Postmodernism Archives
Getting all postmodern on the economic crisis.
Economics, it seems, is all around us. With banks in trouble and bailouts passing, America's financial future is the new Sarah Palin. With that in mind I'm going to try and articulate something I've been trying to articulate for quite some time (mostly unsuccessfully): The idea that everything is imaginary.
I know that sounds a bit odd, so please bear with me as I try to explain. Mostly I started thinking about this around the time of brand tags, when I was spending a lot of time talking about how brands all exist in people's heads. As the site illustrates, everyone has a different idea of what a brand is, shaped by an infinite number of factors (when they were introduced, how they were introduced, whether they've actually experience it, etc.) and every single person, no matter how different their perception is, is equally right.
This starts to send one's head into a bit of a tailspin: How can everyone be right about something with completely different answers? In the case of brands it's slightly easier to understand (I think), but then when it comes to the economy it's slightly more difficult but equally relevant. While there's lots of stuff that makes up the economy, ultimately it's mostly a bunch of people's perceptions about how the economy is doing that drives it. In a state of perceived crisis (such as now), we all react by following the leads of others, even though the vast majority of us don't actually understand what is going on and how it threatens us as individuals. Or, as Paul Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California explains, "I am not a financial genius. I do know that when you see millions of people in the market essentially freaking out, that spills over into your brain and you get this impulse to do what everyone else is doing." Which is freak out.
So, we all hear about people freaking out about something that we don't really understand so we all start freaking out and some of us start taking our money out of the bank and then all of a sudden there isn't enough money to give the rest of the people who want to take their money out of the bank and we've gotten ourselves into a giant mess (luckily we aren't in this giant mess at the moment).
What makes this financial crisis especially interesting is that it's built on top of more "imaginary" stuff, mainly pools of mortgages that have been combined and recombined (and recombined) so that the original bears no resemblance to the final product. As The Deal explains, "The rationale for such complexities is credit-risk transfer. The realities: securities and leverage so much bigger, more complicated and detached from actual assets that value itself became an abstraction."
And now, all of a sudden, economics is starting to sound a whole lot like postmodern philosophy. Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodern philosopher is most famous for writing about what he called the simulacrum. Like most things in postmodernism, it can't be easily defined, however, it's roughly the point where the simulation becomes reality. Put more simply, "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." A quote from Ecclesiastes that Baudrillard opened his essay, Simulacra and Simulations with.
Turning back to the economy for a minute, thinking of it as a simulacrum actually works out quite well. In the essay, Baudrillard walks through the four phases of image transformation:
- It is the reflection of a basic reality.
- It masks and perverts a basic reality.
- It masks the absence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Now mapped against my simple understanding of economic history:
- Trade: It is the reflection (or formalization) of a basic reality (give something, get something).
- Money: It masks and perverts a basic reality (trade).
- Credit: It masks the absence of a basic reality (money).
- Collatorized Debt Obligations (or any similar complex financial products): It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Part of the reason we have lost control, I would argue, is that we've entered a new age. Again in my very limited knowledge/understanding of economics, we reached a point where the financial products ceased to reflect any of their underlying realities. They became something completely new. Just take a look at this chart from The Deal to get a sense of just how many steps removed from a basic reality we were/are.
Now part of the reason I think people are having so much trouble dealing with this is because they've got to accept two very difficult things: First, things are random. Or, as Baudrillard explains:
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
Or, more simply put, "in situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories." When things move beyond our realm we try to find patterns even when none exist. This is how we cope. We're no good at accepting that sometimes randomness happens because with it a lot of other institutions are thrown into wack. As a simple example, anyone who works in marketing can attest to post-rationalizing the success of a campaign and the failure of another when in reality you really have no clue what happened. (Duncan Watts has written about the reality of this as it relates to musical stars.)
As for the second thing we're really bad at: Lack of moral clarity. To illustrate, I was having a conversation the other day about the bailout. The argument was that we were bailing out a bunch of people who didn't deserve it. My answer was yes, and we were doing it because not bailing them out may have meant digging our own grave. The answer, in this case, exists in a moral netherworld: There is no right or wrong, just the reality (or hyperreality) of the situation at hand. Luckily, Baudrillard just happened to have written about this as well:
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.
