Feedback Loops and Self-Consciousness (7 July 2011)

I tend to view reflexivity as a burden, the cost one pays for the broader freedom to shape one's own destiny that modern life has brought to people in wealthy countries. Modernity has brought mediation and mobility and a certain amount of anonymity that lets us become what we want to be, but determining what that is requires a paradoxical sort of self-knowledge -- taking active steps to become what one is supposed to inherently be. This condition is what sociologists like Giddens call ontological insecurity. I'm ceaselessly arguing that technological developments exacerbate this condition while pretending to ameliorate it, mainly because capitalism works better with insecure subjects.

So I'm pretty skeptical of the "quantified self" movement and other efforts to increase the amount of self-knowledge we are burdened with at any given moment. These seem to fundamentally split us, imposing mind/body problems onto us technologically. And they also seem to become self-surveillance, with the data collected on oneself being made available to outside parties for purposes of social control.

I am not persuaded to think otherwise by this Wired article by Thomas Goetz praising the magic power of feedback loops, a banal commonplace idea that is treated here like its some disruptive innovation. Yes, when people are given information about themselves in real time, they will generally change their behavior. In other words self-monitoring changes the self. The observer effect holds for self-awareness. But I'm not sure the resulting changes can be regarded as automatically beneficial; that seems like naive positivism to me. And I couldn't get past my sense that the article existed ultimately to hype a bunch of tech companies and their great gifts to the world, smart meters for the self: "The feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades." At points, Goetz's rhetoric is breathless, as when he discusses David Rose, founder of a company that makes devices that get users to take medicine.

Borrowing a concept from cognitive psychology called pre-attentive processing, Rose aims for a sweet spot between these extremes, where the information is delivered unobtrusively but noticeably. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical.

Yes, very magical when technology can program us unobtrusively. Take away the benevolent aim of these particular devices and what's left is design as propaganda. How enchanting.

Goetz buys the argument that feedback loops cater to humans' innate striving and are an expression of evolution at work rather than the extension of a regime of quantification and data generation.

Evolution itself, after all, is a feedback loop, albeit one so elongated as to be imperceptible by an individual. Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it’s something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford’s Bandura put it, “People are proactive, aspiring organisms.” Feedback taps into those aspirations.

All these propositions seem ideological to me: that learning is a matter of self-monitoring, that success must be measured to be valid, that humans inherently crave confirmation of individual status, that feedback taps pre-existing aspirations rather than inculcating them. These propositions support the overriding idea that self-regulation must be put in service of facilitating competition -- the capitalist way, and the essence of the form of subjectivity assumed by neoliberalism. The meaning of our existence is to be calculated on life's great balance sheet, with feedback loops allowing us to perform the requisite accounting duties. At the same time, feedback implicitly makes us personally responsible in real time for the performance being measured. The gadgets that give us real-time feedback are part of the neoliberal imperative to shift risk on to the individual, making concrete the idea that you alone are responsible for how society is failing you. It's right there in the numbers that you need to try harder.

All of this is to say that feedback loops are mechanisms of social control that are all the more effective as they masquerade as self-regulation; they are not liberating forces bequeathed by magic technology firms to help us improve ourselves according to some transcendent goal for ourselves that we devise.

The Accursed Share of Self (11 March 2011)

The most recent issue of the journal Mediations has an interview with Marxist political theorist Paolo Virno, who wrote a short and surprisingly accessible book called A Grammar of the Multitude, which explores the ramifications of "post-Fordist" labor conditions -- that is to say, non-factory employment that emphasizes worker cooperation and flexibility and can involve the production of immaterial goods -- brands, services, experiences, entertainment. (Hence this sort of work is sometimes called "immaterial labor," though that ambiguity of the word immaterial can throw people off.)

Unlike the book, the interview is somewhat forbidding. I'm going to hazard a guess that this interview was not conducted face to face, with such questions as these being asked aloud:

In the contemporary “creative industry,” collective work often takes the paradigmatic form of “brainstorming.” It consists of the discussion and production of both ideas and solutions, even if a considerable part of them are rejected after critical examination, though this work sometimes opens the door for unexpected innovations. In the conditions of Fordism, massive collectivities — organized through a strict disciplinary division of labor — produced the well-known effect of the multiplication of separate productive forces of workers (“the whole is more than the sum of its parts”). Maybe it would be possible to make a (disputable) assumption: under the conditions of post-Fordism, collective work can be organized through “subtraction” when the result of the work is inferior to the sum of the collective effort. This becomes a sort of exception, an unexpected innovation (“the whole is less than the sum of the parts”). On the other hand, if not considered in terms of products, such collective work produces a feeling of strong subjectivity and strength, valorizing each member of the collective. What is your opinion? Would it be possible to connect this “subtractive” mode of functioning with the disappearance of a measure for work in contemporary production?

Stripped of some of the verbiage, there's an interesting point in there, namely, that unlike assembly lines, which paradigmatically maximizes the minimum contribution from workers to make a sophisticated product, creative-class-type work encourages lots of brainstorming, much of which is discarded. The end product is less the than total mental energy poured into it. (This immediately reminds me of when magazine interns are asked to draft huge lists of ideas for various sections only to have most of them summarily rejected, or when dozens of headline ideas are tossed out over the course of interminable meetings.)

Virno's response to this idea is also interesting. He suggests that collective effort doesn't vanish so much as linger and threaten to spoil. It becomes a sort of accursed share that must somehow be expended, or rechanneled.

Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available.... Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action. Also, here we need to bear in mind an essential ambivalence: the same phenomenon can become both a danger and a salvation. The copiousness of collective intelligence is, altogether, heimlich — familiar and propitious — and unheimlich — disturbing and extraneous.

One can see in that response the optimistic view of post-Fordism, the opportunities this cooperative energy represents. But I am more familiar, I guess, with the detriments -- the divisive competitiveness, the ambition gone awry, the depression and defeatedness. I associate most of those negative ramifications with the narcissistic implications of post-Fordism -- the way we are encouraged to position ourselves as personal brands in order to succeed in a decentralized workplace that seeks to reward merit over longevity and loyalty; the way the effort we put into shaping our identity becomes a productive economic force; the way commanding and brokering attention begins to justify any means necessary; the way we are taught to regard our consumption as a mode of symbolic production, making us believe our consumer tastes are highly meaningful and in some ways zero-sum. I sometimes end up feeling that I need certain bands to fail in order to vindicate my indifference; I need certain writers to publish mediocre work because I haven't aligned with their brand. I end up being threatened by people when they seem smart, which makes no sense at all, since I generally want to learn things from the people I talk to or whose work I read.

In short, there is a killing reflexivity, an endless recursiveness, to our behavior that seems to stem from post-Fordism, or late capitalism, or the New Capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. Virno notes the ways this reflexivity manifests itself in impossible commands like: I order you to be spontaneous. He writes, "In our present time, the labor force enriches the capital only if it takes part in a form of social cooperation that is wider than the one presupposed by the factory or the office. In post-Fordism, the efficient worker includes — in the execution of his own labor — attitudes, competences, wisdoms, tastes and inclinations matured somewhere else, outside that time specifically dedicated to the production of goods." Part of social cooperation, I think, is carework and affective labor -- the sort of nonmarket nourishing that we all need to reproduce as a species and not just kill ourselves. But arguably, much of the rest of that effort that we spend outside the workplace is spent on self-fashioning -- on presenting a winning identity to our friends, who are now available to us in theory as a potential audience at all times. We engage in a form of "social cooperation" by sharing through social media, often in order to establish our personal brands and test their reach, measure their equity. (Virno's word for what I call the personal brand is virtuoso -- which admittedly gives it a more positive spin, evoking an unalienated, nonprofessional mastery of something.) Then that anxiety, and the fruit of participating in those social networks, are brought to bear on the brainstorming sessions during official work hours; in effect, then, one is always working, because successful job performance depends on developing the right sort of knowledge and connections throughout the whole of one's personal life. You have to be able to leverage not only the office watercooler talk but the similar ambient information one absorbs outside work. This qualifies you to be a Gladwellian influencer, a certified creative-class meaning-maker, a hipster.

