A Conversation with Sherry Turkle

You've spoken of your book, Alone Together, as a book of repentance. I'm wondering if you could reflect on that statement, in particular as it relates to your two previous books, Life on the Screen and The Second Self.

The artificial intelligence that I had researched for The Second Self and Life on the Screen was an AI where researchers were trying to make the computer smart. In sociable robotics the intent was less to make the computer smart than to make a “creature” that pushed people’s buttons, to do what was necessary to convince people that this machine was sentient and cared about them. It was playing on what the AI scientists knew about people’s make-up. The point is not so much that the machine is smart but that we are vulnerable. So, for example, I began to see sociable robots that looked you in the eye, kept eye contact, said your name, tracked your motion.

And there was something else. It turns out that if an artificial being, no matter how primitive, asks us for nurturance, we attach to it. Think of the little Tamagotchis, the little virtual creatures on tiny little screens that kids carried around in the late 1990s. These Tamagotchis asked you to feed them, amuse them, and clean up after them. When they did this, we attached. People nurture what they love, but they also love what they nurture. And that whole direction in sociable robotics, to create artificial creatures that might some day become substitutes for human companionship, and the realization of how vulnerable we are to such creatures, was something I really didn’t encounter until 1995, as I was finishing Life on the Screen.

Research on this new research tradition and our vulnerability to sociable robotics became a major preoccupation of mine. Every year a new sociable robot would come out, and every year I would embark on a new study of kids and this new robot. I studied Furbies, Aibos, My Real Babies. And finally robots were designed for the elderly in nursing homes, and I began to track that story as well.

So the growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.

You tell the story of a graduate student who says she would prefer a robot over a human relationship.

Yes. And I studied people who are happy now to give these inanimate creatures to the elderly because, well, they say it’s better than nothing. They accept that there’s nobody else for these people. But how did we get to “there’s nobody else”? People have come to accept that we live in a society where there simply aren’t the resources to take care of our elderly. But this is a social decision that these resources are not available.

So Alone Together is a book of repentance in the sense that I did not see this coming, this moment of temptation that we will have machines that will care for us, listen to us, tend to us. That’s the first sense. A second thing that changed my mind has to do with where I see social networking and the internet going. My initial excitement about networked communication took place during a time when I saw the world of online play as an identity workshop: a place where people experimented with avatars, played out aspects of self that often were not fully expressed in their everyday lives. That still goes on, but now online life has become a life of continual performance. When I studied online life in the mid-1990s, I envisaged it as a place you went to experiment. But now, with our mobile devices “always on/always-on-us,” we are always “on camera.”

I didn’t see that coming, although it was right before me. And with it has come the culture of distraction, which isn’t even experienced as distraction because it’s just how we live. People feel they have the right to customize their lives, to put their attention where they want it to be. If they are at a meeting and want to text, they do. If they are at dinner and want to text, they do. Students in class tell me that that if they don’t check their texts, it makes them anxious. They can’t feel present if they are not also in some way absent. I didn’t see that coming. As in the case of sociable robotics, this new lack of attention to each other is something, again, where I feel that we are not doing our humanness justice.

The first part of your book is on robots, and the second is on social networking. A common theme in both is the way in which these new technologies both express and foster greater loneliness. Can you talk about this paradox, where you find people being more connected than ever, but also more lonely?

We’re moving from conversation to connection. In conversation we’re present to each other in very powerful ways. Conversation is a kind of communication in which we’re alive to each other, empathetic with each other, listening to each other. When we substitute Twitter or status updates on Facebook for this, we’re losing something important. Sometimes it’s not clear to me if it’s the volume, or velocity, or continualness of it. Some kids are up to 10,000, to 15,000 texts a month. That means they’re never not texting. In this cascade of communication, we move from conversation to mere connection. And so we’ve positioned ourselves in a way where we can end up feeling more alone, even as we’re taking actions that would suggest we’re more continually connected. In all of this there is another loss: I think we lose the capacity for solitude, the kind that refreshes and restores. The kind that allows us to reach out to another person.

by James Nolan, The Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Inn at Langley. Whidbey Island.
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The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget

There was a time in my life twenty years ago when I was driving a cab for a living.

