I was touched by this Economist article and its report that some dreamers (you might call them money-grubbing, ecology hating real-estate developers, but I call them dreamers) have decided to sink millions in building surfing parks in landlocked cities and ski slopes in places whose thermometers never see the south side of the freezing point. While waterparks might be the “hottest artificial experience in the United States” according to the amusement park industry spokesperson the article cites, I'm more touched by those people who feel the need to go even further than building a roof over fake whirlpools and waterslides in their attempts to negate nature. And I also find nothing to impugn in the seemingly malapropist notion of "artificial experience." Real experience is somewhat mundane, available to anyone simply by waking up. Whereas artificial experience, preferably in impossible man-made landscapes, is a testimony to humankind's epic discontent with the given world and its restless efforts to alter it, even at the flimsiest prod of the possibility of more amusement. It's easy enough to find pleasure in nature as given -- to enjoy a sublime landscape or a clear-running stream or a majestic ridge of mountains or whatever. But the desire to "beat mother nature" as Cleveland indoor-mountain-biking entrepreneur Ray Petro claims to have done, produces something of Promethean grandeur.
Criticizing "artificial experience" has the taint of class warfare about it -- after all, as the positional goods of authentically natural leisure in genuinely recherché locales become more scarce, they become more the province of only the rich, and talking up the regality of such experiences serves to enhance their usefulness in creating distinction. Meanwhile the non-positional manufactured forms of leisure --engineering marvels in their own right -- become contemptible because of the plebeian taint they take on. I'm not usually one to champion the so-called democracy of mass entertainment and see something inherently cheering in whatever forms of leisure become popular. I wasn't particularly enthralled by Disney World or its totalitarian approach to leisure, whereby attempts are made to control everything, including the patrons themselves. But there is something seductive about nature minus Nature, about nature reconceived as serving the sole purpose of pleasing us -- rather than, say, destroying our forests with insects or our towns with floods. Of course, our own efforts may have turned Nature largely against us, but this only strengthens the allure of a fantasy that foregrounds our complete mastery over it.
The Economist writer snarkily opines, "Nature, clearly, is too inconvenient to fit the modern lifestyle," and an insane and aberrently unquenchable desire for convenience may be behind some of these au rebours projects. Certainly there is the appeal of sheer decadence, as well, the implied luxury that comes from the Las Vegas-style idea that anything can be brought to you to serve your leisure. But the pleasure of simulation itself should not be underestimated -- people don't choose to visit these parks or Las Vegas or other man-made monstrosities because nature is inaccessible to them. These parks are intriguing precisely because they are human products, not in spite of it; they fire the atheistic dream of a world without any creator other than humankind itself, and that we can produce anything we want to, given the proper incentives and capital.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Rooting against fashion (16 July 2006)
When I see an article like this one from BusinessWeek about Urban Outfitters' recent struggles, my initial reaction is a delight akin to schadenfreude. but I'm beginning to question why I have any sort of emotional reaction whatsoever. Yes, Urban Outfitters is one of the more annoying upscale downmarket retailers that sell commodified cool to the 12-to-24-year-old demographic.
But their flounderings doesn't mean what I initially assume in my blush of delight -- it doesn't mean that fashionability itself has become any less important to people. Instead, it simply means that fashion has proven once again its unreasonably powerful and inevitable fickleness, creating more economic losers (not to mention the few poor chumps who dropped the cash on clothes suddenly made uncool by forces beyond their control). And some new company, Zara or H&M or whoever, is picking up the slack for Urban Outfitters; the game has simply moved as it was being played, to paraphrase X. So I'm really just delighting in an increase of human misery, with no compensation anywhere in terms of the greater good -- there are new winners and losers, but their proportion remains unchanged.
This realization leaves me one step away from conceding that in rooting against the promulgation of fashion, I'm rooting against prosperity in general, which is the essential condition for fashion to matter at the scale of mass-market retailing. This point of view assumes that the natural result of prosperity is the individual being empowered to pursue some kind of distinction, to express himself more publicly and thoroughly, with fashion-related goods being one of the main ways this can be pursued. But that seems true only because our society labors to link goods with social recognition and communication -- we have a massive discourse-generating machine of ads and entertainment and so forth that imbues goods with connotations, with meanings. But meaning might reside elsewhere, in a different sort of (utopian?) society. I'm still holding out; I still stubbornly believe that there's a better use for prosperity than peasant skirts and drainpipe jeans.
But their flounderings doesn't mean what I initially assume in my blush of delight -- it doesn't mean that fashionability itself has become any less important to people. Instead, it simply means that fashion has proven once again its unreasonably powerful and inevitable fickleness, creating more economic losers (not to mention the few poor chumps who dropped the cash on clothes suddenly made uncool by forces beyond their control). And some new company, Zara or H&M or whoever, is picking up the slack for Urban Outfitters; the game has simply moved as it was being played, to paraphrase X. So I'm really just delighting in an increase of human misery, with no compensation anywhere in terms of the greater good -- there are new winners and losers, but their proportion remains unchanged.
