Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic

[ed. I have another theory. Maybe readers are just disgusted wtih all the rewarmed, dumbed down, clickbaiting bullshit articles and ads littering up those sites? You think? For example, I never go to this site or this one anymore because they just assualt my eyes and tax my patience.]

The business of online news has never been forgiving. But in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic.

This month, Mashable, a site that had just raised $15 million, laid off 30 people. Salon, a web publishing pioneer, announced a new round of budget cuts and layoffs. And BuzzFeed, which has been held up as a success story, was forced to bat back questions about its revenue — but not before founders at other start-up media companies received calls from anxious investors.

“It is a very dangerous time,” said Om Malik, an investor at True Ventures whose tech news site, Gigaom, collapsed suddenly in 2015, portending the flurry of contractions.

The trouble, the publishers say, is twofold. The web advertising business, always unpredictable, became more treacherous. And website traffic plateaued at many large sites, in some cases falling — a new and troubling experience after a decade of exuberant growth.

Online publishers have faced numerous financial challenges in recent years, including automated advertising and ad-blocking tools. But now, there is a realization that something more profound has happened: The transition from an Internet of websites to an Internet of mobile apps and social platforms, and Facebook in particular, is no longer coming — it is here.

It is a systemic change that is leaving many publishers unsure of how they will make money.

“With each turn of the screw, people began to realize, viscerally, that this is what it feels like to not be in control of your destiny,” said Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who left the company in 2007.

Audiences drove the change, preferring to refresh their social feeds and apps instead of visiting website home pages. As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites. Sales staffs at media companies struggled to explain to clients why they should buy ads for a fragmented audience rather than go to robust social networks instead.

Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.

The power shift was made clear last week as the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage for the company’s annual developer conference. He stood in front of a diagram outlining an audacious 10-year expansion plan, which included several features to help keep people inside Facebook’s world instead of following links out.

by John Herrman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chang W. Lee

​The Six Elements of an Effective Apology

There are six components to an apology – and the more of them you include when you say you’re sorry, the more effective your apology will be, according to new research.

But if you’re pressed for time or space, there are two elements that are the most critical to having your apology accepted.

“Apologies really do work, but you should make sure you hit as many of the six key components as possible,” said Roy Lewicki, lead author of the study and professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

In two separate experiments, Lewicki and his co-authors tested how 755 people reacted to apologies containing anywhere from one to all six of these elements:

1. Expression of regret

2. Explanation of what went wrong

3. Acknowledgment of responsibility

4. Declaration of repentance

5. Offer of repair

6. Request for forgiveness

The research is published in the May 2016 issue of the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. Lewicki’s co-authors were Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State, and Beth Polin of Eastern Kentucky University.

While the best apologies contained all six elements, not all of these components are equal, the study found.

“Our findings showed that the most important component is an acknowledgement of responsibility. Say it is your fault, that you made a mistake,” Lewicki said.

The second most important element was an offer of repair.

“One concern about apologies is that talk is cheap. But by saying, ‘I’ll fix what is wrong,’ you’re committing to take action to undo the damage,” he said.

The next three elements were essentially tied for third in effectiveness: expression of regret, explanation of what went wrong and declaration of repentance.

The least effective element of an apology is a request for forgiveness. “That’s the one you can leave out if you have to,” Lewicki said.

by Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State University | Read more:
Image: Ohio State University

Infrastructure: The Movie

[ed. Forward to 17:15 if you just want to see the movie, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing. See also: Hail the maintainers.]

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The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans

Since 2013, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer—five books, hundreds of articles published, a number of awards and fellowships, and a small (very small) but respectable reputation. You wouldn’t even know it to look at my tax return. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper-middle-class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn’t know it to talk to me, because the last thing I would ever do—until now—is admit to financial insecurity or, as I think of it, “financial impotence,” because it has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and ministers to individuals with financial issues. “Much more likely.” America is a country, as Donald Trump has reminded us, of winners and losers, alphas and weaklings. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation—even a form of social suicide. Silence is the only protection. (...)

