Anthropologist Grant McCracken points to this New York Times article by David Carr about former Us Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller and makes an interesting point about the ideological effects of the celebrity-gossip tabloid Fuller pioneered.

The [article’s] most illuminated observation comes from Janice Min…. Here’s how Min explains Fuller’s success. “She is able to almost distill the id of the reader.  She channels them in a way few others do, and what she heard is: ‘I don’t care about your acting method in your last movie. I just want to know what workout you used to get that fabulous body.’ “
This suggests that there has been a shift in the celebrity culture, a movement from admiration to imitation. Fans now treat the star less as a god and more as a set of transformational pointers. Celebrities by this reckoning are better than us but not different from us.
This is a very big change. Among other things, it marks the democratization of celebrity and the rise of a culture in which everyone imagines themselves a star, or at least transform themselves with a star’s effort and care.

 
This seems right. We don’t particularly admire the celebrities in these gossip magazines at all; they are more like mirrors for our self-admiration.

The essence of Us always seemed to me to be the “Stars—they’re just like us!” page, which sets up the rest of the magazine, which is advice couched as gossip. And it helps explain why the people famous for doing nothing—Paris Hilton, for example—are the magazines’ prime attractions. These are the people who invite the strongest identification in readers, the most vicarious appeal, because their lack of talent seems to confirm our own fantasies of becoming famous merely for existing. In a society in which there is a lot of attention apparently waiting to be spent, it’s not such a far-fetched dream.

What’s strange is that people now seem to believe that it is better, more significant, to have fame than talent. A species of anti-intellectualism seems to be at work. Talented people stand out from the mass, marking themselves as de facto elitists. The merely famous, though, give hope to us all.

—Rob Horning

In a post from a few days ago, I wondered whether the automated friend-matching component of social networks would eradicate the more spontaneous and seemingly irrational friendships that sometimes spring up unexpectedly in real life. A recent German study detailed here (link via Rob Walker) seems pertinent to this question.

One year after they met for the first time, 52 college freshmen were asked to rate their relationships with each other. By a significant margin, the first relationships they made were often the closest.
“In a nutshell, people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number,” conclude the authors.

Maybe it would be a good thing if Facebook randomly dropped total strangers on your “People You May Know” page and urge you to invite them to become your friend. Maybe the resulting friendship will seem cosmic and meant to be, and Facebook could then recede into the heavens as a kind of divine intelligence.

Anyway, the study suggests that attempts to rationalize friendships in advance may fail to capture what makes friendships work, which may in part be an ineffable spirit of coincidence, hanging over and enchanting everything the friends do together. And even more so, a feeling that the friendship is authentic precisely because there is no good reason for it and no calculation went into it.

—Rob Horning

That we measure consumer confidence and sentiment and report the figures with great portentousness has always troubled me. It’s not just the unsettling implication that the intention to consume more is inherently good, and a positive sign for all of us—though that has certainly contributed to the wasteful, throwaway economy we currently enjoy, in which sensibly reusing goods registers as damage to the economic picture. But is there really something all that relevant in how people feel about spending their money? Shouldn’t we stick to the data about what they are actually doing? Surveys seem an especially dubious way to get at the truth, given that people routinely exaggerate or misrepresent their behavior when they are put in the spotlight and are taken seriously for once. But the scrutiny to which economists and policymakers subject these figures is enough to lead one to suspect that the economy runs on nothing but optimism—that what is produced and sold is in a way secondary or even beside the point. What’s scary is that this might be true.

Yesterday in the FT Wolfgang Münchau mentioned (and dismissed) the possibility that the world economy has reached what is known as a Minsky moment.

Hyman Minsky, the 20th century US economist, formulated the long forgotten, and recently rediscovered, financial instability hypothesis, according to which capitalist economies, after a long period of prosperity, end up in a vicious circle of financial speculation. The Minsky moment is the point when what economists call this “Ponzi game” collapses.

The WSJ‘s Justin Lahart offered this more specific explanation last year:

At its core, the Minsky view was straightforward: When times are good, investors take on risk; the longer times stay good, the more risk they take on, until they’ve taken on too much. Eventually, they reach a point where the cash generated by their assets no longer is sufficient to pay off the mountains of debt they took on to acquire them. Losses on such speculative assets prompt lenders to call in their loans. “This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values,” Mr. Minsky wrote. When investors are forced to sell even their less-speculative positions to make good on their loans, markets spiral lower and create a severe demand for cash [that can force central bankers to lend a hand]. At that point, the Minsky moment has arrived.

