No. 24
DAV I D M c L I M A N S
The very best in anti social media
M A R K S . FI S H E R
w w w. t h e b a f f l e r. c o m
No. 24
The journal that blunts the cutting edge
The journal that blunts the cutting edge
No. 24
E DI T OR I N C H I E F
John Summers 9
F OU N DI N G E DI T OR
S E N IOR E DI T OR
Thomas Frank
Chris Lehmann
9
DE SIG N A N D A R T DI R E C T ION
The Flynstitute 9
M A N AGI N G E DI T OR
Lindsey Gilbert
A S SI S TA N T E DI T OR
Rhian Sasseen
L I T E R A RY E DI T OR
Anna Summers
P OE T RY E DI T OR
Thomas Sayers Ellis
C ON T R I B U T I N G E DI T OR S
Barbara Ehrenreich Susan Faludi David Graeber George Scialabba Aaron Swartz (1986~2013) Catherine Tumber Eugenia Williamson 9 F OU N DE R S
Thomas Frank Keith White
M A R K S . FI S H E R
W
e decided to publish an issue on the theme of play, and look what happened! Sure, we pondered the eternal questions— what science doesn’t know, why fun feels so much like work, who killed JFK, et cetera— but time must have played a trick on us and accelerated, because it was December before we delivered these salvos, stories, poems, and illustrations to our printer. Sorry about that! For playing along with us, we thank Phineas Baxandall, Emily Carroll, Zach Davis, Maggie Doherty, Will Frears, Josh Glenn, Josh Humphreys, Sheldon Krimsky, Evgeny Morozov, Carolyn Oliver, David Rose, Richard Stallman, John Trumpbour, and Lisa Weidenfeld. Game on!
PA S T P U B L I S H E R
Greg Lane, 1993~2007 9 No interns were used in the making of this Baffler. The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA | thebaff ler.com © 2014 The Baffler Foundation, Inc. No part of this magazine may be republished in print or electronically without the written permission of The Baffler Foundation. That means you!
2 1 The Baffler [no.24]
q Graphic Art |
Br a d Holl a n d
The
Baffler [no.24] ! 3
Con t e n t s ( The Baffler, no. 24 ) Under the Table
The Rites of Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
John Summers
Against Merit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gabriel Zaid
ZO H A R L A Z A R
Jaron Lanier
12 13
SuccessitudesTM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . God’s Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Erik Simon
Photo Graphic
16
The Real Toy Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
HENRIK DRESCHER
Michael Wolf
The Jig Is Up!
20
The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
John Summers
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
David Gr aeber
A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a.k.a. Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Barbar a Ehrenreich
The Billionaires’ Fantasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . M A R K S . FI S H E R
Gene Seymour
Hoard d’Oeuvres: Art of the 1 Percent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Rhonda Lieber man
Play, Dammit! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Heather Havrilesky
Rage Against the Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ian Bogost
The Dollar Debauch CHRIS MULLEN
Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chris Lehmann
Lackeys
4 1 The Baffler [no.24]
50
59
63
76
88
96
104
Deal Me Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
126
The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
138
A stacked deck at the New York Times Alex Pareene
M I C H A E L D U FF Y
8
10
Nerds on the Knife Edge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6
The triumph of Vice Anne Elizabeth Moore
The Jig Is Up !
Story
118
Bcc: Dridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner
Poems
Chemical Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Timothy Donnelly
Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fanny Howe
Narcissus Tweets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Airea D. Matthews
Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with the Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company of Brooklyn 1893
Dar a Wier
It was the year we turned to dragons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Metta Sáma
What It Look Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Terr ance Hayes
A Poet’s Guide to the Assassination of JFK . . . . . . . . . . . [the Assassination of Poetry]
40
87
94 137
156 169
Feminism for Them? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
148
Tom Clancy, Military Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
157
Susan Faludi
Andrew Bacevich
Decently Downward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An appointment with John O’Hara William T. Vollmann
Grave Dance
How Sweet Is It? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
George Scialabba
Xcerpt
Feminism for Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
M E LI N DA B EC K
161
Thomas Sayers Ellis
The Literary Playground
J O N ATH O N ROS E N
Floyd Dell
K ATH E R I N E S T R E E TE R
162 166 V I C TO R J U H A SZ
154
Graphic Art
3 Mark Dancey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Mark Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Br ad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
J OS E P H C IA R D I E L LO
The
Baffler [no.24] ! 5
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The Rites of Play Competition is the legitimaIn the great game
tion device in the American system. Long ago enshrined in our laws as a mechanism for regulating goods and deciding value, competition is also our testing field for personal worth. From today’s tech entrepreneurs to yesteryear’s captains of industry, the players who emerge victorious from the contest must be pronounced meritorious too. The losers of the market game, likewise, have seemed to deserve their fate. ’Twas ever thus, but it’s hard to think of a time when the competitive ethos has so fully dominated our style of life. In the great game called America, 2014 edition, the sport of choice is ambition itself. The system may produce fewer tangible goods, but we can never praise the entrepreneurs enough—even if the specifics of their bold quests against the odds matter little to us. This is why we cheer and boo the procession of ordinary people who appear on reality TV to participate in talent shows and characterdefining contests. And it’s why we subject our schoolchildren to endless rounds of testing and spend millions of hours playing video games. Our legions of fans 6 1 The Baffler [no.24]
called America, 2014 edition,
the sport of choice is ambition itself.
9
pay ever-higher ticket prices to collectively pour into splendid, capital-intensive stadiums and arenas, to scream for their favorites in football, basketball, baseball, auto racing, and related forms of noble combat, while our sports-obsessed chief executive follows the league action from the White House. Is the fabled playing field on the level? Most people suspect not; our sports heroes, like our business stars, have never been untainted by force and fraud. Even as the myth of the self-made man took shape back in the nineteenth century, the business corporation was busily forming itself into a collective credit transaction for seizing political control of the industrial process from workers and farmers, in the name of competition. Twentieth-century monopolies wound up turning those same workers and farmers into dependent employees and salaried professionals.
And ever since, the angle of competition has turned big corporations against us. At least we have developed a tradition of “positive thinking,” a consolation prize to keep us all in the game.
Today, five years (and count-
ing) after the computer games concocted by Wall Street’s corporate players went haywire and plunged the country into a prolonged economic crisis, the system of power has no obvious justification. Yet the competitive ethos that’s long been its signature product in the field of human relations has gone positively berserk. Global corporations, not small businesses, write the rules of the market game by which we all play. Nonproductive, uncreative rent-seeking accounts for a larger-than-ever share of wealth. Yet the mythos of the self-made man has never appealed so broadly. That the traditional rites of competition would spread into every part of life when power is actually concentrated in global bureaucracies does make some sense, in a perverse sort of way. The ethos of competition was never exclusively concerned with justifying the spoils taken by life’s winners; it
S O L RO B B I N S
Double Dutch
Demand with us the freedom of play. was at least as concerned with managing the fate of the losers. To play the game of America is, inevitably, to learn how to lose. And that’s where The Baffler no. 24 cuts in, analyzing the culture of competition amid the inglorious and unglamorous social facts piling up around it. Read here of a whole city turned into a talent contest for entrepreneurs, look
9
through the trophy rooms of hedge-fund-managing art collectors (assuming none have gone to jail since we went to press). Consider how the competitive ethos determines the design of online videogames, produces self-defeating economic doctrines, infiltrates evolutionary biology, and warps science fiction novels. Not to win or lose, but to be free of the system of
winners and losers—that’s the jackpot. There were always alternatives to business. “Feminism for Men,” a 1914 essay by a forgotten writer that’s excerpted and remembered here, contains a still-subversive flourish—“the adventure of life”—that ought to be the aspiration of all our issues. So read on, demand with us the freedom of play, and enjoy.t —John Summers The
Baffler [no.24] ! 7
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Against Merit The National Lottery of
Mexico is a government institution that organizes drawings for cash prizes. Introduced in 1770, the lottery was once a monopoly that sold tickets in even the smallest of cities. It fell into decline when casinos were legalized, and now it loses money, but the government continues to support it as a device for redistributing wealth. At its height in the twentieth century, the lottery was a hugely popular symbol, a talisman. The drawings were broadcast over the radio and heard by listeners across the country with tickets in hand. The numbers were sung by a child, like a liturgy: a solemn decree read from on high. In 1921, amid the turbulence of the Mexican Revolution, the poet Ramón López Velarde went so far as to sing to the nation, “You live day to day, like a miracle, like the lottery.” The religious metaphor makes God and the Virgin the bestowers of the lottery’s miracles. A coin tossed into the air or petals plucked from a daisy are not statistical noise but a signal, a message, an exchange with eternity. When we set in motion a random mechanism (spinning an urn full of lottery tickets; 8 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Play is a simulation of need (goals, resources, rules, ambition, traps, success, or failure), happily divorced from need.
9
DAV I D SA N D LI N
letting loose a tame bird to tell our fortunes by selecting folded slips of paper; slicing a Christmas cake with a figurine baked inside; rolling dice, shuffling cards), it’s like raising an antenna to listen for a heavenly voice. It was the culture of Catholicism, after all, that invented the probability calculus. In 1654, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal proposed a method for analyzing how many tosses of a pair of dice would be likely to yield a pair of sixes. Later that same year, he had a religious awakening and entered the Port-Royal convent, where he wrote about grace and merit and came to think of existence as a gamble, with the believer’s life at stake.
Playing the lottery means
trying to make a connection with divine providence, giving God a chance to intervene in our lives, rejecting the narcissistic idea that success is due solely to our own efforts—in short, accepting grace over merit. It also means accepting a fundamental equality in which we’re all children of God, though some of us are more favored than others. Good luck is a blessing, a sign from heaven. Even bad luck acquires a deeper and more bearable meaning when it’s understood
as inscrutable divine will. Good luck is a less offensive privilege than merit. When accession to the throne is determined by birth order, the second- and third-born are considered unlucky, not unworthy. But when anyone (theoretically) can be president, the many who never become president are by definition failures. When money falls from the sky, those of few means are unlucky; when status and income are (theoretically) determined by merit, those who have less are deservedly inferior. Even when it leads to success, merit is merciless, lonely, bleak. Luck, meanwhile, is grace unbidden, whether it heaps Job with blessings or strips him of everything.
T he lottery is a yearning for
paradise: for the age of hunters and gatherers, before agriculture and work. According to Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, hunter-gatherer tribes (which still inhabit some parts of Australia) don’t work: they talk (while they’re out shopping in nature) and they play (while they’re hunting and fishing). To live like this is to be “another being” (as Johan Huizinga says of play)—not as a pause, a diversion, or a suspension of ordinary life, but as ordinary life itself.
W I L LIA M B E N GTS O N
In Catholic countries, which favor holidays over the work ethic, there’s a joke: “How can work be good when it’s God’s punishment on us?” From the Fall into work comes the modern opposition between productivity and play. The ideal, of course, is to transcend the opposition: to be happily productive. Or, as in the lottery, to reap without working, to regain the freedom of the gatherer’s paradise. The benefits of work can also be attained through play: creation, communion, freedom. Play is a simulation of
need (goals, resources, rules, ambition, traps, success, or failure), happily divorced from need. It’s like the exercise of animals who attack each other but not in earnest, or who trap something they don’t need. When we’re lucky enough to be happily productive, to have transformed need into freedom, play is an unwanted distraction. In paradise, there is no yearning for paradise. t —Gabriel Zaid Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. The
Baffler [no.24] ! 9
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THE SPOKEN WORD
Nerds on the Knife Edge people who understand it.) Silicon Valley is not an entirely new phenomenon. What’s new is the rise of a sterile nerdiness as a dominant personality. It’s almost an eschatology: the world is a giant program that we’re optimizing, and we’ll make ourselves obsolete as part of that—the grand project of the singularity. You did hear some fairly nutty thoughts from Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, people like that. But this sort of stuff has a knifeedge nerdiness to it that’s new, and it’s distinguished not so much by what it thinks of itself as by its success in imposing its pattern on everyone else. When was the birth of the nerd? One possible marker is Isaac Newton, who thought that if you could calculate, you were better than other people. The nerd personality came into its own with the arrival of computers, though there was definitely a superiority complex among rocket engineers and physicists before then. One of the things people used to say when Albert Einstein’s work first became known was, “Ooh, only six people in the world understand relativity. It’s so esoteric.” (If you talk to a physicist, the right answer is that there are zero
10 1 The Baffler [no.24]
MIT was the first place there was really a nerd culture, where you could have a whole building of nerds. I remember in the 1970s it still felt like you were in the middle of Gravity’s Rainbow or something. There was this dark, dank, World War II, hollowed-out, bombed-out feeling in the buildings. It was like encountering the ruins of a great military encampment—all those old buildings, everything stained. What I’m seeing right now is people choosing to be the same rather than different. In terms of nationalities and ethnicities, Silicon Valley is more diverse than it was thirty years ago, but cognitively it’s much more homogeneous. Everybody has the same nerd personality. It wasn’t like that back in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s become a dominant style of thinking on campuses too—there will be large classes where every kid is kind of the same.
Some New Age people
say to me, “Oh, you are so right, we don’t understand anything.” But that’s wrong too. We do understand some things. Science and technology are real. But our under-
standing is like an unfolding wave that also illuminates new areas we don’t understand. The idea that all that’s left are details to be filled in, that the computational worldview is complete, that the manifest destiny of optimizing the universe is our final project—that sort of feeling really shuts down creativity. How can you be creative if you believe that all the fundamental lines of inquiry are already established? To defend mystery is not to demand that everything be mysterious or that no mystery ever be solved. When I talk to young people with startups, they are not saying, “We’re going to do this thing and we just have a feeling it’s important, we have a feeling it will matter to people, but we don’t know why or how.” Instead, they have this airtight worldview, as though what they’re doing is dictated by the zeitgeist. But in order to have culture, there has to be some little bubble that’s not meshed with everything else, within which something can brew. And you don’t get that when your startup is routed through a giant computer. Every area of life can have its own startup, of course, but most of them today try to do the same few things. We’ll
Silicon Valley is more diverse than it was thirty years ago, but cognitively it’s much more homogeneous. Everybody has the same nerd personality.
9
ZO H A R L A Z A R
put sensors in snow cones, aggregate all the data, optimize, and then we’ll know everything about who prefers what kind of snow cone, and we’ll correlate that with their health prospects and their career prospects, and then we’ll sell that data! Fine, I think
sensors in snow cones could be great, for public health or whatever. The problem is that all the startup nerds think the same way. It’s this all-inclusive model of what will happen when we optimize within the boundary— but the boundary itself isn’t
mysterious, isn’t fuzzy. We have the appearance of diversity everywhere in the digital universe these days. In practice, there’s less diversity than ever. t —Jaron Lanier in conversation, Boston, MA, Oct. 6, 2013 The
Baffler [no.24] ! 11
FA K E A D
. . . from The Baffler no. 10 (1997)
S U C C E S S I T U D E S TM ~ Incenting the extreme professional since 1993 ~
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A Word From Our Chairman Successitudes™ began with my life-long passion for acquiring stuff—money, cars, fine cigars like this one in my mouth, chicks (of course). I learned long ago that if you want a piece of the action, you gotta strap on a pair of brass ones. Now, some inspirational merchandisers talk a good game about positive mental attitude. They’d have you festoon your office with posters telling you how life is like a golf course and paperweights telling you what T-E-A-M stands for. If that kind of candy-ass uplift makes you feel better about your dead-end middle-management job, fine. But just remember—high-net-worth individuals like myself find chunks of suckers like you in our stools every morning. And that, asshole, is why you should write for our catalog today. P.O. Box 378293, Chicago, IL 60637.
12 1 The Baffler [no.24]
—James Hatt
S AT I R E
God’s Game
It’s sadly easy to forget all
the good Christian work football does. Leaving aside the divine manifestation of a career-ending hit (how else to interpret a pregame prayer that ends in a gametime fractured spine?), there are numerous other examples of the marriage of Jesus and football. And in this season of head-snapping success for the NFL, I think it behooves us to mention just a few. (What’s more, given the skyrocketing rates of divorce, celebrating our strongest marriages is an act of public service, if only to keep hope alive.) But let’s first deal with the thorny issue of the NFL being a nonprofit, which seems a tad bearing-false-witness-ish. Many, frankly, find it hard to believe. Initially, I was among them, but once I learned commissioner Roger Goodell makes thirty million a year, I found it much more plausible that the NFL isn’t clearing a profit. Besides, if football were lucrative, it simply wouldn’t stand to reason that stadiums almost everywhere are built using taxpayer dollars. But make no mistake: of all professional sports, it’s pretty clear which one is on the Lord’s side. The NBA, after all, declares an annual
BRAD HOLLAND
war on Christmas with that December 25 game. Major League Baseball is no better, scheduling games on the Fourth of July, which is just a civic war on Christmas. The NHL, for its part, has so many Russians playing in its league that it long ago lost any right to call itself Christian. There’s plenty of cosmic fate in a football game worth bantering about, such as the perennial theological conundrum of players on both sides of the football praising the Lord for a good play.
