The Rise of the Data Self (25 Jan 2012)

This Smithsonian post (via 3QD) offers some more support for my fledgling thesis from Monday's post that "normal" identity is becoming explicitly data-based -- that it's natural to think about who we "really" are in terms of statistics-driven self-surveillance rather than depth psychology or self-actualization quests or anything like that. Freud is out, Facebook et al. is in. For example, we try things that seem self-expressive using media that can give us quantified feedback, and only when the results come back do we decide whether what was expressed was "true." We can convert ourselves in the same way into data, that can make us into a statistical profile and return to us what other people with similar data profiles are doing, and hence what we ourselves should be doing.

Recommendation engines are perhaps the most explicit form of this: "Customers Who Bought Items in Your Recent History Also Bought..." Data-driven micro-marketing approaches are another form. The Smithsonian piece offers other examples derived from "quantified self" initiatives that have people monitoring their vital statistics and uploading them for analysis and aggrgation.

Consider the possibilities in health care. In the past, anyone analyzing who gets ill and why had to rely on data skewed heavily toward sick people–statistics from hospitals, info from doctors. But now, with more and more healthy people collecting daily stats on everything from their blood pressure to their calorie consumption to how many hours of REM sleep they get a night, there’s potentially a trove of new health data that could reshape what experts analyze. As Shamus Husheer, CEO of the British firm Cambridge Temperature Concepts, told the Wall Street Journal, “You can compare sleep patterns from normal people with, say, pain sufferers. If you don’t know what normal sleep looks like, how do you tease out the data?”

What a dream come true! We can collect enough data to create the profile of the ultimate superbeing: the perfectly average human. And then we can use health-insurance protocols to force everyone to become this or else.

But my suspicion is that this runs deeper — that data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self — what we regard as the real self. Data is the authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society; the other means are suspicious, deluded or outmoded. This is not just a matter of the evergreen appeal of naive empiricism. (It has numbers; it can be graphed; ergo, it's true! Numbers don't lie! Who cares how they are contextualized?) Since interactions within social networks are now easily captured and standardized, the quantifiable data thereby produced have become far more constitutive of identity. Just read this article about the designers of Facebook's Timeline function. As the post explains, the user interface is what is supposed to dictate the self as you navigate through your own data heap. With Facebook's organizational help, you muck around in there looking to build the real you.

The assumption is that by letting Facebook capture and process everything, a more reliable version of the self than our own memory can give us will be produced. As the post's title suggests, the UI has "soul"; you do not. Or, as a subheading in the piece claims, life should be seen as having a UI. There is no direct experience of life; it's entirely a data network that we need mediated for us. In one of the more disturbing hubristic-techie quotes I've read in a while, one of the designers tells us what Facebook Timeline lets us do: "You gently consume time.” Rage, rage against the dying of the light, etc.

And though Facebook wants "the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about," it has provided a tightly controlled and highly formatted medium for it that emphasizes standardization (echoing the old Facebook vs. MySpace distinction; Facebook was "clean" because it retained aesthetic control). It imposes the metaphor of life and memory as a stream, which, as Eric Harvey notes, is not some natural, neutral reflection of how we remember but a reshaping of life into narrative, which suits Facebook's ends. The more work we put into making a coherent story out of the data Facebook collects, the more useful, marketable information we give them.

It makes little sense to look within for the true self when we have available immediate (and processable) reactions from and comparisons with masses of other people to help sketch out our contours, when we have an enormous data trail we have created incidentally to be reprocessed by outside parties as self-revelation. Our filters are who we are; the "social graph" is not something on which we are merely one point, but it's instead a map of our identity (or at least what capital wants us to think of as our identity). We become more of a person the more we build out this graph, let the flows of information it facilitates constitute us.

As Nicholas Carr pointed out here, the "right to be forgotten" by tech companies that want to own our memories and even the process by which we remember, may be in danger, despite the E.U.'s effort to institutionalize it. The degree to which the data self is naturalized for us will determine how much such a right will seem beside the point.

The new strategies of desire (23 Jan 2012)

The Economist's holiday double issue a few weeks ago had an article about 1950s motivational-research guru Ernest Dichter (author of The Strategy of Desire) that argued that newfangled behavioral economics marks a kind of return to his approach to consumer behavior -- that most of it is "irrational" and dictated by unconscious impulses and emotional needs, not by the perceived usefulness of a particular commodity. For a few decades, those assumptions were regarded as dubious -- rejected as being patronizing toward consumers, refusing to grant them agency or the sophistication to desire things for complicated yet still conscious reasons. Motivational research and hysteria about consumer manipulation at the hands of evil corporations were based on assumptions that consumers are passive saps who are brainwashed into wanting this and that, whereas it had become more politically expedient for the left and the right both to begin to argue that consumers exercised real power over and in their deliberate shopping choices. Consumerism was touted as a genuine forum for self-expression, an arena in which the identity-enriching fruits of capitalism could be harvested. Or it was a place where consumers could genuinely subvert the hegemonic order, repurposing consumer goods to suit their own "revolutionary" purposes and undermine systems of control.

In reality, both of those interpretations of consumer behavior reinforced one another: individualistic identity projects became hard to distinguish from subversive detournement of goods, and squabbling over fashion-derived hierarchies leeched energy away from the confronting institutionalized economic ones. That is part of what makes consumer capitalism so durable. It commodfies identity and thereby makes it seem more powerful, the key to solving all of capitalism's other inequities. It starts to seem plausible that the problems with capitalism are simply problems of self-expression.

So what then to make of the return of the irrational consumer? Here's how the Economist article synthesizes recent behavioral research:

Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free.

In Dichter's time, figuring out how to manipulate consumers beneath the level of consciousness was a matter of applying Freudian theory in what seemed to be intuitive, arbitrary ways ("To elevate typewriter sales, [Dichter] suggested the machines be modelled on the female body, 'making the keyboard more receptive, more concave,' " the article notes). Now it's more a matter of Paco Underhill-style applied surveillance, where retailers spy on their consumers, amass data on the ir aggregate behavior and draw conclusions that no individual consumer would have been able to explain -- what kind of music leads to more purchases, how wide the aisles should be, which products should be placed at eye level, and so on.

This suggests how our improved capacity for quantification and data processing has changed the way we think of the "true self": It's no longer about depth psychology or the formation of a unique unconscious on the basis of universalized childhood experiences or what have you. Instead, we are starting to think the truth about ourselves is hidden from us not by our defense mechanisms but by our lack of computing power. We only have so much data in our memory (mainly our own limited personal experience) to process with our minuscule capacity to determine what is going on around us or why we are acting in such a way. Whereas computers aggregating the behavior of thousands or millions can reveal the genuine, normal response. Computers are our best analysts, not Freudians. We understand our irrationality not in reference to childhood trauma but to some composite of normal behavior built from masses of collected "shared" data and fed back to us under the guise of automated recommendations, superior filtering technology, influencing power within networks, augmented reality, etc. The empirical sheen to the computated conclusions about "ordinary" human behavior in the contrived situations being measured make them seem all the more incontrovertible. We begin to believe for expediency's sake that the recommendation engines know the real us better than we could ever know ourselves. It makes it easy to fit into our world to accept that.

