Automated recommendations

I have defended the volunteer customer reviews on Web sites like amazon.com lately as being a useful way to get unprofessionalized opinions on things, a way to tap into genuine enthusiasm in a commercial culture predicated on a ceaseless flow of hype. But the personalized recommendations that Amazon and Netflix produce for you by tracking everything you view on the site and correlating it with bundles of similar things other people looked at strike me as extremely sinister. Especially when they are accurate, when they produce for me a list of things I am actually interested in.

Why should I be bothered by this? Shouldn't I be thankful that Amazon has expedited my shopping experience and turned me on to some things I'll appreciate? Shouldn't I be glad that it has stepped in to provide the word of mouth I no longer really get from friends, because I don't really have all that much time to spend with friends? Shouldn't I be excited by all this access? Well, no. Cultural goods like these in and of themselves are generally less important to a person than the social network which they embody, the actual word of mouth among friends that makes them meaningful. Sure, some films, some records are better than others, possibly even from some objective point of view that argument can be made, but really what makes certain films and records personally significant is the kind of community it allows one to feel an allegiance to, a participation in. If that "community" consists solely of a mammoth associational database, it kind of demystifies the whole process, the whole myth of community through consumption. It exposes word of mouth to be not a social process but a sheer mathematical one, a probablity game. Maybe the destruction of that myth is worth celebrating; maybe those are phony communities to begin with -- but it's not like other forms of community are springing up to take their place.

What these personalized recommendations actually accomplish is depersonalization. They encourage you down the same cattle chute that any other person who has stumbled on to the same general interests may have been rushed down. This upsets any kind of organic flow to the discoveries one can make, obviating whatever sense of selfhood one's discovery of interesting things might previously have offered. Internet tools that plug you into the mass cosolidation and aggregation of data reveal devestatingly just how homogenized you always already are, just how frail the illusion that you have conceived of something unique really is. Again, it may be ultimately beneficial to have the myth of individual uniqueness shattered, but in the transitional phase, when models of self-esteem through extreme individuation still rule, this experience painful.

With the thrill of discovery automated and the social aspects of consumption mechanized, all that's left is speed of consumption, volume, amassing a miser-like collection of "cool stuff" for it's own sake. What makes it "cool" eventually becomes simply a matter of its novelty, as the sensual qualities of things so quickly gets used up in the climate of imperative convenience. And this is the quintessential recipe for the hedonic treadmill, where the more you acquire, the more you need.

Starbucks

Today is apparently Starbucks day in the Wall Street Journal, with front-page articles in both the A and B sections dealing with the company's travails. (Also of note, a quote from the one guy who's unhappy that junk-food manufacturers are marketing as aggressively toward children, George Carey, CEO of Just Kid Inc. Where else but the Journal? And what is this guy thinking? How do you get into a career like that?). In the A section, a report on how Starbucks honchos are fretting over their recent lobbying victories in Washington, and their recent participation in the pay-for-play legislation-writing system that makes American democracy so great, so responsive. Starbucks garnered themselves a huge tax break by schmoozing the Bill Frists of the world, but they wonder if this in keeping with their reputation. What reputation? Who (outside of the Wall Street Journal, who grouses over how it makes them less competitive) gives Starbucks any credit for the genuinely good things they do, like give part-time employees benefits? At least among the people I know, Starbucks is just another colonizing, homogenizing force, akin to Wal-Mart in its propensity to drive small businesses out of business. Maybe the people who get drive-through lattes in the morning are thinking to themselves how they patronize a "blue-state" business that practices fair trade. But I kind of doubt it. They probably are comfortable in the fact they are patronizing a quasi-luxury business, the same feeling they get in Pottery Barn.

