potlatch

Santander 2013

This advertisement should be in the running for the Turner Prize.

It is one of the most unsettling pieces of film that I've ever seen, reducing advertising to a set of blank and bland facts, to be recited out of the mouths of an apparently arbitrary collection of sports stars. What are the celebrities doing in other people's houses? Have they broken in illegally? Or are we to suppose that they are ghostly apparitions? The atmosphere of the ad is one of oppressive silence, like that of a family that has lost a member but refused to ever discuss it. It's difficult to know what is stranger: the fact that Jenson Button is standing behind someone's fridge door, dressed in his racing gear, or the fact that he is sharing tips on gas bills, or the strange resignation to all of this on the part of the man using the fridge. Jessica Ennis is represented as a sort of track-suit-clad bag lady, who bothers people in the street with unwanted - and almost certainly false - information. The ordinary people, trying to go about their days in peace and privacy, exude a sad resignation that capitalism now drops (real? hallucinatory?) celebrities into their bathrooms and kitchens, to talk at them uninvited. If they could speak, what would they say? Their faces project fear and anxiety, as if they are now are trapped. Mostly they just want to be left the hell alone, to live, walk and paint; but this is the wish that sport, finance and above all advertising clearly will not grant. Is this a warning of some kind?

how not to save a tiger

In my best impression of Alan Partridge, I recently lost my rag with someone in the street by shouting at them, "that's not how tigers die!" An unusual form of insult, I'm sure you'll agree. The person in question was a chugger, probably from the World Wildlife Fund or somewhere, who had been trying to block my path in the now-standard manner of waving a clipboard in my face and doing a silly little dance. But as I walked past, still smiling falsely at them, they had the nerve to say "this isn't about a direct debit! I just want you to send one text and save a tiger!"

How dare they? How dare they insult both me and the tiger community (as they are probably known), by implying some equivalence between a text message and a tiger's life. An absence of text messages, as I informed the young chugger, is "not how tigers die". I am usually a more gracious respondent - chuggee? - than that, but I am becoming increasingly wound up by the marketing strategies of charities and their phoney account of digital media. Exhibit B:

Again, the imputed equivalence in this advert is horrific, and entirely unbecoming of a charity of Amnesty's stature. This is one of a series of ads on the London underground, implying some magical omnipotence to the possessor of a commuter with a mobile phone (or, conversely, some peculiar impotence or triviality on the part of a prison guard or torturer several thousand miles away). 

First and foremost, the advert is a lie, although the word "and" is of course ambiguous. Maybe they're not implying any causal link between the two events, in which case one might place an advert saying "A man in Colchester shops in Tescos and he wins the lottery". Maybe that's what most advertising effectively does anyway, but the bit after the "and" is normally represented with an image, to the effect that "a man uses a deoderant and [image of woman with large breasts]".

But there is something more troubling about this, than just standard marketing mendaciousness. Adam Smith was concerned by the fact that human beings seem to feel less sympathy for others, the further they are away (see this interesting piece in the LRB on how this problem manifests itself in climate change). This is not a problem that can be easily solved or got round. But the strategy of these charities is not to work on increasing the level of sympathy, but of trivialising the nature of the problem. In the advert above, it is assumed by Amnesty that human beings (at least in London) have very little capacity to imagine the situation of others, to sympathise over distance or to adopt an unconditional moral position. Rather than nurture imagination, sympathy or moral sentiment, the advertisement effectively suppresses those things by containing them within the solipsistic realms of the ego-phone. The individual's solitary comfort zone is reinforced by this, rather than rattled in any way.

Aside from this, there is also the problem of economic and technological functionalism, that I've complained about before, in which social life is reduced to a series of inputs and outputs. Institutions are hollowed out by a philosophy that understands them entirely in terms of their measured outputs, rather than their routines and rules. But when digital technology is thrown into the mix, something quite preposterous happens: the relationship between input and unput becomes utterly mystified, as if it's no longer anything to do with us. The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran.

