Twitter As Scoreboard, As Anomie (7 April 2011)

The Browser, an aggregator that pretty much dictates my online reading at this point, linked to this essay by Keith Lee about Twitter as gamification in action:

The Twitter system encourages following, re-tweeting and the like because it functions as a scoring system for the ego of the user. So it’s really no surprise that Twitter is generally viewed as a sort of “Happysphere” – it’s innate to the functioning of the system. Users encourage other users as part of the positive feedback loop in order to increase their own engagement statistics and push up their number of Re-Tweets, followers, etc. So despite that nothing is actually being accomplished, it generates a feeling of accomplishment.

I agree with that in principle, but my feelings are complicated by the fact that I found the link to this article on Twitter (and then promptly retweeted it). On Twitter, one can find useful information because users are incentivized to provide it, but playing on those incentives means reinforcing petty ego-scorekeeping and recessive reflexivity among those users. So is it a net win or a loss for society?

Gamification reminds me of the "hedonic treadmill," a trope in critiques of consumerism: the point is that consumers never actually achieve satisfaction through consumerism even though that is often what ideology (or "common sense") leads us to expect; instead we perpetually chase novelty and status, which turns ordinary goods into positional goods -- bearers not of utility but distinction or symbolic meaning, emblems of the scarcity pursued when sustenance is taken for granted. As Baudrillard's early work argues repeatedly, consumerism as a system turns our market behavior into an inescapable language that more or less speaks us as we speak it. It prompts us to leave use value behind and adopt an attitude of perpetual scarcity -- we don't have enough status, or we don't have enough attention to give, or we don't receive enough attention, or we don't have enough time, etc. The scoreboard mentality (which I wrote about in this 2004 column about competitive thrift-store shopping, and again in this response to an article about "shopping hackers") sustains this feeling of scarcity, inverts it, allows us to harness it as motivation.

It seems like gamification can quickly become a disguise for anomie, a ruse to make the hedonic treadmill livable. In a recent post, Will Davies cited this passage from Durkheim's Suicide, which offers a grim definition of anomie:

Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. It has been claimed, indeed, that human activity naturally aspires beyond assignable limits and sets itself unattainable goals. But how can such an undetermined state be any more reconciled with the conditions of mental life than with the demands of physical life? All man's pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or -- which is the same thing -- when his goal is infinity. Since the distance between us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might as well have made the motions without progress from the spot. Even our glances behind and our feeling of pride at the distance covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

Using Twitter may also condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness, for similar reasons. If we inject ourselves into the infinite pool of information with the hubristic notion that we will help organize it all, we're doomed, as our contributions only add to the muddle, to the heap of notions to be processed. If we think we are going to keep up with all the feeds worth following, we're doomed too. And precisely because we know that Twitter is often useful, we're lured into diving into the whirlpool.

Quantification, self-exploitation, prostitution (25 Jan 2011)

I've written before about my suspicions regarding the quantified-self movement and the data-driven life. To want to turn one's life experience into data is obviously an expression of a deep-seated urge to become an object. It reflects a yearning to make one's life knowable in an "objective" way -- or rather, to be known in the way that our highly rationalized society regards as authentic. You know, numbers don't lie.

Some of that urge is pragmatic: since bureaucracies are already turning us into data, why not manage the process more directly? But the process of making fresh data by experimenting on oneself seems an especially sinister kind of alienation, reifying a mind-body split that threatens to rob one of ability to experience life as flow, installing instead a Taylorist manager in one's mind, a superego run amok. With all these "objective" numbers, the potential for self-flagellation becomes limitless, as the numbers vividly render the illusion of life as the ceaseless quest for measurable progress. But there is always another measurement to take. One never arrives. The data we generate becomes a miasma into which our soul eventually disappears; we become a set of numbers pre-formatted for the institutional data-processing and the recommendation engines that increasingly structure contemporary life. We become ghosts in the machine at best.

I called the obsession with measuring oneself and mimicking the way technology already translates us into data "robot envy," an idea that apparently finds some support in Sherry infoTurkle's new book Alone Together, which I need to read ASAP. This Chronicle Review piece about Turkle's recent work lays out her thesis about "sociable robots" and the possibility that we will prefer relationships of convenience with selfless machines to fraught and necessarily ambivalent relationships to other humans.

"What if we get used to relationships that are made to measure?" Turkle asks. "Is that teaching us that relationships can be just the way we want them?" After all, if a robotic partner were to become annoying, we could just switch it off.

The article doesn't mention it, but one obvious use for the sociable robots of the future would be as prostitutes. The prostitute-client relationship is already about supplanting awkward intimacy with convenience and efficiency and providing a "made to measure" relationship. It's also a realm in which social behavior has already been rigorously quantified: time is strictly metered and billed at a negotiated rate, which serves as a putative measure of the value of the prostitute's company. This essay in Salon by a prostitute writing under the name Charlotte Shane explains how prostitution can be regarded as the logical end point of the urge to quantify one's social impact. She argues that we "are living in a world where a woman's worth is constantly equated with her sex appeal. Is it any wonder that many women might find it compelling to take that equation to its logical end?" That a woman's "worth" is often regarded as entirely a matter of her sexual usefulness is depressing enough, and one could certainly blame patriarchy, but one shouldn't neglect the way patriarchy is served by the capitalist drive toward ever greater rationalization, efficiency, and quantification. These are all vectors for self-criticism and for insecurity in relation to numerical standard that has been abstracted from any particular context that can make it meaningful. The strictures of femininity in capitalist culture manifest themselves in lots of numbers: dress sizes, weight, caloric intake, breast measurement, etc. Shane writes, tellingly, "I was so highly self-critical as a young adult that by the time I was 12 I vowed I'd have breast surgery."