Obviously, the Lord can’t be favoring both sides of a conflict, but for marketing purposes, it certainly benefits the Lord to have both sides praising Him; it’s sort of like the Nike swoosh on opposing uniforms. Then, too, we never can know who the Lord favors, so it really is in our best interest to assume that the Lord loves both sides equally, un-Christian-like in a football way as that may sound. It was Fisher DeBerry, former football coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy, who famously hung a Fellowship The
Baffler [no.24] ! 13
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of Christian Athletes banner in the team locker room that said, “I am a Christian first and last. . . . I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.” If the banner offended Jewish, Muslim, or atheist athletes, 14 1 The Baffler [no.24]
well, those athletes needed to ask themselves what they were doing in that locker room in the first place. After all, it wasn’t some state school locker room; it was the locker room of the U.S. Air Force
Academy, and the bond between our savior and our military shouldn’t come as a galloping shock to anyone any longer. Furthermore, the banner spoke the unvarnished truth. You see, not only was Fisher DeBerry a slave to Jesus, but he was also a servant of the truth. After Coach DeBerry hung that banner, his team lost to TCU, most of whose starters on defense were black. DeBerry candidly admitted, “Afro-American kids can run very, very well.” Back to the NFL: Yes, the noble league apparently knew its game was destroying the brains of its players and kept it a secret, but hey, when was the last time any of you told the painful, unvarnished truth to your children? And aren’t men who play a game for a living children of a sort? And I don’t say this pejoratively. After all, Jesus said that we must all be as children to enter the kingdom of heaven. What’s more, no matter how battered, broken, or concussed a football player is after a game, don’t you always see him joining others in the center of the field for a prayer? So, sure, football has done some bad things. Who among us hasn’t? But none of us should be casting any stones, although drilling an opponent in the sternum or kidney with our helmet won’t draw a flag.t
—Erik Simon
1988–2013
23 issues • 400 contributors
251 salvos • 337 illustrations
25 years 160 poems • 70 stories
The
Baffler [no.24] ! 15
* Photo gr a phic
The Real Toy Story 3 Michael Wolf
16 1 The Baffler [no. 24]
Plastic toys,
purchased secondhand from stores in California, surround photographs of factory workers in mainland China, where 75 percent of the world’s toys are made.
The
Baffler [no. 24] ! 17
The Jig is Up!
“ The great American game, they say, is Poker. Just why Real Estate should not come in for honorable mention in that way is not to be explained off hand.” —Thorstein Veblen
9
18 1 The Baffler [no. 24]
DAV I D M c LI M A N S
The
Baffler [no. 24] ! 19
Th e Ji g Is Up ! i CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan 3 John Summers
E
ver since Mark Zuckerberg reappeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 and announced that this old city had growth potential after all, the region’s public officials have been eagerly positioning themselves to ride a wave of digital startup commerce. The state’s Democratic governor, Deval Patrick, has been ardently lobbying corporate players in biotech to fall in with the Facebook titan and exploit the region’s educated workforce. Massachusetts House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo sent an open letter to Zuckerberg begging him to follow through on his comment and locate an office here. “A lot has changed in Massachusetts in the eight years since Facebook moved out,” DeLeo wrote. In 2012 legislators OK’d a $1 million “Talent Pipeline” to be run through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and allotted $50 million to a tech-and-science research matching fund, gilding an investment climate already rich with grant managers, laboratories, liberals, venture capitalists, and university degrees. New York still has Wall Street, Phoenix has housing again, and for Shreveport, Louisiana, it’s all the way with shale gas. And what do Cambridge and Greater Boston have to offer? They call it the “Innovation Economy.” It’s a neat utopia: an entire economy rigged to a framework of intellectual capital, from PhD to patent, with a startup model of rapid development taking hold of cities like Austin, Berkeley, Boulder, Las Vegas, Raleigh, and Seattle. Still, it was a Boston-area small business that successfully petitioned the White House to declare the first-ever “National Entrepreneurs’ Day” in 2010. The president 20 1 The Baffler [no.24]
proclaimed a whole “National Entrepreneurship Month” the following year (November, in case you are thinking of starting a company) and created the White House “Startup America” initiative, devoted to “cutting red tape and accelerating innovation from the lab to the marketplace.” And it’s Cambridge where you can take a stroll on the “Entrepreneur Walk of Fame,” complete with stars for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Kendall Square, in MIT’s neighborhood, has seen Amazon, Biogen, Google, Microsoft, Novartis, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson all move in or expand their office parks, research facilities, or life science laboratories since 2012, joining companies with longstanding ties to the MIT meritocracy, such as Sanofi, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Draper Laboratory. The list goes on. So does the networking—or, as this scrum for a new, worlddefining synergy of big data, big pharma, and startups is elegantly known, the “clustering.” The method is meant to wrest “competitive market advantage” (in the White House’s words) out of physical proximity. “Clustering” has spun out a miniature knowledge economy of its own around here, with brands like General Catalyst, Koa Labs, Atlas Venture, Spark Capital, Intrepid Labs, Dogpatch Labs, and Sandbox. You can’t turn a corner without encountering some fair, summit, accelerator, catalyst, meetup, incubator, or kaffeeklatsch. News of the latest triumph at the hottest innovation center is hard to miss even for a moderate consumer of media gossip. (A tidbit: Someone at the MIT Media Lab founded Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics
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What do Cambridge and Greater Boston have to offer? They call it the “Innovation Economy.”
9 startup that won the jackpot in 2013 when it was purchased by Twitter for $67.3 million!) And so the question everywhere is: Where will the next Mark Zuckerberg turn up? The Harvard Innovation Lab? StartupLab Allston? Could it be MassChallenge or Startup Institute? Maybe the New Man (and, yes, the Innovation Economy is led almost exclusively by men) launching the next millennial app or social-media doodad will be found squatting in one of the “Innovation Districts” that have been demarcated by cities like Boston and Holyoke. The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) is everyone’s best bet. Based in Kendall Square, it’s a retail office space for hundreds of startups, a moveable brainstorm that smartly takes a piece of the action, a percentage of the New America. Or as Gov. Patrick put it during a visit to CIC’s offices, it is a real incubator of wonderful ideas and economic growth for not just this neighborhood but frankly the whole of the Commonwealth and much of the country. We have been taking counsel . . . about ways that we can support this kind of economic growth, because we believe that innovation is our edge, it’s where our future lies.
On November 8, 2013, reacting to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook was expanding into Cambridge, CIC chief executive Tim Rowe nearly cried. “It’s very emotional for Cambridge and Greater Boston to have Facebook come back,” Rowe said. “It’s the one that got away.”
Feed Them Who knows what innovations will crawl from between the interlocked toes of the technol22 1 The Baffler [no.24]
ogy corporations, venture capitalists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and biologists now incubating in the nation’s creative class redoubts. Collaboration is the buzzword that sits tremulously like a fig leaf over the privatizing clusters in which America’s future is restarted. But if you think about the Innovation Economy as a model for urban development, you might find yourself wondering, How new is this future, really? The concept feels recycled because, in truth, it’s just a semantic merger of the “New Economy” mantra of the 1990s with the “Knowledge Economy” that’s ever popular in postindustrial management theory. A mix of big corporations and investorbacked startup enterprises gathers around the shared strategic value of innovation, operating in an environment rich with public resources. The triumphant arc is chronicled in the rapid development of some new product and said to be personified by a Zuckerberg or a Gates, a captain of coding brimming with cowboy grit, pressing onward into the computerized frontier and all. The hero is the one who creates something from nothing, thus resolving the eternal pundit riddles of American life like Can we keep our edge? and Are we still number one? Considering the slack in today’s economy, you can see why the consensus is encouraging the inner entrepreneur in the new generation of scientists and technologists. If innovation really is the tonic for this disease, however, and if startup entrepreneurs and their corporate uncles really do transcend partisan ideologies, then some sign of health should be visible in the communities where they cluster. And here’s one clue worth pondering: In early summer 2013, Governor Patrick signed a “tech tax” on computer services that was
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supposed to raise the money badly needed to save the region’s aging bridges, buses, roads, and subways from falling into disrepair from the additional density of Innovation Economy development. In early fall 2013, the same Governor Patrick signed a repeal of the same “tech tax.” The tech tax reversal neatly illustrates the law of economic development concealed within the Innovation Economy’s magic wand. Call it the innovator’s dogma: in response to the siren call of the future, the whole community must conform. The innovator’s dogma explains why, two months after reversing himself on the “tech tax,” Governor Patrick decided to extend the operation of the aging subways and buses until 3 a.m. on weekends, a policy generations of the region’s college students had failed to achieve. “Is this cool or what?” the Governor cooed. Others warned that maintenance workers will bear the additional pressure and that the transportation system will decrease in safety. But the governor’s special pleading knew no
On the border of Central Square, the MIT Museum, dedicated to “the possibilities and opportunities offered by science and technology,” stands next to a fraternity.
bounds: “This is about how we make the system modern for the kind of economic growth we have been experiencing and will be experiencing. The folks who work in the innovation sector—they live differently.” He then left on a ten-day trade mission to tell business leaders in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong the good news. The innovator’s dogma means making all your city’s peoples and institutions attractive to corporate professionals-in-training. That’s why the first-ever “Police Innovation Conference” convened, and why it did so inside Microsoft’s Cambridge headquarters. The conference was the dream of a former detective and public information officer who quit the force to join the startup community. The enterprising detective developed MyPD, an app that 125 police departments are using around the country. The
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It’s why the superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools has unfurled a reform program labeled “The Innovation Agenda: Educating Students for Their Future Not Our Past,” as though understanding our past were not essential to creating their future. It’s why the Cambridge Historical Society made “Innovation: How Cambridge Changed America” the theme of its benefit in 2012. And it’s why the Cambridge Science Festival is held annually, with events in the field house of the high school. The innovator’s dogma can explain why state officials have redefined art and culture to accord with the White’s House’s desire to accelerate ideas “from the lab to the marketplace.” A “Creative Industries Economy” is said by officials at the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Economic Development to be growing alongside the Innovation Economy. So they’re holding “CreativeNext Resource Meetings.” These sound laboratory-like, all right, but sort of disturbing too, when you realize that 24 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Like the sign says, this is Cheapo Records, “Your Home for Vinyl Since 1954”—in other words, one of Central Square’s distinctly un-innovative redoubts.
the “Creative Economy” acknowledges only “the enterprises and people involved in the production and distribution of goods and services in which the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional engagement of the consumer gives the product value in the marketplace.” Here’s a definition broad enough to admit every form of “content” from web marketing to film, yet so narrow as to rule out the social conditions of sympathy, cooperation, and security in which creativity thrives—and never mind classic works of the twentieth century that were born in opposition to the market for consumer taste. But the innovator’s dogma deals in the world of commodities. And Cambridge is teeming with products for solving problems we didn’t know were problems. Hence Sqrrl Data Inc., started up by a group of former National Security Agency employees. Following
You can’t turn a corner without running into some fair, summit, workshop, accelerator, catalyst, meetup, incubator, or kaffeeklatsch.
9 the entrepreneur’s playbook, the NSA technicians redeployed their government-funded spymastering to develop a commercial product that offers innovative expert protection against . . . spying. Edward Snowden’s revelations did make these privacy entrepreneurs a bit nervous. Would public anger at the NSA taint their launch? Nyet! They discovered that what the people fear the market will then control. So these savvy NSA veterans scored a big infusion of venture capital and a larger office in Cambridge as a result of the revelations. This, you see, is how innovation works. Mask political choices in the universalist rhetoric of the market. Purge the surrounding environment of social intelligence. Surge into the space with vested interests masquerading as public ones, and then call in the future for cover. Cambridge, so understood, will be little different from any other city where entrepreneurs come to model their dreams. According to Brad Feld’s Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City (2012), cities where innovation happens are divisible by two: “Leaders of startup communities have to be entrepreneurs. Everyone else is a feeder into the startup community.” In the “feeders” category are colleges and universities (“a source of fresh blood”) and governors, whose only job is to help companies grow by shaping society to suit their needs. The reason is obvious to Brad Feld. “Startups are at the core of everything we do,” he writes. “An individual’s life is a startup that
begins at birth. Every city was once a startup, as was every company, every institution, and every project. As humans, we are wired to start things.” In the long run, however, nothing we “feeders” do can ever truly satisfy the innovator’s dogma. As Feld observes, “entrepreneurs are going to do what they do, which is create new things (products, companies, jobs, and industries) out of nothing.” Brad Feld’s comically narcissistic portrayal of the entrepreneur’s prerogative hardly reflects the whole lot of them, and his version of the Innovation Economy model never quite works with its intended focus on plunder and exploitation. Still, Feld is a graduate of MIT, a successful venture capitalist, a cofounder of the prestigious accelerator fund TechStars, and a founding adviser to President Obama’s Startup America Partnership. He’s a “leader.”* The Innovation Economy’s futurist model of urban development is, in other words, propaganda for the present system of power—it’s class interest presenting itself in the guise of prosperity, and it appears to be the best that these most liberal of liberal Democrats have to offer to the nation. Where this fraternity of entrepreneurs and their municipal handlers travel to remodel society in the image of a private company, inequality is synchronized to follow, and liberalism, which once robustly opposed privileges and monopolies, provides cover for ushering out those who haven’t been given the password.
* Feld started out as a self-described “hard-core nerd” in Cambridge and then journeyed to Boulder to become a nerd leader
there. He recently made the nerd news by purchasing a house in Kansas City and lending it to the local startup community. His Startup Revolution book series includes a title that should be required reading for every urban planner thinking of inviting an Innovation Economy to set up shop within the perimeter: Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. The
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Collaboration is the buzzword that sits tremulously like a fig leaf over the privatizing clusters in which America’s future is restarted.
9 So come along, while there’s still time, and let’s tour the People’s Republic of Zuckerstan. Observe the residents fleeing, the acres being enclosed in office parks and laboratories, the moguls smiling, and the thought leaders humming tidings of the future. Be sure to notice all the ways in which the composite picture doesn’t add up to progress.
See the View, Don’t Be the View Cambridge is actually a more interesting city than all this boosterism would lead you to expect, with a great many pockets of autonomous activities and attractions. The parks are open and clean; the grocery stores, pubs, cafes, schools, hospitals, fire stations, and churches are plentiful. We have a beautiful new library. Well-established amenities such as pedestrian’s right of way and Fresh Pond (our own dedicated supply of fresh water!) make it some sort of idyll. The city’s nickname, “The People’s Republic of Cambridge,” has more than a little merit behind it. Now and then my family and I even catch sight of a rainbow flashing in the sky outside our kitchen window. At such gossamer moments, we don’t envy the knowledge workers slaving away on artificial intelligence in their labs up the street. Compared to them, we feel like the Little Prince, who needs only to move his chair a few feet to watch the sunset whenever he wants to. It’s not everything, but it’s enough. The groundwork for innovating this idyll was stirred by Question 9, a referendum that repealed rent control in Massachusetts in 1995 and began the unsettling of nearly everyone unable to compete in the housing market. Developers had tried for years to repeal 26 1 The Baffler [no.24]
the regulation in the only three cities in the state where it had remained in place—Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge. Oddly enough, business flaks could never persuade residents of those cities to voluntarily pay higher rents. So, in a fit of class pique, the Small Property Owners Association and the Massachusetts Homeowners Coalition put the question to a statewide referendum, and then sat back and watched voters in Western Massachusetts teach Eastern liberals a thing or two about economic fairness. The market has been driving the poor and the working class out of these cities ever since, and the Innovation Economy is finishing them off, cleaning house for the new guests. The cost of housing in Cambridge and Greater Boston has zoomed, with rising rents taking a growing share of dwindling low- and middle-incomes. Partly by design, partly by accident, the corporate consolidation of the housing stock will wind up leaching diversity from neighborhoods by pricing residents out and installing corporate professionals in their place. Innovation means the price of existing goes up. Not only is there no master plan from government officials to address the housing emergency, it was their master plan that caused it. Between 2010 and 2013, while the state’s leading Democratic politicians went around the country selling off the region’s neighborhoods to corporate partners in the Innovation Economy, the number of homeless people in Massachusetts rose by 14 percent. (The national number went in the opposite direction.) Significant gains in jobs outside commercial science and biotech have not materialized; indeed, the jobless rate for those who don’t have a college credential is twice that of degree-
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holders. So we can expect the Innovation Economy to send more of the region’s poorest and most vulnerable residents scrambling with their children into temporary shelters and motels. Housing is the hinge of class formation. Nearly all the Innovation Economy construction has simply added to the region’s phalanx of luxury homes, condominiums, towers, laboratories, auditoriums, and office parks. The capital investment in the machinery of invention (filtered through the region’s tax-exempt colleges, hospitals, and institutes) is staggering. The University of Massachusetts, Boston, is opening a science complex to the tune of $182 million and 220,000 square feet. Boston University is adding two buildings to its science and engineering complex, one of them seven stories tall and 150,000 square feet and the other eleven stories and 165,000 square feet. (Big, in other words.) Add another $225 million for Northeastern University’s science and research center. “We think of Boston as one large campus,” North-
This is where Novartis lives, works . . . and sends the real estate prices sky high. Thanks!
eastern president Joseph E. Aoun told the Boston Globe. Two months before President Aoun boasted of the industry’s imperial ambitions, Harvard won approval to carry out a long-delayed plan for developing 359 acres of unused land it owns in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. In addition to fortifying its Innovation Lab, Harvard will build a 60,000-square-foot, 3,000-seat basketball arena; a 200-room hotel and conference center; and three new buildings for the business school. Commercial developers once considered Cambridge a tough community to crack, due to all the smarty-pants intellectuals and community groups bleating for affordable housing and air to breathe. And it’s still true that the city is full of pesky intellectuals. According to Amazon, Cambridge was the fourth “most well-read city” in America in 2013. But residents haven’t exactly been buying up pamThe
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phlets on utopian socialism. Cambridge, in fact, ranked as Amazon’s number one market in the “Business & Investing” category. Evidently, this city of nonprofits lies awake reading business books with visions of cashing in. And this is, no doubt, one reason that neighborhood associations haven’t been able to do much more than slow the bulldozers and cranes that rip, bend, and scrape along Massachusetts Avenue, the main thoroughfare that connects MIT with the city’s Central Square. Millennium Pharmaceuticals, having overcome several years of community opposition, is now expanding into a 250,000-square-foot office and lab complex. The move enlarges a twenty-seven-acre complex (on MIT-owned land) called University Park, which comprises nine research and office buildings, a parking garage, a supermarket, and a hotel, along with restaurants and luxury apartment towers intended for “wealthy individuals and couples who want to see the view, rather than be the view,” according to the developer, Forest City Boston. 28 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Novartis, a global leader in not-curing cancer? Check. Toxic dumping, safety violations, price-gouging, bribery, and sex discrimination? You got it!
