the tedious ethic and the spirit of capitalism

The spirit of capitalism is not in good shape, if this advertisement for the iPad is anything to go by. Could our contemporary era be about to suffer a crisis of banality?

The reason for my alarm lies in the messages that are contained in these various tweets. These read:

The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?

Just ate the best sandwich. Ever.

Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!

Ran 10km this morning

I've long found the marketing strategies of telecom companies fascinating, though also deeply irritating, as these posts explore. What intrigues is that telecom networks are a product without any cultural quality or definition of their own, and must be sold purely as the possibility of social interaction. The product is other people. Hardt and Negri suggest that sheer sociability (speech, sympathy, affect etc) is now the source of value within post-industrial capitalism, and what must be inculcated in workplaces and beyond, to be drawn on by capital. What they do not add is the extent to which sheer sociability is also sold as a product, particularly by telecom and IT companies.

It follows from Hardt and Negri's analysis that individuals must be kept in a state of adequate sociability if immaterial labour (on which capitalism now depends) is to produce effectively. But it may also follow that individuals must be kept in a state of some loneliness if immaterial products (the promise of togetherness, love, sexual satisfaction) are to carry on being purchased. Hence, how telecom companies set about dangling that promise in front of people is actually quite significant. 

There is a dilemma attached to this. The sociability in question has to be available to everyone, and yet has  also to be special. It cannot be 'weird' or 'abnormal', but nor can it be dull. T-Mobile briefly experimented with some grizzly attempts to use amateur singers to represent what was special-yet-universal about their network, but these have thankfully disappeared of late. Family has long served to solve the problem, right back to those BT adverts depicting people ringing their parents and grandparents (including this monstrous attack on the queen of sciences). The fact that everyone has a family does not by any means detract from what makes it unique and special. But one problem that the telecom industry has, which other industries do not, is that it is hard pressed to employ the advertising industry's most reliable source of desire, namely sex. Where phoning one's mum is a nice marketing proxi for everything that is warm and special about family, phone sex or pornography are not (yet) acceptable means of channelling libido into retail. In a sense, the Orange 'don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' ads are an honest appraisal of this dilemma.

Which brings us to twitter. What is a normal, yet special, thing to be communicated via twitter? What is twitter for? It is in many ways a credit to the power of twitter that it isn't for anything. No doubt it very occasionally offers a medium for essential information to be transmitted, maybe even averting emergencies, or catalysing them with political uprisings. But to say that twitter isn't for anything is also to say that it offers us far more technical communicative capacity than we could possibly need. We are only able to say that water 'isn't for anything', because we have more than we need; if we didn't, it would be for drinking, cleaning and farming.

Capitalism depends on frustrated yearning to persist, as both Marx and Keynes recognised. Its gravest danger is that people get enough of something, or even too much. Enough leads to a demand short-fall; too much, and you have a crisis of over-production. Many people pine for more intimacy with their loved ones; many people pine for greater sexual gratification. Harnessing these sources of dissatisfaction provides capitalism with a route to its own survival, as Boltanski and Chiapello put it. But digital communication now suffers a problem of over-abundance, leaving capital with no means of explaining what, specifically, it is for, or why, specifically, it is desirable.

Look again at those messages. "The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?"; "Just ate the best sandwich. Ever."; "Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!"; "Ran 10km this morning". To recognise quite how strange these are (in an advert), try to imagine an ISP using such tedious content to sell the internet just ten years ago. But someone has thought long and hard about these; this is what twitter and the iPad are deemed for. These were not thrown together, but probably analysed at some length. If anything they betray remarkable honesty regarding the networked age, that it has turned us into a society of communicative itch-scratchers. Yet if the desirability of an iPad lies in access to this carnival of banality, then Apple could have itself a serious problem in the long-run.

Then again, what else could this advertisement offer, when we quite manifestly have more than enough ways of communicating? Splitting the difference between Orwell and Huxley, maybe it is all ending with one long yawn.

Comments

[IanC]

Thanks Will. As Wittgenstein would have said, whereof we wish to tweet, thereof we should be silent.
The stupefying banality of the iPad ad is indeed surprising - it's a fair reflection of the quality of the tweets one comes across even if one is not on Twitter (and I'm not, nor shall be). Surely a better ad would have been one including tweets of just enough cleverness, wit and usefulness to imply that people with iPads can enjoy a better class of social networking chitchat. On the other hand, as John A Hall observed in Powers and Liberties (1985), advanced industrialism depends on cultural egalitarianism to help sustain capitalism in the face of vast economic and political inequalities. So the impression the iPad needs to convey is one of anti-elitism and banality alongside its upmarket looks and price. If this is the strategy, they're right on the money.