In other words, risky assets are sold along a chain of investors, with each investor confident they will be able to sell the asset along to a bigger sucker and take profits in the process. Eventually, though, investors run out of suckers, the accumulated debt engenders fire sales and spiraling depreciation, and central banks are forced to become suckers of last resort. Vox EU’s compendium of analyses of the subprime crisis offers this description the logic leading to a Minsky moment: it “starts with unrealistically high asset prices and buildups of leverage based on momentum effects, myopic expectations and widespread overleveraging of consumers and firms.” Myopic expectations seems a good way to describe what surveys about consumer sentiment and confidence are likely to record, no matter how far in the future the time period is that the people surveyed are supposed to prognosticate about. It seems possible that such surveys have the effect of fostering myopic expectations, generating a seemingly statistical and sound basis for such optimistic feelings (that is, while the Minsky moment is building). The consumer opinion measures are trailing indicators that often are passed off as leading indicators, so they incubate optimism even when people are starting to wonder where the next sucker is. Such surveys are not passive gauges but are actively constructing the sort of sentiment it seeks to measure by the momentum of its own periodicity and the assumptions built into the questions, that consumerism is rational and reflective rather than impulsive with motives poorly understood even by those caught up in them.

What precipitates a Minsky moment is some vague awareness that things can’t go on forever, but it’s not clear what triggers it. John Cassidy notes in this New Yorker essay about Minsky moments that “the onset of panic is usually heralded by a dramatic effect,” but that is to say it’s only apparent after the fact. The inevitable end seems a problem for game theory: Tyler Cowen linked yesterday to an excerpt from Richard Tuck’s new book, Free Riding, which aims to make the case that individual action is meaningful even when the difference it makes seems indiscernible. In the excerpt, he looks at the prisoner’s dilemma and notes that cooperation among participants can develop as long as no one believes the end of the game is near:

There is now a large literature examining the possible strategies which can arise in repeated games of this sort. An obvious one, which is the subject of a whole book by Robert Axelrod, is ‘tit for tat’: if you defect from our common enterprise and make me suffer, next time round I will defect and make you suffer, and so on until we end up co-operating. This is also in effect what has been suggested by modern economists as the correct strategy for firms under oligopolistic conditions. Of course, if we know the games are going to end at a determinate point, tit for tat ceases to make sense as a strategy as the last round approaches, though precisely where it ceases has been a matter for debate. Strictly speaking, prior knowledge of where the sequence of games will end ought to dictate non-co-operation in every round.

If the consumer-driven economy is one big prisoner’s dilemma—one in which it makes sense to extend credit only if you suspend what seems to be your dominant strategy—then it’s imperative that the end of the game never seems near and that continuing the game almost becomes more important than winning it. Only the players are playing to win, not merely to play—though merely playing may be analogous with the inherent benefits of living in a prosperous society. (In other words, there aren’t consumer-confidence surveys in Zimbabwe.) But the cooperation in this case becomes a kind of momentum-driven speculative mania, with each tit-for-tat raising the overall stakes and leaving a residual of mounting risk. Eventually this risk appears to outweigh the gains of cooperation—even the circumscribed ones presumed by accepting implicit cooperation as a strategy. “At some point,” Tuck writes, “the players will decide that the end is close enough to abandon this strategy and move to full non-cooperation.” This is the point at which they no longer fear reprisals from the other participants, where they see trust as a scam, possibly because they see their own trustworthiness as dubious.

Consider this story from today’s FT, which begins:

Credit rating agencies failed to properly manage conflicts of interest in assigning top ratings to bonds backed by subprime mortgages and other assets, the Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded.

And this story, in which Gillian Tett notes, “Few bankers want to hear dissent about the models when they are enjoying a profit bonanza. Greed is what drives much of the modern financial world—combined with fear of getting sacked.” Greed and fear, however, seem to be motives pulling the economy in opposite directions; their tension supplies the dialectic that may have the economy careening from bubble to bubble, from Minsky moment to Minsky moment. Or it might allow, in Münchau’s phrase, for “Minsky’s moment to become an eternity.”

