Monthly Archives: April 2004

Gillnets for the internet

An interesting story today in the New York Times “What’s On Your Playlist.” It notes that the iTunes Music Store is now selling celebrity playlists. Selling, mind you.

This is interesting, because it suggests a solution to one of the great problems created by the Internet: too many content creators and not enough mediation. Even when a “power law” helps organize this community, it is almost impossible for any of us fully to canvass all the things going on out there. Even if it were static, this would be true. But of course it is anything but static. New music, new art, new blogs, new everything arrives daily.

This is especially true for music. There are now so many producers working in so many genres that it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. Clearly, this is a special problem for an anthropologist who has chosen contemporary culture as his “beat,” but it is, I think, a problem for us all. We all wish to remain in touch with what is going on in our culture. (There are indications that some of us are tempted by the possibility of secession from this culture. See Virginia Postrel’s comments yesterday about like minded people chosing to live together as one possible indication of a larger movement of this kind.)

The way the market typically solves this problem is by incenting some people to act as mediators. (This is the new dynamic model. The old one was to have an elite appoint guardians of taste, and this was one of the first casualities of the Internet and contemporary culture.) These mediators audition all the novelty taking place “out there” and they recommend some of it to the rest of us. They act, in sum, like magazine editors or DJs drawing up playlists. They serve as our early listening devices.

Clearly, magazine editors and DJs continue to play this role. But there is way too much invention out there for them to serve as authoritative or even modestly exhaustive mediators. The new system is so voluminous that it will take a hierarchy of mediators, dividing the labor, some of them out there on the bleeding edge of contemporary culture with an array back to those of us who live in the middle. (This is not a new elite. Consumers will vote on who they find useful and who they do not.)

The trouble so far has been that there is been no way of monetizing the process. Some of these editors can do their work part time, but this community will not create real value until people are able to work full time. And this can’t happen until they find some way to recover some part of the value their efforts have created in and for the world.

So back to the New York Times piece. It suggests that iTunes will sell celebrity play lists and this says that we know have a business model. We will surrender value to capture value. (And this breaks with the internet model that says everyone gives away everything–a model I was personally fond of, but not fully persuaded by. More on this in a later post.)

Now, who should do this? Certainly, not celebrities. They have already been hired in this editorial capacity by the big labels–as when Fred Durst and Madonna are given their own labels. And, generally, they are good readers of the dynamism of contemporary culture–and could not be “stars” without this ability.

But what we want is an array of editors that stand between all that invention out there and the thicker parts of the market place. And we want to fill this array with people who can get paid without having to be celebrities. Who will build it? When does the market place supply this “emergent” response to a compelling consumer, cultural need?

Poor Canada, Poor Sweden

Tyler Cowen has some discouraging words about Sweden. My remarks yesterday about Canada address the same problem from a different point of view.

This much is clear. The “wealth of nations” will depend upon who does and doesn’t do dynamism. Canada and Sweden have committed to marketplaces and to cultures that are deeply suspicious and refusing of dynamism. In the next few years, as the world speeds up, this must tell.

Poor Canada: first Goneril, then Regan, now Benn

Benn Steil recently argued that we should eliminate “monetary sovereignty,” claiming that most of the world’s currencies are an illusion of autonomy that only gets their holders into trouble (think Argentina several years ago). Poor Canada, this would be the last straw.

Nationhood in Canada has been diminishing quietly for some time now. It is regarded as appropriate for nations to have a military with which to defend the borders that assert its territorial autonomy. Recently, the Danish laid claim to one of Canada’s distant islands, and we could barely bring ourselves to rattle a sabre. (Canada has a sabre?)

National airlines have been another way that countries have declared themselves on the international stage. Canada’s airline is suffering insolvency. For a moment, it looked like it might be rescued by an investor from Hong Kong. He backed out and now it appears that the rescue will be accomplished by a German bank.

Robust economies are another marker of difference, and here too Canada limps forward. Even little Finland is more remarkable. There are dark rumors about the security of Canada’s membership in the G8. There are even questions about whether, over the long term, Canada can sustain first world status.

Culture is often seized upon as a way of defining the national difference. (Deborah Silverman notes that the French did this in the 19th century.) Canada did an especially stupid thing during the Massey commission of 1949 and insisted that the national culture would be anything that popular culture was not (so to distinguish us from the Americans). This was foolhardy and unsustainable.

