Applegarchy

It's always sad when someone suffers and dies earlier than they might otherwise have because of cancer. So I am sad that Steve Jobs has died. Of course, were he a nobody instead of a billionaire, though, I wouldn't have felt anything about it. I would have ignored his death like all the other strangers' deaths.

I am not much of a believer in the sorts of ideals Steve Jobs came to represent, and seeing the outpouring of gratitude in various media outlets for how he "invented the future" and so forth has made me feel more than usually estranged from the culture I live in. So forgive me if I come across as sour or surly. For his hagiographers, Jobs is an innovative, entrepreneurial genius who gave concrete form to the inchoate desires of the masses to live more beautiful lives. Indeed, he is the man whose marketing savvy brought us the gadgets that set us free to become what we wanted to be, the stylish silhouettes dancing in the old original iPod advertisements, opaque and indistinguishable in their solipsism.

What I see when instructed to appreciate the awesomeness of the world that Jobs helped created is a world full of atomized consumers enthralled by gadgets that promise to augment their lives but just as often compress them, reify them, codify them into quantified data. I see a superficial aesthetic anchored in fastidious fonts and hermetic product design that I am supposed to receive as a special consolation, a privilege of my era as wonderful as electricity or refrigeration. I see commercial products specifically designed to repel curiosity and DIY modification championed as harbingers of the triumph of the "personal." I see gadgets design to accelerate consumption and subsume more of everyday live to the anxieties of mediation represented as great enablers of productive self-expression. Apple under Jobs put a sleek, brushed-aluminum case on the ideology of consumerism and convinced us it had sparked some sort of revolution.

I have no special complaints about the functionality of Apple's products, though they are relatively overpriced. Their vaunted ease of use has only occasionally disappointed me, though I have never understood why I was supposed to be so grateful for it. Praising products for merely working seems to speak of our undue tolerance for broken, shabby things, not a generalized elevation of expectations. And outside of fast fashion, perhaps no company exemplifies the commitment to obsolescence more rigorously than Apple. No other company has been more successful in leveraging the media to make its perfectly functional products seem useless and outdated on a regular schedule. All hail "innovation"!

Still, my problem has always been more with the cult of Apple and of Jobs himself. To me, Jobs represented the tyranny of design, the soft command of seductive interfaces, the covert control through cleverly marketed convenience, the triumph of closed, hierarchical systems over open-source ones, commercial protocols and the ethos of the gated community over the commons. More than any other corporate executive, he commoditized creativity and sold it as a fungible status symbol. Apple is supposed to serve as proof that good design can drive capitalist expansion, that market competition will ultimately produce only things that are held by consensus to be not only utilitarian but beautiful. But one could also see this as a demonstration of capitalist ideology's advance -- it no longer needs appeals to utility and rationality to justify itself, but can presume its subjects will regard exchange itself is beautiful, that its logic can only but yield pleasure. Apple thus betokens a growing dependence on the market in order to experience pleasure. We must buy things to entitle ourselves to an aesthetic feeling.

That I own an iPod probably opens me to accusations of hypocrisy in some people's eyes. Complaining about consumerism but still shopping for things probably makes me a hypocrite to such people (if they are not straw men) too. If you participate at all in the status quo -- if it ensnares you as it is intended to -- you have no right to criticize it. It's incumbent instead to celebrate it. A cursory look at Twitter shows there is certainly no shortage of cheerleaders. When I listen to music, it doesn't mean that much to me if it happens to come from an iPod. But Apple ideology tells me it should, that he device is more significant than what it conveys. My reactionary response has been to fetishize vinyl.

Part of me feels viscerally an envy with regard to Jobs that marks the degree to which I've vicariously participated in the myth that has been built around him, in the entrepreneur worship, the fantasy of power -- of being able to alter other's lives and still be regarded as benevolent. Technology is a perfect vector for that sort of power, masking the agency of those who develop it and program it and representing that as irresistible progress. That instinctive envy engenders a deep skepticism of Silicon Valley, of the sort of people drawn to it, those who seeking technocratic means to dominate the world, impose a vision, dictate the contours of others' lives. Jobs worship perpetuates the idea that proprietary technology is developed for us, for our improvement and our needs, rather than for profit or for the egos of venture capitalists and self-proclaimed visionaries. It makes more sense to me, if you want to worship tech gurus, to choose someone like Linus Torvalds, though I doubt he'll be on the cover of Time when he dies.

