I am on the record as being against customer service. It seems to me a trick to get us overinvested in shopping as a place where we can exercise our will to power. So when Yves Smith asks, in this post about a few ideas for new consumer-service businesses, “Do we want to foster customer neurosis?” I believe the answer is yes. Of course we do. Retailing is essentially the art of making insignificant choices seem paramount, and getting people hooked on the “thrill” of making such discriminations. Total neuroticism is the art practiced at its highest form and is a state of mind marketing in general is always preparing us for, stoking our fantasies of omnipotence and our insecurities about not belonging to group of preferred customers or whatever. (That is part of the logic behind retailers’ loyalty programs—those stupid cards you have to flash to get the sale price on items, like you are part of some elite cadre of special shoppers. Though the main reason for them, I always thought, was to track what you purchased and use that to compile demographic data to sell to manufacturers and advertisers.)

Perplexed by services for helping customers get the best rooms or seats within a hotel or particular flight, Smith asks “Is this much information really empowering, or does having such fine grading merely make some people unhappy when they don’t get what their little website says is the best?” It certainly supplies the illusion of power and an opportunity to discriminate. I think it allows for the pleasure of making petty judgments, becoming ersatz insiders, and scoring insignificant victories over peer shoppers on a scoreboard that the insecurity mongers conjure out of thin air. Basically, when we as customers become fussy children, the retailers become our parental authority figures, granting or withholding the love we crave, even as we foolishly believe we are in control because we are being fussed over.

In a consumer society, shopping isn’t about satisfying some set of wants extrinsic to the market arena—it is about entering the arena and having our wants stoked and then satisfied, with our competitive juices stoked and our fantasizing mind fully engaged. Shopping is itself an experiential good; anything we take happen to take home from us is often just a souvenir.

Like Vaughn at Mind Hacks, I’m generally skeptical of neuroscientific research of the brain-lights-up-therefore-it’s-true variety, but for what it’s worth, this WSJ piece today explains that shopping is like crack smoking:

Research shows that people often do get a high from shopping—the brain releases chemicals such as dopamine or serotonin when a person is stimulated by discovering something new, such as a handbag. Sometimes, aspects of the shopping experience such as friendly sales clerks, eye-catching displays or aisles that are easy to navigate can trigger brain activity that brings about these “euphoric moments,” says Dr. David Lewis, director of neuroscience at Mindlab International, a United Kingdom-based consultancy whose clients include athletes, retailers and advertising companies. “The brain is turned on by novelty.”

The writer sums up that “For the consumer, such studies serve as an important reminder that these euphoric moments do exist but they aren’t necessarily triggered by the desire to own a particular item.” I’m starting to believe that we convince ourselves we want some specific thing as an alibi so that we can enjoy the shopping experience as a whole. Like when I would sit down for some “writing” because I knew that would lead to cigarette breaks.

To a larger and larger degree, the wants occur after we have already decided to go shopping; they are not the impetus. So we don’t start by wishing we could be “getting a better room” but we enter the sphere of services and discover that we can and then want to. The key for marketers is to keep us in that sphere—a mental space more than a physical space—where we are searching for things to buy, with buying becoming how we remind ourselves of our being.

—Rob Horning

On the internet, displaying our musical taste has become easy to the point of being virtually automatic. Social networking sites, with searchable lists of our preferences, seem expressly designed for the purpose. And if we so choose, we can let people eavesdrop on what we are listening to through our computer at any time, or broadcast it like we are our own personal radio station. But in the real world, our options are more limited. We can drive around with our car stereos blaring, wear conspicuous T-shirts, spend a lot of time in clubs. Or we can hang around in the right record stores.

I used to go to record stores a lot—nearly every day, in fact. But then slowly my visits tapered off, and finally I stopped going altogether. Internet distribution and home-digital-copying technology is part of the explanation for this, but it’s not what I think of. Instead, I remember the last time I was in a real record store: in 2001, a place called the Sound Garden in Baltimore. Surrounded by the posters for bands I hadn’t heard of, and struggling to concentrate while atonal music blared through the loudspeakers, I skulked in the aisles, hyperaware of the clerks’ scowling stares and frequently jostled by the much younger customers around me. Intermittently I would flip through rows of discs, but it was a rote gesture to make myself feel less conspicuous. I had no particular hope of finding anything, and beyond that, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to.

