Dec 312008
 

Thoughts emerging from a conversation with Sandra Luft of San Francisco State U (who bears no responsibility though):

“Who am I?” Or, “Who are you?“ How we answer such questions clearly changes over time. One of the main ways, though, has been with a narrative, a personal story that describes how one ended up where one is and who one is now. The story takes in the key experiences that seemed to cause one to veer in some new directions, the milestones one passed, the actions, the forks in the road that could have led one elsewhere, the feelings that propelled one in one way or another, the chances encountered and taken or not. In these stories, at least since Freud, the earliest experiences and memories of family life have a particular place in indicating who we have become. If one chooses a more biological approach, putting genetics in a starring role, or even if one puts an emphasis on culture handed down, the story becomes interwoven with an even longer history of the family, the tribe or society. To live is to have a history, to unfold, to evolve, or perhaps to revolt against the given, by turning some corner which leads to new discoveries about oneself.

Discoveries about oneself suggest an inward quest or adventure, also taking place through the passage of time, to discover who one perhaps has been, unbeknownst to oneself, all along. Again, that is  a personal history extended over time, however, a path to a full discovery that possibly can only be completed at one’s death.

That at least is the old way of self-description and self-feeling. The new way, with and through the Internet, is not diachronic, it would seem, so much as synchronic. You are your current set of interests, contacts, Twitter postings, Facebook postings, blog postings, listserv controversies, your latest images, and YouTube videos — trapped in an eternal but changing present that gives no sense of birth or death or growing up, or even growing at all. (I’ve also touched on this in my article on the “Mentality of Homo interneticus” ) You are tied to others and you are only defined in some sort of interaction with them, but only as now. (This also ties to the notion of superself I posted before.)

How would you respond, then, to the question,  “Who are you?” — assuming it still has meaning at all? Is it an impertinence, would it simply be answered by listing all your current contacts, your recent google searches, and maybe a few of the items you have around the house or have recently purchased? Would you describe your ambitions, past achievements, etc.? Or would these be just window dressing for the sake of providing a resume? Are you just something floating in the now — a list of current attention paid and received and nothing really more?

What is the role of your physical body in all this? Is the body more than the sum of yoga classes, gyms you frequent, sexual liaisons, recent or anticipated, foods you have scarfed down in the past few weeks or recipes you plan to try soon, restaurants you plan to eat at or have reservations for? Are you the trips you already have tickets for? Or is your body merely what is on show in the photos and videos that appear on the various websites you connect to? The fact is that it becomes ever easier to present an instantaneous photo or video record of our current surrounds, physical attitudes and appearances, so  that the past is lost in “old” photo “albums” which we have no attention  to waste on excavating.

Is this simply the self of existentialism, as would be familiar to Sartre in Being and Nothingness? Yes and also no, because what gives us our immediacy, what focusses us on the now is as much as anything the inrush from many others, the constantly changing environment on the Net in which so much of life is now spent.

Who are we now? Who are we becoming?

Dec 292008
 

In yesterday’s (12/28/08) NY Times “Week in Review” section, two articles (on the same page) are worth comment.

“Boobs”

The first is “Contemplating the Boobs We Were” by Peter Applebome. He argue correctly that Americans don’t understand enough about economics. Then he suggests that this topic should be taught in high school, or at the very least students should be taught of the joys of compound interest in savings, and the pitfalls of it as debt.

There are several flaws in these proposals. While it would be salutary for students to learn the dangers of indebtedness, how many of them are likely to learn this complex lesson when the joys of credit cards seem self-evident. If one’s parents or other close adults have gotten into serious debt trouble, that might be convincing, but a lesson in class on such a subject is likely to be seem sanctimonious, stilted, boring, or ignorant of reality. Should schools teach students to forego college to avoid college loans? Can teachers — who probably have a dim grasp of this, and, in many cases, can’t get by without loans themselves — successfully get it across?

A worse problem is the supposed benefit of compound interest on savings. If everybody saves and no one spends, and few go into debt, compound interest cannot materialize as promised. Numerous presumably intelligent people now tell us we should all invest our money and not spend it, but clearly, under such circumstances there would nothing worthwhile to invest it in. This is the macroeconomic reality hidden when only the microeconomics of individual cases is discussed.

