, real people." Buying local goods is environmentally beneficial (saves on transport costs), but ethnocentrism seems to be the main feature of craft fairs, even when some particular kind of folk art is not specified by the occasion. Ethnocentrism and a chance to indulge pious nostalgia for hardy craftsmanship may even be considered the primary goods for sale at such events. More important than the good is the connection established with a particular artisan, the good becomes a souvenir for that good feeling of providing patronage.

What struck me most about my Boalsburg experience, though, was one particular booth that had some moody lithographs and spare, unsentimental prints -- a silhouette of birds congregated on a telephone pole, set at an ominous angle with the frame, for example. Nothing wildly original, but clearly an entirely different aesthetic sensibility than that embodied by the bedazzled teddy bears to be seen elsewhere. The booth's proprietor was not a middle-aged flea-market veteran, as with most of the others, but a woman in her mid-20s, probably a recent art-school graduate who made the most likely difficult choice to give an honest go at trying to sell her work to a paying crowd. In the past, I might have found her to be sad, sort of pathetic, and quite possibly would have considered her to be some sort of sellout. But I see that impulse now as a defense mechanism, because I know I lack the bravery to do something like that. I wouldn't be able to handle the rejection or the ego bruising that comes with general indifference to one's precious creativity when it's put on display.

The woman at the fair seemed to me more sincere about her work than, say, artists in established artists' neighborhoods in hipster districts, amid an audience of friends and fellow "artists" who won't bother to challenge their conceptions of what artists should do -- which seem to be to elect one another to an elite class of art appreciators and applaud one another's originality and distinct vision. They make art as part of a lifestyle, and teh lifestyle draws a circle around itself and wards away the outside world. The woman in Boalsburg confronted that outside world directly. It seemed to me that she wasn't out to be recognized as an artist so much as she was trying to send her work out into the world where it might do something other than serve as a testimony to her sense of self. There's a good chance that she probably didn't sell a thing all day, but for me, anyway, she was the jar on the hill in the Wallace Stevens poem.

Supercities and trustafarians (20 Feb 2007)

A week ago Joel Kotkin wrote an article for the WSJ about fading American "supercities" (New York, San Francisco) and the B-list cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Charlotte) that are gaining population at their expense by providing better value (mainly via cheaper real estate) and catering to a more family-oriented middle-class lifestyle. That is, they are pseudo-urban suburbs.

I lived in Las Vegas and Tucson and have been a frequent visitor to Phoenix, and I am always struck by how similar these places are: they all feature walled-in middle-class housing-development fortresses, a logical rectilinear street plan which makes finding shopping zones seem almost instinctive, chain retailers predominate, but small businesses pop up in the interstices if you are looking for them. What makes them most suburban-like is how one's insulation from the lives of others is upheld pretty well -- traveling in cars assures that. More than anything they resemble the interzones between Eastern cities -- take away the climate and mountain views, add some trees, and they become indistinguishable from the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut. Suburbs often get a bad rap, obviously, which may be unfair (but then again…)

That B-list cities would thrive seems to fly in the face of theories about the so-called creative class who flock to urban centers in pursuit of alternalife and almost incidentally happen to fuel all sorts of innovation that business can seize upon. As much as I am suspicious Richard Florida (though since when is he a leftist?) and his cheerleading for the supposed creative class, I think cities such as Phoenix are geared toward ordinary life and ordinary aspirations; they are no place for the unusually ambitious or curious.

According to Andrew Beverege, a sociologist Kotkin cites, New York must find "ways to address the basic issues that affect the middle class — high housing costs, taxes, regulation, schools and lack of support for diverse small businesses, particularly in the outer boroughs. How else can New York hope to create opportunities for a population already overwhelmingly minority and predominately working class?" And that would probably be a good thing (though it will only make the outerboroughs more like suburbs and less like the city), but it has little to do with the larger premise of the article, that Manhattan has become, in the mayor's words, "a luxury product" and this bodes ill for its future. The city, it seems, is not necessarily threatened by the loss of a middle-class at its core. Instead it is a magnet for those unsually ambitious people who want to work on a cosmopolitian scale, who aren't particularly motivated (at least yet) by procuring middle-class security and Wobegonian above-averageness.

