I have a post up about the end of anonymity over at Generation Bubble. As I was writing it, half of it got deleted in a Word Press malfunction, so I’m afraid it became a little disjointed as I struggled to reconstruct what I had had before. My overarching point is that Web 2.0 innovations encourage us to eschew online anonymity and stay logged on as our actual selves—fusing more completely our online and offline social lives. More important, when we conduct various transactions online, whether they are purchases or pleas for attention, they are associated permanently with that integrated identity, enriching the data that can be mined from it. Consequently, we begin to believe that we deepen our identity by contributing more data to the online archive, despite the fact that it is being exploited by the corporate interests who control the archives. We become more of person, with a more compelling identity, the more through our online presence mirrors our offline existence.

I argue that this is the completion of a trend away from the impersonal markets that once signaled freedom from sumptuary laws and class-based discrimination in the world of consumption, and toward the idea that what we consume should be precisely associated with who we are. An anonymous purchase is a pointless purchase.This begins as a nostalgic movement to restore communal meaning to a world made atomistic and alienating, to make social relations more relevant in a world that has been structured to isolate us (a complaint I’ve made a lot over the years here). But what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. (What economists Wolfers and Stevenson call hedonic marriage: “what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.”) The more transactions we make in the markets in which we can’t hide our identity, can’t pay cash, the more articulated our identities become. We “share” more and more in order to be.

—Rob Horning

I love manfestos with theses: Here is one from FibreCulture about Web 2.0 (via Metafilter), written by European academics. They contend that internet culture has now fully integrated itself with everyday life (it is not a simulation or virtual anymore, but the genuine substance of our lives), which has ramifications for how social networks and the like might facilitate social change. One of their theses (it’s more like an amalgam of about a dozen theses):

Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ‘social’ qualities: the network is the message. What’s created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

Social networks don’t function as a new public sphere but as an entertainment technology. They prompt us to replace the tussle of genuine connectedness with further self-display. Instead of arguing with one another, we preen. And this preening becomes a kind of exploitable labor, thanks to the way social networks facilitate data-mining. This is how social networks empty friendship of its significance as a haven of honesty and noneconomic reciprocity. It also neuters the online space, heading off any of its potential as a site of radicalization. Because the online space is devoid of conflict—everyone is “friends”—it is anodyne; “the Tyranny of Positive Energy” assures that politics is screened out of online social behavior. (Back when I used Facebook, I remember deleting several “friends” who made pro-McCain statements in their updates. I decided I didn’t need to engage with that sort of thing when I was consuming friendship.)

The authors make the key point that the way we conceive of our activities in online space is dictated by the tech firms and their software and gadgetry:

What, then, are the collective concepts of the social networked masses? For now, they are engineered from the top-down by the corporate programmers, or they are outsourced to the world of widgets. Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence.

What we do online is engineered by these concepts, possibly at the level of the proprietary, branded language itself—and words that once had utopian zest to them have become assimilated into the cynical Web 2.0 jargon: “sharing”, “friending” and so on. We are losing words to describe what it means to join others in solidarity. (Maybe I should start a social-networking company called Solidarity—target green, progressive types.) I wouldn’t argue that we can therefore fight the battle against the technological commercialization of private life on the semantic level. But the progress of the resistance can perhaps be charted in changes in the language usage that gains common acceptance—that crops up in consumer magazines and in the mouths of sitcom characters.

This advice is offered in the last thesis: “If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.” I’m not sure that this is worth the effort; though I already do this in the way I multiply email addresses to suit various online purposes. Having multiple crypto-identities may muck up data-harvesting and stand as a sign of resistance to the main allure of social networking right now, which is to archive our personal identity project and dignify it with all the preserved affirmations provided by others. I have a Facebook page, but it’s there the way I would have a listing in the White Pages in the telephone era.

—Rob Horning

Kerry Howley argues in Reason that libertarianism should concern itself with social coercion (the tyranny of traditions and conventions) as well as government interference.

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

Later Howley adds, “A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is not living a free life, even if no one has bothered to codify the rules in an Important Book and call them ‘laws.’ ”

It seems strange (at least to me, a refugee from the academic left) that one would even need to make an argument like this. The state is not automatically the explanation for every curtailment of personal liberty—often the state must arbitrate between individuals when their pursuits conflict, serving as preferable (to non-crazy people) to the exercise of brute personal force in the war of all against all. The state can also override those conventions which serve to restrict the individual’s opportunities when necessary. In fact, as Howley argues, the state is itself a quasi-cultural institution; it must win consent to protect property as most libertarians (as opposed to anarchists) concede it must.