This realization leaves me one step away from conceding that in rooting against the promulgation of fashion, I'm rooting against prosperity in general, which is the essential condition for fashion to matter at the scale of mass-market retailing. This point of view assumes that the natural result of prosperity is the individual being empowered to pursue some kind of distinction, to express himself more publicly and thoroughly, with fashion-related goods being one of the main ways this can be pursued. But that seems true only because our society labors to link goods with social recognition and communication -- we have a massive discourse-generating machine of ads and entertainment and so forth that imbues goods with connotations, with meanings. But meaning might reside elsewhere, in a different sort of (utopian?) society. I'm still holding out; I still stubbornly believe that there's a better use for prosperity than peasant skirts and drainpipe jeans.
Beyond the profit motive (15 June 2006)
A few months ago, on a tip from BoingBoing probably, I downloaded a pdf of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which in the spirit of its subject, open-source "social production," was being offered for free by the author as if it were software source code. I never got around to reading it, in part because a 350-plus page pdf is a little unwieldy, and tying up the printer with a document that big would attract unwanted attention even at my laid-back workplace. So I forgot all about why I was interested in it in the first place until I read Paul Duguid's review in the TLS. Duguid frames his assessment around a Microsoft origin legend, in which Bill Gates stops tinkering with software as a hobby and seeks to make it proprietary, declaring in a letter to a computer club that no quality software will be written if no one can make money by doing it. Gates was voicing a principle that animates mainstream economics back to The Wealth of Nations, namely that the profit motive and market-organized competition are necessary to motivate people to take risks, innovate, and produce what people want -- to make "quality". Without the exercise of self-interest, enlightened or not, one's efforts will be dilettantish, personally satisfying perhaps but not socially productive.
Benkler, as his play on Adam Smith suggests, wants to refute that, and offer open-source collaboration as an alternative mode of social production to the invisible hand -- open-source projects seems to develop through a similar form of spontaneous order, only they are not guided by the hope for profit but for a different kind of capital perhaps -- recognition, influence, potlatch destruction of one's own efforts, display of one's skill, etc. Does this form of social production create an different kind of economy, based on the gift rather than exploitation for profit? That question is what intrigues me, because it promises a different model for human interaction and ethics than the "virtuous" selfishness that often seems to power capitalism. At the risk of sounding like a naive flower child, I'll venture the uncharacteristically optimistic proposition that at least as many people need to adapt themselves to the cutthroat expectations of economic efficiency as find such selfishness natural; a single-minded focus on getting every last bit of utility you can at the margin often seems to run against human nature in a way that cooperation doesn't. One of my operating assumptions (derived in part from Galbraith, in part from Frankfurt School theory) is that capitalist society must expend a great deal of effort naturalizing selfishness at the expense of collaboration and cooperation and the satisfactions of community; so those natural pleasures that tend to isolate us or focus our attentions on ourselves and the significance and importance of our individuality -- that posit our uniqueness as a joy in its own right --are championed in our culture, and collective pleasures are suppressed, trivialized, or marginalized to "exceptional" occasions of holidays and festivals. One of the most off-putting aspects of conservative ideology is the low esteem it holds human nature, which it presumes to be base and selfish and Hobbesean at all turns, restrained only in spite of itself by the operation of the market and ruthless competition, the grim view of human nature expressed in Fredrick Douglass's observation (which I'm plucking from the end of a BusinessWeek article on spyware): "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." Hayek's Road to Serfdom is full of similar "realism", that it's hopelessly naive to assume that the pursuit of individual power could ever be hemmed in by a feeling of social responsibility. And looking at the world, it's hard not to believe that this is so. But when you contemplate the huge amount of trouble people are willing to go to to make the fruits of their labor available for free in open-source scenarios, whether they are writing extensions for Firefox or rewriting and correcting Wikipedia entries or providing free left-wing news analysis or preparing their rare unencoded albums for sharing on MP3 blogs, you get an injection of hope that there really is some utopian alternative just over the horizon.
As someone who studied Bakhtin and did a lot of fruitless thinking about the dialogic nature of texts, Wikipedia, which stages the struggles among different registers of discourse and the different agendas behind them in a text that is permanently unfinished and always changing, seems to offer a way out of the tendency toward doctrinal official versions, illustrating instead how culture can become more actively democratic at the granular level of texts themselves, whose uncertain status demands a more active participation from users. Of course, not everyone wants to be active and skeptical all the time, one of the attractive things about books, and cultural industry product in general, is that we could surrender to them and wallow in responsibility free passivity. This is one of the reasons, probably, why prepackaged culture so quickly obliterated folk traditions of communities and families making there own entertainment. After all, anyone can make pop music -- anyone does, as demonstrated by the untrained musicians who write their own tunes and make up the bulk of popular music creation. We outsource that sort of creativity because it simplifies things, makes entertainment something that's off-the-rack, ready-to-wear. We don't have to stage a private theatrical like at Mansfield Park every time we want diversion. We don't have to have pencil in hand, making disputational notes while we read whatever we read, with a mind to correct it.
