But I am struck that the anxiety of the political class and their close partners and associates (which include academics, I think) is always operating on at least two levels. There’s the anxiety I and most everyone else I know is feeling about what a Trump victory could mean and even what it means that he has any measurable support of any kind from our fellow citizens.

However, I also think that in some sense Trump is something else, which is another form of the “disruption” that has become the ideology of 21st Century nouveau capitalism. He is a threat to their economic well-being in a very direct sense. Political consultants, pollsters, advertisers, policy wonks, career civil servants, are on edge because if Trump performs as well as or close to as well as Romney it throws out much of the conventional wisdom about the necessity of an expensive infrastructure for political victory or for carrying out policy initiatives. The countering proposition is that Trump is a unicorn, successful only because of a unique brand name that can’t be easily imitated, or successful only because he understood how to cheap out on the media by making himself the story every day. But what if instead Trump is revealing that you can’t do worse than 40-45% of the national vote no matter what you do, that underneath our voting is basically two major social coalitions that will pretty much do the same thing whether they know a candidate well or poorly, whether they’re worried about a candidate or not, etc.–that only about 10-20% of the voters will actually switch from one candidate or the other?

This fear is easier to see if you’ve studied the history of advertising. There are periodic waves of skepticism from clients about the actual value of advertising–that beyond some basic workaday advertising to create brand familiarity and some point-of-sale payments to get shelf space, the main thing that shifts consumers is just price. Advertisers in different eras have responded to that skepticism by trying to prove the value of their craft, by authenticating and detailing the expert skills that they have, whether that’s the methods of social science or the insights of “creatives”. They hold forth the successes and make ominous remarks about the failures. And of course advertising is today also facing its own forms of “disruption”–the possibility among other things that completely free forms of many-to-many communication will intrisically help to promote commodities that are well-liked by their buyers, and doom commodities that are hated, regardless of the money spent to reverse that verdict.

As with advertising in general, I suspect the infrastructure of campaigning and political authority matters when the candidate or policy is a “marginal buy” for that small group that might go one way or the other. But maybe at least some of the time, all you need is that (R) or (D) after your name in a district or state that’s been built as a social machine intended to elect you.

About capitalism, I think this: people will give to Kickstarter even more than what they’d pay for the delivery of the product they’re backing if the product were available on a store shelf. Kickstarter is being used to signal desire. What’s striking is that it shows that consumer capitalism is in some sense just as hamstrung as the modernist state in its ability to deliver what people want and will pay for. All our institutions and organizations, of all kinds, are now tangled up in their own complexity, all of them are increasingly built to collect tolls rather than build bridges.

All that money spent on market research, on product development, on vice-presidents of this and that, and what you have, especially in the culture industry, is a giant apparatus that is less accurate than random chance in creating the entertainment or products that consumers can quite clearly describe their desire for. So clearly that the consumers are giving money to people they like who have no intention of or ability to make what the donors say they want. Because, rather like the lottery, at least you can imagine the chance of the thing you want coming into being. Waiting around for Sony or EA or Microsoft or Ubisoft to make it feels like an even bigger longshot.

Which also says something about money and its circulation. The crisis of accumulation isn’t just visible in the irrepressible return of subprime loans, or in the constant quest of financiers to find more ways to make money by speculating on the making of money by people who are making money. It’s even visible in more middle-class precincts. Who wants to invest a bit of spare cash in the long-term deal or the soberly considered opportunity now? It’s like waiting in line to deposit a small check while the bank gets robbed repeatedly.

Most professional associations of academic disciplines rather markedly avoid Vegas as a venue. Despite what gets said by some sociologists in the IHE article, that can’t be about cost. Las Vegas is consistently one of the cheapest airfares in the country from almost any location within the United States. It has a huge price range of accommodation, particularly if you’re willing to stay somewhere a bit away from the Strip. There are way more beds at affordable prices in Vegas than in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, the perennial favorites of most of the big disciplinary associations. In the current recession, which has had an especially sharp effect on Vegas, I would think that most professional associations could negotiate deeper discounts than in any other major American city with a large range of hotels and services. If you really wanted to do graduate students and adjunct faculty who may need to attend a professional meeting to be interviewed a favor, you’d put the meeting in Las Vegas every single year. I’d even bet that at least some hotels or conference centers in Vegas gouge less on providing projection services or wireless connections to presenters. It would be nice to attend a major professional meeting where presenters aren’t left to scrounge for their own presentation technology, as has happened at some of the meetings I go to, because “it’s too expensive for the association to deal with”.

