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.

Rent to Pwn (22 April 2011)

I am all for people buying less stuff and sharing more of their stuff with people. I think it is great when people figure out how to give stuff they are getting rid of to people who want to use it. But I am fairly skeptical of "collaborative consumption," which wants to monetize these impulses in new tech startup companies. A current Fast Company article by Danielle Sacks covers this emerging sector, what Silicon Valley investor types apparently call "underused asset utilization" ventures, which includes car sharing and other co-op-like schemes, peer-to-peer rental services, and eBayish resale sites. There is so much scary dystopian potential in what Sacks reports that I almost choked on the omelet I was eating while reading it (at which point it occurred to me that if I coughed it up, maybe I could re-sell it to a underfed peer).

"Underused asset utilization" strikes me as a far more honest term than "sharing," and it certainly sheds a new light on what Facebook is doing: getting us to conceive of ourselves, our social lives and our identity as "underused" assets to exploit. (My web-surfing history is really too valuable to keep to myself -- and really, how can I monetize my friends? What else are they good for? Are they even my friends if I can't profit from them?) The governing principe with all these ventures is to use the deeper mediation of people's personal lives (through smartphones and social media) to get them to behave even more like little capitalist firms. Consider the way Sharable founder Neal Gorenflo talks about his own life:

One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut -- she's now his wife.

Is there anything more to life than adding value? Not from this point of view. "Sharing" might evokes images of potlatch and competitive altruism, but in the world of underused asset utilization, sharing has nothing to do with gifts and everything to do with efficiency, with bringing rationalized use of capital resources to ever single nook and cranny in one's life, even if you had no intention of being a entrepreneur or a capitalist. The backers of these ventures imagine the purpose of the social web and "connections" is merely to make self-entrepreneurializing easier, near automatic. So when you are about to "underuse" some "asset" in your everyday life, your smartphone can intervene to rent it to someone else (and let some Silicon Valley venture capitalists get their cut). "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says one investor. That sounds awesome, a real recipe for joy. (It reminds me of Marx's "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!")

Gorenflo tells Sacks, "Business has spent centuries making buying really easy. We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy." This had me confused at first, because I don't really get how firms can be capitalist if they are not seeking profits through selling things. This confusion could prompt a person to think that the "sharing economy" is some sort of postcapitalist potentiality -- as when Rachel Botsman, the co-author of a book about "collaborative consumption" declares, "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership." But these companies are not out to usher in the end fo private-property rights. Botsman says that she realized, ""I just can't help companies sell more stuff," but that doesn't mean that she's looking to decrease the volume of capitalist exchanges or slow the velocity of commerce. It means selling services rather than stuff, brokering the exchange of existing goods between parties, like a pawn shop owner. The for-profit sharing companies are still operating like capitalist companies; only they are now "platforms" that root exploitation deeper into the lives of the independent contractors (i.e. the customers they "serve") they use to generate work product.

The part of the article that struck as most depressing, though, is the development of private "reputation companies" that hope to create a "trust rating" similar to a credit rating based on one's online behavior, the "data exhaust" one's mediatized activity generates.

The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser.... Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system. But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world.

By all means, let's automate trust. Who doesn't love the arbitrarity of credit ratings and the way they rob one of a sense of autonomy? Yes! Let's extend that principle more generally, and let computers assign a number to the quality of our ethical character overall, based on how much garbage we look at online! That is a beautiful idea. Who wouldn't "choose to opt in"? (As if opting out won't come to signify having something to hide if, god forbid, these systems catch on -- you already can't really opt out of Facebook and belong socially in the accepted way in the U.S.) Let's let an algorithm score our cultural capital and make that number known so people can more efficiently judge whether it is worth their time to interact with us. Splendid! How efficient will my "sharing" and appropriating become then, when I know who the losers are after a glance at a spreadsheet?

I guess this is why Amazon is constantly pestering me to "rate my transactions" all the time. They can't leave me alone and let me have my book; they want me to volunteer my feelings to grease the wheels of their distribution and rent-extracting mechanisms. I don't want to help build reputations; I want to reserve the trust that my minuscule contribution to this world can build for something better. I don't want to be part of a panopticon that is deemed socially necessary to keep people from cheating one another under a generalized Hobbesean regime of hypercapitalism in which every single gesture and every single thing I think and do is theoretically for sale and is thus a theoretical cheat. Offshoring "reputation management" to private companies seems like a terrible way to build general trust in a society, as does assigning people a numeric rating. These are indications that trust doesn't generally exist, and shouldn't be expected from one another. It's a neighborhood watch society where people are only kept in line through fear, not sympathy.

One of the positive aspects of markets (and possibly the whole point of trust-building between parties) is that they can facilitate anonymous exchange and foster privacy -- granting a modicum of autonomy to getting and spending and owning. What you buy and collect is nobody else's business. But to the sharing czars, it's necessarily everybody's business -- that's where their profit opportunity is, having an itemized list of your stuff. Or even your opinions. In a world where value is primarily created socially at the level of affects and signifiers and brands and so on, privacy makes you into an "underused asset." And Silicon Valley can not let that stand.

The Accursed Share of Self (11 March 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authenticity Crisis and the Dream of Escaping Irony (23 Sept 2010)

A section of Andrew Potter's mostly compelling new book The Authenticity Hoax deals with Soviet kitsch and mentions a park in Hungary that's now home to Soviet-era monuments and statues. Hungarian authorities, anxious that the park would be misinterpreted as a cynical move to cater to what Potter calls oppression tourists, have given it this motto: "no irony, memento."

That strikes me as a good motto for everyone laboring under the burden of authenticity, which seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid striking an ironic attitude about oneself. It's clear in the peculiar note of 2000s hipsterism, that mawkish nostalgia for juvenilia that passes for a "new earnestness," the evocation of the comforts of familiar things from the developmental period that predates cool -- the stuff people are into before puberty, before tastes matter to our sense of self. We want to build a self in the present that honors and remembers that pure self, before we had to try to be cool.

Potter, who previously co-authored The Rebel Sell, about anti-conformity marketing, argues that authenticity has supplanted cool as the au courant advertising strategy -- which, because he sees advertisers as following the proclivities of the consumer public rather than shaping them, means that authenticity is an idiotic fetish that middle class people have somehow managed to get stuck on in their quest for status. "Cool fizzled out when it was exposed as just another consumerist status hierarchy.... The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it is taking time for you, to create a life that is focused on your unique needs and that reflects your particular taste and sensibility."

