This could be a purely personal idiosyncrasy, but I’m wondering if it might indicate something larger about why big-box stores are so successful in America. I’m extrapolating from my weird aversion to going to the local bike shop. I just started to ride my old bike that I had in Arizona, and I’ve quickly realized that I need a few things for riding in New York City—mainly a helmet and new handle grips. Even though there is a local bike shop five blocks from my apartment, I find myself procrastinating about going over there. Maybe I spent too much time in record stores as a teenager, but I have this unshakable paranoia that the people in the bike shop will laugh at me. They will see that I am not a “real” biker; riding a bike around is not my lifestyle, it’s not my brand. I’m not going to ride my bike to work, let alone be one of those guys darting through traffic in midtown, menacing pedestrians and drivers alike. I’m not going to join Critical Mass and try to blockade the transit grid. I don’t wear special gear to bike around in and I am not even sure I know what model of bike I have. (It has gears.) I’m strictly “entry level,” to use Hipster Runoff terminology—I’m a novice, an amateur, too clueless to even know what is at stake with the subcultural signifiers. If I had more strength of character, perhaps, I would brazen it out in the bike shop and get what I need, despite my vague sense that it will be slightly more expensive than it need be since I’d be paying the specialty store/small business tariff. I wouldn’t care what people might think of me.

But instead I am attracted to the possibility of shopping anonymously. I think of going out to Target to get my bike helmet. There I can be assured that no one in the store particularly cares about what I am buying. I might even be required to check myself out at a self-service register, permitting me to have no encounter with another person at all. How convenient!

Anyway, my suspicion is that convenience, anonymity, freedom from other people’s assumptions about our lifestyle, the automatic assumption that we are pursuing a lifestyle inauthentically, the desire to face as little human contact as possible while we are in consumer mode—all these things are intertwined ideologically, and make up the field of consumer capitalism as its experienced by ordinary people—or at least people like me. Big-box stores seem engineered to supply a specific retail experience that protects our anonymity and minimizes our need for human contact, preserving our bubble of narcissistic fantasy as we roam around handling the merchandise. When this bubble gives way—when we seek the nuisance and insecurity of human contact—we mediate the relation through the signaling function of our goods and disappear into the life that they imply.

—Rob Horning

When I was looking to find a new apartment, I was in the office of a parasitic bloodsucker—whoops, I’m sorry, a real estate broker—in my neighborhood (brokers have locked down the apartment market in my corner of New York pretty tightly, largely because of immigrant and absentee landlords). This particular broker also showed houses for sale, and his office was decorated with a cartoon that depicted a broken-down old couple hobbling along in the street, above a caption that mocked them: “They are waiting for home prices to drop.” I thought of that cartoon while reading this Mark Thoma post about what caused the housing bubble, which takes as its jumping-off point this post at the NYT economics blog by Ed Glaeser. Glaeser admits that “The housing price volatility of the last six years has been so extreme that it confounds conventional economic explanations,” and agrees with housing economists Case and Shiller that “housing bubbles were fueled by irrationally optimistic beliefs about future housing price appreciation.” He uses the Las Vegas bubble as his example:

I once thought that the Las Vegas housing market was so straightforward (vast amounts of land, no significant regulation) that no one could be deluded into thinking that prices could long diverge from construction costs, but I was wrong. I underestimated the human capacity to think rosy thoughts about the value of a house.

My father lived in Las Vegas in the mid 1990s, and when I would visit, I would be astounded by the exponential growth along the I-215 corridor. It seemed utterly senseless—shopping centers that hadn’t existed on my previous visit would be filled to capacity with virtually full parking lots (I’m thinking of the Eastern Ave. exit circa 1998), while the centers a few exits back toward downtown would be nearly empty. The fetishization of the new shopping centers was indicative of the insanity that was free-floating through the region then. The new housing developments would already be started before the road grid even reached them. Planners had a difficult time coming up with all the new names for all the new cul-de-sacs being created. And the new homes were presumably being purchased by the new arrivals to the area, who by and large were construction workers in the home building business. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that pattern was unsustainable.

The key question, that Glaeser declines to try to answer here, is why did people think such “rosy thoughts”? Thoma quotes Shiller, who argues that housing bubbles have happened because “people believed that both land and building materials were becoming relatively more scarce over time,” which is plainly false. Still, how come people in Las Vegas and Henderson believed houses would continue to go up, against the obvious evidence in front of their face of the utter lack of land and materials scarcity? Thoma suggests people assume a long-term premium on their “investment” in a home, because they make a semi-conscious connection between buy-and-hold investing in the stock market (presumed to bring surefire 8 percent returns over the long haul) and home ownership. But buying a home is a consumption purchase, not an investment.

