A Prediction on the Radical Transformation of the Internet

why revealing your true identity will be the next tectonic shift in the virtual space

Posted 2010-08-19 12:15 in business, business models, culture, ethics, human nature, improvements, marketing, social networking


The role of anonymity is a topic that comes up often about the increasingly unpleasant tenor of discourse on the internet. It’s getting harder and harder for websites and content providers to deal with the incivility, abusiveness, and venomous anger that is constantly being spewed out on their forums— almost all stemming from users who never reveal their real names or identities. As I mentioned in a previous article, as the internet has moved from obscurity into the mainstream, civil and thoughtful conversation has become increasingly rare. We’re finding that it’s easy for the public to sling mud on the internet when they can hide behind their monitors. It’s common for vigilante internet mobs to form and harass their enemies. Namecalling and insults abound.

As a thought experiment, think about this for a minute: how would behavior on the internet change if you had to use your real name?

As I see it, changing this one aspect of the internet would radically reduce the level of unseemly activity in the virtual environment. In “real life”, norms of civility and politeness help us maintain our positive appearances in the eyes of others, which to most of us is pretty important; on the the internet, anonymity allows us to largely avoid consequences of bad behavior, essentially giving us license to abandon self-control. But when your name and identity is forever linked to the comments you make, you must maintain a certain level of comportment fit for someone interacting in polite society, lest you earn a permanent mark against your character. And, as a friend of mine once said, the internet never forgets.

Thus, I predict that some day, the internet will undergo a radical transformation into a dichotomized space: there will be one portion that is anonymous; its qualities will be generally seen as chaotic, unreliable, and unstructured. This anonymous internet will not be taken very seriously by anyone— even the people who use it; it will probably not be regarded very well, and people will use it either just to let off steam or to just mess around.

And then there will be the other portion, demarcated by the use of users’ real identities in communications. This latter internet will be regarded as civil, purposeful, and reliable in its information; it will be a place where reputations and communities can be built, meaningful and polite interaction can take place, and where comments are helpful and constructive rather than snarky, dismissive, and hostile. Though it may come off initially as a somewhat sterile space, as its userbase expands, it will evolve to be as the primary virtual complement to “real life” interaction. The anonymous forums of the ‘other web’ will simply be too unstructured by comparison for long-term investment of time. A company will probably make a lot of money selling you an official identity that you will use as a login for all the websites that subscribe to this part of the internet; this will prevent you from making up an identity and ruining it for everyone.

Privacy advocates will worry about this evolution of the internet into a sphere in which we give out our real names and are forever linked to our comments, but the dystopian reality of the current internet “community” and commenting as a whole is one that both the public and those privacy advocates simply must acknowledge, as the current state of affairs threatens to undermine the internet as a whole. Currently, websites are having to employ increasingly heavy moderation to weed out bad behavior, but ultimately, content providers will find that they lack the resources and manpower to corral human nature in an atmosphere where there are no rules. However, they can avoid having to deal with this problematic behavior when they understand how the presence of social norms can suppress incivility from the get-go.

People will initially be reluctant to sign up for this idea—mainly for privacy reasons and the fact that they are accustomed to anonymity— but once they realize it’s the only ticket to entering a consistently constructive and civil society in the virtual world, I think they will understand the value, and eventually embrace it. They will see how it can be leveraged it to bolster their personal reputations, build their names, and create a lifelong history of their characters. They will appreciate how the internet will go from being a glorified anonymous chatroom to being a community of real people with valuable things to contribute. They will appreciate how having the discipline to maintain oneself will make conversations more pleasant, constructive, and intellectually satisfying. They will appreciate how knowing each others’ names will facilitate the transition from being online friends to being “real life” friends.

It will be interesting to see whether my prediction will come true, and if so, how long it will take. The level of moderation necessary on reputable sites that allow public commenting (like news sites) is reaching all-time highs, and younger generations who have grown up with the internet as a free-for-all are posting with increasing frequency. Why, even the middle-aged adults who were taught growing up to mind their Ps and Qs have, over time, been socialized by the rest of the web to drop their pretenses of civility.

Given all that, my bet is that the wheels will be in motion within the next 5 years.

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Order Matters

how you think is often defined by how you’ve been taught to think

Posted 2010-08-18 11:19 in culture, human nature


“If the telephone had been invented after e-mail, everyone would be overjoyed at how much better it is. ‘You mean I can speak to him? Right now? Using my normal voice? And he can talk back to me? That’s great.’”

- Recording engineer Steve Albini, quoting Big Black’s Jeff Pezzatti

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Why I Waited in Line for a $20 Plate of Boiled Onions

on jumping the hurdles on the road of authenticity

Posted 2010-08-11 14:15 in branding, business, culture, experiences, human nature, marketing, postmodernism


I spent last weekend in a place called Door County. People from all over the upper Midwest travel to this area of Northern Wisconsin for its natural beauty, bucolic charm, and for something called “fish boils.” A fish boil is exactly what it sounds like— a dinner consisting primarily of two pieces of boiled whitefish, served alongside a couple boiled potatoes and a couple boiled onions. In the world of Door County, this remarkably simple set of unseasoned (with the exception of salt) ingredients dunked into hot water can run you upwards of $20 per person. What’s more remarkable is that people come in droves, cash in hand, to get a taste of the famous Door County fish boils, which in description does not sound all that appetizing.

It’s hard to understand why people are so eager to shell out what seems like a lot of money for inexpensive food that could easily be prepared at home. After all, it really does not require any level of culinary expertise to boil food. It’s also worth noting that despite the ease with which a total novice cook could boil a dinner, boiling is probably one of the least popular forms of cookery. And, I should add, I’ve met exactly zero people who have confessed that they crave eating whole onions cooked in any manner, much less boiled.

One of the first things people will tell you about fish boils is that it isn’t so much a meal as it is “an experience.” This is hard to dispute on account of the pre-dining ritual that occurs as a central part of the Door County fish boil. A large kettle filled with water is heated by fire as a group of diners stand around and watch. A so-called “boilmaster” ceremoniously dumps onions, potatoes, fish, and salt into the bubbling brew. After 10 minutes of heating, kerosene is thrown onto the fire, causing the fire to momentarily flare up in a visceral and visually arresting manner. The rapid increase in heat causes the mixture in the kettle to boil over. Apparently this flushes the fish of its oils (it’s unclear to me why eliminating the oils is a good thing, but the raging fire is fun to watch). The food is then taken out of the water and served.