I agree with that analysis, but I think it's not quite fair to blame consumers for falling into authenticity traps, as Potter does when he declares "we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying." At that point the business journalist in him seems to get the better of him, as he ignores his own arguments about capitalism's role in trigger an authenticity crisis. Potter, a philosophy Ph.D who writes for Maclean's, a sort of Canadian Time magazine, does a good job tracing the history of the idea of authenticity, through Hobbes and Rousseau and Hegel and Benjamin (though it was a tease to use the phrase "jargon of authenticity" without citing Adorno), but that metaphysical spadework is dispensed with once we reach contemporary times, and individuals are expected to be able to transcend the social conditions into which they were born and reject myths of authenticity out of a common sense appraisal of the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. One of Potter's primary concerns is with the ways the fascination with authenticity is currently taking an aggressively atavistic form, with people yearning to roll back the Enlightenment and market capitalism and get in touch with pure nature. I don't think authenticity automatically implies a look back to a phony lost golden age (though it often does). Sometimes it is constructed as agreat leap forward; sometimes it is infused with technophilia, as when Mark Zuckerberg claims that people with integrity (i.e. authentic modern persons) share everything on Facebook to prove they have nothing to hide.

And Potter sometimes seems to border on adopting the right-wing narrative that regards eco-minded consumers and lifestyle connoisseurs as some sort of liberal fascists. But by and large his tone is shaped by an apparent desire to be accessible to general readers, which makes it reasonable and conversational. He gets into some issues in metaphysics without ever becoming obtuse or recondite (i.e., he wisely leaves Heidegger outside his bailiwick here).

Potter is quick to say alienated labor is simply "the way it is" -- you know, work sucks, get over it -- which strikes me as hasty. I don't quite understand his claim that alienation "does not mean that there is a problem and that something ought to be done about it," though I suspect it has something to do with his implicit rejection the idea of human species being (i.e. he implies that having meaningful work to do is not necessarily the goal/purpose of human life) and his advocation of tolerating a rigid separation of the private and public self -- which I am totally on board with. More on that below.

Anyway, blaming consumers for allowing authenticity to become a marketing tool holds them unfairly responsible for the ontological insecurity brought on by modernity (to put it in Anthony Giddens's terms). That insecurity, in my view, brings on the crisis of authenticity, which consumerism has attempted to ameliorate ever since. Marketing cool is one of many strategies, one that was especially suitable to a fragmenting media market that allowed each of us to regard ourselves as our own niche. Marketing environmental concern -- a point Potter is especially strong on -- seems to be the ascendant strategy currently.

But the goal of selling a claim to lost authenticity is as old as the forces that first broke up traditional ways of life and melted everything solid into air, to borrow Marx's phrase (from a passage Potter also cites). The first anti-irony wave was perhaps the cult of sensibility in the late-18th century, which was a response to the rising tide of commercialism and "interestedness" in English culture as capitalism began to reshape subjectivity and inculcate rational calculation as a socially tolerated morality. Hence all the literary fad novels full of weeping men and feeling heroines -- A Sentimental Journey, The Man of Feeling, the works of Fanny Burney and Frances Sheridan and countless other forgotten late 18th century writers. The characters are obsessed, just like we are, with displaying sincere emotions without letting the fact of the display and the self-consciousness of it invalidate the gesture -- and with outdoing the displays of others on the scale of "conspicuous authenticity" that Potter derides.

In other words, the need to prove authenticity and the capacity to "really" feel things is not a new status hierarchy, but one that emerges with capitalism and consumerism (which was born in the late-18th century). It undergirds the class distinctions that come into play as aristocratic titles and such get washed away. It always serves along side of the conspicuous consumption that Veblen famously described to establish class boundaries. It's been there all the time, helping differentiate those who consume vulgarly from those who consume tastefully -- or genuinely, authentically, organically, etc. And since authenticity has no metaphysical basis -- there's no intrinsic "real self" to display; it's defined negatively, as Potter notes; it's always contingent, as Rorty argued among many, many others -- the grounds of authenticity can always be shifting in order to freshly reinscribe the hierarchy. Fashions can change as class markers get appropriated without posing an existential threat. The problem is that privilege gets laundered as authenticity and gets to pass without being questioned. It becomes authentic to be inegalitarian.

The "authenticity hoax" is precisely the Romantic idea that we have a true self to which we must display our faithfulness. We think our integrity is at stake in consumerism when really what we are doing is attenuating the status system, replenishing the "code". We think we are recalling something -- a memento of the real self -- that isn't there at all; we blind ourselves to the truth of irony, an inescapable and paradoxical self-awareness that our self is a construct, a work in progress, an open-ended (and mortal) set of possibilities rather than a timeless essence. As Potter puts in in his introduction, "we need ... an individualism that makes its peace with the modern world while allowing for a meaningful life free of nostalgia, reactionary politics, or status seeking."

That sounds pretty utopian, but it's also what Rorty seems to be after in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. He argues that, since there is no true self, we are burdened with a crushing anxiety of influence -- a sense that we are creating ourselves out of someone else's language and merely establishing our non-existence as a unique being. Each person has a "need to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own." That is to say, we need to create "authenticity" out of rhetoric, a unique personal vocabulary and point of view, through creative restatements of what has already be said, of what already simply exists. We can't be free of contingency, but must seek freedom through it. And we cannot mistake our own definition of authenticity as being the true, universal one -- we must keep it private while adhering to an ideal of cosmopolitanism in the public sphere. One needs to be an ironist, in Rorty's terms -- one must accept that our descriptive language is open to influence and is not permanent or true. So basically, when we are setting up our Hungarian statue park of the self, we should flip the motto, and make it "Irony, no mementos."

You can't ever complete the quest for the authentic self, but you can't really ever get it wrong either. You don't have to borrow someone else's notion of the authentic itself. But the idea of authenticity as it's deployed by persuasion professionals (who strive to amplify the feelings of ontological insecurity, since our feeling insecure gets us to buy goods), tends to militate against that idea obviously, positing instead the notion that we have an inner truth that we are in danger of betraying. The sustaining consumerist myth is that authenticity is a matter of manifesting individual novelty and nonconformity rather than a private mode of assimilating inevitable influences. Consumerism perverts romanticism by adopting its critique of modernity and using it to co-opt the quest for authenticity, generating a cultural environment in which most efforts at self-fashioning intensify the feeling of insecurity and phoniness. Potter notes that "selling authenticity is another way of making it self-conscious, which is again, self-defeating."

Creativity, even as it pertains to self-creation, appears as a strict matter of consumption -- not as something attached to a broader sense of practice. So all our efforts can tend to feel like poses, stabs at fashionability, attempts to crack the consumerist code and reap the social benefits. That's in part because the search for self can't take place in private anymore, as Rorty seems to hope. It is now situated in social media, wherein the various gestures and experiments we make searching for ourselves get redeployed automatically as marketing, as signifiers of what is trending.

So I think the specific way to resist the evils of commodified authenticity is to police the public-private boundary more carefully. Rorty writes that we have to "overcome authority without claiming authority" -- to slightly shift that, I think that means we have to find ways to validate our self-making project that don't rely ultimately on commercialized modes of validation, which appear to have transpersonal authority. And we can't broadcast our identity, mediatize it, because that amounts to the same thing.