Across the street, also on MIT-owned land, the life sciences corporation Novartis is constructing office buildings and laboratory space—a 550,000-square-foot, $600 million campus designed by the architect Maya Lin. “This campus,” the company assures us, “will be a life sciences gateway and will provide an important connection between Kendall and Central Squares. It will bring vibrancy to the area with ample green space, pedestrian connection and street level retail space.” Novartis, the city’s fourth largest employer, is a central player in the Innovation Economy sweepstakes. So it’s better not to mention that it’s also a global leader in notcuring cancer, with an all-too-recent history of toxic dumping, safety violations, pricegouging, bribery, and sex discrimination. In a case it finally lost in 2013, Novartis sued the government of India for rejecting a pat-
Those who argue for a diversity of economic models are largely the dispossessed, shouting curses from the back of the moving van.
9 ent application for its cancer drug Gleevec. To prevent companies like Novartis from blocking the availability of low-cost generic drugs, Indian patent law requires applicants to show they have “significantly” improved upon previous drugs. Novartis took the case all the way to the Indian Supreme Court. In 2010 it lost a class action sexual discrimination suit brought by women sales reps and managers over pregnancy, promotion, and pay. That suit cost the company $3.3 million in compensatory damages to twelve women and $250 million in punitive damages to the larger class. The year before, Novartis made headlines by refusing to donate vaccines during the swine flu pandemic. But the company’s world headquarters in Basel is currently being redesigned after the fashion of Cambridge’s Kendall Square, complete with a Frank Gehry building. The adverse legal verdicts pile up. The innovation juggernaut rumbles on. When platoons of large rats are displaced from underground and come skulking into homes and basements, it makes for well-attended community meetings. But opposition to Innovation Economy–style development has no sure voice in the political class and only a marginal position in the city’s social structure. Property owners, who benefit from the booming real estate market, have seen their taxes remain relatively low. Out-of-state campaign donations from developers have grown to unprecedented levels in municipal elections. Those who would argue for a diversity of economic models are largely the voices of the dispossessed, shouting curses from the back of the moving van. The November 5, 2013, election for Cambridge City Council saw an
unusually lively field of candidates and four new councilors put into office, bearing many indications of discombobulation. Only 24 percent of the city’s eligible voters went to the polls, though—among the lowest turnouts ever recorded in the People’s Republic.
Smell the Funk For what does a neighborhood’s history count against the demands of the future? It’s not a question pundits dwell on when they urge concessions on behalf of stagnation-killing knowledge economies. But the fate of Central Square, the neighborhood in which Millennium and Novartis are building, is sort of important to those who live and work there, especially considering the dead-zone look of nearby Kendall Square. Confounding years of efforts to make Kendall into a neighborhood, Innovation Economy development cannot support a civic culture there. The office parks and laboratories are set back off the street. Long, barren blocks surround them. The lab workers log late hours in these zipped-up complexes, darting in and out of the neighborhood for food and drink, and not much else. All this new commercial building in Central isn’t expected to be finished until 2015. What will the neighborhood look like by then? A bedroom community for thousands of corporate professionals? The rents are already inflated, thanks to the legions of MIT and Harvard graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doubling- and tripling-up in local apartments—the region’s vast academic proletariat that tends to higher education’s other function (the teaching). Central Square has been Cambridge’s downtown, its seat of government, and a bellThe
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* G r a p hic A r t
Board Game 3 Mark Dancey
MONOPSONY! The fast-moving game of retail consolidation. Gain the ability to set the rate for your suppliers and sell to consumers at prices your competitors can’t match!
30 1 The Baffler [no.24]
mo.nop.so.ny (mə-'näp-sə-nē) noun 1. A market situation in which there is only one buyer.
The
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Cambridge is liberal enough to listen to a dildo retailer slag the poor in a fake magazine that’s not-so-obliquely campaigning to purge them.
9 wether of financial speculation since roughly the 1850s. It started attracting moneyed interest even earlier, when Boston investors realized that Cambridge was their most direct territorial route to points west and northwest. The first bridges over the Charles River dramatically reduced the distance the gentleman rulers of yore had to travel between Harvard Square and the Boston State House. By the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of first- or second-generation Irish were living in Central Square alongside rural New Englanders, Swedes, Portuguese, Poles, Russians, Jews, Greeks, and Canadians. Most worked in manufacturing and joined churches and labor organizations. In the 1960s, Sgt. Brown’s Memorial Necktie Coffeehouse organized antiwar protests and counseled draft resisters there. The political activity was made possible by the low cost of office space. To the outside world, including many students, Cambridge has seemed an academic town, monopolized by Harvard and MIT. That impression never used to be true, however; to see the diversity of community in the city, one needed only to venture beyond the campuses and walk through Central Square, which lies right in between them without belonging to either one. Over the last few years, the Mayor’s Red Ribbon Commission on the Delights and Concerns of Central Square has gathered politicos, urban planners, and small business leaders to discuss the implications of MIT’s Innovation Economy construction as it crawls past the perimeter of Kendall Square and disrupts the settled social facts of Central. The commission presents a street-by-street view of the likely effects on the neighborhood’s parking spaces, transportation depots, plazas and 32 1 The Baffler [no.24]
parks, signage, storm-water retention, street lighting, and so on. Everyone agrees Central Square is the civic center of Cambridge, the heart of the city’s collective identity. Everyone agrees it’s funky. Everyone is sure they want more creativity there, as opposed to less; they love creativity so much. And everyone wants Central Square to encourage the innovation-friendly habits of celebrating, enriching, increasing, connecting, and diversifying. This admirable consensus has an air of make-believe about it, however. Small business owners have leverage only through the Central Square Business Association, and the Cambridge City Council has leverage over the developers mainly by virtue of its mogullicensing capacities: handing out permits for parking lots and exemptions for height and density. Such powers are not nothing, but they’re pretty small-caliber ammunition, useful more for a negotiated surrender than a fighting vision. “Central Square needs a brand,” a report issued by the Red Ribbon Commission insists, chasing its own tail: A brand for Central Square is about establishing a connection, then a relationship, with those most important to your success. A brand is just the first step. . . . A brand will integrate and analyze all of the branding/ perception information collected over the past few years. It will also develop consistent, compelling core brand messaging that provides the framework for brand assets and communications tools (advertising, web site, social media, public relations, etc.) . . . We are not starting from scratch: this is not an exercise in creating an entirely new
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brand for Central Square. Rather, it’s about capturing the essence of Central Square in a compelling, consistent message architecture. After all . . . Central Square is nothing if not authentic. Its brand must be authentic, as well.
There, there, one wants to say. But the panic is real. As Novartis and Millennium maneuver corporate professionals cheek by jowl with Rodney’s Book Store and Cheapo Records, increasing everyone’s cost of existing, Central Square’s avant-garde faces the usual tragic choice of growing, compromising, or leaving. “They’re soulless, there’s no life there.” That’s what Catherine Carr Kelly, executive director of the Central Square Theater, told me when I asked her about the biotech laboratories and offices coming next door. The theater dedicates a part of each season’s program to something called the Catalyst Collaborative. Its purpose is to produce an emotional identification with science and to host discussions of ethical issues typically ignored in the normal run of innovation. The idea grew out
The outside wall of the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub. Alas, the owners expect to build high-end apartments on top.
of a salon at the home of a professor at MIT, which owns the theater’s building. The owners of the Middle East nightclub, the neighborhood’s largest and most popular creative drinking spot, decided on a less artful compromise. In October 2013 they announced a plan to build four or five floors of residential housing on top of their iconic club—but not for their employees or entertainers. The owners said they would have preferred to build spaces suitable for musicians and artists, but it’s not in the cards. Such stories could make you skeptical about the most celebrated achievement of city planners thus far: a successful request for the state to designate Central Square as an official “Cultural District.” The designation doesn’t bring any funding to offset the spike in rents, and the boundaries are arbitrary, but hey, “Cultural District” has been The
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conveyed on official government stationery, so the neighborhood’s “brand” has been determined: it’s culture—only, a culture that has no meaningful power to arrest the flight of the funky.*
Tea and Sympathy Once, I was pushing my daughter in her stroller along Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square when a man with his back against the wall and a cup in his hand began trying to wave us over. We didn’t stop. He stuck his foot out in front of the stroller’s wheel. My daughter nearly went flying, and would have landed hard on the sidewalk were it not for her restraints. Neither of us was hurt—only scared and angry, respectively. I remembered this encounter when I read comments by the owner of a local real estate company complaining that while the Innovation Economy has sent the market booming,
The man with the mustache flashing a peace sign is not to be trusted. But you already knew that.
the human streetscape is still something of a loss leader: Not long ago I was walking through Central Square with my kids after their dance class. We see this guy just lying there, completely bloodied on the sidewalk. The cops showed up and took him away. The thing is, that’s something I see consistently: three or four times a year.
Yeah, I thought to myself, ask not why the man is “just lying there”; ask why your daughter has to step over such ghastly sights “three or four times a year.” The realtor’s interview appeared in a glossy minimagazine called Scout Cambridge, which describes itself as “Direct—Vibrant—Local” for independent business interests. An issue
* Consider Cambridge Community Television (CCTV), whose three excellent channels exist due to the 5 percent federally mandated franchise fee on cable operators. Speaking to me of her long career in community television, CCTV executive director Susan Fleischmann said she sees “the potential for this industry to have been born, grow, and die in a single generation.”
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Whether Cambridge will remain liberal enough to protect its pantries, shelters, needle exchanges, and mental health programs from the housing emergency remains to be seen.
9 showed up in my mailbox in September 2013, proclaiming itself a “direct-mailed bimonthly to every home and business in Cambridge, reaching more than 47,600 postal addresses.” Infospam for the Innovation Economy, in other words. And the cover story in which the broker’s tactless interview appeared, “At a Crossroads,” contained a noticeably frank display of opinion regarding the last remaining obstacles to Cambridge’s gilded future as a playground for startup professionals. “At a Crossroads,” written by reporter Scott Kearnan, celebrates the Innovation Economy’s stimulus to “higher-end residences and mixed-use buildings” cropping up in Central Square alongside the “upscale establishments” that are now jockeying for position in the nightlife and entertainment spectrum. There was that “hipster music lounge” that closed, but thankfully it reopened as “a higher-end hipster cocktail bar.” Any local knowledge worker can join a ready-made scene at the nearby Middlesex Lounge, with its “hipster-y alt vibe.” The owners of the restaurant Pu Pu Hot Pot are reopening as Patty Chen’s Dumpling Room, “with slicker sheens and higher price tags.” But then the quest for expensive dumplings takes a disturbing turn. The numbers are down in most of what the city planners call “creative experience establishments” in Central. Scout Cambridge asks the owner of the “sleek Asian spot” Moksa for his thoughts. “Our dining room clientele is mostly in the daytime. At night there’s not a lot of activity,” he replies. “When I was young, the square was vibrant. There was so much stuff going on.”
What happened to the vibrancy? Homeless, drug-addicted, poor people began hanging around the benches and plazas, creeping around our creative peripheries, jawboning, congregating outside convenience store windows waiting for the lottery numbers, smelling bad, tripping strollers: the jerks. Central Square may now be R&D headquarters for a global cartel of life-science and tech corporations, but it’s also home to many of the city’s poor. They hobble down the same sidewalks that front Patty Chen’s Dumpling Room in order to partake of a buffet of government and social programs, from WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) to Loaves and Fishes at the First Korean Church. Like the innovation meetups dotting the neighborhood, mentors and support personnel gather around these social services, but the conversations are more about the presenttense struggle to survive than the brave new world—more tea and sympathy than beer and bullshit. Nor will the religious poor be easy to send packing. The Salvation Army owns a building in Central Square. So do the YWCA and YMCA. Leave it to Scout Cambridge and longtime small business owner Suzan Phelps—the proprietor of a sex-toy emporium called Hubba Hubba—to lay it on the line. “There are still too many bums around,” Phelps told Scout. “There are people on drugs, people who don’t work, and they roam around the square begging or sleeping on benches. And that keeps people away. It keeps money away from Central Square.” The person behind Scout Cambridge, Holli Banks, is a creative-class entrepreneur transplanted from New York to Somerville, a city The
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What does the new digital media want? Office space, for starters.
9 adjacent to Cambridge, in 2008. When she couldn’t land a job, she didn’t hang out on the street like a vagrant, for goodness’ sake: “I thought, I better come up with something to do.” She decided to give a glossy magazine a whirl, winning over independent advertisers with obnoxious cover stories like “At a Crossroads” by following the formula crystallized by city monthlies in the 1990s boom: sell transient and dislocated professionals their new metropolis as a lifestyle accessory. Somerville’s squares and enclaves now host outdoor arts and music festivals and offer delicious ethnic fare—and, yes, cupcakes. The town—whose previous claim to renown (or notoriety) was spawning the entrepreneurial, if distinctly unvibrant, career of recently convicted gangland murderer James “Whitey” Bulger—is now the sort of place where creative people can live. The new residents are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, scientists, immigrant professionals, and university department heads—you know, the kind of persons who know nothing about conniving. As the yuppies came and domesticated the place—well, maybe you can guess what happened next. In 1997, Somerville’s Davis Square made Utne Reader’s list of fifteen “hippest places to live” in the United States or Canada. And that was the beginning of the end. In 2012, local pol Frank Bakey provided NPR with an admirably clear statement of this civic renewal policy and then thoughtfully illustrated the ground-level prerequisite for innovation: “We don’t have the crime rate that we probably had years ago . . . because the troublemakers can’t afford to live here anymore.” What can you do? If you are Suzy Phelps, you pick up your bag of tricks and skedaddle. In October 2013, soon after her photograph appeared in Scout Cam36 1 The Baffler [no.24]
bridge and arrived in everyone’s mailboxes, Hubba Hubba was washed away in a tide of Innovation Economy payola. The store’s landlord, the Dance Complex, suddenly decided to upsell the space long stacked with whips, chains, and other delectables. And so, like the opening act of a countercultural war of all against all, the Dance Complex gave Hubba Hubba until Halloween to wind up its affairs. The Dance Complex explained the eviction notice with a logic that might have served as Hubba Hubba’s motto: “We saw a demand and wanted to fill it.”
Museum of Activism Cambridge is still made up of progressives and liberals, as opposed to, say, conservatives. The city is liberal in the sense that it has restaurants with names like Patty Chen’s Dumpling Room and the cosmopolitanism contrived for them tastes bold and exotic on the tongue. It is liberal in allowing life-science capitalism to run biomedical laboratories that would be illegal in some countries and unseemly in some U.S. states. And Cambridge, alas, is liberal enough to listen to a dildo retailer slagging the poor in a fake magazine that’s not so obliquely campaigning to purge them. Both the retailer and the magazine are independent. They can be assumed to be progressive. Whether Cambridge will remain liberal or progressive enough to protect its pantries, shelters, needle exchanges, and mental health programs from the housing emergency remains to be seen. I’m hopeful. Mercy for the poor won’t easily be defeated in a city with a tradition of it. But with a civic vacuum opening up between their remnants and the transient professionals, what will liberalism be good for, other than making development deals? The suppression of public discussion is
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more effective than you might think possible in a city where 44 percent of adult residents have a graduate or professional degree. In fact, there’s barely any journalism to help us figure out the basic details of what’s happening in the entrepreneur’s republic, much less what it portends. The liberal consensus believes in the higher education industry. Higher education wants innovation, not complaints. And what does journalism want? Well, the wild ride of innovation is covered by the region’s only remaining large newspaper, the Boston Globe, with hugs for the industry’s miraculous discoveries and supercool events. Here’s one entirely representative headline from the Metro section: “Flat Out, Totally Wired: Computer Hackers Match Wits at MIT, Yielding Ingenious—and Wacky—Creations.” Meanwhile, the paper’s Innovation Economy and The Hive blogs serve up “some advice for entrepreneurs, Google style,” to pick a typical example from the relentless torrent of boosterism. One day this winter, a story about how the city’s digital entrepreneurs use
The vibrant life of Zuckerstan, brought to you by the Innovation Economy.
printed business cards made the front page. (“Many people find it more efficient to slip a card to someone’s hand. Sure, the data have to be input to a device later, but some consider that extra step a plus.”) There is still a lot of good and necessary reporting in the Globe, some of it reflected in parts of this story. Yet this reader doesn’t exactly get the sense that skepticism is high on the editorial agenda, especially as new owner John W. Henry’s why-I-bought-a-newspaper essay in October 2013 dutifully trotted out the Innovation Economy’s talking points. Henry, who is also a principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, promised to “make the Globe a laboratory for major newspapers across the country,” and to “capture the vibrancy of a region on the move,” and, of course, to “seek to be at the cutting edge of solutions, cures, accountability, and results.” The kind of activist journalism that wants The
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Th e Ji g Is Up !