So take cost off the table. What’s the problem with Vegas? Some of the sociologists interviewed by IHE complain that Vegas is more complicit in the exploitation of women, the reproduction of capitalism, or the exploitation of low-wage workers than other possible venues. It’s odd, you know. I’ve attended big professional meetings in San Francisco, New York and Chicago where the main hotel venue is right around the corner from one of several red-light districts or businesses without hearing that this makes that venue unacceptable. I’ve been to New Orleans for meetings, both pre- and post-Katrina, in hotels right on the edge of the French Quarter, where solicitations to come inside sex-related venues are found in plenitude, drunken young men harass women, and gambling is right nearby. Philadelphia will soon have yet more gambling near its downtown. If you’re so upset by capitalist excess that you don’t want to go to your professional meetings, I assume you always complain when the meeting is in New York.

I’m not saying that you have to like Vegas as a destination. I have weird, conflicted feelings about it as a place, like many people do. I straightforwardly like some things about it (the restaurant scene is great, I like poker, and there’s some beautiful places to hike nearby.) I personally dislike the timeless, adrift feeling of most of its internal architecture, which is totally intentional. But that’s the problem with this whole story: that it should be a non-story. Meaning, that it’s fine to say, “Look, I find this is a creepy place, that’s just me, I have more fun or prefer or enjoy another venue,” in which you admit that at least one of the reasons why you attend a professional meeting is because you enjoy the venue. And in which you admit you are drawn to some aesthetics and not to others, that you find some places pleasurable and not others. I can completely sympathize. I didn’t attend one professional association meeting once because it was in Gary Indiana. Not because I object to Gary for political reasons, or believe there is something uniquely critique-worthy about it. Because I didn’t want to go there. That’s all. Nothing grand, nothing I’d make a fuss about, no sentiment that I’d care to soapbox about.

For some reason, this really reminds me of a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Describing his father’s commitment to being “Conscious Man”, he writes “To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”

I don’t think the academics who go beyond personally disliking Vegas as a venue to argue that there’s something structurally or institutionally wrong with being there are Conscious People in quite this sense. It’s more that they think performing Conscious Personhood is a necessary affect of their professional identity, like a psychoanalyst’s couch or a physician’s lab coat. Vegas is like TV: it presents a surplus of meanings that can’t be accepted or enjoyed as such, that allow no escape into some safe meeting ground between bourgeois academia and the Authentic Masses. It’s all small talk, it pre-empts profundity.

Which, honestly, might be a good reason why more academic conferences ought to be there.

This is one reason why I am so profoundly irritated by conventional media-effects hand-wringing, which often strikes me as much less intellectually sophisticated in its simplistic ideas about the mimetic powers of representation, the extent to which showing or describing or making an action or an image causes it to happen in the real world, than the average man-in-the-street. (There are other reasons to dislike media-effects research, not the least of which that empirical work in the field is often manipulative or tissue-paper thin.)

That said, I don’t think audiences are thoroughly ironized postmodernists whose multilayered consumption of culture is always knowing and masterful, who are never tricked into taking the wrong text or performance too seriously. That’s how some cultural producers cynically try to talk themselves out of trouble at times, mind you. The hard thing about our cultural moment from the audience perspective is that sometimes we do take our cultural pleasures seriously, sometimes we do expect authenticity or truth, sometimes we don’t want to be tricked. Sometimes we don’t want to wander in a metatextual maze, even if there’s a kindly Daedalus around to provide a thread. When audiences invest in authenticity or expect truth, the last thing they want to hear is a producer or author telling them, “Oh, grow up, this is show business, this is just a product, this is how the game is played”. And when audiences divide on this expection, that’s when you can expect the rhetorical blood to flow–and in some situations, maybe not-so-rhetorical.

Three examples I’ve run into in the last week.

One, the Hexbug Nano. 1) I’ve always been interested in robotic toys. 2) I’ve long argued that the potential “killer app” toy or pasttime for digital-age kids would be a more fully functioning, complex version of something like Pokemon, a collect-them-all world of creatures that had digital genetics and evolution, creatures which could interact to create successive generations of new creatures with new combinations of attributes or capacities. So I noticed the Hexbug Nano in a Toys R Us while we were travelling and my daughter and I picked one up to mess around with.

The packaging suggested to me that this might be the toy that combined 1 and 2, that the little bugs would interact to share some kind of persistent genetic information. (The package suggests that there is a “rare mutation” inside.) What you get instead is an attractively packaged bristlebot. Which is as fun as a bristlebot, meaning, fun for a little while, but nothing like what the packaging implies. I thought this video was especially eye-rolling, as it implies that what the Nanos are doing is intentional, involves learning, or is otherwise responsive to environmental cues, instead of being random motion. What we have here is a digital Sea Monkey, really.