Memes and Marketing (22 July 2010)

In the most recent NYT Magazine. Rob Walker has an article about the ramifications of internet memes. It's well worth reading and not merely because it mentions Carles.

Any discussion about internet memes -- beyond participating in them by passing them along -- is inevitably a discussion about marketing. Meme circulation is an obvious laboratory of persuasion, a sort of testing process that exposes otherwise hidden ways in which the network connects us, revealing the strength of certain circuits and what causes them to fire. For marketers, memes sound-check the microphone and PA system of the internet in preparation for the commercial messages it will be expected to carry; they also allow a census to be taken of what sort of people are listening. Proven memes serve as a marketable demonstration of pure influence, abstracted from the relevance or utility of the message. So in other words, a meme is a pure, formal expression of marketing potentiality.

Not surprisingly, the meme professionals Walker talks to are all in the marketing business in one way or another. Tim Hwang, the organizer of the academic conference on memes that Walker attends (now he works for a branding company, is puzzled by those who challenge the natural marriage of meme-making and marketing: "There’s been this weird push around ‘Did ROFL culture sell out? Who owns all these spaces? ... This isn’t cool anymore because there’s people making money off it.’ " But those aren't exactly "weird" questions. Because memes pointedly blur the distinction between consumption and production, they prompt all sorts of concerns about the future of knowledge work, of creativity, of everyday life as a social factory -- of who makes "internet awesome," to borrow the terms Walker picks up on to start the article.

Harnessing the way people spread memes is a bit like getting a free media buy, only with far more dynamic potential. Ownership of the mechanisms that harness the value in meme production matters -- people make real money off the free labor of others' "goofing off". And that labor supplants work that has in the past been compensated with wages or intellectual property claims. The content of memes can be exploited, as the LOLcats entrepreneurs have managed to do. (And incidentally, why do people criticize LOLcats for being stupid? They are just mainstreamed Barbara Kruger.) And it is certainly not that memes become uncool when their links to marketing become explicit -- what makes the connection explicit is the marketers' own evocation of cool with regard to the process of meme circulation; their insistence that it be turned to account, made use of, made profitable in some way by urging the reconception of memes as culturally significant.

I don't know if what I mean by that is at all clear. Memes aren't "cool" -- they become cool retroactively when they are reported about, exploited, made to serve another function other than their pure viral transmission, their discharge of an ephemeral need for distraction. The space in which memes are initially generated is noncommercial, almost quasi-utopian. Maybe even postcapitalist. It's the anonymous space of 4chan that Walker cites, for example, a Bataille-like realm of expenditure, negativity, unredeemed human urges, unrationalized and unassimilated expression. It traces potential routes of circulation that operate outside of commercial influence. Walker mentions the American Indian trickster myth in relation to this, but it also exemplifies Bakhtin's notions of the heteroglossic and the carnivalesque -- in other words, it's a discourse that subverts or mocks official culture though doesn't necessarily challenge it (and may in fact reinforce it by venting off popular discontent or surplus creative energies). For better or worse, it's all about the lulz, as Walker points out.

The “for the lulz” attitude can be more broadly thought of as a rationale for the idea that everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds.

As long as that attitude and the material it produces troubles us, the space of memes retains its peculiar autonomy and can function as a kind of unreflexive social critique, if not a return of the repressed. It has the potential to be something other than what Marcuse calls represssive desublimation -- the liberation of formerly suppressed drives as a new mode of social control.

But that is where the meme professionals/marketers step in to play their crucial role. Marketers find such spaces and contrive ways to assimilate them -- a function far more important than selling any particular product or idea. They bring tangible social recognition and even money for those savvy enough to game the system that has sucked them in. And in the process the creative and chaotic energy that fuels the generation of memes is neutered, rechanneled toward supporting the status quo.

Something LOLcat honcho Ben Huh says touches on this:

“What interested me the most was there’s this entire community of people devoted to following the rules and the system behind the framework of Lolcats,” Huh, who is 32, told me. “No one ever said, ‘These are the rules.’ But everybody said, ‘I know the rules.’ ”

At first, there are no rules but instead the spontaneous order of the bacchanalia. But then, as metacommentary about memes begins to be distributed through marketing channels rules are codified, and what was a spontaneous expression of collectivity becomes obedience and exploited productivity masquerading as free expression.

Surreptitious Selling Out (9 July 2010)

The Arvidsson article (pdf) I mentioned in yesterday's post about jobs pinpoints precisely what is so troubling about being engaged with pop culture in our particular cultural moment. The economic engine of consumer capitalism is increasingly fueled by the good intentions of people who want to be engaged and critical and oppositional. But by assimilating their critique, consumer capitalism invalidates it at a higher level, negating the idea that there can be any other set of social relations within which we could experience culture at this point.

Arvidsson writes about the advertising industry's need to make distinctive messages capable of standing out in the ceaseless hum of informational noise that the spread of formula-reliant, capital-intensive mass media has brought on.

In an informational culture marked by almost infinite reproducibility, media culture thus tends to loose its grip over meaning. It is no longer able to command anything but the partial attention of its audience, much less provide it with a meaningful and coherent worldview. Instead it recedes into the background, losing its control over the practices in which meaning and affect are constructed. Media culture thus becomes a sort of white noise, a noisy environment for the more or less autonomous production of a common social world of common affective intensities.

Media industries have generally lost their power of imposing meaning on its products, imposing how they will be received and used, so they have shifted strategies. Because the mass meaning they once created for us no longer adheres, that means we are all out there producing meanings of our own -- Arvidsson calls this a "flowering productive externality" to the culture industry's ordinary bailiwick of designing and circulating products. With the advent of interactive media, those meanings circulate much more broadly and rapidly, becoming a source of value to industry beyond what money they manage to collect for their products originally. Our spontaneous conversation about culture adds value. Our self-made meanings, from our own point of view, establish our uniqueness, our identity, our particular point of view on culture. But from industry's point of view, they have the potential to reinvigorate their business.

Precisely because this externality has autonomy in relation to capital, it provides a tempting source of innovation, rejuvenation and creativity for the system, the very standardizing logic of which tends to eliminate such results a priori. In the most advanced factions of immaterial production users are indeed in charge (to use the motto of the present Web 2.0 movement), their agency creates the kinds of products that have the greatest use-value for the capitalist system.

Since these meanings are made outside advertising and culture industry auspices, they can be credibly touted by those industries as "authentic" or "genuine" rather than merely contrived to dupe us. Our own agency -- our autonomy, our reflexive self-identity, our affect, our motivation to do something or create something, whatever you want to emphasize about it -- becomes both an input and an output of marketing and entertainment. Those businesses threaten to become perpetual-motion machines, subsuming culture altogether.