The more familiar Starbucks image is burnished by the story in the B section, which details how Starbucks is trying to streamline its employees' movements ala the heyday of Taylorism and ergonomics, in order that they may produce blended frappacinos with more alacrity. In this story, employees are not the coddled health-benefited workforce of the 21st century, but are instead the automatons of generic labor straight out of the Victorian workhouse. Industrial engineers prefer to call this mechanization and coordination of anonymous labor "a balllet, a well-choreographed play" and I'm sure that makes the person whose sole job it is to make sure customers get thier lattes 20 seconds faster feel very important, indeed.

Sexualizing curiosity

It will be interesting to see if Andrea Dworkin's ideas about pornography and patriarchy will get fair play in the coverage of her death, or if they will be subject to the usual histrionic distortions. The misrepresentation of her thought as being anti-sex merely because it is anti-prostitution and anti-pornography seems to indicate the vested interest people, male and female, have in exploiting sexual power dynamics, and it shows how deeply entrenched is the tendency to want to commodify experience, even intimate sexual experience. The Internet changed everything about the consumption of pornography, it seems to me, making it a low-overhead international business that can generate profit marketing to most minute niches imaginable, encouraging in porn consumers a connoisseur's approach to viewing different ethnicities, different perversions, different permutations of sexual behavior simply because it is available. Viewing all these behavioral extremities has the potential to make Internet porn quests into a proxy for experience, sexualizing curiosity in general while simultaneously instrumentalizing sexuality, making into an expression of acquisitive power. This was Dworkin's essential insight, one that seems absolutely indisputable, no matter how "liberating" you might think it is to be a stripper: Pornography is always about power relations, usually about gender, but never about sexual pleasure. The "pleasure" men get from launching crumpled-up dollar billls at a naked woman's vagina in places like Al's Diamond Cabaret has nothing to do with sex. But it has a lot to do with feeling power, with feeling superiority to the person you can commission to degrade herself onstage for you, with feeling superior to a gender who may often seem to hold all the emotional cards. Male sexual desire tends to make them feel a bit powerless, out of control, subject to woman's whim, and pornography is a kind of political theater that restores their sense of mastery over women to them, establishing at the same time the homosocial truth that real emotional connections and intimacy occur between men, sanctified over the body of a degraded woman. (Read Eve Sedgwick's Between Men for the classic expression of that theory.)

Having had several friends who have worked in the sex industry, I developed a sense that the majority of women in it were deeply emotionally damaged in some way; typically they had bee either abused or raped and had come to understand sexuality as mere power in an especially raw and pitiless way. If you believe that is the core truth underlying all the nicey-nice coverup cant about "love" and "intimacy" and "sharing," then you are likely to see pornography as inevitable, and possibly believe that you should try to leverage your stake in it as a woman for as much as you can get -- you will be a "pro-porn" feminist, looking for ways to exploit your own body as a means to express social power. You will believe you are in control when you can induce the man to throw a crumpled up dollar at your vagina. You will see that expression of sexual behavior as "truer" than the kind where you try to share pleasure with a mate, whose trust will always threaten you because it will always seem like a lie and a facade. Sex that is not controlling will be uncomfortable, confusing, disturbing. Where as sex rationalized by the porn industry will seem logical, safe, explicable, managable.

Porn is streamlined sexuality, is sex made convenient. But as I was claiming about the family, sexuality may be authenticated by its difficulty, by the happy struggle it requires in order for it to sanctify deep human relationships. If you make sex convenient, you strip it of its essential quality, and it becomes something else. It becomes shopping, a way of demonstrating power that's ultimately measured in dollars. Sexual love has no measurement (measurement, as the NYT Magazine article I mentioned yesterday about media measurement and ratings seemed to suggest, is a way of controlling and pre-determining an experience), and that is what many people in a consumer society find so threateneing about it, and why they react so negatively to women like Dworkin who point that out.

Existential despair?

Are you troubled by this thing known as "existence"? Then this blog by my friend Utah Jack can help.