I wonder if capitalism's system of control is evolving in a similar way. The ways capitalism offers subjects the opportunity to elaborate a unique identity are perhaps becoming either insufficient or irrelevant. They are being supplanted by improved surveillance, autosurveillance, constant confessions of the self. The politically useful concept of the unique personal identity is giving way to the more productive networked self, a disseminated identity normed through exhaustive data aggregation. The exhortation to "be ourselves" and discover the authentic self is steadily giving way to the soft commands to always be measuring ourselves, and sharing more information as a means to take that measure.

UPDATE: this All Things Digital post says basically the same thing: "The 'Mad Men' Years Are Giving Way to the 'Math Men' Era," i.e. data is more important than creativity in intuiting what will manipulate people.

Feedback Loops and Self-Consciousness (7 July 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter As Scoreboard, As Anomie (7 April 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Bell and the cult of efficiency (26 Jan 2011)

Sociologist Daniel Bell has died, at age 91. Reading The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism when I was studying literature as a graduate student made me wish I was getting a sociology degree instead -- he seemed to be writing about stuff that was more relevant than, say, medicinal tropes in the work of Samuel Richardson. I didn't agree with all of his arguments, but the title of that book alone encompasses a lot of what strikes me as worth analyzing: those cultural contradictions shape our everyday lives; we are made miserable trying to live them, trying to resolve them. I blogged about the book a few times, here ("Bell wants to call the self-serving individualism a product of a pernicious modernist attitude that's then imported into late capitalism rather than acknowledge that it's a consequence of consumerism itself") and here ("The fixation on preventing hipsters from destroying authenticity would seem to recur to Bell’s idea of fixing a more or less arbitrary limit on culture. In capitalist society, a hipster figure will always be generated by the way commercialization is necessary for cultural legitimization -- commercial viability has replaced religious sanction in this respect.").

Also Dissent linked to a 1959 article (pdf) today that makes much of the point I was trying to make in yesterday's post about quantification much more elegantly.

Actually, the root of alienation lies not in the machine—as romantics like William Morris or Friedrich Junger were prone to say—but in the concept of efficiency which underlies the organization of the work process. The idea of efficiency dictates a breakdown of work and a flow of work in accordance with engineering rationality. It seeks to increase output by erasing any "waste"; and waste is defined as those moments of time which are not subject to the impersonal control of the work process itself. Central to the idea of efficiency is a notion of measurement. Modern industry in fact, began not with the factory—the factory has been known in ancient times—but with measurement. Through measurement we passed from the division of labor into the division of time. Through measurement, industry was able to establish a calculus of time and pay a worker on the basis of units of work performed. But the value of work itself could only be defined in terms of its cost to the user; and cost was—and is—conceived primarily in narrow market terms. Thus the psychological costs of indifference or neuroses, the social costs of road and transport, are charges all outside the interest and control of the enterprise.

In other words, firms reap the rewards of quantification while we sort out the detrimental impact. When we impose quantification on ourselves as a way of trying to deal with it, I think that only makes the psychological costs exponentially worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting bored; situational boredom (30 Dec 2010)

I tend to agree with the adage that there are no boring things, only boring people. I wrote a column a few years ago about boredom, building on Marx's assertion that "the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people." My not especially original point is that culture-industry products engender boredom; they expect it as a precondition in their audiences as prerequisite to being able to please them. We need to achieve boredom first before we can be entertained by, say, NCIS. Boredom, basically, is relative, not an absolute ontological condition. I argued in the column that "just as the more a society produces, the more potential there is for the feeling of scarcity, for perceiving relative scarcity; the more entertainment options there are, the more we become aware of boredom." (That's basically a recasting of economist Staffan Linder's argument in The Harried Leisure Class.) And as social-recommendations crank up, I suspect so will boredom, and guilt over feeling at once overwhelmed with possible diversions and also too utterly indolent to undertake them all in a systematic way. Boredom starts feeling safer than commitment to one thing, since there are so many competing reasons to keep one's attention free for something better that might come along. Thus attention becomes more passive, a languid suitor waiting to be wooed. We stand and wait, bored.

The reason I dredge that up is that the WSJ had a vintage A-hed story yesterday about Boring 2010, a conference in England organized by media-company employee James Ward and devoted, unlike so many other ones, to dull presentations.

Proceedings at the sell-out event were kicked off by Mr. Ward himself, who discussed his tie collection at great length, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. He noted that as of June 2010, he owned 55 ties, and 45.5% of them were of a single color. By December, his tie collection had jumped by 36%, although the share of single-color ties fell by 1.5%. "Ties are getting slightly more colorful," he noted. Also, apparently, his taste was improving. By December, only 64% of his ties were polyester, down from 73% in June. Even less stirring was a milk tasting. Ed Ross, an actor, swirled, sniffed and sipped five different milks in wine glasses, commenting on each one's flavor, finish and ideal "food pairing." (Cereals got mentioned a lot.)

It sounds like this was less about boredom than an elaborate parody of self-obsession and connoisseurship, that is, about things we fail to find boring about ourselves that bore everyone else. It sounds pretty hilarious, and I imagine the pressure to keep it all deadpan made it more so. It also seems like more evidence that boredom is situational, relational; it doesn't adhere in subject matter but in relationships. I am almost never bored when alone, probably because I find myself endlessly fascinating but also because I can ricochet between any number of distractions without any negotiation or warning. I don't have to justify what I am preoccupied with in any given moment. The presence of others conjures the boredom of compromise.

Personal information markets and anonymity (18 Oct 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paradoxes (14 Oct 2010)

I'm not sure that there is a unifying theme to what follows, but I wanted to clear some tabs and have a vague nagging feeling that these items should be blogged about together.

1. This is from the interminable recent profile of Nick Denton, the Gawker Media impresario, in the New Yorker:

“I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability,” Denton told me. “Which is actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.”

I think that is true about online sociality as well, that the measurability is more profoundly disruptive than the immediacy or convenience of it. In our friendships, we once were, like traditional journalists, much more apt to push the aspects of our personality that we thought they ought to like, to use Denton's phrasing. But know we have the means to question that way of going about things, we have new tools to fuel self-doubt and second-guess ourselves and our social instincts. We have data-collecting tools to elevate our suspicions about what our friends really think of us, make all our paranoias viable. This can't help but affect our behavior. The data doesn't constitute real knowledge of some pre-existing truth about our social life, but instead posits its own truth, a new and, in my opinion, debilitating epistemology.

2. This is from a piece by Slavoj Žižek in the new LRB about the Chinese Communist Party:

An anecdote from Deng Xiaoping’s era illustrates the weirdness of the Party hierarchy. Deng was still alive, though retired from the post of general secretary, when one of the top members of the nomenklatura was purged. The official reason was that, in an interview with a foreign journalist, he had divulged a state secret: namely, that Deng was still the supreme authority and was effectively taking all the decisions. In fact everybody knew that Deng was still pulling the strings; it’s just that it was never allowed to be officially stated. The secret was not simply a secret: it announced itself as a secret. Thus, today, it isn’t that people are supposed not to know that a hidden Party structure shadows the state agencies: they are supposed to be fully aware that there is such a hidden network.