What does Amnesty or anyone else gain from this? Their aim seems to be to build up a database of phone numbers, as the tiger chuggers were apparently doing also. Hopefully this makes them better equipped to prevent torture and illegal imprisonment; they must know what they're doing. But they're also engaged in a political equivalent of "quantitative easing", which runs the risk of political hyper-inflation: in their desparate bid to get political will moving, they're exaggerating the efficacy of their tactics, to the point where they will start to lose value. A greater and greater 'quantity' of political output is being promised, for a smaller and smaller 'quantity' of ethical action on the part of the Western consumer. As credulity declines as well, the long-run effect can only be bad for the charitable sector as a whole.

poppies as national cultural audit

Poppies are providing an excellent annual opportunity to take our nation's temperature. Or at least, our nation's media's temperature. Every November, the imagined community of 'Britain' receives a ritualised cultural audit, by an unholy alliance of the tabloids, advertising agencies, the monarchy and - this time round - the England football team. Somewhere in amongst all of this, ex-soldiers get a look-in, though the results aren't very pretty. 

This year it's been especially gruesome. How's this for a clash of illegitimate powers: Prince William and David Cameron have been arguing with FIFA as to whether or not John Terry, Ashley Cole, et al, should be permitted to wear poppies during the hiding they are due to receive at the hands of Spain later on this afternoon. A less appealing bunch of unwanted oligarchs it would be difficult to imagine. If Fred Goodwin were mud-wrestling with Rush Limbaugh over which of them had rightful claim on an old lady's dropped purse, it would be a more dignified and worthy form of political argument than this.

Last year, I felt that the British Legion's advertising campaign was actively re-engineering what was involved in national mouring, reducing it to a form of sympathy and sentimentality, which was locked in the present. The images contained in those advertisements obliterated the past, rather than remembered it. This might help explain how it is that poppy-fever is experiencing a crescendo, at a time in history when the First World War (from where the symbol of the poppy was originally taken) is just fading from living memory. For a teenager today, the First World War is the equivalent of what the Crimean War was to the baby-boomer generation. This is no longer something that one's grandparents can report on.

This enables the symbol of the poppy to acquire a form of timelessness, that enables it to be used in a mildly fascistic fashion, to represent various sentiments and forms of nationalism, independently of any relationship to history. Nationalism always depends on sufficient forgetting, such that a relationship to the past can be reinvented for the purposes of the present and the future. Accurate history or empirical remembering, is an obstacle to nationalism. So how is our imagined community progressing? Here are this year's offerings:

Helen Mirren and Andy Murray are presumably employed here as famous and successful representatives of Britain. Mirren glitters at the Oscars. Murray nearly wins various major tennis tournaments. They are offered as international envoys we can feel proud of. What grates about these posters is the fact that the advertising creatives behind them have entirely failed to eschew their brain-numbingly repetitive tool of choice, namely the pun.

Advertising successfully gets under the skin through double entendre. Every leading slogan has a duck-rabbit element to it, whereby it changes meaning inside the mind, producing a form of psychological tinnitus which continues to reverberate enfuriatingly. 'Enjoy More' (McDonalds), means more enjoyment or more food. Extract any sensible grammar from a sentence and the opportunities only escalate, hence the grammaturgical jingle 'Every Little Helps' (Tescos), whose efficacy is testimony to the psychological power of total nonsense, and which turns its target  into a form of idiot consumant.

The problem with performing this trick on behalf of the fallen and the wounded is that it generates some rather horrific forms of equivalence. The statement that 'Our troops are the real stars' only works in this context, because it assumes that the reader already knows that Helen Mirren really is a 'real star'. If a member of the public were depicted saying 'Our troops are real stars', this would carry a single meaning, namely that our troops are real stars. The only reason they have put these words in a Hollywood actress's mouth is because, that way, they're not entirely true. In all honesty, Helen Mirren is a real star, while our troops are anonymous working class boys. It is only because we all, ultimately, know that to be true, that the advertising slogan works at all.

The Murray advert is more absurd. The pun here - and someone in Soho must have hit the Columbian marching powder a little too hard the day this one was invented - is that, ahem, tennis players sometimes 'don't return' a serve. In case this is too awful to fathom, lets be entirely explicit about this: that advert, the one with Andy Murray in it selling poppies, is making a play on words, which compares our feelings towards a tennis player who's just been beaten by an ace, with our feelings towards a soldier who has been killed in Afghanistan. 'Those who don't return'. Oh yes, I get it! Oh, actually, no, I don't get it at all.