The extreme discomfort I was experiencing didn’t seem accidental. Rather, a nondescript guy in his thirties like me in the store probably jeopardized its appeal with the younger, more spendthrift demographic it was after, so it had concocted the perfect blend of sensory irritations to drive people like me out—like that device that emits a high-pitched squeal to repel teenagers, only in reverse. So in other words, like any luxury retailer, the record store was shopping for the right sort of customer and sought to discourage those who would compromise the image the store sought to convey—that it was place where young, cool people congregated, traded information, and escaped from the plastic mainstream represented by people who looked and felt like I did. On that day in Baltimore, it dawned on me that record stores don’t sell music, they sell a lifestyle.

Of course, the same is true not just of music retailers, but consumer capitalism as a whole. Virtually every company tries to associate its products with intangible desires and aspirations a consumer might have, as these are inexhaustible and are only temporarily sated by the act of shopping. No amount of Newport cigarettes will make you feel “Alive with pleasure” once and for all. You have to keep buying them in search of that elusive jouissance.

So regardless of what we buy, the process of buying itself may be where we derive the most satisfaction, the moment where we indulge most deeply in the fantasy of who the product will allow us to become. This makes where we buy crucially important, which is likely why we are often so sentimental about places like independent bookstores and record stores. Where we buy something supplies a lasting context for how we consume it. When I graduated from the Listening Booth at the local mall to Sounds, on St. Marks Place in New York City, I felt as though my tastes had matured and become more sophisticated overnight. Even though chances were good that I could have found that same XTC record at the mall, buying it downtown felt completely different, and it certainly changed how much I enjoyed it and even what it sounded like to me. (How else could I have found Oranges and Lemons to be edgy rather than derivative?)

What we were after in buying records at record stores was the lifestyle embodied in them; when they disappear, as they have begun to (as this New York Times article notes), it will be harder to recapture that feeling. But then, if that feeling was important enough in the first place, the stores wouldn’t be threatened now, I guess. But I think the confusion between the supposed integrity of the product—the alleged greatness of the music itself, stripped of context—and the ephemeral nature of trying to capture a piece of a trend-driven lifestyle by shopping led customers to believe that it was worthwhile, a bargain even, to get the music without the context by downloading it online. They were confused about why they were buying music in the first place.

Only when it’s too late for record stores will customers realize what they have lost—that they don’t want a mountain of music; they want recognition for being in a certain place vis a vis the zeitgeist.

Perhaps consumers have moved on already and are purchasing their lifestyle experience from some other outlet. Music-as-identity-indicator may have ceased to be relevant to them. Perhaps henceforth, subcultures will be formed along other lines.

Where does that leave “true music fans” who profess to want music as music? When record stores are gone and perhaps replaced with subscription services, will music itself be easier to appreciate in and of itself? Or stripped of its context, will it seem emptier than ever, each song seeming even more interchangeable with all the other songs out there waiting to be downloaded. 

—Rob Horning

Yesterday in the New York Times, Paul Krugman opined that oil prices are high not because of speculation but dwindling supply: “A realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.” He’s not panicking about this, but seen in light of our looming problems with global warming, and reports of fertilizer shortages and the possibility we have maxed out our food production capacity, it makes one wonder if the developed world is ready to give some consideration to John Stuart Mill’s idea of the “stationary state,” an economy that dispenses with growth and works to achieves intensive rather than extensive gains for its populace.

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would. extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population. I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity. that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it.

In his 1976 book The Limits to Satisfaction, environmental studies professor William Leiss updates that ideal and bills it as the “conserver society” that rejects the “doctrine of the insatiability of human material needs”—a postulate of neoclassical economics—and the idea that “nonhuman nature is ... nothing but a means for human satisfaction.” (This reminds me also of Michael Pollan’s argument from a few weeks ago that we should garden to lose out “cheap-energy mind” and dreams that someday “not having things might become cooler than having them”—I am not holding my breath for that.)