Sports are sometimes still grounds for national difference. Hockey continues to do its goonish best, but scratch a Canadian exemplar in any other field and almost certainly you will find an athlete trained at an American university.

You could argue that these are small things, that they do not finally matter, that Canadianness exists somehow sui generis. But recall what Lear said when told that he didn’t really need the trappings of majesty his daughters were systematically stripping him of, “Reason not the need, else men’s lives are cheap as beasts.” “Minor” differences are major ones without which the world grows mere, dubious and contestable.

Benn’s argument may make sensationally good sense from an economics point of view, but from an anthropological one, it is dubious. You start by giving up your currency and before long you’re on a slippery slope. Before you know it, you’re Canada.

Litt, Paul. 1991. The Massey Commission, Americanization, and Canadian Cultural Nationalism. Queen’s Quarterly 98, no. 2: 375-87.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. (Please treat this quote with caution. I have not checked it.)

Silverman, Debora. 1989. Art nouveau in fin-de-siècle France : politics, psychology, and style. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Steil, Benn. 2004. The Curse of Currency Autarky. Wall Street Journal. April 22, 2004. (Not available on line.)

Dynamism 1, 2, 3

Summary: three notes on dynamism in the US and world economy.

Dynamism 1

Virginia Postrel has an interesting post on food prohibition in Europe. It reminded me of work I did for the Canadian drug industry a couple of years ago. I was surprised to see how highly regulated things were there, and someone laughed and said,

“Yeah, that’s the difference [in this industry] between Canada and the U.S. In the Canada, everything is prohibited unless it’s allowed. In the U.S., everything is allowed unless it’s prohibited.”

Prohibition is a very human reaction, isn’t it? It is the way we often respond to highly dynamic circumstances. We think it’s the way to restore order and control. But in a world that is permanently innovative and changeable, it is the wrong instinct.

What we want is an unmediated world that is porous and responsive to change, not resisting of it. What we especially do not want is to have as our mediators government bureaucrats and elected officials. Of all the players in the professional world, these are the parties who have demonstrated the least inclination, skill and motivation to behave in a dynamic way.

What’s interesting from an anthro-econ point of view, is that the feeling for prohibition is written into the cultures and economies of certain countries, especially Canada and the EU, and this must be taken as one of the reason’s the “wealth of nations” will not tip in their direction.

Dynamism 2

But can the US afford to be smug? Must it retain it’s mantel as the world’s “friend of dynamism.”

There is a nice little debate brewing in the pages of BusinessWeek. A couple of weeks ago (April 12), BW ran a cover story on the new CEO of 3M, Jim McNerney. McNerney has been called upon to restore 3M to its “role as one of Corporate America’s most inventive and innovative companies.” As it turns out, 3M hasn’t had a hit since Post-It Notes. Apparently, even the most dynamic companies, in this the most dynamic of marketplaces, in this the most dynamic of cultures, can lose their edge and fall silent.

It turns out that McNerney is a devotee of SixSigma, a cost-cutting tool created at GE in the 1990s (GE is McNerney’s alma mater). The present BusinessWeek (May 3) has a letter to the editor from the Australian academic, John M. Legge who claims “Six Sigma is about eliminating original thinking, not supporting innovation.”

Now, Legge is not my favorite management philosopher, but what if he’s right? The Six Sigma system is proving to be a robust little meme. It is colonizing corporate America. If it is an enemy of dynamism, 3M will not be returned to creativity…and this may be just the beginning of SixSigma’s consequences for the world’s “friend of dynamism.”

Dynamism 3

Tomorrow is the big day. Google goes public.

An article in the New York Times by Saul Hansell (April 26) revealed a certain hesitation on the part of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The hesitation is not hard to understand. Google is cash rich, so it has no pressing need to go public. And once they are public, they will have new obligations and responsibilities. They can’t go shooting their mouths off or promoting nutty ideas.

Nutty ideas? Hansell says that Page and Brin “have talked about building space transporters and implanting chips in people’s heads that can provide them with information as they think.” Say, those are nutty ideas. And then of course there’s Gmail.