Property rights are more than the conclusion of an academic argument; they are themselves a matter of culture. If they are useful to us it is because they govern our conduct and lend structure to everyday life. I may not help myself to the contents of just any wallet, take off in just any car, walk into just any house. A drop-dead argument for the authority of these constraints may exist in pure reason, but they are meaningless without a broadly shared sense of their legitimacy. Absent friendly social forces, property rights are an impotent abstraction. Rights come alive through convention. Culture makes them breathe. Strip away the context in which property rights are respected, and nothing much remains. Yet cultural context, in all its messy inexactitude, is exactly what propertarians wish to resist.

Howley’s essay amounts to a noble effort to detach libertarianism from that intolerant branch of adherents who are basically concerned mainly with stopping the government from interfering with their racism, religious bigotry, gun-toting, and patriarchal prerogatives (think the fundamentalist Mormon sects in Utah, backwoods survivalist compounds, rabid John Birch types, that sort of thing) and make it a respectable political creed that is pro-individual liberty rather than merely anti-state. The crux of her argument to old-line libertarians is this: “it is the role of someone who professes to believe in the virtues of individualism—and emphatically the role of someone who believes that social persuasion is preferable to legal coercion—to foster a culture that is tolerant of nonconformity.”

In order to foster tolerance one must have recourse to a state that can credibly restrain tribalism in its extra-legal guises once they are documented. Libertarians will need to trust government at least that far, that its investment in its own power might preclude its playing petty favorites among small-time groups. (Not that this is actually so, but that it might be forced democratically to approach such a balance. Perhaps there is hope for institutional thinking.)

And Mike Konczal argues that libertarians might have to cut ties with certain hard-line economistic types to take on a culture agenda. He points out how state-hating libertarians have found common cause in the past with regulation-hating free marketeers:

Did you know that women specialize in household work, and men in wage-paying work, because there are increasing returns to household work? Here’s some math from Becker to prove it. Did you know that discrimination can’t exist, because it would imply that markets are imperfect, leaving human capital $20 bills all over the sidewalk? So if minorities are discriminated against, it must mean that they have low human capital (and you can tell that they have low human capital, because they are discriminated against!).

So cultural libertarianism ultimately must move beyond not only blaming the state for everything but also trusting the market to fix everything: “It’s one thing to say that we need to acknowledge a diversity of cultures, and let them play out in a market…. It’s another thing to say that the discrimination and culture oppression currently faced is a market outcome, pareto-efficient in its effects. Pushing to get more autonomy for women would be the same thing as rent control and price fixing in this mental picture of the world.” Making reference to “normative economics”—to what rational choice theory says should happen—is the way out of relativism for old-line libertarians, an absolute way of declaring what should and shouldn’t be tolerated in the “culture of tolerance.” But the problem is that most nonlibertarians find such a code intolerable.

—Rob Horning

Having spent the weekend in a Hilton hotel in Hartford, Connecticut, this essay from Travel & Leisure by Peter Jon Lindberg, about “bad” music in corporate spaces open to the public, resonated with me (via NYT Ideas). The Hilton was particularly aggressive with the piped-in smooth jazz, which blared in the lobby and the coffee shop and the bar and the elevators and the indoor pool and the fitness center and possibly even the business center, which incidentally was basically an extortion scheme for those poor businesspeople who break their laptops during their stay. (The center offers you the opportunity to rent an old computer at the rate of 99 cents a minute. And don’t think you get internet access included with that, or with anything having to do with your stay with Hilton. In fact, the Hilton was out to nickel-and-dime patrons at virtually every level of service. Parking for $18 a night? $15 for the internet? This is not at all how the resort is portrayed on Mad Men.)

Lindberg’s essay is an intermittently amusing exercise in fussy snobbery:

Some people are irked by bad lighting, excessive AC, the reek of European men’s cologne. I’m hopelessly particular about music. Background sound tracks can make or break my impression of a place—and these days every place has one, from wine bars to Williams-Sonoma. Too often it’s employed with alarming incompetence…. I’ve walked out of otherwise appealing shops that elect to blare Maroon 5. I’ve hung up on reservations lines that put me on hold to “Groovy Kind of Love.” I bring earplugs on planes to block out not the roar of the engines but the insipid pabulum of the boarding music.

You get the idea. His taxonomy of Muzak is spot-on, though—Bebel Gilberto, Gypsy Kings, Amadou & Mariam. The idea is to evoke thoughtless, non-intrusive cosmopolitanism, the fantasy that global homogeneity is just one slick programmed beat away. Lindberg reserves special opprobrium for Sade, whose 1984 release Diamond Life was one of the first non-rock cassettes I ever owned. Like Hiltons across America, I believed it would make me seem sophisticated.

