I’ve been toying lately with an idea, and I hope that by publishing the toying I will force myself to make it a reality.

I don’t watch as much TV as I used to.  Maybe.  It’s hard to say – I feel as though I watch less, but I am as guilty as my contemporaries of the binge watching (a term with one foot on my short list of “terms to never use because they are either meaningless or stupid”) that takes one deeply into the heart of a show, only to come up for air at the end with the sense that time has been lost and you can’t remember all that much about how.  One of the things that seems to characterize the TV I have watched, however, is its disconnected disconnection.

I apologize.  Disconnected disconnection is a bit cute, but I couldn’t help myself.

Disconnection is much the rage these days.  The bathos of the millennials and deaths of despair in our older demographics, as well as the increasing transparency (sometimes bleeding into revelry?) around the treatments of racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities, has imbued an astounding number of shows with an apparent desire to mine the trivialities and emptiness of life, as well as its painful failures, into a fourth-wall breaking shrug.  “Wow, this is hard and it sucks,” the shows seems to say, then adding “but isn’t it beautiful/engaging/tragic/funny/pointless?” as appropriate to its genre.  This faux-disaffection – after all, one shouldn’t be so disaffected as to give up watching the show – can be engaging enough when it’s well done, but I find myself losing the suspension of disbelief again and again.

The lifestyles are too ridiculous.

All these beautiful people in their 20s and 30s are suffering or trying to be gritty and make it through, but I’ve started to think about where they are doing it, the clothes they are wearing, and the food they are eating; the setting in which all these are taking place seems insanely out of whack with the very tone they are trying to take.  All these people that are trying to push on the ennui of life or the difficulties of trying to get by…how the hell do they afford all the trappings of success?

I’d like to – if possible – run through a list of the most popular shows on the networks and streaming platforms to see just how pricey a character’s lifestyle might be, and if the numbers behind that reality at all jive with the setting.  I suspect they mostly won’t.  Further, at a time when there is bountiful fist-shaking at the difficulty of upward mobility and stagnating incomes, I want to look back in time at popular shows of decades past and see if portrayals then might be better attuned to the reality of the average person.  Might it be the case that Hollywood has dramatized the mood of our time in a setting that actively undermines and gives the lie to the message?  Being a cantankerous soul, I hope so.

So, to make myself a to-do list, here is a list of some of the most popular shows of the past 5 years I  think I should look into.  I pick them based on archetypes they fulfill, being new enough that the can be considered up to date for what they attempt, and of course how much I like (or hate) the show:

• Shameless – if there’s a show that tries to show hardscrabble, it must be Shameless.  It even overtly discussed gentrification.  Would its numbers add up?
• Arrow/The Flash – haven’t seen them, but superheroes are certainly at peak popularity.  Do those with “alter egos” live in circumstances that are less than heroic?
• Supernatural – I can’t believe this show is still on.  Seriously, I remember it from when I was a kid.  15 seasons?  If I remember correctly its set in a small town, so maybe it’s worth revisiting for a non-metropolitan data point.
• Quantico – Is that still airing?  Unknown.  I remember the splash it made when it launched.  I am deeply curious to learn what the lifestyle of Priyanka Chopra on the show would be when she wasn’t looking beautiful wearing an “FBI” emblazoned baseball hat.
• Shonda Rhimes – I hate her shows, but given her cultural resonance one must be good.  Maybe Scandal for its public sector focus?
• Modern Family – people loved it, worth digging into
• The Good Wife – much beloved, but I always thought the opulence was ridiculous.
• Insecure – I really like this show, but it seems to have imbibed too much of the West Coast nebulous everyone-is-doing-ok-but-also-cripplingly-anxious vibe.

Anyway, a project for later.

 

Some time ago I discovered Perry Anderson’s writing on Brazil.  It coincided, roughly, with a rather gushing New York Times feature interviewing the director of a new Brazilian crime series.  The interviewer seemed more worried about describing the location of their conversation and the reaction of eavesdropping strangers than getting to the core of the series, but managed to get across that the show, called “The Mechanism,” was about the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil, momentous in its portrayal of the subject matter and high in its production value – “The Wire” set on the equator.

I watched the first few episodes.  I wouldn’t call myself a devotee of foreign television by any means, but I’ve watched enough that I think I know when I’m truly out of my depth culturally, and I dropped “The Mechanism” because it quickly became clear there were lines a Brazilian would pick up on that I simply wasn’t seeing, let alone reading between.  Anderson’s pieces for the London Review of Books date back to 1989, although his first piece on Brazil was in 1994 – his breadth of knowledge stretches quite wide, but from his early 1990s writing on Italy and the Mani Pulite scandal (which he draws direct parallels to in his recent Brazilian coverage,) his ability to peel back the layers of political intrigue and get to its roots in the local society is well-founded.  My short tenure as a “Mechanism” viewer demonstrated that periodic columns in The Economist – usually relating to inflation, oil, agribusiness, crime in the favelas, the bolsa familia policy, and Lula – had given me a shallow familiarity with the country’s headlines and macroeconomic figures but, perhaps unsurprisingly, no real idea of what was going on.  Anderson’s writing was dazzlingly informed, so fluent in the history and cast of characters it was as though my previous acquaintance with the country were through a child’s coloring book and now I was watching the IMAX adaptation in 3D, no expense (i.e. word count) spared.  His most recent pieces delve into Jair Bolsonaro, yet another member of the current pantheon of democratic thuggery.  For an author to deliver such a compelling history and analysis of an entire country over multiple decades merely as part of digging into the backstory of the country’s newest leader is, to me, remarkable.

