Wasn’t that Who performance at the Super Bowl yesterday awesome? Who would have thought they would open with “Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hands” and then slam into “Glow Girl” before closing it out with “A Quick One”—it was like the Rock and Roll Circus set, only on a bigger stage, with higher stakes…. No it wasn’t. It was a total travesty: bad singing, bad harmonies, shockingly bad guitar playing, all done with an utter lack of imagination. Shame on you, Who. A medley of tunes from Face Dances and It’s Hard would have been better. Please watch Prince’s performance from a few years ago to see how it is supposed to be done. And could we please have some non-jurassic performers next year? Can’t they book Jay-Z?

I suppose we should all be glad the Who did not play “Squeeze Box,” in keeping with the ultra-misogynist theme of the commercials—or perhaps more appropriate to say antihuman. As a Woman of a Certain Age points out, “When Charles Barkley offers the evening’s best non-football performance, something is amiss. At least he was just lovin’ on tacos, not hating on women. Or himself.”

—Rob Horning

Social-network researcher Danah Boyd responds to Mark Zuckerburg’s declaration that “age of privacy is over” and makes a good point about the relative value of privacy (link from P2P Foundation).

Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

It may be too late to worry about “public” becoming the default; the soft-surveillance society may already have become a fait accompli. As Boyd points out, “It’s in Facebook’s economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process.” But because “public-ness has always been a privilege” many don’t experience this as coercive and volunteer to participate, and continue to participate even after they discover they might be more expose than they thought because of confusing privacy settings and terms of service agreements. Also, once a person’s network is built within a particular site’s architecture, it becomes very hard to check out, when the reciprocal expectation is that you’ll be there, ready to respond and to update in order to maintain the (now mediated) friendship with others.

Boyd writes that “The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.” This is something that has always escaped me about the use of status updates and the like. If you add enough of them, what you don’t share gets more protected, more private, hidden behind the smokescreen of the ephemera we do share. The problem is that the shared self we create online then becomes something trivial itself. We find ourselves forced into a position of inventing a shallow, superficial self to guarantee the intimate self can escape exposure.

—Rob Horning

This Fast Company story about prosthesis envy is possibly even more creepy than the classic of the genre, the Atlantic‘s “A New Way to Be Mad,” about voluntary amputees. It begins as though it will be a story about reducing the stigma attached to artificial limbs and then takes off into voluntary body modification and the fantasy of transcending human limitations by becoming bionic, like the Six Million Dollar Man. I have nothing against amputees doing whatever they want to improve their lives, but I admit, and this may be wrong of me, that I find the idea of amputating additional parts of one’s body for aesthetic reasons disturbing.

Amputees are now regularly removing healthy tissue to make room for more powerful technology. “I see it every day,” he says. “People will get a second amputation—move their amputation up their leg—to get the prosthetic equivalent of a hotter car.”
Orthopedic surgeons often consider amputation the equivalent of failure, Young says, and reflexively save as much of a damaged, injured, or diseased limb as possible. But in leaving lots of human being, they create a bigger problem: There is little room left for high-performance machinery. Now, the allure of that machinery has become so powerful that amputees are routinely taking the extreme step of paying out-of-pocket for what the industry calls “revisions.”.... Herr’s suggestion, of course, is that the better prostheses make us perform, and the more glamorous they look, the more beautiful they will make amputees seem, too, even though their sheen, contour, texture, and color have ceased to look human.
“What is the obsession with looking human?” he says. “You think the only beauty is human? Bridges can be beautiful. Cars can be beautiful. Cell phones can be beautiful. They don’t look biological. So why do you anticipate 30 years from now that amputees will give a shit about human beauty? They won’t. Their limbs will be sculptures.”

Herr—an prosthetics engineer—is right. I wish Apple would stop designing gadgets and start designing elegant human-body-replacement canisters so I could do away with this hideous flesh husk. I have always aspired to be as beautiful as a phone.

