Sunday, October 4, 2015
Do Millennials Really Deserve Their Bratty Reputation?
Millennials—who are they, why are they here, what do they want, and when will they get a move on? Numbering in the tens of millions in the United States and the billions worldwide, a demographic bulge whose birth years are loosely defined as extending from 1982 to 2004, Millennials, Generation Y, Gen M’ers, Generation Next, or Millies—as I prefer to call them, for the sake of catchiness—inspire an animosity, suspicion, and wary prejudice usually reserved for misunderstood, aberrant minorities, such as the original X-Men. The first generation of digital natives and Facebook fiends, Millies possess the biological attributes of other Earth dwellers but appear to represent an evolutionary hop into a future that seems stuck in traffic. Ready to take on a world that isn’t making room for them, they’re thwarted, slowly, awkwardly, fitfully integrating into adult society and doing a remarkable job of getting on everybody’s nerves. They walk among us, though most of them don’t appear to mind where they’re going, their eyes and forefinger scrolling down ghostly screens as they maintain constant textual linkage with fellow mutants and finesse their flat affect. They work among us, although if the testimonies of executives, middle management, and Human Resources can be credited, Millies require a constant drizzle of compliments and acknowledgments—strokings and pokings—to remain motivated or at least stop fidgeting. Whatever Millies do or consume, they want to feel special, because so many of them have been treated as special all of their lives. This perception is at the hard nub of the resentment against their generation—the notion that they’re a spoiled, entitled legion of precious snowflakes who expect prizes just for showing up, pout when they’re insufficiently petted, and never go anywhere without slathering on creamy layers of self-esteem.Is this group caricature anywhere close to fair, or a more virulent strain of traditional intergenerational bigotry? “I see something nasty in the getoffmylawnism that we get today that I don’t really remember previously,” the blogger Duncan Black noted at Eschaton. “I see a lot of hatred of the youngs. It’s troubling and weird.” Washington Post Wonkblog contributor Christopher Ingraham also sees a whole lot of hatin’ goin’ on, but believes it’s for the wrong reasons. Forget “the derisive talk of selfies and selfishness and Snapchat,” Ingraham wrote. “If you do want to hate on millennials, at least do them the credit of hating them for the right reasons,” he advises, helpfully coming up with five biggies, based upon recent polling. (1) Millennials are the most unpatriotic generation, a disgrace to everything John Wayne growled for. (The upside to this, though neocons will not see it as such, is that Millies “are also far less supportive of the use of military force and may have internalized a permanent case of ‘Iraq Aversion,’ ” according to a Cato Institute white paper called “Millennials and U.S. Foreign Policy.”) (2) For all their multi-culti airs, Millies are as racist in their attitudes as older coots. (3) They are the most clueless, duh generation when it comes to the news. (4) They’re the leading vaccine skeptics, “seven times as likely as seniors to believe in the unequivocally discredited link between vaccines and autism.” (5) They are queasy about free speech and expression, though I don’t consider the survey Ingraham cites on publishing Muhammad cartoons a convincing example. A better citation might have been the wave of “trigger warnings,” safe places, “micro-aggressions,” and virtuoso claims of victim status that are turning so many universities into high-rent nurseries. It is such coddling and cocooning of educated Millennials within a comfort zone patrolled by helicopter parents and their proxies that provoked the novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis to diaper-pin them as the hypersensitive “Generation Wuss.” The little wussies are fickle, too.
As a veteran contributor to Vanity Fair, I am unfazed by such talk of divas. Pull up to the campfire some night and I will relate thrilling tales of Divas I Have Known, or at least heard about over lunch. I suspect Millennials are minor-leaguers by comparison, but I’m spared the friction of finding out firsthand. In fact I feel I bring a cool impartiality to the topic, since I am not a marketer, manager, teacher, or, sigh of relief, parent; I don’t have to put up with Millennials, nor they with me, on a routine, close-quarter basis; and, as a good liberal of the Larry David school, I strive to avoid facile generalizing, following a policy of judging people not based on their birth cohort but strictly as individual interfaces, each with something unique and/or annoying to offer. If I am favorably inclined toward the Millies, it’s because the shining young exemplars I have come into contact with tend to be recent college graduates interested in arts journalism and criticism—smart, avid, outgoing, energetic, smooth, and almost opaline they are, displaying far better manners than many of the crocks I run into at the ballet or theater. With their dynamically designed résumés, business cards, and follow-up notes, these cadets are far more entrepreneurial and savvy than I was at their age. They have to be—they’re facing far greater odds, far fewer entry points to advance beyond magazine and cable-news internship, if they’re lucky enough to land even that. The multi-tiered print world that racketed and teemed when I arrived has been deforested and arts journalism largely vaporized; the post-dot-com-boom avalanche of Internet riches hasn’t flowed to creatives, but to Atlas Shrugged Silicon Valley app innovators, content funnels, and platform owners—“into the pockets of Digital Monopolists and Digital Thieves,” as Jonathan Taplin, the director of the U.S.C. Annenberg Innovation Lab, put it in an open letter to Millennials titled “Sleeping Through a Revolution,” which appeared online at Medium. Over the last two decades artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, critics, and performers have seen their livelihoods devastated by the piracy and streaming-content penury of the Internet, but it’s not as if the carnage were limited to the infotainment sphere. Taplin: “My feeling is that media is just the canary in the coal mine, and that in the next 20 years, millions of the jobs you [Millennials] are training for might be automated.”
by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Darrow
How the Superwealthy Plan to Make Sure Their Kids Stay Superwealthy
The first clue that this is no ordinary crowd of sulky teenagers comes when the instructor asks those who’ve invested in the market to raise their hands. Most hands go up. As a financial planner explains the benefits of investing, one boy interrupts. “What do you suggest investing in right now?” asks Liam Whitfield, 18, a senior at a private Seattle high school, with swooping bangs and a shaggy sweater. The speaker, from a local investment firm, suggests a standard mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds. Whitfield looks disappointed. He already owns shares of Apple, Facebook, and Starbucks. “I was kind of looking for an actual stock tip,” he says.
It’s a Saturday morning in March, and Whitfield is sitting with two dozen teens in an antiseptic meeting room for a lesson on money management arranged by their well-to-do parents. The lecturers have broken the ice with a Saturday Night Live ad for a book of financial advice called Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford. (It’s one page long.) They show photos of cars that go from humble to glamorous and ask the kids to pick one—but only after calculating how long it would take to afford by saving $2,000 a year. An instructor praises a girl who chooses a Volkswagen Jetta over a $90,000 Range Rover. “You followed all the rules—it’s exciting, guys, right?” says John Gage, a 6-foot-9-inch recent Stanford graduate who roams the front of the room. Gage works for Cornerstone Advisors, a wealth management firm in Bellevue, Wash., that’s hosting the class for children of clients and prospects. During an exercise in monthly budgeting drawn from real-life salaries, someone notes how difficult it can be. “Especially if you’re a teacher,” one kid cracks.
This is the most gilded age since the Gilded Age, with 5 percent of American households controlling 63 percent of the country’s wealth. Decades of stagnant income growth for the middle class contrasts with family dynasties such as the Waltons of Wal-Mart, wealthier than the poorest 40 percent of households combined. Some $59 trillion—the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in U.S. history—will flow down from estates through 2061, according to Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy.
None of that’s made the rich any less anxious, at least when it comes to keeping their money. The number of family offices for the ultrawealthy has doubled since 1998, branching into areas far beyond portfolio and tax planning. The advisory firms reach deep into their clients’ family lives, aiming to prevent squabbles among heirs and head off early signs of wastrelism. Some teach classes like this one near Seattle or organize family retreats. Others use board games and flashcards to drill sound money concepts into children as young as 5. One firm, Ascent Private Capital Management, employs an historian and two psychologists to help clients put their fortunes and family dynamics into perspective. “We didn’t just want to help clients manage wealth, we wanted to help clients manage the impact of wealth,” says Michael Cole, the firm’s president.
Like others in the business, he brings up an adage—shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations—and says, “It’s real.” Thought to be a variation on a saying from Lancashire, England, about families going from clogs to clogs, the idea resonates in many cultures. Japan’s version is rice bowl to rice bowl. In Italy, from stars to stall. Or, as the striving executive Jack Donaghy put it on 30 Rock: “The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things; the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas; the third generation snowboards and takes improv classes.”
Adviser Roy Williams says he was recently approached by a representative for wealthy Asian families in the Pacific Northwest, each with more than $200 million. “They said, ‘The kids are consuming our wealth, buying Lamborghinis and Bentleys, and we don’t know how to change the pattern,’ ” he recalls.
by Peter Robison, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty
Saturday, October 3, 2015
A Permanent State of Sneaker-ness: Inside the Battle Between Nike and Adidas
Everybody wants the Yeezys. It's a frigid February night during New York Fashion Week, and Kanye West has just spent the afternoon at a runway event in SoHo unveiling his first fashion collection for Adidas—a collection anchored by the futuristic Yeezy Boost 750s, a.k.a. the Yeezys, a.k.a. suede high-top sneakers that look straight out of the Star Wars props department, complete with side zips and patented springy soles made from spaceship-grade foam. And now here comes Kanye, clambering onto a purpose-built stage at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, at an event that's been billed as a concert but feels closer to a product launch. Ten thousand people have shown up tonight, many claiming their tickets with an Adidas app and the rest waiting untold hours in temperatures that barely top 15 degrees, the cold compounded by gut-punches of snowy wind barreling off the East River.
