Rob Walker links to this long, compelling post by Rhodri Marsden about the difficulty musicians have in making money. Marsden paints a picture of the misery of pre-internet record distribution, when warehousing middlemen absorbed the brute facts of consumer indifference, to contrast that with the current state of affairs, in which the internet lets bands track their own sales metrics. That blessed space of ignorance of the marketplace, which once bred fantasies of stardom, is now gone.

Now that we’re put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who (a) don’t need warehousing space for your MP3s, (b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, (c) don’t care whether you’re brilliant or whether you’re bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn’t mean we can sell them—in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn’t mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can’t blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them. And we’re starting to obsess about it. We can’t stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as “thnx 4 the add”, and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we’ve poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.

So lots of people may be listening, but these listeners, when consuming music on the internet, are not shoppers. They are not in a mode where they are browsing for something to spend money on. Instead, they are paying for the music by paying attention, and that’s all they are willing to give, and really, that should be enough, considering all the competition for it.

As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn’t give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one’s working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song’s video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.

In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they’re there. And if, against the odds, you’ve been given some cash, you’ve managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god’s sake don’t get angry. Don’t see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you’re freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you’re almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn’t make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it’s worth nothing.

The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it’s a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It’s extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people’s art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won’t pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn’t lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.

—Rob Horning

This happens every time I make the mistake of tuning into the Republican convention: I end up extremely frightened for America. The glee with which the Republican party repeats its new slogan “Drill baby drill” is extremely unsettling, as it shines a light on the nihilistic, end-times animus that fuels it. The underlying belief behind the slogan is that there is no hope for innovation when it comes to energy resources, and restraint in the form of environmentalism or conservation is an expression of weakness in the coming war of all against all for what’s left on the planet. Government only serves to impede this anarchic struggle, which is why the Republican party apparently believes the preservative restrictions the state places on despoiling economic behavior must be lifted. It’s another indication at how reactionary the party is, how it seems utterly unable to grasp the notion of future consequences. The slogan, rendered more accurately, would read: “Suck the world dry, there is no future!”

Writing in 1982, historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen noted in Channels of Desire the peculiar American fixation on despoiling as a perverse form of patriotism. “The adversarial interpretation of the relationship between people and the natural world is prominent in commercial ideology and production. Waste and throw-away are signatures of what is often termed ‘the American way of life.’ “ They then quote this astounding remark from Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who demonstrates how this contemptuous attitude can be reconciled with a certain strain of end-times Christianity. Asked whether he favored preserving the land for future generations, Watt replied, “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” So in light of the Rapture’s imminence, we should drill, baby, drill.

Fitting for an eschatological view of the universe, we are supposed to believe that such contempt for the future will somehow assure that the past will return. But the small-town USA of the 1950s is gone for good, thanks in part to Republican economic policy. If anything, last night seemed like 1992 all over again, with conservatives vilifying cosmopolitanism and diversity and trying to bait the country into a needlessly destructive cultural civil war, as if we don’t all share the same needs for things like better health care, a job-generating economy, and a sense that the country won’t be destroyed by environmental catastrophe. Tuning into the RNC, you’d think such problems don’t exist, and that the real problem is elitist overlords from the Demonic Northeast threatening to dismantle families and extinguish Christianity. As Douglas Rushkoff notes, the Republican Party is eagerly transforming itself into the “hate party.”

Megan McArdle’s analysis here seems apt. With nothing substantive to say about any issue, the Republicans are out to launch an “all-out cultural war.” (McArdle’s awesome line about Romney’s speech perfectly captures the occasional arbitrarity of conservative contempt: “Mitt Romney seems to use the word liberal in a randomly perjorative fashion.  I half expect him to say ‘I was eating breakfast this morning, and my hash browns were all liberal.  I sent them back and told the waitress to bring me some good, conservative hash browns.’ “) Of this war, Sarah Palin is the harbinger. Ingeniously, the Republican party would like to make the election a referendum on her, as a person, and they are expecting that on that personal level, many American approve of the values she claims to represent. But at the level of ideas, she is a far-right conservative crusader, far outside of the mainstream, and the ideas she represents will probably prove abhorrent to Democrats and independents alike if they (or the press) bother to ferret them out and reinforce them clearly. 