When probed about it, an employee at a small town visitor bureau confessed to me that people who live in Door County area don’t eat fish boil, and many have never even tried it once despite the fact that outsiders came from hundreds of miles away to get it. Some locals who have eaten fish boil, I was told, did it under the pretense of “doing that touristy thing” in order to understand what the hubbub was about. These revelations do not come much as a surprise.1 Lots of places have things they are famous for that only outsiders appreciate. When I lived in the Bay Area, I found that hardly anyone who had lived there for any period of time had spent an afternoon riding cable cars, going to Fisherman’s Wharf, or riding the boat to Alcatraz. Consigned to being tourist elements, these things are almost entirely out of the psychic purview of the average Bay Area denizen (except when relatives come into town and want to see them!).

Nevertheless, there are good reasons why certain things become famous. Just as the cable cars of San Francisco are unique, the fish boils of Door County are also unique. And it’s not just that these things are unique; they actually factored into the traditional cultures of these places at one time. They are sold as authentic expressions of regional culture. The fish boil was a tradition of Scandinavian settlers of Northern Wisconsin, and as you might figure from a meal of boiled onions and fish, this tradition was born out of extreme poverty and lack of food availability. It had long fallen out of common practice in the area, except for events like church fundraising dinners (again, a context where frugality was a virtue). It was only after a businessman who owned a place called the Viking Grill decided to package it and market it to tourists in the early 1960s that it gained popularity, and moved from the province of outdated tradition to that of the tourist trap, entirely bypassing the possibility of being a normal food for normal people living in the region.

What is fascinating about all this to me is how easy it is to get people to implicitly believe they can’t have the “real” experience without consuming certain things:

If you didn’t see the Pyramids, you didn’t really go to Egypt. If you didn’t see the Eiffel Tower, you didn’t really go to Paris. If you didn’t experience a fish boil, you didn’t really go to Door County. These sorts of hurdles extend far beyond simple tourism in half-serious cultural truisms that we’ve heard repeatedly. Some examples:

Here, specific acts of consumption, through various means (sometimes deliberate acts of marketing, sometimes through more obscure mechanisms), become socially-mandated pre-requisites for entry into an entire category of human experience. At that point, to partake in the consumption category without partaking in the specific consumption pre-requisite almost becomes an act of fraud, or perhaps worse, alarming ignorance.

As denizens of a post-modern world, seeking out authentic experiences is an all-consuming pastime, but what’s truly remarkable is how we’ve been trained to collect proof of our authentic experiences in the form of photographs, souvenirs, and artfully retold stories of our times spent doing things in these exotic environments. If you ask me, the reason why Door County visitors go to fish boils has nothing to do with people wanting to try boiled fish per se; it’s about wanting to experience an authentic tradition, which serves as an insurance policy against the possibility of doubts being raised (possibly by oneself) about whether one actually went to Door County. Not went, really— went went.

1 Something about the way this tradition has been marketed in Door County literature has the feel of a “tourist trap.” For starters, it seems awfully expensive for something that is supposedly a tradition actively practiced by locals— especially when the foods involved are inexpensive and cooked in a manner that should be incredibly cheap. Also the fish boil comes up way too frequently in literature about Door County, as if a concerted effort is being made to hype up the fish boil as something really special, a sort of anachronism whose bygone quality defines Door County as a whole. People talk about San Francisco sourdough and New England clam chowder and New Orleans Po’ Boy sandwiches, but despite the historic import of these foods in regional tradition, they aren’t employed as central metaphors in nearly every single piece of literature about these places. And then there’s the highly ritualistic aspect of the fish boil. The fact that it is an event that diners are specifically asked to make reservations for and told to come 25 minutes early to witness is unusual. It transforms a solitary meal into a community event, just another dinner into a highly photograph-able spectacle, one that is be easy for people to showcase to their friends at home. The roaring fire— itself a genuinely quaint symbol of an authentic retreat from modern life— couldn’t but help in this context.

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On Arming the Enemy: Dissecting the Consumer/Corporation War Narrative

how the cultural battle of consumers vs. companies is flaring in the marketplace and where it might take us as a society

Posted 2010-08-10 12:25 in business, consumerism, culture, economics, ethics, marketing, postmodernism


Proctor and Gamble, one of the biggest companies in the world, spent $8.6 billion in advertising in Q4 2010. This, as you might notice, is a lot of money. It’s easy to see this sort of expenditure as confirmation of the fact that as a society, we are constantly being inundated with advertising and someone’s always trying to get us to buy something. However, this massive number should also illustrate a more important point that maybe isn’t as obvious, and which culturally, we aren’t attuned to recognizing: advertising doesn’t really work. Perhaps more accurately, advertising as we’ve known it is a ridiculously clumsy tool that requires inordinate amounts of spending for a small level of effectiveness.

Think about the traditional forms of (non-internet) advertising. Companies pay millions of dollars to put on a 30 second ad during a television show— effectively broadcasting their ad to everyone who might be watching it. Or they have a full page ad placed somewhere in a magazine or newspaper. These are not very precise methods of reaching people. They might be able to target certain segments of people by carefully selecting the TV program (ex. viewers of Star Trek, for example, are likely to be very different consumers than viewers of ESPN SportsCenter) or by being selective about the magazine to advertise in (ex. readers of BusinessWeek are likely to be pretty different than readers of Martha Stewart Living), but there’s no doubt that these techniques are crude methods of gaining attention. It has been said, quite accurately, that effective advertising is the art of reaching the right person, at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. The chances of traditional forms of advertising hitting the mark on all of these levels is quite small.

Of course, the reason advertising was always like this was because of clear structural limitations; the options for advertising were few, and effective targeting was not easy given the limitation of options. Companies advertised in this ineffective way because they had to.

But these barriers are quickly melting away, and it’s creating what I see as a spectacular and fascinating clash of consumers’ cultural values and those of businesses. Here’s an example:

For some time now, Hulu, the popular internet media site that allows consumers to watch many television programs online, has allowed viewers to choose from a list of advertising that they want to punctuate the programs they choose to watch. More recently, they started to just show ads with a simple question in the upper-righthand corner asking whether the ads shown are relevant or not. Supposedly, as viewers feed the system with more and more information about what kind of ads they think are relevant, the system becomes more and more adept at giving individuals ads that matter to them; that is, it creates an individualized profile for each viewer.

I have found that as I get talking to people about marketing efforts like this, many consumers are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of receiving highly targeted ads. They are even more disturbed by the idea of feeding companies information that might make ads more targeted to them as individuals. Though clearly our media institutions are set up in a way that anyone who spends any time navigating them will definitely see ads in some form or another, many viewer are mortified by the idea of giving away enough information that they might receive relevant ads.

This is an interesting, somewhat curious observation. Again: People apparently would rather see a random smattering of ads than a bunch of specifically targeted ads that address personal interests. Why would anyone rather see things they aren’t interested in than things they are interested in? On the surface, this sentiment defies all logic.

It’s only once you understand the fundamental narrative that underlies consumers’ cultural understandings of the marketplace, that this attitude begins to make sense.