But the anthro/econ question is this: does the street make a company more or less dynamic? The argument could go either way. We could argue that the company that stays private remains in possession of the courage and freedom it needs to take on high risk undertakings. Or we could argue that the company that goes public finally gets the resources and the discipline its needs to get on with participating in a real world. (Instead of that crazy “space transporter” one.)

I am no expert, but I have to believe that going public is, for some players in some industries in some markets, probably bad for dynamism. Worrying about the market “concentrates the mind” in ways we do not want it concentrated. The time and money needed to fund innovation has for most companies dropped steadily. This means they can get a lot done on their own and not have to worry about “making their numbers” every quarter.

If any of this has foundation, there are conflicting forces that resist dynamism not just in Canadian and EU economies, but even in the American one.

Happy 56th

“Give us an ‘I’
Give us an ‘S’
Give us an ‘R’
Give us an ‘A’
Give us an ‘E’
Give us an ‘L’
What’s that spell?”

Um. Don’t tell me. I know this one.

This lusty cheer was given today in Montreal by 6 high schoolers, their contribution to the city’s celebration of Israel’s independence.

The kids delivered it from the steps of a bronze statue of Edward VII. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

According to Downtown Montreal: An opinionated guide to the City’s squares, churches and underground city, the monument shows,

“four allegorical figures [:] Peace, Four Nations, Abundance, and Liberty. Peace is the woman at the front holding the olive branch, but if you look carefully there is a sword hidden in the folds of her skirt, just in case—a reminder that force is sometimes necessary if you want to keep the peace.”

I went to the celebration for the same reason, I think, that most of us were there: to meet women. But this year, with the firebombing, about 4 weeks ago, of a Jewish religious school in Montreal, the occasion took on a special urgency. Anti-semitism is on the rise in Canada, as it is, perhaps, everywhere. What a virulent beast this is. It must be refused over and over and over again.

All culture has need of recitation. As Edward Sapir put it,

While we often speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition, it is, in the more intimate sense, nothing of the kind, but a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity, ranging from a pair of lovers or a family to a league of nations or that ever increasing portion of humanity which can be reached by the press through all its transnational ramifications. It is only apparently a static sum of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it.

[Sapir, Edward. 1931. Communication. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 4, pp. 78-81.]

But some things need reanimating and reaffirming more often than others, apparently: our loathing for anti-semitism in particular.

For the full essay by Sapir.

For the full treatment of the statue of Edward VII.

blow up the blow in (branding and design)

Branding is a process of meaning manufacture that begins with the biggest, boldest gestures of the corporation (see last entry for a treatment of Google’s Gmail) and works its way down to the tiniest gestures.

This is one of the reasons that design matters. The look and the feel, the fit and the finish, the beautiful, the sensual, the tactile, design is an essential medium of the brand message. Good design captures, commandeers, takes control of every interface and interaction between the consumer and the brand, right down to the little sound that packages make when we close them. Click. This is a brand message. (For a wonderful treatment of this topic, see Virginia Postrel’s The substance of style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness from HarperCollins.)

This brings us to one of the mysteries of Metropolis Magazine. (Thanks to Steve Portigal for the heads up on the May issue.) This is a dandy magazine. The May issue has a wonderful story about the origins of the yellow color of the New York taxi, the shape of the Bell logo, and the person who designed the Greek “we are happy to serve you” coffee cup (Leslie Buck, 1963, Sherri Cup Company). There is also a spectacular article on built form and light.

Metropolis is a design magazine and it is beautiful thing to hold and wander through. Images and text are exquisitely chosen. These people have laid out on lay out. The magazine is a thing of pleasure.

But as I work my way through the magazine, something is fighting me. It’s something caught in the pages. It’s a “blow in,” those 4 x 5 pieces of paper that are subscription offers. Actually there are several of them. Four to be exact. As I make my way through this magazine, I find that these offers force it open in some places and shut in others. And then some of the little pieces of paper actually land on the floor so that I am now obliged to stoop down, pick them up and through them away. My passage through the magazine is resisted and interrupted.

So let’s review. Metropolis turns out a magnificent piece of art direction. They come from a world that understands that everything in the design mandate counts, that everything sends a message.

Then they give us a magazine that resists our passage. They use their design efforts to interrupt and provoke us at the very moment they are suggesting we might wish to subscribe.

Every little gesture sends a message and this one couldn’t be more clear.

