Music Cloud (10 May 2011)

The iPod’s popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.” I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for “all music anytime” — much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for “all movies anytime” (assuming bandwidth can keep up).

Google’s launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: “Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files.” That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: “Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity.” Morris contends that “the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud … enmeshes users in … a process of continual commodification of the music experience.” The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies — we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music “contingent” on providers’ whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: “the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities.”

It’s worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the “hassle” of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: “Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is.”

Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don’t even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening “purity” is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.

Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)

I wrote an essay for the New Inquiry about traveling. I argue that we travel to try to get away from the ease with which we can want things, a modification on Guy Debord’s point that traveling can make consuming the same mass-produced goods seem fresh and exciting. “Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized.”

With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that “for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on” — of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society’s terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.

Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things — a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed — knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.

Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life — the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here’s how Sennett, who’s ultimately skeptical, limns it:

What I’ve described are pleasures which consumers make in things, imposed pleasure which a sober utilitarian would and doubtless should suspect. And the declaration that the “sky’s the limit” could be defended on political grounds: people might be set free by dreaming of something beyond the routines and confines of everyday life. In the same way they might be set free by feeling they’ve used up and exhausted these perfectly workable ways of getting by. Aren’t people set free when they transcend in spirit what they directly know, use, or need? The consuming passion might be another name for liberty.

Desire becomes an expression of the craftsmanship of consumption. And consumption itself becomes, as Sennett argues, theater.

The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn’t represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality — I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.

The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it’s more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.

So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating “good taste” to heathens. It is instead within every consumer’s reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society’s constraints — namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire — having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed — the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of “being useful to others” — that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized — in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.

Existential hoarding (6 Jan 2011)

This CNN item about decluttering has sensible advice that few people, I suspect, would disagree with, as it fits the zeitgeist by seeming vaguely eco-conscious and consevationist. The author, Tsh Oxenreider, invites us to live as if we are always just about to move overseas:

Ask yourself, Is this thing worth hauling 6,000 miles across an ocean and in to a new home? Is it providing that much meaning and value to my life? If not, why bother having it now?

She argues that more is less, in that you have less to take care of or worry about. If you purge yourself of unnecessary things, each remaining object becomes more meaningful, glowing with the value of its being intentionally chosen. The gambit is to create an artificial scarcity for oneself, set limits to manufacture aura.

Living this way isn’t about having nothing. It’s about everything in your life having value. It’s looking at all your belongings and knowing that you’ve given that thing permission to be there, that the item is truly adding value and beauty to your life. When you get rid of the things that don’t matter, the things you do keep become that much more valuable, and you’ll have more time and money to invest in quality over quantity.

It’s an appealing fantasy. I imagine having that one bookshelf on which every book is one of the best and most powerful books I’ve ever read; I think of those apocryphal families of yore who only had a bible but knew it backwards and forwards and derived true spiritual nourishment from it as a result. I think of being able to imagine at some point eating every single thing in the refrigerator, or better yet, emptying it totally and eating only what I’ve bought fresh from the green grocer’s on the way home from work each night. (Like I ever do that.) I think of empty closets, save for my all-purpose utilitarian uniform that I can wear at all times in any weather and always avoid the appearance of “trying to look cool.” I’ll be so free of objects that I will spend all my time in unfettered activity, really doing things — though with only a few objects at hand it is likely to be the same sorts of things over and over, or it will involve me consuming disposable things or spending lavishly to access meaningful experiences. Or maybe not. Maybe I can convince myself that all I need is a guitar, a laptop, and a dream.

I want very much for Oxenreider’s fantasy to be true. I want shedding belongings to generate a lasting and satisfying sense of having purified my life. I want to prove myself the sort of fortified and transcendent soul who can overcome the hegemony of advertising and conspicuous consumption and capitalist reification to see the true value of things, the value that stems from my ability to invest them with part of my own spirit. I can dispense with the vulgar lies of commerce and live a spare, Spartan minimalist life of meditation in a tastefully empty room like the one we see pictured in the article.