Our society has come to implicitly view the marketplace as a sort of warzone. Consumers view themselves locked, via social contract, in an epic conflict against producers. The perception is that companies will do everything in their power to ensnare, enslave, and take advantage of consumers through their business tactics (marketing, data mining, targeted advertising, attacks on privacy, etc), while consumers dutifully resist these machinations, and employ their own tactics in retaliation. In other words, there are two sides, diametrically opposite in mission; companies try to take advantage of consumers, and consumers in turn try to take advantage of companies. But it’s not that simple. Complicating the situation is that while this portrait of dueling archnemeses is going on, consumers and producers are also deeply dependent on one another. In fact, each side could not survive without the other, which means both sides have to limit their aggression and, in effect, make peace in some way.

So here we are, entrenched in a struggle that mirrors an abusive love-hate relationship. Consumers want the television programming, but they don’t want to give the enemy “ammunition” by telling them whether the ads they show are relevant or not. This is in spite of the fact that, rationally speaking, consumers really have nothing to lose (and most likely something to gain) by having more relevant ads.

Many people openly voice concern and outrage about targeted advertising. Google faced a lot of heat when their AdWords system (by far their most profitable enterprise, and the one that keeps their business afloat) was released. This system simply displayed targeted ads based on what users looked up on the Google search engine, and what words appeared in the text of the emails they were looking at in their GMail accounts. This process collected absolutely no information about users as individuals, yet the outcry was sizable.

To the naysayers, the self-described rationale is that It’s about the loss of privacy. It’s about the encroachment of commerce into every sphere of society. It’s about the desanctification and cheapening of life by turning it all into a story about consumerism. It’s about how corporations, through advertising, create of societal anxieties and pervasive feelings of inadequacy.

I do not entirely discount these fears as overblown or paranoid fantasies. These are very real and very legitimate concerns. It is not hard to see how the encroachment of commerce has, in the past, scarred the physical landscape of many formerly beautiful spaces through the addition of strip malls, chain restaurants, and giant illuminated billboards; it’s no stretch to think that the psychological landscape could be tainted in a similar fashion through invasions of privacy, the cluttering of the information environment, and the subtle integration of commerce into every activity known to man.

In the past, it was easy to cordon ourselves off from marketing messages; for example, you couldn’t receive an ad if you weren’t watching TV. But as technology changes, we find companies like Foursquare ramping up, using our cell phones to determine our current locations and targeting us for couponing and other forms of marketing that capitalize on the sorts of dynamic information that TV and magazines simply cannot make use of. Our entire lives then become transformed into a marketing landscape, a sort of augmented reality in which specific information about us and our environments are mined, processed, and returned to us in the form of new layers of information and messages that follow us everywhere we go. If you subscribe to the mainstream view of the consumer marketplace that I described above, this sounds like a very disturbing, Orwellian vision of the future.

However, that’s only one side of the equation. It’s also important, though many deliberately avoid considering it, to acknowledge how consumers’ voluntary offering of information to marketers could actually benefit those same consumers. Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if you were thinking of buying something, and you’d get a coupon for $20 off right before you bought it? This is just one example, but it’s exactly what a lot of marketers want to do. On one hand, it’s got all the “big brother” overtones of constant monitoring, but on the other, it seems like legitimate value is being conveyed in this process. As a consumer, you’ve been given a special deal on something you were thinking of doing anyway, and you still have the option to ignore the message and move on with your life; no one is forcing you to do or buy anything. So what’s wrong with this?

Well, if you think back to the nature of this consumer struggle against corporations, the resistance makes more sense. Consumers have been culturally trained to believe that when producers offer discounts and deals, which on the surface appear to be helpful and valuable, it is actually a case of producers gladly forfeiting the battle in order to win a larger war. Here’s an example of how this perception plays out in real life.

All the major grocery store chains offer loyalty cards. Loyalty cards typically offer consumers discounts on various products from week to week. All you have to do is present your card and you’ll save a lot of money. It seems like a no-brainer to carry a loyalty card then. But many people simply will not use them because it violates a sense of propriety with regards to consumers’ own roles in the consumer-producer struggle. Using a loyalty card would be tantamount to handing power over to the grocery store; to use the loyalty card is tacit acceptance that one is willing to sell out the greater cause (consumer rights in the face of corporate hegemony) for some small discount. It is offering information to be data mined, and licensing a company to use the very same data to later exploit the consumer— and indeed all consumers again and again in the future.

Another part of this that can’t be overlooked is the cultural attitude we have towards the twin concepts of materialism and consumerism. These words lack a clear definition in the public consciousness, but it’s quite clear that no one wants to be viewed as representing those ideas, nor does anyone want to be viewed (even by themselves) as possibly promoting those values in any way. Talk to people about targeted ads and inevitably the concern comes up that people need to be protected from themselves. Yes, it’s true that advertising doesn’t force anyone to buy anything, but people (other people, never the person you’re talking to, mind you) are unduly influenced by advertising, and will consume recklessly. This is highly detrimental to our society and must be prevented. Better not to feed people with targeted ads that may lower their sales resistance.

For these reasons, highly targeted ads are viewed as dangerous exercises that threaten to undermine the very foundations of a civil society, turning it into an uncentered, amoral sphere controlled by corporations. How well founded these fears are is anyone’s guess. However, my own opinion is that as a society, we have perennial fears about corporations and concerns about how they accumulate and wield power; the form that these fears take is constantly in flux, but at its root, the fears are always the same: the very nature of society is at stake. Historically speaking though, one thing is certain: new technology is almost always met with serious concerns about its impacts on society. Introductions of any new system in which consumer information is collected and used is always decried as taking things too far. As information becomes increasingly easy to collect, transfer, and utilize, these fears too escalate in proportion. But what also seems to happen is that these systems don’t really go away; instead, after the initial furor dies down, we eventually as a society become comfortable with them as a constant presence, and we get used to having them around. They become integrated into consumer culture, and people begin to view them as institutions and even as valuable pieces of social currency, even if they don’t necessarily come out and say it or even think about them consciously in that way.

But by then, consumers are looking at new corporate inventions and thinking about how the implications are going to destroy society.

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The Unbearable Weight of Post-Modern Symbolism: The Case of Background Music

how categorization holds us hostage

Posted 2010-07-21 15:12 in culture, experiences, marketing, postmodernism


Sometimes the post-modern world is a weird place to be. The things we do are so pregnant with symbolism that it’s hard to do anything that doesn’t appear to say more about you than you’d mean for it to. My girlfriend Huan-Hua’s birthday was a couple months ago and we held a very enjoyable party at our house, where about 20 people showed up. What typically happens in situations like this is that I’m expected to be in charge of the music. I can’t stand being in charge of the music.