We are always aware of ourselves as a brand, and we have to nourish its equity with entrepreneurial thinking -- how can I get it out there better, and position it properly and make the right sorts of alliances to strengthen the core message I am trying to convey? In some ways this beats working as we traditionally think of it -- working for the Man, doing our deskilled and meaningless task on the endless assembly line of existence. Post-Fordism extends the opportunity to make all our work seem more integrated with the great project of self-actualization, of expressing ourselves more fully.

But this self-awareness is the accursed share as well -- the leftover from the competitive workplace-brainstorming sessions, that status-hierarchy battles, the arguments over what music and which movies suck, the experience of checking Facebook and feeling outclassed by what your friends have shared, and so on. It all conjures a certain kind of identity into being, one that is defined by its inadequacy. I suppose Lacanian-leaning types would argue that this is always already inevitably the case, that the self should be constructed around a lack, around desire. But that seems to let the relations of production off the hook, as well as the cultural forces that work to snuff out the optimism that Virno can detect in these forms of cooperation. The self-interested acquisitiveness and insatiability that capitalism encourages are posited as natural conditions, as inescapable human nature, and are allowed to pervert the other side of human nature -- our tendency to get along with one another and combine to achieve things. Our collaborative nature is expropriated, we regard it ourselves as weakness unless we can turn it to account and make it personally advantageous to ourselves alone. Capitalism prompts us to reject the possibility of collective identity -- what Virno talks about here in terms of "a multitude of singularities," of individuality emerging through collectivity -- for something atomized and uncompromisingly individualistic, that relies on forms of recognition that don't rely on interaction with other people, things like money and abstract status.

Hence the structure of Facebook, the exemplary staging ground for post-Fordist subjectivity. It allows for participation in social networks -- it lets us contribute to the "general intellect" or the "social brain" -- but always at our convenience, without messy synchronous interactions with other people, which might compromise our brand or upset our entrepreneurial focus, and always as a strictly discrete identity (as a personal brand) whose value is independently measured and capable of being brokered by and to parties outside the network. At work, we call those parties who capitalize on the value of our sociality and personal creativity our bosses, yet with online social media, our new bosses seem to fade into the background. The revolutionary transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation that the economy increasingly depends upon ends up being neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism.

Anyway, that's the gist of what I would argue at the Post/Autonomia conference, if the organizers end up accepting my paper.

When the algorithms ignore you (draft) (1 Nov 2010)

For a long time, well past the point of reasonability, I was one of those people who didn't want a cell phone. I romanticized the idea of disappearing completely as technology left me behind and I could assume a "pure" form of unmediated existence. I professed a fear of being too easily reachable. But more likely I was afraid that carrying a phone around would provide continual proof that in fact no one wanted to reach me, that I had already disappeared and didn't even know it.

But what I harped on most was my fear of having to ignore certain calls and have the person who called assuming that I was choosing to ignore them. Maybe they would trust that I have a good reason; maybe they would think, like I often do, that I am self-centered jerk. But the plausible and conveniently neutral explanation that I am not home would no longer apply, would no longer be at the ready to mitigate the missed connection.

Inevitably, I thought, this would degrade my moral obligation to reciprocate with friends in order to sustain for myself the idea that they actually are friends. The burden of reciprocation becomes too great: Because we are expected to carry around phones, it's easy to presume that by default, the conversational channel is always open and that when your call is not taken, it's as if the person you were trying to talk to had turned their back on you mid-sentence. A new burden emerges: an obligation to explicitly redraw the boundaries of availability. Being "not at home" becomes a state of mind, a choice that brings forward any feelings of self-importance that might otherwise lie dormant.

It would seem natural enough to want to associate availability to presence, but thanks to technology, we can be virtually present yet dispositionally unavailable. This conundrum evokes those scenes in 19th century novels when the card of hopeful drawing-room visitor is sent up, and the servant returns to say that no one is in, even though everyone knows that they are. Etiquette deems this a frank, acceptable lie, a recoding that blunts the truth that one person has refused to speak to another.

I have always been uncomfortable with that, probably because I too readily imagine myself being refused. It seemed to me that cell-phone technology was muddling social signals, putting both too much and too little ego at stake in the effort to communicate. To restore clarity, I thought it might be morally useful for everyone to unambiguously experience the full weight of their refusing, and then maybe they would do less of it. (I believed somewhat naively that no one thrived on the capricious power to reject.) Naturally I overlooked how much refusing I do. When I didn't have a cell phone, I operated under the illusion that my various refusals were disguised by the "not at home" fiction; now I am in the position of having to feel like one of those drawing-room snobs every time I ignore a cell-phone call. But I don't want to be the snob, I protest to myself -- the snobs are supposed to be picking on me. I'm the underdog! I'm the underdog!

If anything, social media have made our responsibilities toward those friends trying to reach us even murkier. Some of the success of those platforms must be attributable to how they ease the pain of refusing people. When you are socializing in a broadcast medium, you don't have to refuse anyone. To accept a friend request on Facebook, for instance, sends out a self-satisfying burst of good will and burdens us very little; at worst, we may have to defriend the person later, an invisible action that the defriended may never notice. The awkwardness of building cliques is displaced to the medium and becomes part of the platform's functionality, how it allows you to regroup friends and filter the results of their gross social product online.

And increasingly, Facebook is performing the social filtering for us, absolving us of the guilt implicit in that as well. Social media structures communication between friends so that the responsibility for listening -- inescapably built into earlier mediums that structured talk between friends as person-to-person -- is modulated into a vaguer injunction to respond if and when you feel like it. Because status updates and the like are not addressed to anyone specific, they don't generate an obligation in anyone specific to pay attention. The messages instead compete in an attention marketplace that Facebook's interface creates and moderates, in which the currency is comments and "likes" and the other click-driven responses that the company can measure and process algorithmically. The results of that process -- which is explored in this Daily Beast article by Thomas E. Weber -- determine which messages will be featured prominently in friends' newsfeeds, and which ones will be suppressed.

The algorithms that Facebook uses to generate the newsfeed it presents to users do a lot of pre-emptive refusal for us, filtering out materials it has determined will be less compelling to us (or someone in our friend pool or who is statistically similar to us, at least). But its sense of our interests is only one aspect of its filtering criteria. MORE HERE Weber points out that the "most recent" updates are not simply the most recent ones, and that posts that others have responded to are more likely to show up in news feeds, and so forth. He advises that you "try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items" if you want to show up in your friends' newsfeeds more regularly. Facebook apparently priortizes updates that prompt "user engagement" (links requiring click through) over ones that are just thoughts or ideas.

In short, Facebook filters what we are saying for its won purposes of keeping people logged in and generating data trails it can use. So what?

For average users, cracking the Facebook code is something of a fun puzzle. But for marketers trying to tap Facebook—or individuals who see the service as a way to promote themselves—understanding how content propagates through the system is anything but a game.

But the deeper danger that Weber glosses over here is that Facebook may be systematically obliterating the distinction he maintains between average users and marketers. It makes friendship into a game of self-promotion, a struggle to get noticed, for everyone brought into its sphere.

