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.

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.

Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)

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

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

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

Boredom production (6 April 2010)

This PSFK item about social networks ends with a platitude about keeping fickle consumers interested.

The rapid pace of change and relative unpredictability of when consumers’ rapt attention will become boredom is an ongoing challenge for social media players to continually understand their users, lifestyles and consumption habits – and to adapt to keep them engaged.

This reminded me of my most recent essay for Generation Bubble, where I argue that we are continually driven to produce our own boredom. The gist of my piece is that social media lets us function as our own mini ad agencies, working to exhaust the meaning of things more quickly so as to expand the flexibility of our identities, and to make each identity-signifying gesture seem more significant in the moment. Does that make sense? My point is that we want to expend the meaning in a good in a fireworks-like explosion of broadcasted signification; we don't want our goods to continue to signify who we are after the contrived moment of their presentation to our public. As a result, we purposely make ourselves bored with things, and boredom is a state of open, uncommitted possibility for us, whereas ongoing engagement with some specific set of thing is confining.

So there is no way to keep consumers engaged without continually presenting them with novelty -- to repackage the same crap as something new, if necessary. It's not "relatively unpredictable" that consumers will be bored; it's completely predictable, and the pace at which that exhaustion occurs is continually accelerating.

Trying to avoid distraction (12 Jan 2009)

Nicholas Carr, building from my post about dilettantism and incorporating an analysis of the Clash's "Complete Control" to boot, draws this pertinent conclusion: "Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable."

That seems right to me. The implication is that the level of our interest in our amusements, and worse, in what we may consider to be our life's work, has its limits set by the sort of society we live in -- the tendency to become distracted is not some personal failing or the indicator of someone's weak will, but the accomplishment of a bundle of associated forces that help naturalize certain consumerist preferences. Our susceptibility to boredom is "programmable" through the amount of stuff thrown at us and the amount of stuff a "normal" with-it person is assumed to know about and the various ways cultural ignorance can be exposed. (Hence the useless entertainment quizzes and trivia contests and the like. These seem innocuous enough, but they help calibrate our boredom, suggesting what the breadth and depth of our knowledge should be.) Fortunately, we are not yet "perfected" consumers in this fashion, but -- if you'll forgive a lapse into teleology -- that's the goal a consumerist economy hopes to accomplish. That trend is palpable (though perhaps that is because those resisting it do not register, have no way of communicating their resistance to a hypermediated and hyperaccelerated society without acceding to its terms). If we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and the "helpful" tools to force more and more material through that tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I'm listening to.)

Impelled by a sense that we must streamline our consumption and absorption of information and experiential opportunity (a need fomented by media technology, which both extends marketing's reach and expands the amount of information we can readily acquire), we end up going for quantity over quality, the superficial over the complex, and regard convenience as an abstract good rather than being defined in relation to some other activity. Convenience only speeds our pursuit of more convenience. In this, we come to resemble our society's economic system, which seeks profit for its own sake. To keep up the incidental Marx references: in The Limits to Capital David Harvey points to this relevant passage in Capital:

The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value...becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.

Basically, the economic roles we fulfill -- for most of us, that means "consumer" -- shape the horizon of our subjective aims while serving the underlying function of reproducing the existing system. That means embodying the restless pursuit of novelty, at least to the degree to which we want to be at harmony with the culture we live in. We become consumerism "personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will."

As a result, it's hard to avoid the feeling of missing out on something, no matter how into whatever it is we actually are doing. Alternatives are always filtering in to taunt and tempt us, and we hold our ability to become absorbed, to achieve "flow," in abeyance, waiting for the diversion.

The urge to devise a scorekeeping system for our consumption grows as we seek a way to manage it all and compare what we've done to some standard -- to restore the meaning that's lost with our failure to become absorbed and committed to something. So if there is no way to keep score, then the activity can seem pointless. (A commenter to my previous post made that point about Guitar Hero, adding that this aligns our personal pleasure seeking with corporate notions of total quality management. If there were only some way I could attach some kind of scoreboard to my guitar when practicing scales, maybe I would do it more.) For example, I start to fetishize the number of posts I plow through in a day in my RSS reader; if the unread posts figure reaches 500, I go into orange alert, and start reading faster, skimming more, leaping past the longish posts and the Vox.eu papers and such for BoingBoing and Metafilter links.

