The narratives of subjectivity are supplied by the institutions that one encounters in society; these take the inchoate and infinitely generative biological, neurological, genetic stuff that is the raw material of identity and bound the set, permit it to take coherent, knowable shape. The institutional framework provides means to think identity out of the raw material. It reduces the infinite possibilities to a select finite set that suits the existing social order. It supplies a grammar, a syntax to the genetic stuff that makes it speak something comprehensible to the individual and his society. (Lacan’s and Althusser’s version of subjectivity—we route the inchoate stuff of self through social institutions so that they mirror/speak it back to us, and we obtain self-knowledge, the selfhood that society makes out of us.) This self then reproduces the institutions that made it, doing the work that sustains their power to shape subsequent generations. That is, until technological disruptions change the reproductive circuit.

In consumer society, marketing is the main discourse for impoverishing the narratives of self. It provides idealized prefabricated social imagos around which any given individual’s self can crystallize. But Web 2.0 platforms are taking over for marketing, or at least marketing is evolving through these platforms into something more integrated with the discourse of friendship. Marketing and friendship have become inextricably intertwined, so that having a friend is an inherently commercial operation. Worse, the same came be said of having a self—it will need to be grounded in commercialized, corporatized discourse before we apprehend it—our self-knowledge comes to us preloaded with the prerogatives of corporate consumerism, which has at that point transcended the need for overt marketing, as the marketing is interwoven with the ways, the language, the terms, the categories in which we know ourselves.

Social networks externalize those ways, integrate them as a seamless, coherent platform. The narratives of subjectivity are even more impoverished by the restricted classifications of digital data possible within these platforms, though it remains generative to the subject himself—it seems to solve the (false) mystery of self more completely than any technology heretofore offered—but the sad irony is that the technologies produce the mystery and the ersatz solution. The self we are compelled to produce online is winnowed, smaller, with less potential for growth and less curiosity, the more we produce it and add to the archive that will dictate our future choices.

Its permanently insecure subject and its economy of identity are geared toward reproducing not the capitalist system necessarily but its own peculiar consumerist modalities. The hyperpersonalization that emerged from capitalist individuation combined with a return of communal needs in the new form of the digital network. If you go to the most recent issue of Fibreculture, you can read all about that.

—Rob Horning

A useful myth took definitive hold in the Reagan years about taxes: the government steals our income through taxes and helps the lazy poor with massive transfer payments. Liberals have never managed to effectively counter this nonsense, perhaps in part because they are bought off by actual massive subsidies of their own, which arguably come at the expense of the poor. (Dean Baker and James Galbraith each have good books on how this works.)

Home-owning subsidies are maybe the worst of these. Justin Fox linked to this Congressional Budget Office report about the government subsidies in housing, which estimates that (as Fox notes in his post’s headline) that only 20 percent of the federal housing aid goes to renters. The remaining 80 percent goes to homeowners, mostly in the form of mortgage-interest tax deductions. Another way of putting this is that America uses policy to create a rentier society, subsidizing landlords and creating property bubbles for their short-term benefit. And meanwhile, the report tell us, “The burden of housing’s costs is more pronounced among renters than among owners: In 2007, 45 percent of renters (compared with 30 percent of owners) paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing.”

The alibi for these subsidies to those who are already relatively privileged is that homeownership is an inherent good in its own right, a widely disputed claim. It is neither economically efficient, environmentally sustainable, nor the facilitator of more livable communities. (America’s fixation on single-family homes gives us anomie and exurbs.)

I wonder what renters like me can do about this. I have no interest in home owning, but feel like a chump for missing out on the gravy train. I’m like a middle-class person who insists on riding the bus instead of buying a car like society seems to be insisting I must. It grows tiresome to go against the grain of what society tells you someone in your class should do; to persist in it we probably need to link isolated individual behavior to an organized movement. Otherwise it seems like pyrrhic self-importance.

—Rob Horning

Lane Kenworthy linked to this NYT article by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (pioneer of the concept of “emotion work”—the often uncompensated labor of managing emotions to allow for social relations and market exchanges to transpire). The article offers an explanation of why Americans rank marriage’s importance so highly yet divorce more frequently than citizens of other nations.

Why are Americans on this marriage-go-round? Is it the “restless temper” Alexis de Tocqueville observed 175 years ago? It is true, Cherlin observes, that more than people elsewhere, we move from job to job, city to city, and even church to church. Could this be linked to a missing government safety net and ­family-protective policies? Cherlin gives little credence to this idea, but he leaves us with another useful notion — that more than we realize, we’ve become accustomed to a move-along life-go-round world.