But for at least some consumers, that’s enough: the movement of the bugs is entertaining and they had no other ideas about what they were getting. Or in the case of many kids, their imagination trumps the reality, and they’re perfectly happy attributing intentionality to the bugs. As far as that goes, though, I think they’d be better off just building a maze out of household objects and catching some living insects: the variety of responses will be richer, the attributional fantasy more compelling.

So if it’s good enough for some, why am I crying in my beer? This is where culture’s mysteries arise: why do I invest when others stay safely on the surface, unruffled? Why do I demand something more honest (or something more ambitious)?

A different case where almost no one in the audience is content with taking things for what they are, settling for what producers offer, is this season of Top Chef. Reading across a diversity of fan sites and comment boards, there’s a nearly universal dislike for this season, and some evidence in early falling ratings that this isn’t just a lot of talk. The negative reaction, as I read it, is largely focused on the uncharismatic cast, the lesser quality of the food, and most especially on the editing of the show, which has highlighted gossipy, negative and petty interactions between the cast members.

What Top Chef viewers are saying back to the producers is that they’re not content to watch the show in a deeply ironic, postmodern fashion, knowing that it’s-just-a-reality-show and that whatever they’re seeing is simply the storyline that the producers have decided to show them. Instead, they’re claiming that at least some past competitions have had the virtue of authenticity, that the people and the food and the emotions have been real, and the reputational stakes have had genuine meaning in the careers and lives of the contestants. Frequently, you see self-described fans contrasting the show to other reality programs, arguing that it’s “classy”, “real”, “collegial” by comparison.

In last week’s episode, the editing strongly implied that one chef stole another chef’s dish and presented it as his own, leading to the possible-thief winning that week’s competition. The show’s chief judge and leading spokesman, Tom Colicchio, wrote a blog entry that more or less dismissed the scenario, arguing both that there was no way to know whether it happened, and that if it had happened, it wasn’t a big deal. The negative response has been voluminous, with almost three times the number of comments as for any other episode.

What I find interesting is that almost all the viewers are having the same triple-layered reaction that I myself had to the episode. First, knowing that the editing for the program intended to provoke this intense response, that the producers want people to be involved and angry and blogging and linking, and that in all likelihood, the current episode this week will somehow resolve the narrative line of the theft of the pea-puree rather like the way that old cliff-hanger serials would get their hero out of trouble: by rolling back in time and showing you a scene of his escape that you never saw in the earlier episode. Second, a lot of people are angry not just at what the storyline of the episode contained, but at the violation of the cultural contract between audience and producers. In other words, they don’t want to give the producers the satisfaction of reacting the way that the producers want them to react, because the very fact that the producers are willing to reveal so nakedly the style and technique of their manipulation of events disrupts the investment that the audience wants to make in Top Chef.

So third, a lot of people are trying to figure out what the appropriate metatextual response is: stop watching? Write critiques? Generate negative buzz? Or ignore the show altogether? The problem being, when you do invest or trust in the authenticity of a cultural work, it’s hard to think metatextually, because you don’t want to. But one thing I also know is that the producers of the show are playing with fire: when you force audiences to switch codes, when you pull back the curtain to show the little man playing with levers, when you break those contracts, you often kill your gold-laying goose. The really interesting metatextual question for me is why that happens as often as it does, why producers find it so hard to understand how their audience thinks, what pleasures and experiences and investments they’re deriving from a work of culture.

One more example that I’m planning to talk about in a subsequent blog entry: the case of Andrew Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod. This is a complicated example, already ably dissected by a whole range of online writers and journalists. But of course, also enabled in the first place by online writers and journalists, and that’s the problem in a nutshell with the contemporary American public sphere. What are we to do as audiences when we want to exercise a selective ability to take some writing and reportage as authentic, to really invest in its communicative and factual capacity, and yet we also know full well that virtually no one producing that content, in any medium or any format, cares any longer to make good on that investment? Or, more disturbingly, what are we to do when we suspect retroactively that we’ve never had that capacity? Mooning about for some past moment when reporters dished up the truth, tirelessly and ruthlessly investigating the hard fact, is less credible (and less emotionally satisfying) than believing the tooth fairy left you a quarter under your pillow. Even so, it feels to me that in some past moment, if you’d been caught burning the Reichstag this flagrantly, you would had been shuffled off to some dusty, unpaid corner of the public sphere to edit a hand-mimeographed newsletter for an audience of ten or twenty local cranks. Instead of being rewarded in a world where no publicity is ever bad publicity.

Getting Top Chef back to where its audience wants it to be strikes me as being at least plausible, and whether or not anybody ever makes the digital-genetics robot Pokething of my dreams is not really of any importance except maybe to some manufacter’s pocketbook. The public discussion of the most important questions of our day? Not so much.