Basically on Facebook, our communication is assessed like online advertising -- how many click-throughs did it inspire? Presumably this will prompt us to make what we say on Facebook sound like advertising discourse. That in turn furthers the sense that on Facebook and other social media, we are not "friends" so much as competing personal brands, and that the media themselves encourage that kind of identity formation. After all, the way we talk about ourselves is to a large degree who we think we are. Self-expression is insufficient for sustaining friendship in the realm of Facebook; you need to offer actionable communiques, you need to be selling something, and you need the numbers on your side to make an impact.

In a sense, this is always how markets function; they depersonalize exchange and reduce transaction costs, thereby increasing the number of exchanges that occur. Accordingly, the volume of friend communication was consume thanks to Facebook has increased exponentially, but we have next to no ethical obligation with regard to any of it -- that's understood by all parties entering into Facebook's market for friendly discourse. That market works like any other successfully efficient one. But what has radically changed is the nature of friendship, which once upon a time was something intended specifically as a bulwark against depersonalization, against market logic. But twith Facebook, the consumerist allure of "more, faster" has fused with a closely related moral cowardice about rejecting people to drive us en masse to bring the efficiencies of commercialization right into the heart of our social lives.


When the algorithms ignore you

Personal information markets and anonymity (18 Oct 2010)

I was reminded by the Generation Bubble twitter feed (@GenBub_tweed; incidentally, mine is @marginalutility, trying to make it worthwhile/getting sucked in to it) of this WSJ article from July, which made a bit of stink at the time but which I was too dismayed and apathetic to address then. It's a story about how companies surreptitiously archive our online behavior, use it to profile us, and then sell it along to marketers looking to target pitches. That's not really news, although most of us probably unconsciously block out that information in order to continue to use the internet comfortably. One of these companies is Lotame:

Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person's name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. [A person's tastes] can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of "50 First Dates").
"We can segment it all the way down to one person," says Eric Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.

I guess at that point, withholding your name doesn't really matter; your name and your profile are the same for all intents and purposes. The ad targeted for you reaches you and only you.

"It is a sea change in the way the industry works," says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. "Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages."

Isn't the pretense of anonymity always already violated? When everything about you is shared but your specific name, is your privacy protected in any meaningful way, especially when that aggregate of preferences can be used to target you? There may be no operative distinction between real name and user ID that holds up. This is part of what makes the recent news that Facebook apps leak user IDs so troubling and also so besides the point. That the entity being sold online on personal information markets is not your actual name but a string of digits is somewhat irrelevant, particularly since your name is the least important piece of information about you to marketers.

I feel like I am struggling to get at what I mean, so I apologize for the redundancy: But if all the contextual information we generate can allow us to be targeted quite specifically, what difference does our name not being attached make? We can still effectively be singled out for our deeds and preferences if need be.

"Profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months," the July article reports. We can be traded precisely because we have been anonymized, abstracted, because our name doesn't mitigate the impact of the data. Our name is the one thing about us that means nothing.

"Engagement Ads" on Facebook (28 Sept 2010)

Brad Stone's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Facebook's advertising strategies gets at several different ways that marketing through social media is nefarious. It's moving beyond the already creepy technique of silently scanning your data trail (far more intimate, presumably, in the Facebook realm) and presenting you with ads that it predicts will be relevant to you. Since it has so much more data on you, it can refine its target on you, hit you square between the eyes.

Facebook takes targeting even further. If you recently got engaged and updated your Facebook status to reflect it, you might start seeing ads from jewelers in your hometown. They've likely used Facebook's automated ad system to target recently engaged couples living in the area. If your profile mentions your appreciation for old-school hip-hop, the right local wedding DJ can find you, too.

Those who are looking to be sold to may enjoy this experience, even though giving in to predictive marketing essentially means closing off certain horizons while having them superficially broadened. If you accept that identity has become a matter of consumer practices and what niche we find ourselves in, then you have to accept the conclusion that the data trail we create online can hem us in and trap us, restricting our ability to deniche-ify ourselves. I can imagine a future service that "likes" a bunch of random things and browses through a bunch of random sites on our behalf to throw off the ad targeting -- in the same way those tags you can put in your Gmail email (words like murder and funeral) can shut down the contextual ads. (One could theoretically browse in "private" mode and eschew social media, but then one risks becoming an outcast. All those people who send out invites to things only through Facebook are dragging all their friends into the marketing cesspool, and normalizing the whole sordid process.) But right now, our past history becomes inescapable, shaping the contours of the online experience we can have, which more and more shapes the kind of life experience we can have generally, limiting what we know about, what we do and how we are seen and what we accomplish.

But it gets even more depressing than that. Facebook wants its ad system work (which, by the way, you cannot opt out of no matter how you jigger its byzantine privacy settings) by making one's friends seem like the marketers rather than the companies buying the ad space.

[Facebook] talks up more ephemeral measures such as recall and brand recognition, which it argues can be boosted by social activity that occurs around an ad. Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

I have a tendency to "share" things in Google Reader when they seem provocative to me, and I suppose that is not that different from "liking" a Nike ad in Facebook. By sharing those posts I think I am trying to extenuate or complicate or further arguments I have written about before that I think anyone who bothers to follow my shared items would also be interested in. But I also have this uncharitable suspicion that people, including me, "like" and "share" things to publicize their gesture of liking and score some general recognition for their good taste. To some degree, they are promoting themselves through these likable things rather than the things in question. This is how social media works to exploit our identity-making process, to extract productive labor out of our ontological insecurity in ways never before possible. The more we construct ourselves in social media (a move becoming more and more necessary), the more we have to rely on liking and sharing as the building blocks of the self, and these building blocks automatically becoming marketing gestures. And the fact that everyone knows they are marketing gestures reflects back on the self we build, commercializing it, opening up to the sort of judgment we reserve for corporations or other strictly profit-seeking entities. That's another way of saying that making a self in social media instrumentalizes it to an unprecedented degree.

Social media generally diminishes what it means to belong to a community. "Likes" for instance are effort-free gestures of faux reciprocity, casually recognizing someone else's sharing, which itself is often automated by the medium itself. As Jodi Dean points out in this post, social networks are "community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when you've moved on!)." Facebook is essentially a "consumer space" where the contacts between people are engineered to be convenient and more or less friction free, and without that friction, there is no true possibility of building solidarity or political engagement -- a point Malcolm Gladwell makes in this New Yorker piece. He argues that the "weak ties" of social media are not conducive to activist commitment, which requires the strong ties of true intimacy. Gladwell:

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

The increasingly commercial and instrumental world of social networks is not likely to inspire you to die for a cause; you won't risk a police beating in hopes that someone will "like" your sacrifice. And someone who "likes" a Nike ad as well as a protest march is unlikely to inspire to many people either. The "like" draws a demeaning and diminishing equivalence between different orders of experience. This is one of Facebook's chief accomplishments, to reduce all sorts of different aspects of social life to a uniform pap that can be liked or unliked. This makes participation trivial enough that people will market for companies for free, because there's an outside chance someone will think they are cooler for doing it. And participation of this sort seems so ephemeral that it does not dent one's social capital at all; it doesn't cost anything. Social media, as Gladwell points out, offers a

form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Activism on social media is indistinguishable from self-promotion and congratulatory participation at a distance. It lowers the bar for that feeling of doing something about some sort of injustice. We all can feel like we're making a difference without looking away from our phone. Individual agency gets supplanted by a collective relay of buck-passing referrals until someone else at some point actually does something about it.

But what depresses me most of all about Facebook's "engagement ads" is how they threaten to shift the modus operandi of advertising practice generally.

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

The ads are meant to be no different than your friend's status updates -- it's all just social-media content. So there is no separation between the edit and ad sides, as they say in the magazine-publishing business -- no suspicion that there is any conflict of interest or pretense of neutrality or objectivity. So to extent what may be a useless metaphor, our identity, as it's constructed in social media, is not "pure edit" content, it's not objective but can be seen as having been co-opted by the advertising it sponsors. The self consists of the same "content" as the ads; there's no wall between the self doing the "liking" and the stuff "liked". Not surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg strongly endorses this approach:

Zuckerberg says that ads, just like videos and news links, make it into the main stream of activity only when friends want to share them. "The most important thing for ads is that they work in the same way as everything else on the site," he says.