It was a cowboy’s life, a gambler’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss, constant movement and the thrill of a dice roll every time a new passenger got into the cab.

What I didn’t count on when I took the job was that it was also a ministry.

Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a rolling confessional. Passengers would climb in, sit behind me in total anonymity and tell me of their lives.

We were like strangers on a train, the passengers and I, hurtling through the night, revealing intimacies we would never have dreamed of sharing during the brighter light of day. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, made me laugh and made me weep.

And none of those lives touched me more than that of a woman I picked up late on a warm August night.

I was responding to a call from a small brick fourplex in a quiet part of town. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partiers, or someone who had just had a fight with a lover, or someone going off to an early shift at some factory for the industrial part of town.

When I arrived at the address, the building was dark except for a single light in a ground-floor window.

Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a short minute, then drive away. Too many bad possibilities awaited a driver who went up to a darkened building at 2:30 in the morning.

by Kent Nerburn, Zen Moments |  Read more: 
Photo: Taxi Union Square 2007 by Thomas Hawk

Honey, I Got a Year’s Worth of Tuna Fish

Forty-five minutes before midnight on a wintry Tuesday evening, Cathy Yoder and Monica Knight, a pair of 30-something Boise women who run a popular coupon blog called Fabulessly Frugal, strode with purpose through the parking lot of their local Albertsons supermarket. It was the third and final night of “doubles” at Albertsons. This biweekly happening, during which the store issues coupons that double the value of manufacturers’ coupons, is to dedicated coupon clippers what the full moon was to Druids. Yoder and Knight, who are Mormon and have nine children between them (Yoder: seven; Knight: two) had spent the day working on their blog and then taught a three-hour couponing class — all without a drop of forbidden caffeine. Yet with the supermarket in sight, they grew visibly jazzed, like Vegas high rollers entering a casino. “We’ll have it all to ourselves, and we’ll know all the cashiers,” Knight said.

Within minutes, Knight — a part-time dental hygienist with glossy, nearly waist-length blond hair and enviable white teeth — had discovered a sale on StarKist tuna fish. “Oh, Cathy, the tuna’s a dollar right now!” she said, as she stood before a shelf containing shiny blue plastic pouches of chunk-light tuna. A bulging nylon binder, which she had seated like a toddler in the front of her cart, held six StarKist coupons for 50 cents off; paired with Albertsons coupons, they were worth a dollar each, the same price as the tuna. “So it’s free right now,” she continued. “And we haven’t even blogged about it!”

For “couponers,” as they call themselves, free product is the holy grail. Freebies are obtained by combining various promotions in ways that can seem laborious and arcane to the civilian shopper: waiting for items to go on sale and then using coupons to buy them; “stacking” manufacturers’ coupons with store coupons; shopping during “double coupon” days; or receiving, post-purchase, a “catalina” — a coupon from a company called Catalina Marketing that can be redeemed on a future transaction. These little papers, which are spit out by a mini-printer that sits near the register and look like run-of-the-mill receipts, usually meet an unceremonious end in the graveyards of shoppers’ pockets and purses, but couponers regard them as cash. (...)

Yoder and Knight are part of a growing community of people for whom coupons are a significant part of making ends meet. After declining for nearly a decade, coupon use has increased almost 35 percent since 2008, according to Matthew Tilley, the director of marketing at Inmar, a coupon clearinghouse. Last year, more than 3.5 billion coupons for consumer packaged goods were redeemed, an increase of 6.1 percent over 2010. Coupon bloggers contributed to that increase, and though it’s hard to say how many of these blogs exist now, the numbers exploded during the recession. “When I started blogging in the summer of 2008,” says Jill Cataldo, a coupon-industry watchdog who writes a weekly syndicated column that runs in 154 newspapers, “there were not a lot of coupon blogs out there. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name more than a handful.” Fabulessly Frugal was also born in 2008. “I couldn’t even find anything local,” Yoder says. Now there are at least six other coupon blogs in the Boise area. A nasty review of a product or a complaint about a deal on one of these Web sites can have such a profound effect on customer perception — and thus on sales — that many companies have liaisons to correspond with them. Supervalu, whose major chain stores include Jewel-Osco, Cub Foods and numerous Albertsons, has created the position of “Social Media Coordinator” to communicate with bloggers and ply them with occasional giveaways.