There is, admittedly, a tinge of implicit condescension in that remarkability that makes me wince; Brazil is the fifth most populous nation in the world, so perhaps it should be unremarkable that a cogent 17,000 word piece placing its leader in historical context should appear in a reputable global publication.  Trump-related writing certainly surpasses that figure by an order of magnitude on a daily basis, even if we discount the tweets themselves!  Nonetheless, Anderson’s comprehensive account taught me more in one reading than a decade of casual if regular consumption, so on that score alone he deserves to be read – past, present, and future – with attention.

He also had two asides, related to Brazil in only the broadest sense, that had me reaching for an underlining pen.

“Often heard…is the opinion that [Bolsonaro’s] rise represents a contemporary version of fascism. The same, of course, is a standard depiction of Trump in liberal and left circles in America and the North Atlantic at large, if typically assorted with escape clauses – ‘much like’, ‘reminiscent of’, ‘resembling’ – making clear it is little more than lazy invective.”

He ends the last sentence with a citation, but bear with me while we visit the other inciting comment, which comes only a paragraph later:

“Is Bolsonaro better pigeonholed as a populist? The term now suffers such inflation as the all-purpose bugbear of the bien pensant media that its utility has declined.”

There.

First off, I love any aside from an esteemed academic writer (Anderson recently retired from UCLA and was an editor of the New Left Review) because its high risk always pays off for the reader: we either get the highly trained and deadly verbal thrust of a specialist, delivered with all the esoteric power, self-assuredness, and frustration that build up in the ivory tower, or a lazy swipe that allows the ghost of Gore Vidal – and us with him – to smirk once again at the flailing efforts of academe.

I think these fall into the former category.  The call out is not pedantic, as his (rather smug, certainly) swipe at the bien pensant media rings true – populism and fascism are two words on the tip of the buzzword tongue.  As an undergraduate I took a course on populism which I quite enjoyed, although the political theory was well outside my wheelhouse.  The populist movement of that moment, the populist characteristics of which my professor rightly challenged us to inspect, was the Tea Party, in the avatar of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  I have done little to refresh my studies of a decade ago, but my remaining knowledge does twinge every time I hear the word populism being hurled at political developments worldwide by way of explanation – it has become the equivalent of a verbal shrug.  Not to say it doesn’t merit deep analysis, but Anderson’s argument for lessened utility holds true for me.  So, too, his point on fascism.  I despise Donald Trump, and I fully appreciate the sort of invective he deserves.  I even plan to contribute my mite to the pile that history will, no doubt, pile upon him.  But when the posters and rallying cries of fascism become so common from so many disparate groups, I begin to wonder if the word hasn’t become a cousin to the most popular political phrase of all – “No!” – in that many will pump their fists in the air to scream it, but can’t agree on why they screamed it when the fists come back down and conversation resumes.

Thus Anderson’s citation.  Erudite readers, unlike me, would no doubt have noted that the footnote Anderson gives at the end of the first quote above leads to a recent piece in the New Left Review, so the usual sorts of academic conflicts of interest arise.  And yet the argument in the piece – “What Is Trump?” by Dylan Riley – is elegant and wonderfully crafted, such that I have to give Anderson a full pass.  Riley begins by plucking quotes from political figures across the spectrum (including an anarcho-syndicalist, which I thought only existed in Monty Python) comparing Trump to fascists gone by, but always with verbiage that defuses the charge.  After gathering the evidence, he demolishes their charge by delving into the origins of fascism in Interwar Germany and Italy, combining an argument about the imperialist goals fascists necessarily pursued with analysis of the social classes that responded to the clarion call.  He then moves on to contrast Trump’s presidency and policies with those of the Interwar fascists, and I think does a very convincing job of demonstrating the unsuitability of the label.  It’s not that Trump isn’t a terrible president, racist and seemingly bent on diminishing the country he is supposed to lead morally and economically, it’s just that all of the above do not make him a fascist.

Riley goes on to categorize Trump’s political style using a more theoretical framework – Weber is trotted out – and pins him, cicada-like, with an exact political taxonomy.  The departure from empirics makes me, a philistine, less inclined to follow along, but it does complete the overall idea of “we should criticize this goon using the tight terms” nicely.  By the end, Riley cannot help himself but call for the forces he thinks should replace Trump – he has earned it, after all – and this being the New Left Review the FBI and CIA are abolished.  The trailing off at the end, however, does not detract from what I think is a profoundly successful piece at least in that it urges the correct consideration of the facts, even if the reader doesn’t agree with the author’s conclusion after synthesizing them.