“We ain't even gonna mention that other company no more, right?” Kanye asks the crowd. “We ain't wearing that other company no more, right?”
That other company, of course, is Nike—not only the most popular sneaker manufacturer but the single most valuable apparel brand in the world. Nike has 57,000 employees and a market cap north of $86 billion. And in these halcyon days of sneaker culture—the once humble sneaker having become the focal point of personal style—Nike has a heritage that consumers respect and that its competitors can't buy.
In fact, until relatively recently, if you happened to be a big-name rapper or marquee athlete, you didn't really think twice about signing with Nike. Where else would you go? Kanye himself parked his Air Yeezy line at Nike for four years.
Then, in 2013, in a deal worth a reported $10 million, Kanye abruptly announced he was leaving Nike and going to Adidas, the German rival that keeps its North American headquarters in Portland, Oregon, just up the road from Nike HQ in suburban Beaverton. Nike was shackling his creative freedom, he said. Not paying him enough. Not respecting him as a designer. “They weren't giving me the opportunity to grow,” he alleged. “They were working off an old business model.” (...)
The experts who estimate the size of the global sneaker business put the number around $55 billion, greater than the entire GDP of Ethiopia. No one buys more sneakers than Americans, and we're buying more than ever. According to the premier analytics firm NPD Group, American consumers spent $28 billion on sneakers last year alone, an almost 50 percent bump from just five years previous. Matt Powell, a self-described “sneakerologist” with NPD, believes the growth will continue for the foreseeable future. We are entering, he says, a “permanent state of sneaker-ness.”
Subscribers to this magazine (or anyone who spends any reasonable time out of doors) will understand how Powell can be so confident. A decade back, sneakers were, for the majority of adults, casual footwear, designated for specific occasions: the gym, an athletic event, mowing the lawn. Today we wear sneakers everywhere—to work, to dinner, to church, to weddings—and spend as much on them as we do on dress shoes.
Controlling 62 percent of the market (compared with Adidas's 5 percent), Nike is the primary beneficiary of our addiction, and the reasons for its supremacy are myriad. It is big. It is smart. Its endorsement roster is a portfolio of human blue-chip stocks. It caters to traditionalists with old-school Blazers, Jordans, and Dunks—some of the coolest and most coveted sneakers ever made—while testing the bounds of how futuristic a shoe can look and feel. (See, most recently, the Flyknit.) It employs more designers than any other shoe manufacturer (650 compared with Adidas's 200) and gives them unparalleled resources. Nike will take expensive risks, and when it whiffs, as it recently did with an ill-fated and quickly canceled snowboarding line, it acknowledges the error and moves on.
For years, Adidas appeared destined to fall further behind Nike in the States. Yes, Adidas had its deep roots in soccer culture (it still outfits clubs including Manchester United, A.C. Milan, and Real Madrid), and yes, it remained a top sneaker retailer in Western Europe. But although it kept offices in Portland, most of its design staff and senior brass were stuck in Adidas's global headquarters, in the German factory town of Herzogenaurach. Unsurprisingly, Adidas products often appeared out of touch with the average U.S. customer and tone-deaf about the American holy trinity of football, baseball, and basketball.
That began to change last year, with the installation of a new Adidas Group North America president, Mark King, who has mounted an unprecedented challenge to Nike—of which the Kanye shoe is only a small part. Under King, Adidas has poured money into advertising and gobbled up new endorsees. His biggest coup came this summer, when he outbid Nike to snatch away the NBA's bearded wonder, James Harden, in a deal reportedly worth $200 million over 13 years. In fact, Adidas is in the midst of the most aggressive marketing campaign in company history, showcasing music-industry talent like Pharrell, who has designed his own polka-dot Adidas sneakers and lime green track jackets. Last year, Adidas also sold out of its $800-a-pair sneaker collaboration with goth designer Rick Owens, the dark lord of haute menswear, who stitched his freaky sneaks with goat leather. The low-top Yeezy Boost 350, with a Primeknit mesh upper and rope laces, dropped in June, selling out within an hour.
Adidas has unveiled a key innovation in its Boost line, which utilizes that springy, patented foam in the sole. It has also positioned classic Adidas Originals sneakers like the Stan Smith and the Superstar—recently relaunched for its forty-fifth anniversary—less as athletic footwear and more as straight fashion. And it has moved Adidas creative director Paul Gaudio from Herzogenaurach to Portland, along with a small army of top designers who have been tasked with ripping the American market away from Nike.
Young tastemakers are taking note. In August, Adidas announced the signing of the dapper, baby-Afro-wearing NBA rookie Justise Winslow, a national champion this year with Duke, whose statement about Adidas after signing was telling: “What they've been doing with Kanye and Originals is changing the game.”
Adidas may never be able to approach the reported $3 billion Nike spends every year on marketing, but it's trying everything it can to out-cool Nike—to win the battle of taste first, ultimately building enough street cred to win the long-term financial contest.
by Matthew Shaer, GQ | Read more:
Image: Getty
“We ain't even gonna mention that other company no more, right?” Kanye asks the crowd. “We ain't wearing that other company no more, right?”That other company, of course, is Nike—not only the most popular sneaker manufacturer but the single most valuable apparel brand in the world. Nike has 57,000 employees and a market cap north of $86 billion. And in these halcyon days of sneaker culture—the once humble sneaker having become the focal point of personal style—Nike has a heritage that consumers respect and that its competitors can't buy.
In fact, until relatively recently, if you happened to be a big-name rapper or marquee athlete, you didn't really think twice about signing with Nike. Where else would you go? Kanye himself parked his Air Yeezy line at Nike for four years.
Then, in 2013, in a deal worth a reported $10 million, Kanye abruptly announced he was leaving Nike and going to Adidas, the German rival that keeps its North American headquarters in Portland, Oregon, just up the road from Nike HQ in suburban Beaverton. Nike was shackling his creative freedom, he said. Not paying him enough. Not respecting him as a designer. “They weren't giving me the opportunity to grow,” he alleged. “They were working off an old business model.” (...)
The experts who estimate the size of the global sneaker business put the number around $55 billion, greater than the entire GDP of Ethiopia. No one buys more sneakers than Americans, and we're buying more than ever. According to the premier analytics firm NPD Group, American consumers spent $28 billion on sneakers last year alone, an almost 50 percent bump from just five years previous. Matt Powell, a self-described “sneakerologist” with NPD, believes the growth will continue for the foreseeable future. We are entering, he says, a “permanent state of sneaker-ness.”
Subscribers to this magazine (or anyone who spends any reasonable time out of doors) will understand how Powell can be so confident. A decade back, sneakers were, for the majority of adults, casual footwear, designated for specific occasions: the gym, an athletic event, mowing the lawn. Today we wear sneakers everywhere—to work, to dinner, to church, to weddings—and spend as much on them as we do on dress shoes.
Controlling 62 percent of the market (compared with Adidas's 5 percent), Nike is the primary beneficiary of our addiction, and the reasons for its supremacy are myriad. It is big. It is smart. Its endorsement roster is a portfolio of human blue-chip stocks. It caters to traditionalists with old-school Blazers, Jordans, and Dunks—some of the coolest and most coveted sneakers ever made—while testing the bounds of how futuristic a shoe can look and feel. (See, most recently, the Flyknit.) It employs more designers than any other shoe manufacturer (650 compared with Adidas's 200) and gives them unparalleled resources. Nike will take expensive risks, and when it whiffs, as it recently did with an ill-fated and quickly canceled snowboarding line, it acknowledges the error and moves on.
For years, Adidas appeared destined to fall further behind Nike in the States. Yes, Adidas had its deep roots in soccer culture (it still outfits clubs including Manchester United, A.C. Milan, and Real Madrid), and yes, it remained a top sneaker retailer in Western Europe. But although it kept offices in Portland, most of its design staff and senior brass were stuck in Adidas's global headquarters, in the German factory town of Herzogenaurach. Unsurprisingly, Adidas products often appeared out of touch with the average U.S. customer and tone-deaf about the American holy trinity of football, baseball, and basketball.
That began to change last year, with the installation of a new Adidas Group North America president, Mark King, who has mounted an unprecedented challenge to Nike—of which the Kanye shoe is only a small part. Under King, Adidas has poured money into advertising and gobbled up new endorsees. His biggest coup came this summer, when he outbid Nike to snatch away the NBA's bearded wonder, James Harden, in a deal reportedly worth $200 million over 13 years. In fact, Adidas is in the midst of the most aggressive marketing campaign in company history, showcasing music-industry talent like Pharrell, who has designed his own polka-dot Adidas sneakers and lime green track jackets. Last year, Adidas also sold out of its $800-a-pair sneaker collaboration with goth designer Rick Owens, the dark lord of haute menswear, who stitched his freaky sneaks with goat leather. The low-top Yeezy Boost 350, with a Primeknit mesh upper and rope laces, dropped in June, selling out within an hour.
Adidas has unveiled a key innovation in its Boost line, which utilizes that springy, patented foam in the sole. It has also positioned classic Adidas Originals sneakers like the Stan Smith and the Superstar—recently relaunched for its forty-fifth anniversary—less as athletic footwear and more as straight fashion. And it has moved Adidas creative director Paul Gaudio from Herzogenaurach to Portland, along with a small army of top designers who have been tasked with ripping the American market away from Nike.
