Christopher Shea linked to this post at the Awl, in which Tom Scocca threw up all over Mark Greif’s earnest look in n+1 at sexual freedom as a way out of capitalism’s confinements. Greif writes,

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

Scocca’s retort to this sort of sentiment: “What is this CUDDLE-PUDDLE BULLSHIT?”

Though Scocca is taking a deliberately obtuse and unsympathetic tack to squeeze out a few laughs at Greif’s expense, this is a fair question. Greif is polemicizing about “repressive sentimentalism” but puts forward his own sort of sentimentalized absolute—sex for pleasure. (What David Brent celebrates as Free Love on the Free Love Freeway.) Greif’s interpretation of domination as repression ignores Foucault’s arguments about the political uses of pleasure. I’m tempted to call this move repressive tolerance, though that doesn’t quite fit. Actually, Greif is arguing that gay-marriage rights are a form of repressive tolerance, masking the underlying domestic system of oppression. Power, however, can work through permissions as well as through prohibitions in the sexual sphere as well. One can end up in the trap of competing to see who can become the most liberated, a competition that suits consumerism—which aids this pursuit with a variety of lifestyle accouterments—just fine.

Greif’s take on free love is grounded in an essentialized version of libido:

Yet you have to stick with sex, as a utopian—even when you’re not a particularly lubricious person yourself.
You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies.

The amount of qualifications Greif has already had to put in that proposition is a clue that it’s pretty dubious. I’m reluctant to agree that a sexual relation is “a deep intuitive process.” It seems more a labile, tentatively constructed thing, highly normative as opposed to instinctual. I’m totally with Greif that marriage supports patriarchal arrangements regardless of the gender of those marrying, and that a radical restructuring of society would require a drastic reordering of domesticity. (Laura Kipnis makes a similar argument in Against Love.) But free-love utopianism feels like a short-circuiting of the sort of theorizing necessary to address the problem, which is ultimately one of who performs the socially necessary emotion work. Sex is great and all, but it is not the only “authentic” form of pleasure. To regard sexual relations as directly given to our consciousness is to submit to a fantasy about sex’s pure spontaneity, the final destination in the quest for an unmediated private and personal relation, independent of society.

But sexual desire is far from “universal” in its expression. The sexual relation is not necessarily economic in nature, but that doesn’t it mean it pre-exists economic relations or is capable of purifying them or that it is automatically egalitarian. Sex doesn’t inherently make you “love people.” That claim reimports the sentimental cant about love that he began by wanting to banish. Also, “Sex without consequences” is not really possible because all actions have consequences. Ruling out one particular set of consequences does not mean there are none at all. It seems morally foolish to posit as the ideal the ability to act without consequences—not to go all existential, but that makes for a freedom that is inherently meaningless. Acting in the world is the self’s pursuit of responsibility, but advocating the pursuit of pleasure “without consequences” as model behavior seems like a wish to abdicate it in the search for oblivion.

It seems to me Greif is more on the right track when he talks about the seductiveness of the existing system of marriage:

Domination depends rather on the beauty of sex with consequences, the pleasure of sex with consequences, to guarantee commitment to the family-centered fold. Women’s straight desire and wish for love and pleasure is the thing that’s supposed to seduce women back into the system of inequality—a beautiful inequality mentally structured by childbearing and the determination of your life course by the consequences of desire. It is beautiful, in its way; as oriental despotism was beautiful, too. You must give something up to leave the system—or else the system is revealed as naked and weak. Thus feminism always needs to be pictured publicly as sexless, man-hating, or just manless—not to mention babyless—or it would become appealing. (Indeed, baby love may furnish the greater lifetime erotic satisfaction for straight women, on the traditional system.) If desire fails to pull people back into patriarchy, patriarchy’s arsenal is diminished.

Yes. It seems that feminism needs to reach a point where it need not be deliberately “represented” at all—a point at which it so thoroughly saturates our values that the fact that someone is a “feminist” wouldn’t jump out at us. In other words, it needs to cease to be an identity and simply be a practice.

Chris Dillow linked to a paper that takes an entirely different approach to marriage.

I’m intrigued by this new paper on the economics of marriage by Gilles Saint-Paul.
He begins from the premise that the gains from marriage arise from innate biological differences between men and women - that men can have loads of children, but don‘t know which ones are theirs, whilst women cannot. Given this, marriage is a potentially mutually beneficial trade. Men get to know which children are theirs, which is utility-enhancing if they care about the human capital of their offspring. And women get someone to help (if only financially) with child-raising.