The question then is why people were so quick to view housing as a great investment and all those renters out there as “suckers” who were “just throwing their money away.” The answer, I think, is straight-up propaganda. Consider how often the NAR economist is cited in the press as an objective expert on the meaning of housing data. Consider how much blather we hear from politicians about the ownership society and the sanctity of home owning. Think of the tax breaks and subsidies that homeowners get and seem to believe they deserve. Think of the whole parasitical class of real estate agents and the relentless advertising on their behalf and on the behalf of the mortgage lenders and banks.

In the U.S. an ideology about homeownership has become entrenched that seems guaranteed to produce irrational (by economists’ standards) views about home owning. So it’s hardly surprising that this ideology yielded a housing market full of deluded buyers and sellers who had little understanding of the true value of what they were bargaining over. Sadly, very little has been done, even now, to dismantle this erroneous view of housing. Perhaps because of the vested interests—I doubt my neighborhood broker has taken down his cartoon.

—Rob Horning

I’m all in favor of championing meaningful work over bureaucratic paper-pushing or assembly-line tedium, but nonetheless, I was a little skeptical of Matthew Crawford’s thesis in this New York Times magazine essay, adapted from his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. (A more philosophical version of the essay’s ideas is here.) He certainly has a point in detailing how mechanics are presumed to be less intelligent than office workers and information workers, but he tends to err on the other side of the equation, painting those who don’t work with their hands as deracinated half men. In championing “real” work as tinkering with tools and fixing engines and rewiring houses and that sort of thing, Crawford seems to have in the back of his mind the supposed threat of boys being neutered and pussified by modern education techniques—namely they are being medicated so that they won’t be aggressive and so that their rambunctious curiosity is stifled:

There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.”

That sounds very reminiscent of this sort of thing: “Consider, for example, the fact that we still expect our six- to-eleven-year-old sons to sit for hours at a stretch, reading and writing, at a time in their lives when adventure calls.” Of course, girls can be expected to sit around a school; after all they need to get used to sitting around at home waiting for their men. But boys are special. Crawford tries to be a bit more gender neutral than that, but you can’t help but feel that he’s motivated by a sense that masculinity is bound up with a certain sort of tactile manipulation of the world. Those without handymen skills are hardly men at all; they are at the mercy of the social order and economic division of labor instead of being rugged individualists.

Crawford is a motorcycle mechanic, so you can throw in the gratuitous machismo of revving engines and indulging dangerous pursuits in search of kicks. His economic exchanges then, instead of being suspect and shamefully interlocking him into the system, are saturated with manliness, trading in a testosterone currency:

Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can’t wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant “bwaaAAAAP!” of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It’s a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is “Yeah!”

Fuck yeah! Woo-hoo. One bro helping another bro out, just how the world should be. None of that impersonal faceless corporate world or the cash nexus for him.

As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community.

That repairmen and such are undercompensated compared with bankers goes without saying, but in many respects this is because of what Crawford points out—those jobs can’t be outsourced, so they are paid in security; and those jobs are absorbing and immediately rewarding (you get to see what your work has wrought), so they are paid in satisfaction and integrity. They are motivated to work for reasons other than money, and thus by the inexorable logic of capitalism, they are underpaid.

Crawford rhapsodizes how the real men who do real work draw not on institutional information but informal networks of semi-arcane lore, sometimes resorted to brute trial and error or a mystified sort of intuition that comes from long practice.

The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Yes, it is thinking, but must he call it real thinking? Real thinking takes place outside of machine shops too. But he tends to be suspicious of any job where knowledge production or dissemination is the purpose, and regards jobs that require coordination as inherently stultifying. Crawford declares, “There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well”—hoping to put a rhetorical stake in the heart of middle managers everywhere. If only everyone would stop being so insistent on the rules and started generating ad hoc procedures as they went along, then everyone would feel so much more creative and fulfilled. We all would be allowed to reinvent the wheel.

But Crawford’s point about the middle manager’s moral maze is right on:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

That’s a good explanation of weasly corporate-speak, which is not the product of ignorance but instead of the need for plausible deniability. But that also means that they are thinking on their feet, albeit verbally. Crawford assumes there can be no satisfaction in this, that it is automatically born of desperation and squirming. That is the same mistake as assuming that the dirty work of mechanics is stupid.