Facts and logic cease to matter in the simulacrum because it's no longer governed by the rules of reality. We have to abandon these things and only deal with what's in front of us, which may in fact be a perfect way to think about the future we now face.
Or not: Maybe I'm just assigning order to something inherently chaotic.
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A bunch of quotes roughly about non-linearity presented linearly.
To be honest I have no idea what this is about as I start writing, all I know is that over the last half hour I have had a wonderfully serendipitous reading exploration that I felt like sharing. There may be conclusions to draw, there may not, I won't really know until I'm done writing.
It started with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the world wide web. In discussing why he was doing this, Berners-Lee explains that the storage system for ideas must mirror the ideas themselves. As he wrote:
In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything.
This reminded me of a quote from Black Swan that I emailed my Mom recently:
These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitos in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest...
In other words, the internet and it's non-linear foundation is much more "normal" than the command and control hierarchy that was previously imposed on information.
So, next I read a Wired interview about memes with Dr. Susan Blackmore. She explains that "Memes are using human brains as their copying machinery" and goes on to say:
Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied -- photocopiers, printing presses -- but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It's all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There's a shift to the machines doing all of that.
I don't even know if I'm ready to tackle that one. It's just one of those things I know is important. I also find it interesting in the face of the next quote I read from Anil Dash who wrote: "I've been obsessing lately over what it takes to make change happen, in both culture an technology. And the answer to me seems to increasingly be the embrace of iteration." In reality, this is also what makes life. Evolvution is not anything if it isn't the embrace of iteration. So what is the impact of machines that evolve? What can we learn about our own behavior and evolution? (These are all questions Blackmore addresses in the interview).
Continuing on I came to Zeus Jones writing about the advantages of just the kind of iteration Dash was discussing: "... because of the fact that it's very difficult to research services in the abstract - our research methodology has typically been: build, test and learn. Rather than spending lots of money in researching an idea, it's been far more economic to simply build the idea and then research the actual product." I can't help but feel like the reason all of this works better is that it's the natural way of things. The other architecture, as Taleb put it, is the square in the rainforest.
Finally, I turn to politics, and specifically a piece by David Brooks on Obama (via Steven Johnson). Discussing a speech in 2007, Brooks writes:
Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: "And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!"
For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.
Not even sure where to begin with drawing conclusions . . . Need some more thinking time. If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them (about any of the quotes, or anything else for that matter).
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Digital technology is forcing us to rethink everything, especially the structure of organizations.
About three weeks ago I was at an event throw by David Berkowitz and the good people at 360i. Not surprisingly, one of the most impactful presentations of the day came from Google. It was on digital asset management and the basic crux was to forget about 'campaigns.' The idea is that on Google a lead is a lead. Doesn't matter whether it comes in March or November, it's still worth the same amount of money. Marketers should end the campaign mindset and just make all their assets digital and marketable all the time.
Obviously this is in Google's best interest, but it also makes a lot of sense. As long as the system's fairly efficient at weeding out non-lead clicks, then it should be no-brainer to run advertising all year long, especially if you're a manufacturer who sells via the web.
Now for the issue: Companies still work on quarterly budgets. Thinking of working towards an indefinite ending is not really an idea many people understand. In this case, I ultimately see the structure of the organization as holding itself back from doing what's best for the business.
Let me give one more example: Blogging. I was at OMMA a few weeks ago and during one of the talks an audience member asked who should own the company's blog? I think it was Rohit Bhargava who said it should be whoever is most passionate. Blogs are an interesting problem for an organization. For one, they do not subscribe to the command and control ideology so many corporate communication departments use. Secondly, blogs cut across the silos. It's a communication/product/sales/marketing initiative. That leads to 'ownership' questions.
Ultimately, digitalness is at the core of the whole debate. In an analog world, silos were mostly okay, information couldn't really move across disciplines anyway. But in a digital world, where all information is made up of the same ones and zeros, those walls don't work so well.
