“Vista is not a failure and not a mistake”

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
All Things Digital Conference

References

Miller, Michael J. 2008. D6: Gates and Ballmer Talk Vista, Windows 7, and Microsoft History. Forward Thinking …. PCMAG.com blogs. May 27, 2008. here.

It is a commonplace around C3 at MIT that most people under 35 are pretty good at detecting the grammars that produce media and marketing.  They see through the TV show, the movie, the advertisement to the strategic and creative strategies from which it springs.  (But of course this is not only an MIT understanding.  It is shared by millions of people under 35.)

Yesterday, I was looking at the Crest ad for that spinning toothbrush thingy.  It featured a woman brushing with gusto.  It was corny and stupid in the grinning, idiotic way that so much 1950s advertising was grinning and idiotic.  This is precisely the sort of thing that got repudiated as we entered a more sophisticated era in the 1960s and beyond.  And it is precisely the thing that has been let back into marketing practice by the new sophistication of those under 35.  In a still more sophisticated era there is no point trying to be hipper and less obvious.  Everyone gets what’s going on here, so we might as well be utterly obvious.  Indeed, it is more authentic for us so to be.

We have in a sense gone full circle: from corn to subtlety back to corn again, riding that great tilt-a-whirl that is contemporary culture.

But I think things are a little different in the world of politics.  Here, the real sophistication of the under-35 voter means that you really have to watch it, and when you don’t, this voter will make you pay. 

Hence the article today in The Onion.  This captures precisely the sensibility of the under-35 vote quite precisely.  (With the proviso that The Onion is necessarily a little more observant and unforgiving.)  In this wonderful piece, The Onion nails the Obama camp for its artifice in image building.  Look, it says with glee, we see what you’re doing.  And it’s precisely because you appear to think we cannot see the artifice here that we must point it out and make you pay.  Play us if you must, but don’t play us for fools. 

The entire piece is worth reading (see the link below), but if I may let me quote my favorite passage.

Obama has reportedly been working tirelessly with his top political strategists to perfect his looking-off-into-the-future pose, which many believe is vital to the success of the Illinois senator’s campaign.

When performed correctly, the pose involves Obama standing upright with his back arched and his chest thrust out, his shoulders positioned 1.3 feet apart and opened slightly at a 14-degree angle, and his eyes transfixed on a predetermined point between 500 and 600 yards away. Advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.

Oh, sublime.  So much of politics is an exercise is posturing (figurative and here literal) that it is hard to image what politics can look like once the new voter is factored in.  In the meantime, we leave it to the likes of The Onion, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to point out to the would-be emperors that we can see right through that clothing they don’t have on.   

References

Anonymous.  2008.  Obama Practices Looking-Off-into-Future Pose.  The Onion.  Issue 44-22.  May 28th, 2008.  here.

Sometimes, I resort to that great line from William Gibson,

        the future is already here, it’s just badly distributed. 

But the other day, I was thinking how much I like Faulkner’s remark:

        In the South, not only is the past not dead, it’s not past.

Somehow both these truths apply to us.

Certainly, we are getting better at remembering.  One of these days, services like untravel media (as below) will allow us to extract the history of a city from every nook and cranny of the city.   And we are pretty good at spotting the future when it makes those cameo appearances of which Gibson speaks.  Remember how agonizing things were in the late 1990s when we would just sit around drooling with confusion.  It was horrible.  Now most of us can crunch through an analysis of the latest 2.0 application.  Yes, it’s the future.  No, it just isn’t.  And this means, ironically, that we are getting better at producing more futures faster.

Oh crap.  The first anthropological question is how we have managed to get ourselves stretched between Gibson’s futures (the ones that get here early, I mean) and Faulkner’s pasts (the one that won’t go away, I mean).  The second is how we live in a world when the present isn’t actually very orienting, when what we live in is, potentially, all worlds at once.  Economies just need to be responsive.  Culture need to be something more than that.  They ought to be orienting. 