Music Cloud (10 May 2011)

The iPod's popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air." I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for "all music anytime" -- much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for "all movies anytime" (assuming bandwidth can keep up).

Google's launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: "Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files." That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: "Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity." Morris contends that "the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud ... enmeshes users in ... a process of continual commodification of the music experience." The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies -- we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music "contingent" on providers' whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: "the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities."

It's worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the "hassle" of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: "Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is."

Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don't even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening "purity" is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.

"This generation got no destination to hold" (4 April 2011)

I enjoyed the essay about the "iPod era" by Nikil Saval in the new n+1 (excerpt by Slate here), which considers the ramifications of solitary listening for political action. I thought it would cover the same ground as sociologist Michael Bull's book about the iPod, Sound Moves (which I wrote about here), but it turned out to be something quite different.

I don't accept Saval's claim that the music of the 1960s was "an incitement to social change" without a lot of qualifications that are not supplied in the essay; I think the music was shaped by political ferment that preceded it rather than vice versa, and most politicized pop was cashing in on the zeitgeist. The explicit merging of politics and youth music culture in the popular mind undermined political action, diverting it into self-neutralizing spectacles like Woodstock (funny how that more or less heralded the end of radicalism for many of its participants even as they claimed it was just the beginning; instead it was as if they knew they had achieved the goal of having participated in something "historical").

I'm more persuaded that the surge in politicized pop in the 1960s was a demographic phenomenon, a Baby Boomer thing. There is always music for youth expressing a rejection of certain aspects of the status quo; when there was more youth, there was more of it, and it was more prominent culturally, as that bulge of young consumers made what they consumed significant to the entire capitalist system. There was no golden age when music could be put to good political use. All music conjures a feeling of solidarity, I think; iPodization has just made the vicariousness of the process explicit.

What I liked best about Saval's essay was the survey of pop music sociology: Saval suggests Adorno and Bourdieu offer "the two most considered attempts to connect music and society" and contrasts them: Adorno held out for traditional aesthetics and the importance of high culture as a form of resistance; Bourdieu rejected musical taste's autonomy from the social order, arguing that it reflected status rather than an appreciation for something transcendent. I'm glad Saval takes some tentative steps to refute the idea that Adorno was "wrong" about popular music (I've written about that before for what it's worth), but still seems to want to emphasize the autonomy of the consumer in an administered consumer system. However, the essay makes this excellent point:

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network.

Popular culture is already subsumed by capital; this is not different from the situation in the 1960s. RCA didn't care what kind of polemic Jefferson Airplane put on its albums, because the company just wanted to sell records. The radical sentiment was already commodified and neutralized; what it inflamed in listeners was to a degree already contained, already likely to express itself as radical chic, vicarious fantasy, and scenesterism rather than radicalism. And scenesterism is good for the culture industry; it enriches the value of products with new, valuable meanings for customers. It builds brand equity.

Saval suggests Bourdieu is a "philistine" who asserts the "falsehood" that "music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and it has nothing to say." I don't think that's false at all; I think it is a recognition that music, like any other form of art, is not an untarnished container for humanistic pieties about what constitutes "greatness." But music, like asbtract art, more easily masquerades as such because it seems "purifed" of interpretable content and presents audiences with the higher truth of form qua form.

Bourdieu, Saval claims, refuted Adorno, but I think that Adorno and Bourdieu have complementary perspectives; both see popular culture as manifesting the failure of popular culture to be autonomous from capitalism and the classes it structures to support itself.

Saval's essay concludes, probably ironically, by recommending silence as a mode of resistance, as a means of steering between the Scylla of Adornesque snobbery and the Charybdis of Bourdieuian identity self-consciousness:

One radical option remains: abnegation—some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: The word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. But it was the tremendously congenial avant-garde gadabout John Cage who showed, just as the avalanche of recorded music was starting to bury us, how there was "no such thing as silence," that listening to an absence of listener-directed sounds represented a profounder and far more heroic submission than the regular attitude adopted in concert halls—a willingness to "let sounds be," as he put it ... Silence is the most endangered musical experience in our time. Turning it up, we might figure out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear.

That seems like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me: "against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will look also for slowness," he wrote in Fatal Strategies, in 1983. "Not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too."

The dilemma Saval diagnoses is painfully familiar to me; I am always trying to find a way to "really" hear music, stop instrumentalizing it. But I probably won't ever choose silence or to "Enjoy the Silence" or even listen to Hymns to the Silence. My strategy recently has been repetition. (Insert obligatory citation of Derrida and/or Lacan here.) I tend to listen to the same handful of albums over and over again and hope that constitutes a nullification of the imperative to seek and enjoy novelty for its own sake through the medium of popular culture. Right now (god help me) one of those albums is Wings' Wild Life.