Week in review: Week 4-Month 4-2004

Monday opened with an essay that showed the discontinuities that exist between anthropology and economic, culture and commerce. These are sometimes as distant as a little girl growing up on the Canadian Prairies some 70 years ago and the real estate market of present day Manhattan.

Tuesday’s essay was about the same. Pip Coburn is a wonder of clarity, intelligence, and exposition that the social sciences cannot begin to match. So Will (Straw) and I are left to scratch out interesting questions but to do so in a self created void.

The social sciences and humanities have taken so little interest and exercise so little intelligence in the pursuit of the connection between culture and commerce, it might as well be a “Northwest passage”…except of course that most of the people teaching in the humanities and social sciences doubt that it exists—and will send no boats in search of it. Oh, for a small band and a sturdy ship like the Saint Roche.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were all about brands. This is the easiest place for social scientists when it comes to thinking about what commerce is and how it works. After all, brands are those magical devices that add value to the product and come mostly from, often, exquisite manipulations of contemporary culture, virtuoso expressive accomplishments, of marketers and marketing teams, creative directors and advertising agencies. Naturally, we know next to nothing about this activity because of the great clanging stupidities that are routinely turned out by Naomi Klein and company.

Where it not for these clanging stupidities, I believe that marketing and brand building would not remain a nascent art and, as we see in the case of Silicon Valley, an amateur entreprise. Ebay, Adobe, and Google are all making rookey errors. This despite the fact that markets is at least 100 years old. Some day, marketing will look like Pip’s world of the leading intelligence that directs capital markets.

But that little boat has a very long way to go.

This coming week I hope to finish up the manuscript for a book called Culture and Consumption II and send it off to Indiana University Press. It won’t help a lot but it may help a little. Two essays from this blog will appear there.

Branding in Silicon Valley

quick summary:

Three brands: Ebay, Adobe and Google. All of them are success stories from the dot.com era. But none of them seem to have more than a rough idea about how to build a brand. Some of them are learning. Well, ok, not Google.

full text:

EBay was until recently the worst offender in matters of brand building and it still misbehaves pretty extravagantly. It’s most important interface with the consumer was a webpage that looked until very recently like a dog’s breakfast. There was too much information, arranged with scant regard for clarity or ease of access. Good design and the exercise of brand intelligence doesn’t cost very much. Ebay has been spinning revenue. Was there really no money to sort this out?

Recently, Ebay went through a redesign. It is a little better. But it is still resembles the bulletin board of a community centre more than the future of the market place. This business is now almost 10 years old. It has nearly 6,000 employees. It is run by a woman who graduated from one of the great marketing academies of our time: P&G. When does Ebay step up?

Adobe:.

Today I had the very pleasant surprise of opening a PDF file that did not oblige me to spend 10 seconds looking at a self congratulatory splash page from Adobe. Ten seconds is a long time these days, especially when it’s obligatory. We can’t get to the Adobe software until they are through blowing their own horn. And, really, do I need to know the names of all the team members? Unless Adobe is chosen to pay these people in recognition, I think we will just assume that they are marvellous and hard working, and leave it at that.

This is interstellar stupidity. Adobe found a way to use a moment of interaction with the consumer to piss them off. This is the opposite of brand building. This is brand destruction. People are going to do something with those 10 seconds, and most of us use it to think, “who the **** do they think they are?”

So, if they have put this right, good on them. Let us hope they will move on with the rest of the suite of software.

Google:

There was a note today from Lance Ulanoff called “Is Gmail safe?” Lance says:

“Individuals, public advocacy groups and even states are nearly apoplectic over the fact that Google’s completely automated technology will be “reading” mail received in its still-in-beta Gmail free e-mail service.”

Is anyone surprised by this? Google won the search engine game larging by being the most elegant solution to the problem. They were not just the fastest in retrieve times. They were “fastest” in terms of conceptual clarity. We went to the Google home page and we knew just where we where and what to do. (Compare this to the double dog’s breakfast that Yahoo remains.) Google was a compelling brand proposition because it was exactly what we wanted in the form that made it most accessible in every sense of the word.

And now Google is going to read our email. At a stroke they have taken an almost pristine brand and surrounded it with a shadow of doubt. Sure, sure, we don’t really have to worry about privacy. That, from a branding point of view, is not the point. The point is always “who do we think they are?” With Google, that used to be clear. Now it’s not.