Acknowledgments

I am sure I have managed to get both of these lines slightly wrong.  Apologies!

References

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Walter Disney Now.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  here.

I was talking in Vancouver yesterday. The slide that everyone seemed to like the best has “shoot the lawyers” as its title. My argument is that we have to be much more free with our intellectual property.

The other slide that got an audible response was the one about resetting our tolerances as marketers. In the old regime, we are risk averse and inclined to control the marketing message as much as possible.

But its clear that as we bring consumers into the process cocreation, as we participate more fully in contemporary culture, we are obliged to give up control. The brand can no longer be the perfectly formed, pristine thing we hoped it would be.

As it is, senior decisions makers stick to the old standard. They still believe in the pristine brand. It is people under 40 that understand we need to reset tolerances.

So, I feel to thinking: what if we colloborated on a manfestio that made the new tolerances not the daring risk of a marketer, but a collective declaration, and a way especially of telling the senior decision makers, “look, the world has changed.”

Ok, have to catch my plane. I will come back to this theme, tonight or next week.

If there is a concept crucial to our understanding of what and who we are, it is “interest.” This is the sinew in the movable hand. It is emergence’s secret motive. Interest replaces elite control and expert wisdom. In our world, we turn our affairs over to interest, and usually we live with the outcome. (No monarchs or mullahs for us.)

In our world, unlike traditional and hierarchical ones, culture comes from interest, not the other way round. The miracle of social cooperation comes not from shared values or mutual regard. It comes from interest. As Adam Smith put it,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages (Wealth of Nations [1776] 1976:26–7, as quoted in Swedberg, reference below)

For anthropologists, interest is miraculous. It makes things we didn’t think possible, possible. Once a social world gives itself over to interest, one person no longer needs to to like or understand a neighbor. As long as a relative small set of social conventions is satisfied, one person doesn’t have to know or care about the interior life of another.

Indeed, we no longer need even to have what the students of autism call a “theory of mind.” As long as those conventions are satisfied, I don’t need to have any insight into you, nor you into me. We will meet in the marketplace but in this case we are merely mirrors to one another. I am selling something you think you need. You are selling something I think I need.

And now a hundred poppies grow. Now that we are protected from scrutiny, presumption and control of our neighbors, we may engage in any and every act of social invention. We are free to become preps or punks, geeks or goths. We are free to invent Burning Man, Country and Western music, the Antique Roadshow, or Steampunk. In the bracing air of our mutual indifference, we are free to find our own way. Culture is free to wander where it will. And now the anthropologist really has his work cut out for him or her.

Do we understand interest? Or is it a matter of, “what’s to understand?” We may simply assume actors are able and willing to identify their interest, and let it go at that. But everywhere we look, we see the economics paradigm under challenge. People are saying that the new media ushers in a new market, and this is shot through with notions of community, moral value, shared objective, and a good deal of sharing and caring. More and more, capitalism would have us reverse the terms of Smith’s dichotomy and address not “self-love” but our mutual humanity. (And indeed yesterday in the New York Times, David Brooks seemed to be saying that this was the inclination of Britain’s new conservative party.)

This is all very interesting for the anthropologist. And a little exhausting. It turns out our social world is a little like the weather in Ireland. If you don’t like it, that’s ok. Give it a couple of minutes and it will change. But this difference, this eclipse of interest, I mean, would make for lots and lots of differences. If interest is to be displaced, we will be a more humane place, but we may be a dramatically less inventive one. And let’s face it, if there is a truth more certain that the need to transcend the interest model of the economy, it’s that by the looks of things, we are going to need all the inventiveness we can muster.

Sturdy little interest. The little engine that could. It helped build great sprawling social worlds. Western societies in their present form are unimaginable without its constant inventive, relentless press. What happens when it is eclipsed by new economic models?

References

Brooks, David. 2008. Editorial. New York Times. May 13, 2008. [Sorry, no link. My WiFi connection is down.]