This exemplifies Žižek's theory of ideology as a kind of open secret, a kind of doing it anyway despite knowing it is all lies and pretense. A variant on that is the Lacanian premise of the big other, the overriding social fiction that legitimizes localized bad behavior, allows one to excuse oneself. The Big Other makes us do bad things; it's not our fault. This is the governing paradox of authoritarian regimes. I also think it governs Facebook in some way, but I haven't worked it out yet.

3. This is from Jonah Weiner's Slate article about GIF files making a comeback:

In the two minutes it might take me to load a viral video and watch it in full, I can watch the money shots of 15 different viral videos. Yes, we're talking about decadent levels of impatience, inanity, and time-wasting here, but GIFs allow us to waste less time online—or, rather, to waste it more efficiently.

This on the other hand is the governing paradox of contemporary consumer capitalism. We are driven to find ways to be more efficient in our wastefulness.

Hang the DJ (8 June 2010)

How can this possibly be true?

“Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me.

That's from Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker article about Pandora. I suppose I am blinkered by my own habits. The amount of time I listen to the radio is generally limited to the time I am trapped in environments playing the radio (e.g., the supermarket on the corner near my apartment, the barber shop, etc.). I don't spend much time in cars, which is where I once listened to the radio, mainly on car trips back and forth from Tucson to Phoenix and Las Vegas. That was mainly to alleviate boredom while traveling alone; trying to find a listenable song is a way to stay awake. All of that has made me feel somewhat alienated from the culture in which I live.

What songs DJs play on the radio are the result of a variety of institutional forces -- playlists, payola, personal preferences, radio station formats -- which is what makes those songs listenable, I think. They encode the zeitgeist, balancing various social pressures and contextual factors, expressing market forces as well as advancing certain trends while leaving a window of theoretical possibility for individual expression and taste. The medium of radio posits a collective audience that can be pleasurable to join or judge, or both. It allows for passive participation in something beyond oneself.

Frere-Jones lauds an online music service: "In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio." But that seems backwards -- his assumption that we want more options to suit our individual niche when we listen to the radio seems wrong. I don't think we care as much about hearing something we like than we do about exposing ourselves to what's going on in the world. Listening to the radio feels like cultural participation precisely because the options are limited. If one can choose from a huge number of stations, one doesn't end up with the feeling of participating in culture -- instead one seems to be escaping from it (to where?). The limited number of stations mimics the limits our cultural context puts on our identity. The boundaries are necessary to create a sense of belonging to something, of being something in particular. If "what's on the radio nowadays" becomes an unbounded set of songs, the radio becomes useless as a cultural barometer. And music itself becomes less intrinsic to social life, the more choices there are about what to listen to.

So I am skeptical that DJs will ever be replaced by computer-generated, Pandora-like applications that try to play what you as an individual really want and like. Listening to music is only partially about expressing an individual taste. It also about reading the collective mind, belonging to it, participating in a cultural conversation that one needs DJs (or perhaps other consumers that the Internet could connect us with) to moderate to believe that they exist. The iTunes autofill playlists put me into a conversation with an opaque algorithm that tends to infuriate more than anything else. (Hey, "Genius": Please stop playing Three Dog Night.)

Robot envy and self-tracking (28 April 2010)

I'm not much for biofeedback. In fact, I regard it with suspicion. Obviously not stuff like blood pressure and blood-sugar monitoring, but mental self-preoccupation. I often think that the more we know about ourselves, the more unhappy we are likely to become, and not merely because it takes out of flow (the liberating freedom from self-consiousness) and not because this sort of awareness must inevitably make us all too conscious of our own death (h/t My Dinner With Andre). Self-monitoring tends to limit our sense of ourselves to the limits of our measuring equipment. So when we use devices to record data about ourselves -- the subject of this forthcoming NYT magazine piece by Gary Wolf -- it seems like we are adding to our self-knowledge, but actually we are subtracting from it, limiting ourselves to what we have been. Maybe I'm hubristic, but I like to think I am bigger than that.

Wolf's piece is full of anecdotes about mega-narcissists tenaciously collecting data on their personal lives, with the idea of using the data to discover some truth about themselves that is hidden from their own consciousness but will be revealed in the numbers, as though the numbers are more themselves than their own thoughts.

For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

This strikes me as the saddest and most profound form of alienation humankind has ever known. It seems fueled by the data-driven information economy in which we live; people feel obliged to become more like robots in their effort to better assimilate themselves to the highly tracked, digitized environs. They seem to want to be handled logistically by the "network society," like a set of bolts necessary for a Toyota assembly line or a just-in-time shipment of product destined for a Wal-Mart somewhere. Wolf poses this question, and I think he is in earnest: "We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?"

There are many answers to that question. The most obvious comes by way of Iron Maiden (by way of The Prisoner): "I am not a number. I am a free man!" Another answer: because the knowledge produced in not self-knowledge but self-circumscription, self-digitization. It's like ripping yourself to your hard drive. (That probably sounds appealing to some techno-utopians.)

It seems obvious that quantification serves the ends of consumer capitalism; we produce data that finds itself in the hands of statistical analysts and marketers, who happily sell back to us the truth about ourselves we seek in the form of commercial products and services. 'Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing," Wolf writes, because who wants to share ideas? What he means is that data is perfect for the pseudosharing enabled by social-networking apps that feeds raw intel into the number-crunching maw of online data rustlers. It is actually the antithesis of sharing. When we want to automate what we are doiung and broadcast it to the indifferent world, we are building a wall of data to keep real intimacy away. (H/t Pink Floyd The Wall). Wolf adds, "You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report." Here's a thought: if you have nothing to say, keep quiet until you think of something. Only the machine is interested in having you "report" your cyber-cognitive datastream.

Having the habit of self-quantification -- seeing ourselves as Facebook sees us -- predisposes us to trust what automated suggestion systems will tell us about what we want, what we need, what we should dream, etc. As Wolf notes, "Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square." When we consent to quantify ourselves, we are packaging ourselves for those institutional machines, and the gains we receive by this process are essentially the gains to be had from cooperation and collaboration with these institutions' disciplinary functions. In other words, we are rewarded by government and business by making ourselves "tractable." Our qualitative self is the "problem" the institutions are looking to solve and dispatch.

Numbers can provide only one sort of "truth" about ourselves, and to pursue it we must surrender or compromise other kinds of truth -- for example, the intuitive faith we have in our qualitative assessments of our dasein. (There is a methodological problem, too, with recording ourselves recording ourselves recording ourselves.... The self-observance becomes more recursive the more thorough it becomes.) In other words, we give up our soul for a spreadsheet.

Social Media Anxiety (31 March 2010)

In this post about social-media anxiety, Jonah Lehrer makes some interesting points:

The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.
What I'm most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful. We've taken the natural nebulousness of social interactions -- I might know you're important, but I don't know how important -- and made them explicit. The end result is that our online relationships are shadowed by power relations.