And as Duguid stresses, not everyone is qualified to be producing culture that other people should have to acknowledge. Open source systems work for software production, he argues, because there are already filters in place that get rid of the folks who will do more harm than good -- namely, you have to know how to program and want to. But he wonders who will want to consume DIY culture instead of Hollywood quality. But he misses a crucial point -- the entertainment comes not from consuming but from producing the music, the film, the texts, whatever -- from working collaboratively with friends to make something. DIY culture is about the doing it, not about the enjoying it as a product later. Duguid assumes that consumers are only and merely consumers, that they by definition can only find pleasure through consumption; technology that allows intervention into existing media product allows us to become producers, to derive pleasure from activity rather than absorption.
Does this sort of production-as-pleasure move us beyond the profit motive (which seems to require passive consumers as part of the circuit of capital) in any meaningful way? Will this always be a isolated realm of exchange, far down the long tail, as Chris Anderson speculates? Maybe I should actually read Benkler's book for some ideas.
Benkler, as his play on Adam Smith suggests, wants to refute that, and offer open-source collaboration as an alternative mode of social production to the invisible hand -- open-source projects seems to develop through a similar form of spontaneous order, only they are not guided by the hope for profit but for a different kind of capital perhaps -- recognition, influence, potlatch destruction of one's own efforts, display of one's skill, etc. Does this form of social production create an different kind of economy, based on the gift rather than exploitation for profit? That question is what intrigues me, because it promises a different model for human interaction and ethics than the "virtuous" selfishness that often seems to power capitalism. At the risk of sounding like a naive flower child, I'll venture the uncharacteristically optimistic proposition that at least as many people need to adapt themselves to the cutthroat expectations of economic efficiency as find such selfishness natural; a single-minded focus on getting every last bit of utility you can at the margin often seems to run against human nature in a way that cooperation doesn't. One of my operating assumptions (derived in part from Galbraith, in part from Frankfurt School theory) is that capitalist society must expend a great deal of effort naturalizing selfishness at the expense of collaboration and cooperation and the satisfactions of community; so those natural pleasures that tend to isolate us or focus our attentions on ourselves and the significance and importance of our individuality -- that posit our uniqueness as a joy in its own right --are championed in our culture, and collective pleasures are suppressed, trivialized, or marginalized to "exceptional" occasions of holidays and festivals. One of the most off-putting aspects of conservative ideology is the low esteem it holds human nature, which it presumes to be base and selfish and Hobbesean at all turns, restrained only in spite of itself by the operation of the market and ruthless competition, the grim view of human nature expressed in Fredrick Douglass's observation (which I'm plucking from the end of a BusinessWeek article on spyware): "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." Hayek's Road to Serfdom is full of similar "realism", that it's hopelessly naive to assume that the pursuit of individual power could ever be hemmed in by a feeling of social responsibility. And looking at the world, it's hard not to believe that this is so. But when you contemplate the huge amount of trouble people are willing to go to to make the fruits of their labor available for free in open-source scenarios, whether they are writing extensions for Firefox or rewriting and correcting Wikipedia entries or providing free left-wing news analysis or preparing their rare unencoded albums for sharing on MP3 blogs, you get an injection of hope that there really is some utopian alternative just over the horizon.
As someone who studied Bakhtin and did a lot of fruitless thinking about the dialogic nature of texts, Wikipedia, which stages the struggles among different registers of discourse and the different agendas behind them in a text that is permanently unfinished and always changing, seems to offer a way out of the tendency toward doctrinal official versions, illustrating instead how culture can become more actively democratic at the granular level of texts themselves, whose uncertain status demands a more active participation from users. Of course, not everyone wants to be active and skeptical all the time, one of the attractive things about books, and cultural industry product in general, is that we could surrender to them and wallow in responsibility free passivity. This is one of the reasons, probably, why prepackaged culture so quickly obliterated folk traditions of communities and families making there own entertainment. After all, anyone can make pop music -- anyone does, as demonstrated by the untrained musicians who write their own tunes and make up the bulk of popular music creation. We outsource that sort of creativity because it simplifies things, makes entertainment something that's off-the-rack, ready-to-wear. We don't have to stage a private theatrical like at Mansfield Park every time we want diversion. We don't have to have pencil in hand, making disputational notes while we read whatever we read, with a mind to correct it.
And as Duguid stresses, not everyone is qualified to be producing culture that other people should have to acknowledge. Open source systems work for software production, he argues, because there are already filters in place that get rid of the folks who will do more harm than good -- namely, you have to know how to program and want to. But he wonders who will want to consume DIY culture instead of Hollywood quality. But he misses a crucial point -- the entertainment comes not from consuming but from producing the music, the film, the texts, whatever -- from working collaboratively with friends to make something. DIY culture is about the doing it, not about the enjoying it as a product later. Duguid assumes that consumers are only and merely consumers, that they by definition can only find pleasure through consumption; technology that allows intervention into existing media product allows us to become producers, to derive pleasure from activity rather than absorption.
Does this sort of production-as-pleasure move us beyond the profit motive (which seems to require passive consumers as part of the circuit of capital) in any meaningful way? Will this always be a isolated realm of exchange, far down the long tail, as Chris Anderson speculates? Maybe I should actually read Benkler's book for some ideas.