Yet when I try to live with that sort of rigor, I experience little lasting joy. When I’ve purged things in the past, the feeling of lightness that follows tends to be fleeting. Instead, entering into purging mode can sometimes open a yawning void in my life, not because I am ridding myself of things and worry I will feel their loss but because I start to see how little anything “really” means. What’s the point in having anything? I’m just going to die anyway. Having a hoard of stuff to sort through and manage and muffle my existence also stifles my sense of mortality, for better or worse.

And perhaps because of how I’ve been conditioned to experience things, the thrill of getting rid of stuff — unconsumption, as Rob Walker would have it — ends up feeling much like the joys of acquiring it. That is, the pleasure is detached from the nature of the object itself, from the intentionality that is supposed to be so obvious within it. Instead the objects prompt multifarious fantasies, depending on where we are coming from, what we have been exposed to, what are particular situation is that moment. So it is not as simple as it might seem to get rid of the “unnecessary” things in our lives, because necessity is a moving target, much like our own sense of self, our own priorities. Sometimes it seems very useful to me to have every album by Grand Funk Railroad loaded and ready on my computer just in case; sometimes it seems like insane clutter preventing me from noticing the really great music I could be listening to.

Sometimes the meaning of things elapses — revealing another scary truth about mortality. It doesn’t mater how few things you have; your memory is going slip away. The things that seemed important will merely haunt us then, or we will remember things we didn’t save but not remember why, or we’ll cherish that lost moment of purging more than what we’ve kept. Maybe at the point when you can no longer remember why something was important to you, you just throw it away — but then why was it ever saved in the first place? You save it because you are afraid to forget its meaning, and when you do start to forget, the item may seem more dear than ever in its obscure mystery. Hoarding can be a matter of luxuriating in that surfeit of mystery as much as it is a matter of suffocating on material goods.

I don’t think my life is a matter of memories stored in goods, but I am afraid of it seeming as empty as that room in the photo. In my eagerness to purge, the danger is I’ll shut everything out. I don’t know if I can access a way of organizing my life that doesn’t lump people and things together — a way of living in which I don’t need otherwise useless things to remind me of the people I want to keep in touch with. Theoretically, I should be able to have a purity of intention that doesn’t require objects in this inefficient way, and I shouldn’t think about collecting experiences as if they were things or objectifying the time I want to spend with others. But to live according to that theory, with little social support for it, is to risk the empty room becoming not tasteful and light but a void.

Oxenreider writes as though our intentions are constant, so close to the surface, so readily accessible, but she also writes as though only our individual tastes are at stake in those things. But usefulness and meaning are slippery, social concepts, and we end up implicating one another in our needs for things, multiplying those needs without being able to account for where they are coming from within us. It seems like this weird burden to have things, this inexplicable hoard we end up with through no will of our own. But in fact that is just the burden of being with others, refracted into miscellaneous odds and ends.

Pod People (17 Aug 2010)

The BBC reports on Kelly Sutton, the “21st century minimalist” and proprietor of a website called Cult of Less. He had concluded that he needs next to no possessions since the meaningful things in this life (i.e. entertainment media) have become by and large digitized (via Carles).

This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.
“I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation – cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact,” said Mr Sutton.

This seems like an intermediate phase before we wire the internet directly into our brains and enter the goo pods from The Matrix.

I would have an easier time getting behind this idea if it didn’t seem like Sutton was just another stunt consumer trying and succeeding in becoming a meme — like the guy who didn’t ride in a car or the guy who made his family recycle everything or whatever. All these stunts give the impression that ethics themselves are also stunts, good only for attracting lucrative attention, and typically beyond the capabilities of ordinary people in their everyday life. Leading a better life quietly, without drawing lots of attention to it or making it seem extreme, outrageous or clever, is apparently now tantamount to not leading a better life at all. Achieving notoriety is the supreme moral guideline, and lesser imperatives can be subordinated to that ultimate goal.