In other words, ads should by design be indistinguishable from non-ad content; that is, all content should be subject to the suspicion that it is an ad; that is, everything is an ad and why should that even bother you? It's the attention economy, and everything you do is just a ploy for "earning" more attention. Nothing can be for its own sake anymore. Why waste a good marketing opportunity, a chance for engagement? What else are friends for if not to leverage them?

Pattern recognition in social media (21 Sept 2010)

Esther Dyson makes some scary points in this article touting a new service called Digital Mirror, which analyzes your online activity and provides reports about your patterns of interaction -- who you talk to, how you talk to them, who you avoid, who avoids you, etc. I'm sure all the data-driven, self-obsessed freaks out there are thrilled, but what's scary to me is the fact that this kind of analytical surveillance is already becoming customary in social networks. Dyson writes:

Facebook and other social tools operate under the covers: Facebook notices which friends you interact with and whose photos you comment on in order to select the items in your NewsFeed or the ads you see. But Facebook does not show that information to you. Digital Mirror does.
Within a few years, this kind of transparency will probably be commonplace, both from Facebook and from ad networks and behavioral targeters trying to derive information about your likely purchases. But right now, only Digital Mirror is one of the few to give you the ability to do the same for yourself.

How perfectly awful is that. Rather than open our horizons, our own activity online serves to close them off, thanks to these "services" operating in the background. We think we are indulging our curiosity but we are merely blueprinting our own personal prison, and helping sketch the floor plan for the cells of our friends. At least all the ads we'll see while we are trapped there will be relevant.

Gmail's Priority Inbox (31 Aug 2010)

I suppose it's a measure of my social insignificance that I don't get very many emails to my personal account in a day -- no more than dozen or so tops, and a few of those are from automated mailing lists. I have never had much trouble keeping up with that influx. So I can't say that the priority inbox feature that Google is rolling out -- described here by Slate's Farhad Manjoo -- is targeted at me. But it bothers me nonetheless, and for the usual reasons. They want to assume responsibility for some of our tedious decision-making tasks so as to better develop a simulacrum of our thinking processes, to anticipate what we want as an intermediary step to knowing better how to dictate our desires.

Google proposes to collect information about your priorities so that it can sort your mail for you before you see it and perhaps even ensure that some emails deemed unworthy of you never offend your eyes, much the way most spam is effectively banished to junk folders. Manjoo describes how it is supposed to work:

Priority Inbox looks for signals that a message is especially valuable. Among other things, it analyzes your experience with a particular sender—is a message from someone whose mail you tend to open and reply to? Was the e-mail sent only to you, or was it part of an e-mail list? Did the message contain keywords that have proved interesting to you in the past? If a message makes the threshold for importance, Gmail marks it with a small yellow tag. These messages will appear at the top of your inbox, above the rest of your mail.

That seems semi-innocuous, automating a process you can set up manually with Gmail's existing filtering features. What makes this whole thing sinister is this: Manjoo notes that "Priority Inbox promises to get better the more I use it. Google has added two buttons that let you train the system—you press one button to mark a message as important, and another to mark it unimportant." To call it "training the system" is to put a benign aspect on what's really the collection of highly intimate personal data about your social life and encoding in a way that makes it immediately operational. It's in effect a Google initiative to get a hold of some of the "social graph" data Facebook is designed to collect and own -- who cares about who, what, when, and why. Facebook spits out its status update feed on the basis of such information and is always refining it through its monitoring of our interactions with the site. No doubt Google would like to offer future marketers something similar in terms of proof-of-concept: "See, we can mimic their own decision making so well that they accept it as their own!"

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.

RSS feed blues (30 July 2010)

I have a yo-yo relationship with my RSS feed. Sometimes I am on top of the flow and it all seems very generative, the ideas the reading stir in me seem proportional to my capacity to think them through. But more often, I fall behind the pace of news I have set for myself, and the entries pile up in my Google Reader, and I start to become increasingly anxious. I feel as though I am not only falling behind in my reading, but with the times themselves, that the rising number of unread posts is an index to how irrelevant I've become.

But that number is also an index of my ability to focus -- the higher it is, the more successful I have been at focusing on something more appropriately limited. I've been working on something "real." I've been reading and researching, not consuming.

Sometimes when the number gets high I respond by barreling through as many as I can in one sitting, usually late at night, and usually far beyond the point at which I can think about anything I'm reading with any kind of clarity, but instead experience it all en masse as proof that I don't know anything, everyone else knows more than I do, and wouldn't I be better off if I stopped trying to integrate and assimilate all this knowledge and all these conversations going on over my head once and for all? What's the point of drilling down to zero new items other than an arbitrary sense of accomplishment with no substance to it? The RSS reader makes my reading into a metered sprint to nowhere.

It becomes paralyzing, the overload. What makes me think I have something important to say, relative to all this that is already being said? What am I trying to learn anyway? What productive purpose is all of this serving? The ideas in the posts, which crop up somewhat randomly, pull me in dozens of different directions, each of which would require hours if not days to properly follow up on to the point where I could credibly respond. All the posts hit me less with their content but instead as tiny proofs of the focus of these other writers I respect, who somehow manage to evade the traps I am stuck in -- the frenzied dilettantism, the arrogance to believe I can keep up with all these different disciplines. Who do I think I am, James Franco?

I would likely benefit from a better set of filters that do the focusing for me, but what then? What sort of intellectual autonomy do I have left (presuming I have any to begin with) once I've outsourced my ability to stay focused?

Gift Glut (18 May 2010)

Rob Walker's most recent Consumed column is about the digital gift economy: "Surely it’s the case that never before have so many creators offered so much to so many for $0. A result, in effect, is a gift glut." The surfeit of free cultural product and the free labor that produces it has proved economically disruptive, as anyone who works in consumer magazines can tell you. It seems to promise a gift economy of sorts in which a greater proportion of socially necessary labor will be done voluntarily and not under the direction of bosses. The fruits of the labor could be exchanged through distribution channels largely moderated online, without mediation by middlemen and other extortionists. There would be less alienation and exploitation, since people would be worked when they wanted, more often doing what they wanted to do.

But one of the problems with that utopian vision is that we want to have our work specifically recognized and appreciated more when we are giving it away than when it is extracted from us. Even in a gift economy, all the freely offered, unpriced material gets valued, not by a dollar amount but by the measure of attention it receives. "There is also a great deal of creative expression out there," Walker notes, "that ... qualifies as an unwanted gift: the unlinked-to blog post, the unliked Facebook page, the unfavorited Flickr photo, the unwatched YouTube video, the unretweeted link and all the other expressions that are ignored or overlooked or simply not rewarded with positive feedback." These unwanted gifts are easy enough for consumers to filter out, but the producers have lost something more than their time and effort -- there is negative utility in being ignored and implicitly rejected.

Markets are good at making sure that labor, even if it is forced and joyless, is not simply wasted. That is to say, getting paid supplies a kind of depersonalized recognition for our effort. Whereas giving an unwanted gift is a personal failure, a rebuke to one's identity that is potentially worse than the depredations of wage slavery.

Gifts are supposed to transcend market relations and establish instead a personal relation through the exchange process. The gift is ideally elevated beyond judgment and becomes a qualitative expression of a reciprocal relation. It's the thought that counts, as the cliche has it. But the online aspect of the nascent gift economy undermines that: Walker points out that "the newer and more accessible economy of sharing means that practically everything is subject to some kind of rating or ranking, all the time."