———-

Tone is a complicated issue in evaluating writing of any kind. It matters: writing is rhetoric, not just content. Content is easier to dispute and correct: this is wrong, this is right, this is confused.

It’s hard to write about tone in a review of a book without complaining that the author should have written the book that you would prefer to have read (or even authored), in which you take yourself as an ideal, typical or important reader.

One example in my recent reading is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which I finally got around to finishing. It’s a strange sensation to finish a book where you agree with the basic premise, agree with many of the specific points, acknowledge that the author is quite aware about the history of the ideas that are important to him and still find yourself frequently annoyed as hell with the way he chooses to say it.

I’m all for teaching what Crawford calls “the practical arts”, I’d agree that visceral experience with the material world has a power that abstract knowledge does not have, and that there’s a power in knowing for yourself how things and machines work.

Part of my problem, I guess, is that he oversells his case. There are people who approximate what he calls craftsmen even in knowledge work, for one, who have the agency and ethos that he sees as systematically absent from that world. He often takes material objects, machines and technologies as artifacts which simply exist for the practical, craftmanslike person to work with, showing little interest in the processes by which new technologies are imagined, designed or implemented until or unless they become something he disdains because they are no longer easily accessible to craftsmanlike tinkering. He’s got a fairly shop-worn (pun intended) critique of consumer culture, which is banal but tolerable until you stop to think a bit about the fact that the business that puts bread on his table is maintaining vintage motorcycles that his customers drive for fun down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hello, 21st Century leisure and consumption! It’s not exactly reshoeing the plow horse for the Widow Stevens so she can plant enough wheat for the coming winter.

Maybe it’s that he complains about erudition but keeps most of his polemic afloat with plenty of readings and citations and some cherrypicking. The best two chapters in the book are his “Education of a Gearhead” about his concrete experiences in motorcycle repair and a small bit of the following chapter on his white-collar discomforts: the rest of it feels, a bit like Sandra Tsing Loh’s essay, like a personal conviction in search of a social narrative, as if his own discoveries and experiences aren’t enough to keep it going. It feels, in that sense, both padded and lacking in confidence, as if he wants his old think tank buddies to think well of him and believes that they won’t unless he speaks their language as well as the new literacy he’s discovered.

Maybe it’s just tone, and personal taste. There was all of what I liked in the book, which was quite a bit. Then I had some more dispassionate questioning of some of his evidence or interpretations. And then there was a growing amount of irritation with the way he chose to say it.

Crawford doesn’t like technologies which automate some aspect of their functioning, which take the manual agency of the user out of the picture. Fine, I guess, but it’s sort of an arbitrary line in a lot of technologies, not to mention a feature of technological history which waxes and wanes rather than moves in a steady line.

What triggered me off, and kept me triggered as I read the rest of the book was a complaint about faucets which have infrared or motion sensors rather than handles.

Crawford writes, “Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elict a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers. It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.” pp. 55-56

This is like an Andy Rooney monologue that’s gotten in bed with a raging polemic and produced a child more irritating than either. What, a faucet is somehow agency because you turn it? Agency over what? A massive infrastructure which brings the water up through the faucet? Crawford’s got a footnote in which he concedes this very point, as if he read the passage over again and felt sheepish about it. It’s not just the exaggeration of the point itself that annoyed me, however. If you’ve got a first-person point to make, make it with the right pronoun. What’s so hard about, “I find it irritating to wave my hands in front of the infrared sensor”? And seriously, “it offends the spirited personality”? They make spirited personalities pretty fragile where Crawford comes from, I guess.

When the tone is that wrong once, I find I’m much more sensitive to similar off notes and ill graces for the rest of a text. Save for when he’s squarely focused on his own experiences with machinery, Crawford frequently slips into this distanced third-person voice and makes universal and abstract pronouncements on work and agency and human dignity.

It’s not just that I feel a cussed desire to argue with even the statements I’m sympathetic to, but that somehow this voice, this tone, is far away from the substantive argument of the book: not concrete, not practical, not rooted in experience, not visceral. It feels like he’s trying too hard to validate his choices in a sweepingly universal way, as diktat rather than proposition, the same way that Loh feels like she’s writing about anything, everything, that will keep her from having to look too long in the mirror.

Wardell’s backtracking since the story began to circulate is the kind of mix-and-matching of gestures that makes me rub my temples wearily. His objection to the UPS boycott, he said, had nothing to do with Fox News or Glenn Beck, just that UPS had made a public statement that they were conducting a boycott. His own statement wasn’t intended to be a public action, because he made it on a Facebook page to hundreds of friends. He doesn’t like companies that try to push ideology, but he’s not trying to do the same. The Internet twists what people mean to say or do.