—Rob Horning

I came across some notes I had made probably years ago about what struck me as the antisocial essence of computers. I think the notes were prompted by the first time I saw people in an office who were sitting 15 feet from one another communicating by instant message instead of talking. I thought then that putting computers on every worker’s desk reduces solidarity and encourages each person to seek their own distractions, their own entertainment. People become absorbed with their screens even when they aren’t working, and it becomes more difficult to distract them with the mere pleasantries that nurture social connections, that allow acquaintanceship to flourish. The personal computer reinforces a kind of extreme individualism by promoting the sense that you are the ruler of a virtual world and that every aspect of that world can and should be customized and personalized for your convenience. It is a realm that negates the need for cooperation, patience, conciliation, consideration—anything that requires a moment’s reflection or a temporary suspension of desire.

Social networking, despite its apparent goal of bringing people together, fortifies that private kingdom. It places friendship under the value system encouraged by computing, becoming a practice to indulge in only on one’s own term. It becomes measurable, and it is expected to dole out blasts of immediate gratification that may seem reciprocal on its face (I send a message, and then receive one back) but is better described as instrumental exchange—one clicks the right buttons to get the desired response, like solving a kind of puzzle, while the complexity of the human beings on the other side of these exchanges becomes muted if not nullified altogether. It certainly becomes irrelevant to the way a platform like Facebook mediates and manages social contact. There is a preordained shape for social contact to assume—a series of commands to make a game of Scrabble happen, an algorithm that suggests who you should try to befriend, a log to remind you of what significant things have happened so that you don’t have to bother to remember to ask or to share.

One of the most unsettling aspects of Facebook is those suggested friends; it’s as if the site aspires to replace the spontaneous accidents that foster friendship in real life with something mechanical and logical (and simultaneously contributing to the relegation and diminishing of social skills necessary for making friends offline). But there is not always a coherent logic to why we are friends with who we are friends with. Sometimes the sheer pointlessness of carrying on certain friendships is what makes them so salient—it is like art for art’s sake. These friendships feel the most authentic and perhaps bring out what we would recognize as our most authentic selves. But in providing tools to manage our sociability, social networks seem to aspire to control the concept, redefine it in such a way that it may be more thoroughly exploited commercially. (It may be axiomatic that anytime an activity becomes virtual—moved online—it becomes more commercialized.) The online tools supplant the social skills that were once part of our human heritage; it seems like a dangerous evolution in a world that requires some level of cooperation for our species to survive. Can online mass participation, each on their own terms, replace actual directed cooperation to accomplish tasks and negotiate necessary compromises? Or will we become disaggregated atoms, longing for a connection to a society but capable only of the ersatz online alternative, which requires too little commitment and demands none of the reciprocity that makes ties bind?

Social encounters are often awkward and vaguely dangerous; on Facebook, I’d imagine that they are rarely so. So it would probably be easier to handle a friend request from someone in your office than a face-to-face encounter with them by the microwave at lunchtime. So one of social networking’s boons is removing some of the uncertainty that comes with social contact and thereby mitigating social anxiety. But it does this by making that contact more or less antisocial—it makes it an on-demand phenomenon that is essentially one-sided for the friendship consumer. You log on when you feel like it, take in as much friendship as you feel like taking in, and log off when it no longer amuses you. You can ignore the contacts that aren’t important to you, or mollify them with cursory or perfunctory attentions that the site more or less automates. As a byproduct of all this convenience, actual friendship begins to feel more onerous, which accelerates the trend toward moving all of our friend maintenance online, where it is more easily managed. Better to send an email than talk on the phone; better to update a website than communicate to all the firends individually. Better to “poke” a friend than share anything substantive, etc. Sociality becomes akin to snacking. The moments upon which deeper friendships are built are not given the occasion to occur—soon nothing will be able to happen in a friendship that wouldn’t fit into a Twitter post.

But in some ways it’s unfair to pick on social networks; they are just highlighting tendencies inherent to the internet as a whole; the services are just the most obvious vectors for making human interaction obey the logic that manages computer networks. (Facebook is like a router for human relationships that have devolved into networks.) I think Jason Kottke is right about Facebook: it’s the new AOL—that is, it attempts to present its users with a scaled down, simplified, seemingly more mangaeable version of what the internet itself provides. Kottke writes: “As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.”

