Disloyalty Programs (25 April 2011)

This morning I opened a tub of yogurt and was confronted with the above image...

I was somewhat skeptical. If rewards are easy to get, maybe they are not actually rewards at all, and the word reward is being used to disguise what is really going on. At first I was thinking this was just another example of advertisers luring me into a species of magical thinking in which my specialness (that the company has somehow managed to recognize) allows me to take shortcuts not available to all the other losers out there. It tempts me to believe that what is true for me is different from what is true for the others, because after all, it is my world and the others are bit players in it. Almost all ads play on that sort of solipsism, dissolving the reality of other people's claims, the interdependencies of society, to present a far more convenient world where our consumer decisions are sovereign in the broadest sense -- the only kind of power that is real and worth exerting.

In this particular case, it seems that the yogurt company is wedding the promise of convenience to something that strikes me as rather inconvenient, logging personal information and participating in an online marketing scheme rather than eating yogurt and then going about one's business in life. A reward that comes easy is probably more accurately described as a gift (or even a "free gift"), but this yogurt company wants me to believe that I have somehow already earned the "rewards" they promise, and I all I have to do is enroll in their loyalty program and dutifully record the serial numbers of every tub of yogurt I eat henceforth. I show my loyalty to the yogurt company by reporting on myself to its website, but I don't earn the company's loyalty to me (in the form of coupons on their yogurt) until I have purchased enough of their product.

It seems to me that this is something of a disloyalty program. The yogurt company demands unearned fidelity from me up-front and then teaches me that "loyalty" should be repaid with systematically doled out rewards intended to make loyalty worth one's while. It teaches me the error of being loyal without a reward program; it teaches me that companies don't see themselves as owing anything to the occasional customer, and thus you shouldn't bother to patronize any particular company until they afford an opportunity for you to enroll you and acknowledge your special diligence. I am reminded that the market is not a sphere of inherent trust between parties who share ethical mores about fairness, but instead a sphere of competing loyalties where savvy players are subsidized by suckers who aren't negotiating special favors on the basis of their past behavior. The market doesn't situate us on a level playing field in which the usefulness of what we bring determines its value; instead it is a place where we leverage our reputation and engage in a kind of competitive self-reporting. The market doesn't let one escape the past and it doesn't offer equal opportunities or a level playing field -- it's a place where class advantages and social capital tilt outcomes; it's a place where the burden of the past is reiterated and reinforced, reinscribed again and again so that the pre-existing imbalances between negotiating parties can be reproduced if not exacerbated.

Drug Stores Selling Groceries, Lifestyles (15 Nov 2010)

I haven't yet figured out how to synthesize Rob Walker's column about the drug-store chain Walgreens starting to sell fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods neglected by traditional grocers and produce sellers and my somewhat mind-blowing experience at the brand-new Duane Reade (a NYC drug-store chain) in the hipster haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Neighborhood activists have encouraged a boycott (on Facebook at least) of this particular Duane Reade location because it apparently represents the wrong sort of gentrification and is uncooling the area with its non-mom-and-pop-ness. It sits across from another local pharmacy that has served the neighborhood since before it was colonized by 20-somethings and is therefore acceptably authentic.

To counter the bad vibes, Duane Reade apparently did some market research and concluded the way to win over locals was to hide the pharmacy in a remote corner and stock the store with a beer counter where one can have growlers filled; a huge walk-in beverage cooler that features, as it says above the entrance, "retro brands"; haute niche brands in both the food and makeup departments -- Ronnybrook Farms, Skyr Icelandic yogurt, Demeter fragrances (including Paperback, Dirt and Riding Crop) -- in the immense and gleaming K-mart-size basement-retail floor with luxuriously wide aisles. We can't give you mom-and-pop authenticity, the store seemed to be saying, but we can collect more of your lifestyle accouterments in one store than you ever dreamed was possible. People were audibly cooing and gasping in delighted surprise as they wandered around and saw just how much Duane Reade was willing to pander to them.

It's at this point that I want to draw some righteous parallel between poor neighborhoods and crypto-bohemian ones, between the food desert on the one hand and the desert of the real on the other. Whereas the Williamsburgers apparently want to see their warped integrity reflected in their neighborhood retailers, the people in food deserts see only society's general intention to ignore them until they disappear. The oversaturation of symbols and the esoteric plane on which the lifestyle war is being fought in the one neighborhood reflects the dearth of social resources in the other, the misplaced energies of a social order seeking profit opportunities and thus reinforcing hyperindividualism among the privileged.

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.

Thoughts on Go-gurt (4 Oct 2010)

I have always been puzzled by the concept of Go-Gurt, yogurt that you squeeze into your mouth out of a tube. It seems sort of lewd. I don't know if I could look the cashier in the eye if I bought some.

As if the phallicism weren't salacious enough, Go-Gurt has a flavor called Bikini Bottom Berry. Who is doing their branding? Al Goldstein? Presumably this "flavor" has something to do with Sponge Bob, and if I had children I would understand that the idea of eating Bikini Bottoms is not dirty or scatological but cute. Still, it makes me want to break out Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and get to the bottom of it.

A few decades ago, a product like Go-Gurt would probably have been advertised as space-age, a product that lets kids emulate the astronauts, like Tang (another oddly named product, come to think of it -- perhaps the sexual promise of adulthood is being encoded/coopted in cheeky brand names). But it doesn't seem like too many products are sold to kids through heroic images of adulthood anymore. Now we all learn to want adolescence to last forever.

Leftover thoughts about authenticity (23 Sept 2010)

I found the bookmark I was using when I was reading The Authenticity Hoax, on which I had made a bunch of near illegible notes. I think I covered most of it, but I missed this: Potter at one point dismisses the problem of alienated labor and more or less endorses what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, "a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." Or to put it another way, the attitude of "work sucks, get over it" is an ideological position, not a statement of fact -- it's an example of the way capitalist ideology shapes what appears to be realistic and what registers as slacker daydreaming, establishing the range of expectations for working life and normalizing the idea that work should be personally nonproductive -- it's effort made to forward somebody else's ideas in return for cash, or it's not "real" work.