I liked Anderson’s asides because his righteous dismissal of misleading orthodoxy speaks, I think, to the same basic urge that makes everyone hate fake news – including those who are reading it.  Without doing the diligence to at least agree on a basic set of facts, we risk being unable to have a basic conversation, which means the farthest we can progress together is standing in the streets with our signs shouting “No!” but never actually sitting at the table to get things done.  I read recently that the Yellow Vest movement in France coalesced into not one but two political organizations, which apparently surprised their respective organizers.  It’s easy to look out at the No’s and see a vision of a particular future, but without doing the work to understand what specific issues brought everyone to the table – beyond allying against an easy, if inaccurate, umbrella term – it’s hard to imagine how to successfully get things done if or when the No’s have to become Yes’s.  This is what I’m afraid of for the Democrats.  The No energy that in many ways motivated the midterms was a joyous release, a reaction, but I don’t see the groundwork for Yes’s in 2020.  Pelosi and Schumer are, in their way, no different than McConnell – old partisan hands ready to enact their agenda when they have their chance, tacking with the intra-party winds in the meanwhile but not making fundamental changes in course.  Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has seized the Sanders demographic with vigor, but her wonderfully articulate defense – or better yet, offense – in the face of Republican actions is not a substitute for concrete plans.  The Green New Deal combines two nice ideas, but the fact remains no one has attached a dollar figure to it yet, and it’s Warren rather than Ocasio-Cortez who seems to have policies that actually raise revenue.  Internecine Democratic warfare awaits in the wings, and with Trump standing orange and unbloodied atop a mountain of vanquished rivals, “the Resistance” may hand their archrival victory by being unable to unite.  In some way I most fear some kind of Democratic Trump vaulting over opponents in the same way Trump did, so remarkably, over his Republican rivals.  To repeat this cycle because we were unable to do the serious work of figuring out what was happening and how to respond to it would be the ultimate shame.

But hey, at least we’re not in Brazil!

From the review of the recent Bellow biography in the LRB.

“The publication of Herzog in 1964 – Bellow’s semi-epistolary novel about a divorced Jewish cuckold and highly evolved malcontent who, writhing in the throes of a midlife crisis and sexual combat (‘What do women want? They eat green salad and drink human blood’), composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction.”

“Highly evolved malcontent” is stellar.

A study was released today digging into the effect of the polarizing “soda tax,” which taxes sweetened beverages at 1.5 cents per ounce.  (“The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects”)

If the data are telling us that the tax fares poorly on its “bonus” objective of improving the health of citizens, we can still ask if the city has come out ahead in its new policy?  No one is asking that question explicitly, but the answer seems to be an emphatic “yes” – if the city made $77 million in fiscal 2018 (per the Controller), at 1.5 cents per ounce, that’s 5.13 billion ounces of sweetened beverages.  Assuming an average price of 4.3 cents per ounce (blended average of data from the paper) that’s $220 million of sales.  Given the city’s 2% sales tax, that’s $4.4 million of revenue – a fraction of the soda tax revenue.  The paper estimates sweetened beverage sales volume is down by 42%, and we can see that even if we there was a 50% drop, the loss of $4.4 million dollars in sales tax is dwarfed by the gain of $77 million.

To be fair, there are knock-on effects.  The paper mentions that consumption has merely been displaced to outside city limits.  If consumers are buying their groceries or other goods while outside the city (i.e. “I’ve made a trip to load up on soda, so I might as well buy all my groceries at this store as well”) the city is losing sales tax revenue on items other than soda.  If the city has “net” gained $70 million on the sweetened beverage tax, then 70/.02 = $3.5 billion of substitution necessary to come out behind on soda tax revenue.  That’s quite a hurdle!  It seems safe to say that the city has indeed been successful in generating revenue from the soda tax, even attempting to control for foregone revenues and knock-on effects, but the ongoing conversation about who pays the tax and, accordingly,  how it should be spent it one worth having.

 

I recently finished Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media by Marcus Gilroy-Ware.  The book plays to all my biases around social media, so it wasn’t a surprise I generally agreed with the author’s criticism of social media companies (primarily Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, although Google sneaks in there as well) but he surprised me on two counts.  First, he managed to clearly demarcate where the anti-social media argument must stop with particular attention to technological determinism and the accompanying nuances.  Secondly, I had ignored the word “capitalism” in the title because I thought it related primarily to the lack of regulation of social media companies and the dangers inherent in their for-profit status, but in fact his aim was indeed at the entire system, which I thought came across as passionate but much less factual than his otherwise well-researched argument.

Before I sum up my opinion, I’m going to copy a few of my favorite excerpts from the book and a brief reaction.

“The effects of social media use are pretty wide-ranging, and study after study shows that our satisfaction with life, body security, social relationships, and overall psychological wellbeing are negatively affected by the consumptive use of social media platforms, and improve quickly when we stop using them.” (pg. 7)

This is a thesis statement for why this whole topic deserves serious attention from all of us, and self-reflection on our own usage patterns.

“We are now, you often hear, an “information society,” largely thanks to the internet.  Writing before “social media” existed, Todd Gitlin (2003) argued that terms such as “information society” or “information technology” were “instant propaganda” for a positivist view of what technology of the internet could bring its users. (pg. 14)

Labeling is so critical…Gilroy-Ware goes on to point out that the very term social media is inherently positive – “social media is not a neutral term and should not be above critique.” In fact,

“Those who scolded me for seeming as though I had overlooked the social benefits they had experienced on social media were missing the point. It is not that “social media” aren’t intensely social, so much as the fact that they neither have the exclusivity on sociality in the way that their name appears to suggest, nor function in an exclusively social role…” (pg. 20)

Just so.  The knee-jerk response to social media critique seems frequently to be that the critic is anti-social, or somehow warped in their ability to use and appreciate the platform when compared to the average person on the platform.