Consequently, we end up having to set up defenses against distraction. Writer Cory Doctorow, a BoingBoing.net contributor, offers this compendium of advice for getting writing done. The advice all seems sound if not ultimately somewhat tautological -- the best way to avoid distraction is to not allow yourself to be distracted by bells and whistles on word processors or by instant messaging or the infinite research possibilities online. Such resistance makes sense if we can muster it, but it can feel bad, like stifled curiosity. The problem is that in our culture, curiosity has been co-opted, inverted, made to function as its opposite -- distraction, novelty for its own sake. The growing burden on us is to enforce rigor on our curiosity or exercise the discipline to ignore the would-be forbidden fruit.

How to fight Googlephobia (10 Sept 2008)

Google's apparent control over the information society in which we live (no, not that information society) has been a robust topic lately, with much fretting over whether search engines have permanently damaged the depth and persistence of our thinking. 3 Quarks Daily linked to this article by Geert Lovink about Google's having moved us from the society of the spectacle described by DeBord to a "society of the query." The essay seems to have been dubiously translated into English from another language; otherwise I don't know how anyone familiar with the subject would report Google's motto as "Don't do evil." Anyway, drawing on computer critic Joseph Weitzenbaum, Lovink notes that the advent of a huge information repository requires

the acquisition of a proper education in order to formulate the right query. It's all about how one gets to pose the right question. For this one needs education and expertise. Higher standards of education are not attained by making it easier to publish. Weizenbaum: "The fact that anyone can put anything online does not mean a great deal. Randomly throwing something in achieves just as little as randomly fishing something out." Communication alone will not lead to useful and sustainable knowledge.

But people aren't "throwing" material online "randomly." Such a conception betrays the off-hand elitism of much of this sort of criticism, which detests "amateur" contributions mingling with material made by professionals -- held accountable by the need to make a living -- or some other sort of official who is accountable to the state. In the past, those forms of accountability seemed sufficient to establish "truth", but of course, that truth was merely a matter of convenience and no guarantee of the Truth. The truth conveyed therein simply aligned automatically with the version the state and other powerful institutions wanted to propagate. Now, in post-modernity, such guarantors of truth are distrusted in part because of all the other contesting voices able to publish their versions. This cacophony leaves some nostalgic for the the days when truth could be force-fed to us.

So naturally, "critical thinking" needs to be taught more effectively to teach us how to process all the information of varying levels of quality, and how to frame queries so the information returned to us is useful to us. Knowing how to search effectively is becoming an important component of our human capital, along with the other intangible aspects of the habitus that facilitate success. But in order for critical thinking to develop, there needs to be a space in which it can be exercised -- something akin to a Habermasian public sphere where critical insights can be voiced and tested and, well, critiqued.

The capacity of capitalism to absorb its adversaries is such that, unless all private telephone conversations and Internet traffic became were to become publicly available, it is next to impossible to argue why we still need criticism – in this case of the Internet. Even then, critique would resemble "shareholder democracy" in action. The sensitive issue of privacy would indeed become the catalyst for a wider consciousness about corporate interests, but its participants would be carefully segregated: entry to the shareholding masses is restricted to the middle-classes and above. This only amplifies the need for a lively and diverse public domain in which neither state surveillance nor market interests have a vital say.

The internet is precisely not that. Though anonymous browsing is become more user-friendly, the default mode of internet presence -- it many ways its raison d'etre -- is to have everything we do logged and publicized. And our primary way of navigating is through shallow searching and sorting rather than through deliberate, exhaustive moves prompted by careful critical thought.

Why? Because of the time crunch brought on by so much accessible culture. Digitization, fomented "cynically" by Google's various scanning programs, transforms culture into data, which reduces it to its instrumental value in generating profit. A consequence of the accessibility of all this digital stuff is to pressure us into valuing novelty and making efforts to speed up our consumption (which I try to argue here among other posts). Keeping up with culture becomes a matter of opportunity costs; marketers tout novelty to glamorize and boost consumerism and technology facilitates our quick flitting around from subject to subject, which makes us believe we derive more utility from the practice than from slow reading. It becomes easier and easier to spiral into dilettantism.

So the war against Google is war over time. As Lovink puts it:

What is necessary is a reappropriation of time. At the moment there is simply not enough of it to stroll around like a flaneur. All information, any object or experience has to be instantaneously at hand. Our techno-cultural default is one of temporal intolerance. Our machines register software redundancy with increasing impatience, demanding that we install the update. And we are all too willing to oblige, mobilized by the fear of slower performance. Usability experts measure the fractions of a second in which we decide whether the information on the screen is what we are looking for. If we're dissatisfied, we click further. Serendipity requires a lot of time.