According to Leiss’s diagnosis, our wasteful society emerges from a process which has systematically confused people about the nature of their needs—not by implanting false needs (as it is so tempting to argue when we see what other people are buying, or we contemplate the goods in the average 99-cent store) but by making them ever divisible and ever more ambiguous. “Each aspect of a person’s needs tends to be broken down into progressively smaller component parts, and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult for that person to integrate the components into a coherent ensemble of needs and a coherent personality structure.” We lose our moorings as needs are refined by the persuasion industry, with the consequence that “personal identity becomes a supple mold reshaped daily by the message mix.” (Thus, I am a product of my RSS feeds.) Individualtion doesn’t guide us to our particualr preferences; rather, an awareness of our individuality is itself a product of our consumer practices. Leiss argues that “the integration of the components tends to become a property of the commodities themselves”—we become reliant on consumer goods to integrate our self-concept: “The fragmentation of needs requires on the individual’s part a steadily more intensive effort to hold together his identity and personal integrity. In concrete terms this amounts to spending more and more time in consumption activities.”

Then the problems incipient in the “attention economy” come into play. It takes time to use the goods we are amassing, but time is limited. So we will be motivated to choose activities that allow us to use our goods over ones that don’t require things. We won’t want to walk in the park when we have a stack of DVDs to watch. Incidentally, This problem is exacerbated immeasurably by the ability to download massive amounts of media for “free.” Of course, it’s not free; we pay in time, which we seem ill-equippped to properly value in relation to consumption. That is economist Staffan Linder’s insight in The Harried Leisure Class, what Leiss calls a Gresham’s Law of consumption—“wants for ever greater numbers of commodities tend to depreciate all types of desires that are not dependent upon the consumption of things.” This erodes “craft knowledge” (in Leiss’s terminology) or what I think of as a kind of happiness biofeedback—we lose touch with how to use goods efficiently to satisfy ourselves and concentrate instead on simple maximization. Hence iTunes library with 10,000 songs, many unplayed. Nothing rings more true for me than this comment of Leiss’s: “The simple want for larger and larger numbers of things means that the individual must pay correspondingly less attention to the particular qualities of each want and ech thing itself. In other words, the individual must become increasingly indifferent to the fine shadings and nuances of both wants and the objects which he pursues in the search for satisfaction. (Explains a lot about pop culture, I think.) And this process of trying to achieve “increased goods intensity” (as Linder calls it) entices us to incorporate more and more gear into any activity, so that use of the gear preempts the activity itself—we go camping to make use of all our camping supplies, not because it’s fun to sleep in a tent.

Contemplating the situation we find ourselves in, Leiss sounds a lot like Al Gore before the fact: “There are some tolerance limits in the biosphere; the industrial production systems of the developed world are now testing those limits; we do not know what these limits are at present; it is unwise to continue along our present path until we reach or overshoot these limits, since by that time it may be impossible to mitigate the adverse effects or to do so only at the cost of catastrophic social disruptions.” He then suggests we might limit our economic development by extending legal rights to nonhuman life and considering the “needs of nonhuman nature,” to my mind a terrible way of putting the important concept of considering externalities and the mounting problem of environmental destruction. The phrase suggests I should care about environmentalism because the trees have feelings too, and despite what some believe about the secret life of plants, I remain skeptical. The reason it is imperative to reform our environmental practices—the only reason that can resonate universally—is the debt we owe to one another, to other humans who inevitably suffer from the damage we cause and to posterity. A tree can’t advocate for itself; only humans can do so on its behalf, and that’s when it becomes especially slippery, because who is to say that what the human advocate does is not simply on that specific human’s behalf, at the expense of other humans.