[Tom Chatfield]

I love the phrase "carnival of banality" - a wonderful description on many levels.

But as a regular participant in a similar carnival, the stream of chat surrounding games, I'd beware of leaping from an advert's banality to a reading of this as "honesty regarding the networked age."

Most of what gets communicated between most people most of the time is banal. More or less by definition, in fact, since the exceptional and the original can hardly be a norm.

When it comes to the content of actual networked communications - rather than the inoffensive stuff it's necessary to put in an advert - it seems to me we're seeing more an amplification of existing tendencies, in all directions, than a new order of idiocy.

What we are being forced to see, writ large and constantly and with no possibility of our ignoring it, is just how much human communication is of itself little more than unedifying noise; and at the same time, how parts of that communication can be wildly inventive, expressive, witty, offensive - everything that we've always been able to do. Only more so. In more directions. More of the time, on written record.

[oliver]

I don't envy the copywriter who had the impossible task of coming up with the 3-4 tweets that are somehow meant to express the experience of using Twitter to an undifferentiated audience. They couldn't have done much worse though.

@IanC The quality of tweets one comes across reflects the wit and likemindedness of the people you follow.

[Will Davies]

Thanks, Tom. I don't think I'm guilty of confusing advertising for reality. Nor am I suggesting in any vuglar culture studies fashion that advertising somehow determines reality, or usage.

But how a product is advertised is part of the promise that it feels able to make. It could offer a great deal more - I know enough about twitter to know that it can do a great deal more than communicate the fact that "i've just eaten the best sandwich. Ever." Yet I think it is nevertheless interesting that this is how abundant communicative capacity ends up being sold.

I guess another way of putting this is that certain structural properties of the technology in question make it the first product in history that advertising ends up under-selling. Exaggerations and fantasies are either undesirable or unhelpful when marketing this product. The result is that advertising hoardings, which are typically communicate extreme beauty and surreal levels of performance, end up displaying humanity in all its boring-ness. Which is in some ways to be welcomed, but must also be considered a marketing failure.

[Dick Pountain]

"Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates
modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption
have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from."

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

[Luis Enrique]

Capitalism depends on frustrated yearning to persist, as both Marx and Keynes recognised. Its gravest danger is that people get enough of something, or even too much. Enough leads to a demand short-fall; too much, and you have a crisis of over-production.

well maybe, maybe not. In an admittedly very simple model, if you suppose the marginal utility of consumption hits zero at a certain level (people get sated) labour supply also falls (why would you work if you don't want to buy stuff?) and everything is fine and dandy, markets clear, returns on capital are maintained. OK, throw in various complications and you can argue that a sudden negative shock (what if we woke up tomorrow and people suddenly no longer wanted to buy things!!???) could have nasty adjustment effects, but really there's no particular reason to think that capitalism would collapse should people decide they have enough stuff.

It would do in a model in which people still want income of X, so want to keep working, keep saving and investing, yet only want to purchase x, but that's not internally consistent.

[Alex]

See also the "content" that appears in Apple iPad adverts. Juliette Lewis and the Licks. Wolf Hall. Mediocrity in a can. I find Jobs' vision really stultifying and unattractive.

[Luis Enrique]

jesus, I'm half way through Wolf Hall and was enjoying it. Now I feel like a mediocrity.

yes, why don't all these companies selling mass consumption goods use content that you like Alex?

[Francisco]