I wonder if that's true though -- sometimes serendipity happens in an instant, particularly when we don't know what we are looking for and might view anything that's kind of cool as destiny. But it does seem to me that reducing our temporal intolerance -- ridding ourselves of data rage -- is key, though it's basically counter to every trend in our culture, all of which encourage convenience and rapid consumption.

Lovink argues that we should stop fighting the inevitable:

Rather than trying to defend ourselves against "information glut", we can approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world.

But in this article, there are no hints as to what those new forms would be. The only thing that comes to mind is the intellectual equivalent of mashups -- link-saturated blog posts like this one, I guess.

Regarding "Channels of Desire" (9 Sept 2008)

A few ideas derived from the Ewen's Channels of Desire, a look at the history of using images to stoke consumerism.

1. The core thesis: "The mass media and the industries of fashion and design, through the production and distribution of imagery, have reconciled widespread vernacular demands for a better life with the general priorities of corporate capitalism." In other words, consumerism becomes the solution to the political threats that might have otherwise arisen from inequality; consumerism deals primarily with images, the goods end up being somewhat secondary to what they are purported to represent -- i.e. the good life.

2. Images can be disseminated widely and cheaply, and technology assures that they are never scarce. Access to such images comes to stand in for actual lived experience of the life represented in the images. Digitization of culture allows more of the world to function as images; in fact, "image" in the Ewens' usage may be reinterpreted to mean "digital culture," which has become as cheap and ubiquitous as images were in earlier decades. We can all possess the symbolic representations of things that prompt satisfying fantasies of the good life, of a richer self with a greater range of reference points through which to express itself. Tallying and cataloguing the images/digital cultural goods we possess becomes a shorthand way of conducting our life. We gather ersatz experiences, and then we struggle to defend these experiences as authentic. The consequence of this may be that we see the presentation of self as image as the essence of life -- life is a project in which we attempt to perfect our user profile.

3. The book hints at the role of consumerism in healing the wounds of hegemonic rationality -- the disenchantment of the world by scientism and industrialism and the cash nexus. The gist is that capitalism tends to make money the measure of all things, eroding the sentimental value of things and traditions. But consumerism works to reenchant the social realm in a manner suitable to capitalism -- reviving magical thinking in a commercial context. (The recent series of posts at 3 Quarks Daily about philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment" explores the fate of enchantment in Western culture at great length.) To reduce the argument to a platitude, shopping functions as secular religion. What we end up with after our shopping pilgrimages are just souvenirs of our spiritual quest, with little inherent usefulness in and of themselves. Of course, these goods have objective, practical functions, but those functions -- usually a matter of helping us get on with everyday life, or enabling us to have some type of experience through their use -- are being degraded or occluded by the spiritual, identity-fashioning aim. So the depth and breadth of our everyday life and lived experience is suppressed in the very acquisition of the goods meant to facilitate it.

4. The Ewens cite soapmaker Benjamin Babbitt as an innovator in the creation of branding. Babbitt figured out that you sell the soap wrapper, and the soap itself is ultimately incidental. "Babbitt -- and other innovators like him -- wrought massive changes in the daily life of Americans. Taking a staple of home production and turning it into an attractive marketable commodity, he established a basic principle of American marketing -- masking the ordinary in a dazzle of magic." This tends to be the thrust of the Ewens' critique throughout, which seems to unduly champion the drudgery of home production and the dignity of what's "ordinary." They acknowledge that Americans may have embraced brands to escape ordinariness, to spend less time making things at home that bear little stamp of individual creativity. Consumerism thrived on the promise of beauty and ease -- the "substance of style." The trouble is that the pendulum swung too far, or worse, the pendulum metaphor doesn't apply, and we have shifted permanently into a world where passive consumption and perpetual self-branding through goods are the default life experiences for most Westerners.

5. A few 1890s-era quotes from Simon Patton, whom the Ewens describe as an "apostle of industrial consumerism," captures the logic behind why consumerism is basically an addiction to images, not things in themselves:

So cheap are many kinds of pictures that they are largely distributed as means of advertisement. Everywhere the homes of the poorest people are full of beautiful objects, many of which have no cost; and when their taste is improved by contact with these objects, others more suited to the new condition can be obtained at a slight increase in cost.