—Rob Horning

I referenced this n+1 article about the “hype cycle” in the previous post, but it’s worth, well, hyping. Mocking the odious New York magazine-style approval matrices, the author compares the fluctuating social capital of cultural goods to asset bubbles, lamenting that media hype “transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value.” In other words, we don’t judge art by its underlying fundamentals; instead we trade on their momentum. I’m skeptical that those things can be separated. The degree that pop culture is enjoyed privately isn’t going to be expressed in the public sphere, where opinions become hype because they become part of one’s identity posturing. The private enjoyment can simply be experienced; the direct pleasure of listening to a song need not be mediated to be felt. What does need mediation is the pleasure of being culturally relevant, being part of the zeitgeist or ahead of it.

So how we “use” culture depends a great deal on how we regard it contextually. Without context, there isn’t much there to consume—it’s not as though the intrinsic qualities are so deep and sophisticated. That private pleasure goes only so far, and if we were after that private pleasure alone, we’d consume something other than the culture that’s mainly relevant because it is contemporary. Rather, with pop culture, we are consuming context in object form; we are choosing to engage our times through an artifact, be part of the cultural conversation. This may be why most people don’t mind hype and, in fact, respond positively to it. Hype gives us a reason to consume, an opportunity to get something beyond the things’ intrinsic qualities. We can passively consume things that were once required activity: participation, a sense of belonging to something larger, a sense of being excited. Hype sucks primarily when you have a lot of free time to discover things to be excited about on your own—a luxury for most people who are not pop-culture connoisseurs. For everyone else, the vicarious excitement of hype is welcome—an efficient solution for not having enough leisure (or imagination) to become excited from scratch, entirely on our own.

The main use value of popular culture—what makes it popular—is its ability to signal one’s personality in the public sphere. (The n+1 article limits what one might signal through culture to the reputation of connoisseurship, but most people don’t seem to care about that. They want to belong, not be singled out as snobs.) What gives popular culture that capacity is its widespread distribution and its malleable substance, and often it’s made with that kind of negative capability in mind. It is intentionally indeterminate, or in other words, “shallow.” Hype, then, does reinforce the generic, insubstantial qualities of pop culture by expanding the base that can relate to it, creating network effects and magnifying the feelings of participation it conveys and communicating potential it has. A feedback loop is created: the shallower culture is, the more useful it is to us in the ways hype amplifies, and more hype proliferates and highlights cultural superficiality. This cycle tends to abrogate pop culture for those who want to experience it as connoisseurs (the brunt of the n+1 complaint). Hype makes us (happily, for many of us) have to consume culture as zeitgeist; it ceases to be an occasion to express our refined tastes. Instead, it liberates us from having to worry about tastes at all.

Of course, there is still public discussion of culture that is not hype, but it happens on a parallel track, only among parties that have established their bona fides with one another. Often, that means talking to oneself.

—Rob Horning

In his upcoming book, Buying In (which I plan to review more thoroughly in a few weeks), Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, discusses protest brands: brands consumers latch on to to try to flaunt to the world that they are indifferent to brands or too knowing to subscribe to them. His main example is Pabst Blue Ribbon, the lousy beer that has become a staple for a certain breed of hipsters. It’s likely that the beer’s popularity has a lot to do with its being the cheapest option in bars too cool to stock Miller or Bud, which is precisely Walker’s point—PBR seems like an alternative to the majors not because it is a substantially different product but simply because the makers don’t advertise. PBR has a vaguely authentic-seeming legacy, so its name resonates and allows consumers to attach their own sets of meanings to it while still tapping into the reach that national brands seem to have. According to this view, co-opting a brand is sort of like seizing control of a radio station or something; but really it’s a matter of consumers doing the marketing for a company that can’t afford to—this way they can broadcast their belonging to a “creative” niche. Walker argues that brand owners are doing this deliberately, masking their overt marketing efforts and instead doing “murketing” that recruits consumers in doing the meaning making for them. Since there was a void where the national message for PBR might have been, consumers were able to fill it by making the beer signify a rejection of the brands that advertise heavily. It’s one way of rejecting the fog of hype we live in (as this n+1 essay details) without simultaneously foreclosing the chance to participate in our culture—which is made up primarily of brands and whatnot. Of course, the protest brands are parasitic and derive their resonance from the mainstream brands; thus, protest brands are a kind of extension of the mainstream brands and don’t really do much to undermine their strength.