by Amanda Fortini, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

Nanotechnology Shock Waves

“I sing the body electric,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855, inspired by the novelty of useful electricity, which he would live to see power streetlights and telephones, locomotives and dynamos. In “Leaves of Grass,” his ecstatic epic poem of American life, he depicted himself as a live wire, a relay station for all the voices of the earth, natural or invented, human or mineral. “I have instant conductors all over me,” he wrote. “They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me… My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself.”

Electricity equipped Whitman and other poets with a scintillation of metaphors. Like inspiration, it was a lightning flash. Like prophetic insight, it illuminated the darkness. Like sex, it tingled the flesh. Like life, it energized raw matter. Whitman didn’t know that our cells really do generate electricity, that the heart’s pacemaker relies on such signals and that billions of axons in the brain create their own electrical charge (equivalent to about a 60-watt bulb). A force of nature himself, he admired the range and raw power of electricity.

Deeply as he believed the vow “I sing the body electric” — a line sure to become a winning trademark — I suspect one of nanotechnology’s recent breakthroughs would have stunned him. A team at the University of Exeter in England has invented the lightest, supplest, most diaphanous material ever made for conducting electricity, a dream textile named GraphExeter, which could revolutionize electronics by making it fashionable to wear your computer, cellphone and MP3 player. Only one atom thick, it’s an ideal fabric for street clothes and couture lines alike. You could start your laptop by plugging it into your jeans, recharge your cellphone by plugging it into your T-shirt. Then, not only would your cells sizzle with electricity, but even your clothing would chime in.

I don’t know if a fully electric suit would upset flight electronics, pacemakers, airport security monitors or the brain’s cellular dispatches. If you wore an electric coat in a lightning storm, would the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Would you be more likely to fall prey to a lightning strike? How long will it be before a jokester plays the sound of one-hand-clapping from a mitten? How long before late-night hosts riff about electric undies? Will people tethered to recharging poles haunt the airport waiting rooms? Will it become hip to wear flashing neon ads, quotes and designs — maybe a name in a luminous tattoo?

Another recent marvel of nanotechnology promises to alter daily life, too, but this one, despite its silver lining, strikes me as wickedly dangerous, though probably inevitable. As a result, it’s bound to inspire labyrinthine laws and a welter of patents and to ignite bioethical debates.

by Diane Ackerman, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Agata Nowicka

You and I
You are
delicious
And I am
greedy.
You are
generous
And I am
needy.
You are
experienced
And I am
learning.
You are
flammable
And I am
burning.

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Non Cogito, Ergo Sum

[ed. In other words, being in the zone. Easier said than done.]

It was the fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s US Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of his fate.

Federer served fast and deep to Djokovic’s right. Seconds later he found himself stranded, uncomprehending, in mid-court. Djokovic had returned his serve with a loose-limbed forehand of such lethal precision that Federer couldn’t get near it. The nonchalance of Djokovic's stroke thrilled the crowd. John McEnroe called it “one of the all-time great shots”.

Djokovic won the game, set, match and tournament. At his press conference, Federer was a study in quiet fury. It was tough, he said, to lose because of a “lucky shot”. Some players do that, he continued: “Down 5-2 in the third, they just start slapping shots …How can you play a shot like that on match point?”

Asked the same question, Djokovic smiled. “Yeah, I tend to do that on match points. It kinda works.”

Federer’s inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn’t been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking”. This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much. When a footballer misses a penalty or a golfer fluffs a putt, it is because they have become self-conscious. By thinking too hard, they lose the fluid physical grace required to succeed. Perhaps Federer was so upset because, deep down, he recognised that his opponent had tapped into a resource that he, an all-time great, is finding harder to reach: unthinking.

Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.

In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

by Ian Leslie, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:
Photo: Getty

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Santana

many useful tips i’m sure…
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Private Empire

You cannot hide from Steve Coll. Better men than you have tried. The world’s most elusive, powerful networks have failed.

Take the Central Intelligence Agency. Spies and spymasters spend their lives in the wind, dealing in top-secret information. Yet what emerges from Ghost Wars, Coll’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the agency, is the full measure of the CIA—its personalities, successes, and follies—as Coll made visible hitherto hidden links between dozens of covert agents and Afghan allies as they went about their hunt for radical Islamists. Or take the hunted militants, who were themselves unknown entities until a September day in 2001. How, exactly, do you write a biography of the leader-in-hiding of a shadowy terrorist group? In 2008, Coll showed readers how with The Bin Ladens, connecting the dots that made up a sprawling global family, at whose center sat a void named Osama.

“The CIA obviously keeps a lot of secrets,” says Coll, whose clear, calm voice is an asset amid the uncertainties he’s used to dealing with. “But ExxonMobil is, in many ways, a more closed system by design. It’s very disciplined.”

And there you have it: ExxonMobil is perhaps the most walled-in organization in the world. Its sheer size and wealth—it was the largest publicly traded company in 2011 by market capitalization—make it arguably more powerful than either the CIA or al Qaeda. It grew out of the ashes of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil when it was split into 34 companies in an antitrust suit in 1911; one of the successors became Esso, later renamed Exxon, which merged with Mobil in 1999. During the first year of the merger, it earned $228 billion in revenue, more than the gross domestic product of Norway. If it were a country all its own that year, it would have been the world's 21st largest economy.

The fact that its treasures lay buried deep beneath countries all over the world makes its reach tremendous. The consequences of allowing such a regime to rule without much visibility or accountability are dire, as ExxonMobil’s business affects not only our consumption but our industries, geopolitical influence, health, environment, and human rights. Which makes Private Empire a brutally important book. Coll has forged the biography of “a corporate state within the American state,” as he so aptly calls it.

by Jimmy So, The Daily Beast |  Read more:
Images: Ed Kashi /Corbis and Seattle Times

Bibi in the New Eden Roc Restaurant, Cap d’Antibes
Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1920, printed 1977
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Devin Yalkin
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The Beginning of the End of the Unpaid Internship

In August 2011, when Diana Wang began her seventh unpaid internship, this time at Harper’s Bazaar, the legendary high-end fashion magazine, she figured that her previous six internships – at a modeling agency, a PR firm, a jewelry designer, a magazine, an art gallery and a state governor’s office – had prepared her for the demands of New York’s fashion world.

“I was so determined to make this one really worth my while,” says the 28-year-old Wang, who moved from Columbus, Ohio, to New York, where she was living with her boyfriend (also working as an unpaid intern at one point) and living off of her savings. “I knew I couldn’t do anymore internships after this.”

As it turned out, Wang’s internship was just like many of the thousands of others: unrewarding in terms of both pay and marketable experience — not to mention the lack of a job offer. In fact, the only difference between her internship and most others was what happened about a month after it ended. Wang sued.

On Feb. 1, the law firm Outten & Golden filed a class-action lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, on behalf of Wang and any other unpaid and underpaid intern who worked at the company over the past six years. The lawsuit alleges that, among other things, Hearst violated federal and state labor laws by having Wang work as many as 55 hours a week without compensation.

“It was disgusting,” says Wang, referring to her unpaid daily responsibilities like shipping hats between New York and London for $350 each way, not being able to eat lunch until 4 p.m., routinely shuttling heavy bags around Manhattan and working to 10 p.m. with no break for dinner – all while supervising eight other interns. “Thinking of the spring interns who would come in with high hopes just like my fellow interns and I had — I decided that someone had to put a stop to this practice, which was going to go on forever and get worse before it got better.” (...)