Young tastemakers are taking note. In August, Adidas announced the signing of the dapper, baby-Afro-wearing NBA rookie Justise Winslow, a national champion this year with Duke, whose statement about Adidas after signing was telling: “What they've been doing with Kanye and Originals is changing the game.”
Adidas may never be able to approach the reported $3 billion Nike spends every year on marketing, but it's trying everything it can to out-cool Nike—to win the battle of taste first, ultimately building enough street cred to win the long-term financial contest.
by Matthew Shaer, GQ | Read more:
Image: Getty
Alcohol as Escape From Perfectionism
Racing in from a long day at the office, an evening of cooking and homework ahead, my first instinct is to go to the fridge or the cupboard and pop a cork. It soothes the transition from day to night. Chopping, dicing, sipping wine: It’s a common modern ritual.
For years it was me at the cutting board, a glass of chilled white at my side. And for years this habit was harmless—or it seemed that way. My house wine was Santa Margherita, a pale straw-blond Italian pinot grigio. There was always a bottle in my fridge, and I’d often pour a second glass before dinner, with seeming impunity.
In the years when this was my routine, I rarely thought to put the kettle on instead. These days, my go-to drink is Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea: a rich mix of cardamom, cloves, chicory, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger. But back then, as I burst through the front door, laden with groceries, wound up from the day, my first instinct was to shed some stress as quickly as I shed my coat. Once, after an unusually difficult day, my fiance Jake pointed out that the fridge was open before my coat was off. It pained me to hear this, but I know it was true.
Within a few minutes, I would be standing at the cutting board, phone cradled on my shoulder while I sipped and chopped and chatted, often to my friend Judith or my sister, Cate. Nicholas, my son, would be upstairs, doing homework, and dinner would be in process. Sip, chop, sip, chat, exhale, relax. Breathe. With two parents who had their own serious troubles with alcohol, alarm bells should have been ringing.
But my habit seemed relatively harmless. Common, even. A glass or two seemed innocent enough.
And truth was, believe it or not, I got a lot done when I was drinking. In my alpha dog years—when I was holding down a senior job at a magazine, raising an artistic, athletic young man, giving speeches on the circuit—life was more than full. Alcohol smoothed the switch from one role to the other. It seemed to make life purr. I could juggle a lot. Until, of course, I couldn't.
That’s the thing about a drinking problem: It’s progressive. But for a long, long time, alcohol can step in as your able partner, providing welcome support—before you want to boot it out.
On a recent November evening, I took a stroll through the elegant streets of London’s Chelsea district around that witching hour—an hour when many had yet to pull the shades for the evening. Heading up from the Thames River, north on Tite Street, I passed more than one window with a woman standing at her kitchen counter, a half-drunk glass at her side while she worked on the evening meal. I passed a dad unloading children from a shiny BMW, children lugging heavy knapsacks, calling out to younger siblings waving in an upper window.
It was a cozy scene, and I found myself thinking wistfully of those rituals of younger years, when my son was under my roof—not far away in California, doing a master’s degree in fine art. Time was he would saunter into the kitchen, hungry and tall, and dance me around the room while dinner cooked—a boisterous little tango that left me flushed and laughing. More often he would serenade me with his guitar.
Those years were loud and rambunctious and incredibly busy, crammed with duties and chores. Once dinner was over, he’d do homework and I’d make lunches and then noodle with a little more work before bed. He was a rower and morning came early: I’d rise in the dark and ferry him down to the waterfront, standing with the other parents as the boys headed out on the water.
Those years were full of stress and laughter, in equal doses. Often, Nicholas and I would find ourselves up at night, talking in the kitchen: I would make popcorn and we would stand side by side, filling in the blanks for each other. We were a pack of two: our conversations were deep and rewarding, and we read each other easily. And when those precious years were over, when he went off to university, the house became very quiet. Too quiet: like a stage set after the actors exited. That’s when I wrote a column in the magazine, called “Mother Interrupted.” And that’s when I began to think that a third drink might make sense. And once it was three, I was in trouble.
Flying over to Britain, to do research for my writing, I splurged with my airline points and booked myself a first-class ticket. Flight attendant to me, after dinner: “Would you care for some port with your cheese, madam?” “No, thank you, I have to work.” She frowns. “Lots of people drink port while they work.” And indeed, she pours some for the neighboring woman, who is laboring over a spreadsheet with a glass of wine. All I can think is: “That used to be me.” Six years ago, that would have been me, and my exit from the plane would have been a little fuzzy.
In a recent poll done by Netmums in Britain, 81 percent of those who drank above the safe drinking guidelines said they did so “to wind down from a stressful day.” And 86 percent said they felt they should drink less. Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, author of Alcoholism and Women: The Background and the Psychology, believes women are looking for what she calls “oblivion drinking.” “Alcohol offers a time out from doing it all—‘Take me out of my perfectionism.’ Superwoman is a cliché now, but it is extremely dangerous. I've seen such a perversion of feminism, where everything becomes work: raising children, reading all the books, not listening to their instincts. The main question is: What self are they trying to turn off? These women have climbed so high that when they fall, they crash—and alcohol’s a perfect way to crash.”
I ask Leslie Buckley, the psychiatrist who heads the women’s addiction program at Toronto’s University Health Network, if she sees a pattern in the professional women who come to see her. She doesn't skip a beat: “Perfectionism.”
Such an unforgiving word, such an unforgiving way of being—echoed by yet another doctor, who speaks of patients who look like they stepped out of Vogue: perfect-looking women with perfect children at the right schools, living in perfect houses, aiming for a perfect performance at work, with eating disorders and serious substance abuse issues.
The tyrannical myth of perfection: it seizes the psyche and doesn't let go. My mother was in its grip, and she paid a serious price for it. This was in the 1960s, when men came home from work and expected dinner and a stiff drink—except my father was usually traveling. For years my mother held down the fort. She wrote perfect thank-you notes, she cooked perfect meals. As a new bride, she ironed bed sheets and pillowcases; as a new mother, she starched our smocked dresses. My sister and I wore white gloves when we traveled, velvet hairbands in our hair, and wrote perfect thank-you notes, too. And then my mother was the one with the stiff drink, and it all crashed—but not before I had it imprinted on me: Perfect was the way to be.
by Ann Dowsett Johnston, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via:
In the years when this was my routine, I rarely thought to put the kettle on instead. These days, my go-to drink is Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea: a rich mix of cardamom, cloves, chicory, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger. But back then, as I burst through the front door, laden with groceries, wound up from the day, my first instinct was to shed some stress as quickly as I shed my coat. Once, after an unusually difficult day, my fiance Jake pointed out that the fridge was open before my coat was off. It pained me to hear this, but I know it was true.
Within a few minutes, I would be standing at the cutting board, phone cradled on my shoulder while I sipped and chopped and chatted, often to my friend Judith or my sister, Cate. Nicholas, my son, would be upstairs, doing homework, and dinner would be in process. Sip, chop, sip, chat, exhale, relax. Breathe. With two parents who had their own serious troubles with alcohol, alarm bells should have been ringing.
But my habit seemed relatively harmless. Common, even. A glass or two seemed innocent enough.
And truth was, believe it or not, I got a lot done when I was drinking. In my alpha dog years—when I was holding down a senior job at a magazine, raising an artistic, athletic young man, giving speeches on the circuit—life was more than full. Alcohol smoothed the switch from one role to the other. It seemed to make life purr. I could juggle a lot. Until, of course, I couldn't.
That’s the thing about a drinking problem: It’s progressive. But for a long, long time, alcohol can step in as your able partner, providing welcome support—before you want to boot it out.
On a recent November evening, I took a stroll through the elegant streets of London’s Chelsea district around that witching hour—an hour when many had yet to pull the shades for the evening. Heading up from the Thames River, north on Tite Street, I passed more than one window with a woman standing at her kitchen counter, a half-drunk glass at her side while she worked on the evening meal. I passed a dad unloading children from a shiny BMW, children lugging heavy knapsacks, calling out to younger siblings waving in an upper window.
It was a cozy scene, and I found myself thinking wistfully of those rituals of younger years, when my son was under my roof—not far away in California, doing a master’s degree in fine art. Time was he would saunter into the kitchen, hungry and tall, and dance me around the room while dinner cooked—a boisterous little tango that left me flushed and laughing. More often he would serenade me with his guitar.
Those years were loud and rambunctious and incredibly busy, crammed with duties and chores. Once dinner was over, he’d do homework and I’d make lunches and then noodle with a little more work before bed. He was a rower and morning came early: I’d rise in the dark and ferry him down to the waterfront, standing with the other parents as the boys headed out on the water.
Those years were full of stress and laughter, in equal doses. Often, Nicholas and I would find ourselves up at night, talking in the kitchen: I would make popcorn and we would stand side by side, filling in the blanks for each other. We were a pack of two: our conversations were deep and rewarding, and we read each other easily. And when those precious years were over, when he went off to university, the house became very quiet. Too quiet: like a stage set after the actors exited. That’s when I wrote a column in the magazine, called “Mother Interrupted.” And that’s when I began to think that a third drink might make sense. And once it was three, I was in trouble.
Flying over to Britain, to do research for my writing, I splurged with my airline points and booked myself a first-class ticket. Flight attendant to me, after dinner: “Would you care for some port with your cheese, madam?” “No, thank you, I have to work.” She frowns. “Lots of people drink port while they work.” And indeed, she pours some for the neighboring woman, who is laboring over a spreadsheet with a glass of wine. All I can think is: “That used to be me.” Six years ago, that would have been me, and my exit from the plane would have been a little fuzzy.