This, in Dillow’s interpretation, means that “repression of women’s sexuality operates to the benefit of second-rate men. If women were free to shag around, they’d only go with the best men and ignore lower-quality ones. Repression and marriage thus give second-rate blokes a chance.” When women pursue “sex without consequences,” by this reasoning, they curtail the possibility for sexual liberation for those average men who won’t find willing partners. That sounds a lot like the “nice guy syndrome.” Here’s a definition from the Urban Dictionary:

A annoying mental condition in which a heterosexual man concocts oversimplified ideas why women aren’t flocking to him in droves. Typically this male will whine and complain about how women never want to date him because he is “too nice” or that he is average in appearance. He often targets a woman who is already in a relationship; misrepresenting his intentions of wanting to be her friend and having the expectation that he is owed more than friendship because he is such a good listener. He is prone to brooding over this and passive aggressive behavior.
He is too stupid to realize the reason women don’t find him attractive is because he feels sorry for himself; he concludes that women like to be treated like shit.

 
As Greif notes, Houellebecq’s novels are about this problem—free love becomes institutionalized, yet “nice guys” find themselves under more pressure than ever to use prostitutes in order to get in on the action. Maybe Greif in his essay is trying to find a way to circumvent nice guyism without giving way to Tucker Max-ism, intellectualizing what is easily reduced to an alpha-male evolutionary premise in order to redeem it, dignify it, preserve it as “hopeful.” But as anyone who has seen the preview for Tucker Max’s movie knows, there is no hope for humanity.

—Rob Horning

Metafilter linked to this interview with Andrea Natella, director of Guerrigliamarketing.it, which (I think) pursues culture jamming under the auspices of being an advertising agency. The translation isn’t great, but as far as I can tell, the idea behind this is either that ads have become their opposite, or that resistance to ads has become a latter-day form of advertising in itself. (I prefer the far more cynical second interpretation.) In Natella’s own words: “Guerrigliamarketing.it was born out of a bet. Is it possible to imagine modalities of radical participation on the universe of brands and at the same time present oneself as an advertising agency? Is it possible for the professionals of communication not to give up their own political ideas in carrying out their job?”

What happens when you make “resistance to marketing” your brand? Is that some sort of parallax approach to advertising? Can you converse in the discourse of brands without tacitly endorsing it? Doing Wacky Package-style art seems to vindicate the power of brands rather than subvert it. I guess I am skeptical of the whole “culture jamming” concept, which seems less like Situationist detournement than borderline-cruel pranksterism (sort of like Improv Everywhere). I know it is supposed to “make us think”, but culture jamming often ends up mocking the consumers it purportedly wants to win over.

It strikes me that a strategy of less clever nuisances might be more effective in slowing the juggernaut of thoughtless consumption. When an effort is made to mitigate the inconvenience that inevitably arises from monkeying with the retail market with what can be taken as hipster humor, it alienates the discomfited even further. That makes the subversion of culture jamming into advertising a weird sort of dialectic that ends up vindicating consumers, if you believe Natella, anyway: “What we try to do is to increase the awareness that true value is produced by the consumers.” This is a familiar theme in cultural studies, that consuming culture is an underappreciated form of production—users innovate new techniques to use things, and produce signs and cultural capital with regard to what cultural goods mean. But that doesn’t mean marketing is ultimately benign; it just suggests that its modality is depressingly easy for laypeople to adopt. The value we produce is often something that marketers most appreciate; it is our doing their job for them. So while Natella touts the more obvious capacity of guerrilla marketing to be confrontational—“We made people think that in order to sell a company [the agency] is ready to do anything, also on the border of illegality. We tried to confuse these borders”—the more radical implication is that we are all being drafted as guerrilla-marketing recruits without especially realizing it. Marketing has so saturated culture —with people adopting the discourse of branding, with online activity being tracked and parsed by companies to serve ads, with people embracing hype as a conversational strategy, and so on—that we produce ads simply by virtue of living our lives.

(Incidentally, do not follow the link to thisman.org. It will haunt your nightmares.)

—Rob Horning

Matt Yglesias noted the other day that no one but pundits watches cable news.

Just like traders have CNBC and Bloomberg on in their offices, political operatives are constantly tuned in to what’s happening on cable news. The result is a really bizarre hothouse scenario in which people are basically watching . . . well . . . nothing, but they’re riveted to it. How things “play” on cable news is considered fairly important even though no persuadable voters are watching it. And cable news’ hyper-agitated style starts to infect everyone’s frame of mind, making it extremely difficult for everyone to forget that the networks have huge incentives to massively and systematically overstate the significance of everything that happens.