Having once experimented with smoking moribund brands of cigarette (Tareytons, L&Ms, Larks), I could relate to this, though eventually I became a Marlboro smoker (in the soft pack only; still needed some distinction) before I quit. And when I read this BusinessWeek article about Li Ning, a fledging Chinese athletic-shoe brand, I had a twinge of the same feeling that had me smoking Tareytons. Athletic shoes are much like beer and cigarettes in that for all the supposed qualities that separate the various makes, they are, for most ordinary consumers, indistinguishable beyond the branding. So they are a fertile field for a nascent protest brand, as no one will get confused and think you chose the protest brand because its goods are of superior quality.

The important thing for a would-be protest brand is to be a brand with some scope—it needs to be recognizable on a broad scale in order to bear the message. That’s why identity-conscious anti-brand folk seem to find it insufficient to protest brands by simply using nonbranded goods. There needs to be an idea, a focal point—a name, a logo—around which a community can coalesce, something others can copy (or maybe just something we could imagine others registering and possibly copying if they thought we were cool) when they understand and appreciate the message a person has used a brand to communicate and want to send the same message about themselves. The unavoidable presence of advertising and brands in the public sphere make us feel deeply that brands are part of an internationally recognized language of self-fashioning that we need to be speaking. Otherwise our identity-making gestures will likely go unheard, and alternatives for garnering public recognition—for publicly communicating a sense of ourselves—are not so obvious as brands.

So consider Li Ning’s logo:

Looks pretty familiar, doesn’t it. This blunt, clumsy appropriation for me signals that the company is not trying too hard to be original, that it knows it will be seen as a copy-cat and basically doesn’t care. It hasn’t made a fetish of its own fictitious independence from the brands that already exist.

Li Ning makes no bones about admiring its bigger rivals. Its gleaming corporate campus near Beijing, complete with indoor swimming pool, basketball courts, and a climbing wall, seems like a page out of Nike’s play book. Ads feature the slogan “Anything is Possible” (which the company launched before Adidas came out with “Impossible is Nothing,” but long after Nike’s “Just Do It"). And its logo is strikingly similar to the Nike Swoosh. “They just dusted off a Nike marketing plan, took bits and pieces, and said, “Voilà!’” says Terry Rhoads, a former Nike China executive who runs Shanghai sports consultancy Zou Marketing.

The article calls Li Ning a paper-tiger brand, because it is trying to use the Olympics and non-Chinese endorsees to foster the illusion that the brand has greater international reach than it actually does to appeal its national market. It wants the same credibility Nike has in the eyes of its domestic market.

But these same moves may give it a reverse appeal internationally. The aura of not caring about aping established brands seems a good one for a protest brand, which after all is supposed to allow its consumers to demonstrate a knowing superiority (that verges on irony) to the desperate cool seeking of straightforward brands. Openly proclaiming “We’re a lame knockoff” somehow mitigates the fact of being a lame knockoff. Wearing the lame knockoff brand proudly has a similar effect with regard to the identity one is trying to display: “I don’t care what people think of me. I am going to wear these shoes that say just how little I care.” Or “I don’t need to try that hard to distinguish myself with brands. I’m going to take this lame brand and invest it with my credibility.” And wearing Li Ning serves the fundamental purpose of saying, “I resist and reject all the marketing of the big athletic-apparel companies. I don’t need their cachet to feel good about my sneakers.”

At the same time, Li Ning is obscure and novel enough to make its wearers seem exotic. At this point the brand’s consumers can feel like innovators, discoverers rather than followers. You can’t wear Nike without feeling somewhat like a follower, unless you are doing some counterintuitive rationalizing. In order to wear Nike in a hip anti sort of way, you must make the case to yourself that its ubiquity has made it invisible. You can signal an indifference to brands by selecting the überbrands, trying to suggest a laziness that led you to pick the most widely available option.

