Book Thoughts, 12.5.20

10 days of real-time reactions to:

• How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman

• The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears

• Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, edited by Simon J. Bronner

1. 

Is computing its own next stage in the means of production, or is it just a new color, a new blending, in the “commercial” society we’ve had since the 1700s? Industry managed to be adapted into the coffee and cacao-driven global empire version of commerce with only aesthetic tweaks, no large evolution into a higher form of values and life goals.

So are the philosophers of an age where “production” refers to dopamine responses to ethereal presentations on electronic screens going to remain those writing about the tobacco trade in Glasgow? This isn’t a leading question; the narcissistic assumption about the historic period in which anybody lives, rationalized for me by the Harari and “Transformations of the Human,” is that we are changing from the Book of Kells to printed flyers. But then some smart people want our economy to refocus on manufacturing. So I really don’t know. 

2.

There seems to be a ceiling on creativity in society, which is set by: 1) how many people there are with talent to be creatively delightful or useful and 2) how much time and space exists for the consumption of created works. 

But maybe the ceiling can be lifted. Malthus was pretty smart, but now we think of him as a short-sighted pessimist. He couldn’t observe how technology could change the fundamental limitations of group existence, allowing enormous populations with plenty of food. Who could blame him when the Highlands were full of starving people, with agricultural production that could support barely half the population? 

If creativity is the higher form of living, won't technology find a way to unstop its limitations, whatever bottleneck there is around it?

3.

Jenkins’ Ear; his blood cry before Parliament. An early mention of the “public,” through “the press” aflame. Nation, war, populace, public demands, emergent of printing and reading and popular literacy they enabled. Modern society and culture as we understand them arising from 15th-century technology. 

So as to many well-meaning critiques of a fixation on computer science education; true. Code is not a cheat code for usefulness, for creative inquiry and resilience. 

But: the history of progress is warmest and kindest where the larger number of people learn the practical skills of building interpreting and manipulating the new ubiquitous tools and language. When everyone does this, like a preponderance of people in England and Scotland in the early 1700s, something extraordinary emerges on top of it. Fifty or two hundred years from now, if everyone can build, fix, and understand computing, what will we see? Let’s have it sooner. 

4. 

I think if there were any dramatic melody flying over my project, it’s to suck people into the idea that vulnerability, fear, suffering – sunken, darkened holes or patches in bodies of existence we want to imagine as supple and springy – are essential, or a part of, or at least does not stop, a life that is dazzling. 

5. 

I wonder if starting a bookshop in Glasgow in 1772 would be like starting a bootcamp or an incubator or coworking space today – an enterprise of popular caricature that yet is the forum for collecting and distributing and manifesting the progress (neutral term) of its era.

Is it possible to create enlightenment without being sneered at? Is insufferability the price of doing right by history?

6. A nice essay

“Fretful.” A ringing word, in the cab of the Suburban Tony Soprano is driving in his show’s 1999 pilot, when his to-Dr. Melfi voiceover says he feels like he came in at the end of things. The ubiquitous pre-phone swipe feeling that you don’t notice until you’ve been scrolling for five minutes. Me, when I sit up in bed, or right now, or when I think about how I’ve only had a sustainable job for 6 months and it could disappear at any time. A word that holds all the shakiness and forestalled terror of this time, between Bill Clinton and now, and all that is brought for this country and the world. 

Except, as I see, in this book The Culture of Consumption, “fretful” is as much a word for the time of those bicycles with front wheels the size of elephants, of pith helmets, of steam engines, and of Vito Corleone, as it is for today. Such was the sensation of the mildly well-off Americans, more than 100 years ago, amid seeping Darwinism and disintegrating Protestant salvation. 

Instead there was a “yearning for a solid, transcendent framework of meaning.” And a familiar cast of causes and symptoms of this yearning: moving from watchful agrarian communities into the anonymity of cities. The prevalence of “immobilizing depressions,” among urban bourgeoisie; context for how, though an “epidemic” of mental illness is described today like it’s new, actual figures are flat going back decades. Bowling alone, but for their own time. Our contemporary rage and ennui is maybe not as new as I thought.

And so in that time rose up the single, winding, sharp, lonely impulse; a fretful drive for selfhood, a not necessarily desperate, but holding some of the motivating qualities of real desperation, quest for self-realization. And to give it voice to broaden, amplify it, weave it together into a larger whole, risers what this book calls “consumer culture.” Reflected in different forms, with different keywords, by different authoritative speakers, what the book calls “therapeutic ideologues,” from ministers to psychologist to advertisers, all passing the same advice: now that the culture of work has passed; to feel better, revel in choice; participate in fantasies of stuff; buy whatever you want. 

“Culture” isn’t a strong enough word; after all, you can go home from culture after leaving the theater. It’s something much more hegemonic; explosive; encompassing; something as correct-seeming as your current political ideological conventions, whatever they may be. It’s “society's conventional wisdom, the band of behavior outside of which is tasteless,” irresponsible, or otherwise unworthy of consideration.

True freedom reaches so far beyond the number of ways you could think of planning your adult life that wouldn’t make your internal personification of this culture say, “oh?” when you think of it, the way Queen Elizabeth says it in The Crown when Margaret tells her she's in love with a man she’ll never be allowed to marry. I heard that voice all the time myself, over the least two years, every time the fact arose for clear observance that I only had pay lined up for the next six weeks. Our homeostasis -- our drive for meaning -- is made narrow by the question, “what’s the minimum I need to do to be able to consume sufficient to my having free choice?”

Consumerism was and is good! Protestant work ethic was only a rationalization of physical misery; consumption is wonderful, with the freedom of spontaneous runs to Target or Home Depot; the sight of Amazon packages like it’s Christmas Morning; hell, Christmas morning. Decorating your home so that it’s just right. But as a response to the yearning, it's therapeutically incomplete. 

Can we evolve – are we already evolving – the hegemonic culture, beyond what it’s been for a century? Can we address the yearning with something more? Can we augment our wonderful buffet of colors and tastes with calm attentiveness to vulnerability, connection, exploration, creativity, purpose? Can capitalism be constructed to better the happiness of workers, to serve what we’ve since 1910 come to scientifically learn are the answers to the existential yearning, the the depressions they spark? Or is it oxymoronic to suggest that markets can serve anything more – because creativity and connection, as with learning, can’t be bought or sold?

7. Hume and Smith were drunk; I meditate

I’m aware that I’m next, not even in my own place probably, in a multitude, so wide and disorderly that it can’t be called a succession, of hopeful souls who have been to Burning Man and wonder, hope, bank a decent amount of their calm about existence, whether humans can actually be better. The philosophies on which our systems of social organization have been built can’t just end with Kames and Hume, right? Surely new understandings of the nature of the mind, of perception, of reality; of the science of happiness; can underlie new systems that better take advantage of that knowledge of human needs? I feel like I’m holding up a pink cotton candy against a grey fog, smoke, a wall of blades and deadly cloud. Of every past philosopher and demonstrated certitude of everyone of any importance or solidity or prominence in the rapids of unfolding history. 

But I really believe that undisturbed, with patience and healing, there is a basic quality of compassion underneath everyone’s sun-spotted personality, the unlearned low sound of the universe, the binding behind the stars, a disembodied underlying reality, bigger and wider and more fundamental against which all other demonstrations of personality rise up. 

Meditation is what lets people be free of the passions that Hume was so worried about governing. 

The part of modern society, per Herman’s interpretation of Hume, is to channel the passions we are enslaved by towards the greatest possible harmony. But what if we didn’t have to be enslaved to passions? (It’s easier when sober). 

There is irony in that the fleshing out of authentic selfhood and expression requires the understanding that there is no self. 

Really what I mean by self is whatever really comes out of my body, even if the “explainer/decider” that lets it out of my body is not, itself, the self. 

Or maybe it’s just, what is shared alongside full acceptance of fear and shame, rather than in an effort to mobilize them. 

7. From an “aesthetic of consumption” to the “practice of creativity”

Maybe I’m not demanding everyone be perfect, be their version of Gandhi, be kind and value connection and fit in at the Ashram. Maybe I’m just saying I think capitalism, markets, would continue to function at a high level, or thrive again, if the criteria we used to judge people and ourselves as rich or poor shifted; if we move from financial materialism to artistic or creative materialism. 