The video-store clerk as icon (13 July 2006)
One of the first jobs I ever had was as a video store clerk, so perhaps I should be sad that video stores are in danger of becoming extinct. But this post by Tim Cavanaugh from the libertarian journal Reason's blog reminded me that there's nothing positive you can say about them -- they inhibit choice, they are inconvenient, they sometimes surreptitiously edit what you see, they subject you to the scorn of clerks (like the young me) judging your choices in entertainment (adult or otherwise). Cavanaugh writes to refute the idea floated on the Boston Globe Ideas page that indie video stores were like indie bookstores, places where nonmainstream folks could share their tastes, and with their disappearance we lose another place for"underground empire" impresarios to hang out. But as Cavanaugh points out, any tips you might have yielded from the video store, you can get online much easier, with the extra bonus automated efficiency. And the things video stores process -- the videocassette or DVD -- aren't romanticized. No one will ever rhapsodize over the feel of having a DVD in the palm of one's hand, the way some revel in the objecthood of books. There's nothing about the medium itself that lends itself to preservation; no one makes coffee-table tomes of video box art they way do with album covers (Though Cavanaugh points out that video-box blurbs constitute a poetic genre all their own, with its own unique relation to truth.) The video store for many people is a place associated with decision-making paralysis and relationship tension -- Netflix makes such choices faits accomplis.
What we will lose is the video-store clerk as icon. Video store clerks, for some reason, held a special place in shorthand language of film, where it was a convenient job to assign to the character who was meant to be a hipster nerd (as in Scream or Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking or even Egoyan's Speaking Parts). It gives movies a chance to be self-referential, which seemed an irresistible trend. Glamorizing the video-store clerk was a way to glorify the idea of knowing a lot about films -- it was good publicity for the industry as a whole to suggest that encyclopedic knowledge of movies was a way to build meaningful cultural capital. (I think this a main reason why the culture industry went postmodern in the 1990s; maybe if I ever finish reading Jameson's book, I'll know for sure.)
My time as a independent-video-store clerk was decidedly less glamorous then the Boston Globe or 1990s films make it out to be. In my patch of suburbs, there wasn't much underground empire culture; the store's foriegn-film section consisted of maybe 35 titles, some of which were American films set in foreign locations. I was a nerd, for sure, but not a respected or knowledgeable one (unless you count my thorough knowledge of dialogue from such films as Stripes, Just One of the Guys and Fast Times at Ridgemont High as knowledge). There were no rap sessions with customers about Godard and Trauffaut; no discoveries of obscure Asian directors or exploitative genre films; no script writing with my clever clerk pals. Instead, much time was spent figuring out how to get away with watching movies in the store that had profanity and nudity in them and answering questions from irate customers about why all the copies of Dirty Dancing were always already checked out. I remember fighting with coworkers about who got to take which movie posters home: I really wanted Room with a View -- that's the kind of nerd I was -- but ended up with a choice between Romancing the Stone and Fright Night. This seems somehow representative of my entire experience of youth.
What we will lose is the video-store clerk as icon. Video store clerks, for some reason, held a special place in shorthand language of film, where it was a convenient job to assign to the character who was meant to be a hipster nerd (as in Scream or Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking or even Egoyan's Speaking Parts). It gives movies a chance to be self-referential, which seemed an irresistible trend. Glamorizing the video-store clerk was a way to glorify the idea of knowing a lot about films -- it was good publicity for the industry as a whole to suggest that encyclopedic knowledge of movies was a way to build meaningful cultural capital. (I think this a main reason why the culture industry went postmodern in the 1990s; maybe if I ever finish reading Jameson's book, I'll know for sure.)
My time as a independent-video-store clerk was decidedly less glamorous then the Boston Globe or 1990s films make it out to be. In my patch of suburbs, there wasn't much underground empire culture; the store's foriegn-film section consisted of maybe 35 titles, some of which were American films set in foreign locations. I was a nerd, for sure, but not a respected or knowledgeable one (unless you count my thorough knowledge of dialogue from such films as Stripes, Just One of the Guys and Fast Times at Ridgemont High as knowledge). There were no rap sessions with customers about Godard and Trauffaut; no discoveries of obscure Asian directors or exploitative genre films; no script writing with my clever clerk pals. Instead, much time was spent figuring out how to get away with watching movies in the store that had profanity and nudity in them and answering questions from irate customers about why all the copies of Dirty Dancing were always already checked out. I remember fighting with coworkers about who got to take which movie posters home: I really wanted Room with a View -- that's the kind of nerd I was -- but ended up with a choice between Romancing the Stone and Fright Night. This seems somehow representative of my entire experience of youth.
