Non-Time and Hauntology (5 May 2011)

I went to a talk last night at NYU by Mark Fisher about "hauntology," which refers to a kind of intermediate space-time between places palpably shaped by organic time and nonplaces (shopping malls, etc. -- see Marc Augé), which are wrenched out of time and posit an unending nontime, the end of history, an undisruptable retailing present that perpetually recurs. I didn't really get what hauntology was all about: it seemed to have to do with cultural productions that are aware of the nonplace/nontime crisis -- the way neoliberalism has foisted non-space/time on us, along with a subjectivity without depth that must flaunt its requisite flexibility by shuffling the deck of floating signifiers -- and are "reflexive" and "critical" and "negative" about this condition. Fisher made this point with music: British pop music now is blithely appropriational of the past without foregrounding that in any particular way; retro has ceased to be a meaningful descriptor. So music made now would not be at all disruptive, he argues, if someone living in 1979 heard it. There would be no retroactive future shock. It doesn't sound like the future; the future that should be occurring now has been thwarted, lost, effaced. The sense of cultural teleology is gone, vanished, perhaps, in the now pervasive relativism that regards all culture product as potentially valuable.

There are lots of plausible and interrelated explanations for why the pop-culture future can no longer occur, including:

(1) The demise of a hegemonic culture industry (and the rise of digitization and peer-to-peer distribution) brought the end of a shared sense of the cultural moment. We're not all watching the same TV show at the same time and hearing the same records on the radio. Instead we have access to all culture all at once, on demand -- whether it's, say, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the complete works of Margaret Cavendish, yesterday's episode of Survivor, or all of them at once. This AV Club article by Steven Hyden about Def Leppard's Hysteria gets at the idea:

As everything changes rapidly around us, we as music fans in many ways still think we’re living in a Def Leppard world, where winning a Grammy means you’ve arrived, and going to No. 1 on the charts makes you a pop star. In reality, we live in a culture where the terms “mainstream” and “underground” have become virtually meaningless, as practically every song by every band ever is equally accessible, frequently at no cost, to anyone with an Internet connection and the interest to seek it out ... It’s clear that music rarely unites us under the banner of mass-accepted artists anymore; even in a concert audience, we’re all just a bunch of individuals, with little connecting us to one another beyond a shared interest in the artist onstage—one artist among hundreds on our abundantly stocked iPods. Sounds lonely, doesn’t it? Sometimes I yearn for the old world, the one I grew up in, a place where dinosaurs like Hysteria stomped around pop culture for months, if not years, leaving sizable impressions in the hearts of a generation, whether they liked it or not.

The availability of everything means that particular works of pop music lose "symbolic efficiency" to use (and possibly misuse) a term from Žižek. Nothing successfully connotes the zeitgeist; everything invokes a desire to one-up with a better reference or a new meme or detournement of the contemporary. We are too knowing and skeptical to accept anything as unproblematically representative of the now.

(2) Neoliberalism/post-fordism/late capitalism has projected itself as the end of history, normalized nontime, and generalized the reception of conditions of ontological insecurity as freedom. We lack a subjectivity that can experience or recognize historicity.

Fisher links the idea of a "missing future" with the disappearance of negativity and criticality in contemporary pop culture, which (as I interpret it) has no space for anything oppositional or which transforms oppositional gestures into postures that circulate only as signifiers of personal identity. It reminds me of Douglas Haddow's "Hipsters are the dead-end of Western culture" argument:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Hipsters don't experience non-time negatively, as a loss, as melancholic, as indicative of deep alienation. Instead they seem to be thoroughly subjectivized by neoliberalism to the extent that they regard it as opportunity to show off how creative they can be in their cycle of appropriations. That last thing they want is to be reminded of how their personality is conditioned by the times they live in; in nontime, one can feel transcendent and immortal, one can permanently defer adulthood.

Hauntological music (like Burial) tries to at least evoke the feeling of loss, tries to register the missing future as a kind of catastrophe, Fisher argues, though it can't actually instantiate this missing future. It tries to at least restore meaning to the concept of retro, foregrounding the appropriations of the past by sounding like a scratchy record, and so on. (I don't know; all electronic music literally sounds the same to me.) I wasn't persuaded that a work's reflexivity about how symptomatic it is itself of the impossibility of escaping non-time made it viable as a mode of resistance. I'm probably too skeptical of reflexivity to ever regard it as resistance; I see reflexivity as the quintessential mode of neoliberalist subjectivity -- a calculating self-consciousness that can't be escaped, that forces us to be considering our identity as an alienated thing to be developed and invested entrepreneurially. (The following is highly provisional and may ultimately prove embarrassing): Whatever is reflexive needs to become collective. The problem of non-spacetime is that of an isolated individual subject who admits of no possibility for intersubjectivity, which is perhaps the primary way we experience history, through how our relations with others subjectivize us in particular, contingent ways. Reflexivity about our loss of that intersubjectivity seems to still cling to the individuation, to see and secretly cherish one's isolated uniqueness and incontingency in the recognition of it as a loss.

In my view, social media have become the extension of non-spacetime, where nothing, no identity or incident, is necessarily contingent or organic, and one is doomed to the "freedom" of endless ontological insecurity, the forever search for a grounding authenticity that can only generate more memes. Social media are where we go to protect our experience of nontime, which is threatened by the Real, by historicity, by death. Facebook is the ultimate nonplace. Being on it is to enter non-time, to maintain a continual pseudo-presence.

The non-spacetime crisis, I think, is a crisis of presence. When we exist in non-spacetime, presence becomes impossible -- or it is known by its absence, in a kind of negative theology. To put that less cryptically (or maybe not): technology has basically dissolved the unity of the subject in a particular place in time. Smart phones, etc., let us be in many places at once, conducting any number of conversations and self-presentations asynchronously. This casts an air of provisionality over everything we do; our lack of total commitment to a that place at that moment is always implied, always understood. No one is even bothered anymore when someone they are talking to looks at their phone. There is no ethical requirement to be fully present, and without that, there is no genuine (I know, how can you even ever define "genuine") intersubjectivity. The refusal to be fully present is a restatement of the refusal to permit our identity to be socially contingent or to be palpably collective. The smart phone reserves our right to check out of any collective identity formation at any time. This is the essence of contemporary "convenience," which I have long interpreted as being able to avoid interaction with other humans and being forced to empathize with them and recognize their existence as other. (We can only tolerate other people when we regard them as extra in our movie.)

Fisher referred to Jameson's distinction between psychological nostalgia and formal nostalgia, between the ability to evoke a real lost past and being trapped in pastiche. What I took from this is that the postmodern/neoliberal subject cannot access psychological nostalgia, but can only simulate it through pastiche, as this sort of subject has only existed in nontime as opposed to historical time. My sense is that this subject doesn't yearn for historical time at all but worries about historical time erupting into nontime via some sort of terrible Event. When something that threatens to be an Event happens, subjects rush to assimilate it to nontime by mediatizing it, "sharing" it in social media, or meme-ifying it. I'm not sure if this holds, but it may be possible to interpret the ad hoc celebrations of Osama bin Laden's execution this way -- an effort to experience a historical moment in a way that dehistoricizes it -- puts the partyers back at the center of their personal hermetic history, claims the Event as just an event in their individual story.

Because we have no access anymore to psychological nosalgia, we end up nostalgic for the capability for nostalgia, we feel homesickness for a home we never had. These leads to a compensatory attraction to childhood kitsch, to moribund objects (joining a typewriter club is an extreme manifestation of this), to anachronism, atavism, whatever seems genuinely and indelibly marked by a past. This perpetuates the cycle that denies the creation of a distinctive future, guarantees that the future is a more attenuated and annotated reconfiguration of detritus from the past.

(Malcolm Harris has more thoughts inspired by the talk here.)

Dead Media and Mediatized Subjectivity (23 Feb 2011)

Though lots of CDs are still being sold (more than 200 million last year), it still seems fair to pronounce the medium dead, dead as the 8-track or cassette tape. Compact discs were an intermediate technology that full-scale digitization has rendered obsolete. Unfortunately for me, I got caught up in the way that technology was exploited for all it was worth in its 15-year reign, which brought on levels of record company opportunism that, as an insufficiently cynical teenager, I was unprepared for.