Of course, if economics became a curriculum subject for high school, what would be taught would be even more wated-down and tendentious than what is now taught as history. “Patriots” would insist on the full nine yards of total “free-market” nonsense; even Keynesianism would be too vaguely taught, because too few professional economists, much less high school teachers grasp it today.

Macroeconomics itself is far more complex, if evaluated correctly, for it should mean nothing other than the total evolution of societal interconnections. Most scholars, even of macroeconomics, do not get this, because they act as if economics as a whole is a fixed subsystem. They forget that it is subject to historical change. (In truth, they don’t so much forget this. Rather, they simply have never considered it in the first place.) That’s why it is beyond their ken that the money-market-industrial economy could give way to something else, which I of course suspect will be the Attention Economy as I have defined it in this blog and elsewhere.

Books

That brings us to the second article, “Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It” by David Streitfeld. He argues that bookstores are disappearing, and cites  a case in which he bought a like-new book online for “25 cents” (plus, of course, “shipping and handling”) so that the author got absolutely no money.  She points out to him that she did get attention, though without using the word.

If they were in it primarily for the money, the vast  majority of authors would always have been  fools , though a tiny few have made a pretty good living at times. The main goal, I argue, has always bee seeking attention for oneself or —what amounts to the same thing — for what one thinks or has to say. Today, as competition for attention rises, and ways to seek increase too, that is even more likely to be the case.

None of this is to argue that the landscape for books, including bookstores, publishers, etc., is not undergoing rapid and in  many ways disturbing changes. As a book lover and erstwhile bookstore haunter, I am saddened at the demise of such places a Cody’s, mentioned in the article. It is possible to find many more books on line than you would in even the largest bookstore, but browsing them at present remains far from easy. Serendipity still operates, but is quite different in detail from what happens in an actual bookstore. And young people’s attention is now often subdivided in such a way that they see no reason to immerse themselves in an actual book to such a degree that they really do begin to feel the author’s way of thinking — at least partially — from the inside.

As long as we still do have something of a money economy, we should seek — and probably will find — new ways to make sure that authors we like get some support. Some of this will be semi-automatic; some of it may require new social inventions. But I don’t think we should spend too much time mourning the profit-centered kind of publishing that now seems to be perishing.

Dec 242008
 

In ancient Athens’s Agora, in medieval Venice’s Rialto neighborhood, and in small village market squares everywhere, the marketplace for ideas — that is where attention was exchanged —commingled with the market for goods. Socrates wandered around the Agora talking with his disciples and enemies, according to Plato. But he and they spent little time trying out or examining the wares, or in bargaining over goods. Others, say in Cairo’s souks up until today, spend much time engaged in conversation and in bargaining, and would be shocked and disturbed to have their first price accepted by  customer. In these cases attention and shopping are intermingled, but still separate kinds of activity. Today, in more westernized places the relationship is different but still crucial.

Consumer spending is what is said to keep the American — and therefore the world’s — market economy afloat. In recent years this has required most consumers to go into debt, either through home loans, credit cards or both. Today it is increasingly hard to get such loans, because all the banks are afraid of lending. Meanwhile,  a substantial and growing  proportion of Americans have no way to take on more debt and still pay it back. But even if that were not so, consumption might not head up forever. In a previous post I discussed the attention costs of consumption. But there is another side to consuming, which helps explain why Americans have loved to shop. It can be described as simply this: Shopping is an avenue for getting attention. At, least, it seems to be that, sometimes even when it’s not. Let me list some of the ways shopping offers attention.