We’d still have poverty and jealousy and absurd opulence. But, I’m arguing, it would be a “higher” materialism; at least offering that much deeper fulfillment and satisfaction to participants who are wealthy than today’s homeowners in Noe Valley how have no passion, no sense of unique self-exploration or expression. It would offer progress – a neutral value when you logic it out, except it seems that the human brain tends to get angry and frustrated when it doesn’t sense that we are moving in any particular direction. This applies to civilizations, too. 

8.

This came out on the hike yesterday; it’s repeating itself a little bit but it’s a concise version of a lot of what I’ve been trying to say. 

Around four to six hundred years ago a bunch of things were invented or discovered. There was the printing press, the solar system, there was Newtonian physics. These discoveries opened up crazy new realms of thought and consciousness, and new behaviors, taken together en masse to be new ideas about culture and humanity. 

Among other things, the basic insights about reality that all the parts of the scientific revolution unleashed increased humanity’s understanding by like a million percent. This massive relative increase based entirely on what we would call rationality -- evidence, control groups, good sample sizes, all that scientific method shit -- understandably made us feel ourselves quite a bit when it came to the power of logic and reason. So rose up a series of philosophies based on the idea of the power, the sanctity even, of human logic and reason, and then political and social systems from that -- forms of capitalism and democracy, and consumerism. 

But of course hard science doesn’t stop, and the weird thing about the crazy discoveries of the last hundred or so years is that they’ve served more to clarify what we don’t know rather than what we do. Quantum mechanics is real and also is irresolvable with, like, the physics of things normal humans can see and touch and conceptualize, and the only way to make the math works is to break our brains by imagining an infinite expanse of parallel existences where all outcomes are possible. It seems like the main thing neuroscientists will want to tell you if you ask them is not, how cool the basic functionings of the brain and consciousness are, but rather, that we basically don’t know anything about the basic functionings of the brain and what consciousness even is. 

In terms of philosophies and social systems that reflect these new insights….well, these human-centric areas of endeavor haven’t really caught up with the idea that certain things, though we continue to learn more and more, are pretty unfathomable. Not, literally unfathomable, but at the very least, we’ve moved from the confidence of having recently increased our understanding of reality by a millionfold that enlightenment philosophers got to work with, with the realization that even that millionfold increase is, like, teeny-tiny relative to the overall nature of reality, and of the forces that shape who we are and what we do, as individuals and as communities and societies, far more than any choices we try to make with our wonderful, beautiful, rational brains. 

This is a bit of a quandary for today’s groups of people who are trying to take what we know about the world and create philosophies, behaviors, cultures, institutions, and social systems to optimize our existence within it. Some people who never really fully embraced the findings of the scientific revolution and the philosophies based on it see this as evidence that the enlightenment was a mistake; that we need to go back to views of reality that existed hundreds or even thousands of years ago. To me that’s an obvious mistake; cosmic narratives and codes of behavior that arose out of conditions in which, among other things, it was difficult to guarantee access to clean water, seem to be rationalizations of suffering more than anything else. 

But at the same time, it feels to be just a less-bad version of emotional reassurance in a confusing time to organize all our efforts in shaping the world around human rights and free expression and justice and other concepts that are really really important to living in a nice and good world but are political values that ultimately stem from the scientific certainties felt around 1750. Leaders today should have a “yes, and” attitude towards the enlightenment: yes to science and reason and the unambiguous reality of all humans being created equal; AND we need new philosophies and institutions that reflect the best of us based both on, the new understandings we have developed about ourselves as a species and the universe around us, in physics, psychology, genetics, and everything else; and that incorporates a little bit more of the humility and wonder with which we all should be looking at the world and our place in it (which does NOT require a personified God, sheesh). 

For me, I’m most drawn to understandings of the mind that have emerged from Buddhist practice and philosophy. These intersect pretty nicely with research findings in other fields, such as psychology and medical science (esp. psychedelics). They incline me toward belief not only in a beneficence and compassion underlying all people, but also in the capacity for every person, through the expression of their unique qualities, to be delightful to others. This leads me to search for some kind of workable social/institutional models built around this sense of uniqueness and the capacity for people to delight one another by being themselves. Digital technologies, with their always-on ability to perceive very small details about people (for good or ill), and their ability to make it a lot easier for people to exercise their creativity, aesthetic and otherwise, seems like a big piece of the puzzle. 

Others have different approaches. Yuval Noah Harari, who basically started me down this galaxy brain path with his whole-picture analysis of human history since the Neanderthals in Sapiens, has a kind of more dystopian view of how things will work out; the total idea of the self breaking down as we create new beings in the digital cloud and our own minds are chopped and spliced and controlled. I’m me, so I don’t think he’s totally right, but he goes on a two-month silent meditation retreat every year, so at the very least he’s definitely seen some wild shit that I haven’t. 

The point is that everyone, but especially, the people I’ll call “leaders” -- a weird term, because this word has all sorts of ennobling connotations that I think really shouldn’t apply in a lot of cases to the people who have managed to rise to the top of today’s existing hierarchy-driven social organizations -- but leaders need to be thinking bigger. By which I mean -- they need to stop acting like the nature of reality and of human beings is already well-understood, and therefore, the political systems and ideals of Lincoln and Roosevelt are fixed goals based on that reality. And instead -- put on the philosopher hat themselves. Think and read about who we are, and why we’re here. Consider what we know -- and don’t know now -- that we didn’t know -- or thought we knew -- when we were little kids. And start thinking of social and political systems that might have seemed literally insane to Smith and Marx and Hume and all those wonderful folks -- but might just stand a chance of making things here better today and soon. 

The Plane

There has been a mystery since day one, since he rode down the escalators to his announcement podium. It exists mostly as blind rage, a little gray buzzing hornets hive somewhere in my head that I’m scared to draw near to. How could anyone, with a laundry list of typical thoughts and feelings we might describe as “normal,” could want this man to be President of the United States?

Then, a few weeks ago – a few tensions having thawed – I faced a scene. My laptop screen was thick with planes; a Google image search of of his 757, to be exact. I had been gaping at his plan to repaint Air Force One, and there they were: dark red and blue; nose up, gliding against a faint blue sky; or flat against some tarmac, in front of a dark sky, and orange glow around buildings in some cold state, steam rising. “Look at the plane,” the moment said. “Take a breath. It’s all about the plane.”

What was it about the plane? Well. I can’t but reveal myself to have the class of a bag of cheetos but to say that a plane is sharp; a plane is elegant; a plane is cool, dammit. There is no high-spoken defense here. I, Chris, the hater, the writer, the arguer, do not think his plane is cool, of course – how could I? (The psychodrama sticks like maple syrup on fingers). But I can’t help it. If I allow the talkative parts of my brain to drain down to low feeling; if I look only with my cheeks and my forearms; if I blur my peripheral vision so that all that stands out are big shapes; if I consider the plane like it’s in another universe, like IQ84; then the plane is fucking cool.

Cool how? It’s hard; words with soberly considered meaning can only desecrate the originality, the hot warmth, the sensation of “go,” the stepping down on the gas of your brain’s energy reward, that the plane can give you. Its deep and trusting colors; the fact that it’s a passenger-scale jet, not an effete private charter like weak-kneed automotive CEOs take to Washington to be for their bailout; the name on the tail, is overtones of card-table triumph, one consonant-baked syllable. Just silly-sounding enough to create the barest wisp of possibility for mockery, only for the plane itself, the person it it, to make silly all silliness potential.

So if you know voting, and politics, through local news anchors; as formalistic clenching; as earnest, truly unfathomable promises; as the do-gooderism of a shitty teacher that wants to be seen as cool. And if the civil rights movement isn’t at the center of the story your heart relies on; if your mind is not the type to pinched with dissatisfaction at abstract problems. And here comes this jet, and the person it is, the builder of buildings, a wearer of suits and gold and red ties; why not feel led, why not feel roused, by a President?

The hornet’s nest remains; the rage is mostly blind, still. But in what looks to be his last days, for now at least, I feel life in the knowing what might be going on in the colored memories of his supporters’ minds, and in their bodies. 

Why space noises are so cool

I’m some reasonable amount of time into a recorded mix from 15-20 years ago, Sasha or Tiesto or something. And I can imagine the DJs playing, in some kind of pre-megaclub auditorium or dark rectangle of a room like they apparently had back then. In front of them, synthesizers and amplifiers and mixers and other devices that passeth all understanding to the mere enjoyer; a low line of blinking metal boxes. And while I know they must physically be supported by a table, in the atmosphere, it’s easy to imagine them suspended in nothing, floating in outer space. 