New York seems necessary not only to siphon off the self-aggrandizing egomaniacs (like me) to prevent them from spoiling the pace of life in B-list America, but also to put the pleasures and benefits of Middletown in proper perspective. That such big-dreaming people will live beyond their means and be surrounded by outsize examples of luxury and wealth may only help to motivate them; such accoutrements provide the backdrop necessary to sustain the whole overachieving ideology that values global influence or essentially unspendable wealth over the refreshments of a quiet, steady life.

What drives Kotkin's piece is instead a chance to heap scorn on "trustafarians":

The high-price trend is further exaggerated by the large concentrations of "trustafarians," or those with large amounts of inherited capital, in these areas. Many of these people have multiple residences — in some Manhattan buildings as many of half of the owners are non-residents — but can still drive up prices. Together with top-end business types, they can create what Mr. Gyourko describes as "the Vailization" effect: that is, turning part of the city into something akin to a high-amenity resort area, a "scarce luxury good" for a relative few and those who must remain behind to service them.

This has obvious middle-class populist appeal (the poor middle class, always under assault if you listen to American politicians) and seems to suggest that there is something galling about inheritance in general. Which calls to mind this astute remark economist Brad DeLong made on the subject:

The very first thing that any society's wealthy try to buy with their wealth is a head start for their children. And the wealthier they are, the bigger the head start. Any society that justifies itself on a hope of equality of opportunity cannot help but be undermined by too great a degree of inequality of result.

What we see in New York's "trustafarians" (and it would be nice to see a figure on their numbers) is a group who are so far ahead, they presumably no longer need to run the race. The waste (Bataille-style expenditure?) is evident and seems to express a kind of contempt on the hard-working burghers who carry more than their share of the economy's productivity load. It exemplifies the income inequality, much discussed recently, that has supposedly begun to sour the mood of the average bourgeois (the article's target audience). Presumably the dead hand of inherited capital would work to dissuade those ambitious types who give New York its specific character, and trustafarians also are assumed to drive up the costs of everything in pursuit of their meaningless and inefficient status displays. Still, the trustafarian seems like a straw man; if anything they probably serve to patronize the production of nonmainstream culture, not stifle it as this response at BoingBoing suggests.

Kotkin's article brandishes its antielitism:

This is something of an oddity, where the fashionable "left" defines successful urbanism by its ability to lure the superaffluent, the hypereducated and the avant garde — or what Dr. Florida calls "the greatest number of the most skilled people." One wonders what true progressives like Harry Truman or Fiorella La Guardia would think of such an approach.
La Guardia or Truman understood that great cities become so, in large part, due to the strivings of the upwardly mobile middle class and families, not the elites of any stripe.

But this smacks more than a little of flat-out anti-intellectualism, stopping just short of championing mediocrity. Middle-class existence is not incompatible with intellectual pursuit; I wonder why commentators like Kotkin imply that it is.

Cultural production for fun and...well, fun (7 December 2006)

Responding to a Wired article about Google's potentially unprofitable purchase of YouTube, Matt Yglesias forecasts the post-profit future of the culture industry.

Peer-production of digital media probably will produce a fair quantity of awesome popular stuff lurking amidst the vast pool of dreck. And well-designed services will let the awesome stuff rise to the top and the dreck fade to the background, rendering those services awesome and popular. But -- and here's the rub -- having something awesome and popular just may not prove to be especially lucrative. In the past, a popular television show or a popular album or a popular film or a popular distribution channel guaranteed you vast sums of money. In the future, that just may not be the case. The very most popular things will generate some income, enough to live off of and continue financing new projects, but not the sort of gigantic windfalls associated with 20th century media hits. And lots of other things -- including reasonably popular ones -- will only generate trivial levels of income. And they'll continue to be made. Made by people who think its fun, or who derive some benefit from their work other than direct monetary income.