Prostitution supplies another of those numbers, one which seems to synthesize all the others into a master index. What unifies the numbers is the underlying notion that genuine, inarguable objectification is sexual objectification, rooted in nature and vested by the inescapable imperative to procreate, which makes the choice of sexual partner seem like the archetypal consumer choice. This logic fuels the crypto-evolutionary suspicion -- epitomized in, say, Michel Houellebecq novels -- that all consumerism is a matter of status competition, but status is merely a genteel way of expressing the competition for suitable mates. Sex sells everything. Once a market for a woman's sexual attention has been created (it is, after all, the "oldest profession"), the ideology that locates a woman's essential value in sexuality seems concrete, material, an inescapable truth -- after all, a specific figure can be quoted. Shane writes:

There's something almost merciful about finally having the clarity of a number, and once you're an escort, you've quite literally put a price on your sexual powers. That's an intimidating assignment for any young woman with a less than robust sense of self-esteem, but it can also be perversely satisfying: You've finally quantified your appeal.

This seems like an especially pernicious example of the alienation inherent in wages generally, but it captures the temptation of self-quantification. It's a weird, entirely temporary form of mercy, though, because that price we obtain is just one quote. Being priced only reminds you that your value is always being negotiated by others, and you are mostly at the mercy of that often arbitrary conversation. Once you get priced once, you have to keep being priced to procure a moment's respite of security in one's worth.

The eagerness to be quantified is one of those cures that worsen the disease. It promises to resolve insecurity and afford us more control over our lives and how we are perceived, but instead it radically destabilizes the self and gives over the arbitration of our self-worth to an impersonal market. It impels us to keep generating occasions to be measured -- the yardstick dictates our behavior, supplies the form that shapes our identity. We feel obliged to create information in order to know ourselves, but it doesn't constitute capital for us; it becomes a mode of autoexploitation -- we work hard to turn ourselves in a product for someone else ultimately to sell. The self-exploitation process culminates in the development of the personal brand, which codifies the illusion that we are building equity through compulsive sharing and self-measuring: The qualities of the self aren't seen as ineffable and transcendent; as processes rather than possessions; as indivisible clusters of skill, experience and intuition rather than market-assessed commodities. Instead we find social validation in being on the market and being sold -- an understandable conclusion, given the hegemonic idea that value is somehow conferred by markets. How can you know something is worth anything if you don't try to sell it? How can you know your full potential as a human unless you have leveraged your brand and maximized its value?

Objects and Experiences (13 April 2010)

PsyBlog has posted a list of "six psychological reasons consumer culture is unsatisfying." All of them can be boiled down to the idea that when it comes to purchases, experiences are ultimately more satisfying than objects, mainly because experiences become fond memories instead of outdated clutter. Retailers who sell objects are as aware of this as psychologists are, so their marketing efforts arguably tend to try to make shopping itself into an experience, and make the purchased object into a necessary souvenir of that experience. Or is that experiences have become polluted with souvenirs as they are made "consumable"?

I guess what I am driving at here is that the opposition of "object" and "experience" is not as absolute as it may initially seem. Contemporary "experiences" for sale are generally shot through with opportunities to purchase objects, and objects are often packaged as requisite goods for experiences -- e.g., you can't go camping without the appropriate gear, etc. The post contends that consumers typically have a "maximizing" approach to buying things (get the most value for the least money -- the neoclassical assumptions about rationality) and a "satisficing" approach to choosing experiences (getting just enough to satisfy without worrying about maximizing utility). I guess I would like to know more about how the studies were designed to reach this conclusion, because the point the post makes at the end -- that we can think experientially about buying objects -- seems eminently reversible. We can be goaded into thinking of our experiences as objects, as would seem to suit the vested interests of consumerism. That means that the "shopping as experience" ruse may work as a clever piece of marketing jujitsu, promoting shopping for things as an experience in order to habituate us to thinking of experiences as discrete purchasable things rather than a flow of possibility.

Also, I am skeptical that this sort of thing can work:

This experiment suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction. Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the mp3 player in terms of how the music changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.

Making the effort to think in this way would seem to negate the ability to take the contrived thoughts seriously. You have to trick yourself, a la dialectical behavioral therapy, I guess, to forget about how you are forcing yourself to see things differently from how you know, at one level, they are.

Another way of putting this is this: we don't live in a culture that wants to let us think experientially about purchases or to transcend "invidious comparisons", so it requires active resistance to hold on to a experiential perspective. I think that we should worry less about experiences vs. objects and think more of a different continuum -- that of individualism. There must be studies out there that investigate whether thinking less about personal identity leads to a greater indifference about the signifying component of things and experiences and a broader sense of being in the flow of the events of one's life.

Possessed by Possessions (8 Jan 2010)

Ever since I read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces in 2004, I've wanted to read Raoul Vaneigem's Situationist manifesto, The Revolution of Everyday Life. I even went to the trouble of cutting and pasting all the text into a Quark document and printing it out. But I am only now getting to it; the stuff I've reading about immaterial labor and Web 2.0 reminded me of the Situationists, who (in my unrefreshed understanding) seemed like precursors to the techno-optimists who believe the interactivity of the Web has radicalizing potential and may usher in an alternative to capitalism that revolves around ceaseless unexploited creativity and self-actualization. It is the realization of what detournement -- reappropriating commercial cultural and subverting it -- could bring, a radicalized subjectivity that is fluid and spontaneous, uncaptured.

I'm skeptical of all that, agreeing instead with the arguments that see Web 2.0 as the apotheosis of the "social factory," in which our consumption is productive and subjectivity becomes the ultimate capitalist commodity. It has never been more bound up with capitalist production. We make our mediated identities out of the set of commercialized signs, and this becomes the bottom line and the horizon for any form of social activity.