In a recent poll done by Netmums in Britain, 81 percent of those who drank above the safe drinking guidelines said they did so “to wind down from a stressful day.” And 86 percent said they felt they should drink less. Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, author of Alcoholism and Women: The Background and the Psychology, believes women are looking for what she calls “oblivion drinking.” “Alcohol offers a time out from doing it all—‘Take me out of my perfectionism.’ Superwoman is a cliché now, but it is extremely dangerous. I've seen such a perversion of feminism, where everything becomes work: raising children, reading all the books, not listening to their instincts. The main question is: What self are they trying to turn off? These women have climbed so high that when they fall, they crash—and alcohol’s a perfect way to crash.”
I ask Leslie Buckley, the psychiatrist who heads the women’s addiction program at Toronto’s University Health Network, if she sees a pattern in the professional women who come to see her. She doesn't skip a beat: “Perfectionism.”
Such an unforgiving word, such an unforgiving way of being—echoed by yet another doctor, who speaks of patients who look like they stepped out of Vogue: perfect-looking women with perfect children at the right schools, living in perfect houses, aiming for a perfect performance at work, with eating disorders and serious substance abuse issues.
The tyrannical myth of perfection: it seizes the psyche and doesn't let go. My mother was in its grip, and she paid a serious price for it. This was in the 1960s, when men came home from work and expected dinner and a stiff drink—except my father was usually traveling. For years my mother held down the fort. She wrote perfect thank-you notes, she cooked perfect meals. As a new bride, she ironed bed sheets and pillowcases; as a new mother, she starched our smocked dresses. My sister and I wore white gloves when we traveled, velvet hairbands in our hair, and wrote perfect thank-you notes, too. And then my mother was the one with the stiff drink, and it all crashed—but not before I had it imprinted on me: Perfect was the way to be.
by Ann Dowsett Johnston, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via:
Friday, October 2, 2015
Big Talk, Small Talk
My friend Anne sent me a lightning bolt. She also sent me three flexed biceps and a dripping faucet. Also a rainbow, a volcano, and a crying-with-joy face. No smiling pile of poop yet, and no frowning devil or smirking cat. She has nothing against those. The right occasions just haven’t arisen.
Anne loves emojis, the goofy digital pictograms that have become the latest bones of contention in our culture’s never-ending deathmatch of old codger versus eternal youth, and she chides me for my skepticism. The thing is, Anne isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl, a gadget-fetishist, or a trend-hound. She’s a witty, serious, and cultivated writer in her fifties—an award-winning novelist whose elegant and precise prose lingers and haunts, and epitomizes the splendor and necessity of nuanced language.
On emojis, she’s unequivocal. “They’re fun!” she cries. “Silly, sure, but that’s the point. It’s not a reason to reject them.”
She shows me her iPhone. The dripping faucet came from a text exchange with her college-age daughter about a running bathtub: affable shorthand for, “I know, I’m not an idiot.” The string of flexed biceps went to her sick personal trainer, a woman half Anne’s age: a perky “get well” card that strengthened an intergenerational bond. A gift-wrapped candy heart helped patch up an argument with her husband.
“Sometimes language can get in the way,” she explains. “An act is sometimes better than a word. Emojis are like tiny presents. There’s no need to attack them with your intellect.” I’m a theater critic and professor in my fifties who has impugned them as ridiculous and childish. She sends me screenshots so I can mull over her examples, a slow student receiving extra help from Teacher.
Some version of this argument has played out over the past few years between countless literate people. Ever since Apple and Google made emojis standard on iOS and Android smartphone keyboards in 2011 and 2013, they have proliferated not only in texts and emails but also in social media, the art world, literature, politics, advertising, music videos, and fashion.
Most people still use them the same way the Japanese teenagers who first drove their development did—as social lubrication in electronic messages. They’re a cute, shorthand way of clarifying emotional intention and smoothing the rough edges of quickie notes that are easily misunderstood without crucial facial cues. Women use them much more than men, researchers say, and their sincerity has powered a welcome pushback against the bullying brutality on social media.
At the same time, their downside is pretty obvious, at least to educated grownups. Emojis are an infantilization of language in the name of amusement. A New York magazine cover story last year compared them admiringly to ancient hieroglyphs without mentioning that civilization bounded forward after advancing from pictographs to symbolic language.
by Jonathan Kalb, Brooklyn Rail | Read more:
Image: uncredited
On emojis, she’s unequivocal. “They’re fun!” she cries. “Silly, sure, but that’s the point. It’s not a reason to reject them.”She shows me her iPhone. The dripping faucet came from a text exchange with her college-age daughter about a running bathtub: affable shorthand for, “I know, I’m not an idiot.” The string of flexed biceps went to her sick personal trainer, a woman half Anne’s age: a perky “get well” card that strengthened an intergenerational bond. A gift-wrapped candy heart helped patch up an argument with her husband.
“Sometimes language can get in the way,” she explains. “An act is sometimes better than a word. Emojis are like tiny presents. There’s no need to attack them with your intellect.” I’m a theater critic and professor in my fifties who has impugned them as ridiculous and childish. She sends me screenshots so I can mull over her examples, a slow student receiving extra help from Teacher.
Some version of this argument has played out over the past few years between countless literate people. Ever since Apple and Google made emojis standard on iOS and Android smartphone keyboards in 2011 and 2013, they have proliferated not only in texts and emails but also in social media, the art world, literature, politics, advertising, music videos, and fashion.
Most people still use them the same way the Japanese teenagers who first drove their development did—as social lubrication in electronic messages. They’re a cute, shorthand way of clarifying emotional intention and smoothing the rough edges of quickie notes that are easily misunderstood without crucial facial cues. Women use them much more than men, researchers say, and their sincerity has powered a welcome pushback against the bullying brutality on social media.
At the same time, their downside is pretty obvious, at least to educated grownups. Emojis are an infantilization of language in the name of amusement. A New York magazine cover story last year compared them admiringly to ancient hieroglyphs without mentioning that civilization bounded forward after advancing from pictographs to symbolic language.
by Jonathan Kalb, Brooklyn Rail | Read more:
Image: uncredited
I’m a Pedophile, But Not a Monster
[ed. See also, this follow-up post: My week inside the vile right-wing hate machine.]
I was born without my right hand. As a child, this deformity quickly set me apart from my peers. In public I wore a prosthesis, an intimidating object to other youngsters because of its resemblance to a pirate’s hook. Even so, I wore it every day; I felt inadequate without it. I was shy, uncoordinated and terrible at sports, all of which put me on the outs with other boys my age. But I was good at drawing and making up stories for my own entertainment, and I spent more and more time in my own head, being a space adventurer or monster wrangler or whatever character I could think up. These would ultimately prove to be useful skills, but for now they only served to further alienate me from other kids. On top of it all, I still struggled with bladder control—likely due to my heaping pile of insecurities, to which this problem only added more—well into my elementary school years.
But none of this would compare to the final insult the universe would deal me. I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of sexual orientations, a preference for a group of people who are legally, morally and psychologically unable to reciprocate my feelings and desires. It’s a curse of the first order, a completely unworkable sexuality, and it’s mine. Who am I? Nice to meet you. My name is Todd Nickerson, and I’m a pedophile. Does that surprise you? Yeah, not many of us are willing to share our story, for good reason. To confess a sexual attraction to children is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you think me to be. I’ve never touched a child sexually in my life and never will, nor do I use child pornography.
But isn’t that the definition of a pedophile, you may ask, someone who molests kids? Not really. Although “pedophile” and “child molester” have often been used interchangeably in the media, and there is some overlap, at base, a pedophile is someone who’s sexually attracted to children. That’s it. There’s no inherent reason he must act on those desires with real children. Some pedophiles certainly do, but many of us don’t. Because the powerful taboo keeps us in hiding, it’s impossible to know how many non-offending pedophiles are out there, but signs indicate there are a lot of us, and too often we suffer in silence. That’s why I decided to speak up. (...)
Ultimate Causes:
It’s easy to assume that pedophilia is always the result of some early sexualization or abuse, and certainly there seems to be a connection in some cases. However, evidence suggests there’s no magic bullet that pedophilia can be traced back to. For every pedophile who was sexually abused as a child there’s another who wasn’t. Likewise, most abuse victims never manifest pedophilic desires. Some researchers surmise that pedophilia can be traced back to genetics. Others believe the cause is congenital, and still others that it’s environmental. Personally, I think the ultimate cause is likely some combination of those, and that it varies from person to person.
Another issue is the role feelings of inadequacy play in forming our sexuality. Pedophilia may not arise from such fears (otherwise there’d be a lot more pedophiles), but those fears can certainly reinforce it. I think it’s safe to say that many pedophiles have deep-seated feelings of inferiority in one way or another, or at least we did when our sexuality was forming, and this becomes a downward spiral during puberty and beyond. Anything can be the trigger of this: disabilities, weight issues, or just general feelings of unattractiveness to peers. These feelings can be influential on one’s developing sexuality, such that even the severe cultural taboo is not enough to override it. Indeed, the taboo itself can negatively influence these vulnerable children.
I recall an event from when I was 11, sitting in the family jeep with my dad and his friend Andy when a news piece on the radio reported the sexual abuse of a girl, to which my dad said to his friend something like, “They should take people like that and place weights on top of their genitals until they smash.” Pretty horrific imagery for an 11-year-old to process, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with the abuser. After all, I could recall my own molestation perfectly, and I hardly felt it warranted that kind of response.