“Banal, throwaway statements of the form “social media is changing us” typify a variety of lazy thinking known as technological determinism, typical of how technologies are often discussed and understood as their usage changes gear from early adopters to more mainstream usage. To see things according to a technologically deterministic outlook is to believe that technology can somehow induce or suppress our behavior, as though we have no control. Technological determinism is the belief that adding a “pride” flag emoji will make life easier for LGBTQ individuals, or that replacing the “gun” emoji with a fun-looking bright-green water pistol will somehow do anything to ameliorate gun violence….The technology invites you do certain things in ways that undoubtedly influential, but there is nothing in that technology that forces you to do them.” (pg. 23)

He gets a bit contemptuous towards the end but the examples are illustrative, and I think this is a critical point for those of us concerned about social media but can sometimes struggle to clearly articulate it.  We are tempted to argue the determinist path, but this isn’t a pedantic difference – the truth is more subtle but more damning.

If your “friend” Johnny spends an excessive amount of time on Facebook, for example, is it because Johnny is at fault, or because Johnny’s brain, being that of a human being, will tend to seek certain things that Facebook convincingly promises and because the economic and social pressures under which Johnny and many people in Johnny’s society live are inclined to exacerbate compulsive behaviors such as the overuse of social media?” (pg. 24)

A nice reminder that deriding the social media user is silly as well as petty.

“The irrationality with which people are increasingly using social media suggests that they are driven by far deeper and more powerful psychological forces that social media platforms are able to unleash and harness.” (pg. 30)

As per above, social media does make you do anything but they happily piggyback on things that do in order to get you to spend time on their platform.

“When more conspicuously technological entities, such as robots or mechanical devices, are applied to basic acts of human life such as cooking, sex, health, or sociality, the most common response is suspicion, and rightly so as we resist the ongoing technologization of our intimate lives. We recognize that pleasure occurs least often in automatic, predetermined, or technologized area of our lives. Yet in social media we are happily welcoming massive technological edifices into our lives, our homes, our beds, our cars because they have found a way to be pleasurable without being too conspicuous.” (pg. 32)

I think this statement is less self-evident than the author seems to, but generally speaking I agree.  Merely anecdotally, the millennial (*retch*) desire for “experiences” and items like bread-baking and artisanal everything aligns nicely with this statement.  As technology homologizes parts of our life (the AirBnb aesthetic, centralization of taste-making websites, open-floor plan nonsense at work) the places that remain unique and pleasingly analogue receive more attention.

“Secondly, the procrastination study (Meier, Reinecke & Meltzer, 2016) argues that the primary draw of social media is not functional, but dysfunctional, and finds that Facebooks is ‘often selected impulsively and in an uncontrolled manner‘ (emphasis added).” (pg. 33)

This one hit home for me because of its implications around self-control, and the needs to exert it in order to not use these platforms.  I do not use social media, but am all too aware of a shortlist of websites that I click to reflexively when a moment of dead space (more on that later) arises.  If social media consumption is just an impulse, and we assume changing that drive to fill the void with novelty is impossible because it’s biological, where does that lead us?  Thought-provoking question that I have too much of a headache to address right now.  Also, he digs into that later.

“The underlying pattern that involves continuous navigation of novel media is a hallmark of a social media timeline, and it is this architecture that reveals social media use as a form of consumption.” (pg. 36)

Consumption, consumption, consumption.  The infinite scroll and dynamic updating were truly the two volatiles that, when combined, makes social media such a potent consumption tool.  There is an endless list of items to scroll through, and it’s possible – unlikely, but possible – that if you come back a few minutes later, the infinite scroll could offer up a new trove of temporary diversions!  As he evocatively quotes earlier in the book, “Facebook is like a fridge: You know there is nothing new inside but you check it out every 10 minutes.”

“By allowing the user to encounter a stream of novel media stimuli from familiar sources, the timeline facilitates an easy way to feel something other than the emotions that the user would otherwise be experiencing at that moment in time.  According to the research of psychologist Marvin Zuckerman (1980), this behavior is called “sensation seeking.” Human beings, psychologist J.H. Patton tells us, are “aggressive sensation seekers” (2014). This momentary distraction from the user’s emotional reality provides an excellent means of emotion regulation.” (pg. 38)

Escapism, my old friend!  Gilroy-Ware doesn’t use that word, preferring to keep us grounded in the science (which I applaud him for) but the synonym lurks in the background.  An interesting point left unexplored is what I think of as the depth of the escapism.  If social media and its ilk offer brief dips of emotion regulation, would procrastinating by watching an entire TV show or reading a book offer a more complete regulatory experience?  At what point does regulation become actively engaging with a new activity?

“…a further reminder that social media cannot be studied purely as a series of convenient practical tools, and that their appeal goes much deeper than that. The way social media distil psychological stimulation and emotional arousal into a consumable experience is what gives them their power.” (pg. 49)

Well summarized.