Authenticity, as a result of that prevailing ideology about work, takes on a compensatory function in the sphere of consumption -- once the private sphere, but no longer. It becomes a code word for the process of self-making within the "empty work/frantic consumerism" dialectic. We suspend our real self while we work, but are then empowered through cash to elaborate that self in leisure time. That typically means buying products and experiences from the cultural-industrial complex and immersing oneself in consumerism's code rather than diving into some interior possibilities latent or dormant in one's own intrinsic make-up. I sometimes subscribe to the idea that engaging in meaningful work within a clearly delimited community as an ongoing practice is the only way to tap into something that could be called the "real self" or "species being." But that only defers the question of what defines "meaningful" and "community" and so on. Anyway, consumerism thrives on atomized individuals who neglect collective identity and chase an unbounded authenticity through serial purchases and collecting as opposed to letting go of the authenticity ideal in favor of something more like flow, self-confidence through collaborative doing.

I don't know. I'm troubled by the thought that the insecurity about identity seems to be addressed in our society through building a durable personal brand, with the strategies adopted from ubiquitous marketing and self-broadcasting tools. Seeking authenticity now means, more than anything else, developing a strong personal brand. But what is the product we are branding? Bare life? What market are we after a share of? My problem with that isn't that the personal brand is inauthentic -- it just seems subject to kinds of evaluation and tracking and manipulation that corrodes human dignity, which rests in the myth that there is something ineffable and inexpressible about all of us that only comes out when we are in the process of doing something for people.

Trader Aldi's (3 Sept 2010)

I am a little bit obsessed with the oft-neglected connection between German hard-discounter Aldi and U.S. lifestyle-grocery Trader Joe's, mainly because most of the Americans who shop at Trader Joe's would never be caught skulking in an Aldi -- many of which are in lower-income, fringe areas in the U.S. -- and a high proportion of Aldi's customers probably don't even know what Trader Joe's is. It's a not so secret vanity of mine to be one of what I imagine to be few people shopping at both stores routinely. I'm not sure what system I think I am beating; I just feel that "they" don't want you to know that the food in both of these chains is of the same quality. (In Germany, Aldi apparently stocks Trader Joe's branded goods on the shelves, something we will never see in the U.S.)

Though both Trader Joe's and Aldi often get unreasonably crowded and entail long waits in line, they offer a stark opportunity to study class difference in America -- the way the same stuff is branded differently to appeal across income brackets; the different kinds of behaviors customers display and the sort of amenities they expect. Aldi is notorious for offering no amenities whatsoever; the food is piled in cardboard boxes on pallets in the store, and you must pack your own groceries, Euro-style, with bags you have to pay for. Trader Joe's has a weird shtick where the employees are dressed as if they were a ship's crew, and they seem instructed to make cheerful small talk with customers. They offer Dixie cups of coffee and free samples of prepared food -- the scramble for which can often become savage, with lots of anarchic pushing and shoving.

My sense is that Aldi treats grocery shopping the way it ought to be treated, as a grim and necessary duty carried out by responsible adults seeking the best prices and not seeking affirmation about what kind of people they are. The families trudging through Aldi, pushing the oversize cart that you must pay a 25-cent deposit for in the parking lot, are generally nonplussed by the goods on offer, a bizarre array of hapless pseudobrands like "Savoritz" and "Fit & Easy" and "Happy Farms." The products confer no status, so affirmation for people buying stuff there can then theoretically come from more appropriate sources connected to practices more integral to our identity than shopping. Whereas at Trader Joe's customers are patronized like children and flattered and cajoled as if they were helpless simps desperate to be told what will make them cool and clever. The food is marketed as if it all were potentially trendy and impressive. The general impression the experience seems designed to leave shoppers with is that they are superior to the ordinary grocery shopper because they are more alert to a veneer of signifiers overlaying the products and can keep up with and decode these signifiers efficiently. But I don't want or expect to be congratulated for buying the "frozen organic foursome" or "Trader Joe's Ultra-dark Bay Blend" -- I just want my figs and coffee beans and to get the hell out of there.

This recent Fortune cover story by Beth Kowitt supplies some confirmation for my nutty views. Kowitt claims that Trader Joe's is "an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience" -- a description that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the chain. (And if you don't think it is a chore to be in TJ's on, say, a weekend afternoon, you're nuts. It's like being at a public pool on the hottest afternoon of the year, only everybody is an entitled prig blathering on a cell phone.) Kowitt then systematically undermines that brand identity by exposing the way the illusion is constructed. She notes that TJ's is owned by Aldi and that "big, well-known companies also make many of Trader Joe's products" though they are packaged to seem localish in provenance. Vendors are sworn to secrecy about their relationship to Trader Joe's, allowing the grocer to maintain total control over the brand. She explains how TJ's shops for its customers by seeing which zip codes subscribe to foodie magazines and have high education levels -- these indicators apparently mark the insecure but trend-setting customers they want to attract, people for whom food is not something you struggle to afford but something you struggle to master and awe others with.

None of this is all that shocking, but it just points to the ways in which class gets delineated through consumer practices, as it must in a consumer society that on the surface promises purchasing power for all and equal opportunity to goods. But the class matters at stake in places like Trader Joe's appear to dissolve in an atmosphere of righteousness, of cool, of "quality" being bounced back and forth between customers and products, so that consumers don't believe they are partaking in anything unegalitarian -- they don't see themselves as responsible for reproducing class inequity at all.

Self-branding watch (9 Aug 2010)

In case you don't regularly read this blog, I have been occasionally speculating that structural unemployment parallels the narcissistic cult of self-production online through various Web 2.0 platforms. The gist is that work and leisure have begun to trade places; people are losing traditional jobs at the same time as people are voluntarily producing all sorts of services through their behavior and contributions online. That is, the sorts of services we produce increasingly in the U.S. are attitudes about culture, identity-anchoring memes, and opinions, and so forth as well as the digitized fragments of art and culture themselves -- intellectual property as a service, as a real-time-updating flow of information about how we should feel about the zeitgeist -- and ideally, I suppose, about ourselves. We build our personal brand, and the by-products of that process feed a variety of information-hungry marketing and data-processing machines.