Financial impotence goes by other names: financial fragility, financial insecurity, financial distress. But whatever you call it, the evidence strongly indicates that either a sizable minority or a slim majority of Americans are on thin ice financially. How thin? A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didn’t have enough liquid savings to replace a month’s worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said they’d worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses. A similar study conducted by Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University, Peter Tufano of Oxford, and Daniel Schneider, then of Princeton, asked individuals whether they could “come up with” $2,000 within 30 days for an unanticipated expense. They found that slightly more than one-quarter could not, and another 19 percent could do so only if they pawned possessions or took out payday loans. The conclusion: Nearly half of American adults are “financially fragile” and “living very close to the financial edge.” Yet another analysis, this one led by Jacob Hacker of Yale, measured the number of households that had lost a quarter or more of their “available income” in a given year—income minus medical expenses and interest on debt—and found that in each year from 2001 to 2012, at least one in five had suffered such a loss and couldn’t compensate by digging into savings.

You could think of this as a liquidity problem: Maybe people just don’t have enough ready cash in their checking or savings accounts to meet an unexpected expense. In that case, you might reckon you’d find greater stability by looking at net worth—the sum of people’s assets, including their retirement accounts and their home equity. That is precisely what Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of wealth in America, did. Here’s what he found: There isn’t much net worth to draw on. Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation—down 85.3 percent from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, down 63.5 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and down 25.8 percent for the third, or middle, quintile. According to research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the typical household, one at the median point of wealth distribution, was $87,992 in 2003. By 2013, it had declined to $54,500, a 38 percent drop. And though the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 certainly contributed to the drop, the decline for the lower quintiles began long before the recession—as early as the mid-1980s, Wolff says.

by Neal Gabler, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Hugh Kretschmer

The Beach Girl Behind the Beach Boys

Early in 2015’s Love & Mercy, a film based on the life of Brian Wilson, a foxy blonde in cat’s-eye sunglasses addresses the Beach Boys leader. “Hey, Brian? I think you might have screwed up here,” she says, gesturing to the sheet music with her pencil. “You’ve got Lyle playing in D, and the rest of us are in A major. How does that work? Two bass lines in two different keys?”

As she often was in real life, that blonde bassist Carol Kaye is the lone woman in the studio, and the only female member of an informal, unheralded lineup of talent — drummers, guitarists, percussionists, piano, and horn players — that you hear on the Beach Boys’ legendary Pet Sounds. She’s also on a jukebox’s worth of hit songs from the ’60s: Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba,” Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” to name a few.

Mostly, these musicians were jazz players brought in from Los Angeles’s teeming nightclub scene to lend their chops to the recordings of rock bands, some of whom (like the Monkees) rarely touched an instrument inside a studio. So, dramatic liberties aside, it’s unlikely that “How does that work?” was a phrase uttered by the now 81-year-old Kaye, whom Wilson and Quincy Jones have called the greatest bassist in the world.

And yet, because so few people know her name, it’s all too easy to fictionalize a woman who made such a big and influential noise while working in the shadows, and in a nearly all-male world.

Kaye never exactly expected to be remembered. Most session musicians thought they were creating ephemeral pop hits, not lasting touchstones. “Music up to that time had a life span of about ten years,” says the chatty, gray-haired Kaye, speaking from the sofa in the living room of her home on a warm day in early April, her white poodle mix Rusty beside her. “We’re shocked those songs lived on.”

Legacies are complicated affairs. As anyone who shares success with other people knows, collaboration and dispute tend to go together. For instance, session drummer Hal Blaine claims he, Kaye, and their colleagues were known as the Wrecking Crew, a sobriquet he came up with after older studio hacks expressed a concern that these firebrands would “wreck” the music industry with their faddish rock. As nicknames go, the group’s is pretty badass — except, according to Kaye, it’s an ex post facto bit of mythmaking from Blaine. “We were never called that,” she says bluntly, and it bugs her that the term has stuck. (...)

The work became regular. One day a bassist was a no-show, Kaye switched instruments, and after that she was first call — the highest compliment you can bestow upon a session musician. Kaye estimates she was making the equivalent in today’s dollars of almost $10,000 per week by 1965. She booked so many dates that she would lay down on her case to catch a few minutes’ sleep. Fellow musicians’ “wives would come down to the studio, and I’d joke, ‘I slept with your husband today!’ ” she says.