In The Gift anthropologist Marcel Mauss gave some examples of gift-giving potlatches that culminate in the sheer destruction of value in obligatory ritualized sacrifices: "Sometimes there is no question of receiving return; one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back."

I wonder if something like that happens in social media, where the possibility of reciprocation is destroyed by a surfeit of competitive sharing. Because of the ubiquitous ranking possibilities, gift-giving online can escalate into the destructive orgy of the competitive potlatch, in which participants try to outgive everyone else into submission in order to secure a particular identity. On social media, the potlatch takes the form of outtweeting and outsharing the field, overloading the network with fragments of oneself as to seek a ranking. The result is that gifts proffered through social media stop seeming like gifts at all. They become referendums on our identity as we are configuring it in that particular instant. The gifts no longer seem reciprocal; they seem narcissistic. Even though we don't do it for money, we are still back to producing content, not giving.

But the network is now also supposed to be the space in which non-competitive gifts are to be exchanged. The potlatch preening -- the produced content -- threatens to crowd out those kinds of gifts. So the gifts don't get recognized and appreciated in the spirit in which they are given, which may lead to a desperate offering of more of them -- at which point they become content. This creates a self-reinforcing destructive spiral. In other words, if everyone is oversharing, everyone has to overshare to try to be heard, but in such an environment no one has the time to listen. Paradoxically, sharing destroys gifts.

Optimistic ways to be negative (26 Jan 2010)

Going through the archive of this blog, I came across this post, about negativity. There I confess to having a knee-jerk skepticism about things billed as optimistic or positive, particularly when those terms are being used as synonyms for "feel-good" in the midst of a recommendation. I haven't changed much: My first instinct is still to read "optimistic" as actually meaning "short-sighted" or "blinkered," and to see positive spin as ideologically motivated hoodwinking. The role that blithe confidence and animal spirits played in the economic crisis has probably only made me more skeptical -- it's no good if too many people are persuaded to ignore their natural human tendency toward risk aversion. And the incentives are all in place for the financial sector and the media to collude in puffing up confidence, which I am taking to be broader than a mere willingness to spend or invest. This is obviously speculation, but complacency with one's culture would seem to reinforce a blind confidence in the general economic situation, and vice versa. And a habit of resistance and skepticism about culture seems good practice for a similar skepticism towards salespeople, investment schemes, and peddlers of financial products. After the events of the past few years, could one possibly err on the side of being too cynical? Haven't the bailouts and the events leading up to them proven once and for all that most of us lack the imagination to be cynical enough?

Frederic Jameson's gloss on Marcuse, which prompted my earlier post, seems worth quoting again: "Thus it is that the happier we are, the more surely we are given over, without even being aware of it, into the power of the socio-economic system itself." But "happiness" must be understood in a particular way, as a specific kind of narcissism endemic to consumer culture. The kind of happiness Marcuse and Jameson are talking about -- in my interpretation, anyway -- is the special satisfaction of self-fashioning with the tools afforded us by consumerism. It is a matter of experiencing a moment of cool because one is doing the approved things, or doing new things in the approved way, or is generally adding new flourishes and wrinkles to the carnival of public consumption. It is the happiness of online "sharing," of participation in pseudoevents, of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation -- the removal of moral and intellectual engagement from pleasure, and its transformation into a kind of compulsion or addiction. Jameson: "It is only when individual happiness, subjective contentment, is not positive (in the sense of ultimate satiation by the consumer society), but rather negative, as a symbolic refusal of everything which that society has to offer, that happiness can recover its right to be thought of as a measure and an enlargement of human possibilities."

Back in 2005, I endorsed the idea of resistance for its own sake.

What matters are acts of resistance, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—not laughing when the laugh track cues you, not saying “have a nice day” when you don’t mean it, adopting a stubborn literalism in the face of “witty” ads trying to win you to their snarky side, etc. One can help but be implicated in the consumerist system—one can’t simply stop shopping unless one has survival resources that extend beyond what the typical American habitus equips one for. But one can begin to seek out the sorts of tactics Michel de Certeau writes about in The Practice of Everyday Life, the subversive moves wherein the producer’s intentions are subverted by the consumers in an effort to manifest a sense of life outside of the market hegemony. Debord advocated cultural detournement, taking cultural artifacts and parodying them, using them in ways opposite to how they are intended. Sontag called it camp, approaching culture with an incisive irony that turned the consumer society’s soporifics and stupefiers against it. All of these are semi-idealistic, optimistic ways to be negative.

I'm less salient about those approaches now; cultural resistance seems to have been absorbed into what it attempts to resist. The problem with consumer culture is not its content but its form; when we express our resistance with the tools supplied to us to publicize it, our acts of local refusal become general endorsements of the larger system of cultural mediation. (Whatever we complain about on Twitter may be bad; Twitter itself is okay.) It is imperative to resist when we can, but what we end up having to resist the most is the petty vanities of celebrating our own resistance.

Been Digital (18 Jan 2010)

Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital was written in 1995, but it seems much older. The detail with which he has to explain concepts we now take utterly for granted (the idea of broadband internet, the concept of cell phones with internet capabilities, even things like browsers and streaming video) reveals how drastically society has changed.and how much technology we have assimilated in the past 15 years to everyday life. Negroponte was prescient in some ways (about timeshifting and automated recommendation systems, for example), but he makes some predictions that seem foolish now -- we're all supposed to be interacting entirely with voice commands with our devices, and videoconferencing with miniature holograms, like when Darth Vader talks to the emperor in Empire Strikes Back.

The most notable thing he is wrong about is the future of the media, the economics of digitization; he simply couldn't anticipate social media or peer-to-peer sharing. He thought that media companies would be able to monetize their archive by digitizing it; instead, digitization has promoted the concept of universal availability and the whole "information wants to be free" idea. It's interesting to see how complete the big-media hegemony was, so that futurists like Negroponte (who were talking to corporations more than individuals, it seems) couldn't see around it. Negroponte expects media to move to a lucrative pay-per-view model, with customers paying extra for more personalization and ad-supported media diminishing. Instead, search and advertising is the largest online business, and big media has found itself competing with noncommercial information providers and sorters, who have made editing and metainformation as much a free commodity as information itself. Big media has lost its leverage, not gained it. We can get personalized information only from peers, and it is personal in some senses precisely because we don't pay for it. Personalization has proven to mean a growing acceptance of amateurism and the "good enough revolution". Information becomes "free" but so does a great deal of intellectual labor. Intellectual property is no longer profitable, exploitation of free labor moves to replace it.

Why New Music Always Sucks (7 Jan 2010)

It occurred to me while listening to Veckatimist by Grizzly Bear for the third or fourth time. As the songs played, I was finding myself perversely satisfied when I could pin down for myself a reason not to like it (and not to try listening to it again), whereas I had a vague feeling of dread if I found myself reserving judgment, extending the benefit of the doubt. I realized I can't really hear it for what it is; I want it to suck too much.

Rather than hoping new music I hear about -- particular from hype vectors online -- will be good, I almost always want this music to suck, preferably in spectacular, self-evident fashion. But why? Why do I have this entirely counterproductive attitude? Is it because I am "curmudgeonly"? Is it because I have too much amour propre to endorse what's trendy, even to myself in my private listening moments? (Maybe it's no longer possible to believe in private moments in the era of real-time networking.) Am I just old and bitter about how everything was better when I was younger? All that may be.