So I wonder whether this fits in: Via Chris Lehmann comes this noxious but telling article in Money -- a pretty accurate barometer of the alternating anxiety and greed afflicting the American middle classes -- about personal branding as a way of dealing with being unemployed. The article details how to package yourself for online consumption with an eye toward impressing employers, who will confirm their impression of you the traces you have left online. You must of course create a personal website and blog about topics that gibe with the kind of middle manager you hope to become. That you would lack an online presence is taken for granted as virtually unbelievable, a breach of normalcy that makes one inherently unemployable.

Today whatever reputation you have is spreading quickly across the Internet, thanks to Google, industry blogs, and social-networking sites. (Even failing to turn up on search engines says something about you.)

In other words, personal reputation must be realized in a digitized, exploitable form online or else it practically doesn't exist. You must produce a self online or else you won't exist in the working world as it now exists, which requires continual communing with the network, a continual affirmation of presence. Outside that world is the world beyond reputation, a lumpen proletariat world of work that, on the rare occasion it can be found, is not a matter of self-branding but self-annihilation.

Lehmann sums up this double movement well: "The goal of the Taylorite phase of industrial production was famously to place the manager’s brains beneath the workman’s cap, but it seems that the New Information Economy is upping the ante by supplanting the besieged private self with the market’s very soul." We construct a self as brand to hold on to middle-class status and the possibility of cultural relevance, but at the same time surrender the possibility of a different sort of identity, grounded in a less tautologous sort of work. As as we surrender to the the allure of branding, those other forms of socially necessary labor are sent elsewhere, thoroughly proletarianized and immiserated, or abolished altogether.

Immigration and the Mark of the Beast (4 May 2010)

Ever since I was a kid and got Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, the weird numerology of the Book of Revelation has always weirded me out. It didn't make much sense to me then that mainstream religion could accommodate grim eschatological ruminations; little did I know that was one of religion's primary purposes. I remember trying to read Revelation, thinking it would be like cool, doomy sci-fi, and ending up disappointed that despite its many quotable images, it was basically incomprehensible and unreadable. I wouldn't encounter something that inscrutable until I tried reading Spengler. Later I tried reading one of the Left Behind books in the same spirit and had to abandon that project right away. The idea of other people reading that stuff and taking it seriously was very upsetting. The U.S. functions on working compromises, yet not too far below the surface is an apocalyptic spirituality that communes with and yearns for the end-times, a mentality that cannot possibly brook the notion of compromise and enjoys a kind of ecstatic obstinacy that celebrates the failure of civic, secular society.

So, that's probably I found this Dave Emory-ish 3qD essay by Richard Eskow about biometric ID cards and alarm bells they may sound for evangelical Christians fascinating. Did you know that every bar code bears the number of the beast? Do you know about the "tribulation period"? Are you ready to "renounce your faith" and "receive your identification"?

The essay picks up on a Bible passage, Revelation 13:17: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." In other words, without an ID card, you can't participate in the economy -- an idea often touted in immigration-reform debates by moderates. Eskow thus contends that immigration reform may push evangelicals to even higher levels of end-times paranoia. The fear of being marked and counted by a repressive state is not unreasonable, as much of 20th century history shows, and it must have been a pretty salient threat for early Christians under the Romans as well. Secular society has come to address that fear with a robust concept of privacy (that captains of digital industry keep telling us are anachronistic). The video clips Eskow includes of evangelicals exposing the truth about bar codes are really, really creepy -- especially the second part of the second one, which is like a freaked-out, Christianized snuff film. Ditto for the clip titled "Balloons and Beheadings."

In language and content, this law almost seems designed to trigger apocalyptic fears. And just when it seems the symbolism can't get any worse, it gets worse. Way worse. What’s the name of the proposed “national biometric ID system”? ”Believe.” That’s an acronym for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.” But it might just as well be a neon sign indicating that we’ve just instituted the false One World Church, the Whore of Babylon and consorter with kings described in the prophecies and feared in church communities across rural America.

As Eskow suggests, this sort of sentiment is why Bush failed to pass immigration reform -- some on the right are nativists and racists dead-set against the "pollution" of America, others are evangelicals convinced that immigration reform is a stalking horse for one-world government and the whore of Babylon.

Quality brands as moribund middlebrow propaganda (22 March 2010)

In a recent New Yorker column, James Surowiecki argues that retailers are succeeding by eschewing the middlebrow and either making luxury goods or cheap, "good enough" stuff. I had trouble following some of his logic (I didn't really understand what he was getting at in his point about economies of scale) but I thought this was interesting:

In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of reasonable quality and reliability. Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately. The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.

It seems like a good thing if people aren't mistakenly equating brands with merchandise quality. But I wonder whether that has anything to do with information access. It seems like it could reflect an ideological shift, or a shift in the significance of branding.

Surowiecki depicts middlebrow shoppers as dupes who mistook brands for indicators of quality while they bumbled in the marketplace, with no inner resources to draw on to tell what's what. The brand reassured them they weren't making a mistake, even if the quality wasn't there. Paradoxically, the wealth of new information available makes the possibility of making a mistake much higher; there's more we should have and could have known, and we can quickly confirm our disappointment online if something goes wrong with something we purchase. A form of decisional paralysis may set in as brands are devalued, or at least come to signify qualities other than quality.

But brands have more work to do besides signal quality. They need to be more flexible in what they can mean, what sort of fantasies they can evoke. They need to have richer personalities (ugh). What is precisely middlebrow is the idea that a brand signals only quality, and that idea is perhaps dead. (Surowiecki's muted nostalgia for it altogether befits the middlebrow magazine he writes for, its own brand an increasingly irrelevant signal of quality as magazines founder.) Instead, the ways in which products denote class distinctions have become more complex; the grammar which retailers and consumers alike must use with products more sophisticated.