“This mistaken belief in in our rational, controlled relationship to the timeline – however subconscious – echoes the narratives that, as described in Chapter One, we have always been fed about the role of technology in our lives as something that works for us, and makes our “hunting” easier and more efficient, but this illusion is exactly what gives the timeline its power.” (pg. 60)

The rational pitch these companies deliver to us puts me in the mind of a technology executive testifying before Congress and simply explaining, with a broad shrug, how valuable the market finds their service and that they are simply trying to deliver the best product they can.  It’s just east and efficient, it makes the real stuff we care about that much easier to access – but of course, it’s an illusion, and however much time we spend on the real stuff, we spend far more in the hunting, such that the hunting and the real stuff become conflated.

“The timeline is now an addictive hosepipe for the commodified culture and public sphere of its users, where people spend time at home, at work, or even in the middle of the night looking at whatever might be there, without the need to discriminate between these formerly separate areas of culture.” (pg. 63)

Great image.

“Whether we call it escape, distraction, hedonism, we are as motivated to do it as a means of avoidance as we are a means to pursue pleasure for its own sake.” (pg. 68)

A fair point against technological determinism, that the technology is enabling us to feed predilections (like procrastination) rather that creating them.

“One of the many myths about contemporary life on planet Earth that we are repeatedly asked to accept is that since life in the developing world is often a grim struggle to daily survival, life in the developed world must be pleasant, easy, and happy.” (pg. 75)

A nice note that the issues that underpin some of needs and emotions that drive social media.

“It is common for people to “humble brag” about how little sleep they set by on, and perhaps it is no surprise that British ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher was said to get only four hours per night during her heyday of wrecking Britain.” (pg. 87)

Just a great slam.

“Despite the average woman having 164 friends on Facebook at the time of writing, and the average man having 144, most people would turn to no more than five individuals for support (Dunbar, 2016).” (pg. 93)

I love this statistic, I think it so clearly cuts through the image to the reality, and illustrates the gulf between the much-vaunted utility of social media with the comparatively precious deep personal relationships, which actually sustain us.

“A new car, new laptop, new dress may make us feel happy momentarily, but there is a big difference between hedonic happiness, associated with pleasure, and long-term fulfillment, known as eudaimonic happiness. … Even if the having of the hedonic pleasures afforded to some of us will not make us happy, the constant feeling of not having – of missing out – will also build anger, resentment, and a feeling of injustice, that all take their toll.” (pg. 95 & 96)

Again playing on the idea that the material abundance of the developed world does not mean that we cannot have issues.

“Mark Fisher makes a very important point about how his students behave, and introduces the concept of depressive hedonia. ‘Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia,’ he writes, but depressive hedonia is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure, so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that “something is missing,” but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.” (pg. 104)

Useful terminology, and a phenomenon I think is hugely present.

“When taken together, the emotional distress of life under capitalism, the ersatz compensatory role of hedonic media consumption, and the consumption-centric orientation of social media reveal that the compulsive social media use is driven by the desire to soothe and to be distracted from the generalized emotional distress and malaise of everyday late-capitalist life. I refer to this behavior as filling the void.” (pg. 106)

Gilroy-Ware introduces the titular term, as last.  I think it’s a bit melodramatic, but it does provide a clear image of what’s driving social media use, the needs they tap into, and why we should act to address this convergence.

“Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram may be free, but they are still corporations that make money from your using them. Whatever their original form, they have evolved to encircle and exploit the unhappiness of capitalist subjects while providing them with depressive hedonia in the form of the timeline.  Emotions, once considered worthless, have now become a site at which value can be mercilessly extracted for commercial gain. As social media incorporate themselves ever deeper and into more intimate aspects of our lives, they become the fastest, cheapest way of filling the void, and it is their strategy to do exactly this to which the next chapter turns.” (pg. 108)

A great summary of the first half of the book, although the phrasing “capitalist subjects” might be a bit too feudal for me – I don’t think we are on the road to serfdom in this particular instance, but the forest around the roads we are traveling are certainly bandit-plagued.

“Google, for instance, long had the motto “Don’t be evil,” which is interesting not only because it acknowledges that the company is in a position to be “evil,” should it choose to be, but because when Google restructured in October 2015, the motto was dropped entirely. Perhaps it was planning to be a bit more “evil”?” (pg. 117)

I remember when they dropped the motto and had the same thought!

“…typical of the broader platform of social media corporations: You give us something, and we sell it for advertising purposes. Similarly, in January 2012 when Google revised the terms of use for all its products, it was in order to track users across all their devices and all products. In August 2016, Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp, trusted by users because of its end-to-end encryption, announced a change to its terms of use that allowed it to pass your phone number and user-profile data to its parent company Facebook, despite having promised never to do so, although a subtly placed opt-out switch was available.” (pg. 121)

Nice examples that point us back to the much-discussed user agreements we all agree to, and what’s in the fine print.

“In so far as the data and insights collected about us are sold, we are being sold, Balkan argues, and the only other time human beings have ever been sold in the past was called slavery, he has said, somewhat provocatively. “It’s about time to ask ourselves, however, what are we to call the business of selling everything about a person that makes them who they are apart from their body?”” (pg. 123)

As Gilroy-Ware says, provocative, but a fascinating way to frame the problem – after all, the companies are extracting value from people.