Reading Vaneigem (which is not easy -- he tends toward the manifesto style of making a string of prophetic assertions and often argues by way of epigram), I see that the Situationist critique of consumer society (the "society of the spectacle" -- of role-playing displays of identity that are somehow not authentically lived) applies with equal force to 21st century commercial culture, but their Utopian prescriptions in many ways have been co-opted (which is what Marcus was arguing in his book, if I am remembering correctly -- punk failed). Vaneigem expresses boundless faith in the transformative power of spontaneous creativity but did not anticipate the invention of Web 2.0 as a system for harvesting it, stripping it of its subversiveness and making it serve the circulation of commodities and specular identities. It has become much harder to disappear into everyday life; instead everyday life has been assimilated into the existing relations of production. Were I to update Twitter or Facebook, I'd be administering that integration, whether I realized it or not.

Since my last few posts have been about "having to like new music" -- that is, whether there is a compulsion to pay attention to commercial culture that is now metastasizing, this passage from Vaneigem jumped out at me:

To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment of real life. The consumer is killed by the things he becomes attached to, because these things (commodities, roles) are dead.

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things makes you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present but the present has yet to be constructed.

This comes in a the midst of a chapter in which he seems to be arguing that we can live forever if we really wanted to, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess. The lesson in this for cultural consumption is to experience things without becoming attached to them, without collecting them, without forming an opinion about them that it then becomes urgent to convey to others and use as part of your own social identity. That calls for the rejection of "remix" culture, which involves appropriating what's out there to better pin down personal identity so that it can be deployed strategically.

Ultimately, the implication of Vaneigem's claim here is that "self-expression" is a false ideal, at least as we know it -- that is, it has become a way of reifying the self as a manipulable object. What we need to do, he seems to be saying, is purify expression of the self; to end consumption as signification, as a form of production. A key to this, Vaneigem suggests, is to try to think outside the concept of time, which is the pivotal category for integrating the self. That way, we "construct the present" that has otherwise eluded us as we project ourselves into the future or ruminate over the past.

Interesting, but I don't know how this prescription doesn't end up turning radical subjectivity into perfect solipsism. (ADDENDUM: In other words it is hard for us to imagine sharing a world with others before imaging a self who does the sharing; we want sharing to consist of moments of self-expression exchanged rather than it being a constitutive moment, with the sharing bringing a collective spirit into being that precedes a self-consciousness.) The problem is that social recognition has become a product and we face increasing pressure to put it up for sale when we have some to offer. But that doesn't mean we can live a fulfilling human life without it.

Fake friends (1 Jan 2010)

William Deresiewicz has an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that provides a broad-stroke picture of the history of friendship in the Western world before zeroing in on a favorite Marginal Utility topic, how social networking is the opposite of friendship. The critique feels a little dated, since the plague of social networking has been with us for a few years now, but Deresiewicz adds a few new variations to the familiar theme.

1. I like how Deresiewicz puts friendship on a continuum with community and suggests that we are slowly peeling away layers of the social onion, and will continue until we are totally isolated by communication technology.

As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.

"Connection" has been flattened, become something that can be signified rather than necessarily experienced. If someone adds us as friend, "connection" is signified, even if the parties involved haven't had any direct contact at all. It has become a "sense," a derivative of itself. Real connection is not necessary to the signified "connection."

2. I often make the point that social networking is like ham radio, that it is broadcasting. Deresiewicz comes to the same conclusion and emphasizes how this reduces our friends to an audience.

Now we're just broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

Our desire for the unmediated reciprocity of friendship is being edged out by a new possibility -- quantifiable attention that delimits our public notoriety. Recognition gets commoditized through social networks, becomes something tradeable as opposed to something that emerges as a by-product of time spent with another person. We simply announce our identity using the new media tools and wait for anyone to notice and validate it. It no longer matters if that proclaimed identity matches how we actually behave over stretches of time.

3. Friendship, commodified by being mediated, presents the same problems as the superfluity of consumer goods. We have access to more goods then ever, but have never felt so bereft. It's never been easier to be "in contact" with other people, but we are lonilier than ever. A paradox sets in: "The more people we know, the lonelier we get."

4.Our online presence must conform to the social networking medium, which distorts who we are and who our friends appear to be in the medium. Trying to use Facebook, Deresiewicz laments

the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.

Social networking lets us focus entirely on self-fashioning and identity-mongering as species of human capital, as productive immaterial labor. We have to keep reinventing ourselves, to keep identity signifers circulating to enhance their value. The developing real-time components of social networks accommodate this serial publishing of new editions of ourselves. Seen from the outside, Facebook is an alienation machine, forcing us to make ourselves repeatedly strange in the effort to capture some new catchy essence of ourselves to market.

5. Deresiewicz says this of those odd random people who come out of the past to friend us out of the blue:

They don't matter to you as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your life, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of that texture—read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation—and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your 18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should not know them.
Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory.

Facebook is a false utopia, based on the idea that we never outgrown anyone, that friendships never really end but can be relived and consumed again like old TV shows. Inthat fase fantasy, friendships are not reciprocal but something we engage in passively. Chasing that dream flattens out memory, indulges nostalgia until everything once precious becomes trivia.

6. The crux of social networking is naturalizing the idea that identity is nothing more than consumer preferences. Then it entices us to elaborate ourselves in those terms, enhancing the value of various brands and commercial services. Social networks encourage us to think that

identity is reducible to information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid thing you did in seventh grade.... that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we're all conducting market research on ourselves. Far worse is that Facebook amplifies our longstanding tendency to see ourselves ("I'm a Skin Bracer man!") in just those terms.

Baudrillard foresaw this in the early 1970s, extrapolating from the consumer society's "system of objects" the inevitability that we would reduce ourselves to the code of signifiers. AT that point every attempt to escape is just another signifying gesture of neutralized rebellion.

7. The contrast between mediated "friendship" and the sort of friendship that is disappearing:

Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too.

Consuming the personal information is like consuming pornography as well -- done alone in front of a screen, an indulgence of idle curiosity on one's own terms entirely, with no emotional investment. This is how friendship is sacrificed to the god of convenience.