So here we are, the proud British of 2011, parading our chosen Hollywood crumpet, alongside our embarrassingly Scottish Wimbledon semi-finallist, in the hope that we'll all join hands and applaud a series of rituals that are being lifted out of history, and plonked into the middle of a football match, thanks to the intervention by an unelected and a sort-of elected political leader. Yep, that's us. See you next November.

sociology finally means business

Anyone fearing for the future of British sociology, in these £9k-a-year-inflected times, will be delighted to hear that 'sociology' has now found its vocation in the marketing industry. No longer will we be rushing for those criminology text books, in a desparate bid to convince George Osborne of our utility to 'UK PLC'! Yes, Bulmers cider has assembled a team of men with wacky glasses and skinny jeans to travel the country and carry out (in their words) 'sociological experiments', including this young man who goes by the name of Simon (not to be mistaken for the marginally less wacky Sheffield University political scientist, Simon Bulmer).

To revive one of my favourite old tropes, what the hell is going on here?

I only discovered this marketing ploy yesterday morning, when I had time to kill at Paddington station, and noticed that there was an unbranded yellow telephone sitting on a post, with a sign inviting people to answer it. Hmmm... situationist pranks in a major British transport hub, eh? I suspect that if Guy Debord were to ever mutter so much as a word as to what lay sous les paves in twenty-first century Britain, the entire area would have been cleared by machine-gun-wielding policemen before you could say 'spectacle'.

No, quite evidently, this was an 'official sponsor' at work, as befits public space nowadays. But situationism as marketing ploy? As Stuart Ewen, Thomas Frank and Boltanski & Chiapello have each in their own way demonstrated, capitalists love nothing more than a friendly anti-capitalist. But how, precisely, was this yellow telephone helping to sell anything? And if it wasn't, why had the entire station not been cleared by the police?

It dawned on me that an ethnomethodological experiment was underway. Garfinkel as marketing guru! And while I've never before classed myself as a more authentic sociologist than anyone, I figured that it might be fun to watch the watchers for a moment, seeing as these individuals were at the forefront of harnessing breaching experiments for the interests of capital. So here is my field data, drawn from a 5-minute study of Bulmers 'sociologists' studying innocent members of the public using a yellow telephone.

The first thing I observed was that the experiment involves a panoptical arrangement of cameras and people with clipboards, so as to capture what happens when someone answers the phone. It's not clear that the 'society of the spectacle' is being disrupted in this instance.

Many of the people wear skinny jeans and plimsoles, leading me to deduce that they are hipsters. The hipsters stand around watching the phone, adopting the bored-yet-excited stance of people who occasionally feel that they might have escaped the clutches of a real job, but then remember that they work in marketing. Some of the 'sociologists' have moustaches.

NB, there is no indication of a corporation or brand at work at this moment (other than common sense), and I had only established that this was Bulmers cider, by glancing over the shoulder of one of the sociologists, to see what was written on their clipboard. I first became suspicious of the authenticity of these 'hipsters' when I noticed that many of them have matching grey plimsoles on:

Surely these plimsoles can't have been supplied by a marketing agency, can they? (The eagle-eyed may note that the gentleman on the left in the above image is none other than 'Simon the sociologist').

Eventually, the 'experiment' gets under way, and someone (who has failed to notice the 20 hipsters with TV cameras and matching plimsoles a few yards away) answers the phone:

Little does the 'subject' of this 'experiment' know that, on the other end of this phone, is the great ethnomethodologist, Simon from Bulmers! (not to be confused with Simon Bulmer of Sheffield University Political Science Department). Simon becomes animated and sends instructions down the phone, to the unsuspecting subject:

Her instructions include asking members of the public to play tamborines, behave in an upbeat manner and generally stand in the yellow circle area, at least until sufficient footage has been gathered to create one of these youtube videos. Were Simon a slightly different breed of 'sociologist', he might reflect on the irony that, just as situationism is being instrumentalised in order to sell cider, so this last remnant of urban public space is being instrumentalised in order to achieve a viral presence on facebook.

Soon the experiment is complete (the subject no doubt has a train to catch) and the matching panoptical hipsters descend on the subject in order to establish her email address, telephone number, favourite cider and other particulars.