Which makes sense, because existence outside of truly conceivable boundaries – that things can be, in a realm where we humans cannot really imagine being – is what comes across from sounds those devices make. Maybe it’s because of the sound George Lucas decided to assign a blaster bolt, or the kind of sound in between a whoosh and a scrape that comes out of the back of a spacecraft in movies when it accelerates, accompanied by a flat plane of some pale blue substance that is somewhere between flame and smoke. Or that other professional imagination-shapers placed little blinking bleeping lights on the dashboard of every spacecraft cockpit we’ve seen.

But the random-but-rhythmic beeps in an intentional assortment of high pitches; electric-resonant arcing noises; threadbare little walls of sound that pulsate at such a high frequency that they can only be described as shimmering, like points of brightness on a rippled surface in the sun, or maybe, stars seen at the correct angle through the windshield of an X-Wing in turbulence (though turbulence in space probably physically impossible); all of these, our brain associates with a human presence in black nothingness, and stars, and colorful spheres floating alone. Anything like these sounds are the soundtrack for an endless expanse seen through a glass barrier. So that when we hear them, our pavlovian response is to feel like we’re on the edge of all that’s known, on the doorstep of all that is unknowable, alone, and ever-changing outside of regular time. 

For some, who in spite of all luck and outside effort, grow up with learned or inborn agony for normally chilly days, surrounded by a lot of other people who aren’t much to ponder the world or other matters beyond; well, put them in a dark room with space sounds, arranged in tonal intervals and consistent rhythms proven by experience and science to control a person’s imagination, and let them hold their arms out and mouths open. 

The end of one part

I really thought -- had really hoped -- that Spotify and SoundCloud could make a big middle class of musicians. That the rising nichification of taste and content, made possible through platforms’ transcendence of geography and ability to match idiosyncratic taste with idiosyncratic melodies, would distribute rising music industry revenue so widely that recording artists would be the new auto workers. 

And I must be so smart, because people do listen to a lot more music when they have access to unlimited libraries and algorithmic curation. A lot of those new listens go to artists making stranger or more idiosyncratic music, who in the 1990s would have had a hard time finding anyone in their zip code to listen to their music, and who might not have been making music at all. A lot of those artists earn substantial income from Spotify royalties and similar.

But I’m not that smart, because it’s not that many people. 

Even if all income earned by artists on streaming platforms was split evenly, and Drake didn’t earn any more recording revenue than Max Graham, there would only be enough income to go around to support a few hundred thousand middle class incomes. And the same trend applies to painters, movie producers, or any other creators for whom the total aggregate consumption of their work is constrained by highly fintie factors, like hours in the day, or empty space on walls or in closets. We can’t listen to enough music, buy enough clothes, or hang enough paintings to support a large, national mythology-defining middle class of musicians, fashion designers, and fine artists. 

An interesting possibility for my hopeful hypothesis is the potential internetification of physical goods through vastly improved 3D printing capability. Under this dream scenario, idealized by Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future? and by the automotive startup Local Motors, physical goods will at some point no longer be manufactured at centralized hubs and distributed to households. Instead, clothes, cars, spatulas, and coasters will be printed in your garage from new or recycled raw materials. Design specs for these products would move from household to household like so many songs are today. 

This technological state of affairs could in theory lead to a new pattern of consumption of physical goods. Instead of buying new clothes a few times a year, you might try a new style of shirt every single day. Instead of considering a few dozen clothing designs each month, you might consider a few dozen each morning, deciding what outfit strikes your moor. Getting dressed as choosing a playlist or a podcast. Each one of those designs would (again in theory) need a human designer, and (again in theory), a single human’s ability to dream up creative designs in a certain space of time will not have sped up too much. So there would be demand for an exponentially greater number of clothing designers than there is today. 

And that’s just clothing designers. What about people whose vocation is creating digital designs for lamps, toothbrushes, bedspread, or anything else we can imbue with self-expressive value? Consumers might feel like changing the form of every object around them to suit their mood. Maybe people will be constantly exploring and tweaking the appearance of everything around them as resonance waxes and wanes. Prevailing design styles in goods of all kinds could fluctuate with the day, not the season. People could suddenly start to notice fine gradations of experience in response to the appearance of their surroundings, and strive to optimize their moment-to-moment sensations of beauty or delight. They could move about their homes and offices could exist in a near constant state of immersion in their aesthetic whimsy, feeding a workforce that exists to engineer what’s bright and new to an unimaginable scale. An economy no longer build to distribute stuff, but scarce subjective wonder. 

But this is highly speculative and requires technological leaps and bounds that are not assured or even likely. 

So an equation remains unsolved: if the growth in existing professions centered around creativity is inherently limited, than how can the unused creative capacity in everyone human be economically employed? Especially, as seems possible, if their rote and basic logical functions are no longer valuable?

fear; narcissism

Uncapping a pen, targeting a blank line, opening the curtain on how I feel, and finding: simultaneous terror-grief; an urge for togetherness and recognition that makes me pull out my phone and click on Twitter. 

Then I’m moving the pen, forming letters, held by the hard sensation that if I don’t write now, when will I write? When will I exist? Then I’m pausing, rueful that I can be swimming in equanimity at noon, but sometime will always be backed into a corner by that hard sensation, a threat of nothingness if I don’t write something today, don’t form something complete. That’s the desperation that makes me suddenly break off conversation, dash forward, and leap through the closing train doors, leaving my friend on a BART platform; the friend that values brushed teeth, a made bed, and days held with care, not rushed through with objectives, like airport terminals, when you’re late. 

Now I’m looking in the mirror, as my hand restarts movement. I notice hair of disturbing height and volume, a wave, spread thick like meringue. And puffy cheeks, patches of red bumps and flaky skin. He writes defensively, I think, as though he could cancel, or even just diminish, his literal narcissism, that made him look in the mirror and himself and admire his hair under the extremely and defensively normal guise of checking on his health and well-being, that made him write this sentence, and this paragraph, and that makes him write at all. 

As a matter of rhythm, the hard sensation corners me, and color and meaning all dim, along with wonder and intention, like taking a part a theater set, or watching the Matrix dissolve. And I wake up in a real world of something dim, a stunted wreck. So I need to write something, or learn to paint like those paintings I see myself in, the broken skinny men and women of Egon Schiele I have on my wall; need to make something, anything, real and lasting, concrete, you might say, that I can look at, to know that I am unique, strong, interesting, beautiful. Not whatever I really believe.

What kind of day has it been?

“Hey, winning Virginia! She COULD win Michigan!” Thanks for trying to cheer me up. 

We watched Always Sunny back at the apartment. Someone said something about how maybe we shouldn’t, because it was Pennsylvania that was fucking everything up. I hadn’t even known she had lost Pennsylvania. 

One roommate’s friend came in with an armful of Ben and Jerry’s pints, like 4-5 of them. I admire that he went to the store, saw ice cream out of the corner of his eye, and grabbed as many as would make him feel good, no matter how superficially.

I checked the news in the morning to see if it was true. I saw the purple lapels. I hit the Toro. I went back to bed and told the other person there that she had conceded. It happened. 

I couldn’t believe she wrote a book. Nobody cares, Hillary. That’s what none of them get. At this point we all know it’s only ever been about you. For you. “What happened.” We were there, for Christ’s sake.

I called all my dearest friends to let them know I loved them, and reconnected with family long gone but not lost. 

God, what a night that was. Never again.

YouTube

Is “YouTuber” the purest creative occupation of all time?

In my imagination you (the YouTuber) spend your days in cathartic cycles of pain, joyful stillness, and proto-manic drives for completion. And waking up and doing that is for you, what getting in the car, showing up for Zoom, and staying a tad frightened all day so that I don’t miss a call from my boss is for me. All tense energy that most people use feigning diligence channeled towards developing something that is all about and could only have come from inside of you. 

And, in my imagination, it’s not like being a musician, or a filmmaker, or any other creative who has to sit across desks from people in suits who hold all the cards, pretending that you don’t both know that you’re powerless, that you effectively begged for, and they hurriedly assented to, this fleeting window of time; avoiding all stifled indignity that would rise from acknowledging it. 