Anwyn Crawford surveys the damage wrought by the CD in this essay, which recounts the medium's history. She points out that "a CD’s capacity for 74 minutes of data, as opposed to an average of 40 minutes (20 each side) for vinyl, encouraged artists to record longer and longer albums – or alternatively, for labels to stuff CD album releases with remixes, ‘bonus’ tracks, demos and other filler, particularly in the lucrative market of CD reissues." That in turn destroyed the integrity of albums, always a tenuous idea but one which defined the heyday of rock music. In the CD era, albums were a filler dumping ground, and reissues offered unnecessary rejected material that made the original release seem retroactively provisional. Quality gave way to quantity, both ideologically and on the discs themselves.

Now it seems obvious that CDs were misbegotten, especially since the transformation of songs into digital files has made packaging far more important, and the files' infinite reproducibility has made the analog aura of vinyl into a fetish. But when CDs were first introduced in the 1980s, I took the hype at face value and believed that it made perfect sense to discard my record collection and pay for it all over again, so I could hear albums in their alleged pristine digital state. Back then I imagine I was tired of records getting scratched or warped, tired of plucking dust balls of the phonograph needle, tired of having to remember to step lightly when I walked past the table the stereo sat on so I wouldn't make the record skip and possibly ruin it. I was eager to believe the promise of CDs' indestructibility, their "perfect" sound. I wanted to believe that such a thing existed -- a perfect copy of an album, unworn by time; it suited my impression that the music I was getting into was "timeless," transcendentally great.

I had no idea, however -- couldn't imagine -- that industry engineers would be so indifferent, so negligent, in remastering those transcendental classics from the back catalog. I disbelieved my ears when I heard the hollow, trebly sound of the Byrds CDs and Astral Weeks. I didn't believe that Columbia would simply cut several minutes out of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for the first Blonde on Blonde CD and not mention it anywhere. Or that the opening chords of "Brown Sugar" would be lopped off the Sticky Fingers disc. Or that the Doors' first album would be mastered at the wrong speed.

And so on. I just trusted for no good reason that record companies cared about the quality of their products. But in retrospect, the compact disc as a medium was definitive proof that they didn't. The CD offered inferior sound for inflated prices, and the product itself was often adulterated (intentionally or through negligence), which forced consumers who cared to repurchase the same albums on CD multiple times. (How many times has the Village Green Preservation Society been reissued?) And then there are the problems of overcompression destroying the dynamics, and discs being normalized at eardrum-bleed decibel levels for no apparent reason. Ultimately, I came to see that I had been duped and felt betrayed by the record industry, though it never really owed me anything anyway.

I wonder if something similar will happen eventually with iPods and MP3s. Obviously the sound quality of MP3s is inferior, but their convenience has always trumped the need for fidelity, and lossless formats don't seem to catch on, partly because Apple refuses to support open-source codecs like flac. As hard-drive capacity increases, presumably some commonly used future version of MP3s will eventually reach CD levels of fidelity, but such files intrinsically cannot compare with analog sound. The purpose of music in the iPod era seems to have changed fundamentally -- the iPod, as sociologist Michael Bull details in Sound Moves, provides a portable sound world that offers solace and privacy in the abrasive environments we must traverse in modern life. (This always makes me think of the film Morvern Callar, in which the main character uses a Walkman to keep herself tuned out, and viewers are made to recognize the disjunction between her sound world and the diagetical sound we don't hear.)

We use music more and more to propel us through other activities; less often do we make listening our primary activity. Virtually the only time I make paying attention to music my primary activity it is when I am at a live performance, and I hardly ever do that these days. And more important, as Bull's book suggests, we use it to experience mediated faux togetherness through pop music while managing our privacy and exerting our individualist right to hear what we want and block out everything else. MP3s are designed to indulge our individualism and produce/compensate for our isolation. The surfeit of them, the overwhelming number of songs anyone with sufficient hard-drive space can collect, is a reflection of that need for more and more building blocks for us to construct our sonic uniqueness in playlists. The medium encourages the use of music to express subjectivity, even more so then the previous era of music-oriented youth subcultures. With MP3s, music doesn't express its content so much as it expresses us.

Perhaps at some point it will seem insane that people walked down the street wearing sensory deprivation devices that allowed them to ignore one another, and perhaps the format for piping those supplementary noises into our heads will be reviled. But probably MP3s will be replaced by an aural media that gives us even more apparent control over how to experience community as a commodity while we remain safely isolated, entombed in sound.

Eco ego (14 Sept 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

Crowdsourced Curation (11 Aug 2010)

Eric Reasons lays out a case (via p2p foundation) for the inevitability of "crowdsourced curation" -- i.e. automated filtering based on the efforts of other internet users to rank, rate, and recommend content, and on social networks to gather and share links and content appropriate to the groups that form themselves. His argument is that the internet has made it easy to produce and distribute new content, and thus nothing will prevent the channel from being flooded with material not worthy of general attention. With so much material, we will need to democratize gate-keeping functions in order to have all the material appropriately processed. "The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper," he writes, adopting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's cryptic marketing lingo.

But that's a bit of an odd way of assessing the situation. A lot of amateur content is produced with the social network in mind and is presorted -- no one needs to judge the photos one attached to a Facebook profile or most of the YouTube videos people upload to amuse their friends and family. Much of the other stuff getting filtered to us online falls into the category of memes -- cultural material in effect produced by the existence of a vast communications network. Music and blogs and whatnot not produced for friends and family cultivate their own audiences idiosyncratically on the strength of search-engine returns and the relevance of their content until they manage to become memeified: they are adopted by one of the major aggregators and become something that people forward to one another. So the gatekeepers for most of that stuff already exist as well -- BoingBoing, Metafilter, etc. Of course some content gets made and promoted explicitly in hopes of becoming a meme. Some might argue that culture industry product is settling into the notion that the meme in the only relevant commodity it deals in now.

We don't need new gatekeepers for either memes or homegrown friend-and-family stuff that finds its way online. Gatekeepers for the remaining cultural domains are arguably lacking only because the internet has eroded their ability to get paid for their services; the internet shares the essence of their judgments too quickly and too freely. It's not that there is more stuff to be judged; it's that the judges are forced by the new medium to judge for free. Since this leads to nobody doing it as a paying job, it becomes a collective responsibility to get that work done -- hence the free information-processing labor performed by ordinary internet users in their everyday practices, expressing themselves and sharing and so on. They are forced to be productive behind their own backs -- they are not "leaping into production," as Reasons writes.

As Reasons suggests, Apple has a dictatorial approach to this issue. With its closed platforms, it is trying to re-enclose the commons that the internet threatens to become. But when Reasons asks, "Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on YouTube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded?" It is a misleading question. The space of the open internet is limited only by server space and the power required to run the machinery; it requires no special curation to prevent it from being overwhelmed. When Apple approves apps for its devices, it's saying it will basically only consider those from professionals. So, I can very easily imagine Apple's ideal world, where AppleTube rejects 99.9% of potential content out of hand and only approves the material from preapproved suppliers from within the established media giants. The production of amateur content is irrelevant to the media business and helps sharpen the value of professional content, provided you can properly enclose it. In most cases, the only productive work amateurs do online involves processing, not creating, content.

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.

Surreptitious Selling Out (9 July 2010)

The Arvidsson article (pdf) I mentioned in yesterday's post about jobs pinpoints precisely what is so troubling about being engaged with pop culture in our particular cultural moment. The economic engine of consumer capitalism is increasingly fueled by the good intentions of people who want to be engaged and critical and oppositional. But by assimilating their critique, consumer capitalism invalidates it at a higher level, negating the idea that there can be any other set of social relations within which we could experience culture at this point.

Arvidsson writes about the advertising industry's need to make distinctive messages capable of standing out in the ceaseless hum of informational noise that the spread of formula-reliant, capital-intensive mass media has brought on.

In an informational culture marked by almost infinite reproducibility, media culture thus tends to loose its grip over meaning. It is no longer able to command anything but the partial attention of its audience, much less provide it with a meaningful and coherent worldview. Instead it recedes into the background, losing its control over the practices in which meaning and affect are constructed. Media culture thus becomes a sort of white noise, a noisy environment for the more or less autonomous production of a common social world of common affective intensities.