Kaye’s second husband didn’t approve of her job’s late hours, and he especially didn’t like it when she was playing with black musicians, which was often — the late virtuoso drummer Earl Palmer was a close friend. So one night, Kaye came home late from a session for Ike Turner, who had paid the crew in cash, and woke her husband up by dumping the money on the bed. “That’s what the ladies of the evening got back then,” she says with a grin. Kaye divorced him not long after, got a live-in nanny, and said, “Screw it, I’m working.”

Even in retrospect, Kaye doesn’t necessarily see that kind of career-oriented attitude as feminist. Honing her craft in jazz clubs, where women weren’t an anomaly, she didn’t consider gender an issue, so whenever she was treated to an insult, Kaye would hurl it right back with a “Well, you play good for a guy.”

It got to be so that if she couldn’t make a date, producers asked other bassists for “the Carol Kaye sound,” which she says boils down to clean lines, perfect timing, and hard picking that let her “dance on top of the beat,” which she does most gloriously on “Good Vibrations.”

by Phoebe Reilly, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images

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Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care

[ed. Doesn't it get fatiguing? All that energy spent every day trying not to get screwed or manipulated by somebody? Landlords, credit card companies, doctors, lawyers, hospitals, banks, airlines, insurance agencies, contractors, cable companies, phone companies, car salesmen, tech companies, politicians, and on and on and on...? (and that's not even counting Ex's) It's the picture of modern day life -  the monumental effort expended by everyone just to not get screwed or manipulated by somebody... day in and day out.]

Four years ago, I sold my company to Google and joined the ranks there. I spent my last three years there as Product Philosopher, looking at the profound ways the design of screens shape billions of human lives — and asking what it means for them to do so ethically and responsibly.

What I came away with is that something’s not right with how our screens are designed and I left Google to tell the public what they should know about this. I’m writing this to help you understand why you should care, and what you can do about it.

Why does this matter? Billions of us turn to smartphones every day. We wake up with them. We fall asleep with them. You’re looking at one right now.

New technologies always reshape society, and it’s always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason. Socrates worried that the technology of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they [would] not use their memories.” We worried that newspapers would make people stop talking to each other on the subway. We worried that we would use television to “amuse ourselves to death.”

“And see!” people say. “Nothing bad happened!” Isn’t humanity more prosperous, more technically sophisticated, and better connected than ever? Is it really that big of a problem that people spend so much time staring at their smartphones? Isn’t it just another cultural shift, like all the others? Won’t we just adapt?

Invisibility of the New Normal

I don’t think so. What’s missing from this perspective is that all these technologies (books, television, radio, newspapers) did in fact radically change everything, we just don’t see it. Each replaced our old menus of life choices with new ones. Each new menu eventually became the new normal — “the way things are” — and, after our memories of old menus had faded into the past, the new menus became “the way things have always been.”

Consider that the average American now watches more than 5.5 hours of television per day. Regardless of whether you think TV is good or bad, hundreds of millions of people spend 30% of their waking hours watching it. It’s hard to overstate the vast consequences of this shift– for the blood flows of millions of people, for our understanding of reality, for the relational habits of families, for the strategies and outcomes of political campaigns. Yet for those who live with them day-to-day, they are invisible.

So what best describes the nature of what smart phones are “doing” to us?

A New “Perfect” Choice on Life’s Menu

If I had to summarize it, it’s this: our phone puts a new choice on life’s menu, in any moment, that’s “sweeter” than reality.

If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.

And this new choice fits into any moment. Our phone offers 5-second choices like “checking email” that feel better than waiting in line. And it offers 30-minute choices like a podcast that will teach you that thing you’ve been dying to learn, which feels better than a 30-minute walk in silence.

Once you see your phone this way, wouldn’t you turn to it more often? It always happens this way: when new things fill our needs better than the old, we switch:

• When cheaper, faster to prepare food appears, we switch: Packaged foods.
• When more accurate search engines appear, we switch: Google.
• When cheaper, faster forms of transportation appear, we switch: Uber.

So it goes with phones: when it gives us a new choice that’s “sweeter” than being with ourselves or our boring surroundings — we switch.

But it also changes us on the inside. We grow less and less patient for reality as it is, especially when it’s boring or uncomfortable. We come to expect more from the world, more rapidly. And because reality can’t live up to our expectations, it reinforces how often we want to turn to our screens. A self-reinforcing feedback loop.