—Rob Horning

At his blog, economist Lane Kenworthy posted a compelling look at growing income inequality in America, illustrating with graphs how median income has fallen away from per-capita GDP—meaning that as the economy has grown, less of the benefits of that growth have been spread across the entire class distribution of the population. Kenworthy points to this as a source of strain on the middle class and sees it as a fundamental subtext for the upcoming presidential election.

Generally speaking, Democrats regard this inequality as a matter of those at the top leveraging their advantages to seize more and more of the pie. The solution to this, typically, is a progressive tax regime that takes away some of those financial advantages, redistributing the wealth created to those below. The rich resent this, as they tend to misconstrue the gains derive from passive investment as their just deserts for risk taking. (Whereas Marx describes capital as “dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him.") But the middle class potentially has their tax burden lightened while getting improved government services financed by the new tax revenue.

Republicans obviously don’t see it this way. They instead evoke the past, when inequality was not so stark (thanks to policies they rejected at the time) and try to paint a picture of progress as failure and disruption, as individuals being crushed by a distant federal government that is essentially their enemy. The solution to the problems the middle class faces, from this point of view, is a recommitment to individualistic values of self-reliance and a church-based, small-town-size community (while scorning community organizers, the existence of whom signal a localized disharmony that conservatives are loath to acknowledge), and a repudiation of the idea that a federal government has any meaningful role in most people’s lives. This seemed to be the subtext of Sarah Palin’s angry, demagogic speech at the Republican convention last night—that small town people should be wary of those purporting to have expertise. At the Washington Monthly site, Steve Benen articulated the theme of the RNC this way:

Seriously, what’s the message of the week in St. Paul? That Republican governing works? No. That Republicans have a legitimate policy agenda? No. That the next four years should be different from the last eight? No. It’s simple: “Your house may be on fire, but don’t trust that man standing outside with a hose, because he doesn’t share your values.”

The Republicans offer voters an opportunity to live in a fantasy world in which they really are self-reliant and government is unnecessary; where “values” really are so uniform—perhaps because they are mandated by a God whom everyone must worship—that there aren’t any meaningful conflicts among groups that the state would have to mediate. All you need is a military to protect the homogeneous group from outside infiltration. (This is why conservatives are so quick to ridicule “political correctness”—because the existence of diversity, competing interests, fundamentally threatens their ideology of government. The only competing interest, from the conservative point of view, are those that the marketplace sorts out.)

Meanwhile, when voters abandon the idea that the atheistic federal government should work for them, it becomes captured instead by professional politicians and the corporate interests they serve—it becomes a machine of plunder, as Jamie Galbraith details in The Predator State. Ideologues like Palin ultimately provide the cover for kleptocrats like Duke Cunningham and his ilk.

—Rob Horning

The advance of digital technology further and further into the nooks and crannies of our lives is based on an elementary trade-off. It supplies us with a great deal of convenience: It lets us communicate with one another wherever and whenever we want to; it provides us with instantaneous access to and limitless storage of media, everything from personal photos to films to most of the history of recorded music on a terabyte hard drive; it’s capable of building in a level of redundancy in our lives, preserving what we might otherwise forget and protecting us from oversights—if you lose tickets to an event, chances are the barcode on them can be canceled and new ones issued to you. And if your credit card number is stolen, chances are the bank will recognize suspicious purchases and notify you. But in exchange for all this convenience, we sacrifice privacy and spontaneity: We permit all our public actions to be cataloged and processed, and we make ourselves completely and instantly accessible not just to our friends and family, but to marketers who seek to guide our behavior in contexts that they can detect and analyze perhaps even before we have a chance to, and to the state, which may seek to stifle dissent before it has the opportunity to assemble and gather force. We become willing parties to our own reification, to our assimilation into the giant digital data machine. Obviously there is pleasure in this, not only in the expanded access to entertainment but also in the thrill of losing ourselves, of ceding responsibility, of having an all-powerful deity-like entity feed us what it thinks we need to know to be happy in whatever situation we end up in. In short, we have a easier time navigating the world as we experience it because it has been preformatted by powerful institutions. Unfortunately our interests are more or less tangential to these institutions, whose primary concern is their own survival and growth.