—Rob Horning

This paper by Anders Albrechtslund elucidates some of the ideas I was trying to get in my post about Peyton Place a few days ago. Called “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillence” it flies in the face of ordinary English usage and tries to spin the word surveillence as having potentially non-pejorative connotations, and he explores the “positive aspects of being under surveillance”. Chief among these, in his view, is subjectivity building through “empowering exhibitionism.”

Surveillance practice can be part of the building of subjectivity and of making sense in the lifeworld. An illustrative example is Hille Koskela’s (2004) discussion of the use of webcams, TV shows and mobile phones. She introduces the concept empowering exhibitionism to describe the practice of revealing your (very) personal life. By exhibiting their lives, people claim “copyright” to their own lives, as they engage in the self–construction of identity. This reverts the vertical power relation, as visibility becomes a tool of power that can be used to rebel against the shame associated with not being private about certain things. Thus, exhibitionism is liberating, because it represents a refusal to be humble.

This echoes a point I was trying to make about Peyton Place and how it models the transformation of gossip into entertainment. Rather than being ashamed about what people in your small town are whispering about you, print it for the world to read and revel in your celebrity-like notoriety. Individuality, identity, subjectivty—call it what you will, but it is not a natural state, but a process that requires social interaction and recognition of a particular sort. Althusser call it ideology and attributed to a society’s institutions. So perhaps it is enough to see social networks as a kind of ideological state apparatus, another tool with which subjectivity is constituted within ideology, weaving the consumption of technology right into the core of one’s identity.

“Participatory surveillance” is presumably a good thing because by volunteering to be watched, you appear to seize control over its effects. If someone peers through your window and sees you do something, it could be embarrassing. You might have to live in fear that someone might be looking in. But if you open the shade intentionally and make your private life a performace, whether or not someone is watching is nothing to be afraid of. Or rather, it causes a different fear, that not as many people are watching who might be. There is an irresistible urge that sets in to scale up one’s identity, since the tools exist to do so and to measure how large one becomes online—to track how many friends one has and how many page views one gets.

Albrectslund seems to imply that social networks allow us to escape merely existing in the panopticon of modern society passively, instead affording an opportunity to dictate how we will be watched and what sort of identity will result. This seems mistaken to me; the illusion of control masks the discipline, and participants don’t necessarily think through the implications of so much publicity, lulled as they are by the apparent power they feel in expressing themselves and in broadcasting it to a potentially limitless audience. But even if you elect to be poured into a mold, you can’t then take credit for the shape you are then frozen into. It would be akin to the citizens of Peyton Place reveling in their notoriety once their local shame became a matter of national delectation. But, one might protest, the identities constructed online in social networks need not be shameful, as the gossip that made the characters of Peyton Place “interesting.” Perhaps not, but the potentially huge scale of online friendship seems to lead people to turn to the lowest common denominator to appeal to others online and build their friend network. They learn what that lowest common denominator might be from Peyton Place‘s successors; the forms of gossip in the media that teach us what sort of things—invariably scandalous—make private lives more broadly interesting to people in general, who would otherwise have no connection to these lives now up for consumption as entertainment. That’s perhaps what drives people to post naked pictures and tell embarrassing stories about themselves and that sort of thing. Such is much more likely to become the substance of “friendship” when it is no longer conducted on a local, face-to-face scale.

Albrechtsund notes that “participatory surveillance is a way of maintaining friendships by checking up on information other people share. Such a friendship might seem shallow, but it is a convenient way of keeping in touch with a large circle of friends, which can be more difficult to handle offline without updated personal information – untold and unasked.” That is, it seems a means of negating deeper, local friendships in favor of a shallow and more extensive network of friends mediated online through a proprietary system that can be use to disseminate messages—ads and such—having nothing to do with the “friendships” maintained there but coming to be ingrained in their substance—the marketing space becomes the same space in which friendships exist. Whether that is all that different from our ad-saturated lives in the real world is another question.

—Rob Horning