And because of the attention economy, every product will only get more persuasive over time. Facebook must become more persuasive if it wants to compete with YouTube and survive. YouTube must become more persuasive if it wants to compete with Facebook. And we’re not just talking about ‘cheap’ amusement (aka cat videos). These products will only get better at giving us choices that make every bone in our body say, “yeah I want that!”

So what’s wrong about this? If the entire attention economy is working to fill us up with more perfect-feeling things to spend time on, which outcompete being with the discomfort of ourselves or our surroundings, shouldn’t that be fantastic?

Maybe it’s that “filling people up,” even with incredible choices on screens somehow doesn’t add up to a life well lived. Or that those choices weren’t what we wished we’d been persuaded to do in the bigger sense of our lives.

As each player in the Attention Economy invents more and more persuasive tactics to keep people hooked, persuasiveness goes up and agency goes down. Maybe we are “choosing,” but we are choosing from persuasive menus driven by companies who have different goals than ours.

And that begs us to ask, “what are our goals?” or how do we want to spend our time? There are as many “good lives” as there are people, but our technology (and the attention economy) don’t really seem on our team to give us the agency to live according to them. 

And it’s about to get a lot worse.

by Tristan Harris, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited

This Electronic Tattoo Turns Your Skin Into a Screen

[ed. Don't try to resist. You know it's coming... and it's not going stop at patches.]

Putting clock-radio-style numbers on your skin might not seem all that desirable. But these flashing digits are the proof of concept for a new electronic skin. In theory, "e-skins" like the one described Friday in Science Advances could be used for everything from monitoring vital signs to making wearable electronics a whole lot more wearable.

Lots of researchers are working on "smart skins." The idea is to package electronic sensors into a super-thin, super-flexible material — so thin and flexible that the user could wear it like a temporary tattoo. Recently, one research group even made a functional smart skin out of office supplies, such as Post-it notes and foil, showing that the whisper-thin electronic sensors need not be made from expensive materials.

Creating smart skins that include display screens is the ultimate goal: This would allow hospitals to monitor the vital signs of their patients with a simple stick-on patch. And in your day-to-day life, you could have the capabilities of a smartwatch in the palm of your hand — or wherever else you wanted them.

"The advent of mobile phones has changed the way we communicate. While these communication tools are getting smaller and smaller, they are still discrete devices that we have to carry with us," study author Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo said in a statement. "What would the world be like if we had displays that could adhere to our bodies and even show our emotions or level of stress or unease? In addition to not having to carry a device with us at all times, they might enhance the way we interact with those around us or add a whole new dimension to how we communicate."

by Rachel Feltman, Washington Post | Read more:
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Electile Dysfunction

The inability to become aroused over any candidate for POTUS, put forth by either party.
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M83, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

[ed. The top two acts in this summer's 2016 music festival lineups.]

Monterey Pop (Leacock-Pennebaker, 1968)
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Larry Ellison’s Private Eden Is Open for Business

Apostrophe-shaped Lanai is the perfect size to do just one thing really well. It’s been a Mormon colony, a massive ranch, and the world’s largest pineapple plantation. Now the smallest of the Aloha State’s public islands and its 3,000 residents are testing the waters as a sustainable society-building experiment steered by luxury tourism. The driver: tech billionaire Larry Ellison.

When the entire 88,000-acre, 140-square-mile island (or 98 percent of it, anyway) just west of Maui came up for sale in 2012, Oracle’s Ellison snapped it all up, landing two coveted Four Seasons resorts in the deal. And as of this February, after years of small improvements and a seven-month complete shut down, the Four Seasons Resort Lanai (née Manele Bay) is reopen for business.

The Transformation

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s a completely new resort,” said GM Tom Reolens, a 10-year veteran of the property who managed Ellison’s total overhaul, from new rooms to new pools. “We opened up all the views, changed all the landscaping, all new restaurants, and have altered the look to be much more Hawaiian.”

Visiting a month into the beachside resort’s Billionaire Upgrade, those words ring true. If it was spoken of at all before, travelers knew Manele Bay as an underwhelming, “affordable” Four Seasons with a dated Asian look. Its commendable qualities were a location on a quiet, private beach and the arresting cliff-side golf course where Ellison’s sometime rival billionaire Bill Gates married his wife Melinda on the 12th tee.