“Writing in 2008, when Facebook had just fifty-nine million users, author Tom Hodgkinson wrote of Facebook that “we are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.” This is true, but commodification is old-hat entry-level capitalism compared to how social media work.  What social media and especially Facebook, do is effectively parasitise various aspects of their users in order to become part of their lives: Their sense of technology as something that should work for them, their boredom, their depression, their existential angst, their desire to be appreciated, and their existing social relationships.” (pg. 137)

See the above!

“…follower counts, a numerical measure of seeming authority and importance.” (pg. 138)

A brief line but a great one, reminding me of friends off-handedly quoting me the number of likes or views that a post generated.

“We are measured, compared, blamed for our own problems, and pressured to compete according to terms on which we cannot “win,” all while our sense of a bright future and a clear path towards it is taken away by political, economic, and even ecological factors beyond our control. What results is a feeling of emptiness, uncertainty, stagnation, and fear that can only ever be blocked out or escaped from by participating in various forms of enjoyment and consumption, which the corporations of the developed world are only too happy to provide. Capitalism has become established as a culture to which there is no alternative, and from which there is no escape, except subjectively and momentarily via consumption. Social media, as businesses themselves that feed on our need to be distracted from this system, are the most faithful manifestation of this system of all.” (pg. 146)

Strident in tone, but a nice ‘top down’ summary of the author’s position in what is mostly a ‘bottom up’ book.  I don’t agree with his rather absolutist view on capitalism.

“Such architectures allow the capture of data about exactly what is meaningful and important to each user, which both provides a saleable commodity in the form of marketing data, and allows social networks to make themselves increasingly indispensable in the day-to-day emotional life of the user and to pass on the commercial value of this proximity to their advertisers.” (pg. 147)

The sentiment is familiar by now, but this is well put.

“Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith has also argued that “we need to remember how to forget,” calling the insistence on remembering everything hyperthymesis. “Memory has become prosthetic – outsourced to the internet, to external hard drive or cloud storage system. What should we remember? What should be preserved? The paradox of the digital future is the burden of the past that we are constantly archiving,” she says (2016).” (pg. 156)

I love that a Shakespeare scholar makes an appearance here.  I love her view and her dubbing a Greek name onto our digital problem.  Also, the echoes of Ghost in the Shell some thirty years on…external memory devices, anyone?

“Networks such as Facebook and Twitter are designed and built by human beings, mostly American, mostly white, mostly male, and mostly in California, who have a culturally-specific subjective relation to the media and culture for which their technologies have become the conduit, and who will inevitably build their platforms according to this outlook. At all times we should be asking ourselves: Does the way I use this technology, the way it has been designed, and/or the way it is operated, change the way I think about the areas of life to which it relates? Is what I see subtly cheapened, overvalued, or distorted by the medium? When, as with social media, technology can come to relate to so many areas of our lives, these questions should be constant, and posed with every use.” (pg. 157)

A much more subjective argument, the narrow authorship of these technologies is a point well made, and recent articles on how smart speakers like Alexa respond best to California accents drive home the tiny ways this can make a difference, although I think this is a much more intractable issue than the larger topic of social media and data collection and use – how you regulate (and indeed, whether to regulation) hubs of innovation is a very different issue.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (pg. 169)

This is a quote from Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and while it didn’t strike me as a particularly successful quotation for the topic of social media, it seems immensely relevant for the current political environment, “fake news,” and political polarization.

That’s it!  Not a short list.  In the time it took for me to transcribe all these quotes, I’ve been able to reflect more on the book.  I think Gilroy-Ware does an excellent job of assembling empirical evidence for a topic that too frequently runs on gut instinct and cognitive dissonance.  He chisels away at the common arguments around technological determinism and, with his empirical data, digs into the users of the technology for the reasons behind the success of social media’s success.  Towards the end of the book, as he begins to build towards a larger indictment of the capitalist system he begins to stretch, running more on rhetoric than the evidence that made him so successful initially.  He becomes focused on his thesis sometimes to the point of shrugging off the responsibilities of social networks as platforms, focusing instead on the actions of the human users of the platform, but while his semantics mean the book goes out with something of a whimper, overall it is a very successful analysis of the ‘state of the art’ of social media criticism at the time of writing, and a welcome source to use in the years to come.

 

 

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I haven’t been idle after my post on this topic some months back, but analysis hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s worth a full post.  However, a notice in today’s paper made me think it’s time for a brief note, anyway.

Allen Domb, whom I admire purely for fulfilling the necessary role of a city council member who doesn’t need to take off his shoes to count to 20, proposed to abolish the egregious DROP program back in September.  It was always going to be an uphill battle, but even as a symbolic move I applauded it.  Today the Inquirer had a piece on the bill, mentioning among other things that the councilperson in charge of at least giving the bill a hearing has failed to do so.  There was a lot of bowing to the political reality of election season, but the cowardice continues to astonish me.  In a one-party city, people are still so terrified of losing their seat that they won’t do what’s best for the people because they’re afraid of the unions.  Awful.

As it relates to my analysis, the article also noted that the current funding level of the city’s pension programs is somewhere around 45%.  This isn’t much different than where we were 10 years ago.  That’s the crux of my argument – over 10 of what must be the best years in the city’s history since 1945, we haven’t improved a basic measure of fiscal soundness.  To an extent, this is untrue because we have at least made progress on the underlying assumptions that allow us to arrive at the 45% figure (i.e. a plan that is 45% funded with a reasonable return assumption is far, far better than a 45% funded plan with an outrageous, unrealistic return assumption).  Yet the lack of progress needs to continue to be examined, and the willful ignorance or just plain cowardice of the city’s leaders continues to be a real shame.