—Rob Horning

I found the weirdly joyous response by some of the most renowned bloggers to this interesting post about the death of the freewheeling blogosphere of old a little unseemly, an object lesson of what a small world that it is among them. They all seem to lament the loss of “charm” from blogging, since it is no longer a casual activity for them. Yes, they seem to collectively be saying, we were once young and foolish and not as professional as we should have been, but our social capital pulled through for us in the end. Our example proved that the blogosphere was nothing revolutionary, just a new tool for the ambitious to display their talents and make useful connections. It’s sort of a bummer that all those new voices allegedly coming from outside the established power networks in America will continue to be ignored, but oh well! We are all paid pundits now!

Of course I don’t blame them for professionalizing—would that I were paid for blogging. But with professionalization comes all the customary ways in which the fantasy of “meritocracy” is thwarted, or rather, the fantasy that raw merit could triumph over a lack of soft-power skills—cozying up to idols, self-promoting without being annoying, etc., etc. The promise of the blogosphere early on was that it was to provide a new path to the public sphere, a way for new voices to be heard. But instead it was just a new media for journalists to do their woodshedding. I think the idea that you could make it big in the blogopsphere was always a bit of a distortion, since those people who did make it big most likely would have succeeded in journalism anyway. What seemed to have happened is that the early bloggers formed a network and were able to help each other along into the establishment as they began to advance in their careers. In the past, those sort of networks would not unfold in a public forum, as they did in blogs with all the reciprocal links and log-rolling. If the charm is gone in a certain sector of the blogosphere, it’s because the pretense that it’s not an audition for big media punditry has been dropped.

Still, when Ezra Klein writes, “The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers”, he’s mainly referring to his generation of analysts and journalists. I’m guessing he doesn’t bother to read around much in the weird blog world that is certainly still out there (and I’m sure there is a lot of “charm” in the non-professional blogging and video making and so on happening online), because he has a responsibility to keep up with all the big league pundits and have opinions about them. Professional opinion makers who now write blog posts as part of their repertoire for their job are naturally going to assimilate journalistic seriousness to their practice. Laura, the author of the original post, argues that this has somehow made the blogosphere “less hierarchical”—I’m not sure if that is a typo, but it seems that the hierarchy has reasserted itself almost totally, in that most of the bloggers that people link to are established in a reputable big media post or an established think tank. Bloggers establish credibility by becoming affiliated to established brands, by publishing under well-respected banners. It is harder now to create a brand for yourself that extends its reach beyond Facebook, the base camp for inconsequential self-branding.

What was revolutionary about blogging then is merely that it allowed those traditional networks to metastasize in front of the jealous outsiders who, with their own unacknowledged blogs, feel even more bereft. They perpetuate for those outsiders the idea that the world is somehow rigged, and help them continue to fail to see that part of “merit” is the ability to push your meritorious work among the people who can bring it wider repute. In other words, blogging seemed a way to sneak around the whole self-marketing thing—you just put your awesome writing online and wait for the plaudits to roll in. But of course that doesn’t happen. Instead, it is tempting to do even less of the self-marketing, since the work is already out there, and easier to become overwhelmingly discouraged, since it is being ignored. Talent is a matter of taking your own work seriously, and the “freewheeling world of the blogosphere” early on had the illusion of being a place where such serious career-mindedness wasn’t necessary. Now we know better.

—Rob Horning

Complaining about the technologically mediated acceleration of life and the loss of the time for contemplation has become a lot like crying wolf. From what I gather, people seem to be sick of hearing it—as a meme it had its moment several months ago. Even though I’ve beaten that drum many times, I find myself thinking: Okay. Concentrating is hard, but then when hasn’t it been? There are a surfeit of distractions; I get it. But it’s not like I am going to go on an information fast and spend my free time meditating. I’m not going to dismantle my RSS feed and devote an hour a night instead to reading a single poem. Those seem like idealistic, nostalgic fantasies about the “life of the mind,” which in practice would most likely amount to a refusal to engage with life as it is actually being lived. For example, I very much wish I was in a world without Twitter and maybe even without telephones, but that doesn’t mean it’s imperative that I live as if it were so. Down that road lies the technological equivalent of veganism, wherein everyone in my life would need to adapt to my fussy, righteous rules about which ubiquitous behaviors were permissible in my little world.