Media industries have generally lost their power of imposing meaning on its products, imposing how they will be received and used, so they have shifted strategies. Because the mass meaning they once created for us no longer adheres, that means we are all out there producing meanings of our own -- Arvidsson calls this a "flowering productive externality" to the culture industry's ordinary bailiwick of designing and circulating products. With the advent of interactive media, those meanings circulate much more broadly and rapidly, becoming a source of value to industry beyond what money they manage to collect for their products originally. Our spontaneous conversation about culture adds value. Our self-made meanings, from our own point of view, establish our uniqueness, our identity, our particular point of view on culture. But from industry's point of view, they have the potential to reinvigorate their business.

Precisely because this externality has autonomy in relation to capital, it provides a tempting source of innovation, rejuvenation and creativity for the system, the very standardizing logic of which tends to eliminate such results a priori. In the most advanced factions of immaterial production users are indeed in charge (to use the motto of the present Web 2.0 movement), their agency creates the kinds of products that have the greatest use-value for the capitalist system.

Since these meanings are made outside advertising and culture industry auspices, they can be credibly touted by those industries as "authentic" or "genuine" rather than merely contrived to dupe us. Our own agency -- our autonomy, our reflexive self-identity, our affect, our motivation to do something or create something, whatever you want to emphasize about it -- becomes both an input and an output of marketing and entertainment. Those businesses threaten to become perpetual-motion machines, subsuming culture altogether.

That probably sounds a little bombastic. But it helps me understand why I sometimes dread my own "agency" -- why I become particularly ambivalent about trying to write theoretically informed commentary about pop culture. No matter how Adornoesque one thunders about the reifying effects of the culture industry and the curtailment of autonomous creative thought and so on, one is still left feeling that nothing has been accomplished but the further validation of the phenomena one meant to denounce and discourage.

It's not just that the culture industry absorbs critique and rechannels its energy into its own reinvention -- it's not merely that ceaseless flow of amateur criticism powers the mighty fashion wheel. Maybe I am alone in this, but I find that I experience my efforts to be objective about culture simultaneously as efforts to sustain some sort of "cool" subjectivity. And that unwanted synthesis is incredibly frustrating. I don't have any "authentic" experience, I often realize. It seems as the space for it doesn't exist amid all the cultural participation I put myself in for.

I find I inhabit the subject position of pop culture itself to write about it, if that makes any sense -- as though I am parasitically sucking the zeitgeist from it, becoming of the moment myself, culturally "relevant" as Carles likes to say. I become conscious of my immanence in a way that's unbearable; my inescapable existence within culture suddenly produces cognitive dissonance for me, driving me to further reflexive gyrations of opinion-making.

I think that to be at home in consumer culture, it helps to either (a) not engage too far or too self-consciously with pop culture, a sort of fatal strategy of willed ignorance or silence; or (b) sell out completely and openly, and recast the cynicism as pragmatic realism like the former underground folk Arvidsson describes who turn entrepreneurial and get into self-branding, or ironicized futurism along the lines of Takashi Murakami. I find that I fall somewhere in the middle, and I feel like I have no home.

Fashion As "Consumer Entrepreneurship" (23 April 2010)

A few weeks ago, Tyler Cowen linked to this essay by Jason Potts about fashion, in which he likens fashion cycles to business cycles and argues that fashion is what allows consumers to assume risk the way that entrepreneurs do. It's an interesting read, though for me it mainly sharpened my sense of which assumptions about fashion I accept and which I reject. I agree with this:

fashion seems to be an expression of risk culture on the consumer side, just as entrepreneurship is on the producer side of the economy. Could it be, then, that a rational, open society not only accommodates fashion, but actually requires it as a mechanism of competitive advantage and productivity growth?

But rather than claim that "a rational, open society" needs fashion, I would change that to "consumer-capitalist society." Consumerism requires fashion to sustain growth. If consumers lack the will to "explore new consumer lifestyles" they may fail to spend and begin to save, thus crippling the demand necessary to fuel economic growth. Thus fashion -- consumer risk -- is necessary to make us discontented with what we already have and regard it as obsolescent.

Fashion is the "creative destruction" of our tastes in things. It undermines the cultural capital that exists in the tastes that currently reign, Potts suggests, and puts new cultural capital up for grabs.

When a fashion cycle comes to an end, those who placed unfortunate bets during it are put back on a more nearly equal footing with those who were successfully fashionable. To be fashionable in the next cycle, fashion victor and fashion victim alike must pay the price of tooling up again in line with the latest trends.

That sounds sort of egalitarian, which is not how I would describe the fashion world. Each turn of the fashion wheel does not wipe the slate clean. People who "bet wrong" on fashion don't get to start fresh with the same amount of credibility. It's not a roulette wheel. Fashion mistakes have a cumulative weight; misjudge trends and people will ignore you next time. If you keep changing fashions in an attempt to hit a winning one, you run the increased risk of digging a deeper and deeper hole, like a liar who is trying to maintain earlier lies by piling on new ones.

And people enter the fashion field with different levels of social and cultural capital to begin with; fashion is a means to leverage those differences and make them effective. Fashion allows a status difference to translate into being treated differently, preferentially. The process of making fashion change allows those with the cultural capital to have greater say in what form those changes will take -- they can guarantee that they will suit their strengths in other areas or assure that fashion serves other ends they have, like making a profit. And fashion is programmed; the industry dictates when changes will occur and has professional consultants to determine what those changes will be. They may bubble up from the street or from amateurs, but amateurs cannot validate their innovations culturally. They need to be sanctified by the fashion industry; they need to become sellable.

It is easy to see how makers of fashion-oriented product are taking risks -- people might reject the goods. But consumers shoulder an aspect of the risk involved in fashion as well -- and what is at risk for them is status and, to some degree, self-esteem. Fashion, Potts claims, "a mechanism to periodically liquidate certain elements of a consumer lifestyle, triggering the incentive to learn about new things and to demand new goods." Potts views this "social pressure" as an inherently good thing. As things go out of fashion we are prompted to engage with the world to discover what has become fashionable, thus expanding our "flexibility in consumer lifestyles" and allowing us to experience the "sublime pleasures of risk-taking" -- kind of like what the subprime crisis did for the financial sector.

Potts's bias is clear -- he regards entrepreneurial risk-taking as good and necessary for everyone: "Fashion is part of how economies evolve, not of how they decay. It is another name for consumer entrepreneurship: and the more we have of that, the better." But that assumes people are like businesses (the brand of self) that need to constantly grow, and that analogy is, in my opinion, false. The notion of an ever-expanding, limitless identity is a construct that suits consumerism, but is it not an inherent human capacity. We don't naturally long for an ever-changing, ever-growing self that is perpetually unsatisfied with itself. Identity can and does have limits; recognizing those limits brings peace of mind. Potts argues that "consumers who opt out of social competition for the 'quiet life' fail to develop their ranges of experience and capabilities." Perhaps, but nothing about a "range" of experiences makes it preferable to the experiences themselves, even if they be limited in number. Everything that Potts regards as positive about fashion pressure for the economy is probably not so good for individuals.

Fashion effectively functions as a mechanism to induce and accelerate learning in complex lifestyles, enabling these lifestyles to become more complex still, thus improving their productivity in generating valuable consumption services.... Fashion is good for the economy because it is a mechanism to promote experimentation, learning, and re-coordination.

The valuable consumption services come at we the consumers' expense -- our lives become more "complex". In other words, fashion is the means by which we are exploited for surplus-value extraction as consumers, to complement the way it is extracted when we are wage workers. For consumers, fashion does not "promote experimentation" -- it makes us the subject of experiments. It doesn't promote "learning and re-coordination" so much as anxiety and confusion and disorientation that makes "learning" a desperate necessity.

Fashion tells you that you are a fool to prefer the experiences to the range, and it applies "social pressure" to make you change your view. By following fashion and disseminating its dictates and by innovating on its terms, we create additional value for the retailers of fashion-oriented products -- a description that is coming to embrace virtually everything that can be bought and sold. All we gain for what we have risked is an enlarged but more tenuous sense of self -- it's an identity bubble, with an inflated value that's rooted in a superficial expansion in knowledge of trends. But it could burst at any minute by a blast of existential angst. What does it all mean? Nothing. It means you have to keep changing for the sake of change itself or else confront the emptiness.

DIY Manufacturing, the DRM Future, the iPad (29 Jan 2010)

Chris Anderson's Wired article about changes in the manufacturing sector is as breathless and hype-ridden as one would expect ("Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories"; "A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.") It's full of anecdotes about crowdsourced design and 3-D print shops and the world of liberated freelancers and the like. At Gizmodo, Joel Johnson provides a useful corrective: "We used to call 'micro-factories' 'small businesses,' but that was before we knew they were a revolution."