Wal-Mart's "union project"

The Friday Wall Street Journal had a front page article detailing the alleged shady dealings of former Wal-Mart vice chairman Thomas Coughlin, who forged invoices to have the company reimburse him for his $1,359 alligator boots and his $2,589 doghouse, among other things. Coughlin claims these phony receipts were cooked up not so that he could buy himself absurd luxury goods (he was making several million dollars a year as a Wal-Mart board member after all) but so that he could get secret reimbursement for the money he was spending out of his own pocket for Wal-Mart's "union project." In practice, this meant that Coughlin paid spies (either current union members, a felony action, or former union members, a civil infraction punishable by half million dollar fine) to attend union organization meetings so that information could be gathered and the right employees could be leaned on. Wal-Mart of course denies any such antiunion activity paid for off the books, asserting instead that Coughlin, a 25-year employee of the company who was a personal friend of Sam Walton and got his start in loss prevention, was a petty pathological thief.

E-meters and Purple People Eaters

Still reeling from the revelation in last week's New York Times Magazine that Beck is a scientologist and presumably believes in operating Thetans and consents to have his "e-meter" readings charted, I read this week's Magazine and discovered that thousands of people in Houston have agreed to attach a "portable people meter" (not to be confused with a purple people eater) to themselves to track their exposure to various forms of media throughout the course of their daily lives (which will all have an inaudible code embedded in them that the meter detects). This creepy form of total surveillance (for our own sake; to serve us consumers better, of course) is being introduced courtesy of Arbitron and Nielsen, the companies that tally media ratings, at the behest of advertisers, who are demanding better information about who sees what, and what this makes them do. Potentially, these total information awareness systems of complete monitoring will help the culture industry extend its reach, identifying those few moments of the day where one is unexposed to commercial messages, ferreting out those few nooks and crannies that have evaded the media's reach and obliterating them with ever more precisely targeted ads. Soon we will be allowed no time unmolested; every single waking moment will be mediated. And then they will go to work on insinuating ads into our dreams. For our own benefit of course. Because the customer is always king.

Perhaps these systems will finally end the idea that advertising is some beneficient industry that only wants to help people get what they want and people will finally accept that ads are an invasive force that attempts to shift the ideological atmosphere people think in before they even realize their intellectual atmosphere has been poisoned. These measurement tools are not out to allow media to be more responsive to some pre-existing desires of the consumer, but to detect more moments of vulnerablility in that consumer to implant desires, to reshape what previously existed as that person's "authentic wants," if such things even exist. The measurements are out to reproduce the individual as digital code, as data, so as to make him more easily manipulatable. And society at large conspires to reproduce that experience of being manipulated as pleasurable, as the very basis of pleasure (e.g. our responsiveness to sentimental films, our ability to be "moved"). We become the code and as we are decoded in the form of personally tailored ads -- we will see our mirror image in the ads aimed at us, a reflection of ourselves at our worst, with all our vulnerabilities and weaknesses highlighted, all our vanities inflamed, all our basest desires stoked.

As measurement systems become more total, it becomes more true that we only exist as citizens when we are being measured, only when we are exposing ourselves to media, when we are shopping, when we are creating data. To the extent that we withdraw from these measurable systems, we don't matter. We don't exist. And people prefer to exist, to be a part of society, even if that society seems flawed, as the alternative is to be antisocial, and to subject yourself to the intense negative scrutiny of the rest of your peers (to be thought of as a Unibomber or a utopian daydreamer or a hippie freak, et cetera). Hence people prefer invasive marketing, as it appears to integrate them into the hegemonic culture of shopping much more efficiently. People know they are supposed to be buying things to be happy, to fit in. But people quickly run out of things to buy. They need direction. Hence, the more invasive measuring and tracking devices allows amazon.com to make personalized recommendations, will allow your TV to eventually display ads tailored especially for you -- doesn't that make you feel important? All that effort to get you to choose one car over another. The ads making personalized pitches help remedy the problem of needing to shop but having no clue what to buy.