Communication breakdown (12 July 2006)
In my blind rush to hyperbole in the previous entry I probably didn't put enough emphasis on technology's capability to enhance and facilitate friendship. I don't mean to imply that friendship mediated through technology is inherently inauthentic; it's probably the opposite considering how it vastly expands the pool of like-minded people who are accessible to one another. (And, after all, many friendships in the real world are plenty inauthentic as it is without any assistance from the Internet.) It's absolutely right, too, as Autumn pointed out in the previous post's comments, that social networks don't necessarily create snobs and narcissists, they just give them another stage to perform on. Certainly the majority of online social activity never reaches the threshold of the Sunday Styles section -- it's not orchestrated for the sake of fashionability, it's just the playing out of ordinary routines of camaraderie. We all can use more of that, online or on the job or on the street or at cafes or wherever. That's not what the writer in the Times seems to be doing though. It's the boastful triumphalism and the grandstanding in the NYT piece that's so disturbing -- as if having friends was something you do to seem cool rather than something that is its own reward. What is important is the way you have friends, not who they are. It suggests how "cool" seeks to cannibalize everything and how using technological novelties to annex fields of behavior is one of its methods. As Nate, another commenter, points out, here is where modes of friendship are made to mimic modes of disenfranchisement -- when "real" friendship requires not only the coolness aura from MySpace, etc., but also the authentication and verification that databanks on past online behavior and reputation management technology could provide, those who can't afford to be online will be banished to a kind of outlaw realm, unqualified for polite society or good jobs.
My primary fear, though, is about the deleterious effects quantification can sometimes have on things, how priorities can get shifted by the analytical tools at our disposal. Of course, measuring tools are one small part of the potentiality communications technology brings to sociability. And not all of mediated sociability will be filtered through commercial culture and be harvested by advertisers and such for ad targeting. But the availability of statistical information can sometimes be irresistible, and it can change how we perceive things -- it can bring a Moneyball effect to our social lives, where instead of trusting our instincts and our senses, we believe the numbers. I used to examine the information about the hits this blog received, but then that info started to paralyze me, making me question whom I should be trying to reach, what they might expect, how to boost my numbers, etc. Those numbers without question tell an accurate story about what (little) this blog accomplishes, but that's not the only story and it wasn't one that helped me. It wouldn't help me by the same token to be able to evaluate friendships that way -- I think I'm too insecure for that. But when my friend group shifts online, someone at some point will be able to market that data to me, I'm afraid, and in a moment of weakness I'll find out more than I want to know.
In fact, communications technology may carry with it the danger of exacerbating neediness; it can potentially bring out the borderline personality in all of us -- if a friend could have called, then why didn't he? Why doesn't he pick up when I call his cell phone? If she saw I was online, then why didn't she IM me? Why is it taking her so long to reply to my last IM? Is she IMing with someone else right now? Is that person more important than me? If I have so much access to everyone, then why do I feel ignored? I admit, it takes special breed of paranoia to go down that avenue, but inciting insecurity has been a commercial strategy since the advent of advertising -- ads are always quick to remind us of how bad our breath smells and how bad our hair looks and what a bad impression our suit gives off and so on. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for the communications industry to want to induce that paranoia about our friends, for so many cents a minute, so many cents a text message. Not that we'll ever have friends merely for the sake of Verizon, but could we, by virtue of hype pieces about new ways to have friends and on the strength of our own experiences of convenience that these new tools give us, be guided toward having relationships mainly on Verizon's terms, on the terms of pervasive telecom surveillance and hypermediated communication? In the meantime, while I mull that over, I'll keep paying my broadband bill.
My primary fear, though, is about the deleterious effects quantification can sometimes have on things, how priorities can get shifted by the analytical tools at our disposal. Of course, measuring tools are one small part of the potentiality communications technology brings to sociability. And not all of mediated sociability will be filtered through commercial culture and be harvested by advertisers and such for ad targeting. But the availability of statistical information can sometimes be irresistible, and it can change how we perceive things -- it can bring a Moneyball effect to our social lives, where instead of trusting our instincts and our senses, we believe the numbers. I used to examine the information about the hits this blog received, but then that info started to paralyze me, making me question whom I should be trying to reach, what they might expect, how to boost my numbers, etc. Those numbers without question tell an accurate story about what (little) this blog accomplishes, but that's not the only story and it wasn't one that helped me. It wouldn't help me by the same token to be able to evaluate friendships that way -- I think I'm too insecure for that. But when my friend group shifts online, someone at some point will be able to market that data to me, I'm afraid, and in a moment of weakness I'll find out more than I want to know.
In fact, communications technology may carry with it the danger of exacerbating neediness; it can potentially bring out the borderline personality in all of us -- if a friend could have called, then why didn't he? Why doesn't he pick up when I call his cell phone? If she saw I was online, then why didn't she IM me? Why is it taking her so long to reply to my last IM? Is she IMing with someone else right now? Is that person more important than me? If I have so much access to everyone, then why do I feel ignored? I admit, it takes special breed of paranoia to go down that avenue, but inciting insecurity has been a commercial strategy since the advent of advertising -- ads are always quick to remind us of how bad our breath smells and how bad our hair looks and what a bad impression our suit gives off and so on. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for the communications industry to want to induce that paranoia about our friends, for so many cents a minute, so many cents a text message. Not that we'll ever have friends merely for the sake of Verizon, but could we, by virtue of hype pieces about new ways to have friends and on the strength of our own experiences of convenience that these new tools give us, be guided toward having relationships mainly on Verizon's terms, on the terms of pervasive telecom surveillance and hypermediated communication? In the meantime, while I mull that over, I'll keep paying my broadband bill.
