A point made in the previous post Bad Idea deserves emphasis.

The New Deal socialism lite trend reversed in the 70s and 80s. During that era those who lacked scope and scale in their vision and analysis of society, who drive looking in the rear view mirror more than through the wind screen, saw only the extremes, the noisy surface of society, and concluded that the US was following Europe down the path to a centralized, stratified, authoritarian society fragmented into economic, social, racial, ethnic and gender interest groups who all looked to government to manage tensions between them and provide treats for the faithful, and in which there was not just a separation of church and state but a separation of church and society, where religious people were shamed and encouraged to practice their perversions in the closet.

That isn't what happened because Americans didn't want that kind of society. What they saw was a world sinking into despair as prosocial institutions were dismantled and quality of life declined. They were not charmed by the broadcast model of society in which a few sources of information and authority interacted with individuals on a personal basis, claiming an ever larger portion of their wealth to fund such meddling, preferring a networked model of society in which many sources of information and authority vied for mind space while individuals interacted with one another. Not surpisingly, those chained to the broadcast didn't even know this was happening.

The even earlier post Extended Senses was one of a series that criticized some of the followers of social networking in the age of expanded information and communication technologies, in this case a post by Douglass Rushkoff The Networked Individual. They are part of the group "chained to the broadcast" who don't see what society is doing because they think they are ahead of the curve and in some ways determining what society will do. Things never work out for them of course because they are behind the curve by a large margin and events always overtake them.

The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently than what we're expecting. Instead of becoming more empowered as individuals, we may give up on the notion of individuality altogether.

The Renaissance -- the great big one they taught us about in school -- is known for a lot of great inventions: perspective painting, the printing press, ships that could circumnavigate the earth, modern banking and even the sonnet. What we tend to forget about the 15th and 16th centuries, though, is that this was also when we invented the "individual."...

[Today] interactive devices, which allow for what I've come to see as a second great renaissance, give us access to one another. They break down individualism as we know it, and help us redefine it as something very different: as our ability to forge connections with one another. To cooperate instead of compete.

No, we didn't invent individualism, ever. Nor are we now just discovering cooperation and social networking. Every bit of this is false, mistaking new techniques for new behaviors when all we have done is use new tools to do old tasks. New tools can help us do tasks better or faster, they can dissolve old social structures and underpin new ones, but they don't change norms or preferences by providing alternative ways to express them.

In a new documentary The Persuaders Rushkoff tries to extend his thesis though the majority of his data shows that he is simply wrong and leaves him merely advocating what cannot be found in human behavior. Humans are and always have been obdurately individualistic though technology can mask it a bit, at least for those blinded by ideology or self interest. Rushkoff is in the persuasion business and has worked in advertising and other forms of broadcast media. Broadcast is broken. The business models of all types of broadcast enterprises, from TV to political parties, are failing. People tune them out, ignoring them or literally editing them out with their Tivos or premium broadcasts that are free of advocacy. Attempts to evade the evasion, by making the entertainment a vehicle for persuasion - infotainment - is seldom sufficiently entertaining to work.

The newest scheme of broadcasters in "narrowcasting", targeted advertising which attempts to tailor persuasive messages to known characteristics of audience segments. The idea is to reduce costs but also to reduce the amount of information available to those targeted in hopes that their resistance to persuasion will be lowered by the comparative peace and quiet, to reduce the background noise in hopes of being heard.

This bothers Rushkoff of course since his ideal is a single authoritative voice for all of society rather than ever more individualized information streams. His deepest motivations are ideological and political - advertising and broadcast are day jobs - and there is little hope that a society can be homogenized when each individual selects their own information stream through a combination of active acquisition, selective filtering and accommodating vendors more than willing to individualize their pitches and target them to only those who are likely to appreciate the product.