No, for you, all is the rich and devastating process. Or, at worst, much more of the process than in any job. Even professional adventures as independent as running a food truck or fruit stand seem like they would have more or the ritual submission of admin and logistics. You, the lucky ‘Tuber, simply concretize some little zone of your ethereal essence, in the form of an animated education video or analysis of Parasite or whatever, upload it, and so long as the algorithm doesn’t disappear you into Kafkaland, you’re done. What’s for dinner?

I’m sure any full-time YouTuber not in my imagination could tell me how life is life, that they spend as many blurry days plugging tired thoughts into formulas as I do, that the time ratio of creative fever to searching for free stock footage is the same as the ratio of fun problem solving to sitting through mystery calls. That this is only the fantasy of a funemployed seeker who just discovered Egon Schiele. 

But it seems possible – possible – that in big digital networks, we can dream up jobs made almost entirely of what psychologists say is the purest stuff of human well-being. And for an angry, aimless electorate, that would be very cool. 

Brunch and The Grove

Sitting at brunch on my first expedition to West Hollywood, watching patrons linger by the hostess podium: shoes that probably cost $6,000, a three-piece sweatsuit, a handbag that looked like an original Mondrian. Or, Sunday Evening at the pre-pandemic Grove. Exiting a valet hall made principally of dark wood and marble, wending through thick crowds of lipstick and perfume. Men with beards and olive oil skin fitting silk lapels in Zara and taking a dash of umbrage as our paths inadvertently cross. Up and over somewhere, larger-than-life images of Jordan Peele and Jessica Biel (I think it was her, though I can’t imagine what for). The former, standing with command that comes from being seen as one of the only people who can make a movie people will watch without borrowed and laundered characters; the latter, wearing some dense and opulent color pattern on a silk collar. This much maligned and exoticized province of existence known as Southern California has its culture flowing out of culs de sac and soccer fields and its other scenes of the original late 20th-century American life. But it’s also here: in temples to art, celebrated by glamor. 

I relate and support making a God out of art and culture; for raising up those to make it, for treasuring the process of creativity and its concrete outputs. But I wish they did not have to cover themselves in glitter. If only their power and success did not make them feel required to dress as baroque nobility. If only they could burrow into experiences to give meaning to life beyond the story of the world, but didn’t make “relatable” comments on Instagram, while wearing silk colors -- a head fake to participating in everyone else’s world, while confirming that they don’t. 

Because the sheer number of people; the spurt in the fountains; “Sexy Back” bumping out of Sephora; a knot of people with cell phones raised pressing in to glimpse a probably-famous person like they’re a black hole collapsing into a Singularity of recognition; all make me think, for the first time, is this place me? Can I handle this?

This is Los Angeles, my loving home. But in addition to the backwash of a wave crashing from the rest of the Earth, the world’s loose parts and aspirations, it’s a socially enacted ritual to the self, wrapped around the art at its core again and again and again until it’s something else entirely.

LA from the sky

On my LAX descent I look down and see Identical broad squares, packed with little peaked roofs. Covering the flat plain, running up to the mountains, lapping up the sides.  

So beautiful, I think. That we have found a way to construct a world we could be happy with; that we could put down stakes in history’s unfolding narrative, stop the careening, and feel strong chins. That we could build this immersive web of comfort I’m looking down on, air conditioners and smooth roads and swimming pools, and think for one minute that the circumstances of history, whether the old fires of right-wrong tyranny, or the actual fire of climate and ecological collapse, wouldn’t grow up and loom over that nice existence that we birthed right here, in these valleys far to the east of Los Angeles, like the mountains I can see behind them. From the ground, it feels like the calm surface of a happy pond. 

From the sky, it looks like a tiny raft in storm, about to get tossed. 

Yet when I see the narrow gray cable of a freeway, little black beetles gliding up and down, splitting these broad blocks of suburban living, I feel love. Love that this seething mass of the innocent and well-meaning humans, none of them who asked to exist, dared to make the clinging leap and grab onto a sense of rootedness, of life without pain. And dared to dream that it might remain.

Bad Religion

Our minds’ lives are dominated by grand, lofty intellectual climate systems. Architectures of taken-for-granted thought that are our way of knowing that everything we can and can’t see or experience is in its right place, including ourselves. Filters that translate the music of universal chaos into harmonious signals of right and wrong, purpose and failure, covering all things. They are not neutral, but impersonal forces that apply equally to everyone, against which you can establish your merit, but that cannot have feelings about you. We all carry with us the sense that there is something larger than ourselves, universal forces that govern everything, pre-exist everything, and with which we cannot converse, like the laws of physics. 

These are our ideas, systems, and institutions; things like “America” or “social justice” or “the state.” In aligning ourselves with these external governing realities, we experience a kind of broad, open sensation, that occasionally buzzes so much we experience it as strong intangibles like duty, justice, honor, righteousness, and other noble feelings. 

Harari calls them religions. And I had always assumed that humans had always experienced whatever they called “religion,” or whatever else they believed in, in this way. But then I learned about “traditional,” pre-1500, pre-Reformation Christianity in Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 by John Bossy. Here was a cult of social relationships. In which Man (you) had offended God as directly as you offended your neighbor when you slept with his wife; and God looked at you with vicious, attentive eyes like the was a man you just stabbed in the leg with a nail. To be good, or right, free of sin, was not to be harmonized with some kind of abstract, external bounty; it was to give God satisfaction for having pissed him off by eating the apple, to allow him his bloody vengeance; and to avoid any such action as creating such vengeance-demanding conflict in your community. Christ was great because he had allowed that vengeance to fall on himself, instead. 

In other words; God was just an omnipotent man wielding a tribal Germanic code of legal ethics that you were born having pissed off; one navigated a righteous life like navigating a high school cafeteria. All was personal honor and vengeance, all life taking place in the petty, reactive parts of our brains. Objective, external, overarching, impersonal truths did not seem to exist to the European mind. 

But then, Luther said, and people very quickly believed: to be good, to enter paradise, was not to do anything, to take one or another action. For God had changed. He was no longer a person, capable of personal anger and vengeance, for whom you could do things for, who would particularly notice an individual’s remorse or humiliation, who had eyes that he could turn on you in forgiveness or anger. God was now an impersonal, powerful abstraction. 

People had found the printing press in Mainz; soon, brains changed. Reality became different; articulated religion followed. Ironically, in a time that modern liberals perceive as having made God less powerful, God himself became cosmic. The possibility of universal ideas, abstract Constitutions of righteousness covering all beings was born. A sense of good, beyond whatever put you in harmony with people you might pass hundreds of times on the same muddy path in a life lived within 10 square miles, could exist. 

Other abstract realities arose alongside the Protestant, Counter-Reformation God. The market. A state that superseded the personality of its leader, to whom loyalty went beyond petty vassalage -- essentially, promises to back him up in a fight. A nation, a supernatural embodiment of the intangible essence of people with shared inheritance. 

And the narrative of what’s right in a life, of having lived well, stopped being merely to own land, build a castle, and seek vengeance (for Lords); or to avoid causing violent disturbance through conflict with your fellow peasants. But became, to somehow, become bigger than a person, not just an animal with whom one can talk or exchange looks; but to become seen somehow as a part of these new abstractions, a symbol of the state, the market or the culture made flesh. So, start a business. Run for Congress. Post on Instagram.

Now we have LOLs and little screens. Every story reproducible, mundane, vivid, constant. Every personal conversation now stored in text just around the fiber optic corner. In the way that the written word made God from a scary neighbor to a penetrating power, so has every little rivulet of shame or inspiration in our brains, expressed in short, ugly text messages, been made eternal. Our overarching truths fade, just as we’ve forgotten how to hold together as people. That is kind of sad. 

But something else will come. Luckily it will come to us without effort; it will churn up from our collective mash of brains whether or not Ross Douthat writes The Decadent Society. And I have hopes. Maybe we start to believe in some story about humans that includes all our childhood damage, all our bad smells. Maybe we develop some equanimity with respect what scares us, and find purpose and appreciation in expressing the unique totality of one’s perspective. 

Maybe we start to understand our bodies and minds as we evolved to live, and maybe we live under systems that are not celestial enforcers of some strange, universal message, but collected instruments of mutual flourishing. 

If printing let our ideas be written down, and exist in our higher minds; maybe networks will be what lets us finally see what we truly are. 

Palm trees

Gliding on the freeway, on a smooth path through the leaf and concrete tangle, countless palm trees sticking up and scattered into the distance. 