So, considering how technology threatens to render our wishes irrelevant even as it pretends to cater to them—that is, to our desires boiled down to the need for convenience, to consume more faster and with maximum indiscriminateness—it would seem diligent to regard technology’s encroachments with circumspection and skepticism. Because information technology makes so much of our private lives public and because it flattens our experience into a universal code of ones and zeros that threatens to annihilate our sense of its uniqueness, it’s natural and prudent to be ambivalent about IT and the dislocating change it incurs. But The Numerati, a new collection of profiles of mathematician data miners by frequent BusinessWeek contributor Stephen Baker, offers mostly token displays of such ambivalence. The book—whose chapters explore how data about us can be used to make us the target for ads and political appeals, how it can be used to better surveil us at work and capture terrorists (or at least casino cheaters), how it can expose our health issues, and how it can predict the fate of our relationships—is not really for skeptics. While occasionally paying lip service to privacy advocates, it is generally fawning in its coverage of the companies who sell their abilities to profile us in terms of what we might be susceptible to buy. It regards their invasive business practices as inevitable, the inescapable result of increased competition, and a reflection of the dubious proposition that consumer preferences dictate the direction of the economy. Companies need to spy on their own customers, the logic goes, in order to know what those customers will want just in time to provide it to them, maximizing whatever logistical competitive advantage can thereby be derived. “Retailers simply cannot afford to keep herding us blindly through stores and malls, flashing discounts on Pampers to widowers in wheelchairs,” Baker warns in a typical passage.

But if you are not primarily worried about what companies can or can’t “afford,” the values implicit in the book may bother you. You might not celebrate as a company learns to shed its “barnacle” customers—i.e. the ones that try to keep companies to their word and make them deliver on their promises. You might not be happy that shopping carts can persuade people to buy more at the supermarket than they otherwise would have. You won’t cheer when a computer figures out who you voted for based on contextual clues, opening you up to a new slew of fundraising appeals. Baker seems to register just how dehumanizing and awful the world of surveillance and forced digitalization of our lives will be, but in the book, the craven instincts of the business journalist usually take over, and he presents corporate management’s side as the final word—our inevitable fate that we may as well start loving since we are powerless to alter it.

Think of the endless rows of workers threading together electronic cables in a Mexican assembly plant or the thousands of soldiers rushing into machine-gun fire at Verdun—even the blissed out crowd pushing through the turnstiles at a Grateful Dead concert. From management’s point of view, all of us in these scenarios might as well be nameless and faceless. Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday’s story.

The examples cited here are bizarrely incongruous—are we supposed to be happy to be compared to soldiers being ordered to march into certain death? is that at all comparable to Deadheads at a stadium show? and simply because a lot of people have gathered in one place means they have been ontologically reduced to a statistic automatically? But setting that aside, the phrase yesterday’s story is enough to tip us off to Baker’s teleological impulses, while his elision of management’s point of view with that destiny, with the end of the story, with the point of view that shapes the story, is characteristic of the book as a whole. It is our fate to become numbers in the eyes of the powers that be, because it suits those powers that we be organized in that much-more-manageable fashion. But Baker would have us believe that history itself is responsible, not the institutions and those who profit by them.

The confusions about cause and effect then extend to the means of data collection. “When it comes to producing data,” he declares, “we are prolific.” This seems an innocuous enough statement, but it’s totally backward. Our behavior is simply our behavior; to us it is lived experience, memory, sense stimuli. We don’t “produce” the data, the technology that collects it transforms our lived experience into that data that institutions (corporations, the state) crave. It works to have us reconceive ourselves as numbers, as the sum of datapoints, and then presents its manipulations of that data as the means for our personal extension, even though we are now limited to the field it has defined. “Once they have a bead on our data, they can decode our desires,” Baker notes, but it seems more appropriate to say that they encode it, trapping it in the mediated digital world. Amazon, for example, usefully tells us what we might want based on our behavior, and then buying the books it has suggested begins to seem a way of completing ourselves. The data—the preexisting categories, the defaults, the automated processes incumbent in the systems that capture information—has started to produce us.