Ok. Wardell is not the first to feel that what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. I’m sympathetic when the person saying that is an 18-year old who is stunned that some stranger is making fun of a humiliating picture or statement from a Facebook page. I’m not so sympathetic of a professional who has by his own recounting been in business with digital media for 20 years professing equal surprise that what was said on Facebook circulated beyond Facebook.

I’m also a bit confused by Wardell’s views on companies, ideology and advertising. Stardock makes interesting games, but it’s equally known for a taking a very strong position against conventional forms of DRM, a position which Wardell and others have definitely seen as extending beyond their own products. That makes perfect sense: DRM protection is a core issue for digital media producers. But consumer products companies that advertise on television similarly have every reason in the world to be concerned with the associations that can form between the content of such media and the products advertised alongside that content. If you were hoping to reach the audience for some programming at a particular network, but that network as a whole had gained a very strong negative reputation with some of your customer base due to one or two provocative programs, why not try to influence the network towards being a more favorable advertising environment? If you’re trying to influence the network, why not say something publically about your own company’s position?

Let’s suppose Wardell’s decision to prefer FedEx as a carrier was completely private, that he just told his fulfillment people to switch and didn’t tell anybody why he was doing it. So now UPS doesn’t know what they’ve done to lose Stardock’s business. If Wardell doesn’t want politics to influence business, he can’t even tell them that he’s made a switch for some reason other than pricing, because surely it’s a political position to argue that in some aspect of life, we shouldn’t have political positions. So what’s the point of calling down to his employees and telling them to switch to FedEx? Personal whimsy fueled by quick-fire emotional reactions, I suppose. I’m kind of thinking that’s not really the best way to run a business, but there’s precedent enough for eccentric if successful CEOs sending off OCD-fueled memos about the seams in the fabric of an employee’s shirt.

If a CEO is entitled to shift company policy based on momentary annoyance, it’s even easier for consumers to let momentary annoyance influence what are already whimsical buying decisions. I have a lot of things to play and view, my cup runneth over. I tend to find, though, that it’s these kinds of quick and emotional reactions to companies that become lasting buying rules for me. I need a lot of persuading to get involved in a formal, highly coordinated boycott campaign, but very little to trigger a kind of private decision to avoid a particular company. When I get really irked by dumb management of a product launch, for example, that tends to lock in a “don’t buy from those guys unless they give me some reason to reverse my feelings” attitude if the company’s products are ones that I can take or leave or are interchangeable with products from other companies.

There’s a huge literature on sustainability as a concept, so I want to stress that what I’m about to say is more of an emotional reaction than a substantive engagement with that literature. But I associate sustainability with very comprehensive claims about managing the entire input and output of an institution, a household, a personal life. There’s a hubris around sustainability, a kind of aspiration to manage a huge range of decisions against a systematic checklist of criteria, with a global consciousness of action and consequence. Now there’s the very ordinary sense of a sustainable project or enterprise that’s all about how much money or resources are coming in versus how much money or resources are being spent. I don’t have any problem with that kind of discussion, it’s basic for a household or a college or a business or a government. When what’s meant by sustainable is a comprehensive evaluative grid that looks at every activity and involvement in global terms, I at best find that a dizzying bar to set. At worst, I think people end up pushing very strong claims about what is or is not sustainable in that universal sense which aren’t very supportable when you look at the fine print, and then trying to produce a strong institutional constraint to follow the logic of that claim.

Simplicity seems to me a more ad hoc, personal kind of evaluation of any activity. It’s an aesthetic, an attitude, a starting orientation. If somebody says, “Keep it simple”, I tend to think that means (for example) that good enough is the bar you’re aiming for, not perfect. That you avoid ornamentation or fussiness in staging an event, setting a requirement, carrying out a duty. That you avoid excess effort and excess use of resources. Now I grant freely that different people have very different sensibilities about what’s excess and what’s not, but keeping it simple would tend to imply that you just accept that variation and move along. Simplicity is live and let live, it’s not creating elaborate regulations or structures or standards which then need to be recited or enforced at every turn.

Part of my unease has to do with the argument of some experts that what’s needed is a short-term return to the consumer spending habits of 2003-2004 in order to boost the economy, then a managed, gradual “slow landing” to a much heavier emphasis on savings over spending to give the economy time to shed excess capacity in a sensible, graduated manner. That’s roughly the equivalent of expecting occupied Iraqis to universally throw flowers and parades to welcome the American military. Desire isn’t so easily managed, nor for that matter is fear. This vision of the way forward is made possible partly by mainstream economics’ lack of interest in culture, in psychology, in history, authorized by a belief that people are collectively easily pushed one way or the other by signals and incentives.