Most palm trees -- in America, like in San Francisco, or I’m pretty sure, South Carolina -- are ornamental, meaning they were placed someplace by some authority with financial upside attached to whether the place is seen as being tropical. 

In Los Angeles, it is organic. I know the irony: palm trees are not native here. Their ancestors were as much crude bait for tired, cold, rich white children from the East Coast with exotic fascinations. 

But now, not just planted down the middle of a boulevard, or in front of a hotel, university, or other mansion-like structure. But also in the yards of some whose great grandparents were from Alabama, others whose great grandparents were from cold part of Korea and who hadn’t heard of California, and other people of every race and class, washing in like a broken wave from the Pacific Rim and Mexico and Iran and Armenia and lots of other places. 

Many live in single story houses whose backyards, seen from the 10 above, are strewn with fallen gutters or other entrails of semi-decaying late-20th century home life, or whose pools have leaves sunk to bottom, whose front yards are patched and sparse. All around them, a refugee camp of commercial architecture from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. Sharp angles like the arrow on the In-N-Out sign; garish signage; strip mall parking lots. Other marks of our lack of urban planning, collective infrastructure, pleasingly-designed structures and spaces. The bright sun exposes all this, what folks from cities with “civic cultures”  might call barrenness, “a wasteland,” I’ve heard ventured. 

It’s not New York, or Washington, and all their fine statuary and manicured towers. But it’s the deposit basin of the world’s middle class aspirations; the remains of a crashing wave of the world’s collective idea of what America can offer; a shamble of dreams of common people, spread richly across the plain like icing, with palm trees sticking up.

So walk outside and feel the sun’s breath; a constant reminder for the anxiously attached that the basic force of life is not going away. And look at all those palm trees, not constructed artificially by tourist trappers, but part of the physical landscape, monuments to warmth and welcome, of everything from everywhere. 

Ayasofya

From Hagia Sophia, held in imagination, emanates this cavernous sensation, a still magnificence. I am here, at an Ikea desk, looking through plastic slats over satellite dishes to a gray art deco imitation and a bright sun; they were there, wearing cloaks and beards, probably stepping off horses into clouds of warm dust, men nearby holding swords and spears who took orders from a man still called Caesar; just a few hundred meters away from a blue sea on which sailed ships holding clay jars of wine and olive oil; walking under soaring arches I have also walked under, seeing mosaics I have seen, debating, creating, and writing down words I have sung and said over a thousand times. Shivers. I am looking directly at the point of creation of that which is at once mystical and mine.

Maybe it’s inherited from the French and English peasants, right as they decided to become crusaders (I feel it, too, in the last stanza of Allegri’s Miserere, when the C sung on the “ru” of Jeruuuuusalem peels so high it scrapes residue off the roof of your brain). A place, Eastern and exotic, known to be real, opening a physical connection to their religion, which for them monopolized all fathomable mystery and grandeur. This religion is not mine, I’m pretty sure, certainly not in any way connected to bread and wine, miracles, concrete pledges written in Nicaea or anywhere else, etc. But maybe I do hold it, not as something with such personal agency as to be assigned omnipotence, but as something that while existing one or two dimensions up from whatever is our upper limit of comrprehension, is still inside our red bodies. Whatever that is, for some reason, feels like it may live in some thicker form than in our concrete landscape, around these ancient sites. 

Or maybe in imagining these sites I’m not connecting with the actually divine, but with history itself, which I experience as as a kind of divinity. I am communing with the place that I know, intellectually, through the march of a multitude of unknowable moments, eventually resulted in me, and everyone and everything I know. Opening up a tight beam to a deep part of my past, bypassing uncountable generations, from which I inherited many things, religious, linguistic, philosophical, and otherwise. Traditions and laws and phrases and even subconscious ways of thinking. 

That it could be, in some small way, that some place so old and so grand has something to do with my life, fills the space that wonders, what place, what family, in this global community, in this never-ending global story, am I a part of? What is mine, where am I descended from? If in life I’m bored or preoccupied, in this connection, here is some warmth, some magic.

That’s what’s inside the hulking stone shoulders of this old Byzantine church. What I feel when I imagine a high tenor and gravelly baritone ensemble echoing around the shadowy columns, when I look at the the shimmering gold pieces assembled into broad landscapes, or when I consider, what it must have looked like, before light pollution, to see the dome glowing in the night sky from miles away. When I think of Constantinople, “the city,” keeper of the dim but eternal Roman flame. 

Alright, alright: what is all this cloying sanctimony about connection, faith, family, place, if not part of a fantasy of geopolitical sports, written out of the imagination of a bored choirboy, feeling placeless and cold except for singing words written millennia ago in the Middle East? 

But seeing Hagia Sophia turned back into a mosque, I feel sad. For the century in which most of the world reasoned by science and cultivated tolerance, it was a museum; it belonged to everyone. Now, it feels closed to anyone’s imagination, reserved for an exclusive purpose. Another loss in this turn of hardness and fear. 

The Turn

Tyler Cowen, in Stubborn Attachments: grabbing Earthly questions. Earthly, as in, concerning the rocks beneath our minds, the ground pre-existing all feelings. What are we doing here, as a group of people, with beliefs about these rocks, and about each other? And what am I doing here, waking up today, and tomorrow, and next year, and after I’m 40?

The story that is our answer, makes our sense of ourselves, our happiness. Usually experienced as a pre-loaded program, never thought through in the mind’s words, known as through-and-through feelings. The story is built of the same activities and goals, pleasures and pains, that it has for a century. You’ve been told this is the best anyone has ever lived, but you’re as tired as your grandfather would be if he was told his life was going to be the same for another 80 years. 

On your fake tile kitchen floor, looking at some sunny hill and tree leaves outside your second story window, stressing about whether you have time to get your oil changed before getting to the office. You don’t need another room, a heated toilet seat, a new car. What you really need is something else to do with your day. Not because you think, “getting up at a time everyone else agrees on and going to the office is what grandpa did,” and feel you need to one-up him. But because, you’re a human mind, grown to chase the seasons and delight at seeing a herd over a new bluff, or a strange waterfall. And freeways, bland music, signage in the world or on our phones that hack your fruit-sensing brain’s attentiveness to color; smooth surfaces, the gentle rush of the air conditioner, crispy skin and hot sauce; membership beneath stylized logos that make you appear bright and trustworthy to strangers; will never feel good in the way that new things feel good, will never be the exciting arrivals your brain craves. Only the relief from terror and shame at doing wrong, of leaving the tribe. 

Our sense of taste, touch, and sight are overstimulated, brain-frozen. Mental inventions: work, bosses, time itself, have taken us as far as they can. We can invent so much more. 

We can quiet, and notice ourselves; we can see others, and instead of marking, we can ask, and think, and know. With all of the scenes and tools of the world, we can sit, and let the sharp folded figures raise up and take deliberate steps from the warm, rising glow of our minds, and be shared. We can rest in awe of the strange, twisted, filling realness in everyone around us, that’s been there the whole time, behind the screen of America, the beautiful.

The Music Curves

Months, I’ve thought about the Spotificication of the music industry. How when the market for songs becomes a galaxy-space of endless, whimsical discovery, there must be more producers earning livings than when every new track had to be searched for specifically and paid for with money. And I’ve found three studies showing that on-demand streaming’s distinguishing feature, free cost of discovery, increases the consumption of less-popular artists relative to superstars by the 10s of percent.

But as though producers of off-putting sounds from small Vermont towns find their fans in big-city Texas, how many earn good livings? Enough for being a musician to seem doable to the average teenager wondering about life after school, and perfectly normal to a five year old thinking about what “work” looks like?

Here I try to come up with a reasonable range of how many artists could  earn middle-class wages from recording revenue in hypothetical future where all music listening runs through Spotify, Apple, or Amazon. Using hard info on the total amount of music listened to by the average American, a finding from a Stanford study on how listening grows and changes as listeners adopt on-demand streaming services, and a little handful of educated assumptions, I derived a conservative and generous case for the state of the music industry before and after streaming adoption. It’s an approach I’m told is used by many a consultant or financial advisor trying to provide reassuring guidance to clients where none exists, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess (SWAG). 