That is of a piece with the theory that technology has made possible the marketing-driven acceleration of the pace of consumption at all levels of social life. Hochschild cites Juliet Schor who “shows in her research on ‘fast fashion’ that we consume and discard dresses, shoes, toys, furniture and cellphones at a quicker pace than we did in the past.“Spouses are just another product we are encourage to consume quickly and move on from—after all, think of all the associated consumption that is driven by courtship and wedding rituals. Why not cycle people through those as often as possible? It’s a win-win, right? Everyone enjoys the whirlwind of romance, being the center of their own drama that climaxes with a big party.

Hochschild supplies some context for that idea:

Could this “fast-fashion” culture be filtering into our ideas about human connection? On Internet sites and television shows, we watch potential partners searching “through the rack” of dozens of beauties or possible beaus. Some go on “speed dates”; others go to “eye-gazing parties” — two minutes per gaze, 15 gazes — to find that special someone. If advertisers first exploited the “restless spirit” by guiding consumers’ attention to the next new thing, a market spirit now guides our search for the next new love. The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture.

It does seem that this is so, though the key idea here is that market turnover has become identity turnover, and that identity turnover proceeds whether or not it remains a market imperative. As I’ve been arguing in the past few posts, impersonal cash markets have given way to embedded markets in which subjects try to maximize their selfhood in a public forum, commanding resources to serve that end and turning attention, status, etc, into more explicit forms of currency.

The problem is that we have shifted retail consumption into the public sphere, when markets once were making it private. The cash economy democratized consumption, but social networking,etc. is resocializing it within a commercial matrix. Our self-publicized consumption is more susceptible to fast-fashion acceleration, as the signifying power of consumption gestures is relative to who else has made similar gestures and so on. The meaning in the gestures therefore have only brief shelf life. Identity needs more and different things to consume and display more rapidly—it needs more things to share. Yet the alibi of sharing hides how voracious the appetite for novelty has become.

—Rob Horning

I have a post up about the end of anonymity over at Generation Bubble. As I was writing it, half of it got deleted in a Word Press malfunction, so I’m afraid it became a little disjointed as I struggled to reconstruct what I had had before. My overarching point is that Web 2.0 innovations encourage us to eschew online anonymity and stay logged on as our actual selves—fusing more completely our online and offline social lives. More important, when we conduct various transactions online, whether they are purchases or pleas for attention, they are associated permanently with that integrated identity, enriching the data that can be mined from it. Consequently, we begin to believe that we deepen our identity by contributing more data to the online archive, despite the fact that it is being exploited by the corporate interests who control the archives. We become more of person, with a more compelling identity, the more through our online presence mirrors our offline existence.

I argue that this is the completion of a trend away from the impersonal markets that once signaled freedom from sumptuary laws and class-based discrimination in the world of consumption, and toward the idea that what we consume should be precisely associated with who we are. An anonymous purchase is a pointless purchase.This begins as a nostalgic movement to restore communal meaning to a world made atomistic and alienating, to make social relations more relevant in a world that has been structured to isolate us (a complaint I’ve made a lot over the years here). But what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. (What economists Wolfers and Stevenson call hedonic marriage: “what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.”) The more transactions we make in the markets in which we can’t hide our identity, can’t pay cash, the more articulated our identities become. We “share” more and more in order to be.

—Rob Horning

I love manfestos with theses: Here is one from FibreCulture about Web 2.0 (via Metafilter), written by European academics. They contend that internet culture has now fully integrated itself with everyday life (it is not a simulation or virtual anymore, but the genuine substance of our lives), which has ramifications for how social networks and the like might facilitate social change. One of their theses (it’s more like an amalgam of about a dozen theses):

Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ‘social’ qualities: the network is the message. What’s created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

Social networks don’t function as a new public sphere but as an entertainment technology. They prompt us to replace the tussle of genuine connectedness with further self-display. Instead of arguing with one another, we preen. And this preening becomes a kind of exploitable labor, thanks to the way social networks facilitate data-mining. This is how social networks empty friendship of its significance as a haven of honesty and noneconomic reciprocity. It also neuters the online space, heading off any of its potential as a site of radicalization. Because the online space is devoid of conflict—everyone is “friends”—it is anodyne; “the Tyranny of Positive Energy” assures that politics is screened out of online social behavior. (Back when I used Facebook, I remember deleting several “friends” who made pro-McCain statements in their updates. I decided I didn’t need to engage with that sort of thing when I was consuming friendship.)

The authors make the key point that the way we conceive of our activities in online space is dictated by the tech firms and their software and gadgetry:

What, then, are the collective concepts of the social networked masses? For now, they are engineered from the top-down by the corporate programmers, or they are outsourced to the world of widgets. Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence.