Mostly, though, I have this pressing sense that to like something new will increase my already unmanageable cultural consumption burden. And that burden seems partly the result of technological developments that puts all this consumable culture a few clicks away on my computer, and partly the result of behavioral changes -- e.g., a burgeoning tendency to hoard -- that have come along with all that accessibility. If I end up appreciating Veckatimist, then I'll inevitably have to seek out all the band's other albums, and not only that, I'll feel obliged to investigate all the bands who are ever compared to or lumped in with Grizzly Bear. And I'll need to be predisposed to like those bands to a certain degree, and then the responsibility of fandom would just continue to ripple out from there. Soon everything becomes diluted, the passion for listening gets spread too thin as it strains to embrace everything.

It seems easier to be skeptical and wait to see if people still seem to care about the music six or seven years later. Or if they don't, I can "rediscover" it and champion it to myself against the heedless indifference of the masses and the cognoscenti. (Currently on my personal hit parade is one such "rediscovery": Fleetwood Mac's Mirage.) I'm content to live in a time lag rather than chase the zeitgeist.

I suppose an alternative is to be more radically married to the cultural moment, collect nothing in the way of music, and pay attention only to what's new. I could float on the sea of ubiquitous musical novelty, let it carry me wherever it's going. Then I can simply try to like everything without feeling as though that means something or makes me responsible for learning more. I don't know. Grizzly Bear is not the music that will inspire me to do this.

Refuting the paradox of choice (24 Nov 2009)

The idea that consumer choice is freedom is perhaps the quintessential piece of consumerist ideology, so perhaps it is no surprise that economic pundits like Tim Harford, writing in the FT, would be eager to report the evidence against it.

The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.” Perhaps choice is not as paradoxical as some psychologists have come to believe. One way or another, we seem to be able to cope with it.

Interesting that the paradox of choice is here presented as something the psychologists merely want to believe -- is this projection at work? Tyler Cowen, who declares that "the so-called paradox of choice is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences," links to Harford's story approvingly.

Whether you accept the refutation (or the original observation) seems a question of whether you trust the methodology of these sorts of studies. Mine is undermined by the fact that the studies themselves have yielded contradictory results: Harford reports, "Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why." I'm skeptical generally of efforts to replicate real-world psychology in artificial lab experiments. The arbitrariness of the tasks subjects are asked to participate in, and their abstraction from lived social reality, means they have turned off their self-consciousness to a degree and are behaving artificially, different from how they would act in a situation with true social implications and ongoing ramifications for their self-concept.

Determining the psychological impact of the number of choices is a proxy war for whether or not restrictions should be placed on markets in order to benefit consumers -- or to even encourage them to be less of consumers. I don't think any amount of research can ultimately arbitrate what is an ideological question.

Music Discovery Stories (10 Nov 2009)

Nicholas Carr linked to Duran Duran bassist John Taylor's essay (!) for the BBC about how the internet changes music consumption. He relates a story about seeing Roxy Music on television in 1972 and riding his bike for miles to go to a shop where he could buy the record.

We had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance again, however badly I wanted to. And the power of that restriction was enormous.... The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix. I believe there's immense power in restriction and holding back.

The moral is familiar: On-demand culture deprives cultural-industry product of its aura, and consumers are left with a shallow and superficial relation to it. That seems to sell the power of the product itself somewhat short -- if the songs are really good, the aura artificially secured by restricted access presumably shouldn't matter to our aesthetic response. The would-be John Taylors of today should be listening to "Virginia Plain" over and over again despite downloading it. As he points out, the internet can free us from the tyranny of what's popular now and let us discover and become obsessed with culture from a diverse range of eras and locales.

What's lost is the monoculture -- the idea that everyone saw the same TV program and then could differentiate themselves in their community by their diverse responses. In today's cultural environment, everyone seems to be expected to be magpies, amalgamating all sorts of ad hoc bits of culture for themselves. (They are creating their own economy, as Tyler Cowen would say.) So distinctive gestures of musical taste are in some ways harder to find; people find it harder to interpret what your being into Roxy Music is supposed to mean. In the 1980s, it did mean a lot more to be into obscure bands, but much of that meaning was snobbery and exclusivity -- "I know someone who's got a lot of SST records and seven-inches." (I remember feeling weirdly betrayed when certain CD reissues started to come out -- "But I worked hard to gain access to those Gang of Four records! I traveled!") With "restriction" in place, music can serve as a positional good, slating us into subcultural hierarchies. That the internet has assaulted that citadel is unequivocally positive.

Also, I think we will continue to generate stories to go along with the way we discover songs. It is just that the retail encounter will no longer be part of that story. The restrictions imposed by the artificial scarcity created by the music industry will no longer determine significance; instead our own mnemonic efforts will be crucial to weeding among the stuff we binge-downloaded to elevate the songs that signify more than our idle curiosity.

But that requires an effort that we are no longer forced to make -- we can follow the route that society seems to encourage (through marketing and media triumphalism about discovering new trends and such) and just pursue novelty instead of depth in our relation to culture. It seems harder to summon the willpower to impose consumption restrictions on ourselves now that money doesn't do it for us. (That doesn't mean I want to go back to being culturally poor, though.)

Pandora and authentic taste (19 Oct 2009)

Rob Walker's NYT Magazine article about Pandora, the online music-recommendation service, sets up an opposition between musical taste that is grounded in our social context (what our friends like and the siganling aspects of publicly liking certain genres and so forth) and taste that is presumed to be intrinsic to a particular piece's qualities. Pandora's business model relies on its ability to analyze and assign numbers to those taxonomized categories and use that to play music that will keep consumers listening.

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

But as Walker asks, "Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?" One possibility is that these two ways of conceiving musical taste are incommensurable, irreconcilable, what Žižek calls a parallax. It's not that one explanation is an ideological cover-up for the other, real reason -- these are two separate explanations that are perhaps operating simultaneously, and we oscillate between them in comprehending ourselves, forming our consciousness of what we want to appeal to us. In The Parallax View Žižek is very concerned about the gap between them, which he thinks captures the Lacanian "real" that can't be articulated directly. Parallax structures, if I'm getting what he is saying, allow a socially constructed self co-exist within us with a uniquely particular, individual, biological self. It allows us to believe our taste is unique and personal while at the same time developing it consciously to achieve social goals. So we can persuade ourselves that we like Lightning Bolt and not Black-Eyed Peas and find this to be an absolutely authentic expression of who we "really are."

Pandora's founder, in Walker's depiction, is stubbornly determined to reject the authenticity of socially mediated taste.

Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

I can relate to this attitude. It's hard not to be cynical about musical taste and snobbery and hype if you have spent any extended period of time taking what the music press has to say seriously. It seems like the inevitable social concerns that spring up out of pop music aren't inherent in it but are instead a barrier to our simply being in touch with our pleasures. I would think that if I could simply detach from the conversation about music, I would be able to enjoy it in a more sincere way. This took me toward older music (big-band music, 60s sunshine pop), into deliberately square music (Doris Day, the Fifth Dimension). But I was just involving myself in different conversations, even if they were only theoretical. I was still contriving a narrative about my tastes, even if I didn't necessarily share it with anyone. Still it is a very seductive idea, that our taste is like a fingerprint, a snowflake, and that when we find out fully what it really is, we see at last, concretely, how ineffable our soul is. We listen to Pandora, click the thumbs up or down to approve songs, let the formulas work their magic, and continue to attenuate our authentic self in pure isolation.

That seems like ideological fiction; it fits too well with the romanticizing of individuality that is endemic in consumerism. (What seems parallax about taste may be ideological -- there is no intrinsic taste, just the useful pretense of it.) It's more plausible that our musical-taste acquisition is like language acquisition -- inherently social from the get-go. Walker cites Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist who has written extensively about music.

Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

Walker ends by pointing out that Pandora is ultimately curated. Only certain songs are added, and this process is a bit arbitrary.