Friendship as media (23 Nov 2008)

More of my friends are finding the time to get on Facebook, prompting various nostalgia trips as people from the past reconnect. This seems benign enough, but it's a little strange that the technological means makes possible a relationship that everyone involved in was happy enough to abandon to the mists of time. It's like Facebook has more at stake in that revived connection than the individuals reconnecting do -- and maybe that's true.

Actually, this seems like the essential bargain Facebook presents us with. It will facilitate our illusions of friendship and connection by making such social contact nearly effortless and highly insulated. We can broadcast gossip about ourselves and present ourselves in a flattering light and make contact with people we had forgotten about just by going to the site. It maintains our friendships for us by storing a configuration of the network of all the people who have ever mattered to us while exempting us from that particular effort that we had already, in fact, stopped bothering to make.

So we get friendship without the trouble of having to put effort into the relationships. It's friendship rendered convenient through technology, and the convenience to a degree denatures the original significance -- isn't the substance of relationships ultimately anchored in the effort we feel ourselves putting in? (Or am I simply mystifying the ideal of working at things?)

In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then processes the data interrelationships to guide the process of how we subsequently develop our identities through its site. Since it is mediating our friendships, and in effect making the effort for us, it is also directing what the fruits of that effort will be, supplying the framework through which friendships develop and making itself the very medium of friendship.

At that point, Facebook succeeds into making friendship a consumption product, and itself as the service provider. The other friends we have through it, on the other side the screen, are the product it marshals for us. And our consumption of Facebook, rather than the actual experience of friendship with all the effort that would otherwise require, now shapes our personalities -- in accordance with the commercial goals it has set out for ourselves. In that way, it isolates us more by promising to mediate our connections with the rest of the world. It deprives us of the option to make more effort, and make our social efforts more meaningful. Is this too pessimistic?

Cultural consumption at the margins (3 Jan 2008)

Because the manner in which media is distributed these days has so changed the way I experience it and even conceive desires about it, I wanted to refresh my memory on Marxist literary theory, which strongly emphasizes the network of social relations within which a work exists. (You can already see this has done wonders for my prose style.) It seems that, for example, the amount of music available for free (if you are willing to take it) makes it impossible to listen to it in the same way. This reminded me of Terry Eagleton's Marxism and Literary Criticism where he attributes to Marx the idea that "capitalist society, with its predominance of quantity over quality, its conversion of all social products to market commodities, its philistine soullessness, is inimical to art." One pessimistic way of applying this idea: Accustomed as we are to attach a price to cultural product, the fact that it's suddenly (for all intents and purposes) free encourages a massive and rapid accumulation, which serves to reinforce the status of the art as product rather than experience. We become buried under the surfeit, doomed to process the material rather than enjoy it -- forced to focus on consuming our way through it rather than actually listening to it, watching it, reading it, whatever the case may be.

In other words, we may be so ideologically conditioned to regard culture as a priced product that we can't understand it or value it outside of that context, even as technological change is reducing the relevance of price to cultural experience. The underpinning assumption is that the social context that produces cultural objects also produces at the same time (or dialectically, if you prefer, with each altering the development of the other) the subjects fit for such objects -- mass culture, for instance, is presumed to yield a certain sort of person fit to be one of the masses, with lowest-common-denominator tastes and untroubled by disposability. So we experience "free" with a kind of panic, either the culture is becoming worthless or we are in the midst of such a bargain that we need to consume as much as we can to behave rationally within that market. But the outcome -- collections of music, for example, that run into the thousands of albums -- is anything but rational. Spending hours devouring clips on YouTube of commercials you remember from childhood is not especially rational either. Trying to read 17 newspapers a day, because you can, because they all shed a slightly different light, is not entirely rational despite being technically feasible with no extra financial costs at the margin.

It's hard to escape the pressure that marginal thinking puts on cultural consumption -- the idea that if you can download one song for free and 1,000 songs for free at the same expense, you may as well get the thousand, quality concerns be damned -- precisely because capitalism has weaned us to view culture as something to consume. Eagleton, assaying the Marxist position on artists' commitment to progressive or revolutionary attitudes, offers this bleak comment. Comparing postwar art to that inspired by the fascist crisis, he writes:

There are less "extreme" phases of bourgeois society in which art relegates itself to minor status, becomes trivial and emasculated, because the sterile ideologies it springs from yield no nourishment -- are unable to make significant connections or offer adequate discourses. In such an era, the need for explicitly revolutionary art again becomes pressing. It is a question to be seriously considered whether we are not ourselves living in such a time.

The ideology by which we see art as commodity (which has innumerable facets -- reflected not just in the digital files vended online, but in the breathless coverage of Christie's and Sotheby's art auctions, the manufacture of promotional materials and solicitation of reviews, the reporting of sales figures and the equivalence of profit with popularity and popularity with quality, and so on) seems to be one of those sterilizing ideologies that yield no nourishment, but optimists might argue that the wide, cheap distribution and interactive nature of the internet are reshaping that ideology by revolutionizing forms and media themselves, which inevitably reshapes the consumers of such forms and media. This view verges on "crude technologism" -- the idea that technology automatically (and undialectically) produces new social conditions. But if such a revolution is happening, it leaves a certain generation (mine) especially strung between ideological configurations -- open to new developments but conditioned by old practices. And it's not clear that this shift won't yield art (and art appreciators) that's even more philistine -- leading to more quantity over quality, not just for ideological stragglers and strandees but for those fully formed within the internet era. The interactivity and superfluity of culture encourages us not to grapple with it as it is but to alter it to suit our prejudices and convenience. We can, say, only engage with culture at the level of relaxation -- listen to smooth jazz and watch TV shows that spoon-feed us the feelings we're supposed to have. Or we can only pay attention to culture to the degree that it seems to be paying attention to us -- read only the comments people leave for us or that are about us on social networks.