There’s too much scrutiny and expectation associated with that job, too much anxiety associated with failing to match the playlist with the crowd’s prevailing sense of aesthetics, or matching the music to the crowd’s mood. Some people love doing this because they can showcase their impeccable tastes and impress people with their musical knowledge. I envy these people for the unabashed way in which they are able to share their tastes without a neurotic fear of judgment. However, I am unfortunately not in this camp.

Ideally, what I’d like is to just put something on and walk away without having to worry about it. In a world of musical diversity and genre-fication, I feel that the act of putting on a track by [artist X] will have a symbolic social value that is necessarily greater than the value that I personally ascribe to the act of putting on [artist X]. For example, if I am playing DJ at a party, and I happen to put on something by, say, New Order (not a bad selection for a party, in my opinion) I see this act as primarily fulfilling a functional purpose— filling the air with something that is tonally aligned with a festive event. It will serve as suitable background music, and won’t get attract too much attention to itself. But in this post-modern era, a New Order song is not just music. It is part of a genre. That genre is attached to many symbolic meanings. Those symbolic meanings are then attached to the DJ. The DJ then is responsible for the “statement” that these meanings make.

On more than one occasion, I put on an album by John Zorn, who is one of my favorite jazz musicians. His band Masada makes music that is alternately pleasant Middle-Eastern/Klezmer-inflected jazz music and less frequently, crazy, off-the-wall free jazz that perhaps encapsulates the most ridiculous negative stereotypes of what jazz music is (e.g. “It’s just a bunch of people playing random noises without a beat! I could do that!”). When it’s the former, it’s very good, energetic, organic, and sophisticated party music. When it’s the latter, it’s chaotic, unnerving, and immensely distracting. I try to delete songs with avante-garde instrumental wailing from my playlists. Of course, one night I failed, and I felt rather sheepish amidst a crowd of befuddled 20- and 30-somethings being sonically battered by cacophonous screeches of atonal, arrhythmic saxophone. This, for having made a bizarre public statement that I had actually studiously avoided making.

My friend Tim suggests that the best way to avoid this problem is to divest control: put on a radio station. But even then the selection of the station itself is an editorial process that could reflect back on you. Short of dumping the DJ job on someone else, it seems there are few escapes— though I can think of at least two ways out of it; 1) at the start of the party, choose a radio station through a transparently randomized process, or 2) profess total ignorance about anything related to music.

The first of these options, you have to admit, is pretty ridiculous. The statement that would result from you making a spectacle of randomly selecting a radio station is very likely more damaging to your image than you putting on a station representing any particular genre (though putting on a smooth jazz station— aka “quiet storm”— would be one genre that could potentially be even worse).

Professing total ignorance is a route that I’ve seen a lot of people do in the past. It’s a good escape hatch to use when necessary. The typical sophisticate has a strange tendency to want to be knowledgeable about everything. Or at least appear like they are, even if they’re not. It seems important to maintain one’s currency in certain matters (popular television programming, movies, music, politics, alcohol, current events, etc.); It keeps you in the conversation and demonstrates that your tastes mirror those of others— very important for maintaining social standing. However, sometimes the trump card is admitting ignorance.

Admitting ignorance basically does one of two things: either it suggests that the ignorant person is above the fray, or it suggests that they are an outsider who can be schooled. The first of these two leaves someone open for assault on their tastes since it implies that categorical dismissal of a topic (e.g. music) is the result of a selection of something else that’s superior (e.g. film). However, the second leaves one unassailable on grounds of taste. After all, how can you criticize someone’s consumption habits if they come clean upfront that they really don’t know what they’re talking about? Not even the most callous of record store employees would criticize on those grounds.

Playing ignorant is a great strategy to use if it’s true. But on the other hand, pleading ignorance can also be a dishonest way of preemptively truncating any line of questioning that might legitimately address issues of taste. That is, someone who actually knows something about music might, when questioned, demur on grounds that actually, er, they don’t know anything, huh huh. It’s almost a sort of nuclear war of cultural capital where you talk a good game until you see the stockpile of weapons the other guy has, and then you back down and pretend that you weren’t really planning to fight for real. It’s actually this strategy that I’ve seen a lot of. No matter how hollow it might ring to me, somehow I always find it kind of a charming tack.

One way that marketers have cracked the puzzle is not by defying the tenets of post-modernism through a refusal to play the game, but by actively embracing it. Take diversity to an extreme level. Jack radio has done pretty much this. Stations with this format don’t commit to a genre at all. They just play, in their words, “what we want,” which apparently means that they don’t pay particular attention to genre, they don’t pay attention to era. Everything is just thrown together into a blender and spat out over the radio. Jack radio has been gaining popularity since it started a few years back, and for good reason: kids of this generation are not as committed to genre as they once were. A couple decades ago, metal kids listened to metal, punk kids listened to punk, and rap kids listened to rap. I can remember a few years ago when the definitive “indie” music review site Pitchfork reviewed an Eminem album; it was the first non-indie album the site ever reviewed. The backlash was fierce. Its readers were incredibly upset that this site, which was ostensibly a champion of indie music was now reviewing a mainstream rap album. Accusations of selling-out were bandied around and emailed to the site with alarming frequency. It’s hard to imagine this happening now; indie rock kids now brag about listening to both indie music and top 40 radio. Many simply don’t make a hard distinction about the two. Music is music.

A Jack station might be a convenient ‘out’ for the situation I was describing. It both offloads the DJ’ing onto someone else (the station), and it’s hard to criticize on genre grounds. It would have been a good solution. But here’s the one I went with: I didn’t play music at all.

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Who Gets the Blame for the BP Disaster?

a look at consumption, tacit encouragement, and societal acceptance of systemic risk

Posted 2010-05-20 22:07 in business, culture, environment, ethics, human nature, sustainability


The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is set to be one of, if not the biggest, environmental disasters in history. There’s been a lot of talk about about BP’s negligence and how their abject greed and lack of concern for safety precautions led to this problem. While I agree that BP probably did neglect their duties in some ways (evidence does seem to suggest this), and in a lot of ways should be held responsible for their failures, I also think that blaming BP is a very myopic way of looking at the problem and in preventing future disasters.

It’s a longstanding theme— a trope, if you will— within the progressive cultural narrative to blame corporations for all our global and national problems, or at least to finger them as the root cause of all unwanted consumption-related externalities. This view also conveniently avoids having to take serious looks at our own behaviors as individuals and as a society, and how these continually place our country and our environment at risk. When I say this, my point is not to absolve companies of responsibility and to place blame elsewhere. I advocate a holistic view of the entire system— being contemplative about our own roles in the functioning of our society and our complicity in creating it.