Consumerism hinges on this question: Is it possible to enjoy the implications of the images without their being activated by acquiring the objects advertised? One of the promises of the internet is to keep our supply of images teeming without our being subjected to the slight increases in cost. If the functions of objects are made irrelevant by the enhanced accessibility and functionality of images, will we be able to do away with material possessions altogether? That probably makes no sense, but I'm thinking of how I no longer have a physical music collection; chances are I won't have a book collection once they are digitized and portable electronic-book readers become more prevalent. At that point, the space I inhabit will have about 90% less objects in it. Will there be a counter-trend that emerges to preserve our physical habitat? Will my apartment come to resemble a museum of self even more, when the objects seem to have even less practical necessity? If I got rid of things I don't really use (but only fantasize about being the sort of person who uses), how much would be left?

The other Patton quote: "The standard of life is determined not so much by what a man has to enjoy, as by the rapidity with which he tires of the pleasure. To have a high standard means to enjoy a pleasure intensely and to tire of it quickly." An odd definition of standard of living, in that it's based on opportunities to shop rather than the usefulness of what is owned. If you can consume something faster, it's better, because then you can move on to the next thing. Something that must be understood slowly is less "intense", and bogs consumers down. This sets up the justification of convenience as a virtue -- convenience increases consumption throughput, which allows for more shopping, which is where the real pleasure lies. But isn't increasing consumption throughput a defensive measure -- a desperate and futile attempt to keep up with new things that is then reconceived as pleasurable? Increased throughput only serves the positive interests of manufacturers. The quote also speaks to the consumerist ideology of novelty as a virtue in its own right, and the pressure that places us under to refuse to return to familiar things. The assertion that novel pleasures are "more intense" seems purely ideological. It seems just as valid to argue that familiar pleasures are deeper because our past experience with them enriches the possibilities in them. Novelty and boredom are the key concepts of consumerism; any effort to beat back consumerism must invalidate boredom and repudiate novelty for its own sake. The arbitrary fashion cycle would have to be a fundamental target. We follow the fashion cycle to keep up with what people around us seem to know; we don't want to fall behind and into irrelevance. But what pleasure is to be had in the cycle itself? It just imputes boredom to a populace and then offers its arbitrary variations as the cure. But people aren't bored; they are worried boring others by being conversant in what's happening now.

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 birth of the wrongness (18 August 2008)

I'm still thinking about wrongness, purposeful attempts to alienate an audience through a kind of puerile repetition or offensiveness that on its face contains no politically subversive content. Pop music has been a fertile ground for breeding wrongness, as PopMatters' recent list of Detours, unlikely albums by established artists, makes plain. Wrongness may be defined as the attempt to reject aesthetically or repudiate the constraints of popularity after the compromises to achieve it have already been made. (Think Metal Machine Music or Jim Morrison's Miami performance on March 1, 1969.) Since it is so self-referential, it tends to be politically and artistically sterile. The appeal of such wrongness is limited mainly to connoisseurs of disillusionment and cynicism, and more important, to those "true fans" of the contemptuous artists. By sticking with performers no matter how much hatred they direct at their audiences, these fans prove they are not dilettantes.

But the 1990s may have been the heyday for wrongness, as college rock became indie rock, which became alternative, which became profitably embedded in the established mainstream of pop genres. Efforts to preserve indie credibility and maintain integrity in the face of commercial success were played out at the aesthetic level at the very moment when what had first been seized upon as the sign of integrity -- grunge -- became a highly marketable and easily duplicated commodity. Elaborate simulacrums of lo-fi ineptitude became a calling card in alternative rock and graphic design. Grunge could connote integrity and/or authenticity without its purveyors needing to have any. But, of course, that has been true of many up-and-coming commercial forms emerging from various subcultures. What was interesting about the 1990s was that authenticity for the first time became the main appeal of the new style, its basic substance and message, the organizing principle for all its hallmarks. Hip-hop moved in the same direction, fetishizing authenticity as an end in itself rather than serving as an ex post facto description of a style that was ultimately "about" something else.