Swedberg, Richard. 2003. Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7525.pdf

WI don’t

Thanks to Drew Breunig, I am informed of a couple of developments germane to my recent "Walter Disney" post.  Drew notes that a hacked iPhone is capable of accessing Geopedia. 

More spectacularly, he notes that Google Maps now allows us to access Wikipedia.  In the image above, we see a map of midtown New York City, with several Ws, including one expanded for the Seagram Building.  We evoke this view of the city by clicking on "more" between "traffic" and "map." 

I am in Toronto today and presenting tomorrow, so it’s time to get back to my Powerpoint decks. 

Thursday night at the C3 MIT event in Cambridge, I met Ira Hochman, the CIO of Untravel Media. He was there, I think, to bask in the reflected glory and the greatness that is Henry Jenkins, but he ended up talking to me.

And I couldn’t quite escape the sense that listening to Ira was my chance to experience what it was like to listen to Walter Disney in the late 20s, early 30s.

Ira was talking about his Untravel and the “tours” it gives of Boston through mobile story telling. Untravel Media lets us use a cell phone or a PDA in the streets of Boston to listen to a “voice over” narrative. We can travel the West End of Boston and listen to historical matters otherwise obscure (as above).

Normally, Leora Kornfeld and her Ubiquity Interactive is my guide in matters of this kind. And so I have some rough idea of what this technology can do. For starters, it disintermediates the museum in a big way. Now the work of museological, curatorial exposition can be moved out of the museum into the world. Now, we can learn the story of the Empire State Building while in and around the Empire State Building instead of staring at text and models at the Museum of the City of New York.

One of these days our phones will catch up to Japan, and we will only need to point at a building to listen to its story (if someone has recorded this.) The possibilities are mind bending. A city with all of its history attached and on tap? A world with its history there “in the air.” “Living memory” is a perishable thing. It dies with every generation. But this technology lets it live on, not in a book or a museum, but in situ. A city that never forgets.

Ira was talking about an idea of transparency. The virtual companion could now let us see through walls into buildings. We can think of class as a matter of space and knowledge access. The highest ranking person in a social world probably has rights of greatest access. He or she can go anywhere, know anything. And Ira’s technology, to the extent that it can make the world transparent, allows anyone with a PDA to see and know in ways previously forbidden them. The PDA in this case becomes a sociological equalizer.

But, listening to Ira, you could also hear about extra-historical possibilities. It sounds as if his technology is mostly used for expositional purposes. And you can imagine how readily it come be used for evocational ones.

What for instance if you did the history of the West end of Boston not from the point of view of well told history? What if you told it from the point of view of a Southern Belle in 1840s Boston? What if you told the story of the West end not so much to illuminate the place but the person? Not the story told, but the story teller?

This enterprise is a largely fictional one. We can imagines writers abandoning the printed page for an Untravel media or Leora’s Ubiquity Interactive. Novelists released from the novel. A story could begin at the Harvard subway line and wrap up somewhere near Kendall station, proceeding at the pace at which we walk, unfolding in the streets and buildings as we pass them by. This is a little literal. How about hearing from the god (or is it the ghost) of Longfellow Bridge anytime we pass between Boston and Cambridge on Red Line?

There is a compromise position between the two, something expositional that allows us to glimpse a Boston at mid 19th century and something evocational that allows us to participate in what it might have been emotionally. I believe when bring these are brought together, we may call the outcome anthropological.

Was this what it was like to talk to Walter Disney? Hard to imagine that it can have been this interesting.

References

See the Ubiguity Interactive website, here.

See the Untravel Media website, here.

I am at C3 at MIT today, and I am sure I will have lots of interesting things to report by the end of the day.  But let me point to an article that appeared in the NYT this morning, for those of us interesting in trends and movements in contemporary culture.