This is bigger than just business, look at terrorism: The perfect example of a networked architecture fighting a more traditional hierarchical one. Just ask the United States army and they'll tell you it doesn't work so well.
Look at schools. Here they are broadcasting at students used to engaging with media. The system simply wasn't built to deal with a wired world and America's children are suffering as a result.
Bottom line is we are living in a very different world than we did fifty years ago and structures built then are going to be forced to change.
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How the internet opens us all up to world's of ideas.
A while back (about 6 months ago) I wrote about
the verifier approach. As I explained then, "Essentially the approach is a three-part process that can be used in nearly any field. It involves 'watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.'" Using this seemingly simple method, Gordon Rugg, a psychologist, cracked a code that's been a mystery for 50 years.
Who cares, you may be asking. For those of you who actually read every post you may be about to skip over this one as a repeat. But wait a few minutes, hear me out. I'm trying to do something here. There are connections to be made and I plan to try and make them.
First, let me help put into focus just how Rugg, the psychologist, was able to do what a whole bunch of mathematician and cryptographers couldn't: He stepped back from the problem. What he did was take an approach that examined it from the bottom-up, not the top-down. He didn't come at the problem holding any preconceived notions that those before him had. In academia, they call it the "expertise gap" and it basically goes like this:
It starts with the best of intentions. Institutions want top-notch people, so they offer incentives to attract and groom experts. Young grad students learn early that if they want to carve out a niche, they must confine their interests to a narrow field. It's not enough to work in spinal cord regeneration; it must be stem cell-based solutions to the problem. That's great if a researcher just happens to stumble on a perfect stem cell cure. But as specialists get further from their core expertise, the possible solutions - what's been tried, what hasn't, what was never properly examined, what ought to be tried again - get even more elusive.
Aha! Specialization, which brings me to another, more recent, entry I wrote titled
"The Big Idea of Growing Ideas" (
ding ding ding . . . connection number 1), where I wrote:
The more people that understand that big ideas do not appear out of thin air, the more people will be encouraged to think. It extends to nearly all parts of life. You don't need to understand everything about a topic. You don't have to understand every page of that book. Those people who are most successful are usually not the ones who are solely focused on one thing, but the people who have lots of little focuses that they can tie together. The 21st century is all about being a polymath.
Because of all the access to information, we, as individuals, are increasingly branching off into multiple places. Using myself as an example (which, to be honest, I already did in a thinly veiled way in the last sentence), have interests in far more areas than I can count. To name a very few of my current favorites: Design, music, CSS, football, interfaces. I bring absolute authority to none of them, however, I feel confident in my ability to carry on an intelligent conversation in any of them. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, however, I'm trying to get to a bigger point: Without the internet carrying on the range of interests I do would be nearly impossible, or at the very least completely consuming. However, with the massive amounts of information available and the increasingly user-centric ways of receiving it, more and more people are able to approach more and more subjects.
It goes further, though, when we bring blogging into the equation, we give all these people an outlet. I just happened to be reading Kareem Mayan's most recent entry (a response to this piece), where he wrote, "The genius of blogging is not the volume of material that's thrown into the public domain . . but the *ease* with which anybody can now publish content AND reach an audience." Now I have to disagree with Kareem a bit. Nothing personal to him, but I don't believe the two ideas are mutually exclusive, rather, I think the genius of blogging is that "anybody can now publish content AND reach and audience," thereby creating huge volumes of material being thrown into the public domain. In fact, the material being in the public domain is how it reaches it's audience. In the end, however, it's that all that material being out there in the public domain that may benefit society the most.
I've actually written the 800 words above trying to get to this point. You see, today I was reading Steven Johnson's Emergence
(I know I've sounded like Steven Johnson's agent lately, forgive me) when I came across this quote:
With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated units, each pursuing it's own desultory course. With pheromone trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress -- like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail -- by publishing their ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas -- and before long the system arrives at a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals.
Now that's probably much more detailed than everyone needed, but there's a big point in there. Think of the internet as the system Johnson mentions, with all the minds plugged in. Now bring blogs into the picture. They allow people to publish their thoughts and create an even "longer, more durable trail" by providing each entry with permalinks, a place where it can exist for all time (which, while not very celebrated anymore, is a very big deal).