Band name drought (17 Feb 2010)

I was just wondering how it is that doom rock bands from Sweden can get away with giving themselves elegantly concise names like "Witchcraft" and "Graveyard," while bands in the U.S. feel obliged to come up with something (usually outlandish or unwieldy) that is not already taken on MySpace. And voilà, this WSJ piece comes down the pike about how difficult it supposedly is to name your band. It seems true that a cursory search will reveal that what you thought was a great, original idea was already thought up and acted upon by someone else. (I am still sad that both Black Horse Pike and White Horse Pike have MySpace pages.) It's enough to make you pine for the legendary days of local garage-band scenes, where every township could have its own group called the Outsiders.

But really, this is not that huge of a problem. The Awl does a good job saying what needs to be said about the piece.

I mean, how hard is it to come up with a unique band name? Armed with only Google, a rhyming dictionary, and an urgency to get a post done, I challenged myself to come up with ten new group monikers for which there were no registered alternatives. It took three minutes.

The list he comes up with is worth clicking through to check out.

All that said, the matter of a band name isn't something insignificant. It's arguably as important as the music itself. There are lots and lots of bands, and if some can be ruled out by virtue of having terrible names, then they will be. Rare are the bands that are better than their names: Spoon is the only one I can think of off the top of my head right now. But legion are the bands with bad names that stink.

Soviet Consumerism (10 Aug 2009)

Someone on Metafilter had linked to Real USSR, which offers essays and photos of Soviet material culture. It seems like a useful resource in imagining what a postconsumer (or non-consumer) society might look like. The Soviets apparently failed in achieving a positive example of such a society; its citizens, at least in Western representations, were hungrier than their non-Communist counterparts for branded goods and the world of status consumption from which they were by and large excluded. Their seemingly dismal lack of consumer goods was possibly the best propaganda weapon for the U.S. during the Cold War: Dowdy, nondescript proles standing in lines outside gray, barren Soviet distribution centers would be contrasted with the glitz of shopping malls and the endless opportunities for self-aggrandizement. Who wants to work for a collective goal when we can enjoy a solipsistic reverie in which all causes begin and end with ourselves?

Consumerism in Western society, at any rate, is strongly associated with atomistic individualism, offering the illusion of transcending social reciprocity for a higher convenience, in which pleasure is served directly to us through various purchases in well-stocked retail outlets. Pleasure is presumed to be a matter of accumulation -- is constructed to be that sort of thing, a matter of developing the richest self through consuming and mastering the greatest amount of stuff. In Soviet culture, consumerism must have meant something else entirely, carving out a space for subjectivity -- for an alternate currency of information, about goods and what they might signify -- in an authoritarian state premised on surveillance and information control.

Anyway, the posts at Real USSR give a glimpse of the resourcefulness of Russians in the face of deprivation and the ideology that was meant to justify it or excuse it. This resourcefulness is the kind of thing I tend to sentimentalize as what's lost in consumer societies -- only the Soviets probably didn't experience it as pleasure, despite the faint nostalgia of posts such as this one about DIY fashion. It was likely felt as necessity pinching in, complicating everyday life. It was official ideology impinging on autonomy in ways that symbolized how dominated the populace was:

During the Soviet times fashion was first and foremost, an instrument of propaganda of hard work attitudes and education of good taste. Therefore the way people were dressed was very strictly regulated – just like anything else, fashion had to be “planned” and “approved”.

In other words, old-fashioned sumptuary laws were in place to discourage fashion from becoming a medium for suggesting social mobility. The link between autonomy and personal display is maintained where ideally it would be dissolved. The inescapability of invidious comparison is still implied. The post mentions the "fashion neighborhood watch" -- a sort of inverse of the feeling I have when I walk around the East Village feeling helplessly uncool. I tend to aspire toward sartorial anonymity for very different reasons than the Soviets might have -- but then again maybe they are the same, a yearning for safety. Invisibility in a socialist society is suspect because everyone is supposed to be responsible to every one else (in reality, the state) in the collective project of society -- you have to be visible but undifferentiated. In a consumer society, visibility traps one's aspirations to individuality in the realm of fashion -- judgment of who we are remains on the surface level, and can't break through to the aspects of personality that are not so easily displayed. Consequently, the culture industries work hard to produce legible symbols for every possible personality trait, de-authenticating them in the process so that all identity can be regarded suspiciously as pretense.

This post, about Soviet brands, surprised me, because I had sort of assumed that there were no brands in the USSR. The post highlights a perfume called Red Moscow, the name of which suggests how branding was co-opted for propaganda purposes -- of course it makes sense that the state would invent nationalist brands. I tend to take it for granted that brands of products function only to help individuals brand themselves, to allow them to project certain traits along the lines described in the previous paragraph. (For producers, brands allow for the elaboration of differences between competitors' commodities where there are more or less materially indistinguishable.) But Red Moscow suggests that brands could be contrived to close off avenues for the development of a superficial self. Nationalist brands would enlist users into helping complete the ideological project of the state, not the self -- a state that may not allow for an autonomous self. Such brands would demonstrate conformity and obedience in a much more direct way than our brands, which entice us to show off our conformity to the general significance of participating in fashion and having a lifestyle. Consumerism is soft coercion in that sense; it allows for a space where conformity can comfortably coexist with rebellion -- the revolution is reduced to continually turning over one's personal affect within a game whose rules are thereby protected from change.

Meme moments (30 May 2009)

At Murketing, Rob Walker notes the rise of an ironic T-shirt, "Three Wolf Moon," which looks like something that Brett from Flight of the Conchords may have worn. As Walker explains, lots of people wrote silly reviews praising the shirt, and sales took off. If you look on Amazon, you can see the gallery of images Photoshopped to show celebrities wearing it, and so on. Very creative and fun, a contemporary collective experience. So why does it creep me out?

Here's Walker's analysis of the shirt phenomenon:

This is an example of an object acquiring a narrative, and meaning. At first, it was simply a bad T-shirt. Then it became that bad T-shirt, the one that attracted a reviewer-flash-mob. If you were wearing it, and someone asked, you could tell them a story. In fact you could tell them the story even if they didn’t ask -- it’s a good story! -- particularly if you submitted a funny review which you can then recount.
The object becomes a souvenir of a moment and an experience: The time we all got together and made fun of this T-shirt.