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to grasp the root of conflict came to life in Boston around Columbus Day 2011, after the first Occupy Boston protesters in Dewey Square were arrested and dragged off to jail. Inspired by this show of force, and by the example of the Occupied Wall Street Journal, the group called its publication the Occupy Boston Globe. That morphed into the Boston Occupier, which printed and distributed 25,000 broadsheet copies on November 18, 2011. The Boston Occupier financed these early issues with a fundraising campaign that netted all of $9,355, and then fell victim to attrition among its all-volunteer collective, halting publication in April 2013 after printing fifteen issues. It was a significant achievement, given the diffidence of the Innovation Economy’s major institutions. (Harvard didn’t exactly use OWS as a teachable moment. After the first tents went up in Harvard Yard, the school massed police officers at every gate and established security checkpoints that turned back everyone not carrying some form of Harvardissued identification.) 38 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Ian Millard, an employee at Cheapo Records on Massachusetts Avenue.
The Occupier met its fate one month after the Boston Phoenix, by then the region’s oldest and last remaining alt-weekly, ceased publishing after forty-seven years, citing financial losses too big to sustain. WFNX, the Phoenix’s radio station, also closed. Those media enterprises failed because they were organized around coverage of social problems. BostInno, a startup media website whose story is their polar opposite, has succeeded because it offers little to anybody who is not part of the Innovation Economy. It’s a fast-moving mouthpiece that publishes trend-spotting nuggets about venture capital and tech investment and duly recites the crazy doings of the region’s totally awesome entrepreneurs as if economic affairs were a football game and journalism were a matter of jazzing up press releases. The site’s founders started out in approved Zuckerstan fashion, in an expensive college
Novartis is a global leader in not-curing cancer, with an all-too recent history of toxic dumping, safety violations, price-gouging, bribery, and sex discrimination.
9 dorm room, and then scored an investment from one of their wealthy parents. BostInno was advised by BuzzFeed’s founder, himself a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and rather quickly realized the dream of every startup by getting itself acquired by a big corporation. The franchise is now moving into the highend events business with “BostInno’s Boston Fest”—and expanding to a city near you. What does the new digital media want? Office space, for starters. BostInno accepted office space from MassChallenge, a Boston-based startup accelerator (“we help entrepreneurs win”) even while covering events held by MassChallenge. The Boston Globe’s Innovation Economy columnist is among the organizers of “Unpitch Boston,” a free conference for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Conflicts of interest are a way of life in the new media future. The Innovation Hub radio show at WGBH, the region’s largest public radio and television broadcaster, is underwritten by the Harvard Innovation Lab. The show’s chirpy sycophancy trails entrepreneurs as they romp through public education, opine on the “competitiveness” of American workers, ponder their own nervy creativity, envision “America in 2050,” and establish hot spots like, well, the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is conveniently located in Allston, just down the street from WGBH’s studios. Innovation Hub was on hand to celebrate its underwriter’s opening day in 2011 and to interview the dean of the Harvard Business School as he recited the officially approved lessons from Mark Zuckerberg’s return to the campus earlier that same year. “When [Zuck-
erberg] came here and he visited,” the dean said, “I think he reimagined in his mind, he wondered, at least it made me wonder whether, if this space existed, and if he’d met the right kind of people here, could he have started Facebook across the street or could he have started it in Kendall Square?” All well and amusing, this incantation, but the Innovation Economy’s monopoly of opinion means unresolved contradictions stay unresolved. Consider the city’s vote to approve Harvard’s new Allston campus. Here’s Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust after the unanimous vote: Our plans came together drawing on the contributions of many people, over many meetings, over months and years. The Harvard Allston Task Force deserves special recognition and thanks for their guidance, input, and critical questions along the way.
Now here’s a member of that Harvard Allston Task Force, speaking on the same day: Harvard handles development with an exclusive focus on what Harvard thinks is best for Harvard. There’s never any public discussion on what does the neighborhood need.
This discrepancy could explain why Harvard doesn’t teach journalism to its undergraduates. Why should it? It’s not as if the students demand a robust independent perspective (as a glance at the Harvard Crimson can attest) or the Innovation Economy requires one. The most frequently awarded grade at Harvard is A, and Introduction to Computer Science has become one of the most popular undergraduate courses. “I think everyone is interested in The
Baffler [no.24] ! 39
Chemical Life 3 Ti mo t h y D on n el ly For example I go back to the twenty-five caged fish dropped into Snow Creek to assess the toxicity of the waters that the infamous chemical company released its wastes into over decades and how all of them, all twenty-five, lost their equilibrium more or less immediately, how three minutes later blood billowed from their gills like wild fuchsia loosened from a hedgerow four thousand miles away and how, shortly after that, all of them had finished early with this life, as did the people of Alabama who fished and swam and drank from the great Choccolocco Creek which the smaller Snow Creek fed its bad chemistry into, on and on without advisory from the many who knew, the long processions shuddering in time from church to gravesite quietly as cellophane across the lethal waters. So much life destroyed by the elements thought to have given rise to it to start with as the energy and phosphorus sent to earth by meteorites landing in hot pools of acids frothing up around the bases of volcanoes made available the enzymes needed for what science now calls chemical life, meaning the intermediary step between inorganic rock and the earth’s first-ever spontaneously formed and truly living cell, which I liken to a wide, voracious, and unblinking eyeball. First living cell, what do you have to say for yourself now? I see the dumbstruck circle of you spinning late at night tonight on my monitor billions of years before language and I head down to the nearby bodega for a sports drink when I’m practically plowed over
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by an endless garbage truck, one in whose packed bin your double might be brewing even as it narrowly whizzes me by—another take on life, this time hewn from the drizzles and perfumes of an unstoppable crapulence. For in such days it had been customary following exertion, whether heavy, half-assed, or fake critical thought through commercials, to give back to oneself by way of mass-market beverages, the body insensitive to the specifics of its losses, wanting only to be replenished. But here’s the thing. There was just one chance for life to start on earth and after that any spontaneously formed organism novel to the planet would fall prey to all the ardent preexisting organisms the instant it came into being. So you’re pretty much a celebrity, first living cell. And yet my heart is heavy. Don’t look at me, I can feel you say, it isn’t mere life that’s the problem so much as something neither I nor my offspring ever predicted. We had big plans for shit on this planet till some random event sent it in a direction we never wanted and still can’t fathom. We’re into birdsong as much as anyone, not so much all this willful endangerment. And look at you there, up all night and sweating. Wade into the world a little less deeply. Lie down in the shallows and let it stick its infinite leech mouths to whatever ails you, because much as you want to fix what is, what is wants to fix you more. Unload on it your carbon, your phosphorus. Your bones’ calcium will be good for plant life, ditto your potassium. Not to mention your hydrogen, when it escapes our atmosphere, might one day power a star.
The
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Once upon a time, Cambridge reviled noxious corporate raiding. Now, as innovation whittles away the social basis of activism, Carl Icahn is celebrated as an “activist investor.”
9 how you make large amounts of money,” the class’s teaching assistant said on the magical day Zuckerberg dropped by to chat with the students, a comment that also explains the collective swoon of the city’s liberal newspaper, blogs, TV, and radio programs. Or as Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy told a reporter in 2009 after being asked about the steep decline in interest among Harvard students in journalism as a profession, “It’s purely [a] matter of economics, because they’re not stupid.” Jones neatly points up how the innovator’s dogma has eclipsed the culture of principled activism. No, really, follow the money.
The One-HundredMillion-Dollar Question The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan might have less and less room for poor or middleincome families and no interest in alternative models of development, but innovation economies are fine places to park overaccumulating capital. The city, indeed, could hardly be more hospitable to titans of business. That the billionaire investor Carl Icahn exerts such a heavy influence over Cambridge biotechs Biogen Idec and Genzyme is some kind of strange for sure. Once upon a time, the liberal city could join the nation in reviling Icahn’s brand of speculation as noxious corporate raiding. Now, as innovation whittles away the social basis of activism, Carl Icahn is celebrated as an “activist investor.” Or consider the fossil fuel billionaire David H. Koch, enemy number one in the minds of progressives across the country for, among 42 1 The Baffler [no.24]
other things, funding organizations that deny global warming. Koch sits on the board of public television broadcaster WGBH and underwrites NOVA, its science program—and that’s the least of this entrepreneur’s involvement with the Innovation Economy. Over at MIT, the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research is an especially high-minded startup that owes its existence to a $100 million donation from, yes, David H. Koch. The March 4, 2011, dedication ceremony was headlined by MIT’s then-president Susan Hockfield, who locked eyes with the robber baron and said the following: “David, as you know well, I rarely am at a loss for words, but I simply cannot express sufficiently my gratitude for your vision, your generosity, and your enthusiasm. Thank you so much.” The audience gave him a standing ovation. Meanwhile, down in Washington, D.C., Koch Industries was lobbying the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services not to add formaldehyde to the government’s list of “known carcinogens.” One of the country’s top producers of formaldehyde is Georgia-Pacific, which is a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Koch Industries ranks high among the country’s worst belchers of dangerous chemicals. David Koch’s battle for his company’s right to pump a cancer-causing agent into our homes had been years in the making, and isn’t exactly over. How gratifying for him to attend the dedication of an institute that bears his name and to bathe in all that gratitude from the first woman president of his alma mater. Just six months before the dedication, Koch had had to quietly resign from the board of the
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National Institutes of Health after The New Yorker called adverse attention to the conflict of interest involved in his participation. Koch betook himself to MIT, which emblazoned his name on a building. “I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy,’” the baron told the New York Times about his prestige in Cambridge. “And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’” Some sort of pragmatic calculation is the only attitude the city’s liberalism permits in the presence of philanthropy as high finance. Choke down the paradox of cancer-causing Koch Industries donating a wad of money to a maybe cancer-curing Koch Institute. Weigh the costs and benefits. On one side, there’s the man’s tax-deductible donations. On the other, there’s the company’s profits as one of the largest toxic polluters in the country. Do the math, and see who comes out ahead. Only, if you are one of those poor unfortunates of contemporary history who was
In the laboratories of Zuckerstan, the future will be born. Or not. Either way, the campus will be designed by Maya Lin.
frankly never very good at math, or someone for whom corruption kindles a sense of indignation—rather than quiet, agreeable resignation—or maybe a person whose head hurts when encountering acts of staggering cynicism, well, then, you have a problem: If David Koch wants to cure cancer so badly, then why don’t his companies stop mass producing the chemicals that are known to cause it? Since this question is typically considered out of bounds in the Innovation Economy scheme of things, and since so many of its advocates are wealthy, educated, liberal do-gooders, you have to wonder if we aren’t a bit gauche even to think of it. Maybe the question is silly, a relic from pre-innovation days. Maybe commodified science and technology do, in fact, contain the ethical resources for self-correction in the matter of global warming, and the entrepreneur’s moral isolation isn’t as desolate as we’ve made it out to be. Maybe we are too The
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quick to find fault with the angels and barons of the age, too harsh in our suspicions. Wonder, not skepticism, is the preapproved response to striking displays of innovation, after all. Then there’s the memory of Aaron Swartz to remind us what can happen when skepticism takes a wrong turn down an alleyway in Zuckerstan. Swartz, you might recall from the storm of grief that followed his untimely death in January 2013, was a young computer programmer, entrepreneur, and activist on fellowship at Harvard back in 2010. He might have chosen to become a model citizen of Zuckerstan, had he not gotten himself interested in such supposedly obsolete issues as the corrupting influence of money on scientific research. “We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks,” he once wrote. “We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.” Swartz’s alleged crime, which allegedly took place at MIT in 2010, was evading its network security for the purpose of downloading about 4.8 million journal articles 44 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Rather than snapping photographs of homeless people congregating in Central Square, we give you a bus stop. Go figure.
from an academic database. Swartz, that is, had a distinctly Zuckerstanian flair for accessing unauthorized data sets. But unlike our hero Zuckerberg, he was not let off with an administrative warning from confused but tolerant elders, and he did not start up a social networking company or see his hacking made into a celebrated movie. Instead, two MIT police officers and one U.S. Secret Service agent chased Aaron Swartz into a parking lot near Central Square, cornered him, and arrested him on January 6, 2011. Swartz was arraigned in Cambridge District Court and charged with two felonies of breaking and entering MIT’s campus. The Superior Court for Middlesex County indicted him on six more felony counts, including “accessing a computer without authorization” and larceny. Then the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston,
Taking a stand for Aaron Swartz would have dragged MIT down from its rising position in the Innovation Economy’s fable of classless utopia.
9 getting in on this action, brought a more terrible federal indictment down on the head of the twenty-four-year-old. Swartz was rearrested, held in lockup, fingerprinted by the U.S. Marshals Service, and rereleased. In September 2012, he was reindicted, and now there were thirteen felony counts, including wire fraud. The negotiations that proceeded were complex. But the charges, which at one point carried a maximum penalty of ninety-five years in prison and $3 million in fines, were clearly meant to terrorize him. Swartz committed suicide in his New York apartment. And though the U.S. Attorney’s Office went off to assail other bogus threats to the sanctity of scientific data on behalf of the business class, MIT was forced by public opinion to investigate what, if any, responsibility it had for his death. Their answer, as you might expect by now, turned out to be none. The internal investigation concluded that the institute’s leadership had adopted a clear and consistent policy of “neutrality” as Swartz’s case dragged on, that it had preferred to see itself as a bystander rather than as victim or advocate. MIT, the investigation concluded, had cooperated fully with the federal prosecution, turning over evidence even before receiving subpoenas. But the school’s administration formed “no opinion” on the merits of the case. Swartz’s longstanding ties to MIT were well known to the administration. The internal investigation mentioned his frequent presence at the MIT Free Culture Group, his participation in the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle competition, and his speech before an audience of the MIT Computer Science and Arti-
ficial Intelligence Laboratory. His father was a consultant at the MIT Media Lab. When he was eighteen he was “accelerated” by the entrepreneurians at the “Y Combinator” boot camp, which took place on the campus. Arriving in Cambridge from California in June 2005, he described his first impression of the campus on his personal blog: In one of the meeting rooms I found a large box someone had built out of wood, the inside covered in foam padding. Inside was a strange-looking device, a switch, and a bunch of wires. Outside was a light (currently off ) that said “DIRECT FROM THE FUTURE”. I tried figuring out what the box was, with little success. The whole thing felt like a puzzle out of Myst or something.
A puzzle this future would remain. Swartz’s family repeatedly requested that MIT say something on his behalf during the long prosecution. But MIT refused even to announce that it had adopted neutrality. The internal investigation candidly explained why the tightlipped doctrine held through the tumult that followed the shocking end: There were very few direct contacts made with the MIT administration to encourage a change on the part of MIT from neutrality to advocacy. MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, reported regularly on the progress of the case, but this did not prompt any editorials or opinion pieces before Aaron Swartz’s suicide. Nor did people who later criticized MIT for not advocating for Aaron Swartz approach the MIT administration making the case for MIT to advocate for him before his suicide. The
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The manifest destiny of business touts innovation as if it were synonymous with progress.
9
In evaluating this passage, it may help to remember that Swartz’s two-year prosecution took place at a time when hundreds of millions of dollars were filtering into Innovation Economy institutions. His alleged downloading of academic articles may have seemed innocuous to outsiders, but the lords of these networks knew better. In a climate of imperial expansion, his infraction was too trivial to let go. Every institution that intersected with Swartz’s case in Cambridge, in fact, was a member of the Innovation Economy, but nobody had more to lose over those few years than MIT, which proceeded to overtake Harvard as the number-one-ranked university in the world. That MIT climbed to the tippity top of the influential “QS World University Rankings” from 2011 to 2013 is a testament to the strategic value of science and technology deployed in startup cities around the world, as well as the Institute’s ability to recruit major donors like David H. Koch to the cause. And it’s why, confronted by a tragedy that unfolded right under its nose, the numberone university in the world can complain that nobody lobbied it hard enough to make it do something. Taking a stand for Swartz would have dragged MIT down from its rising position in the Innovation Economy’s fable of classless utopia. Advocating leniency for this particular rule-breaking entrepreneur would have mired the school in the murky world of conflicting interests. How much safer to do nothing. What does the Innovation Economy require of MIT? To be a global pacesetter in entrepreneurship? Check. A local real-estate kingpin? Check. An institution that’s prepared to discuss what philanthropy is really for, how cultural power masquerades as “eco46 1 The Baffler [no.24]
nomic development,” or why Aaron Swartz was prosecuted? No, not really. The school’s leadership has long served patrons in the U.S. military and corporate boardrooms. During the Cold War, MIT virtually turned itself into a Pentagon division, providing the basic research and personnel for strategic radar systems, guided missiles, and the Apollo space program, spinning off companies and excelling at the strategic disciplines of electronics, aeronautics, materials science, and physics. In the 1950s the school became a byproduct of defense spending, and very much available for infiltration. The Center for International Studies (now part of the political science department) did who-knowswhat for the Central Intelligence Agency, its primary sponsor. But science is now migrating, like every other field of marketable intellectual endeavor, to the donor class. And to this shakeout MIT’s leadership brings a noticeably fine track record of adaptation, one that guarantees large parts of Cambridge will be the intellectual property of the 1 percent, the progressive city sponsored by Pentagon spending. The military and intelligence establishment, the tech industry, and MIT have been handin-glove for ages, and you can bet they are watching us from Kendall Square, neutrally. You can almost admire the technical consistency of the respective applications of institutional “neutrality” to the cases of David H. Koch and Aaron Swartz, the celebrated polluter and the despised democracy activist—the walking, talking conflict of interest and the scholar of conflicts of interest. That one went away smiling and the other wound up dead has nothing to do with MIT’s core business, which is to innovate.