But those tendencies will be mixed with a kind of indifference to regarding culture economically, as protected property. This indifference to prices, ownership, copyrights, etc., will inevitably rise to a new way of experiencing culture. A utopian prognosis would be something that builds in part on the premise of individuals mashing up digital content and sharing it to amuse friends and in part on the inconsequentiality of what's already made -- everything may come to be seen as raw material for some further production and consumption itself will seem boring. The lack of cultural scarcity will render a coveting, consumerist approach pointless. But another alternative would be the sort of thing Brave New World suggests, where the ocean of interconnected cultural material becomes a network of control.

Freecycle and utility traps (12 January 2007)

In Rob Walker's article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine about Freecycle, a Craigslist or Meetup style Internet matching service designed to help you give away stuff you want to get rid of, founder Deron Beal suggests that his organization has been successful because the sacrifice-free generosity it enables makes people feel good.

Whatever attracts people to join, part of what keeps them involved, Beal says, is something they probably didn’t expect: the moment when someone thanks you backward and forward for giving him something you planned to throw away. “There’s a sort of paradigm shift in your brain: ‘Wow, that feels really good,’ ” Beal says. “That’s what I think is fueling this absurd amount of growth we’ve had.”

It seems to me the analysis of this could be pushed a little further. Sure, it's great to earn approbation for being charitable simply by redirecting your trash pickup. And it's pleasing to simplify and streamline your belongings, something that can be surprisingly hard to do because of the responsibility we may feel toward what we buy. Generally we think we are buying stuff with some use in mind, even though the actual motives have more to do with indulging some fantasy about who we want to become or who we might have been. That fantasy is enacted upon purchase, but the purchased object lingers on even after the fantasy fades, cluttering up our apartments -- and our consciousness, when that fantasy curdles into disillusionment and we are embarrassed or taunted by what we wished we were or what the object reminds us we are not. It sits waiting to be use in the way we promised ourselves would when we bought it. My Russian-English dictionary, for instance, always annoys me with how quickly I gave up on learning Russian. But I don't want to throw it away -- not only will that seem a waste in the abstract, but it's an admission of surrender. So I hang on to it, refusing to give up on the utility still entombed within it. That utility, which was the alibi for indulging the fantasy, becomes a trap until we can find some way of dissipating it.

One way is to find some other person to assume that burden, who by taking the object from you is making their own promise to use it in the way you couldn't. This salvages the whole project, allowing you to part with the good without admitting to yourself complete failure. You've just changed one fantasy about yourself (whatever dream was evoked by the object) for another (the pleasure of being a benevolent gift-giver, the pleasure of feeling useful), and it's no longer your fault if the thing is never really used for its ostensible purpose. Giving things away allows us to use them up without having to consume them in the way they are intended to be used. I use up the squash racket not by playing squash and wearing it out but by giving it to a stranger who now is making an implicit promise to play squash, taking me off the hook. So the gift is not as free as it may seem, it comes with the hidden burden of abandoned dreams and the duty to make good on those dreams for someone else as well as yourself. So the goods exchanged through Freecycle threaten to become freighted with serial failures, all the previous owner's as well as your incipient own. But this probably doesn't happen -- giving something away for free seems to remove that thing from the money-for-pleasure cycle that renders the abstract notion of utility seem so important. The gesture, the effort to find a home for something rather than merely trash it, springs you from the trap, and that, I think, explains the unexpected elation Freecyclers feel.

Ones and zeros (21 December 2006)

Continuing on the theme from the last two posts of class boundaries that prevent people from joining the conversation about what is culturally significant. One of the obvious changes in the shape of public sphere in the past decade is the Internet's permitting user-generated content to be widely and (virtually) freely distributed. Has that change -- opening media up to anyone's participation -- done anything to mitigate the feeling of systemic exclusion that Sennett and Cobb analyze in The Hidden Injuries of Class or has it simply broadened the playing field to make what Sennett and Cobb see as the zero-sum game of social recognition even more inescapable?

Their main contention is that the ideology of meritocracy creates a burden of responsibility in individuals for whatever class disadvantages they have inherited from birth. Individuals want to believe that they can merit success and climb the social hierarchy, but this belief also forces them to see their own current inferior position as deserved. The solution seems to lie in the freedom to live one's life independent of society, to uses one's talents to transcend social limitations and become autonomous, self-sufficient -- this, which is often a matter of Spartan self-sacrifice, becomes a source of personal dignity. However, this solution cuts one off from social recognition and undermines that dignity. No one respects you for your sacrifices; you can see they see your hand was forced. (This reflects Graeber's point in Harper's about working-class kids joining the Army for the same reasons upper-middle class kids go to Antioch College.)

The terrible thing about class in our society is that it sets up as a contest for dignity. If you are a working-class person, if you have to spend year after year being treated by people of a higher class as though there probably is little unusual or special about you to catch their attention, if you resent this treatment and yet feel also that it reflects something accurate about your own self-development, then to try to impugn the dignity of persons in a higher class becomes a real, it twisted, affirmation of your own claims for respect.... [Working-class people] too are individualists concerned with their right to be exempted personally from shaming and indignity. In turning people against each other, the class system of authority and judgment-making goes itself into hiding; the system is left unchallenged as people enthralled by the enigmas of its power battle one another for respect.

So is the limitless public space opening up on the Internet just broadening the war zone in this battle for respect? It seems that as the blogosphere has progressed, quasi-democratic social-network-driven forms of filtering have been battling with the more traditional forms, in which the cognoscenti nominate worthy material and consign the rest to anonymity. The class struggle plays out, according to Sennett and Cobb, in the feeling that you need put someone else in your class down to garner the respect you seek -- to stand out from the mass (gain respect) you have to highlight how dull those around you are as well as do something extraordinary.