I can't tell how serious Walker is about this being a "good story" that anyone would want to hear -- I guess I found it interesting, which is why I am writing about it now, but I would think anyone who was wearing the shirt telling me that story was sort of annoying. I'm sure there are scads of opportunities for this sort of pile-on participation online at any given moment, which seems to rob them all of a significant ingredient of serendipity that would tip the resulting personal stories from lame to not lame. That is to say, the fact that this occurred online on a retail website makes the whole event seem contrived, even though it probably wasn't. The network effects, the rapid scaling-up of online viral phenomena, generates the air of contrivance -- for me at least -- which makes all such spontaneous events seem feasibly pre-plannable. It seems as though there are always enough bored yet clever people out there on the internet to latch onto memes.

But what I most fear -- and maybe I shouldn't -- is that these sorts of experiences may be the only sorts of experiences we will have in the future. For those of us used to different experiences, the transition may be painful. I think this was what I had been feeling at Yellowstone. All our experiences may come with this prepackaged feeling of being contrived, of being designed to be reported on, if only by ourselves. The moments that don't seem worth blogging about or "sharing" will become harder for us to fathom, undigestable, sitting in our minds like the stones in a bird's gullet.

Brand hegemony (9 May 2009)

I attended the opening ceremonies for the Blowing Up the Brand conference at NYU yesterday and heard Rob Walker give a talk about branding's current status as a kind of governing cultural metaphor. Not only are lay discussions of how successfuly or ingenious marketing has become commonplace now, but the "self as brand" has become a ready-at-hand way of conceptualizing our motives for ourselves, for organizing our incentives and our goals. It seems an offshoot of the building preoccupation with identity and self-actualization. It's no accident that "authenticity" -- which came up a bit in the Q&A with Walker after the talk -- features prominently in discussions of brands and self-fashioning. (In fact, I wonder if brand managers could get a PowerPoint presentation out of reading Stephen Greenblatt.) The properly groomed brand image will reveal the enduring truth about us that others will invariably recognize, or alternatively, in will supply others with the raw material (or perhaps the playing field) with which to shape the meaning of our social being. In other words, the transaction involved in brand recognition is now the way we understand how we affect and are affected by others; the brand is what we imagine gets fixed as permanent about ourselves after series of social interactions. If that is so, then -- and I took this as Walker's point -- it will be efficacious to self-brand. People will recognize what you are doing, will interpret it properly, will slot it in with a set of values that have (through the ubiquity of brand talk) established themselves as creditable. But, as Walker suggested, we are also in danger of reducing our own complexities and the nuances of our relationships to the shape of the brand, to the commercial verities of guarded and proprietary corporate communication. Self-actualization becomes perpetual self-promotion. And worse everyone collaborates to keep it limited to this -- every one agrees to "follow you if you follow me." (Fittingly, in such a culture with so many mutual followers, there can be no leaders.) Technology plays in to this because it supplies us with a way of measuring our reach, of rating ourselves the way a TV show is rated by Nielsen. We degenerate into vulgar utilitarians. This drives us to be fixated on our metrics, and ultimately necessarily nebulous concerns about quality are shunted aside for an overriding concern for quantity -- which is far more convenient to wrangle with since it is so cut and dried. (This is also the problem with positivism and enlightenment techno-rationality.)

My own thinking about the brand begins with this: Branding coopts a vital and socially necessary process -- signification; negotiating and fixing the meaning of signs -- and commercializes it. Rather than work to fix meanings (as do signification processes traditionally), branding tends to render signs permanently provisional, always open-ended, so that they can be adapted to whatever commercial purposes suit a given moment. But the commercial aura of this kind of communication gives it a kind of validity that the onslaught of postmodernity had threatened to strip from signification. This vindicating, validating authority from branding as signifying practice derives from its association with structures that in capitalist society come to seem eternal and primary -- the market and a fundamentally "rational" selfishness. (For example: If one can see what a person has to gain by saying something, one understands the "truth" of that statement.) Brands makes us believe the uncertain process of signification has been professionalized.

So brands are always indeterminate, negotiable, but they also aspire to connote permanence, stable meanings. I think this has the effect of making us experience or consume brands for this specific feeling of permanent truth -- we consume the permanence they signify and suspend our knowledge that that meaning is an illusion born in the moment of consumption. We suspend our concern with the fragility of meaning, with its fundamental ambiguity, which seems banished by the clarity of commercial exchanges. Brands offer us a series of engagements with the promise of forever in a transitory moment. The best of both worlds.

Pepsi people power (23 Feb 2009)

Jason Kottke linked to this New York Times article by Stuart Elliott about PepsiCo deciding to reverse course on its rebranding of its Tropicana orange juice line. (AdPulp and Rob Walker noted it also.) I have no investment in the designs at stake here and don't prefer either one. I don't even buy Tropicana juice unless it's the cheapest on offer. (A related but tangential question: Whatever happened to frozen orange juice? It's rarely available and tends to be more expensive than the stuff in the carton everywhere but Aldi. Is this because shipping has become cheaper, rendering concentrated juice unnecessary? I want to feel like a thrifty "new consumer" by reconstituting frozen orange juice, but I am being thwarted!)

But what's interesting about this is the way the internet is being used as a huge marketing focus group by brand managers. This seems cost-efficient (the company says the reversion costs will not be "significant"), as long as companies are willing to be regarded as having made mistakes like this in public. But rather than seem foolish or indecisive, PepsiCo. seems likely to come out ahead from this in a publicity standpoint. The Tropicana brand makes it into the edit pages of publications for free; the company is portrayed as being extremely open and responsive to its customers and somewhat technologically savvy to boot. The article cites a PepsiCo rep, sounding quite pleased with the whole contretemps:

Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America in Chicago, part of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, acknowledged that consumers can communicate with marketers “more readily and more quickly” than ever. “For companies that put consumers at the center of what they do,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”

Being open to public comment on packaging changes may in fact be a way of building "brand communities" online, as it gives an inchoate group of unaffiliated consumers something to rally around:

“You used to wait to go to the water cooler or a cocktail party to talk over something,” said Richard Laermer, chief executive at RLM Public Relations in New York.
“Now, every minute is a cocktail party,” he added. “You write an e-mail and in an hour, you’ve got a fan base agreeing with you.”
That ability to share brickbats or bouquets with other consumers is important because it facilitates the formation of ad hoc groups, more likely to be listened to than individuals.
“There will always be people complaining, and always be people complaining about the complainers,” said Peter Shankman, a public relations executive who specializes in social media. “But this makes it easier to put us together.”