The bile has only multiplied since then, and I believe all that hatred just serves to reinforce pedophilia in youngsters predisposed to it. It’s a form of cognitive bias called the Backfire Effect or polarization. Everyone does this to some extent. When challenged on deeply held beliefs, no matter how uncertain or incorrect they may be, we tend to dig in our heels. With sexuality, that effect is likely magnified because there’s a physiological component, a drive every bit as powerful as belief. In essence, your brain knows what it likes and isn’t going to take no for an answer. For that reason, the nature or nurture question with respect to sexual preference is ultimately irrelevant—it becomes all but hardwired soon enough, until it’s all you know. And it’s self-reinforcing, no matter how much you wish to dig it out. Eventually it all tangles together with the rest of who you are.
Getting Schooled:
Things went along OK until I was two years away from graduating college. I began to smoke pot, a drug I’d experimented with after high school but didn’t much care for then. I didn’t like it the second time around either; it made me anxious more often than not. But I did it anyway, largely because many people I respected smoked it, and I wanted to be more like them. I was trying desperately to reshape my identity before I was thrown out into the real world. I’d even begun working out, lifting weights and exercising to get in better shape. On the outside I might’ve seemed pretty normal, but on the inside I was screaming in terror at the prospect of having to “grow up” and be “normal”—which to me meant getting a real job, finding a girlfriend, eventually getting married and raising a family. Oh, I wanted to be normal, believe me, yet I knew myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to carry that charade off for long, and every fiber of my being resisted the forced transformation.
After graduation I fell into the deepest pit of despair imaginable, one that lasted several years, and I’ve only just begun to pull myself out of it. You can’t experience that much blind terror and pain for that long without being seriously impacted by it. I still worked out every other day, so I was hurting constantly, since depression saps your brain of the feel-good chemicals that helps to counteract pain; but I feltsomething, and that was better than the emotional numbness that had overtaken me. Thus, my project to remake myself into a regular person a complete failure, I retreated inward like a kicked dog, often spending days on end in my bedroom. At the nadir of my depression I was contemplating suicide daily; some days I could think of little else. I found some relief in opiates, which I had to obtain illegally because doctors won’t prescribe them for depression and anxiety. The occasional hydrocodone gave me a moment of respite from the agony I was going through. I’d tried antidepressants, but they were a joke.
In the midst of that dark era in my life, I discovered an unhealthy pedophile forum. Nothing illegal was happening there, but many of its most influential members were pro-contacters, meaning they believed that sex with children was theoretically OK and supported the elimination of age of consent laws. That forum still exists and I won’t name it here, but suffice it to say, I found myself taking up the same pro-contacter chants, if only to feel like I belonged somewhere. At the time it was all that was available in terms of an actual pedophile community, and I had nothing left to lose by joining the cause, misguided though it was, and even decided to out myself on that forum. Over the ensuing years, though, I was often at odds with the pro-contacters and flitted in and out of their clique; I wanted desperately to be friends with people who shared my sexual orientation, even if they held crazy beliefs, but I could never quite reconcile with their viewpoint.
Not long after I self-outed, a group of web vigilantes called Perverted Justice showed up. You’ve probably heard of them; they’re the people behind the now-defunct TV show “To Catch a Predator.” I was no predator, but that mattered not one iota to these guys; they lumped me together with the child rapists and internet creeps just the same. As I was already out of the closet as a pedo, I was an easy target, becoming one of the first people they profiled on their Wikisposure page, a site devoted to outing online pedos whether they’d broken any laws or not. It has since changed hands but still exists online, buried in a dark corner of the internet, and yep, I’m still on it. Not that I much care anymore. Perverted Justice had their day, but they eventually burned their own house down. Back when they were in full effect, however, they managed to make my already miserable existence that much more miserable. After their expose came out, I was fired from my job at Lowe’s.
But things are getting better. Slowly. These days I struggle with bitterness and apathy; it’s a constant uphill battle, and there are days I just don’t feel like making that climb. I eke out a living (barely) on a freelance graphic design business, in a small town where too many people know who and what I am. Now I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism that I’ve never used and I’m living well below the poverty line, existing on food stamps and the couple hundred dollars I manage to scrape together every month, sometimes augmented with financial help from my parents if the bills get too high. I tried filing for disability over my arm and my emotional issues, but that was a no-go in my conservative Southern state. This is what a law-abiding pedophile has been reduced to in this society. At times I’ve wondered why I’ve even bothered to stay legal. Maybe prison would be better, even at the risk of getting shanked as a Short Eyes. At least then it would all be over with. But alas, I could never hurt a child. No matter what, some small part of me still holds out hope that things will go back to normal, or as close to normal as a celibate pedophile with little prospect of a future can get. Besides, like I said earlier, I just couldn’t allow myself to foist this abomination onto another human being. So I simply endured. Until …
I was born without my right hand. As a child, this deformity quickly set me apart from my peers. In public I wore a prosthesis, an intimidating object to other youngsters because of its resemblance to a pirate’s hook. Even so, I wore it every day; I felt inadequate without it. I was shy, uncoordinated and terrible at sports, all of which put me on the outs with other boys my age. But I was good at drawing and making up stories for my own entertainment, and I spent more and more time in my own head, being a space adventurer or monster wrangler or whatever character I could think up. These would ultimately prove to be useful skills, but for now they only served to further alienate me from other kids. On top of it all, I still struggled with bladder control—likely due to my heaping pile of insecurities, to which this problem only added more—well into my elementary school years.
But none of this would compare to the final insult the universe would deal me. I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of sexual orientations, a preference for a group of people who are legally, morally and psychologically unable to reciprocate my feelings and desires. It’s a curse of the first order, a completely unworkable sexuality, and it’s mine. Who am I? Nice to meet you. My name is Todd Nickerson, and I’m a pedophile. Does that surprise you? Yeah, not many of us are willing to share our story, for good reason. To confess a sexual attraction to children is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you think me to be. I’ve never touched a child sexually in my life and never will, nor do I use child pornography. But isn’t that the definition of a pedophile, you may ask, someone who molests kids? Not really. Although “pedophile” and “child molester” have often been used interchangeably in the media, and there is some overlap, at base, a pedophile is someone who’s sexually attracted to children. That’s it. There’s no inherent reason he must act on those desires with real children. Some pedophiles certainly do, but many of us don’t. Because the powerful taboo keeps us in hiding, it’s impossible to know how many non-offending pedophiles are out there, but signs indicate there are a lot of us, and too often we suffer in silence. That’s why I decided to speak up. (...)
Ultimate Causes:
It’s easy to assume that pedophilia is always the result of some early sexualization or abuse, and certainly there seems to be a connection in some cases. However, evidence suggests there’s no magic bullet that pedophilia can be traced back to. For every pedophile who was sexually abused as a child there’s another who wasn’t. Likewise, most abuse victims never manifest pedophilic desires. Some researchers surmise that pedophilia can be traced back to genetics. Others believe the cause is congenital, and still others that it’s environmental. Personally, I think the ultimate cause is likely some combination of those, and that it varies from person to person.
Another issue is the role feelings of inadequacy play in forming our sexuality. Pedophilia may not arise from such fears (otherwise there’d be a lot more pedophiles), but those fears can certainly reinforce it. I think it’s safe to say that many pedophiles have deep-seated feelings of inferiority in one way or another, or at least we did when our sexuality was forming, and this becomes a downward spiral during puberty and beyond. Anything can be the trigger of this: disabilities, weight issues, or just general feelings of unattractiveness to peers. These feelings can be influential on one’s developing sexuality, such that even the severe cultural taboo is not enough to override it. Indeed, the taboo itself can negatively influence these vulnerable children.
I recall an event from when I was 11, sitting in the family jeep with my dad and his friend Andy when a news piece on the radio reported the sexual abuse of a girl, to which my dad said to his friend something like, “They should take people like that and place weights on top of their genitals until they smash.” Pretty horrific imagery for an 11-year-old to process, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with the abuser. After all, I could recall my own molestation perfectly, and I hardly felt it warranted that kind of response.
The bile has only multiplied since then, and I believe all that hatred just serves to reinforce pedophilia in youngsters predisposed to it. It’s a form of cognitive bias called the Backfire Effect or polarization. Everyone does this to some extent. When challenged on deeply held beliefs, no matter how uncertain or incorrect they may be, we tend to dig in our heels. With sexuality, that effect is likely magnified because there’s a physiological component, a drive every bit as powerful as belief. In essence, your brain knows what it likes and isn’t going to take no for an answer. For that reason, the nature or nurture question with respect to sexual preference is ultimately irrelevant—it becomes all but hardwired soon enough, until it’s all you know. And it’s self-reinforcing, no matter how much you wish to dig it out. Eventually it all tangles together with the rest of who you are.
Getting Schooled:
Things went along OK until I was two years away from graduating college. I began to smoke pot, a drug I’d experimented with after high school but didn’t much care for then. I didn’t like it the second time around either; it made me anxious more often than not. But I did it anyway, largely because many people I respected smoked it, and I wanted to be more like them. I was trying desperately to reshape my identity before I was thrown out into the real world. I’d even begun working out, lifting weights and exercising to get in better shape. On the outside I might’ve seemed pretty normal, but on the inside I was screaming in terror at the prospect of having to “grow up” and be “normal”—which to me meant getting a real job, finding a girlfriend, eventually getting married and raising a family. Oh, I wanted to be normal, believe me, yet I knew myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to carry that charade off for long, and every fiber of my being resisted the forced transformation.