La Ferla describes the Steampunk as a

subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

The term comes apparently from the The Steampunk Trilogy, written by Paul Di Filippo (eyes right).  I went to see if I could download this to my Kindle, but the publisher (Running Press) has yet to make this possible.  So I contented myself reading the excerpt on Amazon.  (This is a kind of "stealing signals" that shuts the author out of proceeds due to him.  Still, I am only going to take a little, and I would ask you to look the other way while how I generalize shamelessly on the strenghth of a page or two.)

The opening paragraph of the Steampunk Trilogy gives us a writing machine, all burnished copper, Moroccan leather, pumps, hoses, and glass jars, assembled in a gratuitously complicated contraption that appears in the "lambent, buttery glow" of Victorian gaslight.  It’s operator is Cosmo Cowperthwait, a gentleman of "comfortable income" who on this occasion wears  a "Paisley plastron cravat, embroidered waistcoat, [and] trig trousers."  Cowperthwait also carries a large turnip-watch which he sets by the passing of the 11:45 Totting omnibus. 

Lambent and buttery.  That’s the key.  We respond to this image, and, perhaps, to steampunk because it plays out our technological present in an interesting mirror.  First, this fun house reflection of our Airbooks and iPhones.   In this world, a passing trolly is better time keeper than our turnip shaped watch.  In this world, technology is on the verge of springing apart, something my ThinkPad does only under exceptional circumstances and duress. 

We imagine the Victorian social world is a rickety machine, one that works perfectly well without ever inspiring confidence that it will continue to do so.  This happens to be exactly the way Mumbai seemed to me.  By contrast, we live in an exquisite machine.  Tokyo, at the limit.   We like the idea of a world made of crafted beauty, where seams show, and things continue to be a miraculous even when they work.

Victorians appeal to us in several ways, not only out of a faux nostalgia.  These were people who were profoundly crafty, inclined to working on combustion engines in the tool shed at the end of the garden.  It was a place where rank amateurs could make a contribution to knowledge in their spare time, a motive that is a great motivating hope here at This Blog.  Several institutions of the Victorian period, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and great swathes of the periods of natural history came from amateurs working together in a thoroughly distributed way.  As an anthropologist who is Scottish only by genetic "origin" and otherwise Mediterranean, there’s a puzzle here.  How can the English have been so demonstrative from an intellectual point of view, when they were so utterly undemonstrative for a social one.  Aren’t ideas animating.  Do they make us marionettes (mechanically demonstrative) whether we like it or not?  One gets the feelings that the English men and women in Steampunk (past and present) are pretty darn demonstrative. 

These are early days in the trend, the moment when the thing is still forming.  Now that the New York Times and the likes of This Blog can have at it, we may expect this cultural innovation to begin to over-form and eventually to sit so far down the Kauffman continuum that the early adopters bail out and the thing turns to cliche.  I do my best to serve. 

Just a last note: who would have guessed how syncretic and cooperative punk was going to be.  This look was designed to be uncompromising, hostile to every other form of social life.  But it turns out that punk plays well with others.  We have had gothpunks, skater punks, almost as cooperative as hip hop.  True, still no hippie punks, or luncheon punks, or preppie punks.  There are some places punk can’t play.  Still you can’t help feeling that luncheon punks might be a movement waiting to happen.  No, not really. 

References

Filippo, Paul.  The Steampunk Trilogy.  New York: Running Press.  Order from Amazon here. For the opening page, go here.

La Ferla, Ruth.  2008.  Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds.  New York Times.  May 8, 2008.  here.

von Slatt, Jake, proprietor of the Steampunk workshop.  here.

Acknowledgments

To Sara Winge for helping me to understand the present trend for craftiness. 

Transformations is finally out and let me give profound thanks to everyone who have bought a copy.

One of the things surprised me most about bringing the book to press is Ani DiFranco’s unwillingness to let me quote her lyrics.