The most obvious example of this is social networks, or the even more totalizing Second Life. These data-harvesting applications hope to encourage us to conduct our social lives in their petri dishes and behave in preconditioned ways the service providers can measure and exploit—attaching ads and recommendations to social exchanges that in the real world would transpire with unencumbered spontaneity, with no commercial subtext. Online, though, our behavior—now transformed into marketing data—suddenly works, to those we “network” with, like a sales pitch—a means to some other end rather than being autonomous. Our actions seems less real until they are posted and shared and processed to our maximum advantage with regard to the impression we would like to create or the number of page views we would like to garner. Our consciousness, when reduced to data out of convenience, becomes merely instrumental, something easily reprogrammed to accomplish various tasks. We can automate our social life or refashion our identities thanks to the tools the networks provide, but the thrill of lived experience vanishes to a degree, becoming more and more a matter of adjustments on the spreadsheet of self.

After Baker has misconstrued our role in turning ourselves into data, it’s a short leap to claim that “the only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians.” In other words, don’t try to understand yourself; you need a math genius to tell you who you are and what your meant to do through your behavior. Statisticians are better managers of our datasets than we are, and they are better able to manipulate our data to see what it will yield—to see what our true possibilities are. Apparently our own account of our hopes and dreams and intentions is irrelevant to the degree that it is not conditioned by what the math geniuses have calculated and made permissible. Once we are data, we are inscrutable to ourselves.

Not only does our reduction to data make us strangers to ourselves, but Baker goes so far as to opine that in the future, we will be “happy to pay for the privilege of remaining, to some degree or other, in the dark” about the selves that can be constructed from our data. He has in mind the disconcerting probabilities that we will contract diseases, but it applies plausibly to the whole range of knowledge that can be produced about us. When we begin to be overtargeted, we will need filters to discover our authentic reflection in the efforts to persuade us. We will want liberation from the self left behind by the trail we’ve blazed through commercial culture, as that identity is merely the one that shopping permits us to have. A more integral self will fight that commercially derived one for social space in which to manifest. But the hegemony of consumerism will require us to pay for that privilege of being able to conceive an authentic self independent of our data stream.

What can we do to thwart our being converted to data? Baker suggests a can’t-beat-em-join-em approach, urging us to make spreadsheets of our achievements to demonstrate our worth. As digital data hounds become more thoroughly intrusive, we can probably count on the advent of services that would throw out false scents in our name, creating fake data trails to muddy the image of ourselves therein, to obscure our health concerns from insurance companies who would like to exclude us, and to mask our shopping proclivities to ensure that we don’t suffer price discrimination or perhaps attract favorable discounts. Just as credit-score doctors learned how to game FICO, a counter-Numerati is sure to emerge to try and thwart their efforts to define us. Short of that, it will increasingly be to our benefit to conduct ourselves anonymously if we want to preserve any sense of self at all.

—Rob Horning

More and more, it seems as though a psychological corner has been turned. There is a growing sense that the consumer-credit bubble is over, and as a result the gap in lived experience between the rich and the poor (who lived richer thanks to credit) are about to widen, as Steven R. Waldman explains here:

