Personal Control and the Existential Salve

an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase

Posted Jan 21, 01:55 pm in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions


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?

Further, 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 any resources.

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).

Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties. And yes, they do wish very much to exploit this of you, but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well. They know that the search for transcendence 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).

Certainly such experiences 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 Nov 10, 02:35 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions


It’s so 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 unquestioned, ideologically driven assertions. I realize that doing this often makes me appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where I don’t know the people I’m talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unsupported, points of view.

Being nuanced 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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The Mystery of Coffee Refills

barriers to behavioral change are not always obvious

Posted Apr 21, 12:30 am in business, economics, environment, human nature, marketing, sustainability, unanswered questions


There is a Peet’s Coffee stand in the cafeteria of the building where I spend my days. They have a deal where you can bring in any size container and get a refill for $1.50. The cheapest size of coffee you can buy without getting a refill is $1.65, for a small size. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but as the semester rolls to a close, I find myself going there somewhat frequently. I always bring my old cup so I can get the refill. It saves me a few cents, and besides, I don’t like throwing away coffee cups. It’s not just the cup that bothers me, it’s the heat-insulating jacket and the plastic lid as well. It seems like a lot of stuff to be throwing out, especially if you buy coffee every day, or multiple times a day.

What I find very strange is that I’m surrounded by people who drink a lot of coffee— like 3-4 cups a day— and yet I feel like I’m the lone soul who brings in his used cup to refill. This seems particularly odd because a lot of the people around me are other students who, like me, are living their lives dangerously close to the poverty line and could probably use every cent that they might save.

Unsure about this incongruity, I asked the cashier one day if many people refill their cups. “Hardly anyone,” she replied, “but there are some people who refill huge containers.” She motioned with her hands to show how big the containers were. They were rather large.

Peet’s is apparently okay with this abuse of their refill policy, but the cashier seemed to think it was crazy. The reason Peet’s is okay with it probably has something to do with the facts that 1) they want to promote some kind of environmentalism, 2) refills save money on cups, lids, and insulators which are somewhat expensive, 3) it serves to reduce their waste disposal costs, and 4) hardly anyone gets refills.

But I find the fact that few people get refills curious. Of the people who frequent this coffee shop, many of them are graduate students, staff, and professors, who have offices within the building. Many of the undergraduates have storage lockers in the building as well. Yet the incentive structure is apparently not appealing enough for many of these people to get refills.

For a number of reasons, it is very interesting to observe the lack of consumer response to this initiative. First, it’s not very difficult for anyone to take advantage of it; that is, it doesn’t really create much inconvenience (especially for the customers who have offices or lockers within the building). Second, it demands very little change to habitualized behavior to get the refill (people just have to remember to take the cup with them to the coffee shop). Third, people— particularly those who drink a lot of coffee and multiple coffees per day— stand to save a good amount of money (if you buy a large coffee, you can save some 60 cents per drink, which can add up very quickly). Fourth, it demonstrates how inured we are to our disposable culture; the thought of refilling probably doesn’t occur to most people because they’ve simply never lived their lives in this manner.

As a person interested in understanding how to make behavioral change more appealing in social marketing contexts (this being of environmental concern to me), I note this: despite the bevy of benefits (reduced costs to the consumer, access to virtually infinite quantities of coffee, significant reduction of environmental waste) and the relatively minor drawbacks (you have to keep the cup and remember to bring it when you visit the store), this effort to promote refilling has generally failed. So I ask: what kinds of changes need to happen to make the reuse of coffee cups appealing for the customers of this particular store?

Post your thoughts or comments below, particularly if you are a regular customer of this or any coffee shop!


[Note: I realize that if you read the previous entry on this blog, it may seem to conflict with my attitude here. I should explain: this entry is about encouraging behavioral change that promotes certain ideals; the previous entry was expressing frustration with the repeated insinuations from industry that behavioral change is unnecessary if you just buy the right products. That said, I do not mean to discount the importance of careful and well-considered consumption, and its role in making social impacts; I simply reject it as a singular strategy.]

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Social Networking and Self-Regulation

the potentially crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit

Posted Sep 28, 07:15 am in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions


Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.

Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.

Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.

In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.

For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.

Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.

Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.

To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.

So much for that.

It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.

Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.

To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.

At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.

Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.

Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.

Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?

An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.

Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.

Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.

Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.