Illusory Attention

Yesterday I went to the hub of shopping in the Bay area, the few blocks around Union Square, SF. Within fairly easy walking distance is everything from the extremely downscale Burlington Coat Factory to the upscale Barney’s New York. Also, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Nieman-Marcus, H & S, and Saks Fifth Avenue, along with Crate and Barrel, Apple, Virgin Records, Border’s Books and many other name-brand chain stores, along with a number of discount jewelry stores and many others. Together these emporia function as a kind of gigantic museum of what designers have designed, technologists have implemented, musicians and artists and jewelers and writers have created— all as curated by the store’s buyers and display managers. Plenty of things to pay attention to, but by the same token a great deal of illusory attention. (Illusory attention is the attention you feel you are getting, as if in direct address to you, when in fact the creator in question is unaware of your specific existence or very nearly unaware of it.) You could receive illusory attention by going to an actual museum, say, but you get much of the same just by looking around in stores and shops, or eating in restaurants, especially those with notable restaurateurs or chefs behind them.

Being Attended to While Shopping

Another thing happens, at least minutely, when you shop. The salespeople pay at least a little and sometimes a lot of attention to you. You expect to be noticed and perhaps cosseted; you expect to be smiled at, thanked, perhaps complimented on your taste, told what you should and should not buy, offered reassurances that the possible recipient of your purchase will love it. (It doesn’t seem to matter that the clerk offering such assurances knows absolutely nothing about the intended recipient of a gift; they just know the recipient will love it, and sometimes this remarkable knowledge evidently seems compelling and reassuring to the customer.

Attention Paid to Gift-Givers

A high proportion of all purchases are made around the now traditional gift-giving holidays, and many  — though by no means all –are actually bought as gifts. Some of these gifts were requested, but many are shots in the dark, which may or may not turn out to be something the recipient actually wants or is happy to have. Many such gifts end up never used, instead stored away and forgotten, a kind of Keynesian boost to the world’s market economy, but still hoped to bring about some kind of gratitude and attention paid to the giver. This is so even if the giver is merely fulfilling what she or he takes to be an expectation. The recipient will probably also give a gift in return, unless she is a child or if some other inequality makes reciprocation difficult. Thus many gifts can be viewed as a frilly, inarticulate form of exchange of attention, a concrete demonstration of love, or something of the sort.

Shopping as Part of a Creative (and Therefore Potentially Attention-Getting) Act

A large number of things purchased are for display to others in some form. Such is obviously the case with many clothes, those not purely utilitarian, or maybe even those. But this also holds for furniture for electronic devices, for foods, whether to be combined into something cooked for others or merely as a display as the purchaser herself eats them in semi-public. Cars are also in this category. Sometimes the way things bought are combined is intended to be a kind of artistry, and of course our bodies and what we have on them have been the main way we get direct attention in the world,. This accounts for gyms, cosmetic surgery, ordinary cosmetics, jewelry, shoes,  diet foods, tattoos and more.

Purchasing of the Means for Expression that Will (It is Hoped) Get Attention.

Here I mean everything from art supplies to iPhones, including cameras, musical instruments, computers and much software, even sound and video systems for home use but also to show off our discoveries to friends and others. Even a substantial portion of business-related (and thus deductible) purchases are in this category. In addition to giving such things to ourselves, we can also give them to others with the intent that we will share in some sense in the attention that goes to the expression thereby made.

Attention-Seeking in Other Ways Competes with Shopping and Will Do So More

As I have discussed before, the act of shopping itself of course takes up the shoppers attention, and so the extent it can be done is limited. Further, as I also pointed out, making any use of anything one buys requires further attention. But shopping also takes money, and with money growing increasingly questionable and perhaps hard to get hold of, means of seeking attention that rely less extensively or not at all on shopping would be much sought substitutes. They are certainly available, at least for those who have Internet or cell phone access and the like, and I think that if and when the smoke clears for the money-market economy, non-monetary attention- seeking  activities will be more prominent. The advantages of shopping as a means of getting attention will quite probably permanently lessen.

The Challenge

Less shopping equals less employment, barring massive government intervention. That would yield lowered money incomes for many. That too will make the Attention Economy more important. But just as the musicians and writers of today want to be heard and read as much at least as they want to be paid, the technologists and designers and so forth will want their works widely distributed if possible, so that they can be appreciated.   I f life is not to get totally imbalanced, ways must be found to see that the good things in life are not reserved for only a small group that has managed to hold onto money or have good money incomes.  Plenty of attention will go to whoever figures out how to make this work. The time to start thinking about it is now.