Against curiosity (25 August 2008)

A problem I keep finding myself returning to is why I seem to spend more time tagging and arranging my music files than I spend listening to my music. Part of that is a cognitive illusion, but a telling one -- I'm listening to music the entire time I'm doing the iTunes bookkeeping work, but my concentration is on the data, not on the intricacies, harmonies, melodies and hooks of the music. It barely breaks through, and usually only when the song playing is so irritating, I have to skip to the next one.

In my mind, this is symptomatic of a larger problem, of consuming information about goods rather than allowing goods to facilitate sensual experiences. In part, this is so we can consume more quickly, a product of the time crunch we face in expanding our consumption -- we want faser throughput, since quantity seems to trump quality, and the pleasure in consuming seems to come from the acquisition of the next thing. To authorize that next acquisition, we need to satisfy ourselves that we are done with what we have. Processing it as information is a quick way of doing just that.

As a consequence of this eagerness to process more and more stuff, I end up amassing an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of the surface details of pop culture -- who wrote what and who sang what and who played on whose record and when this show was canceled or had this or that guest star or whatever. Worse, I invest far too much significance in brandishing this knowledge as some kind of accomplishment, as if life were a big game of Jeopardy. This useless depot of detail is what a show like Family Guy tries to reward me for having accumulated. Getting to laugh at it is like a kind of booby prize.

But iTunes metadata seems to me the best emblem of the information problem, of the trap we are lured into of substituting clerical data processing for thought and experience. Adorno seemed to anticipate this precisely in "The Schema of Mass Culture," whose title alone suggests its application to the digitization of all cultural distribution. He argues that art, in being manufactured for the masses, is reduced to the data about itself, which masks its subversive potential. "The sensuous moment of art transforms itself under the eyes of mass culture into the measurement, comparison and assessment of physical phenomena." This is like accessing iTunes metadata in place of hearing the song. Because the metadata for all the music is the same, all music from that perspective is also essentially the same. And the argument can be extended to all of digitally distributed culture.

The underlying sameness of the medium for culture today reveals the truth about the phantasmal differences in form and genre. (As Adorno puts it, in his inimitable way, "the technicized forms of modern consciousness...transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical.") It's all more or less the same, allowing consumers to obey the command to enact the same self-referential decoding process, reinforcing the same lesson of eternal sameness.

The more the film-goer, the hit-song enthusiast, the reader of detective and magazine stories anticipates the outcome, the solution, the structure, and so on, the more his attention is displaced toward the question of how the nugatory result is achieved, to the rebus-like details involved, and in this searching process of displacement the hieroglyphic meaning suddenly reveals itself. It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of "dos and don'ts," and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the consumers.

What Adorno would call "official culture" -- that which is made to be reviewed and talked about by professional commentators and promoted by professional marketers and consumed commercially -- seems to be so stuffed with data and information and objects and performers and whatnot that no one could ever in their right mind question its plenitude. There's so much, you'd have to be nuts to derive some satisfaction from all that. Think of all the stuff you can download! But the one thing missing amid all this data is the space for a genuine aesthetic experience, a moment of negativity in which an alternative to what exists, what registers as "realistic" can be conceived. Instead, one feels obliged to keep up with official culture so as to not find oneself an outcast. People go along not necessarily because they love pop culture but because "they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life." Pop culture knowledge becomes a prerequisite for certain social opportunities, a way of signaling one's normality, or one's go-along-get-along nature. "Today, anyone incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual." I think of this quote sometimes when it comes up that someone has never knowingly heard a Coldplay or John Mayer song, or hasn't seen an episode of American Idol. Really? Have you been under a rock? Are you lying? Why this makes me suspicious rather than elated, I don't know. And it especially reminds me of my record reviewing, when I tried to pretend there was inherent significance in the commercial output of E.L.O. or the Drive-By Truckers. And as the information about pop culture proliferates, we become more ignorant about politics and basic facts about how our economy operates.

Once participation in public official culture becomes a matter of collecting trivial, descriptive (as opposed to analytical) information about it, Adorno argues that "culture business" then plays out as a contest. Products "require extreme accomplishments that can be precisely measured." This I would liken to the data at the bottom of iTunes that tells you the number of songs you have and the number of days it would take to listen to them all. It's not intended to be a scoreboard but it can seem like one. This sort of contest culminates in collecting mania, where an object's use value has been shriveled to it's being simply another in a series.