But rather than competition, blog culture seems on its face to be about linking, of highlighting connections and promoting the interesting work of others in hopes that it won't be lost in the proliferating fog of cultural output. However, that egalitarian aspect is tempered by how the Internet makes audiences for your recommendations measurable; personal influence becomes more quantifiable than it has ever been, and the vague notion that your opinion matters can actually be assigned a pretty precise number. (You were one of x Diggs for a story; you drew x hits for your commentary on that NYT editorial; etc.) In the digital world of ones and zeros, you are even more likely to be aggregated into a mass rather than be afforded your individual dignity; in cyberspace, you are literally just another number. The permeability of the Internet as a social medium is just another mask for the class system, another "enigma" to "enthrall" us. It seems wide open, it seems like anew and better meritocracy, but really it's just a better system of disguises for the networks of power and pre-existing relationships of privilege that are slowly but surely replicating themselves there. A few success stories -- the Lonleygirl15s of the world -- will continue to be touted as proof of a great new era of people-powered media in which the cream can rise to the top, but in fact advantages in real life will continue to be more efficiently leveraged in the online world to reproduce the power relations and class structures we all know and love and count on for our lives to be comprehensible.

Alas, this cynical rant would be what capitalist ethnographer (i.e. marketer) Grant McCracken would classify as leftist moral panic, as a kind of elitism that refuses to recognize the glorious contributions made by everyday people all the time.

The Left was persuaded that capitalism, like the TV that was its crudest cultural expression, was a waste land. Nothing could come of this, they assured us. And along came Silicon Valley, an improved independent film industry, and risk taking television, to name a few. Another favorite notion of the Left is that innovation and cultural commotion must come from the avant-garde, the margin of society. It cannot come from the mainstream. But now of course it comes routinely from the mainstream, which proves ever more inventive. (Scrap booking is a case in point. Women in the mainstream reinvented the photo album.) This is not the way the world is supposed to look! And the Left has embraced a moral panic of their own, which now expresses itself in an intellectual rigidity, accusation and name calling, and extra laps on the high horse of indignation.

Yes, thank God for scrapbooking; where would we be without that "reinvention" of the photo album. And thank god for blogging, which has reinvented journalism. But virtually no one wants to see your scrapbook anymore than they want to read my blog. The more media attention they attract, the more blogs are made out to be technologically glorified hobbies, but perhaps this is a good thing, reducing them back to the scale on which one can feel recognized by a community. But the limitless ability to scale up is there, teasingly available to the small-time blog and making it seem piddling compared to those which have successfully secured massive readerships with the same WordPress technology. McCracken seems to think "elites" can't handle the idea that the masses make interesting things. In fact, they handle it just fine; in fact, they exploit it. This is the genius behind reality TV, where you get poorly paid amateurs, desperate for social recognition that will forever remain fleeting -- even more so as their 15 minutes testifies to how watered-down and evaporative what is available has become -- to provide professional caliber ratings and sell more advertised goods. Whatever innovations are generated by the mainstream in this arena are there to be harvested by those who can use them to build brands (entertainment brands or otherwise) -- that capability remains beyond the power of the individual and that fact is what meritocracy hides. Of course ordinary people drive innovation; it's just that they don't get the recognition for it that they perhaps seek, which is more than being another face in the blurry gimmick mirror on the cover of Time. As many have pointed out, If everybody is the "Person of the Year," than nobody is.

Perverse financial incentives (16 September 2006)

Apart from being an unconvincing defense of Benthamite utilitarianism, economist Richard Layard's Happiness is little more than a compendium of hedonics studies and some general conclusions about their implications -- it is useful as a bibliography if nothing else. One group of studies he cites has to do with performance-related pay, which he is anxious to reveal as a source of stress and hedonic ineffiency. (He also optimistically suggests we should celebrate the income tax as a wonderful way of encouraging a healthy work-life balance.)

But what I found most interesting was this: "Economists and politicians have tended to assume that when financial motives for performance are increased, other motives remain the same. In fact, these motives can change." Layard then cites studies that demonstrate that financial motives tend to compromise pre-existing motivations; it erodes what impulses we might have had to perform an action for its own sake: one found that people paid to solve puzzles will work at them less than those encouraged them to solve them merely for the satisfaction of solving them. Apparently once we are paid to do something, we begin to believe that the pay compels us to do it, and the activity takes on the qualities of disutility economists associate with jobs in general -- that we must be compensated financially to waste our time working rather than enjoying leisure. It seems that being paid is good way to destroy whatever pleasure we take in something; so strong is the alienating tendency of money and profit-tallying that when it intervenes we begin to separate from our involvement in what we are doing in the moment and revert to position of calculation -- thinking about the future, thinking about theoretical maximization rather than actualizing any of that potential in the present moment. This would seem to have the effect of keeping work and leisure unfortunately opposed to each other, a separation that seems to begin with the compulsion to sell one's labor on the open market for wages.

So as long as we remain dilettantish about our hobbies, we can enjoy them; when we professionalize, we turn them into chores. This explains part of my failure to pivot from researching a dissertation to defending one -- I enjoyed learning as long as it was a hobby of mine to understand trends in 18th century cultural production, but when it became a matter of packaging and selling that knowledge, I balked. This is what makes me something of a loser as far as our economy goes; I lack the willpower to be able to stomach the loss in pleasure that comes with professionalization -- another word for that ability to power through that hedonic loss? Ambition, which may be a description of the internal quality of finding pleasure in professionalization rather than tumult and combat and compromise and self-reification. I feel the same way about making music: As long as I have no ambition other than to get together with my friends and make music, I enjoy the pleasures of creation; but if we begin to try to market our band as cultural producers, we're likely to enjoy it less and see it as yet another job, a set of imposed responsibilities from without. But I still perceive these feelings as a kind of failure in myself, balking at the moment when "reality" requires me to summon up ambition and confront the world as it is and integrate the product of my creativity with it in the only apparent way possible: commercially. This is probably why I resent certain bands who are on the brink -- because their music suddenly seems about making those compromises and finding the wellspring of ambition to be more than dilettantes, to be content with more than just their own pleasure.