These personalized ads also help destroy the last remnants of community, the demographic. With the focus on indviduating and personalizing, fewer people will have any shared cultural experiences to draw on, and this undermines the formation of communities that have any kind of local context. You might share a tightly bound bundle of interests with a few hundred people around the country, but you'll be dispersed throughout the landscape, and connected only via a niche cable channel. The idea that one should try to foster a shared identity with the people who are one's actual neighbors will become more and more alien. Geography will be overcome, and one's isolation and insecurity and vulnerability to ad culture will be complete. We will have to rely on the media to let us know what others think about us, because the actual social fabric will have been so disrutped, there will be no other means of accessing the data. As we become more and more indivuated, more and more catered to in all of our idiosyncracies, the cultural choices we make, our tastes, matter less and less even as they seem to become all important, hieroglyphic symbols sent out to all the other individuated people out there in an effort to share something.

The New Frontier

In an essay in The Commercialization of Intimate Life, Arlie Hochschild proposes that with the closing of the American West and the difficulty in sustaining the myth of being able to "light out for the territories" literally, a la Huck Finn, a new frontier in consumption opened to supplant the lost geographic one. "Instead of 'going somewhere' the individual 'buys something.' And buying something becomes a way of going somewhere." In some ways, this is another way of configuring the argument Sociologist Colin Campbell makes about the essential appeal of consumerism, its promise of a private, autonomous fantasy world of ever-replenishing desire to launch oneself into through a revolving cycle of daydreams about various branded lifestyle goods. The frontier myth was one of perpetual reinvention, of always being able to eschew your past and start fresh in unbounded territory -- the fantasy space of commodity-induced daydreams is this kind of territory; goods don't care who you are, or where you've been, or what you did in the last town. Goods allow you to imagine a new you, and ads supply fantasies in which no questions are asked, where donning the Che T-shirt invites no unpleasant questions about what kind of revolutionary consciousness you have, where the present is all that there is. Rather than go somewhere, you consume something to make yourself new; and remaking yourself daily is offered as a worthy goal, as a way of "finding yourself" via a perpetual search.

Hochschild combines it though with some other points about the family, about new frontiers in advertising and marketing that promise to provide the intimacy of family life that has been systemaically eroded by capitalism, and its expectations about work and its tendency to commodify everything. She suggests that we consume to try to get to some idealized notion of a perfect family life, with perfect relationships with spouses or children. The promises is that of a "life free from ambivalence" -- which is what Huck Finn is after, after all -- a life where compromise (in the form of being civilized, in Huck's case) is totally unnecessary. But in pursuing commercial solutions to intimate problems, one admits a new form of ambivalence, a willingness to accept only those solutions one can afford in exchange for their being streamlined into simple economic exchanges. This in turn demystifies the intimate life, removes its aura, destroys its power to be a "haven in a heartless world," a refuge from capitalism's time pressures, vulgarization, exploitation, and reification. In looking for "new places to go" in shopping, we have pushed the frontier of what can be commodified has pushed deep into our intimate lives, leaving no place where a core of emotions unmanipulated by the market can exist, can serve as the comparison point for authenticity or for "true happiness" or "true identity."

Capitalism creates teh need for a haven from exploitation, but it also encourages an individualism that undermines such havens -- Initially it was community-based, then it was family-based, now it seems to based in a dyad, either with a parent, a child or a spouse. It shrinks as we try to make the haven more efficient, more conducive to our needs with less demand of sacrifice, as market ideology has taught us is the clearest expression of what's best -- maximum utility at the margin. But in the drive to make intimate life efficient, we destroy what makes it imtimate, the inefficiencies that represent what it means to be intimate -- the tolerance, the love of mistakes, the patience required to understand and respect other people, the "wasteful" sacrifices of time and energy.

Intimacy is defined by ineffiency -- is that a consequence of capitalism, or has it always been so?