So the spirit of capitalism marches on willy-nilly. Now even the outer-reaches of heterodox, disruptive sociology have been dragged into the fray. This reminds me of an excellent panel series at last year's CRESC conference, organised by Fabian Muniesa, Javier Lezaun and Signe Vikkelso called 'Provoking Realism', in which speakers explored ways in which 'the real' was put on stage, made manifest, enacted, brought into being (see also Javier's article based on observing focus groups and Fabian's new project, Performativity in Business Education). Bulmers' quest to be 'real', albeit mediated by the advice of a social media consultant with a one-time admiration for Debord or Garfinkel, has drawn them to a new level of performance and performativity. No doubt there is copious science studies literature comparing experiments to theatrical performances - in this case, I have simply added an additional audience.

And why did I bother? That, as Simon the sociologist would tell you, is not a question that the situationist has to answer! Simon and I are both pranksters. But I was admittedly rather saddened by this whole event. Not only does the Bulmers 'experiment' rule out the one thing that makes experimentation vital and political in the first place - the possibility of something new and unexpected occurring - but the fact that it exists purely to generate youtube content, in the hope of circulation on facebook, represents a fairly grave insult to the 'reality' of shared urban space: sous la experience public, le capital!

emotional blackmail by Olympics

This morning's Today programme was awash with Olympic chatter, on the basis that the London 2012 games begin one year today. It was a shame that the annointed 'sceptic', Simon Jenkins, seemed to be muzzelling many of his deeper-lying suspicions, which he regularly airs in the pages of The Guardian. Perhaps he's afraid of becoming positioned in the Iain Sinclair curmudgeon camp.

One of the monstrous absurdities that the 2012 project manager was asked to defend was the fact that delivery of the games is proudly still "on budget", but that "budget" has mutated from £3bn to £9bn in the six years since London's bid was accepted. Somehow this £6bn discrepancy (double what is being cut from university tuition, for example) doesn't seem to provoke much riotting.

The contradictions of this whole hideous venture pile up higher and higher. According to the games' proponents, London is apparently hosting them because it is the "best city in the world", but also so as to regenerate this blighted part of East London; but why should the rest of the UK be pouring money into a marshy wasteland, in a city that is quite so full of itself? If there is one place in the UK that can afford a little geo-economic redistribution right now, it is London, and if there are two locales that might assist with this, it is the clusters of skyscrapers sited on either side of the Oympic park. Mightn't the rest of the UK wonder whether the £14bn of bank bonuses paid in the last 12 months could help to pick up more of the £9bn bill? The Olympics only adds to the manifold problems of London's snobbery, exceptionalism and nauseating self-regard (and I write as a lifelong resident). Its economy and housing market is pulling further and further away from the rest of Britain's, a trend that the current Depression is only exacerbating, and to pretend that London either needs or deserves this sort of investment is simply anti-democratic. At least when the KLF set fire to £1m, they did it with their own money and in the Outer Hebrides.

Then there is the rest of the 'legacy'. Hilariously, the radio coverage this morning went straight from Tessa Jowell (Labour's Olympic Minister) arguing that the £270m swimming pool would serve as a resource for the 'local community' (for the 34th time, nobody fucking lives round there) to an interview with an Olympic swimmer praising the pool for being three metres deep, and therefore extra 'fast'. That'll be nice for mothers and toddlers day, then. When will somebody realise that elite sports, by their very nature, lend themselves to a culture of mass spectatorship, not one of participation. At least the Tories have had the decency to admit that sporting spectacles have nothing to do with health and fitness generally, as the BMJ confirmed last year. 

Instead, the whole occasion will be a wonderful opportunity for 'us' to stuff our faces with junk food, and for 'them' to hide from their sovereign debt problems. Many of my friends have bought tickets, but not one of them seems to know why. Instead, they mutter apologetically about javelin-throwing, boxing, women's wrestling, men's high-ball-synchronised-jumping, a little confused as to how their life paths are crossing with such inanities, but equally resigned to the fact that this party is about to blow through their city and only a kill-joy would resist. The attitude seems to be that if the neighbours are blasting out woefully bad music at 4am, the only spirited response is to yawn, don some clothes and shoes, and go and join them for a glass of something unwelcome.