Amen. Social media quantifies something essentially qualitative and makes it more amenable to economic analysis, as well as making "winners" and "losers" more explicit. All of this makes sociality more openly competitive. And because we compete with everybody in the word theoretically, we are far more likely to be anxious and disappointed with our current status. We can always directly compete with someone more popular or revered or whatever than us. Lehrer notes of a famous friend that the resulting asymmetry has "warped the nature of his online social interactions." We are all being warped in the same way; the asymmetry hits us all. It's an version of the problem brought on by advertisements, which establish a false frame of reference for how life is being lived by our peers.

Lehrer is forced to admit that "it's all too often true: we're a craven species, obsessed with status for the sake of status. And that pursuit of status shapes so many of our interactions, both in person and online." That's basically what Bourdieu demonstrates in Distinction; status lurks behind many things like aesthetics that have pretensions of seeming objective. Hierarchies are always trying to establish themselves as part of the unalterable natural order; a follow-up hypothesis is that the more of social life that they affect, the more natural they seem. One of the depressing aspects of social media is that is that they seem to promise to do away with hierarchy through democratized access, but instead the access extends hierarchy's reach into spheres of life that were previously not directly accessible to power. Status plays even more broadly in our lives.

And that has consequences like what Amanda Marcotte describes in this post, where status trumps one's desire to be happy. She illustrates this with the strange antipathy some middle class Americans have for the health care bill that is likely to improve their lot as well as that of society generally.

There are levels of meaning that are simply more important to people than happiness or even realistic risk assessment. Until you understand this, the outrage over health care reform will never make sense. From the rational actor/happiness project perspective, there is no reason for your average middle class tea bagger to be up in arms over this health care reform package. It won’t do anything to hurt them, and for a lot of them, it will have substantial benefits. The simple reduction in fear of being unemployed alone should argue for it, as should the ability of middle class people to continue doing what they already do, which is extending young adulthood for their children until their mid-20s so those kids can situate themselves into more lucrative and stable careers. I could go on, but seriously, the package has a ton of goodies for these folks. And yet they freak out. Don’t they want to be happy?

Well, maybe, but it’s certainly less important to them than maintaining their sense of superiority to other people. They don’t want the rising tide to lift all boats, if their neighbor’s boat lifts up. Just as many people will give up 2 hours of their precious day sitting in traffic instead of having to dirty themselves by being neighborly or, god forbid, living in a smaller place in the city, so they’ll give up reliable health care in order to make sure that others they deem lesser don’t have a share in it.

This sort of thing used to be attacked as a manifestation of "the zero-sum society". The seeming paradox is that status becomes more pressing when digital abundance has the potential to relieve certain sorts of inequality. But we don't really want to get rid of inequality, because it anchors our perception of status. We embrace innovations that supply new ways to feel slighted.

A zero-sum society is not inevitably brought on by natural conditions -- or "Ananke." Instead, it's a matter of the way humans seem to be wired. If you believe what Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents (I don't), status competition is civilization's way of containing our dangerous instinctual aggressive impulses, our natural yearning to rape and kill one another. I guess I'm more in the blame-capitalism crowd, even though human aggression predates it. Like they say, capitalism is the worst system except for all the others.

Overfollowing on Twitter (19 Aug 2009)

Just a few days after having my first experience with Twitter and "real-time search" that could be remotely characterized as useful, I'm reading in this Mark Gimein essay at the Big Money that Twitter is doomed.

The irony of Twitter is that even as it becomes more pervasive, it is in danger of very quickly becoming markedly less useful. Twitter is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. Not because of its problems keeping up with traffic—those are solvable—but because the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging. Even as Twitter reaches a peak in the cultural cred cycle, it's time to start asking how it can be saved from itself.

The problem, in Gimein's view, is that users are too profligate in who they follow, making the concept meaningless -- the number of followers one has is no indication of the amount of people who are actually reading what you have to say, even when it comes in telegraphic blasts. This line of reasoning suggests how Twitter works to quantize communication, making the numbers in the audience more important than what's said. Of course, that has always been true of ratings-driven media, but it hasn't been true for our conversations.

But the genius of Twitter as a potential business is that it turns ordinary people into media companies. It lets us subject our conversations to Nielsen-like ratings, to regard our communications as a product conveying our personal brand. Then we can crunch the numerical data Twitter supplies to tweak our brand, and see what works to improve the numbers, which serve as proxy for our relevance and reach and, by extension, our right to feel important. Then these numbers can be used to sell ads as well -- we can indicate to advertisers what sort of demographic we have in our followers, making it a new way to monetize our friendships, following the inroads Facebook has made in that department. In the process, we become a product, a package of manipulatable content.

Gimein's critique has nothing to do with decrying that process of reification. He's more concerned with effective filtering. I think real-time search makes the following/followed concept meaningless to practical information gathering -- the followers number is all about status and ersatz influence measurement, not communication in any conventional sense. Twitter is less about disseminating information than it is about subjects trying to make themselves feel more real, ontologically speaking, in a increasingly mediated world.

Gimein's argument almost incidentally indicates how fragile the illusion of self-branding is -- we can fixate all we want on the numbers and the illusion of control that gives us over how popular and influential we can become, but that number is ultimately misleading. Gimein relates an anecdote of having one of his posts pushed on Google's corporate Twitter feed, which has a million followers -- it brought his own post a few hundred hits. That's telling -- the click-through percentage probably diminishes the larger the recommending pool is (niche aggregators are going to be more inherently trustworthy to its followers). But also telling is the way Gimein is willing to subject himself with no apparent hesitation to the sort of analysis usually reserved for online advertising.

Anyway, Twitter foments the fantasy of our vast influence, our endless relevance to everyone, and enlists more or less meaningless numbers to sustain it. Following people and being followed doesn't signify any kind of commitment, any reciprocal responsibility -- it's just an effortless way to give and receive empty recognition. It's a devalued currency, hyperinflated. But we can use that number nonetheless as a focal point, a kind of mandala for our self-worship.

The quantification disguises the emptiness of the social relations it is supposedly counting, an operation that reiterates the kind of instrumental rationality that characterizes the neoliberalism colonizing more and more of everyday life. Despite its early promise as a social-planning tool, Twittering is becoming a self-referential operation; we project things that make us feel important and pretend that it is for the benefit of unseen (and, in fact, often indifferent) others. We get a simulacrum of civic participation minus the trouble of other people and reciprocity and responsibility. We can buy followers for our Twitter feed and then forget in the midst of our fantasy how self-defeating that is.

Slowing down (2 July 2009)

Complaining about the technologically mediated acceleration of life and the loss of the time for contemplation has become a lot like crying wolf. From what I gather, people seem to be sick of hearing it -- as a meme it had its moment several months ago. Even though I've beaten that drum many times, I find myself thinking: Okay. Concentrating is hard, but then when hasn't it been? There are a surfeit of distractions; I get it. But it's not like I am going to go on an information fast and spend my free time meditating. I'm not going to dismantle my RSS feed and devote an hour a night instead to reading a single poem. Those seem like idealistic, nostalgic fantasies about the "life of the mind," which in practice would most likely amount to a refusal to engage with life as it is actually being lived. For example, I very much wish I was in a world without Twitter and maybe even without telephones, but that doesn't mean it's imperative that I live as if it were so. Down that road lies the technological equivalent of veganism, wherein everyone in my life would need to adapt to my fussy, righteous rules about which ubiquitous behaviors were permissible in my little world.