Anyhow, you put all that together and you have a lot of people talking and thinking about a lot of different things. While I don't necessarily know that all these "isolated hunches and private obsessions" have yet coalesced "into a new way of looking at the world" for the masses, I can say with some certainty that there are thousands. While they're still mostly just milling around like the slime mold Johnson continually refers to, you have to believe emergence is quickly approaching.
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Thinking about the long term effects of people understanding that big ideas don't just miraculously appear.
As I was writing and updating yesterday's post on the
two new del.icio.us features, I started to think seriously about this idea of creating a social networking site from the ground up (for lack of a better term). This is what
Flickr did. As
Eric Costello, client development lead for Flickr explains:
Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.
This is huge. Enormous even. These sites are showing people that when you start small, by providing people with a specific service they want, there are lots of opportunities to get big. This is an essential idea that many people in the world (both online and off) fail to understand.
Big ideas do not hatch, they grow.
They evolve. They change. They adapt. They are affected by the environment.
In many cases prior to the web, this was not possible. You can't really slowly build a store. What are you going to do, but 10 square feet at a time? Are you going to slowly build your inventory and identity? Change your goods or services based on demand? Nope. Probably not. Can't afford it. Space is too expensive. At least real space is.
That's the beauty of the web, it's the long tail at work. Everyone has access to everyone else and there are million of niches waiting to be filled. You don't need to try and be everything to everyone because you can afford not to be. It's a luxury that didn't exist up to this point. Now we have an opportunity to grow organically. We can build something for a specific need, attract people who are interested in it for that purpose and then slowly add elements that add to their experience. That's why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur (I guess, I can't really say because I'm not one).
But this is bigger than just the web (as usual). This is about people beginning to understand that ideas evolve. The more people that understand that big ideas do not appear out of thin air, the more people will be encouraged to think. It extends to nearly all parts of life. You don't need to understand everything about a topic. You don't have to understand every page of that book. Those people who are most successful are usually not the ones who are solely focused on one thing, but the people who have lots of little focuses that they can tie together. The 21st century is all about being a polymath (a word I learned from Eide Neurolearning Blog that means "a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning).
Steve Jobs defines creativity like this:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they en up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.
The 21st century is all about interdisciplinary education and introspection. It's about recycling and
remixing. All of these notions become a whole lot easier to understand when people get that ideas don't just show up.
In other words, being open to the notion that great ideas stem from evolution lets all these other things in the door.
Together they'll push us all to new heights, both online and off.
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Two writers, two quotes, one theme. Thinking about just what's in the "middle."
I highlight every book I read. It's partly out of habit and partly because I've got a shitty memory, but it's not something I'm planning on stopping anytime soon. Anyhow, I'm in the middle of reading
Snow Crash and couldn't help but highlight the following passage, not because it's overly interesting by itself, but because it brought me back to another book immediately:
Now that the concert is up and running, it will take care of itself. There's not much more for Hiro to do. Besides, interesting things happen along border -- transitions -- not in the middle where everything is the same.
Like I said, not over fascinating, but when I went back and found this highlighted section in
The Crying of Lot 49, things got a little more interesting:
She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
I'm way too tired to get into connecting both of these at the moment. To be honest, this entry is just a poor excuse for me to write down two quotes I'd like to talk about later. So all is not lost, however, let me leave everyone with this word of wisdom:
Highlight your books, you won't regret.
With that I am off to bed. Goodnight and watch out for middles.
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I ran across this quote from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum via ONFOCUS:
"No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them."
This is the power of the internet. It is not in the information, but in the connections between them. I find that I tend to learn more from my search and subsequent linking from one page to another than I do from actually reading any one entry. It is the experience that sheds light on the subject, not necessarily any one entry. The medium is truly the message. It is an interlinked world we live in and the internet brings that fact to the forefront. "There are always connections; you have only to want to find them." Makes me want to read Eco.
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People are now at the center of their media universe.