That probably sounds a little bombastic. But it helps me understand why I sometimes dread my own "agency" -- why I become particularly ambivalent about trying to write theoretically informed commentary about pop culture. No matter how Adornoesque one thunders about the reifying effects of the culture industry and the curtailment of autonomous creative thought and so on, one is still left feeling that nothing has been accomplished but the further validation of the phenomena one meant to denounce and discourage.

It's not just that the culture industry absorbs critique and rechannels its energy into its own reinvention -- it's not merely that ceaseless flow of amateur criticism powers the mighty fashion wheel. Maybe I am alone in this, but I find that I experience my efforts to be objective about culture simultaneously as efforts to sustain some sort of "cool" subjectivity. And that unwanted synthesis is incredibly frustrating. I don't have any "authentic" experience, I often realize. It seems as the space for it doesn't exist amid all the cultural participation I put myself in for.

I find I inhabit the subject position of pop culture itself to write about it, if that makes any sense -- as though I am parasitically sucking the zeitgeist from it, becoming of the moment myself, culturally "relevant" as Carles likes to say. I become conscious of my immanence in a way that's unbearable; my inescapable existence within culture suddenly produces cognitive dissonance for me, driving me to further reflexive gyrations of opinion-making.

I think that to be at home in consumer culture, it helps to either (a) not engage too far or too self-consciously with pop culture, a sort of fatal strategy of willed ignorance or silence; or (b) sell out completely and openly, and recast the cynicism as pragmatic realism like the former underground folk Arvidsson describes who turn entrepreneurial and get into self-branding, or ironicized futurism along the lines of Takashi Murakami. I find that I fall somewhere in the middle, and I feel like I have no home.

Hipster Hipster Hipster (16 March 2010)

Carles (of all people) links to this Village Voice piece by Foster Kamer about how the word hipster can drive internet traffic. He cites this egregious example from Salon, titled "Hipsters on Food Stamps." There's an interesting angle to the story of young people using government money for food, but making it sound as if they are trying to be hip by doing it is patronizing and counterproductive. It's backlash bait, and young people (who suffer disproportionately in recessions) don't deserve that. The article, by Jennifer Bleyer, doesn't even push that angle, but the headline writers have to attract hits, and readers apparently want to read stories about how hipsters are lame.

As Kamer suggests, if the term hipster has any sort of meaning beyond "young-seeming person," then it doesn't seem to apply to the people in the article. His description of the word's history seems pretty accurate:

The truth is that "hipster" - which once only mostly signified only a superficial engagement of certain consumer habits, like tight jeans, Pitchfork-approved bands, and maybe an enclave in whatever part of your town is being gentrified by the moneyed children of baby boomers - has been used so much, it's now just an amorphous term for "young person doing interesting young person things, maybe even some of which could be considered 'cool' or groundbreaking in some way." In the same way we're all "emos" because we're all "emotional beings" who all listen to "emotional music," because most music is inherently emotional. Maybe now that the word has peaked, maybe if we say it enough, maybe if we just read better writing (or write better for our readers), it'll go away. But probably not.

But hipster has become SEO gold, and as such, as meaningless as "hot" or "sexy" or any other marketing word that fires an emotional trigger by evoking a mood rather than something concrete and definable. The term probably thrives at this point because it seems to be something that people feel empowered to voice their opinion about, in a two-minute-hate sort of way. No special insight is required, and nearly everyone believes they have expertise on fashion and consumption -- which makes hipsterism an ideal hot button issue. All you have to do is experience a moment of alienation or exclusion or noncomprehension at the sight of somebody wearing or doing something that seems designed to be noticed. Then you are an expert on hipsters, and can start complaining about how they have ruined everything. Hipster is a reaction, not a person.

Moronization and the End of Privacy (15 Jan 2010)

After having battled through the critiques of positivism and analytic philosophy in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, I was happy to come across some passages toward the end, which seemed to justify the effort. He is describing the conditions of autonomy within a consumer society, in which industrially instigated "needs" are promulgated socially and to a degree constitute what is "social."

Can you tell I have been reading Marcuse? Contra Marcuse, let me have a crack at that in plainer language: as far as I can tell, Marcuse argues that technological advancement, because it is fixated on exploitation and productivity, has brought with it a false liberty that obscures real freedom, which is a matter of generating autonomous needs and decreasing the amount of domination required to reproduce society. The "sale of [our society's] goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration" rather than by true liberation from the brutalities of nature, necessity and hierarchical oppression. The success of this sick society depends on our being inculcated with the appropriate needs that direct our energy to ends that support the existing social relations; i.e., we chase an idea of identity that depends on consumer goods as signifiers and mass media as a means of articulation. Consumerism seizes a monopoly on the making of social meaning. It provides the system in which a given meaning of a thing, a practice, can transcend one's personal idiosyncratic view and become something we all know will be widely understood and interpreted predictably.

Interestingly, Marcuse regards this as the end of privacy:

Expansion has, in all forms of team-work, community life, and fun, invaded the inner space of privacy and practically eliminated the possibility of that isolation in which the individual, thrown back on himself alone, can think and question and find. This sort of privacy -- the sole condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to freedom and independence of thought -- has long since become the most expensive commodity, available only to the very rich (who don't use it). In this respect, too, "culture" reveals its feudal origins and limitations. It can become democratic only through the abolition of mass democracy, i.e., if society has succeeded in restoring the prerogatives of privacy by granting them to all and protecting them for each.

To the denial of freedom, even of the possibility of freedom, corresponds the granting of liberties where they strengthen the repression. The degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace wherever there still is peace and silence, to be ugly and to uglify things, to ooze familiarity, to offend against good form is frightening. It is frightening because it expresses the lawful and even organized effort to reject the Other in his own right, to prevent autonomy even in a small, reserved sphere of existence. In the overdeveloped countries, an ever-larger part of the population becomes one huge captive audience -- captured not by a totalitarian regime but by the liberties of the citizens whose media of amusement and elevation compel the Other to partake of their sounds, sights, and smells.

You can see why the Frankfurt school theorists are sometimes dismissed as elitist. But this captures something of why critics are horrified at social networks -- it erodes the possibility of privacy even further while all the while making its surrender seem voluntary. (Just have a look at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, proclaiming the end of privacy as a social norm.) And what is lost with privacy is not just safety from prying eyes and identity thieves and surveillance; rather we elect to give up privacy to participate in the "media of amusement and elevation" rather then sit quietly in a room, as Pascal prescribed. And with that we surrender our ability to be self-directed (such as it is), to create our own wants, to think, to be other. Instead we look for distinctions within the social language of commercial objects and activities, and then we look to promote ourselves through them. This is what it means by and large to be social, to interact with other people, particularly through a medium like Facebook, which simultaneously records these exchanges and transforms them into marketing and demographic data. Hence, that data is what we are choosing to reduce ourselves to.