The Soul of Startup City And so we arrive at the ultimate contradiction of the Innovation Economy’s mode of development. As we have observed, this new republic depends on reengineering the cultural environment. For the market’s winnings, a frame of acceptance must be created to justify the community’s losses. Irony must erode, so that corporate entrepreneurs can be presented as nonconformists; nonprofits must absorb surplus profit, so that hundreds of millions of dollars in government payments, grants, and contracts, along with tax incentives, subsidies, and exemptions, can be banked for subsequent transfer to the market; even the old method of “clustering” must sound futuristic, so that its actual origins in socialist redoubts like New York’s Greenwich Village (today an innovation hub, naturally) can be forgotten. The Innovation Economy necessitates such cultural changes, but it offers no independent argument for freely choosing them. Instead, the manifest destiny of business touts innovation as if it were synonymous with prog-
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At the corner of River Street and Massachusetts Avenue, a brick plaza, plus a man in a red hat.
ress, rather than one among its many necessary qualities, and leaves it at that. So you can be sure the next time a wealthy college dropout like Mark Zuckerberg filches a banal idea from a couple of wealthier classmates and wants to beat them to midmarket, he need not ride the golden carpet to Silicon Valley and let Stanford or Cal Tech garner all the credit and cash. In Cambridge, teams of elites will regulate the general production from startup to corporate behemoth and make it easy for him to optimize the same thing today that he optimized yesterday. The new man of the Innovation Ideology will be free to code in the morning, head to the laboratory in the afternoon, and brag after dinner, without ever having to read books. Innovation for what else? Not for art, literature, music, history, dance, sculpture, painting, philosophy, religion, poetry, or drama, the traditional means by which a diverse The
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community grows conscious and formulates its standards of value. The governor of Massachusetts won’t be stopping by your office to encourage you in your efforts at moral reasoning about philanthropy, the state legislature won’t be allocating millions of dollars in matching grants for your next novel about how the homeless live, and the websites that have replaced the newspapers won’t report on your subway concert. And there is no good reason for this, except this is how business wants it. Nor should you expect a place to live where you can pursue such pointless passions after you’ve passed through the Innovation Agenda in the public schools, gawked at the robot zoo in the field house, and suffered through your youthful set-tos with tech-toting police. In the system of rewards and incentives surrounding the Innovation Economy, talent in the fine arts has no place, and criticism is a special order of dubious. It’s not creativity unless it employs cutting-edge technology, recruits a big donor, or rewards investors. 48 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Ah, oooh, look at the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, designed by architect Frank Gehry.
Actual progress would make community benefit the objective of urban policy, rather than the unreliable byproduct of commercial competition, and remedy the dangerous cultural imbalance by universalizing the principle of subsidy. Something like Bertrand Russell’s “vagabond’s wage” proposal might perform this trick. Under Russell’s proposal, every person would be entitled to a wage “sufficient for existence but not for luxury,” in an amount large enough to remove the possibility of being distracted by hunger yet small enough not to encourage excessive idleness. “It is true that poverty is a great evil, but it is not true that material prosperity is in itself a great good,” Russell wrote. Those who understand why this is so are those from whom our most lasting discoveries and large ideas may come. Meanwhile, some form of basic income guar-
Under Bertrand Russell’s proposal, every person would be entitled to a wage “sufficient for existence but not for luxury.”
9 antee could reduce homelessness and lessen the unnatural stress of salesmanship (fewer people would feel pressured to prematurely test their talents in silly competitions). And there would be time to insist on our collective right to the city. The mechanism for funding a basic income guarantee could further entrench the very form of exchange that the Innovation Economy model is rigged to win, if the money means limitless commercial development. A lovely garden here for a crappy park there. A lotta condominiums here for a percentage of affordable units there. Millions of square feet of public space permanently enclosed in security-patrolled office parks, in exchange for a periodic festival. And what if Russell’s proposal or something like it were to succeed by spinning out a Cambridge cultural renaissance in music, art, film, literature, painting, and poetry? Then what? Another countercultural bohemia could serve as the avant-garde of consumerism, developing all the new forms of expression and pleasure to be simulated by the next generation of corporate technologists and monetized by the next generation of investors. But at the very least, a campaign would highlight the entrepreneur’s utter dependence on unpaid labor and public goods and give us time to come up with alternative forms of social change that do not continue to deplete the diversity of the human environment. Every city changes in multiple ways at once, of course, and, if you hang on long enough to see entrepreneurs blow in and out, you can find surprises lying between the feeders and the leaders. This much we discovered during a routine conversation with our landlord several years ago.
For a long time we had assumed he charges us abnormally low rent because he is one of those bleeding-heart liberals for which the city is famous. Not exactly, as it turns out. We learned his father and mother had immigrated to Cambridge from Brazil half a century ago, back when a robust working class called the city home. Eventually his parents realized their portion of the American Dream, even saving enough money to purchase a small residential building in which generations of families, including ours, went on to live happily on the lower end of the scale. All along, they kept the rent affordable. Now they’re gone, and their kind of Cambridge is also going; still, their son—our landlord—upholds family tradition and refuses to give in to greed. You know, that sort of thing may save this city yet.t
P. S . M U E L L ER
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! i FREE THOUGHT
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? 3 David Gr aeber
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y friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing. And so it proceeded, in a vast circle, with what must have been a vast expenditure of energy, for what seemed like absolutely no reason at all. “All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder. “Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?” Most of us, hearing this story, would insist on proof. How do we know the worm was playing? Perhaps the invisible circles it traced in the air were really just a search for some unknown sort of prey. Or a mating ritual. Can we prove they weren’t? Even if the worm was playing, how do we know this form of play did not serve some ultimately practical purpose: exercise, or self-training for some possible future inchworm emergency? This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well. Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive suc50 1 The Baffler [no.24]
cess—unless one can absolutely prove that it isn’t, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by. I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I’m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms— which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be. That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It’s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some longterm survival or reproductive function. Despite all this, those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs,
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it. Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?
Survival of the Misfits The tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science. Charles Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons. Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe. The stakes of this new view of nature as the theater for a brutal struggle for existence were high, and objections registered very early on. An alternative school of Darwinism emerged in Russia emphasizing cooperation, not competition, as the driver of evolutionary change. In 1902 this approach found a voice in a popular book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by naturalist and revolutionary anarchist pamphleteer Peter Kropotkin. In an explicit riposte to social Darwinists, Kropotkin argued that the entire theoretical basis for Social Darwinism was wrong: those species that cooperate most effectively tend to be the most competitive in the long run. Kropotkin, born a prince (he renounced his title as a young man), spent many years in Siberia as a natural52 1 The Baffler [no.24]
ist and explorer before being imprisoned for revolutionary agitation, escaping, and fleeing to London. Mutual Aid grew from a series of essays written in response to Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-known Social Darwinist, and summarized the Russian understanding of the day, which was that while competition was undoubtedly one factor driving both natural and social evolution, the role of cooperation was ultimately decisive. The Russian challenge was taken quite seriously in twentieth-century biology—particularly among the emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary psychology—even if it was rarely mentioned by name. It came, instead, to be subsumed under the broader “problem of altruism”—another phrase borrowed from the economists, and one that spills over into arguments among “rational choice” theorists in the social sciences. This was the question that already troubled Darwin: Why should animals ever sacrifice their individual advantage for others? Because no one can deny that they sometimes do. Why should a herd animal draw potentially lethal attention to himself by alerting his fellows a predator is coming? Why should worker bees kill themselves to protect their hive? If to advance a scientific explanation of any behavior means to attribute rational, maximizing motives, then what, precisely, was a kamikaze bee trying to maximize? We all know the eventual answer, which the discovery of genes made possible. Animals were simply trying to maximize the propagation of their own genetic codes. Curiously, this view—which eventually came to be referred to as neo-Darwinian—was developed largely by figures who considered themselves radicals of one sort or another. Jack Haldane, a Marxist biologist, was already trying to annoy moralists in the 1930s by quipping that, like any biological entity, he’d be happy to sacrifice his life for “two brothers or eight cousins.” The epitome of this line of thought came with militant atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish
The tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science.
9 Gene—a work that insisted all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes that, for some reason no one could quite explain, acted like “successful Chicago gangsters,” ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves. Such descriptions were typically qualified by remarks like, “Of course, this is just a metaphor, genes don’t really want or do anything.” But in reality, the neoDarwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed. As a result, the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If oldschool Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth. This, anyway, is how the Russian challenge was understood. Kropotkin’s actual argument is far more interesting. Much of it, for instance, is concerned with how animal cooperation often has nothing to do with survival or reproduction, but is a form of pleasure in itself. “To take flight in flocks merely for pleasure is quite common among all sorts of birds,” he writes. Kropotkin multiplies examples of social play: pairs of vultures wheeling about for their own entertainment, hares so keen to box with other species that they occasionally
(and unwisely) approach foxes, flocks of birds performing military-style maneuvers, bands of squirrels coming together for wrestling and similar games: We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces—“the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species—in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.
To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle. Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence The
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Why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA, but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or an electromagnetic field?
9 freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.” If so, and if Kropotkin was right, then glimmers of freedom, or even of moral life, begin to appear everywhere around us. It’s hardly surprising, then, that this aspect of Kropotkin’s argument was ignored by the neo-Darwinists. Unlike “the problem of altruism,” cooperation for pleasure, as an end in itself, simply could not be recuperated for ideological purposes. In fact, the version of the struggle for existence that emerged over the twentieth century had even less room for play than the older Victorian one. Herbert Spencer himself had no problem with the idea of animal play as purposeless, a mere enjoyment of surplus energy. Just as a successful industrialist or salesman could go home and play a nice game of cribbage or polo, why should those animals that succeeded in the struggle for existence not also have a bit of fun? But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.
Why Me? It’s not just that scientists are reluctant to set out on a path that might lead them to see play—and therefore the seeds of self-consciousness, freedom, and moral life—among animals. Many are finding it increasingly difficult to come up with justifications for ascribing any of these things even to human 54 1 The Baffler [no.24]
beings. Once you reduce all living beings to the equivalent of market actors, rational calculating machines trying to propagate their genetic code, you accept that not only the cells that make up our bodies, but whatever beings are our immediate ancestors, lacked anything even remotely like self-consciousness, freedom, or moral life—which makes it hard to understand how or why consciousness (a mind, a soul) could ever have evolved in the first place. American philosopher Daniel Dennett frames the problem quite lucidly. Take lobsters, he argues—they’re just robots. Lobsters can get by with no sense of self at all. You can’t ask what it’s like to be a lobster. It’s not like anything. They have nothing that even resembles consciousness; they’re machines. But if this is so, Dennett argues, then the same must be assumed all the way up the evolutionary scale of complexity, from the living cells that make up our bodies to such elaborate creatures as monkeys and elephants, who, for all their apparently human-like qualities, cannot be proved to think about what they do. That is, until suddenly, Dennett gets to humans, which—while they are certainly gliding around on autopilot at least 95 percent of the time—nonetheless do appear to have this “me,” this conscious self grafted on top of them, that occasionally shows up to take supervisory notice, intervening to tell the system to look for a new job, quit smoking, or write an academic paper about the origins of consciousness. In Dennett’s formulation, Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots. Somehow, the trillions of robotic (and unconscious) cells that compose our
bodies organize themselves into interacting systems that sustain the activities traditionally allocated to the soul, the ego or self. But since we have already granted that simple robots are unconscious (if toasters and thermostats and telephones are unconscious), why couldn’t teams of such robots do their fancier projects without having to compose me? If the immune system has a mind of its own, and the hand–eye coordination circuit that picks berries has a mind of its own, why bother making a super-mind to supervise all this?
Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage. (If so, wouldn’t foxes also be conscious?) But the question grows more difficult by an order of magnitude when you ask how it happens—the “hard problem of consciousness,” as David Chalmers calls it. How do apparently robotic cells and systems combine in such a way as to have qualitative experiences: to feel dampness, savor wine, adore cumbia but be indifferent to salsa? Some scientists are honest enough to admit they don’t have the slightest idea how to account for experiences like these, and suspect they never will.
Do the Electron(s) Dance? There is a way out of the dilemma, and the first step is to consider that our starting point could be wrong. Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point
became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.) But in fact, scientific observation has revealed that even lobsters engage in some forms of play—manipulating objects, for instance, possibly just for the pleasure of doing so. If that is the case, to call such creatures “robots” would be to shear the word “robot” of its meaning. Machines don’t just fool around. But if living creatures are not robots after all, many of these apparently thorny questions instantly dissolve away. What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”? This is not nearly as crazy as it might sound. Philosophers of science, faced with the puzzle of how life might emerge from dead matter or how conscious beings might evolve from microbes, have developed two types of explanations. The first consists of what’s called emergentism. The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before. In this way, the laws of chemistry can be said to be emergent from physics: the laws of chemistry presuppose the laws of physics, but can’t simply be reduced to them. In the same way, the laws of biology emerge from chemistry: one obviously needs to understand the chemical components of a fish to understand how it swims, but chemical components will never provide a full explanation. In the same way, the human mind can be said to be emergent from the cells that make it up. Those who hold the second position, usually called panpsychism or panexperientialism, agree that all this may be true but argue that emergence is not enough. As British philosopher Galen Strawson recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much work. Something has to be there already, on every level of material existence, even that of subatomic particles—something, however minimal and embryonic, that does some of the things we are used to thinking of life (and even mind) as doing—in order for that something to be organized on more and more complex levels to eventually produce selfconscious beings. That “something” might be very minimal indeed: some very rudimentary sense of responsiveness to one’s environment, something like anticipation, something like memory. However rudimentary, it would have to exist for self-organizing systems like atoms or molecules to self-organize in the first place. All sorts of questions are at stake in the debate, including the hoary problem of free will. As innumerable adolescents have pondered— often while stoned and first contemplating the mysteries of the universe—if the movements of the particles that make up our brains are already determined by natural laws, then how can we be said to have free will? The standard 56 1 The Baffler [no.24]
answer is that we have known since Heisenberg that the movements of atomic particles are not predetermined; quantum physics can predict to which positions electrons, for instance, will tend to jump, in aggregate, in a given situation, but it is impossible to predict which way any particular electron will jump in any particular instance. Problem solved. Except not really—something’s still missing. If all this means is that the particles which make up our brains jump around randomly, one would still have to imagine some immaterial, metaphysical entity (“mind”) that intervenes to guide the neurons in nonrandom directions. But that would be circular: you’d need to already have a mind to make your brain act like a mind. If those motions are not random, in contrast, you can at least begin to think about a material explanation. And the presence of endless forms of self-organization in nature—structures maintaining themselves in equilibrium within their environments, from electromagnetic fields to processes of crystallization—does give panpsychists a great deal of material to work with. True, they argue, you can insist that all these entities must either simply be “obeying” natural laws (laws whose existence does not itself need to be explained) or just moving completely randomly . . . but if you do, it’s really only because you’ve decided that’s the only way you are willing to look at it. And it leaves the fact that you have a mind capable of making such decisions an utter mystery. Granted, this approach has always been the minority position. During much of the twentieth century, it was put aside completely. It’s easy enough to make fun of. (“Wait, you aren’t seriously suggesting that tables can think?” No, actually, no one’s suggesting that; the argument is that those self-organizing elements that make up tables, such as atoms, evince extremely simple forms of the qualities that, on an exponentially more complex level, we consider thought.) But in recent years, especially
Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain “why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun.
9 with the newfound popularity, in some scientific circles, of the ideas of philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), we have begun to see something of a revival. Curiously, it’s largely physicists who have proved receptive to such ideas. (Also mathematicians—perhaps unsurprisingly, since Peirce and Whitehead themselves both began their careers as mathematicians.) Physicists are more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists—partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics. They are the poets of the scientific world. If one is already willing to embrace thirteen-dimensional objects or an endless number of alternative universes, or to casually suggest that 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and energy about whose properties we know nothing, it’s perhaps not too much of a leap to also contemplate the possibility that subatomic particles have “free will” or even experiences. And indeed, the existence of freedom on the subatomic level is currently a heated question of debate. Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience,
something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well. Why do most of us, then, immediately recoil at such conclusions? Why do they seem crazy and unscientific? Or more to the point, why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
Swim with the Fishes Let us imagine a principle. Call it a principle of freedom—or, since Latinate constructions tend to carry more weight in such matters, call it a principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to beThe
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! come an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways. But if nothing else, it would help explain what we actually observe, such as why, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the universe seems to be getting more, rather than less, complex. Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain—as the title of one recent book has it—“why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could. I don’t deny that what I’ve presented so far is a savage simplification of very complicated issues. I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere. Nor, I think, does seeing play as a principle of nature necessarily mean adopting any sort of milky utopian view. The play principle can help explain why sex is fun, but it can also explain why cruelty is fun. (As anyone who has watched a cat play with a mouse can attest, a lot of animal play is not particularly nice.) But it gives us ground to unthink the world around us. Years ago, when I taught at Yale, I would sometimes assign a reading containing a famous Taoist story. I offered an automatic “A” to any student who could tell me why the last line made sense. (None ever succeeded.) Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling on a bridge over the River Hao, when the former observed, “See how the minnows dart between the rocks! Such is the happiness of fishes.” “You not being a fish,” said Huizi, “how can you possibly know what makes fish happy?”
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“And you not being I,” said Zhuangzi, “how can you know that I don’t know what makes fish happy?” “If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,” replied Huizi, “does it not follow from that very fact that you, not being a fish, cannot know what makes fish happy?” “Let us go back,” said Zhuangzi, “to your original question. You asked me how I knew what makes fish happy. The very fact you asked shows that you knew I knew—as I did know, from my own feelings on this bridge.”