If eventually we settle into a new austerity, that is likely to be partly performative, an identity that we try to communicate to others for some of the same reasons we might have tried to communicate fashionability, luxury, discriminatory taste: because in our local worlds, that identity accumulates some kind of social capital. (Or it protects us from attack.) Some of the material underpinnings of everyday life are likely to remain the same, even if we present them as thrifty or moderate. Many of the staple goods and fundamentals of early 21st Century life will still be there, though middle-class American consumers may buy fewer of them, or buy more austere versions of them, or use them more carefully. Families may replace computers or cars on a much more extended cycle, and use them more parsimoniously, for example, but when those wear out, they’re getting replaced.

I’d still argue that a sense that the material world around us is dense in objects and spectacle, that we have a sense of what I’ve called fecundity, is important to middle-class well-being. A lot of professionals of my generation were already trying to make their peace with some kind of downward mobility before the crash of the last year, but that was not an adjustment from wealth to poverty, just a redrawing and relearning of limits within which comfort and material well-being were still very much available. So much cultural creation in the 20th Century has come from a sense that the world around us is materially and socially crackling with possibility, even from a sense of its excess and superabundance, and of course also the starkness of the absence of abundance and wealth from so much of the global life of humanity in the same time.

I struggled during a talk last December to explain that middle-class consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere can find that sense of abundance and possibility in the intangible. I partly meant this as a rejoinder to the argument that consumer culture is inevitably environmentally destructive, that it inevitably consumes material resources at a rate beyond replenishment. I also meant to give some of the manufacturers in the audience a sense that hope for them lies in hermeneutics as much as it does in economics, that a single commodity can carry enormous weight and meaning to people and that they will continue to prioritize acquiring and displaying and using that good if that happens, even when budgets are very tight. Desire works from intangibles and meaning far more than some fixed material utility.

If I had been clearer about my argument, I would have used the concept of “social production” that has cropped up recently at Matthew Yglesias and Crooked Timber. Middle-class well-being in the United States in the last ten years has been increased far more by social production than it has the addition of new material goods. Wikipedia, for all its faults, makes life better and easier. It’s true that Wikipedia happens to displace a material commodity, the encylopedia, and it does so without replacing the jobs that the publication of the Encyclopedia Brittanica provided. Not all social production is directly rivalrous with productivity in this way, but the key is that as social production rises, it supplements that sense that the world is fecund, full of wealth and possibility, it provides some of the well-being that material commodities also provide, and adds new kinds of well-being at the same time. In Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want”, it matters that the table is well-provided with silverware, that the home is safe and clean, and that there’s a big turkey on the platter, but at least some of the comfort and well-being in that scene is social and relational. Not everything that makes us feel wealthy and happy needs to involve the conversion of material resources into material objects.

At the same time, let’s not go skipping down the kumbaya path too far. It’s one thing to think along the lines that John Quiggan does in his Crooked Timber post, and point out that “there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job allocating resources to supporting innovation”, and to look forward to an economy that aligns social production, creativity, knowledge creation, innovation and a leaner, more coherent vision of productivity. It’s another thing to think that this gets us to a mash-up Sunday-school/countercultural version of the thrifty good life where we all live in 9-foot square houses, wear burlap bags, eat Soylent Green supplemented by the modest vegetable garden on the roof of our huts, live in communitarian happiness with our neighbors while flitting about the virtual global village on our netbooks, while producing homebrewed mash-up music videos of our cats for posting to YouTube. At least some of the material culture that both attracts and vexes us is also a part of the Good Life and needs to remain so. It will and should continue to produce difference as well as connection, be haunted by inequality and attended by pleasure.

The Good Life also needs good booze and good food. It needs extravagance and flights of fancy in architecture or the design of everyday objects. The Good Life can’t be bounded everywhere by a mean kind of utility, by a cool external judgement of need and want. Desire can’t just be penned up into an interior reserve: it sometimes must leap out into the material world, to hold and to act. The prophets of thrift throughout the 20th Century were also always preachers on behalf of the intense disciplining of human subjectivity, to the management of time and the control of sensation and the rationalization of beauty, to a Taylorism of the soul. That we’ve given those thrifty, controlled disciplinarians up for their opposite numbers, a crazed frenzy of Dionysian racketeers who pretended to rationality while they engorged themselves, is a good sign that it’s time to rethink how and when we desire, to recognize the ways that social production enabled by innovative technologies have enriched us far more than SUVs or 4-bathroom suburban mansions. But it’s not a reason to stop wanting.

Looking at the current economic global economic crisis with this in mind, while the drop in consumer confidence and its impact on consumer spending is now firmly fused to the massive failure of the financial system, I think it’s important to keep in mind that some of the foundations of mass consumption in the U.S. were already showing serious strains well before the public heard about subprime mortgages.