Of course, the poor spend more than they earn primarily by taking on debt. In the halcyon days of 2006, that was no problem. Credit flowed like honey, and what could always be refinanced need never be repaid. It’s a wonder we didn’t do away with the whole “money” thing entirely. If you can spend all the way down to negative infinity, it hardly matters whether your starting wealth is one dollar or a billion dollars. Why keep track?
But, alas, people did keep track. They also stopped lending to people who might not be able to repay, people who, you know, spend more than they earn. Which means, even putting aside the terrible hardship of bankruptcy, or struggling to pay down old loans, all of a sudden the lived experience of inequality must come very much to resemble those unpleasant income inequality statistics. Are we cool with that?
In a way, the credit crisis comes out of a tension between the broad-middle-class America of our collective imagination and the economically polarized nation we have in fact come to be. We borrowed to finance an illusory Mayberry. The crisis won’t be over until this tension is resolved. Either we modify the facts of our economic relations, or we come to terms with a new America more comfortable with distinct and enduring social classes....
I’m sure this is a bit polemic, but I don’t think it is much overstated. Credit was the means by which we reconciled the social ideals of America with an economic reality that increasingly resembles a “banana republic”. We are making a choice, in how we respond to this crisis, and so far I’d say we are making the wrong choice. We are bailing out creditors and going all personal-responsibility on debtors. We are coddling large institutions of prestige and power, despite their having made allocative errors that would put a Soviet 5-year plan to shame. We applaud the fact that “wage pressures are contained”, protecting the macroeconomy of the wealthy from the microeconomy of the middle class.

For the rest of us, as we are weaned off the tendency to live beyond our means and keep up with the levels of consumption touted in the culture industry as normal, we can now embrace thriftiness, the Aldi alternative.

Accordingly, thrift is beginning to trump branding in retailers’ efforts to reach customers, if you take anecdotal evidence like this post seriously—it details efforts Whole Foods is making to seem cheap, and has a link to an article about Target’s suddenly struggling because of its “classier” image.

As Target released its second-quarter earnings Tuesday, the Minneapolis-based discount retailer said it will not meet long-term expectations if consumer cutbacks continue. Part of the problem is that, much as Target has tried to trump up the “pay less” side of its slogan, consumers don’t believe it.
“The perception is that because it’s more visually appealing than Wal-Mart, that prices are higher,” said Stephanie Hoff, a retail analyst with Edward Jones in New York. “They’re just going to have to figure out a way to communicate that to their customers better. They’re trying to do that, but it could take some time.”

Also, efforts to restigmatize borrowing are starting to permeate economic commentary. There is a general sense that consumer behavior needs to adapt to dwindling credit and make do with less immediate gratification. Easy credit enabled more people to participate in a sort of protracted drama of shopping, in purchasing big-ticket items as a kind of experience. Marketing theory more and more began to argue that the experience was more significant to consumers than the purchased good in the end, and retailers, recognizing the superior margins to selling experiences to goods, embraced this ideology and emphasized it. Brands took on new significance as the starting points for consumer fantasies, and advertising worked to make the brands into more effective triggers for those fantasies.

But without easy credit, the model no longer works as effectively. Daniel Gross, too, proclaims the end of the credit-card-fueled economy in this Slate article. “The endless willingness of lenders to lend and borrowers to borrow—...kept the consumer economy humming uninterrupted from the early 1990s, straight through the brief recession of 2001, until the credit meltdown of 2007.” But now

Retailers who freely extended credit to any customer with a pulse are deploying bean counters armed with sophisticated software to sniff out potential deadbeats. And when higher rates and fees don’t deter their borrowers, credit-card companies resort to slashing credit lines. “We predicted there would be some degree of spillover from the mortgage meltdown,” said Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com. “But the credit line reductions by big credit card companies in the last six months have been fairly unprecedented.”

Gross notes that the absence of credit confronts consumers with the “pain of paying,” the reality of what things actually cost, which is an obvious deterrent to spending. This inhibits the popular notion that shopping is an “experience” rather than a transaction.

Consumers may have to recalibrate their expectations of what a shopping experience is and adapt to consuming unbranded goods. No more will shopping seem designed to single individuals out, flatter them and encourage them to see the retail universe as fashioned specifically for them. Shopping is more likely to be the semi-alienating Wal-Mart or Aldi experience, where you wander through piles of unbranded goods in cardboard boxes on the floor, than the repeat engagement with brand-inspired fantasies. Perhaps, we will shop less to foster identity than to simply acquire more fundamental necessities, and identity could be developed in some other social arena outside of amassing possessions and brandishing brands, through some other means than being catered to by retailers and orchestrating a lifestyle through curating and displaying the correct set of belongings.