Will this make a difference to Google image and brand image? Of course it will. But there are more troubling problems. It raises the possibility that when Google went looking for a way to monitize their opportunity, to build a business model, to capture some of the value they have been creating, they did not have wit enough to factor in what the Gmail option would cost them in terms of the brand equity they were now trying to leverage. This truly is sawing off the limb on which you stand. The further question is: will the markets punish them? When is the Google public offering anyway? I believe some analysts will look at the Gmail option as a reckless spend of the thing they had hoped to buy.

The article by Lance Ulanoff is from PC Magazine Online and it may be found here.

This old house (where ideas come from)

Quick summary:

This entry is about creativity, how ideas form, the places we are most creative. Creativity is of course a large topic. I am interested particularly in the creativity that responds to the dynamism of contemporary culture and more particularly in creativity that takes place in commercial contexts for commercial purposes. (Other entries on this theme can be found by going to “categories” and clicking on “creativity watch.”)

Full text:

I just took my cat Daz to the vet. The vet occupies a house that is probably 120 years old. Daz and I sat in the waiting room, keeping a careful eye on an enormous sheep dog and the office cat who wasn’t much smaller. Daz is normally a champion talker, but in this case he wasn’t letting out at much as a murmur.

I began to see that a door frame in the house sloped badly. Over 120 years, the house has developed pretty bad posture and now leaned heavily in one direction.

I started wondering why it is that places like this, in neighborhoods like this (the Plateau) in cities like this (Montreal) in cultural domains (the francophone) are so conducive to creativity. This is part and parcel why bohemians always occupy neighborhoods that are tumbled down, old, decrepid, and coming apart at the seams. Something about this urban desshelvement seems to aid them in their reckless pursuit of the new. (And I don’t think it’s wise to say: they occupy these neighborhoods because they are cheap. We know have modernist suburbs that have fallen on hard times and no artist community ever takes up residence there.)

The door frame is a friend of creativity because it evokes the world from which it came (the creative world of design and conception) and it how leans towards the world in which it will be a mere memory, a recollection.

The door frame is a friend of creativity because it signals its origins and its future, and is not very dramatically marked by its present, corporeal, actual form. I wish MoveableType allowed for drawing (because, really, how do you think without images) because in this case what we need is a box marked “the real” that shows a tiny arc that begins in the lower left hand corner rises not very high and then exist in the lower right hand corner.

In a door frame, neighborhood, city and culture like this one, creativity enters and takes form in the world, but it is always evocative of the creative domains from which it came and to which it will return. This is why its a good place in which, with which, to think. (Maybe.)

I heard a museum curator recently speak sneeringly of the bobo phenemonon. (This referred to the very interesting book by David Brooks called Bobos in Paradise). The curator was particularly contemptuous of the middle class professionals search for an “urban redemption.”

He seemed to be implying that creativity and bohemian neighborhoods were just for artists (and, of course, curators). But in fact now that everyone lives in a dynamic world, now that every corporation is obliged to be responsive and changing, creativity is the way we live in the world. It makes sense that middle class professionals should want to live in places that are conducive to creativity.

It also makes sense that museum curators should sneer at them for being faux bohemians. Curators have no clear that the world of business is now at least as creative as the world of the artist. They do not know that the world outside the protected domain of the museum has ligquified by dynamism. They do not understand that creativity has moved from being the special domain of artists to becoming a mainstay of capitalism. It is no longer the place we go for new ideas. It is now the first order and the principle grammar of business. Creativity is the dynamism with which we respond to dynamism.

Mach III, I mock thee

Continue reading →

Gillette meets Coca-Cola

I am on the road so this will have to be brief:

It is noted in today’s Wall Street Journal that James Kilts is the odds-on favorite for the CEO position at Coca-Cola.

This is puzzling. I think it’s fair to say that Mach 3, Gillette’s most conspicuous brand, is many people’s favorite example of a brand that is badly out of touch with new consumer and market place realities.

I promise to build the argument when I am back.

Pip and Will

Two notes for today:

Yesterday, I had the privilege of watching Pip Coburn give a talk before a group of investors and brokers here in Montreal. Wow, was he good. He was talking about short and long term prospects in the stock market, and it was astonishing to see how much research and hard thinking he has on tap, and how well integrated it was into an embracing vision.