You’d think it would be sensible if they all simply stopped watching, since hyper-agitation is in no policymaker’s best interest and it leads to superfluous and counterproductive commentary. With not enough organically occurring news to fill 24 hours, the news channels are becoming ongoing emotional barometers instead, but they are tuned only to themselves. They try to make news themselves with a variety of cooked-up debates and pseudoevents and that sort of thing, reporting on the import of their own reports—nothing new, as Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image demonstrates. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that if you don’t watch TV news at all, you are better informed than those who do, even if you are completely ignorant. (At least then you are capable of a genuine response to something that you learn about.) The recursive meta-news that makes up cable news regarding what’s being talked and talked about on cable news just seems like information pollution.

Like Kevin Drum, I get virtually all of my news from online versions of newspapers and from blogs. I’m skeptical of TV news generally because I don’t like emotional presentations of news or pretentious newsreaders or phony objectivity (as though the choice of presenting a story isn’t subjective) or the oversimplification. Most “news” strikes me as attempts to regulate my mood—build my confidence in the government or the economy or undermine it, bludgeon me with scare tactics (“What item in your closet is slowly poisoning your infant? News at 11”) or feed me “human-interest” stories to, as Stewie Griffin might say, “make me smile.” Am I just weird in that I want news as neutral and unengaging as possible, that puts me in a state of suspended emotionality? I miss the old Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, this interview at Boing Boing with a health news watchdog, journalist Gary Schwitzer, whose organization gave up on trying to critique TV health stories, offers some perspective.

In the early days of CNN, we had this tremendous, exciting opportunity. The channel could be place to go in-depth with background and be analytical and contextual. But then the management side swung the other way and preferred to be the wire service of the air—take anything happening anywhere and report it with a quick turnaround.

If cable news simply was a wire service, that would not be so terrible, but when you pit three commercial would-be wire services against one another, we see what happens—noise.

—Rob Horning

I have a post up at Generation Bubble about embedded social relations, prompted by Oliver Williamson’s winning the Nobel prize in economics. WIlliamson’s main field is transaction-cost economics—looking at frictions in economic exchanges that in his view shape the structure firms must assume to accomplish varying purposes. In the post I draw heavily on a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter that emphasizes the dialectical nature of social relations—they are always in process, thus they are difficult to pin down in the mathematical formulas preferred by neoclassical economists. I wanted to use that idea as a jumping off point for speculating about the ways neoclassical economics puts forward as an ideal the possibility of exchanges unhindered by social relations, depicting the absence of social ties as the essence of true freedom. This reverses the apparent human instinct for sociality, yet seems to have a tenacious hold on capitalist society, if you accept that the fetishization of convenience is a product of perfect-markets ideology.

In the process I threw out a stray thought about the necessity of regulation and the problem of finding trustworthy regulators (a primary concern of the other new Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, who is known for her studies of “tragedy of the commons” problems and various self-regulating systems of resource management): Regulation is not a matter of preventing corruption but providing a conduit for predictable corruption at a socially tolerable level. Regulatory agencies serve as clustering points around which a density of social relations can build up, and through which power can be exerted to calibrate the level of exchanges that are seen as unjust.

Anyway, Felix Salmon’s point in this post about smart bankers seemed apropos:

Banking isn’t for outright dummies — conscientious underwriting, for one, is a difficult and highly-skilled job which requires good, well-paid professionals. But far too many bankers thought of that kind of income as boring money, and were much more excited by the higher rewards and sophisticated risk management being shown them by the rocket scientists on the structured-products desk. Maybe in future they’ll be more suspicious of things they don’t really understand, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s what regulators are for.

Salmon’s hope, it seems, is that future financial regulators will both understand thoroughly the complex structures banks invent often to shroud risk and at same time won’t be seduced by their understanding to want to profit by it but will instead work to rein in and discipline the intelligent and ambitious people they must square off against. But financial complexity may work as a subtle form of regulatory capture; it supplies a rarefied meeting place where regulators and bankers can collude, with the hubris of wielding formulas and structures that few can understand working to override whatever generalized morality and adherence to duty that might have restrained them. (Arnold Kling suggests something similar—a “Kool-aid factor” that has regulators buying into financial-engineer hype.)

In the banking world, we’ve learned in the past year, the mastery of complex ideas is regarded as an automatic justification for personal enrichment, regardless of whether that complexity served any useful social purpose, even when that complexity becomes an elaborate ruse to overcome investor wariness. Complexity, as Salmon’s post details, ends up confusing everyone, and rather than match money with sound projects, bankers end up in a game of secrets and lies and off-balance-sheet shadiness.