A few anecdotes (11 Spetember 2006)

I just returned from lunch and witnessed a fashion shoot on Fifth Avenue. The model stiffened herself in the wind, looking like a bodybuilder in the impressive and palpable strain it required for her to hold her pose, her long legs like reeds that refused to bend in the breeze. She was like a strange statue that suddenly had been deposited in front of my office; she had a marble blankness of expression. The photographer was on one knee, pointing his camera up at her, to make her even more monumental. But tourists were staging guerrilla shoots of their own, taking any number of snapshots of her from whatever angle was most convenient to them. Most of them wanted to get the photographer in their shot as well, to perhaps prove that they had manage to stumble behind the scenes. I wanted to wait around and see the model deobjectify herself, see her snap out of whatever it was she had done to herself. But it was taking too long, and I had to get back to work.

Yesterday, before seeing a truly dismal slog of a film, Sherrybaby -- acting for the sake of acting, squalor and dysfunction as "realism" -- we had burgers at a trendy burger joint tucked into the lobby of the Parker Meridien hotel on 57th Street. The line can go slow, and grew even slower when the Austrailian tourist in front of me, in the midst of ordering for her and her six friends, realized that she had forgot to mention some topping for one of the burgers and had to start over again, and again. Thus prompted the cashier to apparently stage an impromptu work slowdown. Some well-dressed media types were in line behind us, and one of them went to save a booth, a few feet away, for their group. Then, after a few moments, I see the woman waving her arms in the air to her friends in line. "Hey," she says, "I'm calling you." She was using her cell phone to call someone who was standing five feet away, someone so close that the sound of her voice was louder than phone's ringtone. They proceeded to have a conversations on the phone, while making eye contact with each other. It was the craziest thing I had ever seen. No wonder so many stadiums are named for telecom companies; they must have money to burn with customers like these. This seemed to prove that at some point gadgets begin to dictate your behavior over and above what may have once seemed like common sense. It's not exactly path dependence, but something related, whereby one justifies some technology by finding the least useful, most ostentatious ways, and then gets trapped in these usage patterns. This may explain in part an otherwise puzzling (but rather cheering) item in The Economist about cell-phone use on flights. Americans hate the idea:

When America's telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, requested public comments on in-flight calling, it received thousands of mostly negative responses. “Please no. No,” read one response. “I object to this in the strongest terms. I can't believe you are even considering it.” America's airlines seem to share this lack of enthusiasm for the idea. Both United and Delta say their customers do not want it.

But airlines may introduce it anyway, because people will use the service whether they really want it or not. Part of this apparent inconsistency would stem from egoism: There's always a perfectly good reason to have to take a call oneself, but other people's chattering is inexcusable. Part of it is probably an unwillingness to admit in a survey that one has given up on that basic standard of politeness: respecting the existence of the other people one shares space with. But some of it would derive from a compulsion to do something simply because one can. The article suggests that airlines may introduce the cell-phone service simply to have the chance to charge more for tickets in cabins that prohibited it. What a great idea -- get a captive audience and subject them to nuisances that they must then pay to avoid. Why not have shrieking noise come standard with your airfare and invite preferred customers to pay more for silence? When cell phone users become nuisances, the best way to beat them seems to be to join them, so one talker would likely beget several dozen more. In that cacophony one will be able to hear the sounds of the social order tearing apart.

Tattoo nation (27 August 2006)

Everyone else in the op-ed racket seems to be writing about some rainstorm or other that happened almost a year ago, but David Brooks comes through in today's NYT with a gripping and timely piece about this breaking new trend: tattoos. Believe it or not, people are marking their skin, with ink! What deep insight, what keen powers of observation for Brooks to notice this. And these people seem to think it marks them in some unique way despite the fact that all these other people are doing it! How silly, they don't even realize how conformist they are in their non-conformity. As Brooks so wisely sums up in his majestic closing statement: "Another generation of hipsters laid low by the ironies of consumerism." Wow. By highlighting this 15-year-old "trend," he has torn the mask off "hipster" culture at last with this column and proven once and for all that all supposed acts of subversion are phony and resistance to the happy progress of American consumerism is futile.

Now, I'm no fan of tattoos myself, but something about hearing Brooks make a similar case as me makes me want to rethink it a bit. Brooks is essentially denaturing the argument made in Heath and Potter's Nation of Rebels and before in Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to seize yet another opportunity to mock people for signaling self-awareness, a tendency he conflates with elitism and selfishness. He makes out people with tattoos to be a shallow bunch of short-sighted simpletons who are blinkered by their worship of empty gestures of individualism (the only individualist gesture that matters, of course, is entrepreneurship). The stories tattoos tell are far more complex than Brooks is willing to admit; they have long ceased to be expressions of how dangerous or different a person thinks she is. Also, having a tattoo is not "an alienated look" as Brooks suggests -- by his very logic, tattoos are an expression of belonging to the zeitgeist, not rejecting it. He seems trapped in preconceptions about tattooing that ceased to apply sometime around the Stone Temple Pilots' debut album. Some people may tattoo as a form as self-harm, as an elaborate form of cutting, but probably the majority do so not to express anger but pride. Brooks is quick to sneer at youth culture as conformist, but when has youth culture ever been about anything but pseudo-rebellion? To call it "conservative" as he does is to distort the terminology -- seeking to belong isn't the same as espousing a political ideology. Or is Brooks admitting that to be conservative is to be conformist and cowardly?