Westergren maintains that catalog size receded as a problem at around the 300,000-song mark. Since passing that, he says, the number of “missed” searches has declined markedly, so the great majority of people who come to the site and type in an artist or song name get a proper introduction to the Pandora system. But the more surprising part of Westergren’s response is his claim that he isn’t worried about compiling the biggest possible catalog. “This may seem counterintuitive,” he told me, “but we struggle more with making sure we’re adding really good stuff.” That sounds like a rather subjective, cultural judgment — shouldn’t the listener decide what’s good, based purely on the genome’s intrinsics-of-music guidance? Well, there’s no question that Westergren is a champion of the unheard music that gets marginalized by sociocultural judgments. But even he has standards.

So Pandora is revealed as an elaborate apparatus for masking with technology and mathematical mumbo jumbo the way tastes can be shaped from above and without. Pandora presents a limited set and invites us to see it as infinite. WHat we make of it is wholly are own and true.That's not so different from the way our opportunities are in practice curtailed by social context while we are raised to believe that anything is possible if we tap into our innate ability.

Rewarding complexity; or, information is not intelligence (14 Oct 2009)

I have a post up at Generation Bubble about embedded social relations, prompted by Oliver Williamson's winning the Nobel prize in economics. WIlliamson's main field is transaction-cost economics -- looking at frictions in economic exchanges that in his view shape the structure firms must assume to accomplish varying purposes. In the post I draw heavily on a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter that emphasizes the dialectical nature of social relations -- they are always in process, thus they are difficult to pin down in the mathematical formulas preferred by neoclassical economists. I wanted to use that idea as a jumping off point for speculating about the ways neoclassical economics puts forward as an ideal the possibility of exchanges unhindered by social relations, depicting the absence of social ties as the essence of true freedom. This reverses the apparent human instinct for sociality, yet seems to have a tenacious hold on capitalist society, if you accept that the fetishization of convenience is a product of perfect-markets ideology.

In the process I threw out a stray thought about the necessity of regulation and the problem of finding trustworthy regulators (a primary concern of the other new Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, who is known for her studies of "tragedy of the commons" problems and various self-regulating systems of resource management): Regulation is not a matter of preventing corruption but providing a conduit for predictable corruption at a socially tolerable level. Regulatory agencies serve as clustering points around which a density of social relations can build up, and through which power can be exerted to calibrate the level of exchanges that are seen as unjust.

Anyway, Felix Salmon's point in this post about smart bankers seemed apropos:

Banking isn’t for outright dummies — conscientious underwriting, for one, is a difficult and highly-skilled job which requires good, well-paid professionals. But far too many bankers thought of that kind of income as boring money, and were much more excited by the higher rewards and sophisticated risk management being shown them by the rocket scientists on the structured-products desk. Maybe in future they’ll be more suspicious of things they don’t really understand, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s what regulators are for.

Salmon's hope, it seems, is that future financial regulators will both understand thoroughly the complex structures banks invent often to shroud risk and at same time won't be seduced by their understanding to want to profit by it but will instead work to rein in and discipline the intelligent and ambitious people they must square off against. But financial complexity may work as a subtle form of regulatory capture; it supplies a rarefied meeting place where regulators and bankers can collude, with the hubris of wielding formulas and structures that few can understand working to override whatever generalized morality and adherence to duty that might have restrained them. (Arnold Kling suggests something similar -- a "Kool-aid factor" that has regulators buying into financial-engineer hype.)

In the banking world, we've learned in the past year, the mastery of complex ideas is regarded as an automatic justification for personal enrichment, regardless of whether that complexity served any useful social purpose, even when that complexity becomes an elaborate ruse to overcome investor wariness. Complexity, as Salmon's post details, ends up confusing everyone, and rather than match money with sound projects, bankers end up in a game of secrets and lies and off-balance-sheet shadiness.

So regulators overseeing complex entities may be more at risk to use their position to obfuscate rather than disseminate information. A point Steve Randy Waldman made in this post, however complicates that hypothesis a bit:

Information is a behavioral attribute, not an attribute of the external phenomena to which it may ostensibly refer. To say that an agent is informed means she behaves differently than an uninformed agent. Her behavior is less random, more predictable. To be informed does not imply one's information is accurate. (In general, accuracy is unknowable, both ex ante and ex post.) Information increases the volatility of outcomes, because it provokes larger and more concentrated bets than uncertain agents would take, creating large gains and losses depending on how adaptive the informed behavior turns out to be. It is often better, as a behavioral matter, to be uninformed than to be poorly informed.
But we do not always have the option of remaining uninformed. We cannot afford to hedge all of our bets. Whether via a great mis-recalculator in the sky or a political establishment largely captured by certain interests, new information will be manufactured.

Regulators obfuscate precisely by manufacturing information, by spreading unwarranted certainty. This may be precisely because they have been taken in by their own understanding, which gathers momentum. "Knowing" is ontological; it doesn't depend on what is supposed to be known. And in a state of "knowing," the objective reality of uncertainty is ignored. Being a "smart banker" is a dangerous state of mind, difficult to corral, impossible to regulat -- we can't force people to think they are ignorant; those who think they are smart also think they can figure out the loopholes.

UPDATE: Boing Boing linked to a writeup of a recent paper that argues complex securities are inherently impossible to regulate. Basically they argue that one can tell with structured securities whether the tranches are random or tampered with so that they are front-loaded with lemons.
UPDATE II: Free Exchange discusses the problem of too many smart people becoming bankers because it pays so disproportionately well, because it is dimly understood and poorly regulated. "To an increasing number of people, it looks as though the financial sector is recruiting the nation's best brains and putting them to work endangering the global economy." A paper (pdf) the blogger links to argues that "financial deregulation" is among the reasons jobs in the sector came to require more "skills" -- which could be translated into: deregulation brought smart people into finance because the field had been opened up to the devising of complex money-making schemes designed to enrich them far beyond what one could make in other more carefully scrutinized professions.

The end of autonomous curiosity (25 June 2009)

Reading this Wired article by Fred Vogelstein about the supposed war between Facebook and Google that's coming, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated and skeptical. Though actually, truth be told, I turned against the article in the second paragraph:

Originally Google had considered acquiring Facebook—a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives—but an investment was another enticing option, aligning the Internet's two most important companies. Facebook was more than a fast-growing social network. It was, potentially, an enormous source of personal data. Internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They used their real names, connected with their real friends, linked to their real email addresses, and shared their real thoughts, tastes, and news. Google, on the other hand, knew relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.

Never mind that the "a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives" aside seems like a suck-up (like much of the article, in fact). I don't see why you'd minimize the marketing significance of "search histories and some browsing activity" and act like that was nothing. That seems like a pretty good way to get at what a specific person is interested in, certainly more reliable than what one tells friends. Data can hardly get more personal and granular. On Facebook, users have every interest in lying or exaggerating about their preferences to signal various commitments and so on. They are hardly sharing their "real thoughts and tastes" in every instance. But when they do Google searches, they actually are interested in getting the information; there is not point of pretense. So having that record of what actually gets searched allows Google to spy much further into the individual user's psyche. That seems for more "real," for marketers' purposes, than the fact that Facebook functions as a database for all that other "real" information. Facebook is a performative space; the Google search window is not.

And the idea that people want to rely entirely on their friends for information is a little strange too. Consider this insane statement: "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline." The nice thing about the internet is that it allows us to connect to a broader context than the little world of our friends. Why would anyone want to retract that? Yes, the need to filter information becomes more and more paramount, but Google's algorithms are useful precisely because they are not parochial. I'll take the "the cold mathematics of a Google search" over the limited scope of the people I know who are into time-killing on the internet. So I reject utterly the emotional logic of this: "Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search." If I care what my friends think, I'll ask them; I won't stalk them over it on the internet. And lots of people I don't know who comment on culture are not "schmucks." They are critics. "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?" Because lots of people out there are far more informed than my friends are about the subject, and my friends are likely to all share the same bias.