Fact: there are serious risks endemic to our energy policy. An error can definitely be blamed on an oil company’s negligence, but simply blaming them does little to stem the damage the disaster creates. As a country, we seem unable or unwilling to face this. Stated another way: there are systemic risks that are inherent in the way our society has chosen to build its infrastructure, and the energy chain we now rely on to achieve the basic functionality of our society.

Blaming BP is a little like going skydiving and having your parachute fail to deploy. Yes, maybe you are right to curse, during your last 30 seconds of life, the skydiving company for their failure to properly prepare the parachute. But as you can quickly see with this example, when you’re falling 120mph towards the hard, cold earth, it’s a bit too late for finger pointing to be productive. What would have been useful to know beforehand was that there is serious risk involved in skydiving to begin with. There will eventually be an accident. No matter what. The statistics might change, but there will at some point be an accident that someone will pay dearly for. And you might be the one affected by that accident. Maybe you should think about that before you go skydiving.

Inadvertent environmental damage. Inadvertent pollution. Inadvertent destruction of natural habitats. Inadvertent damage to ecosystems. Inadvertent killing of important portions of the food chain. These are but a few of the risks we assume with our energy policy. And I would describe this as systemic risk because damage to any one of these spheres could have serious ripple effects in other spheres. A failure of one off-shore oil drilling platform could potentially kill off a vast amount of ocean life. We do not know what degree of damage this might end up being once the effects of this echo throughout the chain. The interplay of factors is complex enough that it’s difficult to predict what kind of collapse we might trigger through one disaster stemming from energy procurement. Realistically, we must come to grips with the idea that things will go wrong from time to time. But to only criticize the companies behind such environmental disasters is to look askance at our own roles in creating the conditions for things like this to happen.

Like it or not, these companies sustain us and our way of life, which is why they are drilling out there in the first place. Unless we are willing to make compromises or wholesale shifts in our consumption as a society, then we’ll continue to have periodic disasters from things like off-shore drilling because things inevitably go wrong every now and then. There is no avoiding this; it’s the nature of a complex system for periodic failures to occur. It’s naive to think that companies simply don’t care about disasters like this; for BP, it’s not only bad PR, but they’re losing billions in profit from all this spilled oil.

Yet, regardless of what happens to the companies, we all suffer for these errors, and maybe in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. One error can be devastating to the entire human race and all life on earth. Yet, we allow companies to engage in activities that expose us to these risks. Why? Because it enables our lifestyle. We could easily prevent them from doing it if we as a society (through our elected officials) agreed that this was not something that was worth risking. But we don’t. We have comfortable lives that we receive as a benefit of allowing the behavior to continue (at least until the inevitable disaster); politicians feel pressure to support risky activities because as a society, we don’t appreciate the level of risk we’re investing ourselves in until it’s too late. Yet, it’s clear that the fewer risky behaviors we encourage or allow as a society, the less number of disasters we’ll have as a whole.

Currently the cap for all damages is $75 million, to be paid by BP. This, as you might imagine, is far lower than either the estimated dollar value of the damages or the amount of money it will take to clean up the spill. Some outraged people think that we should raise that cap into the tens of billions. This sounds good, until you realize that some things are just unfixable. This oil spill (more like a geyser) is pretty much unfixable at any cost. It’s just too late.

It’s for that reason, I think we shouldn’t increase the cap. If anything, I think we should lower it. Why? Having a huge cap will offer us psychological relief that we can keep allowing industries to do things that impose great risks to our society and planet. The larger this cap is, the more we feel like we will have someone to blame and someone who is “responsible” for fixing the problem. But like I said earlier, some things simply are not fixable. A money-back guarantee from a skydiving company isn’t going to do you much good when when you’re falling out of an airplane without a functioning parachute.

If we believe this disaster to be an exemplar of the kind of risk we are not willing to accept as a byproduct of off-shore oil drilling, then we should never have allowed this kind of drilling to be authorized in the first place. If we have low caps on similarly risky pursuits in the future, we’ll probably think a lot harder about what we allow to go on. Getting someone to fork over money for cleanup is the easy part. Actually undoing damage that a disaster on this scale causes is another, largely intractable problem that we’ll suffer the consequences for for a good long time. Lowering the cap forces us, from the very beginning, to think about what we’re doing when we authorize something. That’s what having no insurance policy forces you to do; you have to evaluate things based on an uncolored view of the risks because you are the one who is going to suffer the consequences. This is a realistic proposition because in the case of environmental disaster, we are all affected; a closed system like planet Earth is at jeopardy in its entirety when just one of the checks in a network of environmental checks and balances is threatened. It’s just easy to forget it when you can bill someone else for the problems.

If we think from the beginning about the costs we all have to deal with instead of the costs “some company” has to deal with, we’ll be a lot more careful in the future. If there is a future.

Comment [6]




13 Unlucky Reasons Why Internet Conversations Go South

ever wonder why you can’t have a normal discussion online?

Posted 2010-03-04 13:34 in culture, experiences, human nature, improvements, social networking


Try having a serious dialogue online. No really, try it. Not the breezy kind of conversation with a lot of ‘lols’ embedded in it; the kind where you actually have to debate ideological, conceptual, or socio-cultural points. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

How’d that go? If it’s anything like any of the thousands of conversations I’ve seen take place or have been personally involved in, it not only goes nowhere, but it breaks down into the basest forms of pettiness, cattiness, and personal degradation pretty darn quick, and at a rate that few “real life” conversations do. I’ve long noticed this perplexing and frustrating tendency, and I’ve tried for a long time to grapple with why this is. It’s important to look at, because we look to the internet to serve as some sort of nexus of minds, where finally all the limitations of geography, language, prejudice, and diffuse, unwieldy information sets can be pushed aside for high causes. There are some places, like Wikipedia, where it somehow comes together in a meaningful way, but even there, there are bitter and fiery debates raging behind the scenes, the kind where people actually would do physical harm to each other if they could.

It’s easy to say that people online are just jerks, and have the license to be jerks via their anonymity, but I noticed that it’s not always just a lack of civility that creates these trainwrecks. After analyzing and carefully considering a sample of 150 conversational disasters, I have amassed the following list of 13 unlucky reasons why online discussions get messy. This list might help you think about the level of productivity that online discussion offers, and perhaps will force you to consider whether it’s worth your time engaging in dialogue online.

1) limited information signal

Consider how you make sense of the people around you. It’s not just their language per se that helps you understand them. It’s also a function of many other pieces of information, including gestures and tones. A simple sentence can have hundreds of meanings; it’s the form and context that help us whittle down the plethora of meanings to a smaller consideration set. Without these additional fragments of data, it’s harder to create meta-order from just words. Perhaps to draw an analogy: it’s one thing to see a photo of Niagara Falls. It’s another thing entirely to see it in person, hear the water crashing, and smell its gentle aroma. The online environment does not well convey the weight of a real-life interpersonal dialgoue.