What Anderson seems to miss in all his glee is the erosion of labor's bargaining power. Since we'll all be small-scale manufacturers, he seems to assume, there will be no laborers, per se. Or they will all be in China, at any rate, and who cares about them? The reality of crowdsourcing is that it is a good way to find someone to do any given piece of work the cheapest. And there are always people out there who underestimate the value of their abilities.

The future may be a time when we can't sell our labor power alone; we'll all need to be small-time entrepreneurs, hawking some small-time idea or contribution to a project, just to hustle up a living. In other words, in the future we will all basically be living off the books, and if you've read Sudhir Venkatesh's book of the same name, you know that's not such a good thing. Another book that is probably relevant to this is The Jobless Future by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, which I've not yet read.

Still, the question of whether the disintermediation facilitated by the internet is causing a revolution in the means of production -- what they are, who has access to them, how they are related to capital, and so on -- is well worth considering. Michel Bauwens, whose P2P Foundation site is a fount of links and essays about whether the internet can be the basis for a whole new mode of social organization, posted this summary of his ideas about what he calls (unfortunately) "netarchical capitalism" -- an economic system in which the most important means of production is the information infrastructure that allows for participatory networks to form and free labor to be performed and what Paulo Virno (following Marx) calls the general intellect to operate. The general intellect is basically Marxist jargon for decentralized collaboration and cooperation, the generalized sharing of useful information about how to make things or consume things. As Virno defines it, it is "inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of living subjects. The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labor." In other words, the most valuable thing in the early days of the Industrial Age were machines and factories -- you needed them to compete. Now, those are arguably less important than knowledge, how to operate machines and disseminate their products. And thanks to the internet, that knowledge is starting to belong to all of us.

Virno is glossing the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse, in which Marx suggests that technology will make human labor time less central to production, even though it remains the critical component in creating surplus value through exchange. Virno: "The main lacerating contradiction outlined here is that between productive processes that now directly and exclusively rely on science and a unit of measure of wealth that still coincides with the quantity of labor embodied in the product. According to Marx, the development of this contradiction leads to the ‘breakdown of production based on exchange value’ and therefore to communism." Optimists believe we are seeing that play out now in the development of "the networked information economy" to use economist Yochai Benkler's term (though Benkler does not seem to think these changes threaten the foundations of capitalism).

But that won't happen without a fight. Bauwens recognizes that the information infrastructure will remain in the control of capitalists and could close off the liberating potential of new technology. "A new capitalist class is emerging," he writes, "the forces which both ‘enable’ and exploit the participatory networks arising in the peer to peer era." He adds, "Although the large netarchical corporations do enable participatory networks, their for-profit nature makes them dangerous trustees of commons-favorable protocols." He lists some examples of netarchical capitalists, but no better example exists than Apple, whose new tablet device is clearly an attempt to toll the flow of information and reinstate the prerogatives of private intellectual property in the face of an emerging commons.

As Tom Formeski explains:

By building a proprietary, closed platform, with its own hardware and software, Apple is able to capture a larger part of the value stream from selling media....
Apple is making a bold bid to tie up a dominant share of the future media e-commerce market -- the sale of digital books, movies, newspapers, etc. Its proprietary hardware and software strengthen its DRM; media creators want strong DRM, which will attract them to Apple. And it's iTunes store distributes the media for them and collects payment.

If Apple's device is successful, Nicolas Carr writes, "we’ll all be using iPads to play iTunes, read iBooks, watch iShows, and engage in iChats. It will be an iWorld."

That's also the conclusion reached by Tim Lee (via Matt Yglesias): "Apple seems determined to replicate the 20th century business model of paying for copies of content in an age where those copies have a marginal cost of zero."

Apple is canny in leveraging the zeal its early adopters have for its designs into a wide-held belief in its products' inevitable superiority. Writes Lee, "In the short term, Apple’s technological and industrial design prowess can help to prop up dying business models." The press goes along with this now, hyping Apple PR as important news. Apple clearly intends to use its perceived advantage in design to dictate the terms of media consumption, and the company's slavish fans appear to be willing servants eager to carry out the dismembering of the general intellect. But is Lee right that this strategy is doomed to long-term failure, that people will tire of being in walled gardens? I really don't know. Are Kindles popular?

A "tyranny" of hits (7 Jan 2010)

Yesterday I was lamenting about having too much choice in cultural product, and how that has made me take a skeptical attitude toward anything new --I'm too busy keeping up with what I already allegedly like to start liking more and more. (That is, I have a finite amount of desire to invest.) This Economist article from a few months ago brings up a related issue: it looks at how culture industries have become even more dependent on huge-selling hits, which have paradoxically become more prominent as consumer choice has proliferated.

Offer music fans a virtually infinite choice of songs free of charge, and they will still gravitate to hits. That has been the experience of We7, a music-streaming service based in London which has 2.5m users. Only 22% of We7’s 4m songs are streamed in any given week, says Steve Purdham, who founded the company. The top 100 artists account for more than half of all streams. Users of Spotify, another ad-supported music service, are similarly unadventurous. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties for British songwriters, calculates that the most popular 5% of tracks on Spotify account for 80% of all streams. He is counting only the 3m tracks that were streamed at least once between February and July. Another 1.5m were not touched at all.

Industry people explain this by pointing to the social nature of media consumption; though we tend to hide from this truth, what we like has more to do with what everyone else likes than with the qualities of the product itself. In a sense, though the theoretical range of our choices in culture has become nearly infinite, the real range of options we experience is delimited by who we know and what we read and what we pick up from the zeitgeist. That range may be contracting as the mass media contracts and rallies around the hit products that can still produce profits. That may offset whatever broadening could come from social networking tools that allow people to share their preferences easier. (I'd suspect that such sharing -- the uncompensated brand-building labor I've whined about elsewhere -- also contributes to hit-making.

At the end of yesterday's post I posited the possibility of just loving whatever is hot at the moment and nothing else as a way of evading the trap of having to hate everything in order to protect oneself from becoming overwhelmed. I was sort of joking about that -- seems more like repressive desublimation to me -- but maybe that is what people generally do: Accept hype as a rational solution to questions of taste and search efficiency. If we consume less, and only what is popular, we don't have enough breadth of experience to become disgruntled the products we are consuming and we are popular at the watercooler too. Consider this:

Tom Tan and Serguei Netessine of Wharton Business School have analysed reviews on Netflix.... They find that blockbusters get better ratings from the people who have watched them than more obscure ones do. Even the critically loathed “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is awarded four stars out of five.... Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type.... A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

These people tell other people about their experience, and "the hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill."

This analysis side-steps the question of objective merit, which I think is more or less impossible to determine and is ultimately a red herring in understanding popularity. Objective taste is a myth; those who want to distinguish themselves as cultural connoisseurs merely use the idea of objectivity to differentiate themselves from the masses of Lost Symbol readers. Embracing hits can be a way to opt out of the cultural-capital-accumulation game, which is what seems to be behind the "popist" trend in music criticism. These critics are trying a new approach to objectivity by signaling indifference to the cultural capital embodied in certain tastes, but that signal inevitably becomes its own class marker, becomes a gesture that feels forced, or positional. They don't take it far enough -- to the point of ceasing to be critics altogether and keeping their opinions to themselves and to their word-of-mouth-range friends. Perhaps the only sure way to authentic taste is to abdicate it entirely.

Avatar and Invisible Republic (29 Dec 2009)

I had no particular interest in seeing Avatar, but ended up seeing it the day after Christmas with my family. It seemed futile to resist. I even saw it in gimmicky 3-D, which added nothing to my enjoyment but did cause me to fidget ceaselessly with the glasses that I had to wear over my regular glasses. The film seemed primarily an exercise in glow-in-the-dark crypto-zoology, with little in the way of plausible plotting or character development. (We know Sigorney Weaver's character is cantankerous and outside-the-lines because they have her smoke a cigarette when she gets out of her cryo-travel pod.) It has a half-baked, programmatic but effective sentimentality that elicits emotional responses to the rite-of-passage cues. It kept me engaged by and large, though much of it reminded me of watching my roommate play Final Fantasy 9 (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one) on PlayStation while I was in college.