What we do online is engineered by these concepts, possibly at the level of the proprietary, branded language itself—and words that once had utopian zest to them have become assimilated into the cynical Web 2.0 jargon: “sharing”, “friending” and so on. We are losing words to describe what it means to join others in solidarity. (Maybe I should start a social-networking company called Solidarity—target green, progressive types.) I wouldn’t argue that we can therefore fight the battle against the technological commercialization of private life on the semantic level. But the progress of the resistance can perhaps be charted in changes in the language usage that gains common acceptance—that crops up in consumer magazines and in the mouths of sitcom characters.

This advice is offered in the last thesis: “If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.” I’m not sure that this is worth the effort; though I already do this in the way I multiply email addresses to suit various online purposes. Having multiple crypto-identities may muck up data-harvesting and stand as a sign of resistance to the main allure of social networking right now, which is to archive our personal identity project and dignify it with all the preserved affirmations provided by others. I have a Facebook page, but it’s there the way I would have a listing in the White Pages in the telephone era.

—Rob Horning

Kerry Howley argues in Reason that libertarianism should concern itself with social coercion (the tyranny of traditions and conventions) as well as government interference.

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

Later Howley adds, “A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is not living a free life, even if no one has bothered to codify the rules in an Important Book and call them ‘laws.’ ”

It seems strange (at least to me, a refugee from the academic left) that one would even need to make an argument like this. The state is not automatically the explanation for every curtailment of personal liberty—often the state must arbitrate between individuals when their pursuits conflict, serving as preferable (to non-crazy people) to the exercise of brute personal force in the war of all against all. The state can also override those conventions which serve to restrict the individual’s opportunities when necessary. In fact, as Howley argues, the state is itself a quasi-cultural institution; it must win consent to protect property as most libertarians (as opposed to anarchists) concede it must.

Property rights are more than the conclusion of an academic argument; they are themselves a matter of culture. If they are useful to us it is because they govern our conduct and lend structure to everyday life. I may not help myself to the contents of just any wallet, take off in just any car, walk into just any house. A drop-dead argument for the authority of these constraints may exist in pure reason, but they are meaningless without a broadly shared sense of their legitimacy. Absent friendly social forces, property rights are an impotent abstraction. Rights come alive through convention. Culture makes them breathe. Strip away the context in which property rights are respected, and nothing much remains. Yet cultural context, in all its messy inexactitude, is exactly what propertarians wish to resist.

Howley’s essay amounts to a noble effort to detach libertarianism from that intolerant branch of adherents who are basically concerned mainly with stopping the government from interfering with their racism, religious bigotry, gun-toting, and patriarchal prerogatives (think the fundamentalist Mormon sects in Utah, backwoods survivalist compounds, rabid John Birch types, that sort of thing) and make it a respectable political creed that is pro-individual liberty rather than merely anti-state. The crux of her argument to old-line libertarians is this: “it is the role of someone who professes to believe in the virtues of individualism—and emphatically the role of someone who believes that social persuasion is preferable to legal coercion—to foster a culture that is tolerant of nonconformity.”

In order to foster tolerance one must have recourse to a state that can credibly restrain tribalism in its extra-legal guises once they are documented. Libertarians will need to trust government at least that far, that its investment in its own power might preclude its playing petty favorites among small-time groups. (Not that this is actually so, but that it might be forced democratically to approach such a balance. Perhaps there is hope for institutional thinking.)

And Mike Konczal argues that libertarians might have to cut ties with certain hard-line economistic types to take on a culture agenda. He points out how state-hating libertarians have found common cause in the past with regulation-hating free marketeers:

Did you know that women specialize in household work, and men in wage-paying work, because there are increasing returns to household work? Here’s some math from Becker to prove it. Did you know that discrimination can’t exist, because it would imply that markets are imperfect, leaving human capital $20 bills all over the sidewalk? So if minorities are discriminated against, it must mean that they have low human capital (and you can tell that they have low human capital, because they are discriminated against!).

So cultural libertarianism ultimately must move beyond not only blaming the state for everything but also trusting the market to fix everything: “It’s one thing to say that we need to acknowledge a diversity of cultures, and let them play out in a market…. It’s another thing to say that the discrimination and culture oppression currently faced is a market outcome, pareto-efficient in its effects. Pushing to get more autonomy for women would be the same thing as rent control and price fixing in this mental picture of the world.” Making reference to “normative economics”—to what rational choice theory says should happen—is the way out of relativism for old-line libertarians, an absolute way of declaring what should and shouldn’t be tolerated in the “culture of tolerance.” But the problem is that most nonlibertarians find such a code intolerable.

—Rob Horning