2) translation from aural (ephemeral) experience to visual (permanent) experience

There is permanence in the written word that the spoken word simply does not have. We can revisit the written word again and again, repeatedly absorbing meaning within words. Another thing that seems to happen is that the more we read something, the most we read into it as well. That is, in conversation that is of a more serious or non-trivial nature, it is easier to build layers of unwanted meaning within our conversations. It is easier to find hints of hostility, to find subtle attacks, to find backhanded insults. Often these hidden messages aren’t even there, but are the result of our need for order and meaning. As humans, we often look for patterns, and ascribe meaning to them when we find them— even when they aren’t real. By contrast, a spoken conversation does not have a high level of latency in the dialogue; there is little time to build new meanings into anything that isn’t understood the first time around.

3) inability to complete and translate each others’ thoughts in a dialectical fashion

One of the biggest differences I see between written and spoken communication between people is the loss of the dialectical back-and-forth in the former. In a conversation, the direction of the dialogue moves in a manner that is easily controlled by either party on short notice. There is a mutual shaping of the conversation in a metered manner.

Imagine that two people are standing next to a large block of marble. I imagine a conversation to be the process of making that block of marble into a sculpture. In a spoken dialogue, both parties are chipping away at the marble at the same time. In a written dialogue, it’s more like one guy working at a time, while the other guy waits for his turn. This latter case gives each person more control at certain points, and makes it harder for the other person to respond accordingly because the first person’s chipping largely narrows what the second person can do, and increases the amount of effort it takes to do it because the direction was not created mutually. That is, each conversation partner’s actions are more reactive rather than cooperative. As such, this leads to conversations turning into “arguments” rather than a mutually developed stream of thought.

4) latency of responses in bi-directional conversation leads to very little dialogue over a longer period of time, which leads to increasing gravity of each post and loss of patience

Because email and message board dialogues aren’t happening in real time, there are often large gaps between posts. This gives conversation partners increased opportunity to view each email in the slow trickle of dialogue as having increased importance. Contrast this with a face-to-face discussion, where the continuous nature of the conversation doesn’t allow us the time to think too hard about any single part in the discussion. Further, the latency issue makes what would be a 5 minute conversation in real life into a clumsy, protracted discussion that could take weeks! And because the written word is set in stone once an email is sent, some people spend hours carefully crafting a message that would be stated without any preparation in a real-life conversation, adding gravity to both the writing and to the reading.

5) online answers preclude knowledge of how much time went into responses

One of the primary cues we use in dialogue to determine sincerity, glibness, shallowness, profundity— and indeed the idea that someone is actually listening to us— is the duration of time between the end of a comment or question and the beginning of a comment, question, or answer by the other party. In the context of a dialogue, it tells us a lot about the quality of the conversation we’re having. For example, we’ve all been at parties where we finish saying something, and the other individual chimes in with no pause to say something. It usually irritates us because we know the person hasn’t heard a word we said. On the other hand, a long pause could signal either a lack of interest or careful consideration of the comment. The silence can be as valuable as the words.

6) differing nature of expectations about conversation (academic vs. conversational)

When you’re not sure what kind of conversation is typical in a certain forum, or when you don’t know the people you are talking to, it’s much harder to know how one should speak. Can you have a “normal” conversation, or do you need to back up your assertions with facts, citations, and research? Can you state opinions without having backup? Are your comments viewed as being arguments, or are they just thoughts that are being expressed? These can change dramatically depending on who you are talking to. A lack of alignment or mutual understanding on the fundamental expectations of the conversation will lead to frustration and annoyance.

7) differing expectations about forum being used (appropriate use)

You wouldn’t walk into board room meeting and scream at the top of your lungs. Just by certain cues, you can intuitively arrive at how to behave. The formality of the clothes, the lighting, the furnishings, the noise level— these all tell you things about how you’re supposed to act in this environment. But it’s not as clear what the behavioral constraints are in an online forum because you have very few meaningful cues. If you look around at conversations on this forum, you might get a sense for what people talk about, but you may not as easily come to conclusions about etiquette, the parameters of acceptable behavior, or the level of seriousness with which people take themselves.

8) anonymity means people can say what they want and not worry about losing face or thinking of how they appear to others

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that anonymity gives people license to act in ways that they wouldn’t dream of if people knew who they were. Think about places like 4chan and Something Awful. These places simply wouldn’t exist in the way we know them if every user had to post under their real name and location. The level of incivility, cruelty, and hostility would be erased if people actually had to stand by their comments and have all their neighbors, friends, and family know what they were saying.

9) more time to think of responses means insults are more powerful and labored over than the impotent off-the-cuff comebacks in real life

A well-known episode of Seinfeld features George Costanza getting flamed by a co-worker, and finding himself unable to respond with a withering put-down in the few seconds he has to tear the guy a new one. He finally comes up with a retort— hours too late. Well, formulating the killer response or amassing ridiculous levels of ammunition is now easier than ever, thanks to the internet. People don’t expect that you’re reading their comments right after they commit them, and no one expects a response immediately. In fact, no one knows whether you’ll ever read their comments in the first place. That’s why you have so much time to nail the guy you’re arguing with. The desire to do this only increases with your perception that a lot of people are watching, and it’s going to be written in cement for the world to see.

10) moods of other individuals not detected by posters

You’ve probably had the experience of walking into a room when someone is in a bad mood. You can tell instantly, without a word even being spoken. There’s a vibe. In a medium bereft of signals, there are no vibes. You get vibes after you’ve been flamed. Until then, it can sometimes be hard to tell if someone’s just being good-naturedly argumentative or is seething in their seat. Sometimes the SUDDEN USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS CAN BE YOUR ONLY SIGN!!!!!

11) time it takes to type out responses can lead to truncated stream of thoughts

The fact that it will take much, much longer to convey a thought in writing than it does in speech means that often, writers will lose patience in writing, and write something that’s far shorter, less nuanced, and more direct than what they might say in person. In person, it is easier to follow up comments, expand upon them, and elaborate as necessary in a quick manner.

12) jocularity/sarcasm/irony sometimes not easily understood unless explicitly stated

Because tone and pitch variance is stripped from conversation online, it’s much more difficult to pick up on jocularity, ribbing, and sarcasm. How do you take this statement: “I bet the new Sylvester Stallone movie is going to be great.” Even contextually, it’s hard to get a grip on this because often there aren’t environmental or syntactical cues that preface sarcastic or jocular comments. In person, we learn to detect them by behavioral and tonal cues. Unfortunately, it’s these sort of statements that, when misunderstood, have an inordinate tendency to create ill feelings.