As a result of this ongoing process of needs administration, we can end up feeling helpless when the apparatus is disabled. I always notice this when I travel. Suddenly the system that tells me what to want is opaque to me. Here's how Marcuse puts it:

Massive socialization begins at home and arrests the development of consciousness and conscience. The attainment of autonomy demands conditions in which the repressed dimensions of experience can come to life again; their liberation demands repression of the heteronomous needs and satisfactions which organize life in this society. The more they have become the individual's own needs and satisfactions, the more would their repression appear to be an all but fatal deprivation. But precisely by virtue of this fatal character, it may create the primary subjective prerequisite for qualitative change--namely, the redefinition of needs.

To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.

To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve -- the disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since become part of socially necessary labor -- necessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.

So to call Marcuse an elitist is to miss the point. The critique is not about the "uglification" of pop culture (though he does seem to regard that as a hint to its inadequacy). It's about what manufactured culture accomplishes in the maintenance of the existing relations of production -- how they perpetuate norms of exploitation, oppression, domination, etc., in the name of productivity, understood by consumers as "entertainment" or a lush surfeit of goods, and understood by capitalists as profit and further capital accumulation.

But Marcuse sees hopefulness in this, I think, as he seems to be arguing that the more dependent we become on these media technologies to constitute our desires, our identities, and the more they are centralized, the easier it will be for revolutionaries to know what to disrupt to change society completely. Once the internet supplies all our social needs and let's us become what we are in the sick society, simply destroying the internet will set everybody "free" to build a "real" one -- that's basically the fantasy that The Matrix depicts.

Capitalism hasn't destroyed itself with its rapacity, as Marx predicted. Perhaps, Marcuse seems to imply, unhinged consumerism will do the trick. But he still ends the book on a note of profound pessimism, with the "Great Refusal" that's necessary to stop the one-dimensionalizing of everything unlikely to come from anyone who isn't already beyond the pale of society. "The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concession to the underdog, and their armed forces sufficiently trained and equipped to take care of emergency situations." The absolute refusal that's necessary from the critical-theory point of view "seems the more unreasonable the more the established system develops its productivity and alleviates the burden of life."

So what do we do? Live in a jelly jar? Is this the first step?

The Authenticity Fetish (8 Dec 2009)

A study by MIT professor Renee Richardson Gosline (via BoingBoing and others) shows that people who buy "fake" handbags -- those branded without authorization -- sometimes go on to later buy "authentic" ones.

Gosline interviewed hundreds of consumers who knowingly bought fake luxury apparel, many at “purse parties” where such goods are sold. Gosline found that within two years, 46 percent of these buyers subsequently purchased the authentic version of the same product — even though other people could not necessarily tell the difference. Such behavior is another twist on Veblen’s thesis: For some status-seeking people, at least, the social power of luxury goods means that consumption must not just be conspicuous, but real.

That seems somewhat incredible (Felix Salmon calls it "astonishing"), but it fits well with NYT Magazine Consumed columnist Rob Walker's contention that we are own primary audience for our consumption displays. We can't fool ourselves with a fake.

But then, when we do buy fakes? Are we hoping that our own assessment of ourselves can matter less than that of those around us? Is it an attempt to silence the internal critic? Is a ploy to be postauthentic? Obviously it's similar to the dynamic behind pirating MP3s instead of buying them -- what does it matter if the source of the file is authentic if it is a copy that is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable for an authenticated one? In a world where it is so easy to copy things, authenticity becomes a kind of fetish, a value for its own sake that doesn't speak to any actual physical quality in the objects themselves. The power of the fetish derives from our simultaneous awareness that we should be skeptical of everything, that everything can be faked, including personal identity, which is more provisional than ever, being reinscribed on a moment by moment basis online in some instances. The more I keep telling myself who I am, how I want to see myself, the more I need to manifest that materially through gestures. If I want to believe I am authentic, I need to gesture authenticity. Voila: We seek objects with the aura of authenticity (expensive, distinctive, rare things mainly) so that we can try to feel more authentic ourselves.

Baudrillard literally wrote the book on this sort of thing back in the early 1970s -- For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, which compiles several of his essays about how use value is mistaken for an authentic transcendental truth. He argues that we tend to refer to our needs, and to an object's "real" usefulness as the basis for what should be true, particularly in critiquing consumerism. If we could only stop consuming objects as symbols of other things and just use them in a natural, unmediated way, we would escape the ways in which consumerism constricts and constructs us. (I fall prey to that line of thinking a lot -- I just want to wear a shirt, not signify I am the sort of person who wants to wear this sort of shirt.) But there is no such escape, as concepts like use and need are socially constructed along with identity as part of the same totalizing cultural system. "Just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object but as a social determination." One can't pursue authenticity through that route -- by using only generic objects that we "need" -- anymore than one can by acquiring authentic luxury items. What is "real" about a given object's provenance is open to constant reevaluation; the emphasis can be shifted to suit the needs of those questioning reality at various junctures.

Luxury items are expensive not because they are intrinsically valuable (what is gold "really" worth, anyway? Seems pretty useless as a metal) but because of the social capital embodied in them. In fact, as other research of Gosline's suggests, people authenticate goods in terms of who is using them:

Consumers, Gosline observes, struggle to distinguish the intrinsic qualities of real luxury goods from fakes; instead, they rely heavily on social cues to make those judgments. Indeed, when some consumers are shown pictures of people wearing luxury apparel, they are twice as confident in their ability to judge those products, and willing to pay twice as much for the apparel, as when those consumers are shown pictures of the goods alone.

Social capital is a gestalt, then, an assemblage of goods, gestures, behaviors, etc., that convey a rank in the class hierarchy. If the goal is to climb in that hierarchy, goods -- fake or real -- are not enough. (Incidentally, Gosline's work also offers support for the immaterial labor idea I have been going on and on about lately: "Gosline has quantified Veblen’s famous observation: Consumers are willing to pay twice as much for luxury apparel when they can use those products to send or receive social signals." There is a relation between what goods can mean -- product of our using them -- and what they can be sold for.)

But why not use fake luxury goods for other reasons? They function as a kind of social sabotage, a direct attack on distinction that forces those invested in positional goods to become uncomfortable and shift their ground. In the world of simulacrums of simulacrums, authenticity is a constructed pose, a disguised power play. When the owner of a fake buys the real thing, it is a small triumph for luxury goods makers and the powers that be generally -- their definition of authentic is still holding enough sway to shape behavior. I guess I prefer the possibility that authenticity is worthless.

Black Friday (24 Nov 2009)

Economist Arnold Kling has an explanation for Black Friday -- not the Steely Dan song, but the crazy retail sales. He argues that the experience of shopping on Black Friday has been purposely made miserable, so that people who are willing to pay more for gifts will wait and pay more later. In other words, another example of price discrimination working its stratifying magic.