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The Ultimate Gen-Y Cultural Touchstone Contest

“What binds us is what we stand witness to” (reprise)

Posted Jul 23, 04:27 am in branding, experiences, marketing, unanswered questions


Let’s try something different for a minute. You are among 10 contestants competing against each other in a game for a prize of $1,000,000. The object of the game is for each of you to choose a single cultural touchstone— a book, movie, song, event, etc. (like for example: Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, or Woodstock) to be revealed to a group of 100 Gen-Y’ers (born 1976-1990), who are then asked to provide more details about your choice (explain the plot, hum the tune, describe it, etc.). The contestant with the most recognized touchstone wins.

What do you choose? Post your choice in the comments section (but don’t look at mine first!).

My choice (highlight the black spoiler box to see):
the theme song from Super Mario Brothers (Level 1-1)

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Lost Weekend: A Cautionary Tale about Missing the Point

Don’t overlook practical details in search of big things

Posted Jul 8, 10:00 am in business, business models, economics, experiences, marketing, unanswered questions


A few days ago, I was attending my cousin’s wedding in Toledo, Ohio. While I was there, I was put up in a 4-star, $250-a-night hotel. Words like “4-star” are supposed indicators of quality and detail-oriented service. The funny thing is, I’ve stayed at many such hotels on business in the past, and I almost never find them living up to their supposed standards of quality. For $250-$400 a night, all the loose ends should be tied up; instead, what I almost uniformly find are a flashy exterior, a so-so in-house gym, and rooms with really nice furniture— and not much more. Those things are fine, but it’s the oversights that perplex me.

This hotel, for example— which was clearly the type of hotel that high-end business travelers were supposed to be staying at— had a sub-dialup wireless internet connection that literally required minutes for you to load simple pages like Google.com. It’s great that they had a beautiful hardwood desk that I could put my laptop on, but if I’m doing work, the desk just needs to be functional; it would be so much better if I could check my email without going into a coma. And this is not a flaw that I only noticed that this hotel; I’ve seen it in countless upper-crust hotels. How expensive could it be to fix this problem? If I’m paying $250 a night, at least give me more than a 1 bar signal. If annoyed business patrons can’t do their work, you’d better believe that eventually, they’re going to try staying somewhere else.

Other such bizarre oversights abounded at this hotel. The elevator wouldn’t allow you to push buttons to go to any floor unless you inserted your room keycard every time you used it. And the slot to put the card in was in the elevator, located in a place where you’d have to reach over strangers to put it in, and then elbow people in the face to get the card out again. The slot could have easily been placed on the outside of the elevator if this type of security was really necessary. Five-hundred wedding guests were annoyed all weekend by this ridiculous system that likely damaged their opinion of the hotel more than what was made up by the apparent offer of security.

Moreover, when I made it up to the 13th floor (I thought they stopped going to that floor!), the Executive Suite, the floors were rather unsightly and the wallpaper was straight-up peeling off the walls. I have no idea how much those high-powered, presidential rooms cost, but from the looks of their furniture and size, I’d have to say a pretty penny. And yet, the management has ensured that the first thing a patron would notice was that their $800 a night (or however much it cost) wasn’t going towards making the premises look and feel clean. The furniture was really nice, but there was too much conflicting visual stimuli. If you have oak-lined walls and crystal chandeliers, at least make sure there aren’t holes in the carpet and black stains everywhere. These have a way of eradicating the positive impression you get from the antique furniture.

Another strange recurring theme is that many of these expensive hotels don’t give you a complementary continental breakfast (AKA free donut). Yeah, perhaps this isn’t worth much, but it has a way of making people who sometimes stay at cheaper places like Red Roof Inn wonder what the heck they’re getting for their $300 a night. At least when I’m at Red Roof Inn, I can have a cup of orange juice and a cheese danish before I’m out the door, without having to endure a long sit-down meal that costs an arm-and-a-leg.

With the exception of having rooms that open into a hallway instead of opening to the parking lot, there’s little value that I can see in these expensive hotels, aside from the obligatory ego-stroking for your insecure corporate executives (though perhaps this is valuable?). The cheap hotels seem to be better at delivering real value for their $40-$75 a night. You get a comparably clean room, internet connections that almost always work better than those in expensive places, and well, a free donut.

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Some Random Questions about Self-Awareness

If you have the answers, or come up with them while drinking, let me know

Posted Jul 2, 12:29 pm in human nature, postmodernism, unanswered questions


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