And here's the rub. Every time some yappy bastard offspring of Seb Coe and Tony Blair is wheeled out to defend this money-burning exercise, they frame it in terms of finally overthrowing British cynicism. A false dichotomy is erected, between some pre-Thatcherite nation of losers, cynics and conservatives, and the heroic optimists who (as that nice Mr Murdoch's company likes to say in their adverts) 'believe in better'. Which side are you on? Cynic or achiever? Loser or winner? The ideal type of the traditional, British loser is doing considerable ideological work in all of this, by cajoling those who are neither winners nor losers, to embrace these piles of useless concrete that have conjealed all over Hackney. No rational, critical position on any of this is permitted.

As Benedict Anderson has argued, national identities and nationalism only make sense by force of comparison. It is meaningless to talk of the British being 'cynical', without also asking who we are (allegedly) more cynical than. Of course this comparative compulsion also serves the Olympic spirit further, by helping to organise humanity into tabulations of quantified characteristics. This brain is bigger than that one. That child is slower than this one. London 2012 is deemed obligatory, necessary and praise-worthy, because the alternative is some nation that we are desparately afraid of being: the cynical, ironic nation, that naysayers are nihilistically hell-bent on preserving.

A more honest appraisal of this 'cynicism' might recognise the lurking inferiority we feel with regards to the two Enlightenment republican nation states with which we constantly compare ourselves, France and the United States. Yet if we are more 'cynical' and 'ironic' than them, it is not because we are instinctively wedded to the past or sceptical of the future, it's because we British have no option but to laugh at our version of modernity. We do pre-modernity very well, and post-modernity equally well - often, as in Prince Charles's beloved Poundbury, at the same time - but have never taken seriously that which lies in between. We have no founding myth nor any feeling (because it aint true) that the people are the font of power. What is it, precisely, that the British are being invited to feel sincere and enthusiastic about?

For Seb Coe, McKinseys, Tessa Jowell, Prince William and whoever else to arrive this late in the day and bully us into believing we are a nation of optimists, athletes and 'winners', as the only legitimate alternative to pessimists, cynics and 'losers', won't wash. Being modern means more than getting signature architects and American project management companies to tear up a piece of marshland, and kicking out a few canal boat residents. Being optimistic means more than flattening all obstacles to one's will, through sheer managerial firepower. Enlightenment neither was nor is an exercise in 'delivering on budget and on time', and human autonomy has precious little to do with winning, or for that matter watching men's badminton over a Big Mac and fries.

Fortunately for the 2012 organisers, the entire affair, from Olympic committee down to playground athletics, is resolutely anti-democratic, so there is no risk of popular or majority will interfering in this cult of delivery any time soon.

when did you last see a real market?

Here's an interesting empirical and ethnographic question: when do any of us ever encounter a market? Sure, we believe we live in a 'market society', respect 'the market', worry about how 'markets' will respond to various government policies. But I wonder how many of us ever actually see or use a market. Like 'cold fronts' in the weather forecast, markets are things which we are led to believe dictate social and political conditions, but which we very rarely encounter directly.

This thought arose when I was responding to this post by a psychologist over at the Prospect blog, which claims that:

The ‘free market’ both perpetuates and receives its justification from the concept of the survival of the fittest, a perversion of Darwin, that gives force to a primitive morality: that might is right. It thus supports a narcissistic, ego-centric character type.

As a sociological, cultural or political statement, this would be just about plausible, though still something that Albert Hirschman, Max Weber or Luc Boltanski would take issue with, on the basis that it grossly under-estimates the role of justifications and conventions within capitalism. But as a psychological claim, it is far harder to endorse, given how rarely we ever actually encounter a market. Here's what I mean by this.

Firstly, a market needs to be defined quite narrowly, in order for the term to be useful. As an institution (as opposed to a metaphor), a market refers to some combination of a place, a technology, a set of rules and a set of symbols via which buyers and sellers find one another and have the opportunity to carry out exchange, mediated by price. Yes, competition in public services or for funding in higher education produces market-like behaviours, but without the institution of markets. Yes, trying to find a spouse can be a bit like entering a market, but to establish an actual marketplace in spouses would be illegal in a liberal society.