Lindberg ends up focusing on Muzak as professionalized aural branding for corporations trying to negotiate the diverse tastes of their clientele, and he even celebrates it, as long as it is “hip”—that is, suits his indie-rock tastes. That seems like a cop-out, but after all, the piece was published in Travel & Leisure, not Adbusters or something. But along the way, he cites an academic paper by business professors Alan Bradshaw and Morris B. Holbrook, “Must We Have Muzak Wherever We Go?: A critical consideration of the consumer culture,” which argues that the copious deployment of background music “support concerns that culture is degraded by marketers as a means of social control.”

By methodically testing the effectiveness of certain types of music to elicit certain behaviors in commercial spaces, canned-music suppliers instrumentalize music, make it “deployable” instead of listenable. Simply schematizing our emotional responsiveness to music may ruin it—giving credence to the frequent complaint that music criticism kills what it anatomizes. Music is “de-aestheticized”: The songs remain the same, but the uses to which they are put (as “retail atmospherics,” in the marketing jargon) irreparably alter how we can hear them. We can’t pay attention to it with the goal of immersing ourselves in it. It becomes background music everywhere—it gets iPodded, etc. Further, when music is deployed in this way, we no longer have the option of simply listening to it, of having an unmediated response to it. Music retains its emotional efficacy, but that efficacy is co-opted and used to achieve the ends of those deploying it. When we choose to hear something, we are giving our consent to be moved by it, but when it’s foisted on us, we are vulnerable to those properties in music that slip by our conscious defenses. We are moved against our will, to purposes that aren’t our own. These include efforts to make us buy more and buy specific things, but more surprising is the suggestion that “less pleasant music” affects our perception of time and theoretically makes waiting in line seem to pass more quickly. Bradshaw and Holbrook, pictures of academic neutrality, put it this way:

Apparently, more distasteful music will make the queue appear to move more quickly. Really loathsome stuff should make the wait breeze by in a jiffy. So can it be that the onslaught of diabolically annoying sounds that typically assaults the unwilling victim on such occasions – the most offensive canned drivel imaginable, epitomized by garden-variety vanilla-flavored squeaky-clean middle-of-the-road bland-as-blazes Muzak – actually makes the time seem to fly?

This speaks to Bradshaw and Holbrook’s more general point: Background music is meant to manage us, not entertain us. Whether people “like” it doesn’t figure in to the decision to pipe it in. They cite Adorno’s lament over our loss of the right not to hear music. (This puts a different spin on Keats’s verse: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”)

If background music can be so effectively instrumentalized, is its ultimate purpose not any particular local effect but a general conditioning of consumer-citizens? Is it subliminal orientation to our role in the totally administered society, or some such? “As we have demonstrated, music plays a complicit role in creating this conveyor-belt style of organized consumption, coaxing customers to travel at suitable speeds through a retail setting dependent on the manager’s manipulation,” Bradshaw and Holbrook write. They critique “consumer-culture theory”—that version of cultural studies that regards consumerism as a form of expression and rejects ideas that social control could be implmented top-down through cultural products. Consumers, to that view, are “more than capable of defending themselves against the onslaughts of commercially-entrenched brain washing.” But the efficacy and ubiquity of background music suggests otherwise. Consmers don’t transform it; they tolerate or ignore it while it works semi-subliminally. Music helps regulate our internal rhythms and synch them with the necessary flow demanded by capital. Often, we ignore background music, which suggests it’s working as it should and we are in that flow. When we notice it, when it galls us, we have become sand in the gears of postindustrial society.

I used to think this meant we should complain loudly and often about piped-in music, to prove that we are still alive. The melodrama helped me regard a gesture that cost me very little effort as something truly revolutionary—that is where I would take my last stand, against Natalie Imbruglia in the supermarket. But is this a matter of my performing my discontent, which gives me a stake in the persistence of background music, to give me my rebel identity? Bradshaw and Holbrook note how resistance is typically co-opted, and perhaps only registers when it is available for co-optation:

despite the tendency toward market resistance, the ultimate performed resistance is ironically market-mediated (Kozinets 2002) so that resisting one market discourse of power merely generates another (Thompson 2004). The phenomenon of a countercultural brand community entails a basic paradox.

The problem with resisting Muzak is that it plays immediately into self-presentation, how we use our tastes to market ourselves. The critique of background music is always already defused by the fact that the credibility and motives of the complainers can always be questioned. Many things in consumer society seem to work this way. The idea that we are all “brands” engaged in our ongoing identity projects, just like the corporations, levels the moral playing field and preempts resistance.

—Rob Horning

I’ve always been skeptical that a person’s sense of direction is an empirically measurable thing, and that someone can have a better sense of direction than someone else. I’ve always tended to think that those with a self-professed “bad sense of direction” were just too lazy to think about what they have decided is someone else’s problem. Directions? That’s for the chauffeur to worry about. Not being able to read a map seems like it’s not some innate shortcoming but a product of indifference. And the ramifications of this fundamental negligence merely continue to multiply as the ability to orient oneself becomes more and more pertinent. To plead a poor sense of direction is to confess a craving for dependency.