There is a good chance that consumers of the future will own fewer DVDs, books, and records, and so on, but this will possibly prompt an explosion in the collection of supplementary meaningful objects — tchotchkes of all kinds, not just culture industry products. Not everyone can be “minimalist” because then minimal will simply become normal, and some new distinctive posture will have to be adopted. The absence of things will no longer do the job of connoting what the presence of things already connotes for most people — one’s self-conception as an externalized posture.

The problem in our culture is not so much that there is too much stuff but that we are afflicted with insatiable egocentricity, which the stuff merely reflects. To borrow from Baudrillard, the stuff elucidates the code, and boasting about getting rid of it is just another moment of elucidation, another way of consuming it — that is, getting it to signify ourselves. If you are getting rid of stuff and boasting of it online, you are probably canceling the import of your gesture out. Replacing real stuff with digital symbols of its rejection is just a passing gesture rather than real revolution, which requires rethinking the self, not simply what that self possesses.

(Apologies to those who were led to believe by the title that this would be a post about Trumpy doing magic things.)

UPDATE: Andrew Potter has more.

Information Processing and Pleasure (30 July 2010)

I’ve been reading Tyler Cowen’s provocative book The Age of the Infovore (a.k.a. Create Your Own Economy), which argues for the beneficial potential in seizing upon information organization as a form of pleasure itself rather than preparatory work that leads to pleasure. I’m somewhat skeptical of that; I tend to lament the time I spend sorting my library on iTunes instead of hearing the music. The need to organize and accumulate feels like a screen between me and the music; I can’t even hear it anymore until it’s organized, and I find myself listening as a way of processing to know how to sort a song, put it in its proper playlist, rather than to enjoy it in a more sensation-oriented way. I add so much metadata that it begins to obscure the data; the metapleasure cannibalizes from the pleasure I once derived from music. I end up just collecting music and information about it; much of it never gets played at all. And that gnaws at me at times. I fantasize about getting the “never played” playlist down to zero — sometimes I consider leaving my iTunes playing while I sleep.

Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music “actually sound better” — presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions — the organization “pleasure” feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to “get things done.” Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society — i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.

Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: “Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths…. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.” In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of “little bits,” as he calls them — memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.

Social norms, biological imperatives and technological developments, then, have fragmented culture into ever smaller bits, as our identities have been cut free from traditional anchors. And experiences have been reified, in part because of the ease with which they can be digitized and distributed. As a result, we now carry the burden (or enjoy the freedom) of having to continually reassemble such fragments into something coherent and useful for ourselves — into our self-identity, into an amalgam that represents our interests and self-perceptions, as well as the image we want to present socially. The Internet “encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests,” Cowen notes — they need to be simplified to match the bittiness of how we all have begun to see the world.

As Cowen points out, culture was once largely ordered for us collectively by the nature of the slow media through which it reached us. Songs came in a prescribed order on an album. K-tel picked the hits for Music Explosion. Now we do the selection and the arranging for ourselves. “A lot of the value production has been moved inside the individual human mind,” Cowen writes.

The key word is “individual,” though. These amalgamations are increasingly private and intensely personal, but nonetheless need social validation, which was intrinsic to the cultural order when it was mandated for everyone. When there were only three TV channels, everyone wanted to know who shot J.R. and no one needed to explain what they were talking about with that or why they cared. Now I would need to do a lot of explaining if I was intensely curious about who shot J.R. (which I am, and please don’t spoil it for me!).

The point is, we want our identities — our cultural investments — recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, “share” our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication — the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.

Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing — it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.

Sometimes this seems very sinister to me, a monetization of our social being in a way that cuts us out of the rewards, even as it makes some “knowledge work” jobs expendable. It also leaves us with an identity that feels more fragile and reified at the same time; we are alienated from our immediate experience of ourselves and instead relate to ourselves as though our identity is a brand. It also means that the public sphere becomes “the social factory,” as the autonomistas say, a realm that blends production and consumption so seamlessly that leisure and for-itself social activity and pure sensual immersion become impossible. They become irrelevant, outmoded forms of pleasure — contemplation (decidedly and necessarily inefficient) is a casualty of the joys of efficient processing as pleasure. (Cowen calls this the Buddhist critique — ordering precludes a sense of oneness and harmony with the universe that Buddhists pursue. Nicholas Carr makes similar points about focus in The Shallows; our brains are being changed by internet use to disregard contemplation as joy.)