Database identity and the joy of being processed (12 July 2006)
Wouldn't it be a better world if we could pretend that this writer was joking? She is joking, right? The New York Times is doing a little edgy satire in their Modern Love column. I know narcissism is the coin of the Modern Love realm, but consider how poorly written this column is. Clearly this is parodic:
It's juvenile on purpose. Every paragraph starts with the word I because she's mocking the self-centeredness of her generation and it's supposed obsession with me-media, isn't she? She laughing at the fact that teens today have become an entire generation of glorified ham-radio operators.
I wish I could believe she was joking. But I think NYT published this precisely because she's serious, and because it would alarm people like me and bait us into reactionary declarations of a generational crisis. See, the article brays, you can't possibly hope to understand the youth of today; they're invested in things you wouldn't care about even if you knew they existed. And that's true. I don't have a cell phone, let alone a network of cell-phone-obsessed friends who ping me with every mundane detail of their lives. I've never sent a text message through a phone, and frankly can't understand why you would, especially when they often cost more than talking through it. So I don't consider the cell phone I don't have to be my companion, as Nokia hopes I will. I don't want my friends to make public declarations of their fealty to me on my profile pages and I don't want a running count of people who are willing to associate themselves with me. I don't need to expand my friendship roll the way I seem to need to expand my iTunes library. I don't want my idea of "friend" to be so cheapened that I can have thousands of them. Friends aren't little counters I use to measure my potential reach in a word-of-mouth marketing campaign; they aren't things I amass to keep track of my own greatness. I don't need a computer to rank my friends or score our level of intimacy. I don't need to throttle their access to me the way Netflix throttles how many DVDs I can get a month. I don't want to have friends to justify being able to use technology, rather than have technology enhance the few friendships that matter to me. And I don't crave the feeling of belonging so much that I'll join whatever Web group is out there to join. The column seems to mask its desperate need to belong in bravado, with a reverse-psychology-style embrace of technological dependence and pride in self-regarding shallowness, in presence for its own sake. (It is probably not coincidental that as social networks grow, actual friendship has receded to the point where "Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they had 'zero' close friends with whom to discuss personal matters.")
What most leaves me on the far side of the generational gulf the NYT wants to evoke is my general desire not to want to conduct my friendships in a environment where they can be stored and scrutinized as data. The essence of friendship is its immeasurability, not its publicity. I don't want a database for an identity, nor do I want it for a community. I don't want to run statistics on my social life. I don't want Nielsen ratings for my friendships, I don't want to apply marketing tools to them to see how they might be tweaked, to see how I might reach a better demographic, socially. I don't want to meter the amount of attention I receive. All of that seems counterproductive, unless I decide to run my personal life like a firm and decide that I need to promote myself the way Proctor and Gamble promotes its toothpastes. But as the NYT column gleefully points out, "Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign." But people can't always live up to their online marketing campaigns for themselves. Perhaps the online existence of theoretical people who would make perfect friends leads to more social isolation; we end up rejecting the flawed friends we have in reality, where their inadequacies can't be concealed or filtered out. Meanwhile social networks serve to encourage us to continue to package and market ourselves, to reify ourselves as we reify others into raw numbers ready for accounting principles. We make ourselves into data so that the information-processing capacity of the consumer economy can be used to process us that much more efficiently, squeezing out of us whatever it most requires for its sustained growth. Articles like this aspire to teach us how to enjoy that feeling of being processed.
(Thanks to AdPulp for several of these links.)
My life goes like this: Every morning, before I brush my teeth, I sign in to my Instant Messenger to let everyone know I'm awake. I check for new e-mail, messages or views, bulletins, invitations, friend requests, comments on my blog or mentions of me or my blog on my friends' blogs.
Next I flip open my phone and check for last night's Dodgeball messages. Dodgeball is the most intimate and invasive network I belong to. It links my online community to my cellphone, so when I send a text message to 36343 (Dodge), the program pings out a message with my location to all the people in my Dodgeball network. Acceptance into another person's Dodgeball network is a very personal way to say you want to hang out.
I scroll through the messages to see where my friends went last night, and when, tracking their progress through various bars and noting the crossed paths. I check the Google map that displays their locations and proximity to one another. I note how close Christopher and Tom were last night, only a block away, but see that they never met up.
I log on to my Friendster, Facebook, MySpace and Nerve accounts to make sure the mail bars are rising with new friend requests, messages and testimonials.
I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship. "I miss running around like crazy w/you in the AM and sneaking away to grab caffeine and gossip," Kathleen commented on my MySpace for all to see. Often someone will write, "I just posted to say I love you."
I click through the profiles of my friends to the profiles of their friends (and their friends of friends, and so on), always aware of the little bar at the top of each profile indicating my multiple connections. A girl I know from college is friends with my friend from college's best friend from Minnesota. They met at camp in seventh grade. The boyfriend of my friend from work is friends with one of my friends from high school. I note the connections and remind myself to IM them later. On Facebook, I skip from profile to profile by clicking on the faces of posted pictures. I find a picture of my sister and her boyfriend, click on his face and jump right to his page.