Campbell admitted that there earlier market research had revealed that it wasn't the case that Tropicana buyers "necessarily had a huge connection" to its old packaging. Well, they seem to now.

Rob Walker figures that "Probably this story will largely be positioned as an example of the enhanced power of consumers to complain — the NYT story is full of the usual email-and-Facebook examples, etc. And maybe that’s partly true." I agree but think that the power ultimately rests with the companies, not consumers, who after all are still investing their energy in someone else's product. "Activist consumers" who agitate about product design are still consumers, in fact their are even more invested in their roles as consumers. Maybe that is not the worst thing in the world, but my philosophical presupposition is that the "consumer" role is ultimately confining, blinding us to the existential possibilities outside of shopping.

My conspiratorial mind, of course, assumes that these sorts of brand fauxs pas, since they may ultimately serve to be useful for a company, will come to be increasingly staged as a means for facilitating more consumer engagement with brands -- an elaboration of the recent tactic of encouraging consumers to make their own ads. Campbell told the NYT that the logo was changed because criticism came from the company's "most loyal consumers." That they bother to complain is precisely what makes them loyal. Others would probably just buy something else without a second thought. Myself, I would prefer to be one of those others.

Compensatory chocolate (10 Feb 2009)

Rob Walker's latest Consumed column in the Sunday NYT magazine looks at criminally overpriced chocolate as a vehicle for "compensatory consumption." Professors at Northwestern University found in a study that "subjects who had put themselves in a powerless frame of mind were willing to pay measurably more than the other group for high-status items" and that "individuals who felt less powerful showed a preference for clothing with larger and more conspicuous luxury logos." In other words, our status anxiety may register to us as a lack of autonomy, as powerlessness, and we may compensate by exercising the sort of autonomy with which we are all familiar -- making a wasteful shopping choice to prove that we can. Hence, spending $8 on a chocolate bar.

If this phenomenon of "compensatory consumption" holds, there would be seem to be incentive for marketers to make us perpetually anxious about our status, in good times and bad, and to make sure that status remains a meaningful social category with as much salience as possible. This implies that there can be no end to the social barriers derived from class as long as there is a robust advertising industry. That industry, of course, is not so robust currently; unfortunately, its services in making us anxious about our future are not especially necessary right now.

Could the chocolate taste so good that it would be worth that much? That question is irrelevant, as it is for wine as well. The causality must be reversed; it tastes better because we spent the extra money on it, because we are eating our own sense of power.

Because I live in a neighborhood where cheap imported chocolates from Eastern Europe are readily available, I have a different relationship with chocolate. I get to enjoy not the ersatz thrill of pseudo-luxury spending but the ersatz cosmopolitanism of consuming unusual imported goods. Apologists for consumerism tend to celebrate this sort of access to goods as a kind of "power," but really the variety of goods is not improving my life so much as it is further articulating the status hierarchy. In this case, the status boost I get comes not from my sense of extravagant spending on an overpriced chocolate with a fancy brand name but from a different sort of privilege: the undeserved sense of superiority that comes from living in the sort of neighborhood where I can find Bulgarian and Croatian candy bars that other Americans can't get so casually. Nevertheless, I can't give you an honest appraisal of whether this chocolate tastes better or worse than Hershey's for the same reasons mentioned above. On the level of relative obscurity, they rate highly. What I worry about is the way the status value masks the flavor; it becomes hard for me to tell the relative "objective" worth of things in the ordinary course of life. I would have to go through life blindfolded to really taste anything as it is.

The author as brand (30 Jan 2009)

In my post about volunteer criticism yesterday, I complained about writing online degenerating into self-branding via vectors like Facebook. At the Big Money, the Slate business site, Jill Priluck makes a related argument about the book-publishing business:

Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands.

Without support from publishing houses and their marketing budgets, Priluck suggests, authors can become preoccupied with brand building rather than writing. Self-conceived writing professionals of course have incentive to turn themselves into a brand and their writing into "branded content" -- they want to make a living. But noncommercial writers online face the same dilemma; the Web offers the possibility of a measurable audience, and the temptation is always there to write what increases the numbers (Gawker style) rather than write what one thinks. If as Priluck says, authors "trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances," then so do nonprofessionals who are just writing for attention. Just as Facebook and Twitter seem to suggest that the purpose of friendship is to have the most friends or followers, the purpose of writing becomes maximizing readership, the content itself is merely a means to that end, which is always the content's ultimate meaning.

Is it possible to have "online presence" without it becoming a brand. Probably because of the centrality of marketing discourse in our culture, branding has become the all-purpose paradigm for all sorts of social behavior, a phenomenon whose recent explosion seems directly traceable to the way the internet lets us quantify the extent of our influence while dramatically expanding our reach. But brands are like distillations of our essence that discard the better part of our spontaneous personality -- we simplify who we are to something that is consistent and capable of being instantly communicated -- like an epitaph. And we consent to let the nature of our identity be openly traded and renegotiated in an open market. As Priluck puts it, "When authors are beholden to a brand, they ally themselves, almost like actors and athletes, with agendas and meanings that are well beyond their control."

We heedlessly commit ourselves to thinking of ways to improve our brand without worrying about the fact that it means we are always for sale.

Do brands have personalities? (23 Dec 2008)

Rob Walker linked to this item from Science Digest about research into our susceptibility to "brand personalities." I've tried but failed to understand the upshot of this highlighted finding:

"This research points out an interesting but counterintuitive finding: brand personality can be most useful for forging consumer-brand connections with consumers who tend to enjoy such deep connections in the interpersonal context," the authors conclude.