The sin of pride is alive and well in my person, but I am still able – now and again – to acknowledge someone whose abilities far exceed my own, particularly when it comes to the area I know the most about, finance.  As such, I’m going on the record: I love David Webb.

His website (webb-site.com – already exceptional) has trenchant analysis of Hong Kong markets and politics, written in an concise but deeply informative way I have only seen a few others manage.  If I was in Hong Kong, I would instantly ask to become his apprentice, and would happily negotiate down to typist if need be.  His Enigma Network post in 2017 was what initially led me to him, and I have explored most of the back catalog as well as keeping up with his ongoing work.  I commend his writing to anyone interested in the particularities of Hong Kong finance and politics, or anyone who likes sharply-written reports on short ideas.

In particular, the text of his recent address to the University of Hong Kong provided an interesting counterpoint to the (very) light analysis of China by the New York Times I objected to in my last post.  As a Western resident of Hong Kong for over 25 years and demonstrably strong researcher, Webb argues that the foundation of Chinese growth over the past 10 years has been credit-fueled and accordingly dooms it to bouncing off the barrier to reaching “high income” status.  This isn’t necessarily a new argument, but his boardroom and market-based approach makes it fresh.  His points on Singapore and the Greater Bay Area are brief but convincing.  Overall, he thinks that China will move towards democracy, but that in lieu of top-down reforms, it will take a crisis and corresponding bottom-up protests and changes to make the Chinese Spring blossom.

The speech stands on its own two feet, but it reminded my of a recent London Review of Books post on declinism in Great Britain.  Going through the piece that was looser, albeit more emotionally affective, than it perhaps should have been, I was struck by the references to British companies and their demise at the hands of professional managers or far-removed peers.  I think the argument gets lost in its attempts to define decline as both absolute and relative, as relating to social, industrial, and military matters, but seemed to me that declinism essentially came back to keeping up with the Joneses.  It’s easy to do better when you are a global empire, or you’ve just won a war, but much harder when decades of peace allow the rest of the world to catch up and find new ways to compete.  Especially when you become the hare rather than the tortoise and let your lead lull you into taking a nap (the 1980s, anyone?).

As one of my old professor’s pointed out, it’s easy to complain that China and the like have incredible infrastructure and companies, but keep in mind they’ve only had them for two decades!  If you were given the chance to watch decades of global economic development and start from scratch, wouldn’t you have planned to copy the best methods currently available?  Philadelphia was the sight of the 1876 World Expo, and widely agreed to be the manufacturing capital – or at least one of them – of the planet.  It had only been a few decades since the Industrial Revolution entered full swing, and it so happened that a number of forces concentrated the results of those developments here.  Almost 150 years later, no one would argue that the city has maintained that position – frankly, it would be amazing if it did.  The cast iron sewage system that was cutting-edge and worked marvelously then is now crumbling and nothing like what a modern system would resemble.  Similarly, I would be willing to bet that 150 years from now, the Pearl River Delta will not be the manufacturing hub it is today.  I don’t view that as a decline in and of itself – certainly, it’s possible there will be a decline, but equally possible is simply that some other geography has surpassed it due to a new set of economic and political forces.  Will the Chinese historian of 2160 be gnashing his or her teeth in frustration, having experienced 50 years of relative decline?  Perhaps.  But hopefully they – as all proponents of decline – also have the wisdom to consider their absolute place in history and reserve their sharpest criticisms for when they are truly stepping backwards, rather than watching others pull ahead.

I’ve written before (I think) about Gillian Tett’s old FT article where she stood in front of an audience of the UK’s movers and shakers, and asked how many of them were effectively innumerate.  When a majority of hands when up, the audience laughed, but Tett was astonished at how leaders are willing to shrug off their own inability to use math as part of the daily decision-making process.

The New York Times leads this morning’s edition with an article I found deeply frustrating, because it reflects a more dangerous version of that same trend.

The clickbait title of the American Dream belonging to the Chinese didn’t help.

As part of their ongoing “How China Became a Superpower” series they produced a number of graphs showing the growth of incomes in China, as well as inequality in income distribution.  The graphs were good, but not groundbreaking (they owe much to Picketty) but the text was deeply misleading, in my opinion, as it asked a number of quasi-rhetorical questions that I interpreted as inherently criticizing the American economic system.  I think there are a lot of good – and difficult – questions to ask about our domestic economy, how we balance growth and equality, and why optimism seems to be at an ebb just when the economy is at a peak.  I think the NYT’s piece obfuscates asking (and trying to answer) these questions by using recycled charts and data, and shrugging off information that might not be obvious to a lay reader, for example:

• Growth from a lower base as opposed to starting as the richest economy in the world
• As a democracy, should Americans value 800 million people being lifted out of poverty
• The Chinese still live under one-party rule and re-education camps are alive and well
• Other “quality” vs. “quantity” arguments a la RFK’s speech about what GDP does not measure – pollution comes to mind given the air, water, and soil pollution that are rampant in the country

The offhanded comments meant to defuse foreseeable criticisms of this article also fall far short of what they should be:

China’s progress is especially remarkable given how the government has used social engineering to restrict where people live and how many children they have. Loosening those constraints could accelerate income growth.