—Rob Horning

A problem I keep finding myself returning to is why I seem to spend more time tagging and arranging my music files than I spend listening to my music. Part of that is a cognitive illusion, but a telling one—I’m listening to music the entire time I’m doing the iTunes bookkeeping work, but my concentration is on the data, not on the intricacies, harmonies, melodies and hooks of the music. It barely breaks through, and usually only when the song playing is so irritating, I have to skip to the next one.

In my mind, this is symptomatic of a larger problem, of consuming information about goods rather than allowing goods to facilitate sensual experiences. In part, this is so we can consume more quickly, a product of the time crunch we face in expanding our consumption—we want faser throughput, since quantity seems to trump quality, and the pleasure in consuming seems to come from the acquisition of the next thing. To authorize that next acquisition, we need to satisfy ourselves that we are done with what we have. Processing it as information is a quick way of doing just that.

As a consequence of this eagerness to process more and more stuff, I end up amassing an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of the surface details of pop culture—who wrote what and who sang what and who played on whose record and when this show was canceled or had this or that guest star or whatever. Worse, I invest far too much significance in brandishing this knowledge as some kind of accomplishment, as if life were a big game of Jeopardy. This useless depot of detail is what a show like Family Guy tries to reward me for having accumulated. Getting to laugh at it is like a kind of booby prize.

But iTunes metadata seems to me the best emblem of the information problem, of the trap we are lured into of substituting clerical data processing for thought and experience. Adorno seemed to anticipate this precisely in ”The Schema of Mass Culture,” whose title alone suggests its application to the digitization of all cultural distribution. He argues that art, in being manufactured for the masses, is reduced to the data about itself, which masks its subversive potential. “The sensuous moment of art transforms itself under the eyes of mass culture into the measurement, comparison and assessment of physical phenomena.” This is like accessing iTunes metadata in place of hearing the song. Because the metadata for all the music is the same, all music from that perspective is also essentially the same. And the argument can be extended to all of digitally distributed culture.

The underlying sameness of the medium for culture today reveals the truth about the phantasmal differences in form and genre. (As Adorno puts it, in his inimitable way, “the technicized forms of modern consciousness...transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical.") It’s all more or less the same, allowing consumers to obey the command to enact the same self-referential decoding process, reinforcing the same lesson of eternal sameness.

The more the film-goer, the hit-song enthusiast, the reader of detective and magazine stories anticipates the outcome, the solution, the structure, and so on, the more his attention is displaced toward the question of how the nugatory result is achieved, to the rebus-like details involved, and in this searching process of displacement the hieroglyphic meaning suddenly reveals itself. It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of “dos and don’ts,” and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the consumers.

What Adorno would call “official culture”—that which is made to be reviewed and talked about by professional commentators and promoted by professional marketers and consumed commercially—seems to be so stuffed with data and information and objects and performers and whatnot that no one could ever in their right mind question its plenitude. There’s so much, you’d have to be nuts to derive some satisfaction from all that. Think of all the stuff you can download! But the one thing missing amid all this data is the space for a genuine aesthetic experience, a moment of negativity in which an alternative to what exists, what registers as “realistic” can be conceived. Instead, one feels obliged to keep up with official culture so as to not find oneself an outcast. People go along not necessarily because they love pop culture but because “they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life.” Pop culture knowledge becomes a prerequisite for certain social opportunities, a way of signaling one’s normality, or one’s go-along-get-along nature. “Today, anyone incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual.” I think of this quote sometimes when it comes up that someone has never knowingly heard a Coldplay or John Mayer song, or hasn’t seen an episode of American Idol. Really? Have you been under a rock? Are you lying? Why this makes me suspicious rather than elated, I don’t know. And it especially reminds me of my record reviewing, when I tried to pretend there was inherent significance in the commercial output of E.L.O. or the Drive-By Truckers. And as the information about pop culture proliferates, we become more ignorant about politics and basic facts about how our economy operates.