Temporary sales are often a tool for price discrimination. If you need something now, you have to buy it whether or not it is "on sale." But if the purchase is discretionary, you may only buy it "on sale." The store keeps its prices high ordinarily, in order to pick up profits from the price-insensitive shoppers. The store puts items "on sale" on rare occasions, hoping to pick up profits from price-sensitive shoppers. Unfortunately, they lose profits from price-insensitive shoppers who happen to come in the day of the sale.
The beauty of holding sales on "Black Friday" is that stores know that many price-insensitive shoppers will stay away in order to "avoid the crowds." So you can get revenue from price-sensitive shoppers without sacrificing profits from price-insensitive shoppers.

Once you start thinking about the retail world in this way, it is hard not to recognize this logic occurring always and everywhere -- an insight that for me is followed by frustration and melancholia. We commonly tend to think of social stratification as something that is reinforced by lineage and upbringing and by raw bank-account figures, but it plays out more significantly in everyday exchanges with the institutions of consumerism, rearticulating itself in that moment that you pay $4 for a coffee or when you wait 45 minutes in a fast-food drive-thru. Price discrimination is how the hierarchies of capitalist society perpetuate themselves even as they seem to dissolve in the pseudo equities of purchasing power.

Reified design (14 Aug 2009)

The difference between something that is well-designed and something that is merely designy seems pretty self-evident if you base the judgment on functionality. But the difference between the two is always being blurred, usually by marketers trying to gain an edge for a product that's not essentially different from its market competitors. So we get designy bottles of dishwashing liquid, designy stainless-steel appliances, designy retro-looking appliances and other pseudo-novelties. Design improvements that allow us to consume or use a good more efficiently are conflated with improvements that shift our attention away from use to abstract contemplation -- the good becomes a mirror in which we see reflected our own good taste. Designy-ness, like so many consumerist products, lets us consume ourselves.

These efforts to sell products as a vehicle for design combine to create a climate in which design for its own sake is functionality, an aesthetic end that inherently enriches the lives of those who get to handle such "beautiful" objects. Industrial designers like Apple's Jonathan Ive get elevated to the status of artists, as if their aim was not to sell more goods but to create the Good. Consumerism is thereby transformed into a kind of democratized connoisseurship; Target (or, if you are still trying to preserve class distinction, ABC Carpet & Home) becomes a museum from which you can take home the objets d'art.

So what is wrong with that? This may not be a convincing answer, but designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity. In genuine heterogeneity is the chance that we might really redeem the promise of individualism -- that we will be able to garner social recognition for being ourselves, and recognition could be separated from being judged or taxonomized. But designy-ness and its off-the-shelf aesthetic (often prepared by lauded gurus) militates against that. However much we enjoy our own tastes in such stuff privately (solipsisticly) we become typecast when we exhibit those tastes publicly.

Terry Eagleton gets at this problem in the Kant chapter of The Ideology of the Aesthetic:

In the aesthetic representation...we glimpse for an exhilarated moment the possibility of a non-alienated object, one quite the reverse of the commodity, which like the 'auratic' phenomenon of a Walter Benjamin returns our tender gaze and whispers that it was created for us alone. In another sense, however, this formal, desensualized aesthetic object, which acts as a point of exchange between subjects, can be read as a spiritualized version of the very commodity it resists.

Designy goods, as spiritualized versions of consumer junk, elevate the practice of their exchange to something more seemingly dignified and become the medium for social contact itself. That is, as good possessive individualists molded within capitalism, we are isolated by our tastes and the goods whispering our ersatz uniqueness to us, and we gloat in our transcendence until the loneliness overwhelms us, and we are driven to participate in society, which we can do only on those same terms, at the level of our tastes in everyday goods, in mass entertainments, and that sort of thing. We think we are curators of our own personal museum of tasteful, design-y goods, but in the end it's someone else's institution and we are just the guards.

(For more deep thoughts about design, see this post at one of my other venues.)

The Facebook "lobster trap" (24 July 2009)

It's foolish to say this without data to back it up, but it feels as though the Facebook fad is losing steam. Critiques of the business model -- that it's somewhat unseemly to allow a third party to monetize your friends, that it's creepy to have your social life surveilled directly by marketers, that once you deploy intrusive advertising on your site you become more of a rent-seeker rather than a service provider -- seem to be taking hold and are becoming almost commonplace. And people don't seem to be as insistent and enthusiastic about others using it. Maybe it has integrated itself into people's lives to the degree that they don't mention it anymore. The opposite happened with me -- I felt browbeaten into logging on to Facebook every day or so for a period of a couple weeks, then slowly I forgot about my own account with the site and went back to thinking of Facebook as an abstract evil that others are caught up in. It failed to integrate itself into my everyday life, didn't prove irreversibly useful. This may be because I am unusually antisocial, but I have this hope that my experience mirrors that of many social-network dabblers.

The site seemed a place to turn in anxious moments of loneliness or existential vertigo for pseudo-sociality and pseudo-connectedness; it was a place to turn to relieve the sense of being hopelessly mired in ourselves how we are and do some illusory work on our own characters instead by fine-tuning some settings, making some updates, passing some surreptitious judgment on those friends of ours who seem, judging by their updates, to be even more desperate than we are. Of course you'd have to sort through the chipper updates from the pathologically narcissistic who evince absolutely no trace of self-doubt or troubled introspection, but they made for a bracing backdrop; they set up a kind of grim ideal for what we'd have to eventually become, or else. But now it is starting to seem like that the threat of that dystopia is receding.
Anyway, Kottke linked to this piece by Michael C. Gilbert about Facebook, and reading it felt blessedly like received wisdom, all of a sudden. Offering advice to nonprofits, Gilbert likens Facebook to the pre-industrial-revolution practice of enclosure, by which the commons were privatized so they could be harnessed to capitalist ends and be made more reliably "productive." Gilbert argues that, "The acts of enclosure of the information age are about social assets, they are subtle and invisible, and they are being implemented, to a large degree, by peer pressure." His analysis of the Facebook "lobster trap" is astute:

This walled-off nature has three interesting layers to it. First, it's hard to get your content out of Facebook once you put it in. When someone figured out how to create a simple outbound RSS feed of your own updates, Facebook managers blocked it. You can't just export all your content in a form you can use elsewhere, without going to a lot of trouble. Facebook is a content management system (CMS), among other things, and should be evaluated by any responsible organization just like any other CMS, including interoperability and exit costs. Second, the more content you put into Facebook, especially if it's in a form that people can't get elsewhere, the more you're serving as Facebook bait yourself. It's even worse if you start inviting your stakeholders there directly. All the same exit costs apply at this level as well, only multiplied by the difficulty of being bound by expectation that it's inside Facebook that you'll connect with your stakeholders and them with each other. Third, this scales up to entire social networks and communities. If everyone's friends are at the mall, then we'll abandon the public spaces as well. That's enclosure.

If information wants to be free, as the technoutopians argue, then Facebook should be as doomed as Compuserve. An open-source version of the modest services it proides may come along at any minute and wipe it out -- it will just be a matter of getting everyone to go to the trouble of setting up networks again. Facebook will fight like mad to keep your networks proprietary to itself, making overt the essential problem: Facebook needs to act like it owns us and our friends in order to "serve" us.