On the social science and humanities side, we are still piecing things together on an ad hoc basis without the benefit of good (or any) numbers. Depth and range are hard to find. But shouldn’t it be possible for us to begin to study the cultural and social world with something like this acuity?

Talking point # 2

I left Pip’s talk and went to have a drink with Will Straw, the head of the Art History and Communication Studies program at McGill. We were trying to figure out that moment in the life of a creative community when everyone knows that there is a new form in the works and everyone is rushing towards it, but no one can quite say what it is till they get there. How is it that people can have an “inchoate certainty” of this kind. An innovation is coming, everyone can feel it coming, everyone is indeed participating in its invention, but no one can really say what it is. This act of invention has shared properties that are operating at a preverbal but still powerful level.

This is one of the problems we will have to solve if we are ever to create a problem solving, future seeing system of the kind that Pip (and UBS) have invented.

Forgive me if I miss a couple of posts. I will be on the road.

anthropology and economics, culture and commerce

The intersection of anthropology and economics is a strange place to be.

For many anthropologists, the notion of a marketplace is at odds with the notion of culture. This is why so many of them take vows of intellectual celibacy when it comes to capitalism. They just won’t go there. They don’t know anything about it; they dont want to know anything about it. (To put this in the language of Robert Johnson and the blues, anthropologists typically believe this intersection is a cross roads where one can expect to meet the devil.)

But I am not one of these anthropologists. My objective is to see how culture and commerce are mutually presupposing in First World societies.

This raises all kinds of intellectual puzzles.

On the anthropological side, there is a question of how the economy works as a cultural operator, how it works as a way of enabling and apportioning cultural meaning. This issue is taken up in the first essay below.

On the economic side, there is the question of how value is created out of meaning, how culture works as a way of enabling and apportioning market value. This is the issue is taken up in the second essay below.

Both these essays have appeared on this blog before, but it was only yesterday that I realized that they work as useful bookends for the blog itself and should appear together.

Essay #1

I was talking to a New Yorker recently about an upcoming trip.

“Where are you staying in the city?” she asked.

“Oh, mid-town”

Actually, this was just a guess. I like to sound like an insider. So I use “upper west side,” “soho,” “tribeca” with nonchalance. But to be honest, I am never exactly certain I have got my terms right.

“But where, exactly.”

Damn.

“Um, on 49th, near the Plaza.”

“Ok.”

Whew! Guessed right.

I put down the phone in a vertiginous moment. These neighborhood labels are a little testing for a rube from Canada. (I am in another classificatory scheme, “bridge, tunnel and border.”) But as a classificatory scheme, these labels are almost nothing at all.

And this is where anthropology meets economics. For the neighborhood labels are, like most cultural schemes, pretty general. There are, and now I’m really guessing, about 12 of them. (Ok, I know this because I just googled the question.) That’s 12 categories to cover an island that contains, um, 8 million people.

And here’s where it gets vertiginous. As I put down the phone, I realized that these 12 cultural categories contain, roughly, 19.5 economic distinctions. This is the number of discrete prices for property in Manhattan. (This assumes that the most expensive property sells for $20 million and there is no property that sells for less than $500,000, and that there is, or could be, a property for sale for every dollar amount.) (I am sure there are places that sell for more than $20 million, but you get the idea.)

Let’s review. Culture gives us 12 distinctions. Economics gives us 19.5 million distinctions.

This is not to mock culture. We are very happy to have a set of 12 categories that somehow manages to map the great, blooming diversity called Manhattan. Without it, many things, including a taxi ride, would be vastly more difficult. It’s always true that we want embracing classificatory schemes and without them would be lost in a welter of detail.

But compare this cultural valuation to economic valuation. With this classicatory scheme, we can make endlessly fine distinctions. We can mark the difference between a Soho condo on the 4th floor and the 5th floor. We can distinquish between a property that has double paned windows and with single panes. We can in other words make impossible fine distinctions. And in the process we can what many things are worth: sides of the building, views, neighborhoods, access to a park. Clearly, only the virtuoso real estate agent is fully conversant in these distinctions. But all of us will defer to these distinctions if and when we buy a place on the island.