Only later did its trite politics annoy me. At first, I found it a little bothersome that I had to watch a bunch of humans get slaughtered by cartoons. Humans as a species haven't looked this bad in a sci-fi film since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (which I strongly endorse). We are given no explanation why the resource the greedy humans are after is so important other than the tautology that it's worth a lot of money. Weaver's character tries to counter the already confusing insistence on resource extraction with a non sequitur about how the "real value" of the planet the humans are pillaging lies in the fact that the trees are networked together to form a giant bio-Internet. (Great. The last thing we need is metaphors that glorify and naturalize digital, mediatized interconnectedness.) What is valuable about that? It's regarded as unimportant by the film's producers.

What is important to them is the quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo about the native race on the planet, which seems modeled mainly on American Indian tribes and is represented in an extremely patronizing fashion as a bunch of simple primitives who understand their environment only in supernatural terms. It takes a human outsider, naturally, to teach them the significance of their ways and rally them to defend themselves, since they are helpless against aggression and superior military technology.

The Sociological Images blog sums up the racial politics this way:

Avatar is a fantasy in which the history of colonization is rewritten, but it a fantasy specifically for white people living with a heavy dose of liberal guilt. And it is one that, ultimately, marginalizes indigenous peoples and affirms white supremacy.

I don't see how anybody can contest that analysis. I feel a bit ashamed, actually, that I was sitting in suburban Bucks County with all my white, middle-class compadres, complacently consuming the spectacle without becoming disgusted as it unfolded. At the time it seemed curmudgeonly and cliched for me to reject the high-imperialist homilies the film was lazily built on and the blithe righteousness I was expected to share with the "good" humans. I didn't resist being constructed as viewer in that way because it felt good and flattering. It reaffirmed my sense of belonging to a group of wise and morally pure Westerners who would have done colonizing right -- that is, it played to the ingrained sense of superiority that being white and middle class in America provides. I should have been nauseated; instead I was verklempt as the hero claimed his squaw.

By coincidence, I began reading Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, which in part is about the demise of the 1960s folk movement and Bob Dylan's role in destroying it after having come to exemplify it. The folkies, in Marcus's depiction, had the same patronizing attitude toward Appalachian poverty and civil-rights injustices (the Other America, as Michael Harrington dubbed it) that the makers of Avatar seem to evince about colonization. Capitalism sullied and exploited the pure rural people, as clear-headed bourgeois liberals can best recognize. To adherents, folk music (and Avatar) offers us glimpses of pre-capitalist America, a "democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed" in which art seems "the product of no ego but of the inherent genius of a people." The Avatar planet is such a product, for the race occupying it and the film-industry execs who made it.

The substance of this fantasy about indigenous people at harmony with their appropriate environment is the denial of individual subjectivity (the overriding value of the folk revival, according to Marcus), which is rendered unnecessary and impossible. Everyone is at one and merged with one another. Just look at the blue people in the movie sway to the unsounded rhythm as they worship their special tree. Marcus: "As they live in an organic community ... any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular." This is an attractive fantasy to have about other people, as it leaves oneself as the last unique individual standing -- like the hero of Avatar. Folk music tends to make a virtue out of a subject people's lack of autonomy because its adherents can't see a way to ameliorate those people's powerlessness without surrendering some of their own comfort. Avatar offers a fantasy solution, in which one vicariously becomes one of the subject people without losing one's distinctive identity, and then helps that group achieve autonomy. The story conveniently ends there, before the logic of communal unity eradicates the hero's sense of self.

But the faceless masses are most likely not so keen on being turned into a contemplative object for someone else, not psyched to have their identity and destiny predetermined by historical circumstances. We generally want someone else to be living by that pure code of acceptance of "authentic identity"; we are always tempted to try to reserve for ourselves the power to shape our own destiny and be anything we want. No one seems to volunteer to become the folk if the condition of that is disappearing into holistic anonymity. Instead we impose our notion of authenticity on others, and let their being trapped in it serve to limn the terms of our own private freedom.

Goodbye, critical consensus (16 Dec 2009)

Reading Simon Reynolds's assessment of best-of-the-decade lists ("musical value and consensus are intimately connected") made me think of how symbiotic the music industry and music critics are; that is, critics can only be as relevant as the culture industry is powerful and univocal. The hegemony of taste that the big labels sought to perpetuate relied on critics' pronouncements, making the release of new Springsteen albums and whatnot seem epochal.

Reynolds shares his hunch that the critical consensus unwound completely in the past decade, leading to a situation where more "good" but "unimportant" records are made.

I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it'd be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it's just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call "importance" or "greatness".

Musicians make music; critics and A&R people make "importance" or hype, and the latter is what allows music to become the broadly "unifying force" that critics yearn for it to become. Big, broadly popular records with an aesthetic aura (Reynolds and Pitchfork offer Funeral as the epitome) perhaps validate the importance of critics more than the music itself. It lets us then consume the zeitgeist in product form rather than listen.

The future of recorded music, I hope, belongs to microcommunities, small groups of friends who determine their own standards of importance (through listening rituals, what they play for each other in everyday life) and share them internally without needing to promote those standards online and proselytize. For these communities, it is all "best-of," anything that is heard and remembered, that helps the group cohere, matters. Whether it had been released that year, or decade, or was promoted by the music industry or was a demo from a busker, or whatever, won't matter. Taste can potentially be deindustrialized, and the critics will disappear into the multitude of voices. Ideally, artistic provenance will be relevant to us only if we want it to be.

Vinyl Sales Surge (9 Dec 2009)

The NYT had a mostly anecdotal piece this past weekend about how more people of the "iPod generation" are suddenly buying turntables and vinyl records. I don't know if I am demographically part of this generation, but I can relate -- I've been reacquiring albums I used to have in an effort to recapture the listening experiences of my youth, in which an entire side of a record would get digested in the full flush of analog warmth.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”

It makes sense for music companies to push vinyl since they have no choice but try to reorient consumers to the meaningfulness of physical objects. So it is hard to take Jbara seriously here as he spouts marketing propaganda. Nevertheless I think listening to records is appealing at this moment precisely because it is inconvenient, and maybe inconvenience is, as Jbara suggests, part of the essence of love. Overcoming obstacles is a feature, not a bug, as they say.It brings weight to the experience, makes it contrast with all the experiences that commercial culture has made easy (which in turn makes us consumers passive).

Yeats's "The Fascination of What's Difficult" seems relevant here. He seems to be arguing the opposite:

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.

It's the myth of "spontaneous joy" and "natural content" that has ushered in the "iPod Generation" and its peculiar restlessness, its voracious, overstimulated cultural appetite, its demand for instantaneous distraction. The absence of "natural content" -- the fact that satisfying oneself requires effort -- opens the possibility of substituting novelty for deeper satisfactions. When something doesn't spontaneously please us, we are invited to think the solution is to try something different, not work at the "difficult" thing that has failed us. The vinyl fascination may be the stirrings of a counter-movement that fetishizes difficulty as a way of fixing value, as measured in attention and consumption effort rather than ease and monetary cost.

Or perhaps it is just an expression of a nostalgia for material souvenirs of our taste. Records are a way to make my musical taste seem more substantial to me -- see, these are the albums I really care about, the ones I like so much, I listen to them on vinyl. On my computer, I have everything, so none of it will seem like it is special to me. The record collection is different; it requires sacrifices. Vinyl is the new way to signify that you are "serious about music," since having access to lots of songs and being familiar with lots of different stuff no longer suffices.

One thing I have learned in my return to vinyl is that records that skip are not endearing; they are totally annoying. And it doesn't take very much to induce a record to start skipping.

Chitchat and tittle-tattle (24 June 2009)

Here's something suited to Nicholas Carr's Realtime Chronicles, from a chapter near the end of New Grub Street. Failed author and up-and-coming literary agent Whelpdale presents his idea for a new journal to his friend, the cynical hack journalist Milvain and his sister.

'I want to find a capitalist,' he said, 'who will get possession of that paper Chat, and transform it according to an idea I have in my head. The thing is doing very indifferently, but I am convinced it might be made splendid property, with a few changes in the way of conducting it.'

'The paper is rubbish,' remarked Jasper, 'and the kind of rubbish -- oddly enough -- which doesn't attract people.'

'Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. I have talked to the people about it again and again, but I can't get them to believe what I say. Now just listen to my notion. In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat I should call it Chit-Chat!'

Jasper exploded with mirth.

'That's brilliant!' he cried. 'A stroke of genius!'

'Are you serious? Or are you making fun of me? I believe it is a stroke of genius. Chat doesn't attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hot cakes, as they say in America. I know I am right; laugh as you will.'

'On the same principle,' cried Jasper, 'if The Tatler were changed to Tittle-Tattle, its circulation would be trebled.'

Whelpdale smote his knee in delight.

'An admirable idea! Many a true word uttered in joke, and this is an instance! Tittle- Tattle -- a magnificent title; the very thing to catch the multitude.'

Dora was joining in the merriment, and for a minute or two nothing but bursts of laughter could be heard.

'Now do let me go on,' implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. 'That's only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this: -- I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.'

'Superb!'

'But you are joking, Mr Whelpdale!' exclaimed Dora.

'No, I am perfectly serious. Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on 'buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information -- bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can't sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.'

Jasper had begun to listen seriously.

'There's something in this, Whelpdale,' he remarked.

'Ha! I have caught you?' cried the other delightedly. 'Of course there's something in it?'

'But ----' began Dora, and checked herself.

'You were going to say ----' Whelpdale bent towards her with deference.

'Surely these poor, silly people oughtn't to be encouraged in their weakness.'

Whelpdale's countenance fell. He looked ashamed of himself. But Jasper came speedily to the rescue.

'That's twaddle, Dora. Fools will be fools to the world's end. Answer a fool according to his folly; supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket. You have discouraged poor Whelpdale in one of the most notable projects of modern times.'

'I shall think no more of it,' said Whelpdale, gravely. 'You are right, Miss Dora.'

Again Jasper burst into merriment. His sister reddened, and looked uncomfortable. She began to speak timidly:

'You said this was for reading in trains and 'buses?'

Whelpdale caught at hope.

'Yes. And really, you know, it may be better at such times to read chit-chat than to be altogether vacant, or to talk unprofitably. I am not sure; I bow to your opinion unreservedly.'

'So long as they only read the paper at such times,' said Dora, still hesitating. 'One knows by experience that one really can't fix one's attention in travelling; even an article in a newspaper is often too long.'

'Exactly! And if you find it so, what must be the case with the mass of untaught people, the quarter-educated? It might encourage in some of them a taste for reading -- don't you think?'

'It might,' assented Dora, musingly. 'And in that case you would be doing good!'

'Distinct good!'

They smiled joyfully at each other. Then Whelpdale turned to Jasper:

'You are convinced that there is something in this?'

'Seriously, I think there is. It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item -- we won't call it article. For instance, you might display on a placard: "What the Queen eats!" or "How Gladstone's collars are made!" -- things of that kind.'

'To be sure, to be sure. And then, you know,' added Whelpdale, glancing anxiously at Dora, 'when people had been attracted by these devices, they would find a few things that were really profitable. We would give nicely written little accounts of exemplary careers, of heroic deeds, and so on. Of course nothing whatever that could be really demoralising -- cela va sans dire.'

So Gissing was onto the idea for USA Today, the free Metro papers, and Twitter all at once, and anticipated the attention-span critique of modern reading habits. Technophiles would point to this probably and argue that it shows that critiques have ever complained thus, and have always been irrelevant alarmists. But I think it shows the inherent tendency of technology toward co-opting our ability to think, which after all can be such an enormous burden to us.

John Is Dead (23 June 2009)

The "Paul Is Dead" conspiracy seems to me one of the most interesting spontaneous social creations in the mass media era (to put it as pompously as possible). It's not exactly a work of art, but I've had hours of entertainment from it, and it has enriched my appreciation for the Beatles immeasurably. Something similar, I must confess, is true of the bizarro Charles Manson reading of the White album, which enriches the music with the spirit of chaos and upheaval that then reigned in culture. That's not to excuse the murders he and his cult committed out of a misguided sense of social protest. My point is that conspiracy mongering is one of the most durable forms of "remixing" culture, a primary mode of folk art in the midst of an information surfeit.

So I can partly understand why Joseph Niezgoda would write a book like The Lennon Prophecy: A New Examination of the Death Clues of the Beatles, reviewed here (via Metafilter). The author's urge to create in the conspiratorial mode seems to have been cloaked or excused here by religiosity -- which also suffuses the review and, incidentally, enhances the ironic, distanced appreciation for a secular apostate like me. Irony is probably not the best way to consume conspiracy; it's probably much more fulfilling to be caught up in it, to give yourself over completely to the fantasy that any association you can think of has weighty significance, that all things can finally be connected if you are sufficiently zealous to weave a large enough web. Enjoying conspiracies ironically is to take a condescending and ultimately dismissive attitude toward creative (albeit misdirected and possibly insane and destructive) human energy.

Of course, that won't stop me from cherry-picking ludicrous sections from this review. Judging by this, the "Paul Is Dead" thing appears to be dead (perhaps people no wish he actually was dead, or at least artistically dormant, rather than shamelessly touring and cheapening the Beatles legacy). Instead, Lennon resonates with the most social significance, leading to the construction of this hypothesis that he sold his soul so that the Beatles would succeed. (How else would you explain their singular fame?)

When was the pact made? Niezgoda pinpoints the date - December 27, 1960, the night the Beatles played at the Town Hall Ball Room in Litherland, England. Lennon was a 20-year old wanna-be rock star in a mediocre band not so different from so many others at the time. He was desperate to “be more famous than Elvis.” Desperate enough to sell his soul to the Devil, Niezgoda contends.
During that performance, Niezgoda reports, “the Beatles evoked a response noticeably different from anything in their past.” As they played, the crowd unexpectedly surged onto the stage and the girls started to scream. It had never happened before, but it would always happen afterward. It was the birth of Beatlemania. All four have noted this night as the turning point in their careers.

Not coincidentally, Lennon would be murdered almost exactly 20 years later by a man who claimed to be possessed by demons.

If John had entered into a 20-year pact with the Devil for wealth and world fame, that contract ended that day with his violent death. Mark Chapman would later claim he was instructed to kill Lennon by a voice in his head that kept insisting “Do it, do it, do it.” Five years later at Attica State Prison, Chapman asked for an exorcism to be made by a priest. He said he was delivered from five or six demons.

It's interesting that the Devil (capital D) likes to operate in round decimal numbers. Why 20 years of fame? You would think the contract would stipulate 66 years or something more suitably infernal.

Unlike Paul, who died in a car accident and whose death needed to be communicated to fans through cryptic clues, John had his death foretold to him and felt obliged to convey his destiny through what is now "a well-documented trail of sorcery, mysticism, numerology, backwards masking, and anagrams."

Exhibit A: the "notorious" butcher cover of Yesterday and Today. The reviewer's description of its significance has a sincere perplexedness to it that's almost breathtaking:

The album cover of The Beatles Yesterday and Today, released in 1966, may say nothing about Lennon’s death, but it literally shouts that the so-called Fab Four were involved in Satanism.... This horrendous picture clearly refers to the kind of infanticide that takes place in Satanic rituals and Devil worships, Niezgoda affirms. It is the only credible way I see to explain the message of the picture – it’s surely not just avant-garde art. Take a look yourself and see if you would say it’s just merry pranksters making a joke, as some Beatles’ fans pretend.

Wow. Imagine if the only "credible" way you could explain the existence of this photograph to yourself was to believe that the most popular pop group of the 20th century were Satanists on a mission to surreptitiously spread their creed of baby murdering to a unsuspecting and credulous population that has ceased to properly fear God. This is sure to sound patronizing, but how strangely limited must your intellectual horizons be? How fervent and focused must be your zealotry? The sort of intensity, that sort of narrow but wildly imaginative world view, it seems to me, is not that different from the one that creates something like The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.

In lashing out so vehemently against the Beatles and all they seem to represent -- the culture industry triumphant and ubiquitous -- the reviewer registers a twisted plea (in a very weird and possibly unconscious fashion) for the protection of native, homespun creativity in the face of cultural homogenization, against a zeitgeist that seems to achieve disproportionate scope and obliterates local distinctions. (After all, only religion should have such reach.) The willful misinterpretations of the Beatles is an attempt to neutralize it, or at least tame it, to put individuals back in a place above it, not subservient to pop culture and force to try to keep up with its trends and trivia.