To radically oversimplify, Adorno argued that mass culture, a reflection and paradigmatic example of monopoly capitalism, served to nullify the radical potential in art, debasing its forms and methods while acclimating audiences to mediocrity, alienation, hopelessness, and a paucity of imagination. It works to form individuals into a mass, integrating them into the manufactured culture, snuffing out alternative and potentially seditious ways for people to interact with one another while facilitating an ersatz goodwill for the existing order. "As far as mass culture is concerned, reification is no metaphor: It makes the human beings that it reproduces resemble things even where their teeth do not represent toothpaste and their careworn wrinkles do not evoke cosmetics." The contours of our consciousness are produced by our culture, and advertisements reflect those dimensions while fostering their reproduction.

Basically, through its ministrations, all the movements of the individual spirit become degraded and tamed and assimilated to the mass-produced cultural products on offer, which ultimately fail to gratify and perpetuate a spiritual hunger while occluding the resources that might have actually sated it. Pleasure becomes "fun," thought becomes "information," desire becomes "curiosity."

But what could be wrong with curiosity? It seems like it should be an unadulterated good, a way of openly engaging with the world. Adorno, in a feat of rhetorical jujitsu, wants to have us believe it means the opposite. Because it is attuned not to anything more substantive than pop-culture trivia, curiosity "refers constantly to what is preformed, to what others already know." It is not analytical or synthetic; it simply aggregates. "To be informed about something implies an enforced solidarity with what has already been judged." Everything worth knowing about, from a social perspective -- anything you might talk about with acquaintances, say -- has already been endorsed, is already presented as cool even before anyone had that authentic reaction to it. Cultural product is made with cool in mind, whereas authentic cool, from Adorno's standpoint anyway, must always be a by-product. At the same time, curiosity surpressed genuine change, supplanting for it ersatz excitement for cynical repetitions -- think the fashion cycle, in which everything changes on the surface but nothing really changes. "Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted anyway," Adorno says. "It lives off the claim that there cannot be anything new and that what presents itself as new is already predisposed to subsumption on the part of the well-informed." This means attention to the surface details, which prompts "a taboo against inaccurate information, a charge that can be invoked against any thought." Basically this means that in our cultural climate, your thoughts about, say, Eric Clapton's guitar playing are invalid unless you know what model guitar he was playing and what studio he was recording in at the time. The trivia is used to silence the "inexpert." So "the curiosity for information cannot be separated from the opinionated mentality of those who know it all," Adorno argues. Curiosity is "not concerned with what is known but the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession." Life becomes a collection of data, and "as facts they are arranged in such a way that they can be grasped as quickly and easily as possible" -- in a spreadsheet, for example. Or a PowerPoint presentation. These media suit facts as opposed to thoughts, and encourage us to groom our data sheets for completeness and clarity rather than insight. "Wrenched from all context, detached from thought, they are made instantly accessible to an infantile grasp. They may never be broadened or transcended" -- the metadata fields are unchangeable -- "but like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien." Works don't seek to be understood; they only seek to be identified, tagged, labeled accordingly to make them superficially accessible.

The reduction of thought to data allows us to consume culture faster, enhance our throughput, and focus on accumulating more. The idea that you would concentrate on one work and explore it deeply, thoroughly, is negated; more and more, it becomes unthinkable, something it wouldn't occur to anyone to try. "Curiosity" demands we press on fervently, in search of the next novelty.

The copyright industry arms race (13 June 2008)

At Cato Unbound (an internet publication of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank), Rasmus Fleischer presents what seems to me some irrefutable facts about the troubled future for intellectual property rights in this essay and presents libertarianism in what seems to me to be its most favorable light -- arguing against the consolidation of state and corporate power in favor of the creative use of technology by individuals. The sort of freedom to which the internet accustoms us -- of access and association -- seems to mesh well with libertarian concerns. A platform built not on gun love, tax hatred, and Ayn Randian überselfishness, but rather on a commitment to an agnostic internet, protecting individuals' ability to use technology (the means of production in the information age), and enabling spontaneous organizations to meet needs as they emerge seems to have great potential appeal to a new generation of voters who think in terms of always being online, and always networking at several levels of intimacy at once with a variety of privacy needs to protect.