In both cases, allocating listens under a curve in which y = x^-1.01 yielded a visual distribution that looks reasonable enough that I’m not insane:

Here’s another way of looking at it, because the interesting part of that graph is tiny:

Under the conservative case: the maximum number of non-radio artists earning an additional $64,000-$80,000 under Spotify’s payment model (equal to 10 million listens) is 31,165. And the distribution of new listens is likely to be far more concentrated than that. If all new listens were apportioned equally to every non-radio artist, they would each get 505,901 more track plays. Enough for you to call yourself a musician, and to take a dope vacation from your day job, but not enough to quit. Assuming streaming opens the dam for a massive surge of artists who just learned Ableton but whose songs get no play, and where most growth in listens goes to artists who are already rich, very few new middle class incomes could result. 

The generous case, is well, generous. Here we have a much smaller number of artists, sharing a much larger number of new listens. Under these assumptions, a maximum number of 208,470 artists could receive additional 10 million additional track plays -- out of a total of 261,000 musicians getting any play at all, including Rihanna and Taylor Swift. In other words, almost every single artist with any listens at all would be earning around $70,000 – making this scenario completely unrealistic. 

Based on the vibes each case throws off, the most truthy conclusion I can draw is that on-demand streaming brings in a few tens of thousands of middle-class incomes’ worth of additional listens to non-famous musical artists. 

For reference, at peak nostalgia, in 1978, the automotive manufacturing industry employed about 1 million people. Since then there have been swift dips and slow climbs on that line graph, but has remained fairly consistently in the high hundreds of thousands ever since. How about food service, a kind of job so visible, so common, so (thought to be) easily obtained that it’s like the Ratata of career opportunities? In 2019, there were 2.6 million waiters working in the United States. These are the kinds of numbers you need for a job to be part of what the country really looks like, what people of any background can realistically see themselves as. 

Even if you stretched my implausible generous case to its implausibly generous limit, assuming that all additional non-radio listens were distributed in equal 10 million listen slices; even if you tripled the number of middle-class incomes that would result, to account for the fact that the bulk of artist revenue comes from tours and licensing; even if you assumed that all artists were solo acts, and had to share none of the take with bandmembers or business reps, which is the most preposterous assumption to be found here; the number of artists employed at middle class wages wouldn’t reach the trough of employment levels of the occupation that essentially defined what it means to be middle class in America.

____

A thing I don’t know, but am pretty sure I know, about creating music, or anything else: to make something unique, you have to have on some, possibly pre-cognitive level, observed, appreciated, and accepted what makes you unique. Fundamentally an act of self-knowledge and self-esteem. It’s a difficult, highs and lows journey from an open, threateningly endless sea of possibility in the beginning to a sense of relief and arrival when it’s done, the kind of journey that our brains seem conditioned to need in some form to stay sane. 

These are different sensations than what someone can expect from what usually passes as work, whatever the field. Not that no nine to five involves creativity; but in clean, steady jobs, there’s so much repeating, seeking, retreating, submitting. Done in exchange for a roof and food for the family, and maybe, depending on how it goes, a sense of dominance, in the bad way, and belonging, in the good. And perhaps a sense that by being bored in exchange for money, we are doing the right thing, when doing something wrong feels unimaginably terrifying. 

They are certainly different sensations than what we tell most children they can expect. This is Shea Serrano, the undisputed God of the stream of consciousness, telling the Dallas Morning News about how he began writing: 

““I didn’t have any interest in being a writer. I didn’t even know really that that was a job.” On the south side of San Antonio, ““that’s not a thing that they tell kids they can do. They’re just like, ‘Oh you’re going to work at the tire shop off of Highway 90’ or ... ‘You’re going to put in irrigation or paint houses or lay tile.’”

Streaming services help populate your feed with many a niche artist that wouldn’t have been there before; they help many an listener and performer get their most idiosyncratic strings of appreciation well plucked. But full market saturation of abundant music markets with frictionless discovery, at least based on what we know, will not really change how Americans think about making money; will not tell kids in South San Antonio anything new. 

____________

Making these curves was like, a four-year-old’s first flailing leap of the diving board, limbs everywhere, when it comes to trying to put numbers to the questions I’ve been mumbling about for years. I might have seen the story early if I had thought more about my reference metrics before making the curves. With about 200,000 working musicians in 2009, 1 million auto workers, and 2.6 million waiters, 49% growth in listens was never going to boost musician jobs into the auto worker tier. Next time, in the next market, I’ll be establishing the basic numbers and reasoning about them a little more before opening up Excel. 

Did I miss anything else? Are there other ways of thinking about networked markets and creative jobs? Am I describing things poorly? Math criticism is welcome, too! Help me, friends.

Don't call it a manifesto, that's such a harsh word

It seems that individuals earn income by navigating a channel lined by important people in fancy offices; the path to the American Standard of Living was straight, stiff, and white as a Doric column. But now you can turn in any direction to make a living; now anyone can make a song, a video, a skirt, or any other token of their unique desires, obsessions, and perspectives, and let a network of glass cables and transistors find the right person to give them money in exchange. Whether an important person “gets” them, whether they are rich enough to own a darkroom or a printing press, are not boom barriers in any market whose logic is managed by a global data platform. The only limit is, does anyone else on Earth’s personality make them a match for what a creator makes?

In a society where these unique desires, obsessions, and perspectives are recognized to have been created equal; where the happiness they are aimed at is everyone’s birthright to pursue; and where the time-consuming activity of work is one of our heaviest tools of this pursuit; couldn’t this new capability result in many, many more people using their internet to monetize their personalities through creative expression, to a degree that redefines art away from a mark of privilege to mainstream moneymaker? I believe it might, or at the very least, think that we’d all be better off if it did.

Data networks have only begun their door-to-door sweep through the economy. Engineers will build machines to provide all logic and brute force; with enough data these machines will fit into the most unlikely spaces, into coal seams and atop port cranes. Statistical models astride even the most curious of niche markets will decide who gets what and when for how much. Firms where people answer phones and allocate resources will survive a while; businesspeople enjoy negotiating with their account reps, and there is no pressing reason to not buy cigarettes at a bodega. But people’s behavioral attachments change, and networks matching inputs and outputs in training data to reach the optimal decision are here to stay. 

Where does this leave us fleshy humans? With our silly little feelings and intuitions, about why the most random and ethereal sounds and circumstances are cute, funny, or sad. The creation and synthesis of which will remain ours alone, bubbling up from our pungent psychology. We won’t be able to get paid by digging holes or directing traffic, but we will each be more able than ever to notice, mix, and deliver expressions of our unique selves, in forms we find familiar, like music, coaching, writing, or design, and in forms we find as unimaginable as a yoga class to a 19th century farmer. Maybe millions won’t find a person entertaining; but the networks that know us will find the thousands that find a sense of deeper recognition and expression of their own in our creations. Instead of building and carrying, the deepening and intermingling of appreciation among the unique will be one of the economy’s primary aims. 

Will we all have enough money? Not as things stand. The money value of creating inputs is pennies; of connecting those inputs with outputs, equity. Exchangers on networks beg for tips and Patreon subscriptions while network owners get richer than anyone’s ever been rich before, all while feeling that they’ve done us an enormous favor out of their genius goodwill. This has to change if we want culture and identity to be shared instead of stratified; equality will depend on a balanced relationship between networks and the acts of care and creation they float atop.

And what does this mean for America, the story? What we do and how we get paid to do it, the question of every glossy report on the “future of work,” is just the overture. How this changes how we narrate ourselves our country is the soaring aria; mass creativity can be our turn from stagnant decadence. After millennia of nothing but subsistence, being able to relax in consumptive comfort was a real thrill. But each new convenience and contraption makes us less happy each time; like with any hungover entity, the realization that the recent euphoria could not be permanent has made us pull the covers over our heads and snap at the slightest intrusion of sound or sunlight. 

We can keep stacking new forms of consumption to absurd heights, or we follow the path to greater happiness that is agreed upon by most psychologists: slow down, and offer deeper recognition and connection to ourselves and others. Creative production, delivered to perfect audiences by data networks, offers the possibility of sustaining self-actualization for everyone. In doing so, America could redefine progress – away from the expansionary religion of European modernism and towards something that’s never been done before. 

Will this make us happy forever? Nothing can. But hopefully by the time we’re tired of making art, we’ll be ready to go to space and make subsistence great again. Until then, we would have a lot to do, and be proud of. 

Therapy

Jill Lepore walking back and forth on a dark stage, after purring through images America’s real history, mentions as an aside, in an answer to an audience question, that she expects a new religious revival in America, soon. 