After graduation I fell into the deepest pit of despair imaginable, one that lasted several years, and I’ve only just begun to pull myself out of it. You can’t experience that much blind terror and pain for that long without being seriously impacted by it. I still worked out every other day, so I was hurting constantly, since depression saps your brain of the feel-good chemicals that helps to counteract pain; but I feltsomething, and that was better than the emotional numbness that had overtaken me. Thus, my project to remake myself into a regular person a complete failure, I retreated inward like a kicked dog, often spending days on end in my bedroom. At the nadir of my depression I was contemplating suicide daily; some days I could think of little else. I found some relief in opiates, which I had to obtain illegally because doctors won’t prescribe them for depression and anxiety. The occasional hydrocodone gave me a moment of respite from the agony I was going through. I’d tried antidepressants, but they were a joke.
In the midst of that dark era in my life, I discovered an unhealthy pedophile forum. Nothing illegal was happening there, but many of its most influential members were pro-contacters, meaning they believed that sex with children was theoretically OK and supported the elimination of age of consent laws. That forum still exists and I won’t name it here, but suffice it to say, I found myself taking up the same pro-contacter chants, if only to feel like I belonged somewhere. At the time it was all that was available in terms of an actual pedophile community, and I had nothing left to lose by joining the cause, misguided though it was, and even decided to out myself on that forum. Over the ensuing years, though, I was often at odds with the pro-contacters and flitted in and out of their clique; I wanted desperately to be friends with people who shared my sexual orientation, even if they held crazy beliefs, but I could never quite reconcile with their viewpoint.
Not long after I self-outed, a group of web vigilantes called Perverted Justice showed up. You’ve probably heard of them; they’re the people behind the now-defunct TV show “To Catch a Predator.” I was no predator, but that mattered not one iota to these guys; they lumped me together with the child rapists and internet creeps just the same. As I was already out of the closet as a pedo, I was an easy target, becoming one of the first people they profiled on their Wikisposure page, a site devoted to outing online pedos whether they’d broken any laws or not. It has since changed hands but still exists online, buried in a dark corner of the internet, and yep, I’m still on it. Not that I much care anymore. Perverted Justice had their day, but they eventually burned their own house down. Back when they were in full effect, however, they managed to make my already miserable existence that much more miserable. After their expose came out, I was fired from my job at Lowe’s.
But things are getting better. Slowly. These days I struggle with bitterness and apathy; it’s a constant uphill battle, and there are days I just don’t feel like making that climb. I eke out a living (barely) on a freelance graphic design business, in a small town where too many people know who and what I am. Now I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism that I’ve never used and I’m living well below the poverty line, existing on food stamps and the couple hundred dollars I manage to scrape together every month, sometimes augmented with financial help from my parents if the bills get too high. I tried filing for disability over my arm and my emotional issues, but that was a no-go in my conservative Southern state. This is what a law-abiding pedophile has been reduced to in this society. At times I’ve wondered why I’ve even bothered to stay legal. Maybe prison would be better, even at the risk of getting shanked as a Short Eyes. At least then it would all be over with. But alas, I could never hurt a child. No matter what, some small part of me still holds out hope that things will go back to normal, or as close to normal as a celibate pedophile with little prospect of a future can get. Besides, like I said earlier, I just couldn’t allow myself to foist this abomination onto another human being. So I simply endured. Until …
by Todd Nickerson, Salon | Read more:
Image: : Mors via Shutterstock
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Peeple: 'Yelp for People' App Allows Everyone You Know To Rate You
[ed. Another item to add to our ever-growing list of end time indicators. I doubt anyone will take this app seriously, but something like it is probably inevitable. Isn't that what Facebook's 'Like' feature is mostly about (if in a slightly more opaque way?)]
So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it.When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.
Imagine every interaction you’ve ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.
“People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,” said Julia Cordray, one of the app’s founders. “Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?”
This is, in a nutshell, Cordray’s pitch for the app — the one she has been making to development companies, private shareholders, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. (As of Monday, the company’s shares put its value at $7.6 million.)
A bubbly, no-holds-barred “trendy lady” with a marketing degree and two recruiting companies, Cordray sees no reason you wouldn’t want to “showcase your character” online. Co-founder Nicole McCullough comes at the app from a different angle: As a mother of two in an era when people don’t always know their neighbors, she wanted something to help her decide whom to trust with her kids.
Given the importance of those kinds of decisions, Peeple’s “integrity features” are fairly rigorous — as Cordray will reassure you, in the most vehement terms, if you raise any concerns about shaming or bullying on the service. To review someone, you must be 21 and have an established Facebook account, and you must make reviews under your real name.
You must also affirm that you “know” the person in one of three categories: personal, professional or romantic. To add someone to the database who has not been reviewed before, you must have that person’s cell phone number. (The app was originally supposed to scrape names automatically from Facebook, but the site’s API wouldn’t allow it — to Cordray’s visible annoyance.)
Positive ratings post immediately; negative ratings are queued in a private inbox for 48 hours in case of disputes. If you haven’t registered for the site, and thus can’t contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews.
On top of that, Peeple has outlawed a laundry list of bad behaviors, including profanity, sexism and mention of private health conditions.
“As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity,” Cordray stressed. “We want to operate with thoughtfulness.”
Unfortunately for the millions of people who could soon find themselves the unwilling subjects — make that objects — of Cordray’s app, her thoughts do not appear to have shed light on certain very critical issues, such as consent and bias and accuracy and the fundamental wrongness of assigning a number value to a person.
by Caitlin Dewey , The Independent | Read more:
Image: Mean Girls
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
A History of Everything, Including You
First there was god, or gods, or nothing. Then synthesis, space, the expansion, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion, and fusion. Out of the chaos came order, stars were born and shown and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses and the elements combined and became.
Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled, and divided, and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs, and fins, and hands, and antenna, and mouths, and ears, and wings, and eyes. Eyes that opened wide to take all of it in, the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe.
Eyes opened and closed and opened again, we called it blinking. Above us shown a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the earth. So we named everything including ourselves. We were man and woman and when we got lonely we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex, and most people enjoyed it. We fell in love. We talked about god and banged stones together, made sparks and called them fire, we got warmer and the food got better.
We got married, we had some children, they cried, and crawled, and grew. One dissected flowers, sometimes eating the petals. Another liked to chase squirrels. We fought wars over money, and honor, and women. We starved ourselves, we hired prostitutes, we purified our water. We compromised, decorated, and became esoteric. One of us stopped breathing and turned blue. Then others. First we covered them with leaves and then we buried them in the ground. We remembered them. We forgot them. We aged.
Our buildings kept getting taller. We hired lawyers and formed councils and left paper trails, we negotiated, we admitted, we got sick, and searched for cures. We invented lipstick, vaccines, pilates, solar panels, interventions, table manners, firearms, window treatments, therapy, birth control, tailgating, status symbols, palimony, sportsmanship, focus groups, zoloft, sunscreen, landscaping, cessnas, fortune cookies, chemotherapy, convenience foods, and computers. We angered militants, and our mothers.
You were born. You learned to walk, and went to school, and played sports, and lost your virginity, and got into a decent college, and majored in psychology, and went to rock shows, and became political, and got drunk, and changed your major to marketing, and wore turtleneck sweaters, and read novels, and volunteered, and went to movies, and developed a taste for blue cheese dressing.
I met you through friends, and didn’t like you at first. The feeling was mutual, but we got used to each other. We had sex for the first time behind an art gallery, standing up and slightly drunk. You held my face in your hands and said that I was beautiful. And you were too. Tall with a streetlight behind you. We went back to your place and listened to the White Album. We ordered in. We fought and made up and got good jobs and got married and bought an apartment and worked out and ate more and talked less. I got depressed. You ignored me. I was sick of you. You drank too much and got careless with money. I slept with my boss. We went into counseling and got a dog. I bought a book of sex positions and we tried the least degrading one, the wheelbarrow. You took flight lessons and subscribed to Rolling Stone. I learned Spanish and started gardening.
We had some children who more or less disappointed us but it might have been our fault. You were too indulgent and I was too critical. We loved them anyway. One of them died before we did, stabbed on the subway. We grieved. We moved. We adopted a cat. The world seemed uncertain, we lived beyond our means. I got judgmental and belligerent, you got confused and easily tired. You ignored me, I was sick of you. We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender. There was that time on the porch when you said, can you believe it?
This was near the end and your hands were trembling. I think you were talking about everything, including us. Did you want me to say it? So it would not be lost? It was too much for me to think about. I could not go back to the beginning. I said, not really. And we watched the sun go down. A dog kept barking in the distance, and you were tired but you smiled and you said, hear that? It’s rough, rough. And we laughed. You were like that.
Now, your question is my project and our house is full of clues. I’m reading old letters and turning over rocks. I bury my face in your sweaters. I study a photograph taken at the beach, the sun in our eyes, and the water behind us. It’s a victory to remember the forgotten picnic basket and your striped beach blanket. It’s a victory to remember how the jellyfish stung you and you ran screaming from the water. It’s a victory to remember treating the wound with meat tenderizer, and you saying, I made it better. I will tell you this, standing on our hill this morning I looked at the land we chose for ourselves, I saw a few green patches, and our sweet little shed, that same dog was barking, a storm was moving in. I did not think of heaven, but I saw that the clouds were beautiful and I watched them cover the sun.
by Jenny Hollowell, YMFY | Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. My archives told me this was a popular post recently, so here it is again for those who haven't read it. Lovely essay.]