—Rob Horning

Since I switched to Google Reader, I’ve gotten into the habit, as I’m blasting through all the blogs I subscribe to via RSS, of starring items that I want to think about more later, and perhaps even write about. Of course, I almost never refer back to these starred items, because there is a nonstop flow of new items in my Reader I’m always trying to keep pace with. Instead they linger there, with my act of starring them standing in for the promised deeper thought that never occurs. Before Google Reader, I’d tag items in del.icio.us and send them to bookmark purgatory. And I’d do a lot of thinking about what I was calling the bookmark effect, which I first noticed when studying for exams. I became aware of how underlining something or scrawling a note in the margin of a book was very gratifying, and how if I wasn’t doing that, I felt like I wasn’t really studying or learning anything. This was true even though the underlining was replacing thought—it was as if I were acknowledging that someone else thought something perceptive, and it was sufficient for me to let that person be a proxy for my own thinking. The underlining was an act of appropriation, a way of buying and consuming the perceptive thought without having to think through it or extend it or integrate—that work was left for some time later. (That time has not yet come, and I still have many of the annotated tomes to prove it.) The decision to underline was akin to a purchasing decision—did I “buy” that idea? And this process commodified my reading for me, which gave me an elusive feeling of mastery over it, even as the reading lists continued to extend themselves.

Now, as technology has advanced, bookmarking an interesting post or article (or starring it) has supplanted underlining, etc. It’s still a way for me to dispatch interesting ideas without having to deal with them any more deeply—I just add them to the collection, and take comfort that it is there, forever fresh in my starred items list. It’s not all that different from buying books in lieu of reading them. The bookmarking/starring gesture allows me to consume in the present moment the thinking I pretend I’ll do later, which is an extremely gratifying feeling, particularly if I wisely avoid ever consulting my bookmarks later on. If I make that mistake, though, I feel nothing but shame for my laziness, and despair when the deferred overwhelmingness of it all hits me like a furnace blast.

At some point I’ll need to do a link dump of all that stuff, sort through it and see if still recognize the potential I once saw there. But still the urge to avoid is strong; the ideas seem more potent as unrealized potential. Sorting through them would be like cleaning out my closet; I’d be forced to get rid of stuff that I may never use but that still somehow comforts me to possess.

—Rob Horning

In his essay about the Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes seems somewhat dazzled by its singularity, but part of what he says about it seems true not just of the tower but of much of totemic goods circulated in our consumerist economy.  Barthes points out the essential uselessness of the tower, which makes it a “pure signifier, i.e., a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history).” The key to its usefulness as a signifier is its functional pointlessness. “In order to satisfy this great oneiric function, which makes it into a kind of total monument, the Tower must escape reason.” In this, it resembles our advertising discourse, which is increasingly desgined to achieve our blithe acceptance of illogic as a matter of course and is likewise aspiring to the level of “total monument”—its monolithic presence and fluid adaptability offers everyone a reason to become wrapped up in it. Barthes continues, “The first condition of this victorious flight is that the Tower be an utterly useless monument.” But since we are under the illusion that ours is a pragmatic, rational culture, we are scandalized by this apparent lack of function, so, as Barthes points out, we supply alibis enumerating its usefulness to science and engineering. These are “quite ridiculous” since they “are nothing in comparison to the great imaginary function which enables men to be strictly human.” 

It seems to me that what Barthes is saying about the Eiffel Tower is very similar to what Rob Walker argues about various brands in Buying In. Hello Kitty and Red Bull are gloriously meaningless in and of themselves, which make them adaptable to whatever personal uses we want to put them to in order to conjure our identity into being through the language of goods—before this articulation identity remains notional and inchoate, something we can’t define or prove. Once we make our identity manifest in the goods, we need to broadcast our ownership of the goods to make the identity functional in the social sphere. So the Eiffel Tower is not useless, it’s just that its purported use masks its real one, the same way that Red Bull (or Coca Cola for that matter) pretends to be a beverage while truly offering us a malleable symbol—a lifestyle or personality building-block. What’s more, if Barthes is right, the prevalence of these symbols is not a blight but the essence of our humanity, that which “enables men to be strictly human.” One wonders if there are any alternatives to the commercial brands for the sort of symbols that can be at once deeply personal and near-universally recognizable—through which, as Barthes describes the Eiffel Tower, “one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world.”

From what repository did such symbols come from in the past, before consumerism? Were people simply human in a different, more circumscribed way? Would we want to return to it, even if we could?

—Rob Horning