Perhaps I’m unsympathetic to the directionally challenged because I’m never afraid to get lost. It strikes me as an inconvenience at worst and in most cases an opportunity for discovery. I usually don’t hesitate to take an exit, any exit, off a freeway if the road is congested—tangling with surface streets is all part of the fun and the only way to get to know a city. Getting to scrutinize maps is half the reason I take driving trips anywhere. I like unearthing short cuts, even when they are to places I’ll never need to go. I think makes me exude some sort of palpable navigational confidence, because I tend to get asked for directions in cities I am only visiting—even abroad in countries where I don’t speak the language.

—Rob Horning

Rob Walker’s NYT Magazine article about Pandora, the online music-recommendation service, sets up an opposition between musical taste that is grounded in our social context (what our friends like and the siganling aspects of publicly liking certain genres and so forth) and taste that is presumed to be intrinsic to a particular piece’s qualities. Pandora’s business model relies on its ability to analyze and assign numbers to those taxonomized categories and use that to play music that will keep consumers listening.

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

But as Walker asks, “Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?” One possibility is that these two ways of conceiving musical taste are incommensurable, irreconcilable, what Žižek calls a parallax. It’s not that one explanation is an ideological cover-up for the other, real reason—these are two separate explanations that are perhaps operating simultaneously, and we oscillate between them in comprehending ourselves, forming our consciousness of what we want to appeal to us. In The Parallax View Žižek is very concerned about the gap between them, which he thinks captures the Lacanian “real” that can’t be articulated directly. Parallax structures, if I’m getting what he is saying, allow a socially constructed self co-exist within us with a uniquely particular, individual, biological self. It allows us to believe our taste is unique and personal while at the same time developing it consciously to achieve social goals. So we can persuade ourselves that we like Lightning Bolt and not Black-Eyed Peas and find this to be an absolutely authentic expression of who we “really are.”

Pandora’s founder, in Walker’s depiction, is stubbornly determined to reject the authenticity of socially mediated taste.

Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

I can relate to this attitude. It’s hard not to be cynical about musical taste and snobbery and hype if you have spent any extended period of time taking what the music press has to say seriously. It seems like the inevitable social concerns that spring up out of pop music aren’t inherent in it but are instead a barrier to our simply being in touch with our pleasures. I would think that if I could simply detach from the conversation about music, I would be able to enjoy it in a more sincere way. This took me toward older music (big-band music, 60s sunshine pop), into deliberately square music (Doris Day, the Fifth Dimension). But I was just involving myself in different conversations, even if they were only theoretical. I was still contriving a narrative about my tastes, even if I didn’t necessarily share it with anyone. Still it is a very seductive idea, that our taste is like a fingerprint, a snowflake, and that when we find out fully what it really is, we see at last, concretely, how ineffable our soul is. We listen to Pandora, click the thumbs up or down to approve songs, let the formulas work their magic, and continue to attenuate our authentic self in pure isolation.

That seems like ideological fiction; it fits too well with the romanticizing of individuality that is endemic in consumerism. (What seems parallax about taste may be ideological—there is no intrinsic taste, just the useful pretense of it.) It’s more plausible that our musical-taste acquisition is like language acquisition—inherently social from the get-go. Walker cites Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist who has written extensively about music.

Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

Walker ends by pointing out that Pandora is ultimately curated. Only certain songs are added, and this process is a bit arbitrary.

Westergren maintains that catalog size receded as a problem at around the 300,000-song mark. Since passing that, he says, the number of “missed” searches has declined markedly, so the great majority of people who come to the site and type in an artist or song name get a proper introduction to the Pandora system. But the more surprising part of Westergren’s response is his claim that he isn’t worried about compiling the biggest possible catalog. “This may seem counterintuitive,” he told me, “but we struggle more with making sure we’re adding really good stuff.” That sounds like a rather subjective, cultural judgment — shouldn’t the listener decide what’s good, based purely on the genome’s intrinsics-of-music guidance? Well, there’s no question that Westergren is a champion of the unheard music that gets marginalized by sociocultural judgments. But even he has standards.

So Pandora is revealed as an elaborate apparatus for masking with technology and mathematical mumbo jumbo the way tastes can be shaped from above and without. Pandora presents a limited set and invites us to see it as infinite. WHat we make of it is wholly are own and true.That’s not so different from the way our opportunities are in practice curtailed by social context while we are raised to believe that anything is possible if we tap into our innate ability.

—Rob Horning