Terry L. Heaton has posted a fantastic new essay titled "The Power of Attraction," part of his "TV News in a Postmodern World." Heaton's essay is worth reading and he covers many interesting topics, however, one paragraph in particular stuck out for me:
A case in point is the discussion currently underway regarding the influence of bloggers and the blogosphere  a remarkable Postmodern development. Attempts to assign rankings to various blogs to determine their influence are based on the hierarchical (and therefore Modernist), mass-marketing concepts of reach and frequency. Traditional journalists fear bloggers are whacking their fatted calf, and many bloggers are actually joining in this misdirected fear-cum-anger. The ensuing debates over credentialed versus uncredentialed, opinion versus objectivity, checks and balances, echo chambers, and  most importantly  who has the greater ability to influence the masses, all lock the debaters into purely Modernist arguments. In so doing, the point is missed entirely, and that is that influence in a Postmodern world is entirely the opposite of convention. Individuals now determine their own influences. Think about that for a minute. Do you ever wonder why nothing you try seems to be working anymore? There's your answer.
An individual determining his or her own influences is something I decided to name idiocentricity (I'm not sure whether anyone has referred to it as this before or not). It is what makes the internet such a powerful medium, and what makes blogs and other social software such a great addition to the web's landscape. We have now begun to shift away from messages being broadcast to us by traditional media, instead opting for the route of the internet. This allows us to sit at the center of our media universe and pick and choose what we receive. We are no longer held hostage by the television schedule, rather, we can just tune into an aggregator and receive all the news or entertainment that we've decided we want.
When we want to know something, we no longer look it up in the encyclopedia, instead we Google it, which gives us any number of answers ranked in order of how many other people thought those answers were good enough to link to. From there, we have to choose what information is reliable and what information is not and make a final decision on the answer to our original question. Answers hardly ever come from one source anymore. Now, thanks to search engines, we put together our own answers and explanations, we own the final product, it is an amalgamation of any number of sources. Rather than the traditional top-down mediation of old media, broadcasters decide what is and is not news, we are able to make the final decisions and create our own stories. Thanks to blogs, not only is more information being reported on than ever before, but also now everyone has a chance to add the debate by publishing their own opinions. It is a truly democratic medium.
Heaton ends his essay with a discussion of viral marketing. What the internet has taught people is that they should be able to access information directly. This is why traditional advertising is less effective and why viral marketing has proven to be such a powerful tool. People want to communicate directly with their products, not have their meanings mediated to them by the company through advertisements. This is especially true in young people who have been influenced by postmodernism in so many aspects of their lives, from hip-hop music to the internet. I will conclude with two paragraphs from an article I wrote for the June issue of American Demographics about Obey Giant and viral marketing titled "Buzz Giant Poster Boy." [Subscription Required]
For Fairey, it's about connecting with all these people. That's why he says the ultimate goal of a brand "is to be the equivalent of the Beatles. You've got the dumbest guy and the smartest guy in the room singing your song." Fairey continued, "I want something that resonates and affects people on different levels, but connects with everyone." For this reason, most of the products that he designs for his Obey clothing line blur and break traditional cultural rules. "I intentionally make hybrid products," he explained. "We're always trying to flip stuff up." Fairey then revealed his "truth": "If Public Enemy can sample Slayer, I can do that [make hybrid products]." (For those not on top of late '80s music, Public Enemy is the archetype for political hip-hop. On their 1988 album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, they sampled the heavy metal band Slayer, fusing two very different styles of music.) For Fairey, the crossing of those two genres symbolized the dissolution of boundaries, not just in music, but in all culture.)
Fairey grew up in a generation that has consistently rejected traditional limits. Turntables were no longer just tools to play music on, they became instruments with which to make music. Songs of the past became a giant database of samples and inspiration for reconfigured mixes. The Internet, phones and cable were not just means of talking or watching television, but parts of a complex network connecting telescoping groups of individuals, and cultures throughout the world. On top of it all, as Neisser notes, "The fact that kids watch TV, talk on the phone and IM all at the same time is a behavioral change that no marketer can afford to ignore." With access to such a plethora of information, he says, "The mass market is crumbling before our eyes. As a result, you are talking about 280 million individuals."
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Hi, I'm 