Players versus Spectators

June 26, 2013 By

I’ve been growing increasingly interested in the interaction between players and spectators in various games, literal and metaphoric. In both kinds of games, spectators need players to create value, and players need spectators to consume it.  I’ve been trying to classify the various sorts of “extra” interactions that seem to emerge, and came up with this 3×3 grid.

dialog1

The classification is based on the observation that both sides always seem to want something beyond the basic economic transaction from the other side. Though players sometimes yell “just shut up and watch,” and though spectators sometimes yell in turn, “just shut up and listen, I am the customer” at the players, neither side ever really shuts up.

The phenomenology of player-spectator interactions is of particular interest today because the Internet has seriously muddied the clarity of roles and relationships all around.

Here’s how you read the chart.

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On the Unraveling of Scripts

June 6, 2013 By

I am fascinated by scriptlessness: the state of not having a script telling you what to do. I’ve danced around this question a lot in my writing, mostly with reference to the American middle-class life script. But I’ve never really tackled the phenomenon head-on.

I’ll define scripts as collections of learned patterns of behavior that reliably supply both psychological and material resources for survival.  These lend meaning and sustenance to power the script, respectively. Both are necessary, and any loss on one front, if not quickly reversed, usually leads to loss on the other, triggering a vicious cycle of increasingly severe script breakdown.

This is the unraveling of scripts. It is the subjective experience of collapsing social and material realities around you, leading eventually to a state of behavioral collapse: scriptlessness. Along the way you encounter all those demons poets like to talk about.

Scripts can collapse for groups and organizations, not just individuals, but let’s start with individuals.

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Civilization and the War on Entropy

May 23, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“The ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ from now on would have lives of their own, participating in a perpetual ballroom dance where partners are exchanged promiscuously according to design.”

-Sanford Kwinter

Two threads of discourse dominated twentieth-century urbanism in the United States: the Jane Jacobs-Robert Moses dichotomy and the rise of the suburbs. The former was fundamentally a question of power. Should hyperintelligent master planners decide how cities develop, or should more agency remain at the block level, in the hands of city-dwellers themselves? The questions of how cities should function and whether they should favor vibrant street life or big business, infrastructural megaprojects and automobile throughput all followed from that primary question of power.

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The Economics of Social Status

May 1, 2013 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

In economics, a good is anything that “satisfies human wants and provides utility.” This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status.

As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods — rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).

But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted — spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.

Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives. [Read more…]

The Locust Economy

April 3, 2013 By

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened.

I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in nomadic deal hunters from a vast surrounding region who are unlikely to ever return; that most deal-hunters carefully ensure that they spend just the deal amount or slightly more; that a badly designed offer can bankrupt a small business.

He added one little factoid I did not know: offering a Groupon deal is by now so strongly associated with a desperate, dying restaurant that professional food critics tend to write off any restaurant that offers one without even trying it.

Yet, I’ve used (and continue to use) these services and don’t feel entirely terrible about doing so, or truly complicit in the depredations of Groupon. Why? It’s because, like most of the working class, I’ve developed a locust morality.

DesertLocust

Thinking about locusts and the behavior of customers around services like Groupon, I’ve become convinced that the phrase “sharing economy” is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a pig. What we have here is a locust economy. Let me explain what that means.

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The Wave of Unknowing

March 27, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“Unable to find a place outside the capitalist system, the postmodern subject loses any possibility of fulfilling the Enlightenment ambition of drawing a map that could claim to mirror reality.”

-Kazys Varnelis

When Frederic Jameson published Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism twenty years ago, he ensured that his essay’s subject, the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, would become the world’s most intellectualized hotel. Designed by John Portman and built in the late 1970s, the Bonaventure’s monolithic presence in downtown LA (like much of Portman’s work) still represents everything urbanists hate: The massive building is a mirror-clad fortress with a rotating rooftop bar that boldly shirks any responsibility for relating to or enhancing the cityscape that surrounds it.