It seems much more likely that there's nothing insincere or aberrant in one's getting a tattoo -- the conformity inherent in the practice at this point seems to confirm that. A person's not simply erroneously calculating how rebellious or subversive they will become. Instead I would imagine one gets a satisfying feeling of having followed through with a serious commitment (something you'd expect Brooks to cheer) and displayed some courage (it's not joining the Army, but tattoos do hurt). And the ownership over one's own body one asserts by marking it in some conscious way is a private matter, ultimately, which is why most tattoos, I'm guessing, are not usually immediately visible to strangers -- they are often in a more intimate place and can serve as a way of showing you trust someone. You show the tattoo, you tell the story behind it, which Brooks dismisses as some self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing narrative about shopping, since he sees tattoos as nothing more than "perfect consumer items", but which can often be more a way for a person to organize and articulate a long-developing self-awareness and share it with a privileged few.

Brooks won't admit that these people may not care about how "mainstream" they are, that their minds are on something wholly different, that they could be concerned with any kind of issue larger than themselves (like, say, how their government could fail to plan for a major disaster they knew was coming and allow one of its cities to be ruined, perhaps permanently). If tattoos are consumer goods, they are mundane ones, no more deserving of contemptuous treatment than any of the other goods -- T-shirts, cars, housewares, etc. -- we use to communicate ideas about ourselves to others. I agree that there are probably better ways to communicate, and certainly more important messages to communicate than the ones goods limit a person to, but why single out tattoos? Why not condemn the entire consumer economy, or all consumers? After all the only thing separating a hipster from a redneck (or country club suburbanite or any of the other demographics Brooks has fetishized) is irony, and in the end that doesn't show up anywhere on the balance sheet.

The anxiety of property (23 August 2006)

Every so often, despite devoting almost every inch of column space to the pursuit of money, the business press feels the need to run a concessionary piece about how money can't buy you happiness. This article about money and happiness, from last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, seemed to touch a nerve with libertarians and economists around the blogosphere. The article draws on happiness research conducted by behavioral economists and hedonic psychologists and the like to make the usual points about money only providing additional happiness up to the level of material security, at which point the hedonic treadmill (our rapid adaptation to improvements) and comparative dissatisfaction (our inability to keep up with a ever-receding-and-improving cast of Joneses) set in. That's all familiar stuff, but what seemed to grab everyone's attention, though (me included), was this quote from professor Daniel Gilbert (whose recent book Stumbling on Happiness collects and elaborates these findings, and had already spurred a similar article in New York magazine a few months ago): "Money itself doesn't make you happy. What can make you happy is what you do with it. There's a lot of data that suggests experiences are better than durable goods." In other words, buying memories, which become more valuable as they get older, is better than buying things, which deterioriate over time, causing their owners great anxiety. That is why it is better to travel or to contrive ways to get together and do things with friends. Owning stuff just gives us the pleasure of watching it decay.

This makes perfect sense to me: I think of all the grief my old laptop has given me over the years -- protecting it from viruses, installing software, making network cards work with it, replacing its battery which rapidly lost interest in holding a charge. Now it's so feeble as to be utterly worthless and it sits in a bag in my closet unused, waiting to be junked. I needed the computer (sort of) for various reasons, but it don't think of it as having generated a "flow of experiences" for me, as economist Bryan Caplan suggests. If anything it generated the fear he admits to: "whenever I worry about being robbed over vacation, my first thought is the sorrow of seeing my CD shelves empty." That which is useful isn't necessarily that which gives pleasurable memories, plus the repetition of experience from goods one owns destroys the singularity of the memories created. Also ownership seems to give us the feeling of having potential experience held in abeyance, which seems to nullify any prior experiences with the thing owned. When I think of the laptop, I think of what must still be done with it, not what great things it let me do in the past; and I think of those future tasks as duties, owed to myself and requiring my effort. I take whatever experience an owned good gives me for granted even before I make that experience happen. In some ways, this is why owning a film on DVD tends to ruin it for me; I never end up watching it even though the idea in acquiring it was that I could watch it over and over again. What pleasure I get from owning the DVD is knowing that I could watch it over and over again but don't actually have to. Ownership becomes an acceptable substitute for actual experience. (Maybe this is why I'm waiting to get Gilbert's book out from the library to read it.)

Will Wilkinson offers this defense of experiences over goods:

Two points. (1) Market egalitarianism. Qualitiative differences between cheap and expensive consumer goods is almost nil. There is almost no experiential difference between a cheap TV and a “nice” TV. If Deadwood is good on a $2,000 plasma screen on HBO, it’s 98% as good on your sister’s giveaway used 19-inch, a $35 DVD player, and Netflix. The extra expenditure buys almost nothing in terms of the quality of experience. Same with the music. For $4.95 a month, I can get I’m guessing 75% of of Bryan’s CD collection on Yahoo. Capitalism makes money worth much less when it comes to manufactured non-positional goods. (2) Adaptation. The mind is a novelty whore — a change detector. Consciousness loses its grip on the added quality of a premium picture, sound system, etc., very fast. The cheap, almost perfect substitute for an expensive stereo is a cheap stereo. The cheap substitute for an exquisite meal at the best restaurant in Paris is… what? IHOP in Arlington? A great memory and a great story is an ongoing flow of positive experience.

The term market egalitarianism smuggles some dubious associations into the argument (I don't think the fact that we can all possibly buy comparable TVs makes us all equal in any meaningful way -- purchasing power isn't quite synonymous with political power) but the rest seems right. If we are looking to buy status or novelty, consumer goods are likely to disappoint us. As Megan McArdle at Asymmetrical Information writes, "Status-hunting via material goods is a zero-sum game, and unless you're Bill Gates, the odds are you're going to lose. With a little mental discipline (okay, a lot) you can stop playing that game, and force yourself to concentrate on the things that really give you joy, rather than simply creating a transitory gleam of envy in someone else's eye." And If we are looking for utility, we can find generally it on the cheap. But perhaps most important, utility is not necessary equivalent to happiness -- maximizing utility seems like defensive behavior, an anxious protection of certain standards one has adapted to, whereas happiness is something else, an absence of self-consciousness in the midst of experience, and the subsequent ability to remember later how that felt.