Still, though David Bollier’s account of an April 2009 lecture (probably based on this paper, pdf) by media studies professor David Levy has its share of neo-Thoreauvianism in it, it nevertheless raises some points worth considering. The main gist is this: “The digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships.” I have said the same sort of thing lots of times, but, as Levy asks, what actually constitutes the difference between “productive” thought and “deliberative” thought? I tend to think of the former as data processing—tagging mp3 files, for instance—and the latter as analytical inquiry, but it may not be so easy to distinguish the two. The mental modes tend to flow into one another. Working through menial mental tasks sometimes allows for inspiration to break through—and after all, what is one supposed to be doing with one’s mind when it is taking its time to deliberate? The “information overload” critique sometimes centers on the idea of slowing down the mind. But the mind is always moving, thinking one thought after another; the problem with the internet is that it gives it too many places to go all at once, has the potential to gratify too many idle curiosities. Bollier suggests that “We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves.” But the dream that Levy attributes to Vannevar Bush seems a more apt description of what we’ve tried to do. “Bush’s intention was clear: by automating the routine aspects of thinking, such as search and selection, he hoped to free up researchers’ time to think more deeply and creatively.” It’s just that the two functions can’t be separated; the way in which we think about things doesn’t have degrees. It’s holistic; we require routine tasks to fire our creativity, and creativity can often become routinized.

It’s important to distinguish between having information at our disposal and lacking the discipline to make contemplative use of it. Often the two are implicitly elided, as if too much information automatically leads to frivolous surfing through it. Bollier writes, “Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process.” I don’t quite understand this. We have to live in the now, because we are not “timeless.” We die. And the problem with information overload doesn’t lie with the activities and the media so much as they do with the approach we take to them, the ideology about information consumption we have internalized in the course of mastering these new technologies. We think they are supposed to make our lives convenient, and we measure that in terms of time efficiency. If we do many different things in the same span of time we once were forced to do only a few things—if on the train we can read 17 books simultaneously on a Kindle rather than one—than we are “winning.” The pressure to consume more is not inherent to the technology or in some new perception of time, but is instead inherent to consumer capitalism, which fetishizes quantity. As Levy points out, the roots of this are in the “production problem”—how to keep making more stuff if people are already sated and don’t have the time to consume more. The solution: manufacture new wants and speed up consumption. So the consumerist imperative probably led us to develop many of these technologies. But still, we should be careful not to blame the tools for the kind of people we have become. (If Twitter went out of business tomorrow, many people’s discourse would still remain superficial and inane.) If we have ceased to be able to love, it is not because we lack the leisure or are too distracted. It is because we have learned to privilege different sorts of experience, are rewarded for different sorts of accomplishments.

So the call for “an ‘information environmentalism’ to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives” seems misguided. The “mental pollution” is an effect, not a cause, of our loss of contemplative peace. That is, our mental lives are not degraded by information but by a pervasive cultural attitude about it, that treats ideas as things to be collected and/or consumed.

ADDENDUM: Ben Casnocha’s review of Tyler Cowen’s new book presents a far more cogent critique of the “attention crisis” hullabaloo then what I’ve provided above.

We have always had distractions. We have never had long attention spans. We have never had a golden age where our minds could freely concentrate on one thing and spawn a million complex and nuanced thoughts. Cowen reminds us that charges to the contrary have been made at the birth of every new cultural medium throughout history. Moreover, the technologies that are supposedly turning our brain into mush are very much within our control. The difference between the new distractions (a flickering TV in the kitchen) and age-old ones (crying infant) is that the TV can be turned off, whereas the crying infant cannot.

He also notes the way in which chaos and “un-focus” can lead us to breakthrough insights. Though I don’t remember agreeing with much of Sam Anderson’s New York magazine essay in praise of distraction, this point that Casnocha highlights seems apropos: “We ought to consider the possibility that attention may not be only reflective or reactive, that thinking may not only be deep or shallow, or focus only deployed either on task or off. There might be a synthesis that amounts to what Anderson calls ‘mindful distraction.’ “ That’s what I was struggling to express above: thinking is thinking; subjecting it to binary categorizations does injustice to how it actually works and leads to unnecessary and useless prescriptions for how to provoke thinking of a certain type. 

—Rob Horning

Am I weird? I don’t get Michael Jackson, any more than I get Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers. I don’t quite get why he was such a big deal, and why the nation needs to mourn him collectively by playing his mostly mediocre music. (From his solo career, what is any good other than Off the Wall and “Billie Jean”?) I do get that he sold a zillion albums and was among the two or three most famous people on the planet, but what of it? Because of his fame—because, intentionally or not, he crossed some sort of line into a level of stardom that shouldn’t be reached—he had ceased to be a true object of human sympathy, because no one could know his experience. Bob Rossney (via Boing Boing) explains this well:

It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson.  In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant.  Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger’s.  Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it’s a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him “a man”, just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives.  The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

It seems as though people are trying to resurrect the legend after the fact, as if to excuse the way our adulation destroyed him while he was alive. As Generation Bubble puts it:

To borrow the words of Z-Man, the villain of Russ Meyer’s immortal Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, pop superstardom was Michael Jackson’s happening, and it freaked him — as well as us — out.

—Rob Horning