Very interesting, Will, as usual. But don't you think that this advertisement strategy is exactly trying to channel the expression of the kinds of banal remarks that one can make in hundred and something characters into that specific media? Facebook has managed to establish a platform for consecrating common episodes of public affirmation of personal choices like 'officializing' a relationship and/or coming out as homosexual. By creating a space where most interaction happens, social action is reshaped. Likewise, Tweeter seems to be, more than creating the banal, a way of harnessing it, subsuming it to the logic of the medium. I mean, think about how, depending on the person we are with, we may or may not make a comment like "What a lovely day!". And if we do, how we can be either a spontaneous sharing of a genuine feeling or a clumsy assembly of words uttered to fill in a silence or to trigger an engagement. Or how we may be able to say out of the blue, "I am reading this fantastic book..." which will probably open a space for a long soliloquy,; or we may ask "Did you see The King's Speech?" which will more likely save us from describing the plot.
There is a learning process involved in these choices even if they become automatic. If one is sharing banal comments all the time, expressing feelings of satisfaction with simple things, one probably feels at ease with the interlocutor, or at least is more trained in the art of chatting or blabbering. Well, because these technologies have to disseminate in a flash, these people in the advertising industry need to train us very quickly in something that takes years of experience. They are telling us to open our hearts and share our simplest feelings with an invisible audience. To blabber to the dark. They are saying that it is OK to share your thoughts with the world even if no one asked you any question. That’s what Tweeter is as a product for the masses.
There are no political uprisings or catastrophes everyday. But everyday people eat sandwiches. And instead of releasing a comment, in the hope of starting a conversation with the waiter or with the stranger standing next to you, you will rather clean your hands, open the cover of your ipad and type: "Now this is what I call a sandwich!"
When we think about the profitable uses of the technology, then we can see this as a big assembly of immaterial labour. A huge shopfloor that assembles craftsmen of free-time sociality and organises it in profitable ways. There is no time to waste in assembling the people because otherwise someone else will do it. But capital seems to have much more time to wait for returns. And if it possesses the products of previous factories of the same type, it has an enormous informational advantage and is in a position to expand to new territories.

[Luis Enrique]

why should we want to live in a world when we only have "what we need" when what we need is defined by basic necessities of life? (drinking, cleaning and farming)

I don't need but I enjoy middle brow [1] novels like Wolf Hall. I'd prefer a form of economic organization that provides them. We don't need twitter, but millions of people evidently find something the like in it. What's wrong with that?

Did we have enough ways to communicate before the telegraph, or the telephone, or email? What makes you think drawing the line here has a basis in anything other than your prejudices? You wait until they invent electronic telepathy.

It's not hard to work out advertisers try to be as inoffensive as possible - basic lowest common denominator stuff. Apple could show how you can use twitter on your iPad to have angry arguments about historical materialism, but why try to sell something by showing how you can use it to be a twat?

[1] although calling Wolf Hall middle brow is like somebody from the top 1% of the income distribution saying £100,000 a year is middle income

[Will Davies]

Luis - I think you're extrapolating much too much from my blog post. I didn't say that we "should want to live in a world when we only have "what we need"". Nor did I say there was anything wrong with people using twitter.

My argument is focused on the strange ploys involved in marketing the basic possibility of communication, as a product. And as the scarcity of communication is removed, so the significance and urgency of 'average' or 'normal' communication falls. I am fully aware that people use twitter for all sorts of things. Nor do I have any desire to censor or criticise any (or much) of it. I simply think it's interesting that the ideal as depicted in advertising has, curiously enough, become more banal than the reality. This is the opposite of what usually happens in marketing, but tells us something about the product in question.

[Luis Enrique]

"extrapolating much"

you are of course correct - I was reacting to what I thought was a tone implying that all this wanting unnecessary stuff was the nefarious work of capitalism, as opposed to simply things people like.

mind you, there's an extrapolating-too-much kettle to match my pot around here.

It's not an ideal being portrayed - I'd imagine the ad agency was looking for examples where as many people as possible would think "I could do that" - if they did anything too non-banal, chances are they'd alienate more people than they attract. Of course the ad agency may have misjudged things and have gone too banal, and too many people may be looking at those adds thinking, who write witless crap like that?

What does this tell us about the product in question? I'm not sure what you have in mind .. that the iPad is banal? Are laptops or mobile phones banal? Is the internet banal?

[Dick Pountain]

> that the iPad is banal? Are laptops or mobile
> phones banal? Is the internet banal?

Clearly not, they are all communication channels and it's only the content they convey that can be banal. My guess is that the ad agency chose such stupifyingly banal content because there's still a large portion (a majority?) of the population who feel intimidated by technology, and this says to them "look, it's for dummies just like you too".

[Phoebe]

This issue has been paining me for some time (there is a new Blackberry ad out which is just as depressing – sample communication ‘Having sushi for lunch. Can’t wait!'). I can see that the ad-makers don’t want to alienate their market (‘Reading Don Quixote in the original. Just mindblowing!’) but the most striking thing about the current examples is that they don’t reflect any genuine communication – they’re just brief windows onto the tedious, solipsistic world of the (imaginary) person in question.

Surely it would make more sense to use examples which imply at least a thriving friendship group (say, ‘You’ll never guess what I just heard!’, ‘Anyone fancy a little adventure?’, ‘Just got free tickets to the match this weekend! Any takers?’). This would be just as generally applicable, but at least give the impression that buying the gadget in question would open up a new world of social delight, which is surely the main selling point.