Still, though David Bollier's account of an April 2009 lecture (probably based on this paper, pdf) by media studies professor David Levy has its share of neo-Thoreauvianism in it, it nevertheless raises some points worth considering. The main gist is this: "The digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships." I have said the same sort of thing lots of times, but, as Levy asks, what actually constitutes the difference between "productive" thought and "deliberative" thought? I tend to think of the former as data processing -- tagging mp3 files, for instance -- and the latter as analytical inquiry, but it may not be so easy to distinguish the two. The mental modes tend to flow into one another. Working through menial mental tasks sometimes allows for inspiration to break through -- and after all, what is one supposed to be doing with one's mind when it is taking its time to deliberate? The "information overload" critique sometimes centers on the idea of slowing down the mind. But the mind is always moving, thinking one thought after another; the problem with the internet is that it gives it too many places to go all at once, has the potential to gratify too many idle curiosities. Bollier suggests that "We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves." But the dream that Levy attributes to Vannevar Bush seems a more apt description of what we've tried to do. "Bush’s intention was clear: by automating the routine aspects of thinking, such as search and selection, he hoped to free up researchers’ time to think more deeply and creatively." It's just that the two functions can't be separated; the way in which we think about things doesn't have degrees. It's holistic; we require routine tasks to fire our creativity, and creativity can often become routinized.

It's important to distinguish between having information at our disposal and lacking the discipline to make contemplative use of it. Often the two are implicitly elided, as if too much information automatically leads to frivolous surfing through it. Bollier writes, "Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process." I don't quite understand this. We have to live in the now, because we are not "timeless." We die. And the problem with information overload doesn't lie with the activities and the media so much as they do with the approach we take to them, the ideology about information consumption we have internalized in the course of mastering these new technologies. We think they are supposed to make our lives convenient, and we measure that in terms of time efficiency. If we do many different things in the same span of time we once were forced to do only a few things -- if on the train we can read 17 books simultaneously on a Kindle rather than one -- than we are "winning." The pressure to consume more is not inherent to the technology or in some new perception of time, but is instead inherent to consumer capitalism, which fetishizes quantity. As Levy points out, the roots of this are in the "production problem" -- how to keep making more stuff if people are already sated and don't have the time to consume more. The solution: manufacture new wants and speed up consumption. So the consumerist imperative probably led us to develop many of these technologies. But still, we should be careful not to blame the tools for the kind of people we have become. (If Twitter went out of business tomorrow, many people's discourse would still remain superficial and inane.) If we have ceased to be able to love, it is not because we lack the leisure or are too distracted. It is because we have learned to privilege different sorts of experience, are rewarded for different sorts of accomplishments.

So the call for "an 'information environmentalism' to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives" seems misguided. The "mental pollution" is an effect, not a cause, of our loss of contemplative peace. That is, our mental lives are not degraded by information but by a pervasive cultural attitude about it, that treats ideas as things to be collected and/or consumed.

ADDENDUM: Ben Casnocha's review of Tyler Cowen's new book presents a far more cogent critique of the "attention crisis" hullabaloo then what I've provided above.

We have always had distractions. We have never had long attention spans. We have never had a golden age where our minds could freely concentrate on one thing and spawn a million complex and nuanced thoughts. Cowen reminds us that charges to the contrary have been made at the birth of every new cultural medium throughout history. Moreover, the technologies that are supposedly turning our brain into mush are very much within our control. The difference between the new distractions (a flickering TV in the kitchen) and age-old ones (crying infant) is that the TV can be turned off, whereas the crying infant cannot.

He also notes the way in which chaos and "un-focus" can lead us to breakthrough insights. Though I don't remember agreeing with much of Sam Anderson's New York magazine essay in praise of distraction, this point that Casnocha highlights seems apropos: "We ought to consider the possibility that attention may not be only reflective or reactive, that thinking may not only be deep or shallow, or focus only deployed either on task or off. There might be a synthesis that amounts to what Anderson calls 'mindful distraction.' " That's what I was struggling to express above: thinking is thinking; subjecting it to binary categorizations does injustice to how it actually works and leads to unnecessary and useless prescriptions for how to provoke thinking of a certain type.

Commodified intelligence (26 March 2009)

At the site for the Economist's Intelligent Life magazine was posted this rebuttal to an earlier piece about "the Age of Mass Intelligence." The earlier piece, by John Parker, took a sort of quantitative view of culture and argued that we live in the most cultured time ever. Parker's evidence is familiar, a cultural spin on the argument that capitalism and consumerism has democratized style and material possessions. More people are going to museums than ever before! More people are reading Tolstoy! Since, it is being broadcast online, more people have the opportunity to hear opera! Huzzah!

Not that these are disturbing developments in themselves. The fact that more people have access to cultural goods is a good thing. People encounter fewer barriers to developing tastes for what once were highbrow cultural redoubts. But the improving raw numbers of cultural consumption matter mainly to entrepreneurs in the culture industries. Consumers care more about what their cultural consumption signifies.

Mass cultural consumption can seem like it constitutes an assault on one of the upper class's power sources -- its elitism. Parker suggests we have to call into question the idea of cultural capital thanks to this higher demand for what he has judged to be "intelligent interest":

the growth of intelligent interest may help resolve an argument that exists in universities between those who say culture is really all about class or income, much as it always was, and those who say that, no, sweeping statements about class are no longer relevant, and that these days personal taste, not class or money, is what matters. The new audience suggests both schools are partly right (or wrong). Taste has become fantastically heterogeneous: people do indeed watch and read whatever they want; intellectual snobbery is breaking down. But as Drs Wing and Goldthorpe have shown, one group--those with university degrees--read more, watch more and mix and match more than anyone else.

That fails to resolve anything as far as I can tell. The question remains how do we narrow down from "whatever we want" to manage our cultural consumption? The nature of those desires still have signaling functions, regardless of how heterogeneous the signal pool seems. With no hard and fast sumptuary laws, the boundaries between classes need to be constantly rearticulated -- the pool of signals and symbols from culture serve that function; their meaning is constantly being renegotiated. There need to be constant displays of cultural prowess, constant interpretations. That is why culture becomes a privileged site for political battle in capitalist society -- it seems like a credible route to power to seize control over those symbols. (Whether that is a matter of mistaking the superstructure for the base is a whole other question.)

Cultural proliferation doesn't do away with elitism; it forces elitism to refine itself, to burrow in more deeply into the existing institutions and social mores. It may become even harder to root out as it becomes more attenuated. (That may be impossible to prevent and is no reason to restrict the dissemination of culture, but it's also no reason to pretend that dissemination has no perverse effects.) The increase in culture does not increase the amount of cultural capital, which is relative -- a positional good. One can argue that cultural proliferation has led to there being multiple status hierarchies (this maps to the cultural omnivores in Parker's essay) in which one can have cultural capital (though I think these are ultimately reducible to a master hierarchy which maps onto social class, the hierarchy that permits the conceptualization of power relations in society in the broadest way). But even still, cultural capital is inherently unequal in its distribution; it consists of the leverage gained by a superior working understanding of a given aesthetic domain -- the unspoken rules of taste, the procedures of politeness, the deployment of the proper terminology and allusions, the cultivation of critical authority, and so on. There can be no leveling in these realms -- "de gustibus non est disputandum" is the alibi of the dominant and the last refuge of the dominated.