This take on the butcher cover is the cry of someone who is genuinely threatened by culture, feeling palpably something we may have become too jaded to acknowledge anymore, that is, that maybe we have become unspeakably lazy about filtering the information we consume in the name of entertainment, and this has dulled our own capabilities in ways we can't even recognize. Our spiritual potential atrophies as we drift along in the digitized cultural surplus....

The Yes Man and financial hubris (9 April 2009)

This is obvious and probably has been commented on many times, but the Jim Carrey movie The Yes Man is a pretty good encapsulation of the pre-economic-depression mentality in America. In the film -- which, admittedly, I saw in a semi-delusional state on a flight yesterday -- Carrey plays a low-level loan officer in a California bank. The opening scenes set up the idea that his character is too guarded, too careful, too risk-averse and is therefore missing out on the opportunities life presents us with. One of his friends -- played I think by the actor who played the cop at the car pound in The Big Lebowski ("Leads? Yeah I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab.") -- takes him to see a motivational speaker who persuades him to say yes to everything. As part of that program, we see Carrey dutifully okaying all sorts of absurd small-business loans without so much as an inspection of the paperwork. Now, obviously, that sounds a bit like what they were doing at Countrywide and Washington Mutual, not to mention the fly-by-night brokers who brought us Ninja and liar loans -- extend credit to anybody and everybody and let the chips fall where they may. The difference, though, is that most would-be borrowers are not entrepreneurs; they are somewhat instinctively risk-averse, and it required massive targeted marketing efforts to encourage ordinary people to borrow more, to ignore the common-sense skepticism of free money and say yes to the opportunity that perpetually rising home equity was said to provide.

So the opportunity is there for the film to play as a satire to the easy credit of the bubble years, but viewers must read it against the grain. The film itself isn't satirical at all and has nothing to say in favor of prudent risk management. Its big message is that when we say yes to everything, it's hard to know when we really mean it, or rather, it's hard for others to judge our sincerity and know which of our desires are "real". It verges initially on the somewhat subversive message that we have no real desires at all, only circumstances and opportunities. During the film's build-up, when the rate at which Carrey is agreeing to do things is building momentum, his character becomes pointedly schizophrenic, and other characters comment on how unpredictable he is. He starts to have no fixed identity at all and slips toward the post-structural ideal of moving beyond subjectivity to some existence of unbounded free play. But then, of course, the film's main lesson kicks in: that this identity-free state is utterly unacceptable. His love interest -- a sort of phony free spirit played by Zooey Deschanel; she is in a Flight of the Conchords-type band, rides a scooter, and isn't hung up, as she says at one point, with being "mainstream" -- shuns him because she can't know if his love is real. Love, of course, is always the primary bait for the identity trap, but in films like these, it always seems like a punishment, defined by upholding dreary, rote responsibilities defined by social expectations that often reflect the consumer-society prerogatives of buying the right gifts or experiences to prove love. This is the quintessential set-up for comedies -- it's fun to vacation from responsibility, but ultimately we should crave the return to stability, typically figured and symbolized as heterosexual love, with the strong implication that raising a family will be next. We have to reproduce the status quo, after all.

That traditional theme of reaffirming the reality principle is now overshadowed by the light the financial crisis now sheds on the film's historicity. The peculiar delusions of the decade -- that no one ever really defaults, that all loans can be made good, that a lack of optimism is a kind of character defect -- now show up in sharp relief, because paradoxically enough, the films' producers seem to have taken them so much for granted. In the movie, the idea of "Getting to yes" gets supplanted by a much more convenient negotiation strategy (just say yes) that is blithely presented as sound. No one has to compromise or put forth any effort, and everybody wins! Carrey's character is even praised by one of his bank's higher-ups, who interprets the lack of risk management as the introduction of a profitable microlending program. These touches are now local color from a tour through the zeitgeist of 2006.

Middlebrow Oscar (24 Feb 2009)

The Oscars are ancient history by now in the blogosphere, but I came across this post by Matt Feeney at The American Scene that makes an apt point about "Ocarness" that was absolutely borne out by the by and large predictable outcome.

For a long time, the Oscars have lived within a self-aggrandizing self-contradiction, in which “best” is unofficially hedged up and down with considerations of commercial success and a kind of Oscar-approved moral grandiosity, to the point that nobody thinks the “best” films and performances are actually the best and the whole conversation deteriorates into horse-picking that is implicitly cynical and also besotted with both the celeb-spectacle and the presumption of the awards’ cultural importance. I.e. the awards wouldn’t be so worthy of the emphasis placed upon them if it wasn’t pretended that they award true merit, but if they really did award true merit, they wouldn’t take up the cultural space that they do.... the Oscars routinely reward films that openly game the Oscar logic, and this is now coming back to haunt them. It gives us the prospect of an Oscar show that is fatuous and boring precisely because it is so thoroughly self-referential.

This is why you can generally pick the winners of each award if you haven't seen the films or even read about them. You just have to put yourself into the Oscarness mind-set and think about what ideological duty the film industry imagines itself as being commissioned to perform. This year, it hoped to send a message about gay marriage and about the significance of India as a country, a 5,000-year-old culture that may as well have begun when Danny Boyle's plane touched down in Mumbai, for all Hollywood is concerned.

The Oscars is nothing if not self-referential -- just witness all the pointless and near incomprehensible montages of past nominees from last night's show, and the soporific spectacle of previous winners delivering encomiums to the current nominees. The point is not to honor the year's best films but to celebrate Oscars themselves as a cultural force. Feeney's description of the contradiction at the heart of the show is right on as well; it has just enough credibility to not be entirely creditable -- it defines the unstable middlebrow culture that has recently vanished from publisher's lists with the demise of popular literary fiction.

It makes you wonder if the Oscars' days are numbered. The show felt pretty irrelevant last night, and the employment of a throwback song-and-dance man like Hugh Jackman smacked of a desperate reach for old-time Hollywood glamour from the days when it was still hegemonic. But films seem behind the curve of TV and online media these days; it seems that it arrives late to the zeitgeist, putting out movies, say, about identity theft after the threat already feels stale.

I still make a point of watching the Oscars though, in part because I love the red carpet shows, when extemporizing sycophants collide with often painfully shy nullities and they talk past each other in painful, raw encounters. The celebrities seem so diminished, surrounded by their peers and dwarved by the insane media hoopla, chaotic and annihilating -- it's an almost abject spectacle as the stars re-enter the womb of hype that has made them. I find this weirdly fascinating; all the participants seem on the knife-edge of madness, one banality away from going schizo.

The Oscars also provide a glimpse at a purified secular piety that no one subscribes to personally, but which we all end up willing to entertain as being someone's belief system. By virtue of it being a par ethos calculated to be a common denominator for the vast audience the film industry hopes to reach, it takes on a kind of credibility. It's akin to the cynicism Feeney describes, which leads to our not being at all surprised when inferior, barely watchable films like Crash and A Beautiful Mind are called the "best." Few think these films are the best films, but we accept somehow that society needs to call them as such, for obscure ideological reasons that we'd prefer not to investigate all that deeply. Instead it's just vaguely reassuring to know that the highest echelon of the film industry is so fatuous, and takes its mediocrity so seriously, that it can't ever really endanger the public psyche with anything truly upsetting or challenging in its entertainments. We aren't missing anything epoch-making there; the revolution will not be showing in your local cineplex.

Operational aesthetics in Survivor (29 Jan 2009)

In the comments to my post about complex TV, McChris pointed me to this essay by Jason Mittel, "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television." Mittel provides an interesting survey of narrative in TV over the past few decades, even if his account tends toward the telelogical -- despite an evenhanded tone, the emphasis seems to be on how TV is necessarily becoming more complex and viewers more sophisticated. I'm not convinced that TV is necessarily evolving toward the good or has any role in improving audiences. TV has done a good job of improving its own reputation, however, as Mittel points out. But the fact that audiences are now expected to be engaged with the form as well as the content of shows, as Mittel amply demonstrates, is simply a change, a way for shows to introduce novelty -- not a move to a higher level of aesthetic appreciation. Viewers may need to invest more time in shows and engage with them in a more interactive way, but these developments are not necessarily positive (or negative). That one can spend an entire Saturday watching episode after episode of Mad Men testifies to how compellingly crafted the show is, but it also might leave one empty and exhausted, frustrated with oneself over all the other activities you neglected. (I use "one" as though I'm not talking about myself.)