[ed. My archives told me this was a popular post recently, so here it is again for those who haven't read it. Lovely essay.]
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Project Chariot: Nuke Alaska
Project Chariot: Nuke Alaska
[ed. I'm sure many are celebrating Royal Dutch Shell's decision to abandon drilling in the Chukchi Sea (myself included having studied the area for oil and gas development more than 35 years ago). But on a rough scale of bad ideas, oil drilling can't quite compare to nuclear excavation.]
Losing Liberty in an Age of Access
Afew months before 9/11, when I first moved to downtown Los Angeles, the city’s high rises teemed with lawyers and bankers. The lights stayed on late — a beacon of industriousness. But as I quickly discovered, they rolled up the sidewalks by sundown. No matter how productive and wealthy its workers, downtown was a ghost town. LA’s urban core was no place to raise a family or own a home. With its patchwork of one-way streets and expensive lots, it was hardly even a place to own a car. The boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s that had erected LA’s skyline had not fueled residential growth. Angelenos who wanted to chase the dream of property ownership were effectively chased out of downtown.
But things change. Last month, I moved back to “DTLA,” as it’s now affectionately known. Today, once-forlorn corners boast shiny new bars, restaurants, and high-end stores. The streets are full of foot traffic, fueled by new generations of artisans, artists, and knowledge workers. They work from cafés or rented apartments, attend parties on hotel rooftops, and Uber religiously through town. Yes, there are plenty of dogs. But there are babies and children too. In a little over a decade, downtown’s generational turnover has replaced a faltering economy with a dynamic one.
What happened? Partly, it’s a tale of the magnetic power possessed by entrepreneurs and developers, who often alone enjoy enough social capital to draw friends and associates into risky areas that aren’t yet trendy. Even more, it is a story that is playing out across the country. In an age when ownership meant everything, downtown Los Angeles languished. Today, current tastes and modern technology have made access, not ownership, culturally all-important, and LA’s “historic core” is the hottest neighborhood around. Likewise, from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are driving economic growth by paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.
Nationwide, the line between downsizing hipsters and upwardly mobile yuppies is blurring — an indication of potent social and economic change. America’s hipsters and yuppies seem to be making property ownership uncool. But they’re just the fashionable, visible tip of a much bigger iceberg.
Rather than a fad, the access economy has emerged organically from the customs and habits of “the cheapest generation” — as it has been dubbed in The Atlantic, the leading magazine tracking upper-middle-class cultural trends. Writers Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman recount that, in 2010, Americans aged 21 to 34 “bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.” From 1998 to 2008, the share of teenagers with a driver’s license dropped by more than a fourth. And it isn’t just cars and driving: Thompson and Weissman cite a 2012 paper written by a Federal Reserve economist showing that the proportion of new young homeowners during the period from 2009 to 2011 was at a level less than half that of a decade earlier. It’s not quite a stampede from ownership, but it’s close.
In part, these changes can be chalked up to the post-Great Recession economy, which has left Millennials facing bleak job prospects while carrying heavy loads of student debt. But those economic conditions have been reinforced by other incentives to create a new way of thinking among Millennials. They are more interested than previous generations in paying to use cars and houses instead of buying them outright. Buying means responsibility and risk. Renting means never being stuck with what you don’t want or can’t afford. It remains to be seen how durable these judgments will be, but they are sharpened by technology and tastes, which affect not just the purchase of big-ticket items like cars and houses but also life’s daily decisions. Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft and car-sharing services like Zipcar are biting into car sales. Vacation-home apps like Airbnb have become virtual rent-sharing apps. There’s something powerfully convenient about the logic of choosing to access stuff instead of owning it. Its applications are limited only by the imagination.
That is why we are witnessing more than just a minor shift in the way Americans do business. It is a transformation. Commerce is being remade in the image of a new age. Once associated with ubiquitous private property, capitalism is becoming a game of renting access to goods and services, not purchasing them for possession. (...)
The Hinge of Technology
We are now on different cultural ground than Belloc, Reich, Friedman, and even Pipes had imagined. And unfortunately for today’s conservatives and libertarians, almost all of whom are still persuaded that freedom rests upon ownership, that idea is directly challenged by the new logic of possession and use woven into the origins of digital commerce.
On the one hand, we have become accustomed, when installing software — computer programs, smartphone apps, video games, etc. — to clicking our blind assent to so-called “end-user license agreements,” which function roughly like government largesse in their lopsidedness: if you want the goods, you agree to the terms, narrowed and capricious as they may be or may one day become. Recently, what has been good for the software goose has become good for the hardware gander, with many of our devices, like our iPhones, being “owned” only in a sense dramatically attenuated by the terms of the contracts we sign when we pay for them. Not only have tech companies expanded the logic of licensing to the four corners of their market, but that full-bore advance has marched apace with a growing public belief that these terms are reasonable and commonsensical.
On the other hand, our shifting sensibilities have also helped hasten the offloading of ownership by popularizing services where once only goods would do. “Service” was once characteristically an arrangement that kept owned goods in working condition over years, perhaps decades; then, after an era of “planned obsolescence,” wherein products grew cheaper and more disposable, the current era of services arose. Today, not only has technology awakened us to the experiential advantages of short-term rentals over vacation homes, or Uber (“everyone’s private driver”) over flashy cars in the driveway. Despite the collapse of newspapers, subscriptions are booming — to everything from newsletters, podcasts, and on-demand video to short-term goods like shaving kits and steaks. The AMC theater chain recently announced it will begin experimenting with a flat monthly rate for an unlimited number of movies, in effect bringing the Netflix subscription model from the small screen to the big. Evanescence has become a cultural feature, not a bug. Snapchat, the app whose users’ pictures and videos disappear after viewing, brings a level of immediacy and impact to the social Internet akin to attending live sports or music events. Not coincidentally, sports and music figure significantly in users’ “snaps.”
Importantly, however, at a time when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately eliminated clothing from his list of cognitive cares by adopting a bland uniform of hoodies and casual wear, elites are using their massive advantage in purchasing power in a manner unlike the industrial barons of old. Although the ethic of conspicuous consumption and status wealth is still on display on Wall Street, the future appears to belong to a new generation of the independently monied and independently minded, for whom ownership functions primarily as a means to the privileges of experiential choice.
The upshot of these marked changes in the culture of commerce creates problems for partisans of liberty, problems pointed in two directions. Not only is contemporary culture too Lockean, defending special property rights at the expense of a robust, general conception of them. In other respects, it is not Lockean enough. Despite the vogue for experience, too much of the propertied elite embraces a system of political patronage that further concentrates property at freedom’s expense. The rise of the sharing economy has shifted massive sums toward innovators whose financial success has enabled the rise of what Noam Scheiber, in an influential New Republic essay on Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett, pointedly termed “boardroom liberalism”: “it is a view from on high,” he wrote — “one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.” Indeed, Silicon Valley has shown itself to be comfortable with influential pro-corporate operators of both parties. Meanwhile, more broadly, the affinity for ownership that arises from a proverbial “hard day’s work” is on a decline among rising generations — not so much because they are lazy, but because, increasingly, the satisfaction they derive from work is in the access to experience it unlocks. Plus, even many younger Americans who sense the hollowness and corruption of materialistic patronage prefer to focus self-interestedly on pursuing their alternate path, not fighting against the subsidized concentration of property. In this way, the relationship between ownership and freedom is eroded at both ends.
New Economy, New Politics
Rather than looking for answers among intellectual historians, perhaps the right should now look to the futurists. Indeed, some of today’s best futurists help provide a key insight: the transformation in how we do business involves a wholesale rejection of the social structure of the market.
To be sure, this kind of futurism is very much in the air. Capitalists and free-marketeers concerned to keep the wheels of productivity humming have clued in, advocating for a consumerism of experience. American religion, so often animated by the hope of reconciling material and spiritual plenty, has a stake in the pitch as well. Academic studies “proving” that experiences conduce more to happiness than property does trickle down into the public mind by way of reports like James Hamblin’s recent Atlantic article summarizing the science: “Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it.” That’s because, one hypothesis runs, “you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be.” The alternative? “With a material possession, you kind of know what you’re going to get.” Under the banner of possibility, the idea of ownership is reconfigured as an obstacle to opportunity.
Conservatives have gotten in on the act, without much undue ideological strain. In a New York Times column entitled “Abundance Without Attachment,” American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks advises that America surmount the “Christmas Conundrum” of gift-grubbing by pursuing abundance but avoiding attachment. “First, collect experiences, not things,” Brooks writes with Emersonian heft. Americans are apt to lower their spirits in the “dogged pursuit of practicality and usefulness at all costs.” As Aristotle knew, and Brooks counsels, experience affords knowledge of that which is “admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless.” The economy of experience, intimates Brooks, at last achieves the American conservative’s dream: lighting the denizens of democracy with an aristocratic passion.
Gone is the ascetic, renunciatory conservatism of midcentury theorists like Christopher Lasch, or Philip Rieff, for whom “experience is a swindle; the experienced know that much.” Rieff, a nearly anti-political sociologist, associated the culture of experience with analogue, not digital, technologies, such as psychotherapy. Indeed, Rieff wrote, “the secret of all secrets” and “interpretation of all interpretations” taught by Freud was “not to attach oneself exclusively or too passionately to any one particular meaning or object.” Or, not so covertly, to any particular institution or person — a direct attack on traditional conservatism if ever there was one.