The anecdote is usually taken as a confrontation between two irreconcilable approaches to the world: the logician versus the mystic. But if that’s true, then why did Zhuangzi, who wrote it down, show himself to be defeated by his logician friend? After thinking about the story for years, it struck me that this was the entire point. By all accounts, Zhuangzi and Huizi were the best of friends. They liked to spend hours arguing like this. Surely, that was what Zhuangzi was really getting at. We can each understand what the other is feeling because, arguing about the fish, we are doing exactly what the fish are doing: having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it. Engaging in a form of play. The very fact that you felt compelled to try to beat me in an argument, and were so happy to be able to do so, shows that the premise you were arguing must be false. Since if even philosophers are motivated primarily by such pleasures, by the exercise of their highest powers simply for the sake of doing so, then surely this is a principle that exists on every level of nature—which is why I could spontaneously identify it, too, in fish. Zhuangzi was right. So was June Thunderstorm. Our minds are just a part of nature. We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing. Now wasn’t that fun? t
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ationalists tend to frown upon group activities that seem to serve no evi dent biological or political purpose, like the drumming and masking so often indulged in by protest movements like Occupy Wall Street. Or, for a more historically venerable example, consider the reaction of European conquerors and missionaries to the shocking spectacles they encountered during the “age of exploration.” Almost everywhere they went—from Africa to the Western plains of America, from Polynesia to the Indian subcontinent—Europeans came across native peoples engaged in ecstatic rituals involving dancing, drumming, body-painting, masks, costumes, and feasting. Failing to notice the parallels between these exuberant native rituals and the traditional carnivals of Europe, missionaries tended to explain them as outbreaks of demonic possession, or as proof that the natives were not human at all, only “savages.” Later, twentieth-century anthropologists bewailed the apparent waste of energy and resources represented by these ubiquitous practices, and not just the excesses of calorically profligate dances. Painstaking preparation went into the design of costumes and masks, the invention of new tunes and dance steps, the production of favorite foods—all representing sunk opportunity costs, in this zero-sum view: energies that might have been more rationally expended on hunting, gathering, or horticulture. There had to be some purpose, or at least some function, for these costly and economically nonproductive rituals, and anthropologists soon hit on the notion that they were re-
quired for “social cohesion.” Obviously, doing something together, something that was fun and sometimes ecstatic to the point of trance, deepens the ties among individuals, perhaps facilitating productive collective enterprises, such as agriculture or defense. This was fine, from the anthropological point of view, as long as the festivities remained “liminal,” as in Victor Turner’s judgment, or peripheral to a society’s more serious undertakings. But social cohesion is hardly served by the more agonistic elements of traditional festivities. Even in the most peaceable, homogeneous cultures, there may be competition over dance steps and bodily decoration, as well as sexual rivalries and attempts to settle old scores. In the steeply class-divided towns of early modern Europe, carnivals and other festivities easily tipped over into rebellions against the local aristocracy, and while rebellions may represent social progress, they do not exactly represent “cohesion.” In the Caribbean, slaves seized on carnival as an occasion for uprisings, which is one reason colonialists came to fear the sound of drums. When I attended the 2008 carnival in Trinidad, I saw plenty of convivial dancing, singing, costuming, and playacting, but the blowout also ended with a body count of five, along with twenty wounded in shootings, stabbings, or beatings. So maybe carnival and ecstatic rituals serve no rational purpose and have no single sociological “function.” They are just something that people do, and, judging from Neolithic rock art depicting circle and line dances, they are something that people have done for thousands of years. The best category for such The
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! undertakings may be play, or exertion for the sheer pleasure of it. If that’s the case, then we have to ask why it has been so difficult for observers, especially perhaps white bourgeois Europeans, to recognize play as a time-honored category of experience. Some critics (such as David Graeber in this issue of The Baffler) place the blame on laissezfaire economic theory, which postulates a Homo economicus whose actions are calculated to result in maximal individual advantage—a notion that, Graeber suggests, infiltrated science through Darwinism. From an economic perspective, the carnival celebrant is as misguided as the inchworm leaping apparently aimlessly from stalk to stalk; each of them should be more productively engaged—gathering food, or sharpening weapons, or finding mates. But I would say that the roots of our short-sightedness about play range far beyond economics, that they extend into all of Western science, and that what is at stake here is ultimately even deeper than play. For the last few hundred years, Western science has been on a mission to crush all forms of agency, which I mean in the philosophical sense as the capacity for action. Scientists never allowed that hydrogen atoms might lust after oxygen atoms or that living creatures might swim and run and fly for the fun of it. The goal of science was always to replace agency—or whim or desire—with deterministic mechanisms: Atoms were compelled to unite by their configurations of electrons. Birds flew to find food or escape from predators, and the ones that failed to do so were eliminated by natural selection. Whatever moved or flew or otherwise acted was itself inert, acting only in obedience to unseen forces or the “laws of nature,” although the source of these laws was never explained. Animals, as Descartes and generations of scientists insisted, were machines for consumption and reproduction, and humans, especially those of “inferior” class and races, were not much better. 60 1 The Baffler [no.24]
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was educated in this scientific tradition, ending up in cell biology, which proposed that you cannot understand, say, the flight of a hummingbird until you have killed the bird, cut its wing muscles into slices a few microns thick, and subjected them to electron microscopy. Thus, a kind of unacknowledged necrophilia runs through modern, capital-intensive biology: to study something you first have to kill it. You know you have “understood” it when you arrive at a theoretical description that contains no hint of agency—just a series of mechanisms involving organelles, which you have isolated through high-speed centrifugation, and molecules, identified by a series of fractionation processes. The hummingbird’s speed and grace is explained by the density of mitochondria in its wing muscles, leading to an abundant flow of ATP to the myosin. Similarly, maybe the inchworm’s dance will eventually yield to the dissector’s knife, banishing all notions of play or agency or will. As for humans, individual scientists usually hedge on the subject of whether humans possess free will, but the long-term trend has been to extinguish it to an occasional flicker. Twentieth-century psychology, for example, postulated that humans act in response to instincts, like animals, or that they are driven by “drives.” Economics, if it can be called a science, sees human action springing from rational calculations that are performed to fulfill biological needs, which themselves arise from the buzz of atoms and the jostling of macromolecules. No one, then, is free. Everything happens “for a reason” as part of some vast, insensate, cosmic mechanism. Insofar as human consciousness survives the gaze of mechanistic biology, it is a solitary beacon in an otherwise dead world. As the great molecular biologist Jacques Monod observed, as if surveying the wreckage: “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe.” But science itself has been changing, and not because of any philosophical unease about
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! the paradox of “man’s” existence in an otherwise dead world. It was simply overwhelmed by new empirical evidence, starting with studies of the photoelectric effect that led, in the early twentieth century, to quantum mechanics and the shocking realization that electrons move as if by chance or, to risk the dread charge of anthropomorphism, by choice. Then came, late in the twentieth century, the equally paradigmchallenging formulations of nonlinear dynamics—or, as it is more sensationally termed, chaos theory. Put simply, very small differences in starting conditions can lead to huge differences in effects, which is why, among other things, we cannot hope to predict the weather with total confidence. Biological systems also turn out to be mathematically nonlinear, often better described by algorithms than by static (and effectively deterministic) equations. It turns out that patterns can arise out of muddle; microscopic events can synchronize to produce macroscopic effects. On a less theoretical level, science finally seems to be coming around to acknowledging the existence of nonhuman agency, at least
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in the case of nonhuman animals. Here, too, the empirical evidence is decisive: despite our Cartesian brainwashing, we can all observe that animals do not always perform according to mechanistic expectations—that, among other things, they play. In the last few decades, claims that animals possess consciousness, emotions, and intelligence have ceased to be heretical. Ethologists have found nonhuman animals using tools, developing local cultures, and even producing art. But we have yet to hear a retraction or, better yet, an apology, from the biologists who for so long declared them to be unthinking things. However grudgingly, the scientific worldview has been re-animated, which is not to say re-“enchanted.” No gods or spirits, no vitalistic forces, are required to explain this pulsating, ever-surprising universe, which seethes with activity at the smallest level and, through a mere quantum fluctuation, may be able to bud off an entirely new baby universe. Agency, in some form, is everywhere, from inchworms to electrons, and it is time for science to recognize that everything is, if only in some metaphorical sense, alive. Science and rationality must not give way before this new view of reality and slouch off the stage. We have to engage with it, keep watching and probing and trying to understand it. For some of us, that enterprise, a.k.a. science, remains one of the most compelling forms of play we can engage in. Is there a “play principle at the basis of all physical reality,” as Graeber so daringly suggests? I am drawn to this idea as a metaphysical speculation, so long as we remember that play has no moral valence. It can be elegant, it can be rough, it can be deadly—or all those things at once. But if we want a category of activity that embraces both subatomic particles and carnival goers, then we may as well call it play. And if we want to know what God is doing, should there be such an entity, and why he (or she or it) is doing all this, our best guess is that he is playing.t
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Th e Ji g Is Up !
E
xpect pop culture to define your politics, and you’ll probably get the politics you deserve. Hip-hop music may give you an outlet to vent joy and rage, but it’s not going to improve poor or outdated public schools. Fifty Shades of Grey may magnify your bedroom repertoire, but it won’t enable sexual equality in the workplace. And science fiction is no program for governing—or, as some would have it, for not governing. It’s there to give you dreams, ideas, and nightmares. Yet there lately seems to be much (too much) in our political and financial culture that’s pilfered from the thick, wide corpus of science fiction (or SF, as devotees prefer to style it). Consider Jeff Bezos, the marketconquering overlord of Amazon, and now the Washington Post, who originally wanted to grace his online retail empire with the URL “MakeItSo.com”—an homage to the catchphrase popularized by Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bezos also famously has launched a side company, Blue Origin, dedicated to perfecting private space travel. It boasts its own Federation-style coat of arms, above the Latin motto Gradatim Ferociter (Step by step, ferociously). Another Bezos vanity project involves the construction of a mammoth timepiece that will tick off the next ten thousand years of life on this planet, called the Clock of the Long Now, funded under the auspices of something called the Long Now Foundation. Other well-heeled cyber-visionaries are likewise pursuing their own “Long Nows” designed to steer their empires toward a healthier and, need we add, wealthier future. PayPal cofounder Elon Musk is concocting a hyperloop high-speed train that will set you back $1.3 million for the privilege of inhabiting one of its passenger pods. Meanwhile, another PayPal titan, Peter Thiel, is bankrolling an exploratory round of “seasteading” experiments in libertarian utopian living—self-sustaining colonies of floating ragers against the state 64 1 The Baffler [no.24]
M A R K S . FI S H E R
machine, who will be freely indulging their sacred liberties as they luxuriate atop ocean waters under the international treaties of the sea, beyond the reach of any sovereign nation’s jurisdiction. And Google CEO Larry Page has recently announced another of the company’s trademark “moonshot” projects, which involves nothing less than the abolition of illness and death—a primordial recalibration of the human condition (or as SF fanboy Newt Gingrich might label it, social engineering) worthy of a plot outline from Robert A. Heinlein or Orson Scott Card. These ambitious, mogul-driven projects all mimic one of science fiction’s raisons d’être: the deeply satisfying literary exercise of world-building—i.e., imagining a fully selfcontained set of planets, space colonies, and social relations (human, post-human, or other-than-human) that operate on radically different principles from the ones we know, or affect to know. One of the major benefits of this imaginative process, which likely began back when
There’s much (too much) in our political and financial culture that’s pilfered from the thick, wide corpus of science fiction.
9 Thomas More wondered, not without reason, if there were a better place to be than sixteenth-century England, is its capacity to clear the mental palette, to squeegee away the mundane distractions of what’s redundantly termed “present-day reality.” It permits us to gain a fresh perspective on the ways that the human world can hypothetically function—and how we humans could or should abet such transformations. The problem inevitably comes when speculations on individual behavior, in all its untidy configurations, are shaped into visions that are more streamlined and weirdly, even annoyingly, functional, as in (let us say) some brittle, sour, Ayn-Randian parable of individualism. It is possible to make too much of this. Does the libertarian strain of SF storytelling mean, for example, that the genre could be blamed for the recent surge of obstructionism in the House of Representatives? I don’t know, and don’t much care, how much Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, or even Philip K. Dick the Tea Party insurgents of the Right may have read—though the more dogged students of the SF-libertarian nexus will no doubt detect great significance in the 2012 election of Utah GOP Rep. Chris Stewart, a diehard Tea Party supporter who has written two successful series of novels plumbing the popular, and immensely profitable, intersection of SF and evangelical end-times fiction, in the vein of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind franchise. (Stewart’s best-known series, the nine-part Great and Terrible sequence of novels, imagines a great cosmic political reckoning triggered by pulses of electromagnetic radiation.) Such intersections may be little more than glancing coincidences—after all, the hyperactive investigative antics of, say, Darrell Issa
don’t discredit the use of car alarms, even though that’s where the Inspector Javert of today’s GOP has made his fortune. But as a lifelong reader of SF, and an increasingly aggrieved Washington, D.C., resident whose quality of life depends on the regular paycheck of a federal employee, I have little choice but to take the prospect of a newly doctrinaire libertarian-SF alliance seriously—and personally. And to appraise the full sweep of the case against SF as a Trojan horse for political reaction, I also have to take fresh inventory of my own personal evolution as an ardent SF reader.
Now, Voyagers Like many other daydreaming, hopelessly awkward adolescents, I would drop by science fiction for a visit, once in a while. It wasn’t my first or preferred literary port of call when I was very young. It was one of many genres emerging from the chrysalis of Gothic literature—and, as with the others, SF offered a means of escaping whatever bland or dreary box had been leased from, or by, reality. However much populist explicators such as Brian Aldiss (in Trillion Year Spree, his expansive, indispensable 1986 history of SF) may justify its influence on respected fabulists from Twain and Borges to Orwell and Burgess, the more elitist gatekeepers of our literary culture tend to disdain the genre as a disheveled, somewhat disreputable outlaw tradition. Of course, that curt dismissal only adds to its allure for readers seeking release from their psychic or social constraints. I came relatively late to the genre’s more arcane and venerated glories, having been not quite nerdy or spacy enough in my 1960s teens to have read Philip K. Dick in the original pulp paperbacks. But by the early 1970s, The
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! Dick’s baroque tales of political intrigue and gnostic self-discovery had just begun burrowing out of the pulp literary ghetto when a friend of mine, a thirty-year-old self-professed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist rhythm-andblues guitarist, presented me ceremoniously with the book that would whet my appetite for the elusive social promise of SF. It was a vintage paperback edition of Slan. This was A. E. van Vogt’s 1946 ripsnorter about a future-world vendetta against super telepaths. Van Vogt was a Canadian who started writing for pulp magazines at the tail end of the 1930s. His eccentric, emotionally charged approach to the genre would inspire even crazier visions, including those of the famously paranoid and socially mercurial Mr. Dick himself. I liked Slan for its bug-like exoticism and hammer-into-anvil momentum; though even then, I knew I was at least a half-dozen years too old for it to have as galvanizing an impact on me as it had had on my radical guitarist friend. He’d first sought solace in its pages during an arduous preadolescence; then, as now, the hazards of being too smart at too young an age marginalized you as deeply (if not as lethally) as Van Vogt’s precognitive mutant race had been. Yet because I knew exactly how that felt, growing up as an African American geek in a time and place that didn’t know quite what to make of our variant species, the book’s visceral appeal persuaded me that SF, itself a marginalized mutant literature, bore enough transformative energy to disquiet the gatekeepers of official culture and other entitled bullies. “What about Van Vogt’s other books?” I asked my friend. “Don’t bother,” he said. As one drearily representative example, he cited 1951’s The Weapon Shops of Isher. In this tale, a corrupt dystopian empire several thousand years in the future is subverted from within by the eponymous shops—weapons makers, you see, directly empower people to possess armaments in greater numbers and with more 66 1 The Baffler [no.24]
force than those of the empire. The Second Amendment subtext didn’t much bother my friend. For ideological reasons of his own, he also hated gun control; if the Man has more guns than the People, you see, then we have no revolutionary leverage, and so on. But this book, and many other Van Vogt offerings that came in its wake, carried too strong a whiff of what, as far back as the 1970s, he dismissed as reactionary—or was it bourgeois?— libertarianism. My friend wasn’t wrong. And yet the disparity vexed me; how could a writer who in one novel showed palpable empathy for outcasts produce another work that seemed a demagogic hiccup away from consigning such misfits—especially the unarmed ones—to history’s blackest black hole? Such was my initial encounter with what had already become one of the most prominent leitmotifs of the SF world: the penchant to identify government of any provenance or ideological persuasion as simply a lumbering gray hijacker of freedom, in the vein of the malevolent mind-hive known as the Borg in the Star Trek: The Next Generation franchise. This hostility to government-qua-government, rooted in a response to the high paranoia of the Cold War, continues to enthrall many voices competing for attention in modern SF. You can readily find it not only in The Weapon Shops of Isher, but also among other literary fantasy works endorsed by the Libertarian Futurist Society, which annually presents its Prometheus Awards for the best libertarian science fiction.
Google CEO Larry Page has recently announced another of the company’s trademark “moonshot” projects—a primordial recalibration of the human condition worthy of a plot outline from Robert A. Heinlein or Orson Scott Card.