In other words, making stuff will come to be its own reward, which is what aesthetic purists who deplore artists' "selling out" have long yearned for. And the money once made in performing the onerous editing/filtering function will be all but eliminated by distributing it throughout social networks, with the collective shouting the best material to the top.

I find this argument appealing because it gets at how the ease of Internet distribution undermines old, safe assumptions about the profit motive. When distributing goods was difficult, one could safely assume that only those with big money at stake would bother. Thus you could assume that the main point of doing anything at a larger-than-hobby scale, even cultural production, was to make money -- if you were reaching out to a larger audience than your immediate circle, it was because you sought profits. The Internet, however, lets you seek an audience without your having to make much of a financial investment at all, which pushes the pursuit of social recognition much higher on the scale of recognized and accepted motives for making stuff. Consequently it's much easier to assume, as Yglesias does, that the reason why someone made, say, a mashup of Mary Poppins to make it into a horror-film trailer, is because they want people to notice the cool thing they did, not because they expected to get paid. This seems to me a good thing: better to strive for adulation directly through creative intellectual work rather than through the imperfect proxy of money. And better to assume of people that they just wanted to make and/or share something they appreciated rather than simply trying to come up with a "creative" way of getting cash. (This shift in motive attribution could almost be enough to redeem the calculated pursuit of hipsterdom. But it can't redeem "cool hunters" who are essentially poaching the creative spirit and seeking to assimilate it to moneymaking entirely.) This aligns our incentives more toward meaningful work rather than well-paying drudgery. (Of course, that drudgery still needs to be done, but it could perhaps be better balanced with the stuff we do that we and others recognize as meaningful, expressive, etc.)

The Internet thus extends the strategy of having a day job to pay the bills while working the rest of the time on one's real passion to a vaster audience then those in major cities, to which the underground economy of social recognition was once largely relegated.

One of Yglesias's commenters puts this all more succinctly: "It becomes a social good to make the economy less important to the individual, in that additional hours of leisure not only please the individual but also make the individual more likely to produce uncompensated value for society."

But this doesn't make superstars go away or make potential superstars of us all, Warhol notwithstanding. The ease of distribution sharpens the need to manufacture distinction between commercial and non-commercial art. Commercial art now must make a much bigger show of the capital invested in it (whether through technical proficiency and effects or advertising or massive scale distribution) to justify our paying for it or reporting on it if we are not genuinely enthusiastic. Such investment makes that stuff the universal culture (what we must know to be part of our zeitgeist), and the people involved in it become the superstars who can demand the millions, and they soak up the all the money that once trickled out to the middlebrow makers of moderately popular stuff in the past, the stuff that's been subsumed by well-made amateur material.

Update: At the Economist blog, some skepticism about the future of user-generated content, based on a recent report from http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/. "Trendwatching lists, in its beguilingly breathless pamphlet, a bunch of other ways in which the production of user-generated content is starting to look less like a community service and more like a talent contest in which the winners expect to get prizes, preferably in cash. " If that's so, that's pretty depressing, because it totally undermines my fantasy delineated above about people's motives shifting from money to social recognition, or to put that another way, the possibility of decoupling social recognition from cash rewards. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to argue that media corporations, et al., will put ideological pressure on us all to prefer cash to community because it sustains their power and control (they select winners, they dole out the cash, they maintain the cultural filters, they reap the profits) in the face of Internet-driven amateur production and distribution (I'm tempted to call it democratic.) And the Economist blogger, for one, is delighted: "As a salaried content-provider I start to feel a tiny bit better about my prospects for the first time since I heard the words "Web 2.0."