We are driven to be producing informational value and accepting that as pleasure, rather then engaging in the kinds of pleasure Bataille grouped under the notion of expenditure — waste, symbolic destruction, eliminating meanings, destructuration, entropic anarchy. That may be a good thing, unless you believe the need for “expenditure” builds up within a rationalized society and may explode into fascist movements if not ventilated. It seems that digitization means that our visions of excess are directed into a rage for ever larger collections of things (think hoarders) or ever more order.

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.)

Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)

Sometimes I feel so uninspired. Or should I say, (Sometimes I Feel so) Uninspired.. Usually what happens when I feel this way is I begin driving myself with ever more relentlessness through posts in my RSS reader, looking for something to spark my interest. But what I always seem to forget in these moods is how many ideas and articles I have already set aside because I was too busy to deal with them at the time. I probably have dozens of things that I have either starred or shared in Google Reader, thinking I would write about them later here. And I have a stack of articles printed out as well that I have been meaning to read and write about. Yet when I am in this mood, I never feel like going back to that stuff. (Once I shelve something for later, I am essentially logged it for permanent limbo.) In fact, the essence of the mood seems to be a weariness with the backlog, a sense of futility, and a craving for some deus ex machina that will crank the wheel of my “creativity” without my having to do much of anything.

So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way — as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: “So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well.” (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that’s similar to what I gain after I’ve thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.

A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won’t bother. This also seems like a problem.

Performative shopping and "hauls" (22 March 2010)

Marisa Meltzer has an interesting piece at Slate about teenage girls who make “hauls” — videos of the stuff they bought on shopping trips. Meltzer compares hauls to tech-unboxing videos; they reminded me of when I freelanced at Lucky.

Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society’s great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, “With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important.” The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don’t have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That’s one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.

It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing — and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There’s inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It’s a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.

The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you’d predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.

The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here’s a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: “The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering–and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I’m going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel’s oversize boyfriend blazer.” (Before I worked there, I never had heard of “boyfriend” clothes.” The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation — clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? — made me want to break out my copy of Barthes’s The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)

Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she’s not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She’s not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video “resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens.” The popular girl doesn’t have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.

Anyway, that’s what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing’s future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won’t notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we’ll be using the same idiom ourselves.

Curatorial compulsion (22 Jan 2010)

Nick Bilton writes in the NYT about the curatorial impulse that living online has unleashed.

I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.
Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

This is a perfect example of how performing free immaterial labor is starting to rule our days, become a compulsion. No longer a hobby, it’s an entire mode of being. Life is winnowing down to operations of this limited scope and scale — pointing and thumbs-upping at texts and images.

If we don’t curate online, it’s as if we cease to exist. The efforts are existentially significant to us, but we only get back the sense of being alive; the companies and peers who we are producing for can harvest the value of this labor. But as Bilton points out, we recoup some of the value of the labor by capitalizing on the curatorial work of others: “Without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis.” But should we even feel obliged to? Isn’t that a grandiose and hubristic pursuit? To know the best of everything that is going on everywhere? When the urge strikes me to “keep up with music,” I feel what Bilton is talking about most keenly, but instead of feeling caught up, I instead feel hopelessly behind, as I often do when I log in to my Google Reader.

Bilton cites Maria Popova, a curator he follows, who discusses what she does as “controlled serendipity” and “content discovery.” These cold, oxymoronic phrases are apt in that they convey some of the mechanistic nature of the process, which Bilton labels a “reflex.” But what happens is more like forced serendipity, a demand that the world give forth “content” to satisfy our curiosity, which atrophies, becomes lazier. Online, curiosity loses its active component as it becomes accelerated. I feel it when I fire through the 500 articles in my RSS feed, much of it densely written articles and essays that I cast aside with a glance. Maybe I file it in a shared folder with a satisfied sense of completion. Job well done, curator.

Possessed by Possessions (8 Jan 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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