When grunginess became a mainstream cliche, something more heinous was necessary to demonstrate how alternative you meant to be. Hence, wrongness, or being "brown" as '90s alternative rock band Ween called it. Around the time the band made the quintessentially "wrong" move of putting out a straight contemporary-country record replete with the genre's cliches and lyrics full of derogatory stereotypes -- all the while insisting they were fully in earnest -- it would play shows featuring limit-testing 20-minute versions of b-side "Vallejo" and "Poop Ship Destroyer," an epic tribute to brownness. These were the antithesis of hippie jams (though Ween ironically would later become embraced by the jam-band scene), meant not to be expansive and pleasing to drug-altered minds, but to be abrasively tedious and mind-numbing, forcing observers to question when, if ever, it will end, and cleasing the mind of all remembered pleasures in the show, perhaps so the band could start fresh afterwards, trying to re-earn the audience's trust and approval. In this was an analogue to all indie bands' predicaments, having full knowledge of their own selling out and wondering if it were possible to regain integrity somehow, through some purifying ritual of awfulness.

Anyway, with the Family Guy's success, it may be that wrongness of this sort is in the process of going the way of grunge. What will the new oppositional aesthetic be now that wrongness and purposeful annoyance is losing its ability to repel?

The porn supply (15 Feb 2007)

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen wonders why it's profitable to sell new porn when there's such a huge amount already in circulation. " I don't understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?" He suggests that it might be "that buying the material yields more pleasure than 'using' it."

I had a similar thought in this essay, where I argue that pornography makes sex more like shopping and thus aligns the pleasures it gives closer to those we are acclimated to by consumer society, namely convenience and ownership as ends rather than means. Consumer society seems to encourage us to collect experiences rather than simply experience them; continually collecting porn rather than having sex or even masturbating seems symptomatic of this. The moment of pleasure is moved from the point of experience to the point of purchase; the pleasure is change from a sensual one to a conceptual one based on convenience and security (a stockpile of potential experiences in your porn heap defends you from the fear of exhausting desire.)

At the Economist's blog, Megan McArdle (presumably) suspects the answer to Cowen's porn paradox "must be some evolutionary imperative towards novelty," and asks, "Why do listeners demand such a steady flow of new music, almost all of it inferior to, say, Beethoven's 9th?" What's interesting is the implicit connection between music and porn: both are digital-media products widely and controversially distributed on the Internet. Both track, in their way, trends in fashion. Both tend to be male preoccupations -- especially in terms of building collections. Is recorded music analogous to the commodified desire of pornography -- is recorded music to performance what looking at porn is to sex? Could the impulse to continue to acquire both stem from the same impulse, the same wish to pin down and master the excitement (in the specific sensuality and in the zeitgeist changes they record) each are able to arouse, control it and domesticate it by turning it from an experience into a possession in a ritual that must be continually reenacted? It may be that we enjoy this ritual (albeit in a kind of defensive, self-protective way) almost as much as we'd enjoy direct experience of music or sexual desire.

Yes, porn makes available for direct consumption and enjoyment all sorts of patriarchal prerogatives, but I want to put that analysis on hold for a moment to make a different point about the impulse to collect. As the experience of accumulating music and porn becomes easier (as it becomes, in more and more cases, free), the moment of reassurance and mastery seems to come not at the moment of purchase but the moment of classification, when that digital file is given its appropriate place, is understood and processed and stored in some theoretically and permanently accessible way. Digital reproduction and distribution are making classification more important than ownership -- tagging is all-important, very Web 2.0. We master an unlimited supply by asserting control over it, capturing it, with the unique taxonomies we generate. Novelty becomes an opportunity for taxonomy.

I think this explains the vast amount of music on my years-old iPod that I've never listened to once. In some significant way, the moment I drop a song on the playlist has supplanted the moment of listening to it -- at that moment I am able to experience the satisfaction of the song without having to spend all that time actually listening to it. I manipulate it in a more direct and convenient way that provides me a feeling of mastery, which is what I may be looking for rather than sensual experience. The same thing seems to lurk behind porn blogs, where people curate their porn collections for public view. Something about the impulse to organize one's fetishes has itself become fetishized. And fetishes, in general, are about containing anxiety rather than permitting open experience.

The fear that beauty (in music, in another body) inspires is that it will be lost to us; it summons an intolerable awareness of its own loss. Our culture (and not, I would argue evolution -- the need for novelty seems contingent on what society can promise and provide) prompts us to defend ourselves against this anxiety by accumulating more and more of the stuff, and we think with technology we can realize the dream of perpetual availability. (This plays into the interpretation of porn as primarily being a fantasy of perpetual female availability, i.e. of women's objecthood, of her significance being regarded as received rather than self-generated.)