Anyway, detailing the technological arms race between the copyright industries and pirates, Fleischer foresees "an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties" as governments try to control the use and distribution of digital content. "Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last." The culture industries want to preserve economic advantage by maintaining an artificial scarcity of their goods enforced by the intervening power of the state. But as Fleischer points out,

We already have access to more film, music, text and images than we can possibly incorporate into our lives. Retreating from this paradigm of abundance to the old paradigm of scarcity is simply not an alternative. Adding more “content” will strictly speaking produce no value — whether culturally or economically. What’s valuable is supplying a context where people can come together to create meaning out of abundance.

No matter how draconian efforts to protect content on the internet become, no matter how onerous the burden placed on ISPs to regulate users' activity, they are futile in the face of the "sneakernet" -- the ability of someone to walk over to your place with, say, a hard drive containing all the recorded music from a decade.

Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.
In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

It seems to me the model is to figure out a way to sell the limitations the copyright industries are trying to impose by fiat. When confronted with overwhelming options, people need them edited down. The personal entertainment budget was once the filter, but that is rapidly becoming negligible. Fleischman's conclusion, though, is apt:

Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright.

The iTunes personality test (7 Feb 2007)

A few days ago PsyBlog reported on a study that revealed that people just getting to know one another frequently talk about music and that music serves as a powerful means of signalling personality traits. Here are the details of how the study worked:

participants were asked to judge people's personality solely on their top 10 list of songs. This was compared to participants results on a standard type of personality test measuring the big five personality traits: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability. Overall the results showed that music preferences were reasonably accurate in conveying aspects of personality. Of the five traits, it was a person's openness to experience that was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs, followed by extraversion and emotional stability. On the other hand, music preferences didn't say much about whether a person was conscientious or not.

The study led me to wonder, though, if you couldn't develop an iTunes plug in that would interpret your personality to yourself by analyzing what you are currently playing or have played most often most recently along the lines of how Pandora analyzes music and makes recommendations. (I need something to tell me why I am listening to so much Jandek.) It would work like a horoscope, perhaps, making oracular pronoucements about how you are feeling and what you seem to need. When iTunes inevitably becomes a social networking tool, this horoscope could link you to other people who might be especially compatible with you. If music is proxy for personality, it seems a cinch to make networked iTunes libraries into a kind of dating service.

Still, I found the specific findings of what music makes for what personality a little suspect:

What some music preferences mean for personality:
* Likes vocals: extraverted
* Likes country: emotionally stable. On the face of it, this is bizarre really because country music is all about heartache. Either the emotionally stable are attracted to country music or it has a calming effect on the unstable!
* Likes jazz: intellectual

These correlations seem entirely contingent on popular associations, not some intrinsic quality of the music, and will likely change as the public perceptions of these genres change. Also the signaling power of these genres diminish the more they are understood as sheer signals, and the authenticity of a person's preferences become questionable in light of their obvious instrumentality. If everyone knows you can say you are into the Shins to establish some kind of indie credibility, then liking the Shins no longer signifies that. The music's usefulness as signal empties it of the specific quality it originally conveyed. That's why this is such a poignant and powerful PSA. Music preferences become subject to the rational expectations critique -- the alleged coolness of the preference is already built in by the time you choose to like something, so you get no added coolness out of the choice. You have to choose to like something uncool and hope the zeitgeist blows in that direction. Likewise, jazz signals not that you are intellectual, but that you were aware that it would make you seem as though you are intellectual at the time the choice was made. The more obvious the signal, the less authentic the choice seems, and the less it seems to reflect your true personality as opposed to the one you are scheming to convey. I don't think this study undermines this, because music selection and personality test taking can both be games of projecting who you want to be rather than measuring something that's there and beyond your control. This, in fact, may be why it is always a waste of time to try to determine what someone's "true" personality is -- it is always ad hoc, contingent on choices in the moment, on what one seeks to stress and minimize.

Perhaps this is why I find the question of what music I like a really annoying one to answer, because it has nothing to do with, well, what music I like. I secretly resent the question; it's another way of asking, "Who the hell do you think you are?" It's like the spot on social networking profiles that encourage you to list what books and records and movies you like; this is impossible to do honestly. Generally I'm very reticent to disclose my personality (why I wear a de facto uniform), which, New York magazine tells me, places me in a moribund demographic. I just strongly suspect that anything I say about myself, no matter how well-intentioned, will eventually be made into a lie by my actions, what people should probably judge me by. Which raises this question: Is forming tastes about consumer-culture product now the only form of public action left open to us?