Obviously Gilbert is skeptical of the similar bargain Facebook offers nonprofits: "When you invite your stakeholders to join Facebook, you're handing over your list to a company that will provide them some useful web-based tools, expose them to other companies (advertisers) that will try to sell things to them. And you don't get a cut. That's better, right?" So he sensibly advises that groups make the structure of their social networks explicit in such a way that prevents Facebook from owning the infrastructure. "Always work to make your network's social maps more generally visible. In other words, one of Facebook's strong features is being able to meet friends of friends. In the case of your networks, don't let Facebook be the only place that happens." This seems like good advice for everyone.

Death of crocs (16 July 2009)

Here's a shock. The Washington Post reports that ugly-shoe-maker Crocs is about to go out of business. Wow. That seemed like a business built on a sturdy foundation, one that was built to last. Much like Krispy Kreme, it wasn't tied to a trend at all, and stock touts were surely right to recommend buying in back in 2007. Sometimes the economy is so unpredictable. Who would have thought that demand for Crocs wouldn't continue to grow forever, like the value of our houses?

The company had expanded to meet demand, but financially pressed customers cut back. Last year the company lost $185.1 million, slashed roughly 2,000 jobs and scrambled to find money to pay down millions in debt. Now it's stuck with a surplus of shoes, and its auditors have wondered if it can stay afloat. It has until the end of September to pay off its debt.
"The company's toast," said Damon Vickers, who manages an investment fund at Nine Points Capital Partners in Seattle. "They're zombie-ish. They're dead and they don't know it."

I think that it is safe to assume that Crocs might have found itself in some trouble regardless of the recession. It always amazes me that companies like this get hyped in the financial press; it seems a bit irresponsible and cynical. The unspoken subtext seems to be this: Everyone knows that eventually the trends that such companies are built on will pass, but everyone also believes that the other investors are more naive than they are and have bought into the trend unthinkingly. Everyone then wants to exploit the other's presumed ignorance, assuming some other fool will be left holding the shares when the day of reckoning comes. And the press is there to cheer this game along, pointing to how much growth the company has seen during its peak trendiness, encouraging the extrapolation of such unsustainable figures into the future. I wonder if all the analysts who recommended Crocs a few years ago (or the ones, probably the same ones, who recommended Krispy Kreme in the late 1990s) feel any embarrassment at all.

Clinging to our idiosyncrasy (15 July 2009)

Chris Dillow makes a good point about the similarities between Marxian and neoclassical assumptions about human behavior:

The basic premise of neoclassical economics, that people respond to incentives, echoes the Marxian notion that individuals are bearers of social relations. Both stress that an individual’s behaviour arises from the position he finds himself in - which influences the costs and benefits he perceives - more than from his character. Of course, both views can be pushed too far. But both remind us not to see human action as rising from mere idiosyncratic disposition.

Of course, the idea that our own action stems from our own uniquely idiosyncratic disposition is something we probably all have a tendency to assume. That seems to me the core of capitalist ideology, that we as individuals are essentially responsible for not only our actions but also for the surrounding circumstances that determine the possible range of actions. Dillow points out how this converges with behavior economists' findings:

there’s an important convergence between Marx and behavioural economics. Marxists believe that false consciousness can bamboozle workers into accepting capitalism. If we want to know how this happens, the cognitive biases and heuristics programme helps us. For example, the fundamental attribution error leads us over-estimate the extent to which the poor are to blame for their poverty, and to under-rate the importance of environmental or societal forces. The availability heuristic leads workers to blame immigrants for unemployment rather than less obvious forces. The just world phenomenon and system justification cause us to believe that capitalism must be fair. The status quo bias causes us to accept existing evils rather than risk new ones. And adaptive preferences cause the poor to resign themselves to their fates and want less, with the result that capitalist democracy sustains inequality.

If one's condition can be read as a statement of what is deserved, our empathetic instincts can be tempered if not squelched altogether. With empathy out of the way, the exchange process becomes more unfettered, and can grow to become the basis for more and more of social life, governing more of our interpersonal interactions. Our emotional responsiveness starts to register in our consciousness as irrational miscalculations of our interest, as maladaptive tendencies. In the name of preserving our individuality -- of hewing to the assumption that our idiosyncratic disposition determines our behavior -- we end up even more alienated, with a far more mechanistic view of our own behavior. The stubborn belief in our own special uniqueness is harnessed to a view of human behavior that allows for virtually no spontaneity whatsoever, that presumes our best self always acts out of the calculation of costs and benefits and explains away sacrifice or altruism as covertly self-serving.

Anyway, I know I have a tendency to cling to my sense of my own idiosyncrasy and take a peculiar pleasure in what I think it might prove about me, about my nonconformity, about my ability to resist manipulation, about my ability to transcend social norms and expectations and realize some higher originality. I'm into obscure music; I have a taste for difficult books; I don't watch popular TV shows. I won't go see the Transformers sequel. But I think that my presumptions of uniqueness are probably what guarantee my overall insignificance -- it keeps me motivated to remain deliberately apart, internally praising myself to the extent that other people don't get me, thereby guaranteeing that I will only be happy with myself to the degree that I influence no one. I wonder if this attitude truly is personal idiosyncrasy or the product of late capitalist ideology. Isolating individuals in their presumed specialness is an effective way of rendering them vulnerable to marketing appeals, to consumerism generally.

The strange suspicion of advertising (30 April 2009)

In the NYT yesterday was a brief item about a meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies -- which has decided, perhaps in part because of advertising's growing unpopularity with consumers, to rebrand itself as 4A's. The article quotes the president of 4A's:

“Our business is still fighting for more respect in the public sphere,” Ms. Hill said. “The common perception of our business in the United States continues to be so negative for so many people.”

The belief that simply renaming something removes the underlying structural problems that afflict it is basically everything that is wrong with advertising in a nutshell: The main premise of the industry is that every conceivable goal can be accomplished entirely through reputation and perception management. And consequently, it tends to recognize only those goals that suit such a program, fixing superficiality as an ideal. The success of the industry hinges on how seductive it can make that ideal.

So is it any wonder that consumers are wary of it. The NYT article also mentions this Harris poll (also noted by Rob Walker) that reports that among those polled, two thirds believe that advertising and marketing share some of the blame for the current economic malaise, because they encouraged people to buy things they couldn't afford. The coverage of the poll linked to above attempts to dismiss this finding as Americans playing the bad old Blame Game, but that doesn't wash. (This might be the most ridiculous claim I've ever seen: "Now, thanks to television shows like Mad Men and Trust Me, [advertisers] are slightly more visible and they are an easy scapegoat." So people dislike advertisers more now that they are glamorized in TV shows? And Americans are so myopic that they don't know what an industry does, or that it even exists, until it's depicted on a show?)