Built into this social-search idea as well is this annoying presumption that no one can generate an interest in something without a friend already being interested in it. Whatever happened to autonomous curiosity? Isn't that the essence of "surfing" the web, anyway? Maybe I'm weird, but my "social graph," as Zuckerberg likes to call his customers' co-opted personal lives, is not my primary source of information. Often, the internet itself is, via a variety of blogs, news feeds, and yes, Google searches. The "social graph" is more a primary source for what is being gossiped about; it would be terrible if that constituted the horizons of what I learned about the world. But then, I'm a nitwit who can't figure out the point of Twitter, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I haven't made the leap to making personal, private queries of my friends in a public commercial forum. I guess I am perhaps different from a lot of people in that I am generally less interested in the minutia of my friends lives than what is happening in the world at large. I spend next to no time on Facebook, but an absurd amount of time reading econoblogs. (This reflects my disdain for human-interest stories in the newspaper -- as well as crime logs and such -- and my preference for the Financial Times.)

Vogelstein acknowledges that Facebook's business plan ultimately involves collecting personal data to sell targeted ads, and that its customers are intensely creeped out by this particular use of the "social graph." Facebook promises users a safe place to conduct social business, but that safety feels violated when the information exchanged is sold to marketers. Google makes no such implied promise to its users, so it can seem less intrusive when it, say, mines people's emails for keywords to serve ads. Ultimately, Facebook doesn't really do anything but aggregate information; it's only leverage on users is the data it has collected on them. Then it holds that data hostage and hopes users are too lazy to recreate the network elsewhere. Once a platform is devised that allows the contours of one's social network to become portable, Facebook is finished. My money is on Google for that.

Thinking man's filter (12 May 2009)

Peter Suderman's contribution to the "Is Google making us stupid" debate has already attracted some attention. Suderman's contention is that anytime access to all the information on the internet is making us smart in a different way -- rather than signaling intelligence by having facts memorized, we demonstrate intelligence by knowing where to find information online. The internet becomes collective memory, and intelligence is a factor of who has the best system for accessing that memory. Hence, as he titles his post, "your brain is an index."

Books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.

He may be right about this, but that is exactly what people are afraid of. Suderman's focus on memory and data retrieval seems to ignore the aspects of intelligence that involve synthesizing ideas and making argumentative leaps, and more to the point, that involve hanging with an intricate and long-winded argument and understanding how it works and what its weaknesses are. The fear that critics of internet-mediated consciousness have is that we'll lose the ability to formulate these critiques because we will have regressed into the habit of searching for what has already been said and latching on to whatever superficial information ebbs up from that search. As Kevin Drum, who yearns to be sympathetic with Suderman, is forced to point out,

Understanding 'broader categories' — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop.... Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it's reasonable to draw from it. That's because they don't know the context. They don't know the rest of the story. And that's because they don't read enough books.

Matt Yglesias wonders why Drum picks on the internet and fetishizes the book as a mode of learning, though Suderman himself seems to grant Drum's point, following up his post with links to some reference books. But the deeper question has to do with whether the mountains of data now available to us inhibits thought or enables it, or has no particular effect on the quality of thought. It's great to be able to look up specific information and get it quickly -- to be able to pull up texts and search them for half-remembered phrases, for example. But chasing down information online tends to generate a centrifugal force that takes one out of the orbit of the original inquiry. The promise of more and different and enticing stimuli is always there, and our battle against distraction seems always to become more difficult. I'm not sure if the opportunity for distraction makes it inevitable, or if that's just me. Maybe I need to try meditation.

Technological determinism and convenience bias (15 April 2009)

Yesterday I was trying to make a point about information search costs, and I don't think I ever succeeded in making it clear. I'm hoping the ideas in this Boston Review article by Evgeny Morozov will help. Morozov argues that cyber-optimists who think of the internet as a medium inherently spreads freedom because it creates a public sphere that's harder to control and because it lowers the costs of disseminating information are being somewhat myopic. "Cyber-utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down. Media reports encourage this view of authoritarian governments as technophobic Internet censors." But as he points out, authoritarian regimes (and the media interests that collude with them, perhaps) don't maintain power and oppress people merely through censorship, through the stifling of the information flow. Rather than also maintain control by (1) flooding the public sphere with disinformation or trivia, drowning out or diluting subversive communication and (2) by encouraging egocentric apathy in the population so that they don't develop an interest in political protest or collective action.

The internet, for all the possibilities for semi-spontaneous group formation and communication it offers -- making it, as Morozov writes, "cheaper, faster, leaner" -- is ultimately neutral as a medium; it can facilitate those authoritarian big-brother communication strategies outlined above just as easily as it can be used to circulate samizdat and allow resistance efforts to coalesce in the interstices. The main problem for resistance efforts is that samizdat becomes harder and harder to differentiate from among the cornucopia of information proliferating exponentially online as each hour passes. "While the new digital public spheres may be getting more democratic (at least quantitatively), they are also heavily polluted by government operators, making them indistinguishable from the old, tightly controlled analogue public spheres," Morozov writes. Repressive governments may have reason to encourage us to produce reams of inane personal information online, as this contributes a great deal to the data smog that then shrouds state malfeasance. Blogging is not necessarily disinfecting sunlight; it is just as often provides a smokescreen or a sideshow.

Morozov cites this telling fact, that "East Germans who could not tune in to West German broadcasting had higher rates of opposition to their government than those who did." This implies that access to Western style lifestyle accoutrements -- the apolitical modes of identity cultivation -- quells dissent. The point: "digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades" -- captive to a happy and prosperous marriage of the culture industry with an authoritarian regime. Habituating ourselves to consuming trivia about celebrities and one another assures that developing a political consciousness will remain an unnecessary bother for most of us. That social networks produce reams of self-confessed information highly useful to a state-security apparatus is gravy.

The idea of information pollution is also a matter of information costs. The internet makes it seem as though it is easy to collect information on most subjects -- just type it into a search engine, and there you have it. But this seemingly straightforward process is anything but, because there is no guarantee that what a simple search yields is unbiased or undistorted. It may in fact be deliberately misleading -- the product of information management efforts or shrewd marketing. Search results, in short, are subject to the same possibilities of manipulation as any other information source, only the ease with which the information comes to us conditions us to trust it. A sort of convenience bias, combined with the apparent surfeit of data that a search yields, makes what we discover seem self-directed and therefore credible -- inflected with our interests rather than someone else's, since we picked any particular needle out of the haystack. We grow accustomed to information on demand, guaranteed and certified by our own instant gratification and apparent freedom of choice among readily available options. But this easily harvested information is the most easy for authoritarian forces, or alternatively, oligarchical forces, to manipulate. Thus an ideal synthesis can be achieved by the powers that be: Internet users end up consuming the information that the Man wants them to consume while believing the Man has been circumvented. We think the information has been set free by the apparent limitlessness of the medium by which it is conveyed, and is therefore more likely to be "true" for our intents and purposes. But instead the ease with which information is available is just as likely to make us lazy and complacent about its veracity and about the complicated amalgam of ends it in fact serves.

As information costs plummet, our investment (in terms of mental energy) in challenging that information also drops. Information, as a commodity, becomes too cheap. It no longer pays to worry about our standards while making more of it or in sorting through it. In fact, we have an incentive to consume as much information as possible and sort out at some later date what the utility of it should have been. Convenience goes hand in hand with consumption acceleration.

In short: Thanks to the internet it has become simple for us to produce and disseminate information -- creating information pollution. It has become simple for us to gather information -- creating convenience bias. These offset the gains for freedom that the internet affords.