Once participation in public official culture becomes a matter of collecting trivial, descriptive (as opposed to analytical) information about it, Adorno argues that “culture business” then plays out as a contest. Products “require extreme accomplishments that can be precisely measured.” This I would liken to the data at the bottom of iTunes that tells you the number of songs you have and the number of days it would take to listen to them all. It’s not intended to be a scoreboard but it can seem like one. This sort of contest culminates in collecting mania, where an object’s use value has been shriveled to it’s being simply another in a series.

To radically oversimplify, Adorno argued that mass culture, a reflection and paradigmatic example of monopoly capitalism, served to nullify the radical potential in art, debasing its forms and methods while acclimating audiences to mediocrity, alienation, hopelessness, and a paucity of imagination. It works to form individuals into a mass, integrating them into the manufactured culture, snuffing out alternative and potentially seditious ways for people to interact with one another while facilitating an ersatz goodwill for the existing order. “As far as mass culture is concerned, reification is no metaphor: It makes the human beings that it reproduces resemble things even where their teeth do not represent toothpaste and their careworn wrinkles do not evoke cosmetics.” The contours of our consciousness are produced by our culture, and advertisements reflect those dimensions while fostering their reproduction. 

Basically, through its ministrations, all the movements of the individual spirit become degraded and tamed and assimilated to the mass-produced cultural products on offer, which ultimately fail to gratify and perpetuate a spiritual hunger while occluding the resources that might have actually sated it. Pleasure becomes “fun,” thought becomes “information,” desire becomes “curiosity.”

But what could be wrong with curiosity? It seems like it should be an unadulterated good, a way of openly engaging with the world. Adorno, in a feat of rhetorical jujitsu, wants to have us believe it means the opposite. Because it is attuned not to anything more substantive than pop-culture trivia, curiosity “refers constantly to what is preformed, to what others already know.” It is not analytical or synthetic; it simply aggregates. “To be informed about something implies an enforced solidarity with what has already been judged.” Everything worth knowing about, from a social perspective—anything you might talk about with acquaintances, say—has already been endorsed, is already presented as cool even before anyone had that authentic reaction to it. Cultural product is made with cool in mind, whereas authentic cool, from Adorno’s standpoint anyway, must always be a by-product. At the same time, curiosity surpressed genuine change, supplanting for it ersatz excitement for cynical repetitions—think the fashion cycle, in which everything changes on the surface but nothing really changes. “Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted anyway,” Adorno says. “It lives off the claim that there cannot be anything new and that what presents itself as new is already predisposed to subsumption on the part of the well-informed.” This means attention to the surface details, which prompts “a taboo against inaccurate information, a charge that can be invoked against any thought.” Basically this means that in our cultural climate, your thoughts about, say, Eric Clapton’s guitar playing are invalid unless you know what model guitar he was playing and what studio he was recording in at the time. The trivia is used to silence the “inexpert.” So “the curiosity for information cannot be separated from the opinionated mentality of those who know it all,” Adorno argues. Curiosity is “not concerned with what is known but the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession.” Life becomes a collection of data, and “as facts they are arranged in such a way that they can be grasped as quickly and easily as possible”—in a spreadsheet, for example. Or a PowerPoint presentation. These media suit facts as opposed to thoughts, and encourage us to groom our data sheets for completeness and clarity rather than insight. “Wrenched from all context, detached from thought, they are made instantly accessible to an infantile grasp. They may never be broadened or transcended”—the metadata fields are unchangeable—“but like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien.” Works don’t seek to be understood; they only seek to be identified, tagged, labeled accordingly to make them superficially accessible.

The reduction of thought to data allows us to consume culture faster, enhance our throughput, and focus on accumulating more. The idea that you would concentrate on one work and explore it deeply, thoroughly, is negated; more and more, it becomes unthinkable, something it wouldn’t occur to anyone to try. “Curiosity” demands we press on fervently, in search of the next novelty.

—Rob Horning