That is to say, "dumbing down" is a relative concept, and it's always happening at any given time in a society, from the perspective of a group trying to retain whatever power it derives from its cultural capital. So I think Parker is wrong when he writes this: "It is hard to believe that those who accuse arts institutions of dumbing down would want audiences to be smaller." I think that is precisely what they want; smaller audiences, and a consolidation of culturally derived power. Some of that consolidation, though, will always take a concern-trolling form of worrying about "dumbing down" -- this is a subtle method of policing class boundaries.

In George Balgobin's rebuttal, he highlights a point that I've tried to make in the past: The new emphasis on the quantity of culture consumed and the signals it can be deployed to send (over the new mediums available to send such signals) has led to the development of a widespread collector's mentality toward culture:

Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth. Here people curate their personas and project them at the world. Characteristic of the younger generations, the mood strains for the eclectic while feigning nonchalance. The alchemist arranges lists in search of gold: Shostakovich, Dresden Dolls, Justin Timberlake, Miles. "Mrs Dalloway" is popular, perched between "Harry Potter" and, simply, “The Russians”. Status updates remind you that a friend has just returned from an “HD Mozart Opera” while another is “getting into Herzog films”. This is an achievement panopticon; the participants are its prisoners.

The key question ends up being whether we believe that performing our appreciation of something -- indulging in what Balgobin calls "credentials kabuki" -- means we don't really appreciate it. He asks, "if we fail to distinguish between attendance and appreciation, we may end up poorer for it, left with a corporate caricature of our cultural richness. The 'intelligent' masses will work hard mining the store of culture artefacts, but will they read the texts and learn from them, or only use them as objects for trade?" I think that built into this question is an assumption that signaling through cultural goods precludes the possiblity of authentically enjoying them -- that culture must be regarded as an end in itself or else it has been violated. That's an assumption that's built into a lot of what I've written in the past. But that identity isn't something that can just be assumed; rather it's the essence of the dilemma of consumerism. I guess I frequently worry that concern for signaling erodes the ability to appreciate culture on its own terms, because of my own experience of being a poseur.

Outsourced motivation (20 March 2009)

At the Atlantic's website, Reihan Salam files a report on the tech companies debuting projects at South by Southwest, which has apparently transformed itself into a milieu for venture capitalists rather than A&R men. (Related question: In our iSociety, has music become subsumed under technology?) Salam highlights the proliferation of services that attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. He describes Loudcrowd, which serves up social games to isolated people, commercializing our reluctance to be out in the world where we can't control everything. Channeling Allen Bloom, Salam writes that Loudcrowd suggests to him "anomic dystopia" -- I guess I'd define it as a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can "unite" us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services like Loudcrowd seem to meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. Increasingly, simply hanging out seems like wasted time unless someone is keeping score or is broadcasting it to others who are not there.

We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. As Salam notes, It's easy to imagine this evolving into a social engineering system in which we are told what we should enjoy by virtue of how many points some commercially interested party has assigned it. But where he points out that "this concept of layering games over real life is an extension of something we all do: apply our own standards and expectations to the social world," he fails to note that these services are endeavoring to perform that function for us, pre-empt our own standards while substituting their own.

Meeting with your friends too boring? Social life too uncompetitive for you? Enter Foursquare, "an ingenious service that turns finding your friends into a Zelda-like quest," according to Salam. He quotes this description of the service from the NYT:

Foursquare players "check in" via iPhone application, text message or the Web. That alerts their network of friends to their current location, in case they feel like dropping by to say hello or have a drink. (If you're flying solo, or on a date, Foursquare allows you to check in without posting your location.) Players rack up points for checking in at unusual places, early hours of the morning or in the same location as other users in their network.

It seems strange that we would need to incentivize ourselves to have a social life, but that seems the inevitable outcome of technology-assisted convenience. Convenience tends to be a matter of avoiding interpersonal hassles in favor of a solipsistic world in which we have individual control over as much details of our experience as possible. The ideal, from the perspective of technology, would be a situation in which we don't have negotiate any aspects of shared space or time with anyone. "Sharing" itself would become passe. (Where's the incentive?) Instead, we broadcast at one another from our hermetic worlds. Why trouble yourself with reciprocity when you have the tools to broadcast yourself to those who happen to be interested, and filter out what bores you among everyone else's broadcasts.

Drawing on Will Wilkinson's argument about the proliferation of coexisting status hierarchies making us all feel like achievers (as if these are not themseleves ordered into a hierarchy), Salam suggests that these virtual games mapped on real life are useful because they "introduce new hierarchies designed to make life more fulfilling and fun at a faster rate than we've seen in the past." Generally, that seems like a grim take on human nature, that it requires hierarchies for their to be fulfillment and fun -- that winning is the only joy we know. But stranger, especially for a conservative like Salam, is how he posits acceleration as basically beneficial. This seems to me another of technology's detrimental effects, given our consumer society -- tech is tailored for increasing our cultural consumption throughput. Making social life into a game, quantifying it even more precisely, seems very likely to exacerbate that tendency, nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value. ("I wanted to see that painting show at the Met, but I saw that the Guggenheim was worth more so I went there instead." "Would have went to see your band, but seeing the band playing at Mercury Lounge was worth more points. Sorry.")

"Projects for paying attention to attention" (26 Jan 2009)

PSFK linked to this post by Russell Davies, in which he explains his strategy to make himself actually pay attention to what he listens to:

unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.
So I thought I'd try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.
Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.

I'm sympathetic to the desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by all the music that's accessible to us, but I'm not sure that setting up arbitrary limits is the best solution. Ideally, there would be something at least semi-organic about how we pursue pleasure and pay attention. Is that the impasse we have reached, where we have to force ourselves to pay attention to the things we intended to do for fun? Maybe the "ambient haze" he worries about is actually preferable -- the best we can do nowadays. (And maybe that explains why people like Animal Collective -- and it's even in the A's!)

That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It's a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn't what I want music in my life for -- to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I've compelled myself to consume.

Anyway, this makes me wonder if we really have in fact entered into the so-called attention economy -- the idea that our most precious currency is the attention we pay to something, since so much is freely offered and the competition amongst marketers for our eyeballs has never been fiercer. We do have a limited amount of time in which to concentrate our attention on things, but these limitations have not translated into a clear hierarchy of where to focus. Instead, we seem more bewildered than ever by all the possibilities, and we become more and more whimsical without necessarily wanting to. The need to pay attention to attention suggests that our culture has been too successful in promoting distractions; it may be that we can no longer tell distractions apart from things we want to be interested in. Distraction has become the common denominator of all leisure experiences; the only alternative is basically work, socially constructed as joyless.