Dec 212008
 

A couple of years ago, I pointed out that in some ways money was losing its hold on reality. Routine activities and producing things to which can be assigned some relatively stable amount of money now occupy far less than majority of human effort — while more and more energy goes into the new attention economy, which is only loosely connected with money or markets. At the same time, the growing financial sector takes on the possibility of treating money as a pure symbol, without any underlying or inherent meaning. Financial money can grow or shrink, and this has real effects in what is left of the market economy, but many of the shenanigans within finance do not really do anything beyond the purely symbolic. Now the future of money has become more imbued with the excesses of money’s dream life. To the extent that markets do require money, they also require mechanisms for the insertion of money where needed, and that depends on trust, which is the basis of all loans, investments, etc. Trust is now rapidly leaving the system. The mysteries of derivatives, of the vast variety of new financial instruments, and of things like hedge funds are a perfect cover for the most rudimentary sorts of scams, including the recently unveiled Ponzi scheme of one Bernard Madoff. (A Ponzi scheme requires ever-more investment into it, as current investments are used to pay earlier participants, though this is only necessary if the early investors actually take money out. Like roulette bettors who just let their money ride on a certain bet as winnings pile up, investors in a Ponzi can be fooled by entirely fictional increases in their holdings to leave all their theoretical winnings in, and they might also be likely to add more to the fund, and tout it to their friends. ) Madoff, who caught many who should have known better, as well as a considerable number who could not have been expected to see through his deviousness, was actually apparently quite limited in his methods of covering up his scheme. To whit: he claimed nearly the same yearly growth from one year to the next, which after a few years becomes statistically very unlikely. A more astute Ponzi scheme could vary the growth. This has its limits, of course. You wouldn’t want your Ponzi scheme to issue reports that are too downbeat, because then investors might leave. Still, greater sophistication in reporting incomes so as to evade questions certainly seems possible. Thus, how do you know that your next investment vehicle will not turn out to be a Ponzi scheme or something perhaps honest but hare-brained? The obvious answer might seem to be to diversify investments. But in the Madoff case, some investors thought they were investing in different funds entirely. Any company can do what it likes with any extra cash on hand, so how do you know that an apparently reliable company that makes what seems like a real and straightforward product is not investing in some other dubious scheme? Even a company which does nothing of the sort must take increasing risks in new investments as the climate of creativity heats up. You cannot rely on this year’s popularity to get a company through competition that might not even exist yet but will be quite evident in a few years. The speed at which new kinds of products and services can be put on offer renders the “long term” increasingly short. This past year also shows that such supposedly safe and durable investments such as land and raw materials like petroleum can be highly speculative, because speculating on futures in all such areas can play havoc with the prices there too, if at a high enough level. The net result of all this is that trust has fallen to lows not seen since the Great Depression. But new means of speculation, based on the likes of the Internet and advanced computation are not likely to disappear. Thus a return to “fundamentals” cannot be counted on — ever again. Regulation is unlikely to be astute enough to keep track of all the new means of engaging in new kinds of investment, and nothing can stop these except a complete freeze of the monetary system. That’s where we may well be headed. Alternatives to money and the wide-open market are likely to proliferate.”>pointed out that in some ways money was losing its hold on reality. Routine activities and producing things to which can be assigned some relatively stable amount of money now occupy far less than majority of human effort — while more and more energy goes into the new attention economy, which is only loosely connected with money or markets. At the same time, the growing financial sector takes on the possibility of treating money as a pure symbol, without any underlying or inherent meaning. Financial money can grow or shrink, and this has real effects in what is left of the market economy, but many of the shenanigans within finance do not really do anything beyond the purely symbolic.