And so, as the cultural right has struggled to choose between attitudes toward attachment, the economic and political landscape has shifted decisively underfoot. At the turn of this century, one of our more idiosyncratic futurists, Jeremy Rifkin, had already raised the point, tying cultural and technological change together to account for our spirited turn against ownership. He argued that markets, which once drew people to mingle face to face at specific sites, have been replaced by networks, which disperse us as widely as our transactions. For Rifkin, and some others among the futurists, the eclipse of the market is the hallmark of a new economic — and political — age.
But things change. Last month, I moved back to “DTLA,” as it’s now affectionately known. Today, once-forlorn corners boast shiny new bars, restaurants, and high-end stores. The streets are full of foot traffic, fueled by new generations of artisans, artists, and knowledge workers. They work from cafés or rented apartments, attend parties on hotel rooftops, and Uber religiously through town. Yes, there are plenty of dogs. But there are babies and children too. In a little over a decade, downtown’s generational turnover has replaced a faltering economy with a dynamic one.What happened? Partly, it’s a tale of the magnetic power possessed by entrepreneurs and developers, who often alone enjoy enough social capital to draw friends and associates into risky areas that aren’t yet trendy. Even more, it is a story that is playing out across the country. In an age when ownership meant everything, downtown Los Angeles languished. Today, current tastes and modern technology have made access, not ownership, culturally all-important, and LA’s “historic core” is the hottest neighborhood around. Likewise, from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are driving economic growth by paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.
Nationwide, the line between downsizing hipsters and upwardly mobile yuppies is blurring — an indication of potent social and economic change. America’s hipsters and yuppies seem to be making property ownership uncool. But they’re just the fashionable, visible tip of a much bigger iceberg.
Rather than a fad, the access economy has emerged organically from the customs and habits of “the cheapest generation” — as it has been dubbed in The Atlantic, the leading magazine tracking upper-middle-class cultural trends. Writers Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman recount that, in 2010, Americans aged 21 to 34 “bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.” From 1998 to 2008, the share of teenagers with a driver’s license dropped by more than a fourth. And it isn’t just cars and driving: Thompson and Weissman cite a 2012 paper written by a Federal Reserve economist showing that the proportion of new young homeowners during the period from 2009 to 2011 was at a level less than half that of a decade earlier. It’s not quite a stampede from ownership, but it’s close.
In part, these changes can be chalked up to the post-Great Recession economy, which has left Millennials facing bleak job prospects while carrying heavy loads of student debt. But those economic conditions have been reinforced by other incentives to create a new way of thinking among Millennials. They are more interested than previous generations in paying to use cars and houses instead of buying them outright. Buying means responsibility and risk. Renting means never being stuck with what you don’t want or can’t afford. It remains to be seen how durable these judgments will be, but they are sharpened by technology and tastes, which affect not just the purchase of big-ticket items like cars and houses but also life’s daily decisions. Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft and car-sharing services like Zipcar are biting into car sales. Vacation-home apps like Airbnb have become virtual rent-sharing apps. There’s something powerfully convenient about the logic of choosing to access stuff instead of owning it. Its applications are limited only by the imagination.
That is why we are witnessing more than just a minor shift in the way Americans do business. It is a transformation. Commerce is being remade in the image of a new age. Once associated with ubiquitous private property, capitalism is becoming a game of renting access to goods and services, not purchasing them for possession. (...)
The Hinge of Technology
We are now on different cultural ground than Belloc, Reich, Friedman, and even Pipes had imagined. And unfortunately for today’s conservatives and libertarians, almost all of whom are still persuaded that freedom rests upon ownership, that idea is directly challenged by the new logic of possession and use woven into the origins of digital commerce.
On the one hand, we have become accustomed, when installing software — computer programs, smartphone apps, video games, etc. — to clicking our blind assent to so-called “end-user license agreements,” which function roughly like government largesse in their lopsidedness: if you want the goods, you agree to the terms, narrowed and capricious as they may be or may one day become. Recently, what has been good for the software goose has become good for the hardware gander, with many of our devices, like our iPhones, being “owned” only in a sense dramatically attenuated by the terms of the contracts we sign when we pay for them. Not only have tech companies expanded the logic of licensing to the four corners of their market, but that full-bore advance has marched apace with a growing public belief that these terms are reasonable and commonsensical.
On the other hand, our shifting sensibilities have also helped hasten the offloading of ownership by popularizing services where once only goods would do. “Service” was once characteristically an arrangement that kept owned goods in working condition over years, perhaps decades; then, after an era of “planned obsolescence,” wherein products grew cheaper and more disposable, the current era of services arose. Today, not only has technology awakened us to the experiential advantages of short-term rentals over vacation homes, or Uber (“everyone’s private driver”) over flashy cars in the driveway. Despite the collapse of newspapers, subscriptions are booming — to everything from newsletters, podcasts, and on-demand video to short-term goods like shaving kits and steaks. The AMC theater chain recently announced it will begin experimenting with a flat monthly rate for an unlimited number of movies, in effect bringing the Netflix subscription model from the small screen to the big. Evanescence has become a cultural feature, not a bug. Snapchat, the app whose users’ pictures and videos disappear after viewing, brings a level of immediacy and impact to the social Internet akin to attending live sports or music events. Not coincidentally, sports and music figure significantly in users’ “snaps.”
Importantly, however, at a time when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately eliminated clothing from his list of cognitive cares by adopting a bland uniform of hoodies and casual wear, elites are using their massive advantage in purchasing power in a manner unlike the industrial barons of old. Although the ethic of conspicuous consumption and status wealth is still on display on Wall Street, the future appears to belong to a new generation of the independently monied and independently minded, for whom ownership functions primarily as a means to the privileges of experiential choice.
The upshot of these marked changes in the culture of commerce creates problems for partisans of liberty, problems pointed in two directions. Not only is contemporary culture too Lockean, defending special property rights at the expense of a robust, general conception of them. In other respects, it is not Lockean enough. Despite the vogue for experience, too much of the propertied elite embraces a system of political patronage that further concentrates property at freedom’s expense. The rise of the sharing economy has shifted massive sums toward innovators whose financial success has enabled the rise of what Noam Scheiber, in an influential New Republic essay on Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett, pointedly termed “boardroom liberalism”: “it is a view from on high,” he wrote — “one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.” Indeed, Silicon Valley has shown itself to be comfortable with influential pro-corporate operators of both parties. Meanwhile, more broadly, the affinity for ownership that arises from a proverbial “hard day’s work” is on a decline among rising generations — not so much because they are lazy, but because, increasingly, the satisfaction they derive from work is in the access to experience it unlocks. Plus, even many younger Americans who sense the hollowness and corruption of materialistic patronage prefer to focus self-interestedly on pursuing their alternate path, not fighting against the subsidized concentration of property. In this way, the relationship between ownership and freedom is eroded at both ends.
New Economy, New Politics
Rather than looking for answers among intellectual historians, perhaps the right should now look to the futurists. Indeed, some of today’s best futurists help provide a key insight: the transformation in how we do business involves a wholesale rejection of the social structure of the market.
To be sure, this kind of futurism is very much in the air. Capitalists and free-marketeers concerned to keep the wheels of productivity humming have clued in, advocating for a consumerism of experience. American religion, so often animated by the hope of reconciling material and spiritual plenty, has a stake in the pitch as well. Academic studies “proving” that experiences conduce more to happiness than property does trickle down into the public mind by way of reports like James Hamblin’s recent Atlantic article summarizing the science: “Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it.” That’s because, one hypothesis runs, “you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be.” The alternative? “With a material possession, you kind of know what you’re going to get.” Under the banner of possibility, the idea of ownership is reconfigured as an obstacle to opportunity.
Conservatives have gotten in on the act, without much undue ideological strain. In a New York Times column entitled “Abundance Without Attachment,” American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks advises that America surmount the “Christmas Conundrum” of gift-grubbing by pursuing abundance but avoiding attachment. “First, collect experiences, not things,” Brooks writes with Emersonian heft. Americans are apt to lower their spirits in the “dogged pursuit of practicality and usefulness at all costs.” As Aristotle knew, and Brooks counsels, experience affords knowledge of that which is “admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless.” The economy of experience, intimates Brooks, at last achieves the American conservative’s dream: lighting the denizens of democracy with an aristocratic passion.
Gone is the ascetic, renunciatory conservatism of midcentury theorists like Christopher Lasch, or Philip Rieff, for whom “experience is a swindle; the experienced know that much.” Rieff, a nearly anti-political sociologist, associated the culture of experience with analogue, not digital, technologies, such as psychotherapy. Indeed, Rieff wrote, “the secret of all secrets” and “interpretation of all interpretations” taught by Freud was “not to attach oneself exclusively or too passionately to any one particular meaning or object.” Or, not so covertly, to any particular institution or person — a direct attack on traditional conservatism if ever there was one.
And so, as the cultural right has struggled to choose between attitudes toward attachment, the economic and political landscape has shifted decisively underfoot. At the turn of this century, one of our more idiosyncratic futurists, Jeremy Rifkin, had already raised the point, tying cultural and technological change together to account for our spirited turn against ownership. He argued that markets, which once drew people to mingle face to face at specific sites, have been replaced by networks, which disperse us as widely as our transactions. For Rifkin, and some others among the futurists, the eclipse of the market is the hallmark of a new economic — and political — age.
by James Poulos, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Flickr Ted Eytan (CC)
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