If the author is referring to the one-child policy, the most infamous piece of social engineering, they are of course years late to the reform party.  It’s also disingenuous: China is aging far more quickly than other country’s like Japan and Korea that also broke through the middle income trap.  The reference to where people live and the hukou system is more relevant, but how that inputs into income growth is a much more complicated question.  While an entire paragraph (read that sarcastically) is given over to addressing these challenges, the author shrugs it off with all the panache of a journeyman financial writer:

Yet for now, the economic arc seems ever upward.

Oh, well then!

The NYT never had primacy as a business paper, but if they continue to pass off decent infographics and lazy “extrapolate from the past” narratives to go along with them, they risk losing even the veneer of respectability of such coverage.

 

A few odds and ends.

Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time on or waiting for buses, which allowed me a nice chance to catch up on some reading.  Along with some additional pieces I came across this week, I read an unusual breadth of material in that some was almost impossibly well-phrased and accurate, while other parts seemed almost deranged in tone, or at least disconnected from the thoughtful and strong analysis that lets pieces survive past one news cycle.

On the first front, a line from Adam Mars-Jones’ review of Sally Rooney in the LRB, describing a character followed from childhood through matriculation to college:

“In Dublin, Connell is intimidated by his fellow students, who express themselves passionately in seminars and launch into impromptu debates, until he realises that unlike him they haven’t done the reading and are perfecting the useful technique of making the projection of entitlement stand in for the work of understanding.”

Making the projection of entitlement stand in for the work of understanding.  When I read it I felt as though someone had put an extremely sharp knife in my hand, so that at a stroke I could cut away the wooly ways I have described so many things in the past.  Business school.  The behavior of bores.  That certain quality that makes you like one stranger more (or less) than another when you’ve only just met the two of them.  A champion description I will shamelessly pirate in the future.

It intersects with a much longer article, also in the LRB, looking at (heave a small sigh) Brexit.  I stand strongly against attempts to write “definitive accounts” of anything where memories and anecdotes form the basis of evidence, rather than closely analyzed work that has survived some vigorous review.  I think we are still far too close to Brexit for anything like a definitive account to be written, but James Meek’s close focus on the methodology of the Brexiteer vs. Remain campaigns kept him from stepping over the line.  Perhaps the Independence Day reference biased me in his favor, but his use of the Robin Hood versus St. George analogy was, I thought, spot on.  More to the point, the Brexiteers use of St. George matches up perfectly with this idea of the projection of entitlement.  The work of understanding, the work of Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor, are similarly allied.  Brexiteers’ message lacked depth and understanding (or, cynically, relied on others’ lack of understanding) but the Remainers were unable to condense their lengthier, more demanding message into something sharp enough to breach this brittle armor.

It’s easy, even fashionable at the moment, to condemn people (and their resulting gesalt populism) for being too lazy to embrace the work of understanding.  And yet when some of that supposed work is done in a half-assed manner, it becomes that much more difficult, or at least unappealing, to apply yourself to trying to learn more.

The recent New York Times piece on the origins of Donald Trump’s fortune and the extremely questionable tax maneuvers undertaken to grow and preserve it was, I thought, superb.  The sheer quantity of information it knocked into shape was impressive, and it made esoteric (and, this being taxes, illogical) laws comprehensible.  Without sounding strident, it pointed out the many irregularities about Trump’s wealth-building process and the outright falsehoods Trump has spread about his wealth.  I’m sure this took enormous amounts of time and effort, and stands as a strong example of the work of understanding.

Earlier this week, another Times headline had the whiff of a sequel about it – that Jared Kushner, son-in-law to the President, had also not paid taxes in years.  Eyebrows up.  But clicking through, we discover only that Kushner, as a real estate developer, benefits from depreciation.  Eyebrows down.  Nothing could be more common or indeed logical given how the tax code works.  And yet the narrative of the Times article is clearly trying to lump Kushner in with his father-in-law as a tax cheat.  This willful blurring of the lines undermines the work of understanding and attempts to turn this into a St. George rather than a Robin Hood myth.  (I notice that none of the authors of the original Trump piece contributed to the Kushner article, which makes me glad that they at least aren’t adulterating their own work with such fluffy follow ups.)

So, I’m off to continue my own work of understanding, but hope to be back soon to piece other hollow projections of entitlement.

I should have expected it.  As righteous indignation led me away from silent, resentful thoughts and towards research and education, I discovered that my one-man crusade was in fact following a well-trod path.  I had read the periodic news reports describing the same sets of figures, asking the same rhetorical questions, but I had not expected a deeply researched, well-written report on this very topic.  Rolling up my sleeves to start to dig into the history of Philadelphia’s municipal pension programs, I didn’t even have time to dig up a single obscure reference before I found a 2008 report from the estimable Pew Charitable Trusts on this very topic.  Philadelphia’s Quiet Crisis is absolutely top-notch research and analysis, and I’m amazed that it hasn’t been referred to in some of the more quotidian coverage I mentioned.  It seems like a reasonable road map to track our progress and see what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong, and what hasn’t gone at all over the past decade.  I will also continue attempting to dig up some of the history around this problem as we go.