The Great Awakening was one of the only big strokes of history that was new for me in APUSH, a cultural phenomenon separate from the home island, a crucible of American identity in the mid-18th century. The Second Great Awakening was in the early 1800s, less a thing than the first, still well-noted. My impression: religious awakenings are of the time of bonnets and horse carts and muddy roads and letters that may or may not arrive because you’re counting on some guy you met in an tavern to deliver them. We have other kinds of mass culture now; revivals are for the weirdos who don’t watch TV, who think flying is a sin. Certainly, today’s irony-besotted sinking drain of feeling about the world that would be bitterness and misanthropy if it wasn’t so squishy and apathetic, is not fertile for spiritual passion. Lepore’s was a hot take.

So what did she mean? I read her entire book (for other reasons, too), and found no such prediction. But in an obscure interview, she explained. Read all of this: 

“...I would have expected a big religious revival to explode any minute now. Because religious revivals tend to happen in the aftermath of a very significant, like, essentially, a sea-change in the body of knowledge. And, you know, or received notions of the, how we understand the natural world. So, I think the kind of, you know, the accelerating, the sort of knowledge-vault[?] metaphor of the Internet and the kind of revolution of machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the anxiety about a world of knowing that most people don't understand, at all, is just the kind of thing to set off a religious revival.”

Interesting. Plausible. What a left turn it would be in a history that loves left turns to have America or the world be swept across by some kind of spiritual fervor. Terrifying, if it's the same brand of grotesque predestinarianism that heated up the first Great Awakening’s famous sermons. Hope-ifying if it popularizes increased belief in human dignity and equality, as the second Great Awakening did by emotionally underwriting abolition. Too-good-to-be-true if it’s not Christian at all, but Buddhist-ish, some kind of popularable evolution of today’s elite mindfulness hype that makes stillness, introspection, and self knowledge a part of our inherited cultural philosophy and practice. Allow me to dream. 

Or maybe it’s already happening, in quiet, warmly-lit offices, gentle paintings on the walls, kind professionals staring patiently across from a well-stuffed armchair. And Millennials and Gen Xers, reliving their most intimately painful moments in an atmosphere of kind benevolence. 

Because maybe religion was just socially acceptable therapy, providing quiet and connection that are now best delivered professionally. In discussing low fertility rates in his new book, Ross Douthat mentioned a religious revival in late 1940s. GIs coming home from war; the sudden relief of tension after 16 years of constant crisis. I can imagine some kind of regular church, maybe Methodist, and musty. Dim lights and dark wood. A scattering of 20 or 30 somethings scattered about the available pews seating. And there’s an ex-soldier, a year or two home from the Pacific, in my minds’ eye still in uniform, with a crew cut, though of course neither probably would be true; he’s swaying slightly as hymns are sung, eyes closed during prayers. And maybe, just for those few minutes, he could see in his mind in the mud and the fear; the arms and legs and heads and bones; while feeling that, maybe here in church is a culturally acceptable place to turn inward, forgive himself, and be forgiven. 

Now there are options for my imagined soldier. In 2004, 27% of American adults had sought mental health treatment in the previous two years, many of whom sought medication alone. In 2018, a survey found that 13% of adults were in talk therapy at the time, and 28% used to be. It’s not data, but the WSJ brands Millennials “the therapy generation.” Seems like we might not need to recite creeds to find that safe space; seems like church might be outdated for reliving trauma. 

Of course church is free, while therapy is expensive. That should probably change. Fuck, who am I to compromise? That should definitely change. 

But if Jill Lepore’s promised turn towards some kind of seeking peace in the universe, takes shape as the mass of people realizing it’s ok to slow down, experience, and heal their deep and unique wounds, which inspire all manner of jealous partners and shitty bosses – well, that could be the greatest awakening of all. 

Shiny Starships

There’s the suits, which I first saw in close-up images of the astronauts’ faces in NASA’s marketing announcement. Smooth, sleek composite, in the shape of something that is supposed to cut through air. Narrow oval visors windowing onto the faces of two savagely determined men, with skills so comprehensive they could both take down a wooly mammoth and talk with the great spirits. 

There’s the starship’s interior: seats suspended in space, appearing as though they were conceived by the kinds of designers who care about how things feel to the eyes. The big, blue, glowing screens, crowded with lines of data, replete with informational images, raptly communing with the minds fo the two starpilots tapping and scrolling with casual command. 

The exterior, too: rounded and bright and smooth. Named dragon. Rocket boosters that slow themselves down in tandem to alight on the ground, like they were supporting the Millennium Falcon, coming to rest on the Cloud City landing pad. 

The fact that space flight – the only unvarnished good available to all imaginations in equal measure, the leaving of the cave, the moving to a new country to get away from an abusive school, a change in perspective when we are so, so exhausted by the view from where we are – the fact that it now looks right, that it actually resembles our century’s worth of imagination about space travel, is one of the coolest things that has ever happened in history. 

To be saying that today, on this weekend, in this year; well, what a beautiful tragedy we all live in.

Polity Paintings

Ah, good old Thomas Jefferson. His pretty round home on a hill, with warm red brick, rolling fields, sunset on the Blue Ridge. In his final credited reckoning of life, a little university, with its own private language of slow dignity. That he, the writers say, was a genius in an everything sort of way: a philosopher, a scientist, a leader, and more. That he admired France, spoke languages, and loved wine. Most importantly, that he discovered in his lab of curiosity the original, pure formula of American virtue.

Rising from all of these elements, a glowing, hot-spiced-drink-by-the-fire-at-Monticello sort of aura is endemic to his persona in mainstream memory; the cover of the well-applauded Jon Meacham biography of him is blocks of deep, burnt gold on either side of a close up portrait of his gentle, knowing smile. Washington is a tall, strong oak, Adams is a cold cup of coffee, Madison is a stack of well-worn textbooks, but Jefferson is a golden-brown crusty pie, twenty minutes out of the oven.

Maybe this is deserved; maybe he really was a charming genius. Or maybe his sprawling curiosity was innocent on its own, but was twinned with an inability to see, genuinely and habitually, beyond the self’s immediate and constant hunger to see itself everywhere the brain looks. 

Because America wasn’t a place to him; America was his art. An eclipse of reality with abstract truth; a contained, complete, and witnessable alignment of both spirit and observation. In it, he could only see what he could fit into the framed canvas of a total worldview, a rubric for all society from the soil to the potent and enduring abstractions we still hunt for behind the stars. That’s why he could say, in all seriousness, that a traveler crossing the continent from the Rockies to the East Coast in his time would ascend the complete ladder of civilization, from an absurdly homogenous imagined state of skin-wearing heathenhood to an equally absurdly homogenous most-advanced state of poor diets and psychological misfirings that were the marks of modern Western life even in this early form. 

Or that he could say that everyone but the rich should be a subsistence farmer, because only yeomen were self-reliant, and only a totally self-reliant citizenry was compatible to sufficient perfection with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: So much did he need everything in society in its little place in the political image in his mind, like the background crowds in a giant renaissance painting, or a Mandala, a perfect circle of ideas for the universe and all beings in it. 

The painting becomes the point; emergent complexity is only an obstacle to the ecstasy of realizing his vision. Slavery? He reacts with a constant state of weaselly, infuriating denial. Foreign trade? The painting depicts only total, personal material sovereignty. No room for the people who built things, or traded them overseas, or that he owned as his property. 

He had the immovable, exciting knowledge about how things could fit together, how things should fit together, that arrives from the bones, and the channeling of which into physical form is the artist’s sacred and selfish duty. We want this when the art is paints and canvass. We don’t want this when the art is a country, a seething mess of changes unforeseeable, complexity unmappable, and human lives in the balance. 

I also love wine. I also try to learn new things as much as for any good reason as to further my sense of self in the wider world. And I have my own painting: creativity, higher forms of fulfillment, self-awareness and acceptance, all make calmer, more prosperous, more forward looking citizens; creativity is enabled by platforms that might be universalizing. 

What about the whole world? What about people and stories that make my painting less glowing, more muddled?

Does not compute. 

Sunday Writing

Surprise! I helped change a tire over the weekend. Lifting up a whole car with nothing but a stinging hard grip. Hope lives in the hands and on the ground. 