Now the future of money has become more imbued with the excesses of money’s dream life. To the extent that markets do require money, they also require mechanisms for the insertion of money where needed, and that depends on trust, which is the basis of all loans, investments, etc. Trust is now rapidly leaving the system. The mysteries of derivatives, of the vast variety of new financial instruments, and of things like hedge funds are a perfect cover for the most rudimentary sorts of scams, including the recently unveiled Ponzi scheme of one Bernard Madoff. (A Ponzi scheme requires ever-more investment into it, as current investments are used to pay earlier participants, though this is only necessary if the early investors actually take money out. Like roulette bettors who just let their money ride on a certain bet as winnings pile up, investors in a Ponzi can be fooled by entirely fictional increases in their holdings to leave all their theoretical winnings in, and they might also be likely to add more to the fund, and tout it to their friends. )

Madoff, who caught many who should have known better, as well as a considerable number who could not have been expected to see through his deviousness, was actually apparently quite limited in his methods of covering up his scheme. To whit: he claimed nearly the same yearly growth from one year to the next, which after a few years becomes statistically very unlikely. A more astute Ponzi scheme could vary the growth. This has its limits, of course. You wouldn’t want your Ponzi scheme to issue reports that are too downbeat, because then investors might leave. Still, greater sophistication in reporting incomes so as to evade questions certainly seems possible. Thus, how do you know that your next investment vehicle will not turn out to be a Ponzi scheme or something perhaps honest but hare-brained?

The obvious answer might seem to be to diversify investments. But in the Madoff case, some investors thought they were investing in different funds entirely. Any company can do what it likes with any extra cash on hand, so how do  you know that an apparently reliable company that makes what seems like a real and straightforward product is not investing in some other dubious scheme? Even a company which does nothing of the sort must take increasing risks in new investments as the climate of creativity heats up. You cannot rely on this year’s popularity to get a company through competition that might not even exist yet but will be quite evident in a few years. The speed at which new kinds of products and services can be put on offer renders the “long term” increasingly short. This past year also shows that such supposedly safe and durable investments such as land and raw materials like petroleum can be highly speculative, because speculating on futures in all such areas can play havoc with the prices there too, if at a high enough level.

The net result of all this is that trust has fallen to lows not seen since the Great Depression.

But new means of speculation, based on the likes of the Internet and advanced computation are not likely to disappear. Thus a return to “fundamentals” cannot be counted on — ever again. Regulation is unlikely to be astute enough to keep track of all the new means of engaging in new kinds of investment, and nothing can stop these except a complete freeze of the monetary system. That’s where we may well be headed. Alternatives to money and the wide-open market are likely to proliferate.

Dec 082008
 

I have long maintained that paying attention to someone (or that person’s expression) amounts to aligning your mind to that someone’s. In seeing the world from their point of view, you partially “become” them. This can be through listening to and trying to understand their sentences, through reading something they have written, through looking at a picture or work of art that they have created, through watching them play a game such as golf or football, etc. To the extent you do take on their viewpoint,  you want what they want. And so on.

Recently, an experiment (reported by Benedict Carey in the NY Times) was described in an online science journal under the title  “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping” that demonstrates the ease with which seeing (in this case literally from another’s point of view) makes you feel you are they. A commenter, Alan Peters, said the following: “I have been doing research at Johnson Space Center in Houston with the NASA Robonaut robot for a number of years. One way that the robot can be controlled is through direct telepresense.{sic} That is, the operator dons a VR helmet, data gloves, and some other sensors. The operator sees through the robot’s stereo camera “eyes”. Any motions the operator makes with his/her arms and hands are reflected by the robot. In that way it is possible to control the robot in highly dexterous manipulation tasks. After operating the robot for a short period of time, one feels quite like the robot is one’s self. At least that’s how it felt to me. It was interesting to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. The first time I operated the robot, I could see this bearded, out-of-shape, older guy with a potbelly, sitting on a chair, wearing a helmet, and moving his arms around. It was me, of course. Didn’t seem like it though. And frankly, I didn’t look so good to me. I feel much better than I look! After having finished operating the robot, I always watch myself taking the VR helmet off. I am in the robot until the *instant* my eyes loose contact with the display. Then I have the uncanny sensation of snapping back into my own body. It’s quite an odd feeling, not unpleasant, but unlike anything else I’ve experienced.”

All this demonstrates how fully, and yet how easily we can take on the persona of another, or as I put it aligning our minds to that other. No other model of attention paying makes much sense.