Sure, the advertising industry isn't responsible in the same way Wall Street is (though one shouldn't forget the aggressive marketing campaigns of lenders and mortgage brokers over the past decade), and neither are imprudent consumers buying what they can't afford, for that matter. But what the poll gets at is the climate of irresponsibility that people felt to be palpable, a climate that derives directly from the ideology that marketing must by its nature disseminate: namely that whatever we are doing is inherently inadequate, that we need more, that we shouldn't be too secure in ourselves because we don't really control that all-important surface that we present to people, for which the evaluative criteria are always changing. We distrust advertising because we sense that it is stripping us of our ability to desire, that it entices us to outsource our own motivation (it is far more convenient that way), leaving us as shadows of ourselves. We see that we are giving it all away to avoid the very sort of effort we should be striving to find opportunities to exert.

Yearning for ubiquitous anonymity (18 April 2009)

In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell claims that "discretionary social behavior" rises discretionary income, with the result that "the more idiosyncratic aspects of personal experience and life history -- personality attributes, or somatic body-type constitution, positive or negative experience with parents, experience with peers -- become increasingly more important than patterned social attributes in shaping a person's life-style. As the traditional social class structure dissolves, more and more individuals want to be identified not by their occupational base (in the Marxist sense), but by their cultural tastes and life-styles." Ignoring the misuse of "base" (in the Marxist sense) for the moment, the underlying point that people want to be identified by their tastes seems suspect.

This may have been true when Bell was writing, in 1976, and it seemed sort of true when I was a teenager in the 1980s -- people eagerly owned up to the personality stereotypes suggested by the music they advertised themselves as listening to. But my extensive reading in the work of Carles leads me to think that we wish now to affirm our uniqueness -- that we yearn to be regarded and recognized by our society as being sui generis. The eclectic combination of our tastes is supposed to certify that.

But my first response to Bell's claim was that I don't want to be typecast at all, that in some ways I want not to be regarded in those terms at all, as belonging to any sort of "base." Instead, I tend to seek anonymity -- exacerbated by a constitutional shyness -- to the point that it is probably detrimental. Considering the way identity gets indexed to taste, the result is a sort of contrived mercurialness, a perpetual shifting to new preferences, always with the hope that they will prove to have been utterly unpredictable. That way I can feel as though I am escaping being pigeon-holed and eluding the trap of becoming one of those shallow people Bell castigates. That mercurialness is, of course, just the same as the delusional uniqueness that the postmodern subject is enamored of, and is ubiquitous -- itself the basis for marketing archetypes and appeals.

Buying an experience (27 Feb 2009)

It may turn out to be a question of semantics, but the idea of "purchasing experiences," as this PsyBlog item discusses, has always grated on me. It seems to conform the pleasures of living to the calculus of shopping, as if they were essentially the same, and the consumerist paradigm can be applied to all pleasures and desires. Everything is for sale, and everything has its price, if you only think of it in the right way. (Just ask Gary Becker.) Is this in fact true, that rational calculation underlies even our most spontaneous-seeming choices and we just choose to block it out of our consciousness from ideological convenience, or is hyper-rational-choice analysis of human behavior itself the ideological proposition? The PsyBlog post confirms what most research into the subject has found: that buying experiences is better than buying stuff, because the stuff sticks around and becomes lame and/or embarrassing, while the experiences become warm and fuzzy memories.

Experiences also beat possessions because they seem to:
* Improve with time as we forget about all the boring moments and just recall the highlights.
* Take on symbolic meanings, whereas those shoes are still just shoes.
* Be very resistant to unfavourable comparisons: a wonderful moment in a restaurant is personally yours and difficult to compare, but all too soon your shoes are likely to look dated in comparison with the new fashions.

That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, but I just wish it weren't represented as a matter of what to buy. Can we simply have experiences rather than arranging to purchase them ahead of time?

I had a similar feeling about another consumer-choice related post. Jonah Lehrer, who has just written a book called How We Choose, recently posted about a consumer-research study built on the premise that we all operate with two distinct decisionmaking systems: "the slow rational, deliberate approach (System 1) or the fast, emotional, instinctive approach (System 2)." The study set out to determine which yielded better decisions, using the metric of "consumer consistency." I have read the rationale for this several times, and have failed to understand it as anything other than an inexplicable plug for Nikon cameras.

When faced with a choice task, consumers need to evaluate the overall utility of each of the alternatives they are facing and compare these utilities in order to make their final choice. Such a utility computation process is likely to vary from case to case based on the exact information consumers consider, the particular facts they retrieve from their memories, as well as the particular computations that they carry out; any of these process components is a potential source for decision inconsistency. For example, when shopping for a new Nikon digital camera, it is possible that consumers might change the aspects of the camera they focus on, the particular information they retrieve from memory, the relative importance weights they assign to the attributes, or the process of integrating these weights.
As researchers, we often treat such inconsistencies as ―noise‖ and use statistical inference tools that allow us to examine the data while mostly ignoring these fluctuations. Yet, such noise can convey important information about the ability of the decision maker to perform good decisions, and, in particular, it can reflect their ability to conceptualize their own preferences. In the current work we focus on such inconsistencies / noise in decision making as indicators of the ease in which consumers can formulate their preferences: we focus on the question of whether the cognitive or emotional decisions are more prone to this kind of error.

I'm not sure why inconsistency iis defined as "error" (Am I reading this right?) or why they assume that beneath the "noise" evoked in a given decisionmaking moment is a preference that is true and consistent over time for a particular individual. People's desires aren't that static. And the "noise" in the decisionmaking process is what makes us more than automatons; it makes us strange to ourselves, potentially, but that also means we discover new possibilities for who we are that we wouldn't otherwise reason our way into. I tend to think that our identity is not so continuous as the researchers' assumptions imply; that instead our identity tends to be conjured up by the demands of a given context -- to put it in lit-crit jargon, subjectivity is intertextual. It's relational. It's not a given, transcendent thing that then responds to situations and decisionmaking opportunities. The "noise" is everything.

If we are start making consistent decisions when forced to rely on our "emotional" decisionmaking system, as the study found, that suggests to me a failure of imagination, a retreat into safe choices in response to being overstimulated. The emotional brain is boring in its consistency, not "rational" as Lehrer suggests. Again, this could be semantics, could be a matter of how you define "rational," but it seems irrational to me to continue to choose the same thing over and over again. That seems sort of regressive, tending toward an infantile repetition compulsion. As much as I complain about gratuitous novelty-seeking, the idea that only consistent choices are rational seems even more absurd. (I am missing something about this study? I must be.) I sometimes feel as though I am coming around to a totally indefensible and irrational position that we shouldn't bother to study how we choose at all, since it can hardly be anything but a weapon in the hands of marketers to control what we choose, to force out the noise that makes us unique to ourselves and replace it with an official, monologic hum.

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.