To understand what a market is and why it exists, one need simply consider how a society would operate without markets: individuals with goods would have to roam the countryside, hoping to bump in to individuals with money who wanted those goods. Individuals who behave like this do exist in our society, but they are either valorised as 'entrepreneurs', or criminalised as 'touts', 'hawkers', 'drug dealers' and general irritants. Of course there are also grey areas of the economy, that are emergent, informal or semi-permeable markets, as analysed by Viviana Zelizer as 'circuits' or by Ravi Sundaram as the 'pirate modernity' of post-colonial bazaars. It would be wrong to suggest that there is an absolutely clear-cut distinction between markets and other forms of competition and exchange.

So the question then arises - when do most of us ever encounter markets in our day-to-day lives? One very clearcut example of a market that we actually use is eBay: buyers and sellers can not only find each other, but they are supplied with a set of technologies, rules and symbols with which to facilitate possible transaction. Zopa does the same thing for credit markets. There have been other proposals to use the internet to spread the benefits of markets to grassroots individuals, such as Slivers of Time.

Then there is the small minority of people who trade in financial markets, moving their money (or our money) around in response to movements in prices and other information. Stock exchanges are the most formalised platform for this, but Over the Counter financial products are increasingly common, meaning that financial markets now have greater emergent, less formalised and less transparent qualities. But in any case, most of us only access such markets indirectly through stock brokers, pension funds and (whether we mean to or not) savings accounts.

What about the housing market? Certainly, this is a market that the majority of individuals in the UK encounter a few times in their lifetime. But only for short, very stressful periods of time, when moving house. The fact that people worry about the 'value' of their home the rest of the time only suggests a paucity of imagination on their part, and a failure to recognise use value (I wrote a bit about that here). It doesn't meant that they are actually in any way in the marketplace, although the possibility for equity withdrawal means they are again indirectly affected by market forces. They could quite happily - I suspect, in practice, very happily - forget all about the market price that they might or might not receive once they come to sell their home.

And labour markets? Many of the unemployed and casualised labour force do encounter labour markets on a regular basis, visiting job centres and having various opportunities and wages shown to them for them to make decisions and calculations. Others are being shunted into the labour market. Then there is the 'war for talent' and market for CEOs that is promoted at the very top end of the labour market, which seeks to present very well paid individuals as constantly for sale to even higher bidders.

Yet this leaves the vast swathe of the workforce in between, whose working lives are affected by all manner of pressures, stresses, management concerns and competitive dynamics, yet only rarely influenced by the possibility that they might sell their labour elsewhere to a higher bidder. And when they do seek to switch to another employer, it is debatable whether a market is necessarily at work (Granovetter's network theory effectively suggests that there is a sliding scale between a 'firm' and a 'market', and grey areas between the two, as used when finding a job).

Which leaves shopping. There is lots wrong with shopping and consumerism. I might well have agreed with the Prospect blogger had he written that a great deal of shopping "supports a narcissistic, ego-centric character type". But that's not because of markets; that's because of marketing. And the logic of marketing is not only different from that of markets, it is entirely opposed to it. The logic of the market is to support one-off, spot encounters between strangers (even if, as Granovetter shows, this ideal is never attained in practice), interspersed by rational, atomised choice and calculation. The logic of marketing is to support repeat interactions, fuelled by emotions, loyalty and an irrational, instinctive attachment to certain vendors, products and brands.

As Franck Cochoy argues, marketing came of age in the 1930s at precisely the time when faith in market forces was at its lowest ebb. If the 'laws' of supply and demand could no longer connect buyers and sellers, new techniques and institutions would be required to do so. Producing and sustaining attachments between consumers and things is the purpose of a brand. For this reason, it's not at all clear that a supermarket is a market, seeing as how each brand seeks maximum differentiation from its competitors, largely with the complicity of the supermarket. Individuals do not enter these environments with a mindset of choosing and purchasing a new variety of jam, but of hunting out their jam as efficiently as possible, while the supermarket tries to distract them not with other jams (unless they have been paid specifically to do so by a jam wholesaler), but with orange juice, toilet roll, apples, shower gels and other things that the consumer might happen to buy on their way to the jam section.