(Bonus: My 15-song all-A playlist, judging by iTunes play count:
1. Abba, "Bang-a-boomerang"
2. AC/DC, "Dog Eat Dog"
3. Addrisi Brothers, "Time to Love"
4. Al Kooper, "Be Yourself (Be Real)"
5. Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
6. Alice Cooper, "Under My Wheels"
7. the Arrows, "Toughen Up"
8. Allman Brothers, "Don't Keep Me Wonderin' "
9. Asha Bhosle, "Ankhen Meri Maikhana"
10. Andy Kim, "Shoot 'em Up Baby"
11. Angry Samoans, "Lights Out"
12. The Association, "It'll Take a Little Time"
13. Aerovons, "World of You"
14. A.C. Newman, "Battle for Straight Time"
15. Allen Toussaint, "Electricity")

Ubiquitous measurement (3 Oct 2008)

On his blog a few weeks ago, Kevin Kelly celebrates what I complained about in this recent column: the growing ability to monitor and measure everything. I argued that fashioning databases of ourselves reduces our capacity for selfhood and enslaves us to quantitative ways of evaluating our experiences; Kelly, however, sees all this "metering" as an opportunity to create shareholder value.

In the long run, there is nothing that cannot be made more valuable by metering it. (And in this recursive world, even metering is not too cheap to meter, so metering the meters is a good strategy as well.) We are rapidly inventing new sensors to cheaply, accurately, and continuously measure all things in all dimensions: geo-graphical location, speed, consumption, health, fitness, repairablity, connection, performance, rest, charge, and a million other vectors.

It's true that you can't profit from what you can't measure. But it still seems short-sighted to celebrate everything being metered, and to promote the incursion of measurement further into the private lives of individuals, as if they are being measured for their own benefit. It's instead the final obliteration of idea that any part of life takes place outside of the commercial nexus. To this vision of the future, everything of any significance, any piece of self-knowledge or self-enhancement will come filtered through the valves and gauges of the commercial machine. Outside of that, we don't actually exist; unmeasured we are ghosts. It won't be impossible to be a ghost in this future, but it will be a difficult choice to stick to; it will be hard to be content with merely haunting the lives of others, who will most likely not have made the same choice, since the blandishments of the measured life are not negligible.

What are these blandishments? Kelly points to the "freeconomy" our data streams support: "Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself." On the surface that sounds like nonsense: If the thing is free, than it has no economic value to anyone. But the stuff is not truly free. Kelly continually labels goods and services as "free" even when the payment is being extracted as surveillance: "I can get free email, free storage, free photo manipulation tools, free genealogical sharing, free phone service, free twittering, free .. well almost free anything ... knowing that the hosts are monitoring (metering) my usage." Being watched is the cost, and for most people it is negligible, because they are online exhibitionists. (Social networking, as I was trying to argue here, invites us all to become online exhibitionists, an attractive appeal because the public forum -- where our behavior can be "metered" -- is the primary place to establish our selfhood, which, in a mediated world, derives from being observed and judged.) But nonetheless it can be very costly, as the information is used to construct filters around us, affecting the choice architecture we confront and subtly changing just what it is that we are "free" to do, online and elsewhere. The more data we generated, the more we become confined by the preferences it predicts for us. The field in which we can discover spontaneity, or experience serendipity, shrinks. Perhaps in the future we will look back and see that these qualities were worth surrendering, that spontaneity was overrated. But chances are that the impossibility of spontaneity will make the promise of spontaneity a very powerful marketing tool.

Of course, there is the alternate possibility that the avalanche of data will create a new field for accidental discoveries and serendipitous linkages. If metering is as recursive as Kelly predicts, with metering itself being metered, and so on, the infinite flow of information will become even more unmanageable. With an infinite pool to draw from, "usefulness" and meaning can be extracted with the same arbitrarity that allows astrology to derive useful information from the stars. It requires only a clever manipulator of data to proclaim a significance to a pattern in the miasma. Rhetorical skill trumps statistical analysis when there are always more and more statistics to draw from and present as truth. Objective truth recedes even further from access as the data tide rises. The more data there is, the easier it is to lose sight of the correlations that truly signify -- whatever that means. As Kelly himself notes, "The skills to parse and divine meaningful patterns out of this new environment will become paramount and eagerly sought. Those who control the gateways to this metered information will be kings." "Divine" is an apt choice of words. But controlling the gateway will be less important than having the unscrupulous facility to manipulate the information that is flowing. This is the mettle from which kings of the information age are made -- demagoguery.

Measuring everything merely intensifies the need for trustworthy filters, which makes the service Google provides more necessary. "Google and web 2.0 companies realize this," Kelly writes of the looming information treasure trove. "They meter everything they can because the data about things is more valuable than the thing itself." At face value, this can't be true. Metadata is derivative of the "thing"; without the thing that people are primarily interested in knowing about, there is no metadata from which to extract value. It's like arguing that the credit-default-swap market can continue to expand without any underlying loans to insure. (Arguably the credit crisis exploded in part because investors lost sight of the relevance of those underlying loans to those swaps and began trading CDS contracts as though they were independent assets.)

Measuring everything is clearly valuable to Google, but not necessarily for us, who are interested in things in themselves and not profiting from ways to label and sort them. The value of metering is ultimately parasitical.

In fact, the obsession with metadata compromises our ability to enjoy the thing itself, sidetracking us into a preoccupation with quantitative aspects of our consuming experience rather than qualitative ones. The metadata is always other than the thing itself, but it makes it easier to think we’ve processed the thing itself without investing the time to experience it directly. Because so much more stuff is being thrust at us in digitized form, we begin to see our attention as a limited resource that should be budgeted to stretch it the farthest, which means applying it to derivatives (which can aggregate and condense information about many things) instead of things themselves and allow us to process more stuff superficially, with a sense of satisfaction that we have allowed our mind to touch on more things. We become maximizers, and as Barry Schwartz explained in The Paradox of Choice, this can be debilitating.

Our attention doesn't need budgeting as long as it is fully engaged. Being engaged, truly and thoroughly, is all we reasonably should require of ourselves; consuming more stuff for the sake of quantity itself is fruitless; we're always left with a feeling that we should have consumed more. Ubiquitous measurement serves only to intensify that feeling.

The Numerati, by Stephen Baker (4 September 2008)

The advance of digital technology further and further into the nooks and crannies of our lives is based on an elementary trade-off. It supplies us with a great deal of convenience: It lets us communicate with one another wherever and whenever we want to; it provides us with instantaneous access to and limitless storage of media, everything from personal photos to films to most of the history of recorded music on a terabyte hard drive; it's capable of building in a level of redundancy in our lives, preserving what we might otherwise forget and protecting us from oversights -- if you lose tickets to an event, chances are the barcode on them can be canceled and new ones issued to you. And if your credit card number is stolen, chances are the bank will recognize suspicious purchases and notify you. But in exchange for all this convenience, we sacrifice privacy and spontaneity: We permit all our public actions to be cataloged and processed, and we make ourselves completely and instantly accessible not just to our friends and family, but to marketers who seek to guide our behavior in contexts that they can detect and analyze perhaps even before we have a chance to, and to the state, which may seek to stifle dissent before it has the opportunity to assemble and gather force. We become willing parties to our own reification, to our assimilation into the giant digital data machine. Obviously there is pleasure in this, not only in the expanded access to entertainment but also in the thrill of losing ourselves, of ceding responsibility, of having an all-powerful deity-like entity feed us what it thinks we need to know to be happy in whatever situation we end up in. In short, we have a easier time navigating the world as we experience it because it has been preformatted by powerful institutions. Unfortunately our interests are more or less tangential to these institutions, whose primary concern is their own survival and growth.