13) lack of need for alignment in space-time

There is no physical location on the internet, and individuals are not situated in space-time the same way they are in person. A real-life argument necessitates that both parties be in the same place at the same time. Online, conversation participants can keep returning to the scene over and over, and it doesn’t require the other person to be there at the same time. Exacerbating this is the fact that the internet has both prompted and enabled our short attention spans, keeping us constantly surfing for emotional arousal and, perversely enough, sources of tension.

Some thoughts
What’s the solution to all this? Personally, I think that people aren’t invested enough in the internet to worry about being constructive and productive with it. They’re more interested in the internet to serve as a complement— or perhaps a substitute— for TV or other forms of entertainment. The Straight Dope message board, which for a long time was the best place to go online for serious debates and interesting conversation, was regulated by a modest $15/year entry fee. As you may be aware, users of the internet are not typically used to paying for things. In fact, you might even say that they almost never pay for intangible or non-discrete products. But that’s what made the Straight Dope so good. No one went there just to troll or to create chaos. People who ended up there tended to be pretty self-aware, polite, and considerate; after all, they paid hard-earned money to be there. Of course, there were many times where it all turned into a mess of insults and personal attacks, but the financial filter seemed to do serve a beneficial function, even if it didn’t solve all the problems.

So what else is there? I’m not sure there is an easy answer, but for now, beyond training people to understand the pitfalls of online conversation, and to encourage them— perhaps through environmental cues and institutional constraints— to comport themselves in ways that make the internet something other than a glorified pro-wrestling tournament. Honestly though, short of revealing our identities for the world, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.

Comment [2]




Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?

according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution

Posted 2010-02-19 11:36 in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability


There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.

Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.

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Personal Control and the Existential Salve

an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase

Posted 2010-01-21 13:55 in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions


Our Endless Search
We have moved far from the sort of ‘subsistence’ mental existence that our prehistoric ancestors may have experienced. To make a simple example, as a society, we’re tending to spend less time and energy thinking about where our next meal is coming from and more time worrying about whether we’re ‘accomplishing’ things and whether we are ‘optimizing’ our life experiences. I realize that this may seem like an odd point on my part; wouldn’t anyone rather worry about something relatively frivolous like their status than the fear of starvation? After all, the benefits and penalties are at extreme odds with each other. If you’re worrying about your status and your goal is to make more money than the guy next door, the worst that will happen if you fail is that you feel bad about yourself. If you’re worrying about whether you’re going to be able to eat and you fail at your goal, the worst that could happen is that you actually die of starvation. In this context, most rationalists would probably say that if you had the choice, it’s clearly better to have your fundamentals neatly secured and spend your energy focused on the non-fundamentals— the stuff that’s higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.1

However, there may be other dimensions of this choice whose repercussions perhaps aren’t so obvious, and perhaps touch on the very central tenets of life fulfillment, happiness, and transcendence. If you spend all your daily energies and time on searching for food, water, and shelter, these tasks will form the basis for meaning and fulfillment in your life; for example, note that ancient mythologies revolve around things like weather and harvests, while modern mythologies revolve around things like entertainers and populist worlds attained through consumer goods (for example, the keys to the Wild West lay in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes). If your daily energies and time are spent on building your company’s profits so you can have a nicer car or go on vacation or enjoy recreational activities, then these external fruits will form the basis of your goals and your meanings in life. The question is, which of these will ultimately prove more psychologically rewarding and meaningful in the long run?

The Supply Chain of Uncertainty
It is interesting to note that if your life is defined by the search for food and your reward is the food you find in your search, there is a relatively small chain between your actions and the consequences of your actions. The act (i.e. the search) leads directly to the outcome variable (i.e. food). This inherently implies a simplicity and control in daily life activities, and a greater attachment of meaning to fewer things. As the chain between your acts and the outcome variables becomes more convoluted and unclear, there becomes increased complexity in daily existence, and a more uncertain relationship between effort and results. What does this mean? At the very least, it almost certainly introduces a longer lag time between action and outcome, which means you have to spend more time and effort thinking about and preparing for the future. It also means that you are more likely to be reliant on others (as producers and consumers) to relay desired outcomes to you, since your actions do not directly lead to the outcomes (working in an office for 40 hours a week does not magically produce money that appears on your desk; your work goes into some action that leads to some other action and another, which eventually leads to your company getting paid by someone, and then a portion of that money is given to you). The chain is much longer, more uncertain, there are more things that could go wrong, and less of a direct causal relationship between action and outcome.

This has a lot of implications. If you are searching for food, the amount of time you spend searching will most likely be directly proportional to the amount of food you find. If you are working in an office, the amount of work you do may or may not be directly proportional to your pay; some secretaries do as much or more work than the head executive, but get paid way less. You might work 100 hours weeks to find that you are going to be promoted to a higher paying job— or, as many people are currently finding out, you may do the same only to find that your company is doing very poorly and you’re going to get laid off. You have little direct control over how your actions will manifest in an outcome; the ultimate goals of modern work situations are not typically the direct result of actions, but rather the result of multiple concurrent and mutually dependent processes.

The nature of the uncertainty is different because of the different number of linkages in the chain. The search for food has one link: the search for food leads to food. A job, on the other hand, has many links, and each link has many horizontal and vertical links associated with it, which amounts to a mess of related events of varying causation (e.g. single causation, multiple causation, conjunctural causation, mediated causation, and probabilistic causation). In other words, the relationship between the input and the output is much more complex, and depends on a lot more factors (each of which depends on a lot of other factors). This chain of events is inherently less predictable, and the actions you take have little direct relation to the goals you reach towards.

You might counter at this point that surely there’s a generally positive correlation between how hard you work and how well you are rewarded. Maybe, but note that this is not an unmediated chain of events. There are many linkages that depend on the successful occurrence of other events for the desired outcome of wealth to come to you after a lifetime of hard work. Wealthy people have a habit of saying that their hard work got them where they are, and it is perhaps true that if you looked at data regarding this, you would find some correlation between levels of effort and wealth among an already selectively chosen group (an example of the problematic survivorship bias). But looking over the entire population, it would also not be hard to find people who worked hard their whole lives and got nowhere due to, for example, always working for horrible companies, personal problems, and just bad luck. How would this exact same situation differ amongst individuals searching for food? Logically, it would be very hard to argue that with individuals starting in similar circumstances, the guy who spent less time searching for food over a longer period would end up in better circumstances. I would suggest that this is because the greater the number of linkages in the chain between action and ultimate goal, the less predictable or certain the outcome of the action; therefore, in a situation in which the action leads directly to the goal, the individual who works harder at that action is in greater control of the outcome.