As for classic nostalgic images of pre-supermarket rural townsquares and village centres, these aren't exactly markets either, as there is one butcher, one baker and one candle-stick-maker, each possessing a monopoly. Buyers and sellers certainly find each other, thanks to some form of marketplace, but they don't have much choice as to where and what to buy, unless some form of haggling is permitted (idea for policy proposal for our economically 'liberal' government: make haggling a legal right).

None of the above is to say that markets aren't powerful institutions in our society. Nor is it to say that we don't encounter markets at decisive and stressful moments in our lives, as when being laid off or moving house, or perhaps suddenly wondering where to put our money. Yet the notion that these are institutions which we inhabit constantly and are psychologically governed by seems like something of an exaggeration, when one considers the regularity with which we encounter institutions such as family, employer, newspaper, retailer, pub, advertiser, school and so on.

The fact that economists such as Gary Becker and neo-liberal politicians from Thatcher onwards have sought to extend the metaphor of markets and some of the characteristics of markets (i.e. competition) further into social and public life is another issue altogether, which brings with it its own specific politics, and cuts to the heart of what neo-liberalism is. But I would suggest that market institutions are typically only encountered by the very top and very bottom of society on a week-by-week basis, and only encountered every few years by the rest of us.

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.

make what happen?

I have an entire rant about the Heathrow Express, inspired by the marvellous Splintering Urbanism and the contrasting experience (and cost) of the equivalent train from Amsterdam Schipol into Amsterdam, which I can't be bothered to roll out right now. Suffice to say that you can find out everything you need to know about British political economy from the connections between London and its airports. But I'd never noticed the train's particular advertising slogan before today:

 

This is certainly an improvement on the slogans of other public sector organisations, with their dreary present participles and appeals to motion ('Making Islington cleaner', 'towards a better NHS' etc), although it does also sound worryingly like the title of an Oasis album. But more importantly: make what happen? Perform a leveraged buy-out of ABN Amro in summer 2007? Oversee the largest bankruptcy in British corporate history then walk off with a £600k pension? Make what happen? If the Directors of RBS are quite so intent on keeping quiet, perhaps they could extend this to their branding agents too. And in case you're wondering what the point of this post is, there isn't one. But Heathrow Express + RBS + advertising twaddle = irritation.

the ol' global village

I spy some post-speculative melancholia:

Birmingham is offering to whisk you into a high-tech future known as 1997, when horizontal networks were going to take over stale old top-down organisations, the space of flows was going to make a mockery of traditional place-based communities, and 'London' was going to be re-defined as a network of business parks spread out along the M40.

Birmingham has wandered down this path using the sublime power of numbers. But what do these numbers mean? What would it mean for these particular numbers to be true? By my rough calculation, Birmingham is claiming to host nearly 700 annual conferences every day, which must surely be only a small proportion of the total number of conferences, seminars and trade fairs going on in the city. Is this a lot? It sounds a lot. Or maybe it isn't very much. Who knows?

Then there are the 400 million people that can be accessed via Birmingham's transport links. That's got to be a lot, surely - it's the same as the population of Europe, all accessible, from Birmingham! But then again, it's only quite a small proportion of the entire world. If one were to point out that this leaves nearly 6 billion people who can't be accessed via Birmingham, that suggests something's not quite working. Maybe they should have mentioned that Birmingham's telecom networks offer access to basically everyone in the world. Now that is a lot.

The advert appears to miss one important point about 'facetime', as it puts it: it's never unlimited. People have other obligations beyond networking: sleep, sex and death are the primary ones. Sure, they can just about sustain their bodies with puff-pastry-based canapes and chocolate-chip shortbread biscuits from conference break-out sessions. And there's no doubt bottled water and coffee galore. But, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, networking with 400 million people... well it would just take up too many evenings.

Where did they get these numbers from, and what the hell are they supposed to mean? Interestingly, elsewhere the 'actually existing' network society has rendered such numbers almost commonplace. Wikileaks has just released 250,000 confidential documents recorded from US diplomatic cables, which is comparable to the number of annual conferences hosted in Birmingham each year. Facebook has around 500 million users, which is only 25% more than the people you can travel to from Birmingham. Maybe Birmingham has read Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? and decided to turn itself into a sort of puff-pastry-based networking platform. The next step would be to get rid of Birmingham City Council, all of its democratic and participatory structures, and hand over total control of the city to an asocial 20-something in a t-shirt.