It's juvenile on purpose. Every paragraph starts with the word I because she's mocking the self-centeredness of her generation and it's supposed obsession with me-media, isn't she? She laughing at the fact that teens today have become an entire generation of glorified ham-radio operators.
I wish I could believe she was joking. But I think NYT published this precisely because she's serious, and because it would alarm people like me and bait us into reactionary declarations of a generational crisis. See, the article brays, you can't possibly hope to understand the youth of today; they're invested in things you wouldn't care about even if you knew they existed. And that's true. I don't have a cell phone, let alone a network of cell-phone-obsessed friends who ping me with every mundane detail of their lives. I've never sent a text message through a phone, and frankly can't understand why you would, especially when they often cost more than talking through it. So I don't consider the cell phone I don't have to be my companion, as Nokia hopes I will. I don't want my friends to make public declarations of their fealty to me on my profile pages and I don't want a running count of people who are willing to associate themselves with me. I don't need to expand my friendship roll the way I seem to need to expand my iTunes library. I don't want my idea of "friend" to be so cheapened that I can have thousands of them. Friends aren't little counters I use to measure my potential reach in a word-of-mouth marketing campaign; they aren't things I amass to keep track of my own greatness. I don't need a computer to rank my friends or score our level of intimacy. I don't need to throttle their access to me the way Netflix throttles how many DVDs I can get a month. I don't want to have friends to justify being able to use technology, rather than have technology enhance the few friendships that matter to me. And I don't crave the feeling of belonging so much that I'll join whatever Web group is out there to join. The column seems to mask its desperate need to belong in bravado, with a reverse-psychology-style embrace of technological dependence and pride in self-regarding shallowness, in presence for its own sake. (It is probably not coincidental that as social networks grow, actual friendship has receded to the point where "Nearly a quarter of people surveyed said they had 'zero' close friends with whom to discuss personal matters.")
What most leaves me on the far side of the generational gulf the NYT wants to evoke is my general desire not to want to conduct my friendships in a environment where they can be stored and scrutinized as data. The essence of friendship is its immeasurability, not its publicity. I don't want a database for an identity, nor do I want it for a community. I don't want to run statistics on my social life. I don't want Nielsen ratings for my friendships, I don't want to apply marketing tools to them to see how they might be tweaked, to see how I might reach a better demographic, socially. I don't want to meter the amount of attention I receive. All of that seems counterproductive, unless I decide to run my personal life like a firm and decide that I need to promote myself the way Proctor and Gamble promotes its toothpastes. But as the NYT column gleefully points out, "Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign." But people can't always live up to their online marketing campaigns for themselves. Perhaps the online existence of theoretical people who would make perfect friends leads to more social isolation; we end up rejecting the flawed friends we have in reality, where their inadequacies can't be concealed or filtered out. Meanwhile social networks serve to encourage us to continue to package and market ourselves, to reify ourselves as we reify others into raw numbers ready for accounting principles. We make ourselves into data so that the information-processing capacity of the consumer economy can be used to process us that much more efficiently, squeezing out of us whatever it most requires for its sustained growth. Articles like this aspire to teach us how to enjoy that feeling of being processed.
(Thanks to AdPulp for several of these links.)
Electric cars (11 July 2006)
The new documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? prompted this contemptuous response from TCS Daily, an online business journal sponsored in part by GM. It's hard to argue with the facts here -- batteries don't allow cars to travel the range Americans expect or carry the load Americans occasionally carry, and the recharging time is prohibitive to a generation weaned on convenience. The writer, Ralph Kinney Bennett, explains, "I can drive my wife's big Lexus 55 miles on two gallons (about 16 pounds) of gasoline that cost me six bucks. An electric car like the one featured here could travel the same distance by exhausting its 1000-pound battery pack (lead-acid, costing $2000) which would then have to be recharged. The recharging would take about four hours. I could replace the two gallons of gasoline in about 30 seconds, but I wouldn't have to because my wife's car can easily go another 450 highway cruising miles on a tank of gas." But I don't understand why he feels more threatened by organic grocery stores and people who don't want to drive SUVs than he does by climate-driven catastrophe.
His attitude is right out of the red-blue culture war handbook; it's as though David Brooks was looking over his shoulder. He uses the classic libertarian argument that conservation inhibits personal freedom, and then he throws in the populist angle that no real Americans -- the ones raising kids and building additions on their houses, and tailgating at NASCAR races, etc. -- would regret a single carbon-spewing moment of their lives. He casts anyone who can't relate to this as an effete snob and secret totalitarian zealot who resents other people's ability to enjoy life.