9 But as with any movement that’s singlemindedly committed to poaching its pet ideological game on the frontiers of literary expression, the self-conscious libertarian rebranding of the SF genre ultimately collapses into incoherence. If you want to send your own presumptions spinning into the stratosphere (along with the rest of your head), try finding any kind of consistency among the Prometheus Best Novel Award winners. Some of the authors, to be sure, are fervidly affiliated with the political right (e.g., Newt Gingrich’s friend and fellow SF fan Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of 1992’s winner, Fallen Angels, which imagines a dystopian future controlled by totalitarian environmentalists). But others lean harder to the left (e.g., three-time Prometheus winner Ken MacLeod, whose utopian space operas are each a baroque mash-up of socialist, anarchist, and libertarian ideas). Of course, there are left- and right-leaning iterations of libertarianism as well, so in order to produce a version of SF that’s an uninterrupted saga of smash-the-state individualism, the arbiters of the Prometheus Award have to burrow deeply indeed into the art of what Reinhold Niebuhr famously dubbed “emotionally potent oversimplification.” The Prometheus Award’s Hall of Fame, for instance, is a motley selection that includes Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and George Orwell’s 1984; Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here; and, of course, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. By my count, that’s one objectivist (Rand), two
socialists (Orwell and Lewis), and one Dutch critic of eccentric monarchies. Oh, and Robert A. Heinlein.
Stranger in a Strange Genre Heinlein, whose name appears six times on that Hall of Fame list, is libertarian SF’s main man. And it’s not just libertarians who feel that way about him. As a reader who came of age—and was introduced to the pleasures of SF—amid the convulsions of post-civil-rights racial identity in the United States, I found Heinlein’s work to be a rich vein of post-racial storytelling. Though I hasten to add that Heinlein’s own racial politics, like his overall view of government, military conquest, and virtually every other imaginable human institution, was very much all over the map— a disjointed collection of shifting attitudes more than any legible program of imagined social improvement. Indeed, my own appreciation of Heinlein coincides with that of African American polymath and SF master Samuel R. Delany. In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, his 1977 collection of essays “on the language of science fiction,” Delany recalls the frisson that passed over him when reading Heinlein’s 1959 novel, Starship Troopers. Somewhere in this more-than-a-little farcical tale of intergalactic war with a race of murderous super-insects, the young Delany found “a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, [that] generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through two hunThe
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! dred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hundredand-fifty-page book) is non-[C]aucasian.” ( Johnnie Rico, a Filipino, for the record.) For Delany, who, I’m guessing, was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science when he first read Starship Troopers, Heinlein’s “inanities . . . [and] endless preachments on the glories of war” throughout the book were less important than “the knowledge that [Delany had] experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has dissolved.” It wasn’t the first time Heinlein had used protagonists of color. The Star Beast (1954) imagined an African with “ebony-black” skin as the most powerful person on Earth, while such novels as Space Cadet (1948) and Double Star (1956) used the timeworn theme of earthlings’ fear of aliens as a metonym for transcending racial prejudice. This suggestive strategy of racially enlightened characterization by future-proxy appears to patch into a quadrant of the libertarian mindset whose dreams of a government-free future take for granted that the future will be racismfree as well. Modern science fiction—which, significantly, shares with modern jazz an approximate mid-twentieth-century point of origin—has woven into its corpus a kind of no-sweat color blindness. This was yet another reason I was drawn to it, since it seemed to take forever for rarer-air offerings in the literary mainstream to reach similar conclusions. Still, Heinlein’s approach to racial themes wasn’t always this generous. One of his early works, Sixth Column, first serialized in 1941, depicts white Americans fighting fascist Asian conquerors by using rays able to hone in on specific races. You could blame the novel’s many excesses on World War II, but you’d still wince at its steady tirade of anti-Asian slurs. (In retrospect, probably the most that can be said for Sixth Column is that Heinlein didn’t like it much, either.) 68 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Then there was Farnham’s Freehold (1964), a timetravel story/survivalist manifesto in which the future brings a switcheroo of racial roles. Te c h n o l o g i cally sophisticated Africans become the dominant, decadent, slave-holding class as they belittle and browbeat (or just plain beat) uneducated or castrated whites. Heinlein devotees who bring this book up for discussion on Internet fan sites still sound confounded, if not embarrassed, by it. For my part, the long litany of quarrels with Farnham’s Freehold begins with: Did he have to make the Africans cannibals too? In 1964? The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, published two years later, is where both Heinlein’s libertarian ethos and Heinlein’s seemingly endless penchant for sociocultural mischief reach their apotheoses. The plot and characterization on display in this foundational text of libertarian SF are typically chaotic. Heinlein’s own apparent antigovernment ethos is channeled through the elderly, Peruvian-born Professor “Prof” Bernardo de la Paz. Prof is one among hundreds of outcasts, outlaws, and outsiders inhabiting underground colonies on the moon—or, as it’s known in the late twentyfirst century, Luna. Prof’s chief comrades-in-arms are an Amazonian blonde rabble-rouser, Wyoming Knott (female protagonists, like female SF writers, are a rare species, then and now), and a one-armed computer technician, the narrator-hero Manuel Garcia O’Kelly-Davis. The ragtag trio spearheads a revolutionary movement to make this ramshackle outpost for the marginalized into a self-governing na-
The self-conscious libertarian rebranding of the SF genre ultimately collapses into incoherence.
9
tion free of the repressive rule of the Earth. Neither “Wyoh” or “Mannie” has any clearly defined racial identity—and the same holds true, gratifyingly, for the polyandrous extended families making up Luna’s population. The book implies that such freewheeling social arrangements help set the table for what Prof endorses as “rational anarchy.” Here, Heinlein seems to be employing his protagonist to parrot his own vision of ideal social order: a systemless system whose central tenet is “that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.” John Galt, you have met your extraterrestrial soul mate. For impressionable readers like, well, me at age sixteen or so, these ideas always carry a kind of invigorating rush to the senses. (Yeah, man, who needs government? We just have to be better people!) In his didactic monologues on liberated self-governance, Prof spritzes like a free-form rap artist about a contradictory grab bag of themes: the inanity of all legislatures, the underrated virtues of monarchy, and why the regulation of crime, even theft and murder, can more or less be left to human discretion. You can see how The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’s baggy state-bashing soon found a devoted fan base among sixties iconoclasts of similarly varied and contradictory political persuasions. It just as powerfully inspired subsequent generations of the selfishly enlightened to hector the autocrats and bureaucrats who want to put preschools in workplaces, protect pensions, or keep food free from toxins. Still, Heinlein’s discursive, idiosyncratic storytelling steers him away from the rigid dictates of doctrinaire libertarianism—or doctrinaire anything. You sense that Hein-
lein was more consciously aware than his more slavish readers were of the novel’s central irony: that achieving individual freedom requires collective action among the moon’s ragtag renegades—and not just any collective action, but the kind of all-out guerilla insurgency calculated to prompt a straitlaced freemarketeer to charge the insurgent Harsh Mistress crew with outright Bolshevism. Heinlein must also have known that nothing could be more divergent from common sense than using a fantasy novel as a manual for social engineering, even if it’s intended as a kind of antisocial engineering. And all those readers, liberal, conservative, or otherwise, who think they’ve got Heinlein nailed down must still grapple with his views on race, which, I’ve finally decided, he was reinventing on the fly—just fodder for another novel he was plotting. When Mannie travels with Prof to Earth seeking (though by no means expecting) Luna’s formal recognition as a newly independent colony, he runs into the same kind of confusion humans at home feel about who or what they are. At this point, he tosses off an insight on racial identity so stunningly prescient that most of us, black and white, still haven’t caught up with it yet. America, Mannie observes, is mixed-up place. . . . They care about skin color—by making point of how they don’t care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. Bog knows I don’t know what genes I have. One grandmother came from a part of Asia where invaders passed through as regularly as locusts, raping as they went—why not ask her? The
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! As with Delany, who was so grateful to Heinlein for using a protagonist of color in Starship Troopers that he was willing to overlook, if not excuse, the book’s hard-core militarism, I’m tempted to cut The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress a break, if only to recognize Mannie’s mild rant against racial disingenuousness. I can almost say the same for Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s 1985 space opera about interplanetary war, whose narrative moves like a new muscle car on an open road: sleek, smooth, and roaring all the way in a single line. Card’s breakthrough novel has been compared to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers for its militaristic detail. (Even the alien enemies have similar names: “Bugs” in Troopers, “Buggers” in Ender’s.) Card has also been compared to Heinlein for trumpeting reactionary politics that straddle the crackpot zone. His opposition to gay marriage—and, for that matter, to homosexuality—aroused a nationwide movement to boycott the movie version of Ender’s Game. He’s blogged that President Obama is a dictator, building his own totalitarian police force made up of “young out-of-work urban men” who will “channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.” Let’s calm down and think this over, though. While Card likely shares Heinlein’s embrace of limited government, it would be hard to reconcile the former’s defense of traditional family values with Heinlein’s enthusiastic depiction of group marriage in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. And, yes, Card’s anti-Obama screed is steeped in racist innuendo. (Though I’m also sure that to some of Card’s more, ahem, pigment-conscious adherents, “out-ofwork urban men” sounds like a far-too-polite euphemism.) Still, I have to admit that when I started seeing Card’s invective coursing through the Internet, I wondered who this guy was. He certainly wasn’t the same Orson Scott Card I got to know through Ender’s Game. For all of 70 1 The Baffler [no.24]
its rampant militarism, the book is just as much an exploration of empathy and of the power of the imagination to confront death and recognize humanity in others. The gifted children recruited, tested, and manipulated for battle have souls as complex and intricately wired as their brains, and their passage from play to combat is rendered throughout with a measured, compassionate voice that is of no apparent relation to the ranting, raving scourge of liberal government and alternative lifestyles I’ve been hearing about all year. And, again as with Heinlein, Card puts forth an individualist vision that in his narratives can be realized only through collective action. You could, if you bothered, find that same reasonable voice in Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, a 1990 primer that neatly combines the usual advice about plotting, characterization, and style with sensible tips on making sure the science in your fiction stays plausible and consistent. What’s more, this alleged racist uses many pages of the book to extol, as an example of how to do things right, the late African American SF writer Octavia Butler because, as he writes, “nobody handles exposition better.” This, once again, may reflect the problem with expecting consistent ideas and intentions from those who make their livelihoods by making things up. It might be possible to find in such inconsistencies some genuine negotiable space in our seemingly intractable political divides—and not, as the more fawning and/or credulous members of our pundit class would have it, with a kind of tricked-up,
SF has continued to replenish its fan base from waves of preadolescents who have trouble fitting in with reality’s game plan. These kids—like my old Maoist buddy way back in the seventies—tend to be smarter, more imaginative, and desperate to seek out a speculative future.
9 “they’re-just-as-bad-on-their-side-of-theaisle” faux equanimity. Instead, such salutary divergences from a larger ideological playbook might at least betoken the kind of openness to possibility, paradox, and surprise that science fiction, like most other worthwhile art, has allowed its devotees to experience.
Space Oddities In the broadest terms, SF appeals to its fan base’s strong allergy to being told what to do. It’s no wonder that SF has continued to replenish its fan base from waves of preadolescents who congenitally have trouble fitting in with reality’s game plan. These kids—like my old Maoist buddy way back in the seventies— tend to be smarter, more imaginative, and (thus?) more desperate to seek out a speculative future. At least, that’s where most of them start. Things get more complicated when the kids grow up and carry these yearnings with them. Some of them, while still reaching for the stars, realize that they have to figure out a way to live and work well with others. Some, well, don’t—and they become some variant of the insurgent individualist, ever on the lookout for new ways to reject whatever new authority figure they think is telling them to behave. Those dueling urges are best embodied in mass media, especially commercial TV space operas. On the one hand, there’s the Star Trek franchise’s version of the future, spread out over several spinoffs and sequels from the mid-1960s to now: a known universe pulling
together into One Big Federation with its faster-than-light starships carrying a varied assortment of interplanetary police patrolling the galaxies and maintaining a kind of benevolent order. These selfless hierarchs are dutybound to keep the peace while interrogating their own motives, just as democracy keeps promising itself it will. (And really, what other vision could be expected from Gene Roddenberry, an ex-LAPD officer who spent part of his pre-TV career in the 1950s writing speeches extolling the ideals of urban policing for his then-chief William H. Parker?) On the other hand, there’s Firefly, an earlyaughts space western from writer-director Joss Whedon that flamed out after a brief season on Fox. Long after its network cancellation a decade ago, the show continues to enjoy a cult following, especially among libertarians. In the world of Firefly, there’s only one solar system to deal with, but it, too, is placed a few centuries ahead of ours. Meanwhile, its heroes have no allegiance to any order, benevolent or otherwise. They’re libertarian to the core: a crew of freelance mercenaries and fugitives aboard a spaceship whose captain, Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, is an embittered veteran of what’s characterized as a civil war between “Independents” or “brown-coats” and a federation of planets called the “Alliance.” The powerful Alliance, which is always sending out humorless marshals and bureaucratic enforcers of intergalactic law to harass Mal’s crew, bills itself as a democratic bulwark of civic peace and order, on the order of Trek’s The
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! Federation—only we’re not so sure about that as the series progresses. For his part, Mal is sure—sure, that is, that the Alliance is his mortal enemy. From the first episode, his disdain for all things Federated or Allied is transparent. “That’s what governments are for,” he mutters at one point in the series pilot. “Get in a man’s way.” This might have sounded more off-key around the time of Star Trek’s 1966 TV debut, when the liberal dream still held sway over most of the American populace and when Ronald Reagan was still considered a fringe conservative activist seeking political office. Not even Marshal Dillon, the duly appointed federal lawman of TV’s Gunsmoke, would have dared express Mal’s kind of disdain over the airwaves. Now, however, Mal’s sentiment seems a virtual off-the-shelf echo of Reaganite statebashing rage. It’s simply the common-sense pop-culture outlook on public matters, bred by four decades of liberal disaffection and retreat—and stoked by the ever-advancing cultural tropes of the radical right. And it sounds the loudest on Firefly for Mal’s most precious cargo: River Tam, a super-psychic, teenaged waif with powers that could topple the Alliance’s reign. She is in the care of her renegade older brother, who’s rescued her from a sinister Alliance mindcontrol experiment. In a flashback sequence in Serenity, the movie follow-up to Firefly, River channels the sensibility of the prevailing power structure, and she renders its cartoonishly grim agenda in one of her psychic transports, in the first-person plural. The Alliance’s basic charge, she proclaims, is to be “meddlesome.” “We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk,” she says. “We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right.” While River’s soliloquy may have a certain generic rage-against-the-machine appeal, the broader narrative arc of the Firefly series is unsettling. In a far-reaching, incisive es72 1 The Baffler [no.24]
say criticizing the use of such recent pop-cultural phenomena as Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist slave revenge fantasy, Django Unchained, as markers of s o c io p ol it i cal progress, Adolph Reed Jr. notes that Firefly repeatedly channels the rhetoric and grievances that shaped the white supremacist myth of the secessionist South. Like the guardians of the Confederate Lost Cause, Mal and his crew envision themselves waging a heroic rearguard battle against a remote and sinister regime. Such sentiments often poke through Mal’s sarcastic asides against the Alliance. “May have been [on] the losing side,” he blithely tells one Alliance straight man. “Still not convinced it was the wrong one.” Such exchanges may sound jaunty and devil-may-care to those who see no connection whatsoever with former and would-be slaveholders, but white supremacists have used similar language over our nearest two centuries to extoll their “losing side.” You want to reach through the TV to pull Mal aside (in a friendly way, of course, because he is a genuinely amiable fellow), just to let him know that his antecedents used similar plaints to justify their own “meddling” with innocent human lives, including torture, mutilation, and lynching, all of which were sanctioned by both custom and law. These objections are—or are supposed to be—mitigated by Firefly’s heterogeneous, multicultural crew of supporting characters, which includes two persons of color: a man of God named Book, who’s a whiz with armaments, and Mal’s executive officer, a nononsense “warrior woman” named Zoe, who
Firefly is a neoliberal Star Trek in reverse, shunning the frontier for the neglected cosmic periphery and embracing an ethos of full-scale retreat instead of confident liberal discovery.
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fought alongside Mal in the Lost Cause and is happily married to the ship’s Caucasian hotdogging pilot, Hoban “Wash” Washburne. Even Firefly’s bad guys are diverse, sometimes intriguingly so. In one episode, there’s one black nemesis, a ruthless bounty hunter, who shares with a real-life Confederate raider the name Jubal Early. And in case anyone still wants to make a big, hairy deal out of parallel confederacies, Mal makes clear at a handful of points in Firefly’s short season that he hates slavery of any kind. But in a sense, Firefly’s persistent havingit-both-ways stance on things—How could a diverse and tolerant band of outlaws be channeling our most notorious political rationales for racial reaction, after all?—whitewashes (as it were) the nineteenth-century secessionist fantasy that the Civil War had nothing to do with race, that it was, instead, a great Lost Cause devoted to beating back all the impersonal, grasping abuses of the Northern industrial leviathan. Firefly’s glosses on the Intruder State also show, on another level, just how the creative tensions that fueled Heinlein’s formative SF experiments in both racial characterization and libertarian political theory have long since lapsed into shopworn storytelling cliché. “We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t any right” is not the sort of fire-breathing call to arms that felt fresh (if also more than a little naïve and ingenuous) in Heinlein’s broadsides against the trespasses of government. Heinlein after all, was writing at the first flush of the Cold War, in 1946. More than half a century later, the strident libertarian message of Firefly had become so common-
place in a popular culture weaned on government-hating narratives from Die Hard to The Matrix and back again that the show’s core dramatic conflicts—which all ultimately revolve around the confrontation between the striving individual and the Borg-like drones of the state—boil down to little more than gestures. The Confederate-style patois of hating government purely for government’s sake is by now nothing more than a threadbare plot device. Where Heinlein strained his imagination—and reader credulity, at times—to conjure a future in which technology abetted a new, pre-Lockean social contract while abolishing the lethal superstitions of race altogether, Whedon’s storytelling, lazily, takes both conditions as givens. Whedon’s space narratives are not about the effort to redefine the fundamental terms of selfhood or political self-determination; they are, instead, baby-simple fables that pivot around the strenuous efforts of Firefly’s crew to outrun their faceless, federated pursuers for another week. Firefly is, in short, a neoliberal Star Trek in reverse, shunning the frontier for the neglected cosmic periphery and embracing an ethos of full-scale retreat instead of confident liberal discovery. And Mal Reynolds is the seasteading Peter Thiel or the rocket-launching Jeff Bezos of a blankly undemanding libertarian future, in which the main heroic enterprise is jury-rigging your own space-borne contraption to stay a step ahead of the bad guys. It’s no surprise that the Prometheus Award panel acknowledged Firefly and Whedon with a special award for Serenity. It does bear notThe
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! ing though, that Whedon himself insists he doesn’t share Mal’s sour view of government. (“He’s the opposite of me in many ways,” he once told an interviewer.) Indeed, Whedon’s newest fantasy TV show, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., inverts the great operating principle of the post-Reagan libertarian right by making it abundantly plain in the weekly adventures of its mythical top-secret agency that government may be more the solution than the problem. As D. H. Lawrence said long ago, trust the tale, not the teller—a maxim that holds with special force for political fables in American pop culture.