I didn’t want much, but she refused even to entertain my request. What’s odd about this, of course, is that in the age of Weinberger, Shirky, O’Reilly and Jenkins, we understand that the new knowledge economy represents a new knowledge economy. More exactly, it is almost always better to turn our work into the public domain than to protect it from distribution.

This is a tough lesson for corporations to learn, keen as they are to protect their intellectual property rights. But a woman often styled as a folk-punk artist? This is a tough lesson for her? Really?

And that’s the really odd thing about DiFranco’s refusal. In point of fact, DiFranco ought to be the patron saint of the new economy, the new culture. Here was a woman who seemed to grasp what was happening to us. Indeed, DiFranco can actually claim to be an author of our cultural shift.

DiFranco seemed to get the new symmetry between producer and consumer. She resisted the smash and grab which which studios approached the music world. She resisted the celebrity model. She resisted an apotheosis that took people out of the ordinary world into stardom. DiFranco instinctively embraced the idea of growing your audience, one performance at a time, of staying small, of remaining loyal to your roots. DiFranco grasped the idea of remaining close to your home town, even when this meant making Rochester her base of operations and her mother the head of book keeping. Most of all, she understood that a musician could now control the means of music, marketing and celebrity production, of running her own show. I mean, much of what we see happening with all those independent film and music festivals begins with her. Lilith is impossible to imagine without her. (She did not participate, I think.) SxSW and even Burning Man, I think these were brought closely to the real of the possible by her acts of imagination.

In point of fact, DiFranco should now be an object of worship for anyone who cares about popular culture. Instead, she remains a minority enthusiasm. She is an architect who helped us move from a world of zero sum to something more generative, a prime mover in the transition from value capture to value release, a champion of what Sahlins would call generalized exchange, a participant in what Foucault would call a “sudden redistribution.” DiFranco is there when we move the conference from something dialogic to something all-in. Foo camps, anti-conferences and interesting conventions, these come, in a sense, from her. (Wow, listen, “DiFranco is there,.” Really, author, really?)

But she is, forgive me, unsung. The women who ought to be our patron saint, our Judith, our Joan, our firebrand, refusing the status quo, daring the future to happen, things seemed somehow to pass her by. Somehow DiFranco got “read out of history” as Kuhn would say. The paradigm shifted, but the women who helped shifted it got forgot. I have a friend who actually had in his possession the prow figure of the first American ship to enter an English harbor after the American revolution. Think of DiFranco so.

Well, and maybe this is just as DiFranco wants it. Perhaps she is distressingly true to her intentions. All of us want to pretend our independence but still be showered with fame, glory and riches. Maybe, DiFranco is more scrupulous than the rest of us. Perhaps she is distrustful of the center even when the center is pretty darn and increasingly alternative. But the tragic possibility is that she is addicted to the margin, even after the creative center of things has moved to the center. In which case, she is as the English would say, yesterday’s woman, a person who just somehow can’t grasp that the world has changed.

I say nothing at all of the fact that DiFranco is an architect of 3rd wave feminism, but of course this distinction, too, belongs to her. And I will say from my own experience that I was raised in a feminist household but it was only when I heard her music that I fully grasped what feminism could mean to our culture.

Last note:

Yesterday’s blog, was written in an Air Canada Beechcraft 1900D, one of those little planes that seats, like, 16 people and make you wish to God you had never trusted your life to the miracle of flight. This post was written on an Amtrak Acela barreling from NYC to Boston. I dare you to tell the difference. Because here at This Blog Sits we exercise quality control. Every post, whatever the circumstance, is written by a small team of dedicated writers who stand behind every word they write. (No, not really.)

Really last note:

We here at This Blog offer birthday greetings to the state of Israel on her 60th birthday.

References

Cole, Susan G. 1995. Ani DiFranco: Folk-punk phenom unleashes songs and real-life passions. Now Magazine, no. March: 1-3. here.