I guess what sums the blinkered short-sightedness up for me is this statement: "Like it or not, American motorists see their cars as full of potentialities and possibilities, some of which may seldom or never be fulfilled." Because some Americans need to consume their cars as dreams, as fantasies of the life they will never live, because they are so acclimated to living by proxy through inanimate objects and their ephemeral connotations, their grandchildren will likely get to enjoy a new ice age and half of Florida will be underwater. To the babies being born today, the Hummer driver says, "Screw you, my fantasy of being a quasi-militaristic macho man who is bigger than everyone else is far more important than your reality. I don't care how many species die out forever. I want my big-car 'feel' " The outside chance one might want to drive to Alaska and carry enough lumber to build a survival shack of one's own, or the flimsy pretense that a big tanklike Escalade is somehow safer to drive, is far more important than social virtues like consideration, moderation and conservation. Social virtues? Who needs them when we can dream bigger, dream harder, dream more wastefully, trapped in the solitary pretend world of our own ad-driven imagination. Far better to live in puerile fantasy, and for that let's thank the corporations who make our infantilism possible and plausible and justifiable to ourselves.
John Kenneth Galbraith, defending his much-derided theory of the producer's sovereignty in the economy in "Economics as a System of Belief," has some insight into what Bennett is up to here: "By emphasizing consumer sovereignty, economics makes itself a shield for the exercise of producer sovereignty by the automobile industry. For by making questions about too many automobiles an elitist and undemocratic interference with consumer choice, it effectively excludes questions about the power of the automobile industry to impose its preference. It gives scientific and moral sanction to social indifference."
Billmon, mulling over Al Gore's film about global warming, also explains Bennett's cretinism well: "But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power."
Bennett is quick to protect the ignoble selfish dreams the SUV represents to its drivers, but he refuses to recognize the dreams and potentialities the electric car embodies for its devotees. Because that dream doesn't line the pockets of his journal's sponsors, apparently, it doesn't really count. The only sanctioned dreams for consumer goods are the ones that further individual isolation and status competition -- you can only dream about being better than someone else and rubbing their nose in your freedom.
His attitude is right out of the red-blue culture war handbook; it's as though David Brooks was looking over his shoulder. He uses the classic libertarian argument that conservation inhibits personal freedom, and then he throws in the populist angle that no real Americans -- the ones raising kids and building additions on their houses, and tailgating at NASCAR races, etc. -- would regret a single carbon-spewing moment of their lives. He casts anyone who can't relate to this as an effete snob and secret totalitarian zealot who resents other people's ability to enjoy life.
These votaries of the EV religion get real heartburn when they see people barreling around in SUVs and pick up trucks that appear to be empty most of the time. They don't seem to grasp the fact that millions of motorists do not see their cars as spare and ascetic tools to get them from point A to point B. Like it or not, American motorists see their cars as full of potentialities and possibilities, some of which may seldom or never be fulfilled.
Yes, some of them may only make short trips from their townhouse to the organic food store or that global warming seminar at the university. But many, many more of them will more likely pick up a load of drywall at Home Depot or take the guys to a football game with all the impedimenta for a tailgate party piled in the back. They will drive 300 or so miles searching for an antique or a quaint place to eat. They will revel in the freedom of the road and the ineffable 'feel' of a big sedan or a rugged truck.
I guess what sums the blinkered short-sightedness up for me is this statement: "Like it or not, American motorists see their cars as full of potentialities and possibilities, some of which may seldom or never be fulfilled." Because some Americans need to consume their cars as dreams, as fantasies of the life they will never live, because they are so acclimated to living by proxy through inanimate objects and their ephemeral connotations, their grandchildren will likely get to enjoy a new ice age and half of Florida will be underwater. To the babies being born today, the Hummer driver says, "Screw you, my fantasy of being a quasi-militaristic macho man who is bigger than everyone else is far more important than your reality. I don't care how many species die out forever. I want my big-car 'feel' " The outside chance one might want to drive to Alaska and carry enough lumber to build a survival shack of one's own, or the flimsy pretense that a big tanklike Escalade is somehow safer to drive, is far more important than social virtues like consideration, moderation and conservation. Social virtues? Who needs them when we can dream bigger, dream harder, dream more wastefully, trapped in the solitary pretend world of our own ad-driven imagination. Far better to live in puerile fantasy, and for that let's thank the corporations who make our infantilism possible and plausible and justifiable to ourselves.
John Kenneth Galbraith, defending his much-derided theory of the producer's sovereignty in the economy in "Economics as a System of Belief," has some insight into what Bennett is up to here: "By emphasizing consumer sovereignty, economics makes itself a shield for the exercise of producer sovereignty by the automobile industry. For by making questions about too many automobiles an elitist and undemocratic interference with consumer choice, it effectively excludes questions about the power of the automobile industry to impose its preference. It gives scientific and moral sanction to social indifference."
Billmon, mulling over Al Gore's film about global warming, also explains Bennett's cretinism well: "But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power."
Bennett is quick to protect the ignoble selfish dreams the SUV represents to its drivers, but he refuses to recognize the dreams and potentialities the electric car embodies for its devotees. Because that dream doesn't line the pockets of his journal's sponsors, apparently, it doesn't really count. The only sanctioned dreams for consumer goods are the ones that further individual isolation and status competition -- you can only dream about being better than someone else and rubbing their nose in your freedom.
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