The study hinges on "attachment styles," which seem to have something to do with self-esteem: "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals" -- those with "anxious" attachment styles -- "use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand." But brands don't objectively have personalities. Consumers are actively involved in conjuring them up and pretending that they exist. One can't simply select a brand that already has a given personality, because that whole personality, if it exists, is a delicate social construction heavily contingent upon the consumer's own place in society. The meaning of Abercrombie to me is not "excitement" as the study's authors suggest; it's "shallowness." So when I choose to reject that brand accordingly, that choice derives from my interpretation of the brand, which comes from my social milieu, intermixed with my strictly personal hang-ups and predilections, all of which reconstitutes the brands' own marketing messages (themselves always being modified) into something peculiar to me. I'm using or not using certain brands to signal certain things that I hope will be understood by a target audience that I am hoping to define and attract with the help of those brands.

Maybe that is what the researchers are saying, and I am one of those "anxious" types. I just can't see who would be exempt from such considerations, if they have chosen to participate in consumer society at all. Brands are by definition the appeal of a product over and above its practical usefulness -- it is always the "personality" of the product as opposed to how well it works or what it is capable of doing. But though brands seem to signal some quality, that doesn't mean it rises to the level of actually having a personality. It functions more like a word in a language than a living, breathing person. Calling its signifying quality a "personality" is itself a marketing move, seeking to glamorize products and give them a rich complexity.

Is the point that needy people want their brands to seem to love them back? Do such people mistake the fact that they can detect personality in a brand for the brand's actually making the loving gesture of one person sharing their personality with another person? When I sense that I'm supposed to think American Apparel is "sexy," do I at the same time, at some level, believe the brand is in fact coming on to me?

When people disclose their personalities to one another, it's a gift, a gesture of trust and intimacy. When brands persuade us that they have a personality, it's an affront, an invasion, a corruption of that intimate, human exchange. But if, through anomie and generalized social isolation, we are starved from more of that intimate feeling, we may prefer to accept the brands' personalities on their own terms and assist in establishing them and their social credibility.

The "anxious" types in the study may be more likely to ascribe personalities to brands, to regard everything as a quasi-personal relationship that needs to be governed by the same rules and expectations, because actually personal relationships have been demonized as "inconvenient." These seem to be the twin macro-level goals of advertising: (1) to discourage from having too much inconvenient, reciprocal human contact and (2) as a replacement for real companionship, to encourage us to mistake products for friends, to whom we owe such things as loyalty and forgiveness.

N.B.: I wanted to call this post "Are Friends Electric?" but thought it was too much of a stretch. But you should still watch this.

Consumer atrophy (16 Dec 2008)

Rob Walker's column about the "new frugality" nicely skewers the concept.

We were told our willingness to spend more — on fair-trade coffee, eco-friendly totes, organic dog food — demonstrated a fresh consumer sophistication that would change the marketplace. Now, suddenly, our values are reflected in cheap shirts from Costco.
A new normal that revolves around buying lots of stuff while bragging about our bargain-hunting skills doesn’t seem to reflect changed values.

That's a good concise way of getting across something I've been trying to express but have managed only to formulate somewhat inchoately in posts like these.

Walker ends the essay on this faintly hopeful conundrum: "If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism." But to be honest, this strikes me as all the more reason to be pessimistic, since optimism usually strikes me as ideologically induced naivete. It's better than being miserable, but it licenses our perpetuating in the same self-defeating practices with regard to consumerism all in the name of a dream -- that dream of finding our perfect reflection there in the world of things rather than discover it through the more arduous but more fulfilling route of making and doing. (I can anticipate the objections: Shopping is doing! Consuming is producing! I would argue that they successfully simulate those things while simultaneously promising an escape from them. Shopping has developed the alibi of plausibly passing as "self-actualizing.") I have a hard time reconciling optimism to anything but sunny yes-man-ism, and some critical scrutiny on a society-wide scale will be necessary to uproot consumerist fall-backs.

PSFK linked to this LA Times article that basically epitomizes the new dispensation on consumer behavior. The key goal for service-feature writers in the mass media is to show us how we can maintain the consumer mindset -- shopping with style for self-definition -- only without our having to spend as much (for the time being). This allows us to hold the cherished consumerist attitude in abeyance, keep it well-exercised and prevent it from atrophying while we wait for the economy to turn. Doing away with the mind-set is, of course, unthinkable.

Here, in this article, the formula is simple: Send a celebrity to a closeout discounter and watch him turn junk into magic with his imprimatur! In this case, Philippe Starck.

Famous for putting a modern spin on 18th century French furniture and for creating exquisite environments using expensive materials and craftsmanship, Starck also embraces sensible consumerism. Buy quality over quantity, he says.
"You must be very rigorous," he says, sifting through discounted wares in search of the gems. "Try to find the essence, the most iconic or simple representation of a thing. Look for the bowl that looks most like a bowl. That means we must avoid colors and patterns, and everything that can be trendy."

Starck is also worried about the kids:

"In a crisis, we have to think about our children and especially push their creativity," he says. "If capitalism is failing because it is a selfish system, we can teach them to reinvent society so that it is based on sharing."

A nice sentiment -- but what prompted this reflection? Prada green.

Starck is pleased by the store's furnishings and art supplies for kids. He picks out the aforementioned folding table and chairs, as well as sidewalk chalk, a 240-piece paint and marker set, a packet of paper in a color he dubs "Prada green" and a 10-pack of No. 2 pencils. Total: less than $50.

In general, the media-appointed style mavens always make an appeal to art and timelessness, which on its face seems ludicrous, since nothing is less enduring than fashion dictates. But the trope is important as an analogue for what is truly timeless from the point of view of the fashion industries -- that is, consumerism. The idea that we'll all reach a point where we don't care about the message we send with the "essence" of our bowls and our Prada green is too terrible for them to contemplate.

"Nocebos" and WebMD disease (26 Nov 2008)

One of my hypotheses is that consumer behavior is anchored in the placebo effect, and advertising serves the vital function of supplying the mind with material to work with, just enough to make belief plausible enough to achieve desirable effects. We just have to grant ads the authority we give to actual experts, like doctors. It seems as though we do this readily, without much profound consideration of what should constitute actual expertise. (I'm supposed to buy a certain kind of tea because Dodgers manager Joe Torre drinks it.) We are basically culpable in our being seduced by ads; we're not somehow tricked into belief against our will. It's beneficial to believe, because it promises us placebo magic. Skepticism can turn out to be a costly failure of imagination, especially when we just need to imagine we can feel better to actually achieve it.