Another point to consider: there are a lot of people involved in these longer chains, which means you (as an actor within the chain) have to spend much more energy considering what others think about you, because you have to engender their trust and respect to enhance the probability of your goals being met; this means you have to be more cognizant of social and power structures for your survival. Such concerns create a fertile soil for existential angst borne from the constant need for validation from others. I would also argue that it creates a disincentive to focus on securing only your fundamentals in favor of procuring such things as status and comfort since there is a greater importance placed on your position in a social structure— in network theory terms, one’s centrality. The stronger and more connections one has, the more central an individual is. The more connections you have with others who are central, the more power you have over the whole network and people in it. Network centrality means that you control resources and people; people look to you for instruction and they listen to you if you are central. Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, for example, have high centrality. They can get things done because they know other powerful and central people in networks. They also have a lot of money, which also means power (money and centrality correlate heavily), even among people outside of their networks. I, on the other hand, have very low network centrality. I know no powerful people and have little control over important resources.

Reaching for Predictability
For better or for worse, people who are looking only for their next meal don’t have time (or need) to worry about such things as their network centrality. They just don’t want to die of starvation. And though they need to think about that, they don’t have an immediate need to think about how others in the network might think of them (though in the long run, they may want to consider that they may be able to leverage network connections for future security). Of course, people with near unlimited financial resources also don’t need to consider what others think of them either— unless a mass exodus of network connections could lead to that financial reservoir being unceremoniously drained. Then they do. But for the average person, we have to think about this a lot, because what others think about us dictates our network centrality. The more central we are, the easier it is for us to achieve the goals we seek, and the higher the likelihood that actions we take will actually achieve the goals we want them to— because, again, the long chain between action and outcome involves a lot of people, and if the people in this chain know that you’re trying to get something done and you’re a central figure, they’ll work harder to make it happen (because they themselves are trying to raise their network centrality, and repeatedly following the orders of someone who is more central than them is a good way of doing that). Therefore network centrality grants an individual control, because doing something and knowing it will have a certain effect is the very definition of control, and being able to command the obeisance of others is tantamount to being able to shorten the chain of events.

The entire world is built on our ability to get to this point of predictability and “no surprises” as often and as reliably as we possibly can. It is this foundation-level quality that we work constantly for and which we sell to others. Without this unyielding human desire to gain control, the world as we know it would cease turning. We earn money to gain control of our environment because we believe that having the money will buy us security. People hire us for jobs because they believe our skills can confer control onto their businesses. Pharmacies sell us medications to give us control over our health. Construction workers build roads to give us control over our transport. Television gives us control over our boredom. We pay deeply (at times in financial terms, at other times in other ways) to gain that control, and there is little that surrounds us, either physical, institutional, or conceptual, that did not arise in some way to present us in some way with the promise of control.

In my view, materialism is a by-product of the angst produced by a lack of control. Things can provide us a sense of stability. Things, we think, don’t go away or betray us. They ground us. When we feel insecure, we can cling to them and they will not abandon us. We feel secure in our homes, with our things. When we have jobs, we aren’t filled with fear about losing things we’re accustomed to, like our lifestyles. But it is not just this “negative” quality of materialism that is fueled by this apparent dark side of humanity. Altruism, too, is a response to the lack of control in the world, and an effort to counter it (see related: Just-world hypothesis).

The Marketing of Predictabilty
Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties; but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well (they have their own existential anxieties to quell). They know intuitively that the search for meaning, purpose, and belonging is a universal human experience. And they know well, implicitly, that our society is on a search for transcendence— not through inward searching or contemplation as perhaps the people of the distant past have (and by virtue of the non-industrial nature of their societies, were forced to), but through material goods.

Without putting a judgment on it, it is hard to deny that our world increasingly looks to consumables to act as existential salves, if not vehicles to transcendence and meaning. It is a matter of conditioning; our economic and cultural systems increasingly push us in this direction (for example, the common definition of success has little to do with personal fulfillment and everything to do with financial and/or social capital, a definition that nearly everyone has blindly embossed on their roadmap to personal success). Our cultural values tell us that the houses we buy give us our sense of security and well-being. Our cars and vacations transport us to places we think will offer us moments of joy and escape. Our televisions and media will confer us with the sorts of meaning and realities that we cannot find alone. For better or for worse, our modern search for transcendence is one littered with consumer purchase and consumer desire; part of this is because of the increased availability of consumer goods. The other side of it is that there has been a mainstream psychological shift towards it as a by-product of industrialization and economic growth. More than being a deliberate shift of societal priorities, it is the result of a rapid change in technology, expansion in marketing communications, and an across-the-board raising of the bar of what constitutes the bare necessities of existence in the modern world.

I think most people walk towards this consumer salvation without the slightest conscious awareness of their fundamental underlying purposes; for many, this constant search for new things is simply a lifestyle that they were born into and have integrated into their psyches as the result of a process of reproduction of societal values— a concept referred to by Bourdieu as habitus. For these people, the search for the latest-and-the-greatest and for personal comfort is all there is, because in a climate where this ideology is the norm, they have never been challenged to think otherwise.

As with anything, there are good aspects and bad aspects of this. On the plus side, this mentality opens us to a breadth of experiences, and a wider mindset that can facilitate a deeper array of thoughts and understandings about our world. Because of the advent of advanced economic systems, complex experiences can be bought and sold, and there’s a wide range of experiences available to modern societies that we might not otherwise have been privy to. You wouldn’t expect, for example, tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea to pack their bags, board a plane, and vacation in the Virgin Islands, nor would you expect Australian Aborigines to go out on a Sunday evening to sip on a Tom Yum Gai soup at a Thai restaurant.

The Larger Perspective of Consumer Society and Meaning
Certainly such experiences as the ones mentioned above can be and often are valuable both in the developmental sense and in the sense that it opens our eyes to new opportunities and ways of thinking. As members of advanced societies, we are privy to such benefits, and we tend to think of them as normal experiences that are not all that remarkable or out-of-reach. In fact, we expect, within reason, to be able to purchase pretty much any experience we want provided we have the money for it, and usually there’s someone willing to make the exchange with us to make it happen. Knowing this, our brains develop the not unrealistic notion that we can externally procure any experience we may want to have; thus, we may be simultaneously, and unwittingly, developing an increasing reliance on salable external phenomena to confer meaning and substance onto our lives.

The question remains, however: can there be fulfillment in this? Is fulfillment in purchase any different than fulfillment in being a hunter-gatherer? This is a question that deserves serious inquiry.


1 A model that I find flawed in certain respects, but one that is instructive for the purposes of this discussion

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On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty

the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it

Posted 2009-11-10 14:35 in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions


In a world of soundbites, it’s hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.

Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards certain culturally-driven assertions. I realize that doing this can make someone appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where they don’t know the people they’re talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unquestioned, points of view.

Unfortunately, pushing nuance means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.

But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.

Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:

So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.

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