So, considering how technology threatens to render our wishes irrelevant even as it pretends to cater to them -- that is, to our desires boiled down to the need for convenience, to consume more faster and with maximum indiscriminateness -- it would seem diligent to regard technology's encroachments with circumspection and skepticism. Because information technology makes so much of our private lives public and because it flattens our experience into a universal code of ones and zeros that threatens to annihilate our sense of its uniqueness, it's natural and prudent to be ambivalent about IT and the dislocating change it incurs. But The Numerati, a new collection of profiles of mathematician data miners by frequent BusinessWeek contributor Stephen Baker, offers mostly token displays of such ambivalence. The book -- whose chapters explore how data about us can be used to make us the target for ads and political appeals, how it can be used to better surveil us at work and capture terrorists (or at least casino cheaters), how it can expose our health issues, and how it can predict the fate of our relationships -- is not really for skeptics. While occasionally paying lip service to privacy advocates, it is generally fawning in its coverage of the companies who sell their abilities to profile us in terms of what we might be susceptible to buy. It regards their invasive business practices as inevitable, the inescapable result of increased competition, and a reflection of the dubious proposition that consumer preferences dictate the direction of the economy. Companies need to spy on their own customers, the logic goes, in order to know what those customers will want just in time to provide it to them, maximizing whatever logistical competitive advantage can thereby be derived. "Retailers simply cannot afford to keep herding us blindly through stores and malls, flashing discounts on Pampers to widowers in wheelchairs," Baker warns in a typical passage.

But if you are not primarily worried about what companies can or can't "afford," the values implicit in the book may bother you. You might not celebrate as a company learns to shed its "barnacle" customers -- i.e. the ones that try to keep companies to their word and make them deliver on their promises. You might not be happy that shopping carts can persuade people to buy more at the supermarket than they otherwise would have. You won't cheer when a computer figures out who you voted for based on contextual clues, opening you up to a new slew of fundraising appeals. Baker seems to register just how dehumanizing and awful the world of surveillance and forced digitalization of our lives will be, but in the book, the craven instincts of the business journalist usually take over, and he presents corporate management's side as the final word -- our inevitable fate that we may as well start loving since we are powerless to alter it.

Think of the endless rows of workers threading together electronic cables in a Mexican assembly plant or the thousands of soldiers rushing into machine-gun fire at Verdun -- even the blissed out crowd pushing through the turnstiles at a Grateful Dead concert. From management's point of view, all of us in these scenarios might as well be nameless and faceless. Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday's story.

The examples cited here are bizarrely incongruous -- are we supposed to be happy to be compared to soldiers being ordered to march into certain death? is that at all comparable to Deadheads at a stadium show? and simply because a lot of people have gathered in one place means they have been ontologically reduced to a statistic automatically? But setting that aside, the phrase yesterday's story is enough to tip us off to Baker's teleological impulses, while his elision of management's point of view with that destiny, with the end of the story, with the point of view that shapes the story, is characteristic of the book as a whole. It is our fate to become numbers in the eyes of the powers that be, because it suits those powers that we be organized in that much-more-manageable fashion. But Baker would have us believe that history itself is responsible, not the institutions and those who profit by them.

The confusions about cause and effect then extend to the means of data collection. "When it comes to producing data," he declares, "we are prolific." This seems an innocuous enough statement, but it's totally backward. Our behavior is simply our behavior; to us it is lived experience, memory, sense stimuli. We don't "produce" the data, the technology that collects it transforms our lived experience into that data that institutions (corporations, the state) crave. It works to have us reconceive ourselves as numbers, as the sum of datapoints, and then presents its manipulations of that data as the means for our personal extension, even though we are now limited to the field it has defined. "Once they have a bead on our data, they can decode our desires," Baker notes, but it seems more appropriate to say that they encode it, trapping it in the mediated digital world. Amazon, for example, usefully tells us what we might want based on our behavior, and then buying the books it has suggested begins to seem a way of completing ourselves. The data -- the preexisting categories, the defaults, the automated processes incumbent in the systems that capture information -- has started to produce us.

The most obvious example of this is social networks, or the even more totalizing Second Life. These data-harvesting applications hope to encourage us to conduct our social lives in their petri dishes and behave in preconditioned ways the service providers can measure and exploit -- attaching ads and recommendations to social exchanges that in the real world would transpire with unencumbered spontaneity, with no commercial subtext. Online, though, our behavior -- now transformed into marketing data -- suddenly works, to those we "network" with, like a sales pitch -- a means to some other end rather than being autonomous. Our actions seems less real until they are posted and shared and processed to our maximum advantage with regard to the impression we would like to create or the number of page views we would like to garner. Our consciousness, when reduced to data out of convenience, becomes merely instrumental, something easily reprogrammed to accomplish various tasks. We can automate our social life or refashion our identities thanks to the tools the networks provide, but the thrill of lived experience vanishes to a degree, becoming more and more a matter of adjustments on the spreadsheet of self.

After Baker has misconstrued our role in turning ourselves into data, it's a short leap to claim that "the only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians." In other words, don't try to understand yourself; you need a math genius to tell you who you are and what your meant to do through your behavior. Statisticians are better managers of our datasets than we are, and they are better able to manipulate our data to see what it will yield -- to see what our true possibilities are. Apparently our own account of our hopes and dreams and intentions is irrelevant to the degree that it is not conditioned by what the math geniuses have calculated and made permissible. Once we are data, we are inscrutable to ourselves.

Not only does our reduction to data make us strangers to ourselves, but Baker goes so far as to opine that in the future, we will be "happy to pay for the privilege of remaining, to some degree or other, in the dark" about the selves that can be constructed from our data. He has in mind the disconcerting probabilities that we will contract diseases, but it applies plausibly to the whole range of knowledge that can be produced about us. When we begin to be overtargeted, we will need filters to discover our authentic reflection in the efforts to persuade us. We will want liberation from the self left behind by the trail we've blazed through commercial culture, as that identity is merely the one that shopping permits us to have. A more integral self will fight that commercially derived one for social space in which to manifest. But the hegemony of consumerism will require us to pay for that privilege of being able to conceive an authentic self independent of our data stream.

What can we do to thwart our being converted to data? Baker suggests a can't-beat-em-join-em approach, urging us to make spreadsheets of our achievements to demonstrate our worth. As digital data hounds become more thoroughly intrusive, we can probably count on the advent of services that would throw out false scents in our name, creating fake data trails to muddy the image of ourselves therein, to obscure our health concerns from insurance companies who would like to exclude us, and to mask our shopping proclivities to ensure that we don't suffer price discrimination or perhaps attract favorable discounts. Just as credit-score doctors learned how to game FICO, a counter-Numerati is sure to emerge to try and thwart their efforts to define us. Short of that, it will increasingly be to our benefit to conduct ourselves anonymously if we want to preserve any sense of self at all.