Consumerism supplies imaginary solutions to problems that marketing has convinced us to reconceptualize as purchasing decisions. Making the choice to buy masks whatever underlying problem spurred the "retail therapy" in the first place. Whether or not the good has any actual demonstrable effect on anything -- whether or not we even use it -- is beside the point. An example: I downloaded a bunch of Genesis albums the other day, but I can assure you that I will never listen to most of them. But there was still something satisfying about filling a hole in my music collection, even if that hole wasn't actually a problem. It wasn't like I was suffering for want of hearing Trespass. But acquiring things is a simple way of making myself feel like I have taken some sort of action. Marketing, I guess, functions by making sure I am always aware of that sweet simplicity.

Anyway, I've seen a few articles lately that explore the dark side of the placebo effect, where the benefits of belief turn into liabilities. Last week, the WSJ reported on "nocebos":

Research has shown that expecting to feel ill can bring illness on in some instances, particularly when stress is involved. The technical term is the "nocebo effect," and it's placebo's evil twin. "It's not a psychiatric disorder -- it's the way the mind works," says Arthur Barsky, director of Psychiatric Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Nocebos can even be fatal. In one classic example, women in the multi-decade Framingham Heart study who thought they were at risk for heart attacks were 3.7 times as likely to die of coronary conditions as women who didn't have such fears -- regardless of whether they smoked or had other risk factors.
Research deliberately causing nocebos has been limited (after all, it's kind of cruel). But in one 1960s test, when hospital patients were given sugar water and told it would make them vomit, 80% of them did.

This is a scary look at what the socially distributed notion of authority can accomplish. Even internal movements of our consciousness, which seem to be generated from within, are apparently easily shaped, once we commit ourselves to participation and belief. Back up would-be authority figures with institutional heft, and they can basically create your reality, down to the level of nausea you feel.

Doctors may unwittingly foster placebo or nocebo effects by how enthusiastically or warily they discuss medication. "Physician communication with patients is the closest thing to magic. It gets communicated in incredibly subtle ways—a flash in the eye, a smile, a spring in the step," says Daniel Moerman, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

The authority figure -- the social relation -- is what counts. Often, apparently, the medicine is just the trace of that.

I'm tempted to get sidetracked into a consideration of whether such induced feelings are "authentic" or not, though I suppose death is about as authentic an effect as can be achieved. But it's probably irrelevant to the degree that all "symptoms" are in some way "induced" by something. If we attempt to ignore or downplay the "induced" aspects of consciousness, what would be left to be real? The article makes clear how when you ask someone for symptoms, they generally will supply them.

"People's expectations play a very important role in how they react to all medications," says Richard Kradin, a physician and psychoanalyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and author of "The Placebo Response and the Power of Unconscious Healing." He notes that about 25% of patients who get completely inert placebos in clinical trials complain of side effects -- typically headaches, drowsiness and dizziness.

If the stage is set for us to be self-aware in that way, our minds will make something happen. This has led me to be against biofeedback. The more I know about what is happening with my body, the more I think is wrong with me and the worse I feel. Is there a way to have no expectations at all? Is there a way to achieve total health ignorance? Would preventive care prevent me from feeling good?

The NYT followed with this article on research Microsoft carried out that suggests, to the surprise of absolutely no one, "that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them."

Such findings evoke the debate about whether the internet can create and propagate new mental illnesses by making the very concepts behind them more prevalent and accessible. (This Atlantic story, which I am always looking for excuses to link to, explores that question.)

Obama as historical rupture (18 Nov 2008)

In this LRB essay, Slavoj Žižek ponders the significance of Obama's election. While it seems to represent a temporary triumph over political cynicism -- "what the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions" -- does it also imply some sort of decisive break in historical continuity? Has Obama introduced a whole new game rather than merely adjusting the rules of the existing politics? (See Larval Subjects' thoughts on that here.) As the transition has been assembled, we've seen some of the same Washington power players from the Clinton era shuffled back into prominence, which has led to articles (like this one) pronouncing that nothing's really changed. This allows some pundits to dismiss the outpouring of emotion when Obama won as overdramatic self-congratulation by liberals who will deserve to be disappointed by politics as usual. (Update: See leftist philosopher Simon Critchley's view here.)

Of course, politics will largely remain the same -- various interests will continue to compete for priority and so on. This is a good thing; dreams of post-partisanship are misguided in presuming some underlying consensus among peopple with irreconcilable differences. Žižek makes this point in an aside: when the financial crisis led to bipartisan action, what that meant in effect was "that democratic procedures were de facto suspended."

But it's hard to look at something like this, the first of what promises to be a weekly YouTube chat from Obama, on a government website that is almost unprecedented in its user-friendly slickness, and not feel that something is fundamentally different about this administration. That difference -- a comfort with new media and the opportunities that stem from it -- seems irreversible. (I'm sure this has already been called Politics 2.0 somewhere.) I have to admit that it's a little sinister and Big Brotherly in feel, and I am still cynical enough to suspect these traits will help make it go over well with the general public.

What Obama's team seems to want to do is establish Obama as an untarnishable brand, anchored in images of youth and progress (hence YouTube), that can then be used to win approval for policies without having to convince people of their merits. Participating in politics tends to make people uncomfortable, and few people do it at any level beyond voting. It involves compromise and confrontation and a willingness to be reminded again and again that reality falls short of ideals. But people love participating in brands -- no compromise necessary there, as the engagement takes place on the fantasy level and consists of pure vicarious pleasure. If we become invested in brand Obama, we will end up absorbing the progressive ideology he may espouse as a kind of by-product. And this can then inform the polls that inform political decisionmaking by legislators. Maybe this is nothing new; this is the "bully pulpit" theory of executive leadership. We just have been without a credible leader for so long in the U.S. that's it is hard to remember what that is like.