The confusion lurking within this advert is partly due to a total failure to understand economies of presence, a failure that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s. The notion that knowing or meeting more and more people, of being more and more connected, was somehow advantageous has come to appear rather old fashioned. The founder of Ecademy, Thomas Power, used to say that his ambition was to know 100,000 people (or maybe I've missed a zero); he appears to be more than half way there.  This is perfectly fine, but only in the same way that it's perfectly fine for batty old ladies to fill their entire houses with royal wedding memorabilia and Union Jacks. Each to their own and all that.

The prophets of the network society used to argue that the greatest losers in the dawning age would be the excluded - those without social capital, ICT access and mobility. The implication was that the greatest winners would be the most connected, the most mobile, living the most fluid lives. One thing that they missed was that network connections are not always symmetrical, as twitter has now helpfully made plain: I can 'know' (or 'follow') as many people as I like, but if they don't know me then my 'inclusion' in the great network does not equate to power. The fact that Birmingham is boasting about its access to 400 million people is tinged with a melancholia, offering state of the art transport networks for getting the hell out of Birmingham. It's like boasting about how many people one follows on twitter.

But more fundamentally, the concern for the 'disconnected' also entirely missed out much power can be attached to being disconnected. The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).

So, yes, 'facetime' is indeed a valuable commodity. It is, no doubt, one reason to go to Birmingham, maybe even without the promise of a break-out session and a chocolate chip shortbread biscuit. One may even want to stay there, dwell there, build relationships there, without being lured into international travel and the space of flows. But all of these things are anathema to the logic of network maximisation. The only people who definitely gain from more and more connectivity are the sociopathic founders of the networks themselves. Everyone else is caught in various balances between knower and known, follower and followed, (ironic that Julian Assange is now desparately trying not to be followed, wherever he may be.)

Equally,  'Napsterising' institutions may be thrilling (who isn't enjoying the current diplomatic crisis just a tad?) or depressing (newspapers), or a matter of ambivalence between the two. Birmingham can turn itself into just another node in a network of sublime, exponentially increasing scale. Or else it could try to avoid this insidious mathematical logic in the first place.

the destruction of mourning

Wearing a poppy is quite a unique thing. There aren't many ways that the British are able to symbolise a positive relationship to nation without descending to nationalism, to recognise the honour of the military without veering into militarism. It also has a beautiful ambiguity. It may represent something very patriotic and proud, or a form of pacifism. It needn't mourn the dead of any particular war or even any particular nation. It may even represent mourning for the horrors of the twentieth century more generally. It's not irrelevant that most of those who have died in war over the last 100 years did not go into the military as a career, but were dragged into hellish territorial disputes. Some people might feel particularly moved by those conscripts, others won't. These various ambiguities allow people to congregate symbolically without being defined symbolically.

Unless you work in advertising that is. If you work in advertising, a poppy is something with untapped ROMI (return on marketing investment). Hell, a poppy isn't even targetting any particular emotion right now. That needs to change. Charging hell for leather into the marketplace of sympathy and guilt - jostling for position alongside Haiti, Banardos and the Find Madeleine McCann appeal - the marketers set forth a new vision of how to flog poppies:

 

By this account, poppies are now linked specifically to Tony Blair's wars, and recognise the acute physical and emotional pain of those alive today. They don't even mourn; they just sympathise. Not only that, but the wearer of the poppy is offered no space to interpret the symbol, or to use it as part of their own particular stance on war. They are emotionally black-mailed. From now on, the poppy will be empty of any meaning whatsoever (it is hardly meaningful to be against pain; animals are against pain), save for the meaning invested in its absence: the person without a poppy must be some sort of nihilist or sociopath.

This is a case study in how advertising corrodes culture. But in perfect Polanyian fashion, by corroding culture, it also corrodes its own marketing possibility. If the British Legion pursue this path for the forseeable future, they will lose the very thing that positions them in the marketplace - their unique status in the nation's consciousness - and become one more guilt-probing-device amongst thousands. The (social) marketing bods may note in a few years time that revenue spiked a little circa 2010-2011, then gradually fell away over the ensuing years, despite a guilt-chasing race for the bottom against competitors. "I'll see your sobbing abused child, and raise you one war orphan". What a miserable game.