That Jack Nicklaus-designed course is still there—though now open only to guests—and drawing such celebs since reopening as Cindy Crawford, Will Smith, and Derek Jeter, but the rest of Manele is unrecognizable. By all accounts Ellison was personally involved in every element of the construction, making the designer Todd Avery Lenahan and hundreds of workers redo the lobby from scratch four different times, until the ocean views on entering were framed just right. Designs now mix a few midcentury modern pieces, traditional Hawaiian materials, and Polynesian artwork, such as a 19th century Koa Hawaiian outrigger canoe.

Ellison and his team decreased the number of rooms from 286 to 217, stripping them down to the rebar. They also added Hawaii’s most expensive suite, a three-bedroom, $21,000-a-night indulgence called Ali’i. New wood floors and new fixtures, along with hundreds of works of original art, were added, plus handmade parchment wall coverings, massive French doors opening out to decks, Toto Washlet-equipped bathrooms, large closets—you get the idea. Nothing except the cement structure remains from the previous incarnation.

The result is arguably the best Four Seasons resort in the world—a sentiment the head of Four Seasons hotels, Isadore Sharp, shared with the Roelens at the resort’s reopening in February. “He told us that this is best room product we have in our company today.”

by Charles Runnette, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Four Seasons Resort

A Grief Like This

When I was around the age of six, I couldn’t fall asleep without knowing someone else was awake. Since my parents have always been early sleepers, this resulted in a near-obsessive bedtime routine that lasted for years. If I were awake to hear the electric ping of the television turning off for the night, I’d listen to the sound of my younger brother’s breathing in the room next door. If he was sniffling, it meant his chronic allergies were keeping him up again and we were awake together. But if I outlasted both, which was often, it meant I was truly by myself, and vulnerable to hearing all sorts of horrible scratches, clicks and creaks—sounds a house only seems to make when you’re alone.

When this happened, I’d walk up to my window, look past the backyard, and into the windows of other people’s houses to watch the lit rooms for proof I wasn’t the only one awake. Curtains moving. The shadow of an adult vacuuming at 2 a.m. The harsh blue flicker of an action movie against a white wall. I needed so badly to feel company that I would create, invent, extract it from whatever seemingly innocuous details I could.

I’ve become much better at being alone in the two decades since. I’ve lived, slept and dined alone, and done all three with company. I’d mostly forgotten about this near-creepy childhood habit until a couple of years ago, while reading an essay by Ariel Levy in 2013. “Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself,” she wrote. “But when you are pregnant you are never alone.” The essay doesn’t end happily, but even then, as someone utterly confounded by the idea of motherhood, my breath caught in recognition. “Maybe one day,” wasn’t the thought, but something closer to, “oh.” It felt selfish to admire pregnancy for this reason, but it also felt good.

In the couple of months I was recently pregnant I learned that, in the early weeks at least, this company isn’t so much a knowable presence as it is a series of questions and habits, all of which construct a new relationship with your self. Even though I’m no longer expecting a child, I’m accompanied by some of these questions and habits still. My outfits are softer and mostly waistless. I’ll moisturize twice after every shower for skin that’s no longer scheduled to stretch. Though I’ve been a stomach sleeper for years, I’ll often wake up on my side, only to remember such care is no longer necessary.

It’d be the easier conclusion to think that this continuance is a form of grieving—a way of working through the pain of what so much of medical literature tells me, for a woman of 28, is just a false start. But I refuse to believe either of these things. I refuse to believe the latter, because to use the words “false start” feels like a minimizing and betrayal to my body and this thing it has both done to itself and endured. I refuse to believe the former, because there seems to be so little inside or outside my life to help me understand what this type of grief is supposed to even look like.

Perhaps it’s most accurate to describe these habits as a form of biding time. In a lot of ways it feels as though I am just standing here blinking, my hands still in the shape of a promise they were holding that has since disappeared.

It’s disorienting and frightening to realize how hard you can come to love something without thinking for too long about its existence in the first place. Here is one way to fall in love with an idea.

by Chantal Braganza, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image:Sophia Foster-Dimino

Laurie McCall, Dream Point
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Khatia Buniatishvili

Neoliberalism – The Ideology At The Root of All Our Problems

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of  Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers. (...)

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

by George Monbiot, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Naomi Klein by Anya Chibis

Fatboy Slim

[ed. Feat. Christopher Walken]