In the workplace, there seem to be two long-established but contradictory rules: Everyone gets paid to work – unless there’s mindless drivel to do, of course, and then you get college kids to do it for free.

For decades, that seemed just fine. But that was before a couple of interns sued Fox Searchlight in September after they were tasked with the responsibilities of production assistants, bookkeepers, secretaries and janitors without wages. This wasn’t mindless coffee-fetching, they argued. These were entry-level positions that were being filled by unpaid hands. Thanks to the struggling economy, companies were now relying on interns to do entry-level work without having to pay them wages or benefits.

That lawsuit prompted other unpaid interns to sue, including Wang and an intern who took legal action against PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show” in March.

As college students make the annual rite of passage from college classroom to summer internship, those unpaid positions may have finally peaked. Says Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: “I think we may be at the very early stages of a significant backlash against an internship phenomenon that has gone off the rails.”

by Josh Sanburn, Time Magazine |  Read more: 
Photograph by Alexander Ho

Chef on the Edge

"So Pete, let’s just fucking bang out these recipes,” Chang said.

“We’ll get fish in tomorrow and start playing around,” Serpico said.

“Fish is easy. I know you don’t want to, but you can use the buttermilk with the stabilizer and whip it so it’s like yogurt.”

“I’m thinking a spicy buttermilk. Maybe we’ll make it the consistency of the tofu.”

“Doesn’t Jean Georges have that fluke with a buttermilk dressing and champagne grapes?” Chang said. “It’s fucking badass, over fluke.”

David Chang and Peter Serpico were sitting in the basement office of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, going over what they had to get done before the opening of Ko. The stoves were in, and the gas was ready to be turned on, but they couldn’t cook there yet, because the fire-extinguishing system wasn’t installed. Ssäm Bar was Chang’s second restaurant; Ko was his third.

Chang is only thirty, but in the past couple of years he has unexpectedly and, in his mind, accidentally and probably fraudulently, become one of the most celebrated chefs in the country. He is way too neurotic to handle this, however, so he compensates by representing himself as a bumbling idiot. He is five feet ten, built like a beer mug, and feels that most food tastes better with pork.

Serpico is Ko’s chef. He has worked with Chang for a couple of years, after a job at Bouley. He and Chang both raze their hair to buzz cuts, but while Chang’s makes his head look rounder and more baby-like, Serpico’s makes him look sharper, wirier, ready to flee.

“O.K., the one thing we don’t have down and standardized is scallops, which we’re gonna do right now.”

They’d been working on the scallop dish for weeks. It was a thing of beauty: a smear of black nori purée on the bottom of the bowl; then a layer of sea scallops and chanterelles and possibly clams; and then, spooned on top in front of the customer, a soft heap of foaming dashi (kelp and dried-bonito broth), made intentionally unstable with just a little methylcellulose, so that in front of the customer’s eyes the bubbles would burst and dissipate into a fishy liquid, at exactly the speed that foam from a wave dissipates onto sand. It looked like the sea and tasted like the sea, and Chang was extremely proud of it. The only thing he was worried about was the word “foam,” which, owing to its trendiness in the nineties, had become a symbol of everything pretentious and unnatural about nineties cuisine. In Chang’s mind, he was making fun of foam, but of course some people were not going to get that and were going to think he was just another leftover foam slave. “It’s gonna piss people off,” he said happily.

Serpico noticed a giant eggshell next to Chang’s computer.

“Is that the ostrich egg you cooked up the other day?” he asked. “How was it?”

by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker (March, 2008) |  Read more:
Photograph by Platon

Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way

[ed. I'd be happy with an even simpler and easier to implement model, something like a distributed Handyvan-type system with similar objectives.]

Despite my mania for all manner of irresponsible personal vehicles, I’m actually a public-transportation nut.

A few of the reasons:

• I can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while I’m zipping to my destination
• I have built-in motivation for walking, given that I have to get to and from the bus or train stop
• I feel good that my ride isn’t fueled by the conversion of fossilized sea life into impending climate catastrophe
• I get to trade small talk and occasional newspaper sections with fellow transit riders.