Here I’m not merely referring to levels of credit card debt or the use of home equity to fuel consumption. I think the entire dominant architecture of retail consumption that took shape in the 1990s would have been in some degree of crisis by the end of the 2000s no matter what. Looking back, it’s going to be hard for future economic or cultural historians not to lump in the failure of stores like Circuit City or KB Toys with the Millennial Depression or whatever it is that we’re going to end up calling this whole event, but I actually think many of the retail failures reported in the last six months might have been coming no matter what.

Some of the issues that I think were already visible by 2000 among North American retailers:

1) Saturation of retail outlets. It isn’t just Starbucks: I think we had hit a point in the early 2000s where most communities simply didn’t need any new retail. But much as in the residential market, there were a lot of developers and construction firms that were built around the constant addition of new units, often without taking older retail out of the picture.

2) Saturation of product. Here I’ll agree with my colleague Barry Schwartz and many other critics of contemporary consumer culture: too much choice on store shelves, too much informational noise in the system, too many options and too much duplication, from cheap non-durables all the way up to big-ticket durables.

3) Failure to adapt to the affordances of online shopping. Not just too much choice, too much of it a false choice. Too many shell-games going on where manufacturers bought up shelf space in large brick-and-mortar stores and filled it with variant forms of the same product while those same stores failed to keep deep back catalogs of goods or to stock “long tail” items that might make shopping at that store a real destination experience. Back when a store like Borders first appeared, before Amazon, it was a place you’d drive to just for the depth and variety of their catalog. I remember taking a special trip to the one that opened near DC precisely because it had so many books across so many categories. I freely concede that brick-and-mortar stores now, whatever their size, can’t compete with Amazon’s catalog. But most of them have completely given up entirely on having a selection that goes beyond the last six months of product. This leaves those stores with an increasingly small customer base if they’re selling in communities with substantial online access: they’re selling to the people who can’t shop online, who won’t shop online, or they’re selling to people for impulse purchases of the latest merchandise where there is some value to physical presence or some special attraction to immediacy. (The latest Harry Potter, the newest DVD). Add to this that a great many big retailers still do not seem to recognize that many consumers now use the Internet to do price comparisons. I’ve heard informally from people that some of the chains liquidating in the last six months have taken product off the shelf, marked it *up* by 50% or 100% and then marked it down again to the price it was selling at before the announcement of closure. Yes, this is an old trick, but honestly, it works much more poorly in an environment where price comparisons are easier to come by.

4) Blind acceptance of the Wal-Mart model: squeeze the suppliers, reduce the quality, reduce the price, and hire a poorly-motivated minimum wage labor force to man the cash registers. Maybe this works for Wal-Mart, at least when it is going into retail spaces where the main competition are sleepy small-town Main Street retailers with small inventories at high prices. It doesn’t work in areas saturated with suburban retail clusters and malls. It clearly didn’t work as a model for a store like Circuit City and I don’t think it’s working for other retailers like Home Depot, Best Buy, and so on. Most of these bigger outlets and chains are now vigorously unpleasant places to shop in, pretty much the opposite of the spectactorial grandeur of mass consumption at the end of the 19th Century. Workers in these stores often know almost nothing about the merchandise they sell and have almost no desire to actively sell it to anyone. Many large retail outlets are laid out indifferently or confusingly, and have all the problems with the diversity and selectivity of their stock that I’ve described above. In a lot of cases, short-sighted middle management has added to the problem by requiring sales staff to aggressively push unnecessary warranties or robotically attempt to encourage customers to acquire consumer loyalty cards, to make the experience of shopping intrusive or unpleasant.

5) Saturation of personal ownership, particularly leisure and cultural goods. For example, the music industry, with its obsession about piracy, doesn’t seem able to bend its head around the possibility that another problem they have is that older music consumers may simply have hit a point where they don’t need or want any more music–that they’ve assembled the back catalogs of work they really like and are now vastly more selective about what they might want to add, limiting to new work that they enjoy or the occasional addition of older work. Or maybe they do understand it, hence the constant drive towards new formats with the insistence on sabotaging their compatibility with old formats. This is the only thing a lot of culture-industry and leisure-goods manufacturers get now: steal back the old stuff of durable quality that we foolishly sold to people and require them to buy new stuff where we stick in some expiration date or limitation on its use–rather than attending to the production of new material that might motivate many consumers to a purchase.

If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think it’s going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in a relentlessly downward spiral. And at least some of those changes will involve rethinking the size, scale and ubiquity of retailing. Brick-and-mortar shopping needs to move back towards smaller but more knowledgeable and invested sales staff who are better compensated and respected for their work. It needs to offer better choices from a genuine diversity of goods, to build back catalogs and long-tail selections on the shelves, to look for local or variant producers. Retailers have to stop trying to manipulate information asymmetries about price, availability and quality to their benefit, and have to start investing in standards and regulations that improve the conditions of manufacture.