DiFranco, Ani. 1996. Dilate. Dilate.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

———. 1996. Outta Me, Onto You. Dilate.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

———. 1992. What If No One’s Watching. Imperfectly.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

Foucault, M. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. 1972. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leibovich, Lori. Ani DiFranco: Dilate. Salon.

Poet, J. 1996. Ani DiFranco: Independent as she wants to be. Pulse. here.

Sahlins, Marshall David. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago, Aldine-Atherto: Aldine-Atherton.

Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. New York.

Van Meter, Jonathan. 1997. Righteous Babe. Spin 13, no. 5: 54-60, 126-28.

Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. New York: Henry Holt.

I’m interested in the way advertising mines culture for useful meanings. A couple of weeks ago, I offered a post on the recent efforts by cell phone carriers. An ATT ad shows all the ways people answer their phones. (“Hey, buddy!” “How’s it going?” “What’s up!” etc.) Verizon shows a father’s vane (and vain) attempt to adopt lingo 20 years too young for him. In a comment to this post, Natasha Estey pointed out that a recent McDonald’s ad shows all the ways people eat a Big Mac. All of these find something in the culture of everyday life and seize upon it as a trellis upon which the brand may grow.

A couple of days ago, I saw another contribution to this exploration of popular culture. There is now a Bud Light commercial that consists in a study of all the ways that people say “Dude.” And it is fantastically revealing of the number of things you can say with this single syllable: entreaty, exclamation, exasperation, dubiety, hilarity, astonishment, and so.

In one spot, two guys go to Vegas. As these pilgrims make their was around town,, each moment punctuated by a different, equally reveally “Dude.” One of the duo meets a suspiciously muscular “show girl” and in a hasty ceremony marries her. His pal says “dude” in a voice of sad “I told you so but you wouldn’t listen” resignation, and our suspicions are confirmed with a literal rendering of the term.

This study hasn’t been done, I wouldn’t think, but it would be very interesting to know the 10 words with this linguistic versatility. Can anything be more versatile than “Dude.” Hard to imagine. But what are, for instance, the top ten? I think “wow” would make this list. I find myself using it lots of ways. I am sure there is an intellectual somewhere who takes this to me a measure of our decline as a civilization, but then if you are an intellectual everything, with the possible exception of an outbreak of Mozart festivals, is precisely this. Happily, it is the anthropologists job to observe, not judge.
Anyhow, I was struck by this comment in a recent New Yorker.

In recent years, some of the directors working on modest budgets (in and out of Hollywood) have developed a caste and rather refined new style–a style devoted to minute perceptions of character that lead to small revelations of how life works. Let’s call it the cinema of observation. I’m thinking of filmmakers like Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”), Nicole Holofcener (“Friends with Money”), Tamara Jenkins (The Savages”), Andrew Wager (“Starting Out in the Evening”), and now Noam Murro, whose new “Smart People” is about a middle-aged literature professor in a funk.

Perhaps ad interest in popular culture is also driven by a generationally specific enthusiasm. Perhaps a new generation is coming up anthropologically. Not a moment too soon. We need all the help we can get.

References

For more info on the campaign, go here.

For a look at the Bud Light Dude Vegas ad, go here.

Denby, David. 2008. Overripe, Undernourished. The New Yorker. April 21, 2008, pp. 142-143, p. 143.

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Advertising and its new anthropological content. The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 19, 2008.

Acknowledgments (and hat’s off to):

Bud Light Agency: DDB, Chicago Group Creative Director: Mark Gross,
Creative Directors: Chuck Rachford, Chris Roe Art Director: John Baker
Copywriter: Jeff Oswald Agency Producer: Will St. Clair Production
Company: Biscuit Filmworks Director: Kenny Herzog, Clay Weiner
Executive Producers: Shawn Lacy, Holly Vega Line Producer: Lisa
Stockdale DP: Ross Richardson Editor: Carlos Lowenstein Dude…New Spot
From Director Clay Weiner (repped by Biscuit Filmworks. The Spot And
The Rest Of The Story: Dude.