Toward the end of the essay, Mittel focuses on shows that call attention to their own production:

The viewers of such complex comedies as Seinfeld and Arrested Development not only focus on the diegetic world offered by the sitcoms but also revel in the creative mechanics involved in the producers’ abilities to pull off such complex plot structures, a mode of viewing Sconce labels as “metareflexive” but that warrants more detailed consideration. This set of pleasures suggests an influential concept offered by Neil Harris in his account of P. T. Barnum: Harris suggests that Barnum’s mechanical stunts and hoaxes invited spectators to embrace an “operational aesthetic” in which the pleasure was less about “what will happen?” and more concerning “how did he do that?”20 In watching Seinfeld we expect that each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in a farcical unraveling, but we watch to see how the writers will pull off the narrative mechanics required to bring together the four plotlines into a calibrated comedic Rube Goldberg narrative machine.

He adds that such shows "convert many viewers to amateur narratologists, noting usage and violations of conventions, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes." It seems that Mittel has in mind scripted shows exclusively, but I feel the spur to amateur narratology most of all when I watch the reality game show Survivor, the script for which must be found after the fact in the editing room. Examining scenes in terms of how contestants are shaped into characters and given story arcs and conflicts can often be as suspenseful as the action depicted in the show, since careful attention to the narrative structuring can clue attentive viewers in on who will ultimately win. In a sense, that is where the action is in each episode, in the editors' choices. And rather than merely marvel at how they are woven together, as one would with a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, viewers instead have the opportunity to try to calculate out the ultimate purpose of those choices and deduce the denouement that would make them necessary. Referencing scripted shows, Mittel coins the term "narrative special effects": "moments push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off." All of Survivor is one long narrative special effect, except writers aren't involved.

Since the contestants can't be judged for their performances, and there are no writers, viewers have only the editors to second-guess. Editors become the auteurs, just as DJs have become in the pop-music world. Like the Bush administration, the show's editors make "reality," very usefully directing our attention to the means by which this is accomplished. The ability to see how "truth" is being manipulated in its presentation on TV has never been more important. So perhaps all the complexity on TV serves a laudable political function after all.

Volunteer critics (28 Jan 2009)

Stephen Baker had a recent BusinessWeek article (via PSFK) that explores the kind of labor arrangement that by and large makes PopMatters possible: It's called "Will Work for Praise."

The gist is this: The Web makes it possible to aggregate the labor of volunteers, who hope to be paid in publicity -- who want to build their "personal brand" and feel like "mini-Oprahs." The marketing-oriented site Baker mainly looks at is reminiscent of the "BzzAgents" who offer to promote products for free, merely so that they can feel as though they have been an "influencer". Such is the centrality of marketing in our culture (it is arguably our culture's dominant, defining discourse) that people seek to to seize some of its relevance by merely mimicking it -- they don't care what they are influencing people to do as long as they are speaking the language of influence, channeling its power through themselves and thereby becoming socially relevant.

Laura Sweet...searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on a shopping site called ThisNext.com. Asked why in the world she spends so many hours each week working for free, she answers: "It's a labor of love."
Later this morning, a half-hour's drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to pour passion and intelligence into his site for free. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. What's in it for the volunteer workers? "They can build their brands," Gould says. "In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs."

That sounds a lot like he's saying "My volunteers are daydreaming dupes." And maybe that's right. Gould seems pretty cavalier about his star contributors, assuming that the amount of volunteer labor he can throw at any problem compensates for the singularity of any individual's efforts. Baker writes, "The trick in the volunteer economy is less to keep a superstar from quitting than to make sure that plenty of eager volunteers are ready to work to take her place." Volunteer laborers of this sort are almost always implicitly assumed to be gullible and deluded, misunderstanding what their real motive should be -- namely moneymaking. Free labor devalues paid labor, of course, and challenges the underlying concept of labor itself: Work is compensated in wages because it is presumed to be a disutility -- a pain in the ass. What we do for free is socially regarded as hobby activity by definition; it's unserious, leisurely play.

Consequently, uncompensated work tends to be regarded as inherently suspect, as is the case with the way "amateur" critics online are often regarded by the professionals they are rapidly superseding. An article (annoyingly firewalled) in the Columbia Journalism Review by David Hajdu offers a good example. He quotes New Republic writer Leon Wieseltier:

Every crisis in criticism supposes that it is unprecedented, he says, but now there really is a new reason for alarm. Criticism has always been a mixture of opinion and judgment, judgment being something more learned and more seasoned and more intellectually ambitious than mere opinion. But beginning with Amazon, which made anybody who could type into a book reviewer, and now as the Web sites and the blogs have proliferated, we have entered a nightmare of opinion-making. This culture of outbursts, and the weird and totally unwarranted authority that it has been granted, has been responsible for a collapse of the distinction between opinion and judgment. It’s one of the baleful consequences of the democratization of expression by the Web.

This seems like pure elitism to me. The chief distinction between "judgment" and "opinion" in his account basically boils down to whether or not the opinion giver is properly credentialed, and that is typically a matter of who you know and who is paying you. It's not as though book reviewing is phenomenology. The problem is that the "weird and totally unwarranted authority" of noncommercial critics threatens to devalue the cultural capital of people like Wieseltier, which is why professional opinion givers like Wieseltier bluster about amateurs, trying to discredit uninstitutionalized opinion. Reviews on Amazon are generally not "outbursts" but often attempts to articulate a useful explanation of a work's value. And the reviews here, many written by academics, don't presume a "weird authority." What's weird is the monopoly on judgment that crypto-sages like Wieseltier seem to believe is their unique entitlement.

Worse, the implication is that judgment as exercised by the wise Wieseltiers of the world should do nothing to truly educate their readers, who, perpetually incapable of their own judgment, remain ignorant sieves waiting to have wisdom poured through them. The "baleful consequences" of democratization are that Wieseltier faces more competition, and his publishing-world connections aren't as valuable anymore. Wieseltier basically admits he has no stake in seeing cultural capital more widely distributed and shared in the world; instead, covetous of its relative value, he would like to keep opinion making as hierarchical as possible. (Requiring that a capitalist bankroll you in order for you to have credibility is a fine way of accomplishing that end.)

So paid critics often don't have the best interests of readers in mind; they want to undermine readers' feelings of expertise. Also, as Hajdu details, paid journalists often end up co-opted by the entertainment industry that readers expect them to evaluate objectively. "Music critics, too, feel the pressure to make nice. In an era in which home-studio software and social networking sites have greatly simplified the production and the distribution of popular music, the sheer quantity of new releases by unknown artists has, among other effects, made it more tempting to accentuate the positive." Since the music-business is threatened by disintermediation, it behooves its support system in the print media to give it a boost. The writers end up as an adjunct of that entertainment industry, working for the big media companies themselves. Otherwise, constraints on their editors force writers to eschew critical discourse for consumer-guide-style advice.

I'm not sure how the criticism on PopMatters is regarded out in the world. But in many ways, the volunteer status of most contributors makes the criticism published here potentially more valuable -- it vouches, at least, for the writing's integrity (though I suppose one could argue that, like underpaid judges, unpaid critics may merely be susceptible to being bought off more easily by PR people with tickets to shows and free DVDs and the like). Thanks to internet publishing, it becomes possible to read a different kind of critical voice -- sure, one that emulates the paid press at times, but one that is more likely to preserve an earnest sense of its critical mission. Cynicism is thereby usually reserved for deserving subjects. The writing can grow indulgent in places, but in general there is a sincere effort to be disciplined by the craft of criticism itself, rather than the need to be snappy, or to accommodate column-space concerns, or attract advertisers. I know, that's hopelessly idealistic, but it's an ideal that could only ever blossom outside of capitalist relations.

Anyway, as more outlets for uncompensated content creation proliferate on the Web -- Amazon.com and social networks being the most conspicuous ones right now -- the perception that it's all hobby writing and/or self-branding online (it's all "weird" pseudoauthority; "baleful" democratization; untoward "outbursts" of silly plebes with their silly opinions) will become even more entrenched. Sites may have to go more explicitly capitalist -- pay writers, collect subscriptions, feature advertising, etc. -- to ensure that they are regarded as "professional" and worthy of being read by people who otherwise limit their consumption of amateur copy to those they have friended.