But what is really astonishing, and here is where culture must not just tip its hat to economics, but actually remove it in a gesture of abiding deference, the valuation scheme created by economics actually floats. All those monetary distinctions can change 1) over night, 2) without committee oversight, 3) in almost perfect concert.

That’s condo on 5th avenue that is now worth $8.3 million will sometimes fluctuate with stock market as its owners sleep. Oh, the Japanese buy more dollars. Oh, the exchange rate changes. Oh, the markets respond. Oh, the owners wake up a little richer or a little poorer.

It’s nice to think of a city that has digital read-outs attached to every property, the numbers spinning up and down over the course of a day as the real estate market works out what value is and external factors impinge. Oh, someone just bought a place in your building for 1.5 million more than asking. Everyone’s value goes up a little. The market has spoken.

This is the mystery. Not for economists for they take this for granted. But for anthropologists. A classificatory scheme that lets the market “speak,” in very little voices, in the creation of millions of utterances that are prone to second guessing and revision many times a day.

Anthropology meets economics and comes away astonished.

Essay #2

Commerce has a way of making capital colourless. Here’s a corrective. (All names and figures are sheer guesswork and offered for illustrative purposes only. With apologies to Frank Capra.)

Sarah Zupko is a little girl in Red Deer, Alberta. Her Dad took her into town today. It’s January 4 ,1948. Her Dad stops at Woolworth’s for a coffee at the counter. He falls into conversation with his friends, other farmers, there: crops, water tables, combines, silage, almanacs, Indian summers and spring.

Sarah is pretty sure she couldn’t care less. She wanders though the aisles and comes eventually to rest in front of an illuminated glass case. There under glass is a watch, its perfect little numerals marching around the dial, delicate hands now still, and a metal band of cunning silver, a bracelet really. It is $9.60.

Sarah visits the case and the watch on every visit into town and magically on her 9th birthday, in late March, the watch is hers. The birthday party, thunderous with farm children and festivity, falls silent. The watch is hers.

The rest is economics. The Woolworth’s store in Red Deer keeps half of the $9.60 and the Chicago distributor keeps half of what’s left. By the time Mr. and Mrs. Zupko’s $9.60 finds its way into the Woolworth’s fortune, it has become 33 cents.

Value has migrated from a glass case to a large vault. But it does not stay there.

The Woolworths are building a summer home and 7 cents is spent to help hire men to clear the land that runs down to the point. The value Mr. Zupko extracted as winter wheat from prairie soil will actually now return to the ground as Mrs. Hudson, wife of one of the laborers, spends part of it to buy the seed for her summer garden. A dime will go to help pay for Mr. Woolworth’s dues at the Century Club and part of this will be spent on that bee’s wax that is used to give club chairs and tables the glow they give off in the light of the fire that burns all day in the library. Another dime will go to the grand tour that the eldest Woolworth daughter will take to Europe that year, a trip from which she will return with a taste for poetry and men who are a little bit dangerous. A few cents will even go to help pay for the clasp that holds the necklace that Mrs. Woolworth wears to the social event of the season, where it will be eclipsed by the still more magnificent jewelry worn by that jumped up Mrs. Chetwin, a creature who has finally pushed Mrs. Woolworth from her accustomed place of splendor.

The Woolworth’s family are a little like the mouth of the Fraser River, the place from which the tiny purchases made upstream by little girls in obscure places come rushing into the world, released from transit and their colorless state as mere capital, into labor, summer homes, spring vegetables, bee’s wax, grand tours, poetry, necklaces and social failure.

We’ve said nothing of the upward flow, how the value created by Woolworth’s working it’s way into a glass case and a watch…and from there into parental solicitude, and a little girl’s sense of herself. The watch that played the conduit for this flow upwards and downwards now sits in an antique store in Winnipeg, Manitoba, once more in a glass case, waiting for another chance to turn commerce into culture.

Week in review: Week 3-Month 4-2004

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creativity and complexity theory

An excerpt:

In other words, we are getting better at making new groups work as colleagues and old groups work as strangers. The traditional trade off is disappearing. Being permanently co-premised (as members of a corporation) need not cost you the difference on which creativity depends. Being suddenly co-premised (like the Sterling Rice meeting) need not cost you the sharedness that creativity demands.

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