So regulators overseeing complex entities may be more at risk to use their position to obfuscate rather than disseminate information. A point Steve Randy Waldman made in this post, however complicates that hypothesis a bit:

Information is a behavioral attribute, not an attribute of the external phenomena to which it may ostensibly refer. To say that an agent is informed means she behaves differently than an uninformed agent. Her behavior is less random, more predictable. To be informed does not imply one’s information is accurate. (In general, accuracy is unknowable, both ex ante and ex post.) Information increases the volatility of outcomes, because it provokes larger and more concentrated bets than uncertain agents would take, creating large gains and losses depending on how adaptive the informed behavior turns out to be. It is often better, as a behavioral matter, to be uninformed than to be poorly informed.
But we do not always have the option of remaining uninformed. We cannot afford to hedge all of our bets. Whether via a great mis-recalculator in the sky or a political establishment largely captured by certain interests, new information will be manufactured.

Regulators obfuscate precisely by manufacturing information, by spreading unwarranted certainty. This may be precisely because they have been taken in by their own understanding, which gathers momentum. “Knowing” is ontological; it doesn’t depend on what is supposed to be known. And in a state of “knowing,” the objective reality of uncertainty is ignored. Being a “smart banker” is a dangerous state of mind, difficult to corral, impossible to regulat—we can’t force people to think they are ignorant; those who think they are smart also think they can figure out the loopholes.

UPDATE: Boing Boing linked to a writeup of a recent paper that argues complex securities are inherently impossible to regulate. Basically they argue that one can tell with structured securities whether the tranches are random or tampered with so that they are front-loaded with lemons.
UPDATE II: Free Exchange discusses the problem of too many smart people becoming bankers because it pays so disproportionately well, because it is dimly understood and poorly regulated. “To an increasing number of people, it looks as though the financial sector is recruiting the nation’s best brains and putting them to work endangering the global economy.” A paper (pdf) the blogger links to argues that “financial deregulation” is among the reasons jobs in the sector came to require more “skills”—which could be translated into: deregulation brought smart people into finance because the field had been opened up to the devising of complex money-making schemes designed to enrich them far beyond what one could make in other more carefully scrutinized professions.

—Rob Horning

I don’t have an invitation to use Google Wave, so I can only rely on journalist reports as to what it actually is. But these reports don’t seem especially objective; tech writers have every incentive to hype the next big thing and drive traffic. That seems to be the idea behind this WSJ piece by Jessica Vascellaro announcing the death of email at the hands of Google Wave and Facebook, which Wave most likely endeavors to supplant.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

As Nicholas Carr points out, the assumption here is that real-time communication is something that everyone is clamoring for and will be experienced as a joyous improvement over the delays and distance of email. Carr recalls email’s early days, when its main workplace benefit was that it freed people from the tyranny of the phone—of being disrupted by it and the demands of callers. Email in theory could be read and answered on one’s own schedule. But since email has next to no transaction costs, personal communication, Carr explains, became broadcasting. We get inundated with trivia and simultaneously we cease to recognize when others might think what we have to say is distracting. So parents forward religious inspiration and “funny” pet videos to their agnostic children and so on. As the internet has merged with phones, email has become merely a more intrusive and all-consuming version of phone communication—both disruptive and trivial. Wave will worsen this, making email even more immediate and presence-demanding than it already has been become thanks to BlackBerrys and iPhones. Carr’s conclusion seems spot on:

—Rob Horning

A few days ago I confirmed for myself how out of touch I am with indie music when I took a look at Pitchfork’s albums of the decade list. Of the 200 albums listed, I’d probably heard maybe half of them, and of that half I probably actually liked about 10. I tried again to listen to the albums they are really big on (e.g., Kid A, Supreme Clientele) and was left convinced I should probably regard a high Pitchfork rating as a personal negative indicator. If Pitchfork is associated with a band when I first hear about them, I’m probably best off not bothering.

I bring this up only because I am also reading Greg Kot’s Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, a journalistic look at the music business over the past decade (it reads like a series of Fortune stories—not an insult, just an impression) in which Pitchfork features prominently. Even though I am writing at this moment for what some might consider a “music webzine,” I was pretty surprised at how influential Pitchfork is reputed to be. Some of the industry people Kot interviews makes Pitchfork sound like the financial rating agencies: “I feel the next step for Pitchfork is literally dictating to bands what to do next,” a guy in an indie band tells him. ” ‘Okay, can you just paint a little more green on that album before you release it?’ ” That would mirror the way ratings agencies told banks what to adjust in securities in order to secure AAA ratings to keep the bubble going. These were oftentimes the securities destined to become “toxic,” becoming the assets no one could value properly and no one wanted on their books.

—Rob Horning