But I know you have your very good reasons for being among the 98 percent of the population that shuns public transportation:

• You can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while you’re swerving into oncoming traffic and pedestrians
• You have built-in motivation for stopping at Wendy’s for celebration takeout, given that you haven’t had to walk more than nine consecutive steps the entire day
• You feel good about the copious burning of hydrocarbons, which is creating valuable new beachfront property
• You get to trade hand gestures and occasional gunfire with fellow traffic jammers.

Ok, go ahead and sneer at my bus through the windshield of your Range Rollover. Thanks to some snazzy high-tech upgrades coming to public transit over the next several years, I’ll have the last laugh. Surely you’d envy me, for example, were my bus to suddenly lower four large metal wheels next to its tires and jump onto nearby rail tracks to go roaring off past your Toyota Highballer and all the other traffic. Or were my bus to pass over the roof of your Porsche Careen, supported on giant stilts with wheels that ran on either side of the road. Or, perhaps most impressive, were my commuter train to fly by you—really, actually fly by, lifted a few feet in the air by side-mounted wings.

Well, get ready to gawk. The next time you’re in Asia, that is, because the track-riding bus and the flying train are Japanese projects in prototypes (at Toyota and Tohoku University, respectively), and a stilted bus has been developed in China.

Sadly, the west lags the east in enthusiasm for visionary, if slightly deranged, transit schemes. That’s partly because we lack the motivation provided by the epic traffic jams in some Asian countries that can leave drivers stuck for as long as days, notes Jerry Schneider, a civil engineering professor emeritus at the University of Washington at Seattle, who continues to study rapid transit. “Their situation is much worse than ours, and getting worse,” he notes. China built 18 million cars in 2011, more than the United States did and a third more than the number from just two years earlier.

But the United States doesn’t exactly suffer from a traffic shortage, and I’m not the only one here who would just as soon opt out of the SUV demolition derby playing out daily in our streets. Public-transit ridership has in fact been steadily rising in this country since 1995, and the coming wave of baby-boomer retirees will most likely keep pushing those numbers higher. In response, the Western half of the U.S., which has long trailed the Northeast in developing mass transportation, is in the midst of a 20-year, $150 billion public-transit spree. Salt Lake City alone has invested $3 billion since 1999.

No flying trains headed for anywhere in the U.S., but Schneider points to a slightly less radical approach to tomorrow’s transit that could pick up some of that money: personal rapid transit. PRT, as transit geeks call it, is sort of like a miniature trolley or monorail, but utilizing much smaller, driverless vehicles that don’t run scheduled routes.

by David H. Freedman, Discover Magazine |  Read more:
Illustration: David Plunkert

The Outsourced Life

Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Is the wantologist the tail end of a larger story? Over the last century, the world of services has changed greatly.

A hundred — or even 40 — years ago, human eggs and sperm were not for sale, nor were wombs for rent. Online dating companies, nameologists, life coaches, party animators and paid graveside visitors did not exist.

Nor had a language developed that so seamlessly melded village and market — as in “Rent-a-Mom,” “Rent-a-Dad,” “Rent-a-Grandma,” “Rent-a-Friend” — insinuating itself, half joking, half serious, into our culture. The explosion in the number of available personal services says a great deal about changing ideas of what we can reasonably expect from whom. In the late 1940s, there were 2,500 clinical psychologists licensed in the United States. By 2010, there were 77,000 — and an additional 50,000 marriage and family therapists.

In the 1940s, there were no life coaches; in 2010, there were 30,000. The last time I Googled “dating coach,” 1,200,000 entries popped up. “Wedding planner” had over 25 million entries. The newest entry, Rent-a-Friend, has 190,000 entries.

And, in a world that undermines community, disparages government and marginalizes nonprofit organizations as ways of meeting growing needs of working families, these are likely to proliferate. As will the corresponding cultural belief in the superiority of what’s for sale.

We've put a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us. And, the more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, sure, why not?

by Arlie Russell Hochschild, NY Times |  Read more:

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