This ultimately means lower aggregate sales and fewer retail jobs, in all likelihood. But it’s the only stable long-term foundation for mass consumption that I can see. I’m absolutely not one of those critics of consumerism who basically loathes it from start to finish: there is a great deal to like about late 20th Century material culture in the U.S. and Europe, quite aside from the fact that consumerism is now the heart of the only global economy we can plausibly imagine. Retailers need to think about what’s gone wrong in the part of the economy that they control, and fix it independently of the fixes being aimed at the financial sector. If they fool themselves into thinking that Circuit City is the fault of Citigroup, then don’t look for the consumer economy to have a healthy revival regardless of what happens to toxic bank debt.

If you want a look at what blogs are really for, there’s a fantastically engaging dispute unfolding over a clash between a customer and a barista at a Washington DC coffee shop. The basic issue: the customer ordered espresso over ice. The barista said that espresso over ice was against store policy. The customer, irritated, ordered espresso and some ice. This was reluctantly given to him. When he prepared to pour his espresso over the ice, the barista said that what he was about to do was “Not Okay”. Customer is angry. Customer returns later and orders an iced Americano, which is ok by store policy. (Really not much different than an iced espresso, in my humble opinion.) Customer pays with a dollar bill upon which he has written a message for the store.

Here’s the original post from the aggrieved customer.

It turns out someone else witnessed the exchange.

The store owner replies (and then doesn’t allow comments, unlike the other two posts).

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The comments, though, are the real payoff of the whole exchange. You get the inevitable smattering of metacomments from people who think the debate itself is irrelevant, sure. (I find this kind of comment incredibly annoying, by the way: the person who shows up to say, ‘How silly that you all have the energy to post about such things, or beat dead horses, etcetera.’ How silly does that make the metacommenter, then? He’s got the energy to post about people posting.) But mostly what you get are people making strong statements about the following subjects:

1. How espresso should be consumed.
2. How coffee in general should be consumed.
3. Whether businesses should have policies that dictate how customers consume what they buy.
4. How a service employee should behave.
5. How a customer should behave.
6. What the “real” motivation for the policy might be (to prevent something called a ‘ghetto latte’, where a customer orders espresso over ice and then adds 6 ounces of half-and-half himself for free)
7. The particular history of this particular business, including their problems with DC taxes.
8. Witnesses offering their reading of the way the two individuals in conflict actually acted (I think we’re up to three self-proclaimed witnesses, though the barista himself hasn’t said anything yet, I think.)
9. Whether it’s ever worth getting pissed off enough to write confrontationally on a dollar bill.
10. Whether the owner of a store should reply to a clearly non-serious threat of arson with a slightly less non-serious threat to punch a former customer in the dick.

Once you get into the thread, I think you’re going to end up with an opinion yourself. (For the record: I think it’s right that it’s not the best way to drink espresso though I don’t like iced coffee of any kind; it’s none of the barista or store’s business what someone does once they’ve ordered something and it’s stupid to have a prescriptive policy of the kind that the store has in the first place; the barista himself handled the situation badly; it was over the top to go back and hand in the defaced dollar: that’s what blogs are for.)

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This is how culture gets made, transformed, and is made meaningful. An incident or moment breaks into the assumptions, ideas and orientations that govern everyday life and reveals that there are wide disparities between different people about shared experiences. The accidental character of the particular incident shapes the debate that follows. If Jeff Simmermon hadn’t reacted visibly to the barista at the store or had passively accepted the store policy while quietly fuming about it, the blog entry wouldn’t have drawn attention from BoingBoing. If the barista had initially suggested an iced Americano or shown good humor about the store’s policies, Simmermon probably wouldn’t have been irritated. Simmermon’s quotation of “Five Easy Pieces” gives readers a cultural anchor, and gives further nuance to the different reactions coming from readers.

Sometimes social scientists or humanists argue that stories and incidents serve as mirrors or as synecdoches, that they are a smaller, more concentrated way to view the whole of society. I think this story shows the problem with that perspective. Stories like the “Iced Espresso Incident” don’t reflect underlying social reality: they make it. People discover their own assumptions when reading about such an incident, discover that other people may have very different assumptions, and then modify, rethink, or strengthen the mental software that guides them through everyday life. The particular contours of the story that pulled back the casing of everyday life to reveal the wiring and infrastructure underneath lends unpredictable shape to those reactions. Change the particulars of the story, and you change the way that culture transforms in its wake.