But things may be even worse for the Rushkoffs of the world than they suspect. James Surowiecki, discussed previously in All The Way and Situation Normal where he illuminated the conditions in which group decisions can be highly accurate has struck again in The decline of brands:

Even as companies have spent enormous amounts of time and energy introducing new brands and defending established ones, Americans have become less loyal. Consumer-goods markets used to be very stable. If you had a set of customers today, you could be pretty sure most of them would still be around two years, five years, ten years from now. That's no longer true. A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price. Consumers are continually looking for a better deal, opening the door for companies to introduce a raft of new products.

Marketers may consider the explosion of new brands to be evidence of branding's importance, but in fact the opposite is true. It would be a waste of money to launch a clever logo into a world of durable brands and loyal customers. But because consumers are more promiscuous and fickle than ever, established brands are vulnerable, and new ones have a real chance of succeeding - for at least a little while. The obsession with brands, paradoxically, demonstrates their weakness.

The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer. We've seen a pronounced jump in the amount of information available about goods and services. It's not just bellwethers like Consumers Union and J.D. Power, established authorities that unquestionably shape people's buying decisions, but also the crush of magazines, Web sites, and message boards scrutinizing products.

What have you done for me lately? And more generally, how well do your marketing claims stand up? This affects not only consumer goods but also politics, which breaks Rushkoff's heart. People are increasingly better informed and better able to express their natural independence of mind. We saw this repeatedly during the most recent election season as both politicians and legacy media organizations were fact checked to death and counterspun till they blew chunks.

There is a parallel in this with the classic socialist blunder - the labor theory of value - the failure to recognize the significance of knowledge and information in production, emphasizing material and labor while ignoring knowledge content and information for planning purposes. In the steam age when these ideas were whelped it was possible for the casual observer to overlook the importance of information and knowledge content since they were comparatively small compared to material and labor - possible but not smart. Wiser observers pointed this out and time proved their point.

Similarly, steam age thinkers like Rushkoff overlooked the individualism of people since it was masked by oppressive medieval institutions, at least in public, though again more astute observers were not fooled by surface manifestations and have always understood the basic human condition more insightfully.

If we are humanists, if we like humans and wish them well, why would we seek to subvert their preferences or lament an increase in satisfaction? I suspect it is simple ignorance and ossified ideology. There is no need for mind control - censored information streams - to enable cooperation. People do this willingly, happily, or at least most do. There are exceptions of course, humans are diverse, bad apples in every barrel, but contrary to the reports of the easily confused they don't spoil the rest. If anything, they provide sport for the rest who take quite a lot of pleasure in punishing miscreants.

Like it or not humans are pack animals like wolves not herd beasts like sheep, hunters not grazers. They cooperate instinctively or die alone, sometimes in the jaws of their pack mates. It isn't just the threat of demise that prompts cooperation, it is a great pleasure, right up there with food and sex, something we long to do for its own sake not merely as a means to an end. We don't fuck just to breed, we do it for phun and it is the same for cooperation. The next time you are at a show notice the ecstatic or blissful expressions on the faces of the musicians when they are really cooking, when they are reading one another, each adding his own noise at just the right time in just the right way to create space, as if somehow their coordination conjures extra virtual musicians out of thin air to swell the sound beyond the sum of the individual musicians and synchronize the synapses of all within their sphere.

We can have it all, complete individuality and highly cooperative societies. Increasing individuality will increase cooperation, unpick all the rebellious knots leaving people free to pursue their preferences, and cooperative effort is a strong preference done for sheer pleasure even when the ends are trivial. There is no need for Kings, priests or party bosses to organize cooperative effort. There is no need for planners to decide what cooperative efforts should be pursued. They are usually wrong anyway and they stifle creativity. So what if some of the packs pursue foolish ends. Others will do better and the net benefit to society will be far larger if all are free to choose.

The demise of the persuaders due to pervasive networked communication - though it destroys legacy media, political parties, established religion and unfrocks all the monks of every persuasion - is a more natural, more human state.

» Ugly and Political from Crumb Trail
The ugly bit from the previous post - self censorship of research findings that imperil careers - is often a reaction to this sort of politicized science. Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has......[read more]
Tracked: November 10, 2004 10:01 PM