—Rob Horning

I have a post up at Generation Bubble about “reflexively defiant consumerism”—a concept coined by two marketing professors that they saw as a fusion of postmodern critical theory and consumer protection initiatives. It’s basically the “prosumer” idea of subverting the marketers who want to tell you what to do. It’s obviously an outdated notion; few would argue today that marketers are forcing specific identities on us anymore. Advertisers are probably content to know that we are playing on the consumerist field, and just hope will play with their ball. (Who can resist an unnecessary football metaphor as the Super Bowl approaches?)

My hunch in general is that self-consciousness about how we consume means they have us right where they want us, thinking about how to articulate our identity through consumerism and not through other modes. Douglas Holt’s excellent 2002 paper “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble” (wish I could link it, but my searches haven’t turned up an ungated one) bears that out. He posits a dialectical model of identity and oppositional consumerism that seems to suggest resistance to certain brands tends to produce more credibility for other ones, and that production is now built into the consumerist system of “post-postmodernism.” Reflexively defiant consumers are just the avant-garde producers of new consumerist meanings within the code. The sovereignty they convince themselves that they have earned by pseudoresistance is actually more bound up than ever with consumerism. “Authenticity” becomes nothing but a marketing concept; it can no longer serve an an orienting ideal. It is, as Holt argues, “becoming extinct.”

Worse, we confront sovereignty inflation:

To feel sovereign, postmodern consumers must adopt a never-ending project to create an individuated identity through consumption. This project requires absorbing an ever-expanding supply of fashions, cultural texts, tourist experiences, cuisines, mass cultural icons, and the like. As a result, we are in the midst of a widespread inflation in the symbolic work required to achieve what is perceived as real sovereignty.

In other words, as a character in the 1968 film Psych-Out declares, “It’s all one big plastic hassle.”

—Rob Horning

Suburbia (not this one, alas) seems to be in the news, prompted by Joel “New Geography” Kotkin’s essay claiming that the Obama administration (aka “the president’s cadres”) is inveighing a “war against suburbia.” This is so ridiculous it almost needs no comment. Atrios sums it up well: “This is completely idiotic for mostly obvious reasons, including the hundreds of billions devoted to propping up single family home prices.” (I think Kotkin needs to watch Over the Edge is he wants to see what a war on suburbia really looks like.)

Mike Konczal puts some specific numbers behind some of the other obviousness, the idea that money for Obama’s high-speed-rail initiatives threatens pro-suburban transportation policy.

From the ProPublica Stimulus Spending List:
  Highway infrastructure investment $26,725,000,000
  Highway infrastructure funds distributed by states $60,000,000
  Highway infrastructure funds for the Indian Reservation Roads program $550,000,000
  Highway infrastructure funds for surface transportation technology training $20,000,000
  Highway infrastructure to fund oversight and management of projects $40,000,000
  Additional capital investments in surface transportation including highways, bridges, and road repairs $1,298,500,000
  Administrative costs for additional capital investments in surface transportation $200,000,000

  High speed rail capital assistance $8,000,000,000
Check that out: Over $28 billion dollars allocated to highway spending, with over $26 billion allocated to “Highway infrastructure investment.” That’s over three times the amount spent on the $8 billion for “high speed rail capital assistance.”

—Rob Horning

Maybe this is a silly question, but what constructive purpose did allowing banks to take on more risk ever serve? It seems to accomplish nothing other than inflating bubbles and bonuses. Presumably, banks taking on more risk means more enterprises and newbie homeowners are given a chance, but recent history suggests that they are only given a chance to fail, while banks collect fees and bailout cash. Mark Thoma asks a similar question: “If there’s little or no social benefit from allowing banks to grow beyond a certain size, and it’s not clear that there is, and if there is a potential cost, why take a chance?”

The necessary reforms seem obvious. Economist Simon Johnson argues that

The consensus technocratic assessment is simple: We are smack in the middle of a doomsday cycle of repeated boom-bust-bailout (our version; the Bank of England’s take).  The core issue – banks considered “too big to fail” – was not resolved in or after the crisis of 2008-09; if anything, as these banks have increased in size, the problem is now worse.  We are therefore doomed to run headlong into another crisis.

—Rob Horning