Inside its walls, the Bonaventure is its own universe: disorienting, windowless, and lacking reference to any external reality (aside from the rooftop bar’s panoramic views of the city). Reflecting upon the building and Jameson’s essay, Kazys Varnelis observes that its confusing, illegible layout perfectly epitomizes the contemporary era: “For Jameson, the hotel’s complexity is an analogue for our inability to understand our position in the multinational, decentered network of finance and communications that comprises late capitalism.” In the past, we believed that we could comprehend the world that we lived in—especially the parts of that world that we ourselves had made—but Portman’s hotel was a society announcing that it had finally outsmarted itself and was willing to embrace that outcome.

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Machine Cities and Ghost Cities

February 5, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”   -Henry David Thoreau

New York and New Jersey have a first world problem: The Bayonne Bridge, which connects the two states, will soon block the entrance to the largest seaport on the East Coast, the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal. In other words, New York City and its surrounding region have too much infrastructure, and the older infrastructure is starting to interfere with the newer infrastructure, forcing a public evaluation of priorities.

The Bayonne Bridge, which fulfills the modest task of enabling people in cars to cross a river between Staten Island and its namesake city, needs to be raised: Its 151-foot navigational clearance is too low for Post-Panamax ships (the mega-vessels that will become the ocean’s biggest and most efficient movers of goods after the Panama Canal is widened in 2014). If the bridge remains in place, the port conveniently located closest to the Eastern seaboard’s largest population center will potentially stagnate as a Norfolk or Savannah arises to take its dominant position (just as Port Newark itself surpassed similarly obsolete facilties in the mid-twentieth century). If the Bayonne Bridge does not get out of the way in time, the global freight network will re-optimize itself at a slightly less efficient level, forcing goods to travel farther and more expensively. The plan is to raise the bridge 60 feet higher.

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Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul

January 31, 2013 By

The fable of Stone Soup is probably my favorite piece of European folklore. In the Russian version, which I prefer, called Axe Porridge,  the story goes something like this:

A soldier returning from war stops at a village, hungry and tired. He knocks on the door of a rich, stingy Scrooge of a woman. In response to his request for food, she of course claims she has nothing. So the canny soldier asks her for just a pot and water, claiming he can make “axe porridge” out of an old axe-head he spots lying around. Intrigued the woman agrees.

You know how the rest of the story goes: the soldier quietly hustles a bunch of other ingredients — salt, carrots, oats — out of the old woman, under the guise of “improving the flavor” of the axe porridge. He does this one ingredient at a time, offering an evolving narrative on the progress of the porridge (“this is coming along great; now if only I had some oats to thicken it.”)

The result is some excellent porridge that they share, while applauding the idea of axe porridge together. The shared fiction that soup can be made out of an axe-head results in the fact of real porridge for all.

There are some deep insights into the psychology of wealth and the nature of progress in this fable, insights that are very relevant for our times.

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Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind

January 16, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of neurasthenia or “invalidism” is a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Bright-Sided, it was almost entirely a social phenomenon:

The largest demographic to suffer from neurasthenia or invalidism was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soap-making. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining in chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for masculine “striving” in the world.

What makes this curious, and rather ironic, is that invalidism was becoming widespread just as new possibilities were being opened up to women, through the slow substitution of fossil fuels for muscle power.

This was not a coincidence of course.

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Schumpeter’s Demon

January 2, 2013 By

For a while now, I’ve been dissatisfied with our shared mental models around the creative destruction being unleashed by the Internet.

On the one hand, we have coarse-grained and abstract models based on long-term historical cycles and precedents. This is the sort of thing I’ve explored quite a bit in previous posts. It involves careful analogies to previous technological revolutions. It involves debates around whether or not technological progress is stalling and whether a return to growth is possible.

On the other hand, we have detailed situational models, full of incomprehensible minutiae, that seem to develop around specific important decisions. An example is the  set of mental models that drove the “fiscal cliff” farce, which just played out in the US Congress.  Another is the set of mental models in evidence around the SOPA/PIPA debate last year.

The first kind of mental model is so large-scale in its concerns, it is effectively a fatalistic level of analysis. The other kind is ineffectually preoccupied with each immediate situation in turn. It quickly drives itself into a dead-end each time, and defaults to buy-more-time decisions.

I’ve thought of an allegory for understanding economic creative destruction, that I’ll call Schumpeter’s Demon. It just might be capable of informing meaningful action.