But hope in the story of the world? The story we can’t really see, but that good liberals were raised to channel and identify within. To the extent that I am asked to participate my thoughts, what is there for me in that story but my pressured knot of a seam of feeling, steam of young enraged helplessness hissing from deep in the mind: at the tale of dependable triumph that modern people recline in; at the failure, the honestly enraging weakness, of continuing to find beauty and momentum in a coming turn of the tide. At the avowal of anything but insipid languishing in basic peace, resisting the pressure of the atmosphere of information. 

Our culture lives on the dependable triumph. But those ships arriving from across the galaxy without any explanation, or machinery of plot to hold them up, like the jack held up the car whose tire I changed, was a sick joke. That even when there is nothing to hold on to, this is how the movie must end, because all stories must end this way, because no matter what, we can’t imagine our story ending any other way, is a sick joke. A whimper of the identify of optimism in a world that has outgrown us. 

There is no political hope in today’s old-world catastrophe. Everyone will not become hopeful believers in community and commonwealth, as I am still, and probably always will be, yearning to believe our people are, my identity group, my Americans. There is no shock or change to the chemistry of news and affairs that does not leave us enraged, deranged, stubborn, not with hate, but with antipathy to the decency of struggle. We were powerless that November 8th, and we’re powerless now: thinkers, weighers, considerers, with soft spots, who don’t tragically mistake harshness for health.

The catastrophe, like the one of melting ice caps, only further intensifies the knowledge that millions, millions, millions of people, are broken. Broken, and frenetic, from sadness, from grief, for meaning, for courage. Grief for imagination and empowerment. Grief that lives in nice little apartment complex living rooms with carpets and refrigerators and friendly folks in and around Target parking lots. Filled only where available of certainty, comfort, privilege, and dominion.

The Sweet Spot

The most dependable weekly stack of darkish, vervey, bounce tech-space-prog-house vibes on the internet is Refresh Radio by Solid Stone. I listen every week. One day years ago my eye drifted to an episode’s play count; there were around 1,000. I followed the curious thread to his Twitter profile: just under 5,000 followers and a blank space where the blue check should be. 

No surprise in those low counts; my beats fanhood has been finely filtered. It has been a lot of years of hearing mixes roll by in the background, occasionally noticing an interesting new twist of a sound that I trace to a previously unheard-of artist with a small following. But the knowledge lingered like an aroma, that that an artist I listen to every week, whose music to me doesn’t sound faraway and strange, but steady and right, has fewer followers than there are fans at a college hockey game. 

Like any self-aware narcissist, I wonder, I feel, I know, that my experience must be significant. There has to be some Vox headline-worthy trend to my narrow taste in kick drums and basslines. Surely my Solid Stone fanhood heralds the Era of Niche, supporting a Middle Class of Creativity.

And, in my defense, an understanding friend might play through the slide reel of anecdotes hinting at an emergence of nichiness: First, the Facebook groups with lists of members longer than can be counted or named without aid of a machine, who feel as I do about Solid Stone and other producers who refine a continuous blend of interstellar space, emotion, and the daily grind. Second, another list, also longer than any human can tabulate with the naked brain, of genre and novel subgenre and other ways of classifying groups of musicians whose sounds are described by their fans in equally preposterous mixed metaphors. Each of which has their own Facebook groups and other like forms of gathering and affirmation. Third, the fact that if this were 2005, I would have no way of learning Solid Stone’s name and following his releases, and if it were 1994, if I was not a card-carrying member of a local club scene, I would have no way of knowing he even existed. 

But when it comes to judging whether something matters to America, the global project of growth and exchange, or some other abstraction I am attached to emotionally, I am like Spiros and Eton, the foreign gangsters shipping heroin by the container into Baltimore in Season 2 of The Wire, when they direct dockworker Nick to their subordinate for further reups. “We are wholesalers.” A change in national story can’t rest on a single g-pack’s worth of job creation. I don’t care that it’s easy for Facebook’s multiplicity of groups trick my brain into thinking that music consumption is becoming so well-distributed that there can now be a lot of artists making a moderate amount of money, instead of a few artists making a lot of money. 

The tip of the data says my brain is indeed tricked. The absolute number of employed “musicians and singers” (per BLS) sank between 1999 and 2016. Revenue concentration figures for the last few years have evaded me, but in 2014 the top 1 percent of artists accounted for 77 percent of sales. It feels very real that the infiniteness of Youtube and Spotify, which is supposed to facilitate discovery of artists overlooked by major labels and radio personalities, has just taken anything that attempts to carry a melody and called it a song. And that the long tail is comprised of hobby tracks with between 3 and 300 listens each, worth approximately $0.000023 in revenue to the artists. Indeed (again) the Times of London reported that 76% of tracks available for digital download failed to attract a single buyer. 

But the library size determines sales concentration. The top-consumed tracks comprise the same percentage of revenue but a much, much smaller percentage of the absolute number of titles when you increase the size of the library exponentially. In fact, relative revenue concentration could skyrocket even if the absolute number of tracks in that top-1 percentile is much larger than the top-10 percentile when library sizes were limited. The sun will still look tiny from Pluto even if you quintuple it in size. If the absolute number of artists responsible for the bulk of revenue increases significantly, then pending a spin of the Inception top to make sure I’m not in a dream of shitty intuitive logic, this could support a solid chunk of new musical livelihoods. Hopefully at least a few hundred thousand more, the range needed to become sufficiently commonplace to be accepted into the sacred scroll of what is considered normal, healthy, dignified American behavior. 

Any evidence of that? There are three datapoints suggesting that subscription streaming use increases consumption of non-superstar tracks by in the 10s of percent. But there was little comparability as to what “non-superstar” really means.

First on stage is the Spotification study I flowed about earlier in quarantine. For the faithful readers who don't remember, it found that switching from downloads to subscription streaming increased total music consumption by 49 percent, while increasing the consumption of top 500 artists by 2.4 percent. This means that Spotify shot up listens for lesser known artists by around half. 

The second bit of evidence is our familiar Rhapsody bite. Again for forgetters: in a time dominated by digital purchases, users of a zero cost to discovery subscription service listened to the bottom 99 percent of songs 68 percent of the time, but the bottom 90 percent only 22 percent of the time. That is 68 percent of listens going to artists not found at Wal-Mart; if you imagined that, say, 40 percent of listens in the 90s went to these deep tracks nationwide, a hypothetical universal subscription model the shift towards niche would be almost 30 percentage points, and some actual proportion I don’t want to figure out right now. 

Finally is a new scrap of data from Professor Laurina Zhang at the University of Western Ontario. Remember back in 2006, when you got a new computer and tried to play one of the four songs you bought on iTunes because you couldn't find them on Limewire? You would have had to enter your iTunes password to prove that you were an authorized listener. Well, in 2007 one of the four record companies controlling virtually all music production freed its library from these digital shackles. In 2009, the other three followed. 

Professor Zhang theorized that removal of Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls would make it easier to share songs, reducing the cost of discovery, and boosting consumption of less popular albums. She found that removing DRM increased sales of albums that had sold fewer than 100k copies over the previous three years by 24 percent, and by 30 for albums that had sold fewer than 25k copies in the same time. Sales of moderately and very popular albums didn’t increase or decrease at all. 

If as weak a boost to sharability as being able to email songs among friends increases long-tail sales by 30 percent, how much could more powerful discovery mechanisms, like Spotify’s playlists and rec engines, pump up long tail consumption? Other hand: removing DRM is such a weak discovery boost that it makes for a pretty soft comparison to contemporary discovery tools. 

And if discoverability does increase in consumption of non-superstar tracks of between 20 and 40 percent, for how many artists does that make the difference between making music full time and working at McDonalds, or McKinsey, or whatever other shitty place a person might work?

The Spotify study applied the increase to artists outside the top 500; the 500th most-streamed artist this week was tapped over 4M times. If the increase went to artists 500-1000, it’s probably not going to make many more musicians with mortgages. But too far down the long tail, and you’re just pumping listens for hobbyists who should keep coding by day. It’s likewise foggy to tell whether the Rhapsody increase is good news for people who aspire to both produce music and own property; it only would be so if the 2nd - 9th percentile of tracks to which a big increase was observed were made by artists right on the edge of middle class life. The under 25k sales in trailing three years benchmark of the Western Ontario study is the only absolute measure we have, and who knows how it aligns with the relative categories of the other two. There’s a “sweet spot” in the long tail and I need to find out where it is. 

I need two long tail curves with absolute consumption and revenue marked, one each for before and after Spotify. Not sure where to find them; maybe I’ll conjecture my way to my own.