Dream Catchers How to sort out this tangle of conflicting, self-contradictory ideological messaging in our popular genre entertainments? Well, let’s begin by returning to my Maoist friend. He surely ranks among the most committed statists I’ve ever known, but his absorption in science fiction strongly indicated that he would have had trouble fitting into any state or culture. His was the romantic dream of transformation. And that’s why one of the next books he loaned me back then was destined, much later, to turn up in the Prometheus Hall of Fame pantheon: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Bester’s Grand Guignol space opera, published in 1956, has appeared at or near the top of many lists of the best science fiction novels ever written—including my own. As with Django Unchained, it’s a revenge fantasy, recounted in stark, fevered prose reminiscent of a jazz solo. Gully Foyle, the book’s protagonist, is the sole survivor of a spaceship wreck. He’s also a dim-witted lug who rapes, deceives, threatens, brutalizes, and kills in the course of his quest to discover who had abandoned him to drift alone in the cosmos. I wondered, when I saw Bester’s name on the Prometheus list, what he and his book were doing there. From everything I’d read 74 1 The Baffler [no.24]
about Bester, he seemed to be more of a midtwentieth-century liberal hipster, born and bred in New York City. The Stars My Destination, likewise, didn’t seem to bear any overt political or ideological message. It was, if anything, one of those inimitable artworks that effectively jolts its reader into a higher, richer sensory experience than one would expect from a genre novel. But as I recently reread the book, I got toward the end and, well, there it was. Just as Gully is about to go on a fiery telepathic journey through time and space, he achieves what, for him, is total enlightenment: “Who are we, any of us, to make a decision for the world? Let the world make its own decisions. Who are we to keep secrets from the world? Let the world know and decide for itself.” This is not a doctrine. This is not a program. This is not a government shutdown or a Supreme Court ruling. This is a state of being, a porch toward transcendence. It’s what drew many of us to SF in the first place, rather than a plan or even an identity. Call it permission to let go—or, at least, to imagine how it could feel to suspend your workaday understanding of the real and the possible and to allow something else to guide your imagination. I don’t know if you could put the label of “libertarian” on such a sentiment. But I’m not going to tell anyone they can’t. Or that they have to. SF’s first, best promise—being alive to possibility—is too vital and too bright to be hammered, bent, or squeezed into anyone’s ideology. If that makes me a libertarian—well, I still have a problem with that. For I can be excited and exalted by what Gully Foyle and others like him have found out. But I wake up from my dreams when I’m ready to. And if libertarians think I have the ultimate authority over my life, then I’ve decided that I still have to find a way of living with others as best I can—even with the people who insist on badgering me into thinking they know best what it means to be free.t
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! i ASSHOLES
Hoard d’ Oeuvres Art of the 1 percent 3 Rhonda Lieberman When you’ve got the big house, and you’re driving a Jaguar, what differentiates you from every asshole dentist in the Valley? Art was a way for Eli to distinguish himself.
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—Shelley De Angelus, Eli Broad’s former curator
rt collecting is the most esteemed form of shopping in our culture
today. Thorstein Veblen saw conspicuous consumers as throwbacks—creatures ruled by primitive drives of predation and emulation. Yet the fashion-victimized accumulators of pelf with the historical equivalents of a big house and a Jaguar have always been pillars of society. In the age of landed gentry and indentured servants, Veblen notes, “vulgarly productive occupations” were stigmatized with the “marks of poverty and subjection,” while predatory exploits were considered “honorific,” a sign of “pecuniary strength.” Our neo-Gilded Age, like Veblen’s merely Gilded one, is marked by a predatory culture permitting the feral rich to ravage the productive economy—seizing all the wealth for themselves and creating the most severe levels of income inequality since the onset of the Great Depression. While predators of yore awed rival chieftains with booty, harems, and slaves, today’s Masters of the Universe raid companies, fire workers, extract rents, divert huge amounts of capital out of the economy to uglify our world—and hoard the pelts of middleclass pensions, pay, and life prospects in their mansions, private kunsthalles, and yachts in the form of blue-chip (and capital-A) Art. 76 1 The Baffler [no.24]
These feats of “pecuniary strength,” while socially worthless and detrimental to productivity, are merely “reputable,” as Veblen would explain in his trademark academic deadpan. For maximum prestige, the true distinctionseeking Master of the Universe must outdo rival assholes in conspicuous consumption. And in today’s digital economy, you can monitor this primal battle of achieving egos as it unfolds in real time, on computer screens. At auction, you watch incomparable works of art vanish into exchange value: all that’s solid truly melts into air. The spectacle of yen, dollars, and euros mounting on the screen climaxes in the money shot: the sale price. Juicy sums are applauded, with murmurs of approval for the really big ones. The cult of wealth cheers as art launders the antisocial spoils of exploitation into status symbols, entrée to classy social circles, and even the solemn mantle of philanthropy. Fabulous. The handy Forbes list of “billionaires with a passion for art” abounds with finance types with hoards worth more than $500 million. There is, for example, Henry Kravis of the storied Kohlberg Kravis Roberts takeover firm that minted billions in worthless junk bond paper during the 1980s. These days, Kravis’s honorific predations fund his passion for impressionist and contemporary art, and like many a robber baron from the last Gilded Age, he now has a wing of the Met named after him. Hedge fund manager Steven Cohen breaks spending records for splashy pieces: in 2004 he doled out $8 million for Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a thirteen-foot shark
CHRIS MULLEN
The American spirit is “to take the opportunity that we have in this country to grow and learn . . . and to help other people,� explains Alice Walton, a woman whose family wealth is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! encased in formaldehyde. (The beast at the center of the installation reportedly later rotted and had to be replaced.) As trophies of exploit, Hirst’s sharks, carcasses, butterfly wings, and diamond-studded skulls pack the savage punch of carnage itself, while boasting the added values of conspicuous expense and elaborate maintenance requirements. Less than two weeks after Cohen’s hedge fund agreed to pay the government $616 million to settle accusations of insider trading, this tireless exemplar of the Veblenesque meritorious consumer snagged Picasso’s Le Rêve for $155 million (from rival hoarder Steve Wynn). A dream come true, all around, for the apostles of honorific exploit. Bernie Madoff’s prized piece of office art was a four-foot sculpture of a screw that he frequently dusted off himself (he, like Donald Trump and scores of other plutocrats, is a notorious neat freak). A defense lawyer pleaded for the valued object to be photoshopped out of court documents, lest it be prejudicial to members of the jury. When Madoff’s Ponzi scheme went bust, J. Ezra Merkin, whose feeder funds supplied Madoff with investors, was no longer Mastering the Universe quite so comfortably. So he sold his stunning batch of Rothkos for $310 million. Whenever I see a Rothko I think of Madoff, and how the afterlife of modern art is now yoked to the pissing matches performed by the big swinging dicks of Wall Street.
Public Offerings Long practiced in the finer points of destroying companies—and individuals—to loot their assets, finance now plunders public institutions too. Recently bankrupt Detroit is appraising pieces in the Detroit Institute of Arts for possible sale to private creditors. Honorific-minded buzzards are circling the city’s treasure. The art is mere booty, of course. The real prey are the peons “tainted,” as Veblen would say, with the “unworthiness of produc78 1 The Baffler [no.24]
tive work.” These, after all, were the poor saps whose earnings were gobbled up by the predators’ financial instruments. The Detroit spectacle is clearly a portent of things to come. Strapped public museums can’t hope to compete with the big-ticket private art hoarders who send auction prices soaring. Private collectors are now “bulk-buying so many contemporary works,” the Guardian reports, “that their various mansions are inadequate to house them all. But rather than leave extensive surpluses unseen in storage, they are choosing to share their hoards with the public. As the ultimate status symbol for the super-rich, the private museums even have a new label—‘ego-seums.’” Two top hoarders in particular have provided a tidy snapshot of the taste-in-bulk ethos of our neo-Gilded Age. Education huckster Eli Broad’s Los Angeles pile of aestheticized loot nicely showcases the taste-free hoarder’s ethos in its fullest robber baron excess. But for now, let’s begin at the phony populist end of the spectrum, with the grotesque museum founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton to “celebrate the American spirit.” “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin. In precisely this vein, Walton’s new Crystal Bridges museum offers American-made art to strategically cover up the ugly reality Walmart has created. Spanning the colonial era to the present, the exhibition space’s fulsome celebration of the American spirit eulogizes the nation of shared confidence and abundance, sustainable mortgages, and worker dignity that Walmart has brutally demolished. The notion that Walton’s supremely self-satisfied kunsthalle might serve as a balm, let alone a monument, to the market-battered American spirit is analogous to, say, Genghis Khan inviting survivors of his Mongol hordes to admire an installation of his plunder. Rebecca Mead’s ingenuous New Yorker
Today’s Masters of the Universe hoard the pelts of middle-class pensions, pay, and life prospects in the form of blue-chip (and capital-A) Art.
9 profile of the Walmart heiress glosses over the nasty context of Walton’s wealth—which is a bit like writing about the history of the Pyramids without ever mentioning the slaves. Walmart is synonymous with a race to the bottom on every level. The biggest corporation in the world is also corporate welfare royalty: its “refusal to pay a living wage and benefits forces most of its employees onto public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid,” writes ThinkProgress reporter Aviva Shen. “Each store’s workforce consumes as much as $1.75 million in public benefits each year.” Side-stepping Walmart’s labor-soaking business model, Mead’s profile dotes on the person of Alice Walton, the gentle art appreciator and horse breeder who bids at Christie’s auctions by phone while on horseback (a conspicuous leisure multitasker!) and charms the scribe with her low-maintenance toilette, “not,” we are assured, “the expensively curated look of a Park Avenue matron”: When guests visit, she cooks dinner herself, though she has help to do the cleaning up. She speaks with a broad Arkansas accent— Bill Clinton at his most down home—and when she talks about her museum project she avoids loftiness. “One of the great responsibilities that I have is to manage my assets wisely, so that they create value,” she told me. “I know the price of lettuce. You need to understand price and value. You buy the best lettuce you can at the best price you can.”
Like Marie Antoinette playing dairymaid at her vanity farm at Versailles, Walton deploys a beguiling set of down-home gestures to downplay any whiff of plutocratic privilege—a performance that is itself, by most measures, the ultimate display of plutocratic privilege.
But Mead is duly impressed, and takes Walton’s words at face value. Walton’s frugality, we are told, (whether buying lettuce or art) reflects a responsibility to “create value”—and certainly not the malignant greed with which Walmart notoriously squeezes every last cent from its workers and suppliers. Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s auction honcho, weighs in to rave about the billionaire’s “incredible” “lemonade and homemade cookies.” Don Bacigalupi, Walton’s unctuous chief curator, supplies a mission statement that comes straight out of a Ford truck commercial: “We invite all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art and the beauty of landscape.” He dismisses critics of his employer’s museum—on behalf of all the unwashed people now “living without art” in Arkansas whom the great patroness’s plan of uplift must inevitably help.
Smells Like Art Spirit As Walmart uglifies the country with big box stores, beggars communities with outsourced products and low-wage jobs without prospect of advancement, and thrives on surplus misery, Arkansas’s down-home Marie Antoinette says, in so many words, Let them eat art. Employing an altogether apt but strangely unselfconscious historical analogy—a journalistic cry for help, perhaps?—Mead compares Walton to robber baron Henry Clay Frick, who also founded a “jewel box” of a museum. But The New Yorker scribe tactfully neglects to note that Frick, too, was a notorious unionbuster, one who choreographed the coldblooded murder of strikers in labor trouble spots like Ludlow, Colorado, and Homestead, Pennsylvania. Frick, like his successors on today’s art scene, was eager to cleanse his The
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Crystal Bridges is a sleek “starchitect”-designed facility—two armadillolike structures connected by galleries around a reflecting pool—where visitors can admire the apparently bottomless self-regard of a retail colossus made fat on a global low-wage, nonunion labor force.
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name of brutal associations, and the most efficacious such strategy was to pile up canvases depicting a bygone age of mystic communal harmony and reflexive social deference. And in Mead’s gee-whiz telling, this core collecting stratagem has barely changed since Frick’s late-nineteenth-century heyday—except that instead of bagging Vermeers and Constables depicting pastoral Old World calm, Walton favors landscape-heavy Americana: Walton’s ambition to found a major museum of American art first came to public attention in the spring of 2005, when she paid the New York Public Library a reported thirtyfive million dollars for “Kindred Spirits,” a masterpiece of the Hudson River School, by Asher B. Durand. The library’s decision to deaccession the work was controversial. Durand’s painting commemorates the friendship between Thomas Cole, the landscape painter, and William Cullen Bryant, the nature poet, depicting them standing on a rocky promontory that overlooks an idealized Catskills vista.
The bagging of this piece from a public library is the ultimate neo-Gilded Age exploit: turning the commons into a private asset. The social bond between the poet and painter—along with their viewpoint—is poached by a predator who has amassed her fortune by despoiling the very sort of rural landscape portrayed in Kindred Spirits. By the strange alchemy of the cult of wealth, the honorific soul who displays these trophies expects to be identified with them. Yet the spirit of acquisition here is anything but kindred to the subject matter of the 80 1 The Baffler [no.24]
canvas: Alice Walton’s prized picture idealizes everything Walmart is not. Prompted by that tableau, Mead asks Walton for her own definition of the American spirit. The reply is a veritable rampage of cognitive dissonance: “It is the ability to be the best you can be, and to take the opportunity that we have in this country to grow and learn and be the very best we can, and to help other people,” explains a woman whose family wealth is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined. “My parents were both very patriotic,” the folksy billionaire relates to her New Yorker stenographer, “and I just would never have considered collecting anything but American art.” (Here, too, an ugly irony lurks just outside of The New Yorker’s portrait frame: Walmart “has been the vanguard of outsourcing U.S. manufacturing to China—at times some 10 percent of the U.S. trade deficit with China comes from Walmart alone,” notes global culture site Blouin Artinfo.)
The Corporate Muse Crystal Bridges is a sleek “starchitect”-designed facility—two armadillo-like structures connected by galleries around a reflecting pool—where visitors can admire the apparently bottomless self-regard of a retail colossus made fat on a global low-wage, nonunion labor force. The museum’s collection often supplies an unwitting critique of the whole enterprise’s animating, uh, spirit. For instance, Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, blurbed by Crystal Bridges as “a transcendent symbol” of the
“capabilities, strength, and determination” of American women, celebrates the female workforce mobilized during the Second World War—another mind-bending exercise in historical revision on the part of a corporation that in 2010 paid out $11.7 million in back wages and damages to women in Kentucky. A set of subsequent, much larger class action lawsuits alleging systematic gender discrimination at the company was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that 1.5 million Walmart women are too large and diverse a group to be considered a class. George Bellows’s The Studio, which shows Bellows surrounded by family, depicts the kind of meaningful work, fully integrated with domestic life, that Walmart has disrupted and dehumanized into drudgery. The jazzy abstraction of Stuart Davis—whose goal, according to some art historians, was to “reconcile abstract art with Marxism and modern industrial society”—gruesomely serves, in this Bentonville terminus of maldistributed industrial prosperity, as the death mask of the artist’s hopes. Crystal Bridges’ grotesque recontextualization of these works perversely invites the art appreciator to thank Walmart for “celebrating” everything it has exploited and destroyed—as if by enjoying these works you condone the Waltons’ greed. Fairfield Porter’s lyrical interiors, and even Lynda Benglis’s blobs, are unwitting fronts for the corporate ogre. “So how do people associated with this museum rationalize the exploitation that built it?” asks Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. The answer:
$20 million gift from Wal-Mart that underwrites free admission, Bacigalupi said, the money that funds the museum comes from an entirely different entity, the Walton Family Foundation. “Conflating a private individual and a private foundation with a corporation is a little misleading,” Bacigalupi told me.
Goldberg nails it: “Bacigalupi seems like a bright man, so he must know that this statement is itself a little misleading. The Waltons are rich because they own about half of WalMart. Wal-Mart has made them rich in part because it pays its workers as little as possible.” The name Crystal Bridges, indeed, evokes a range of American associations, be they aspirational or sadly indicative of the way we live now: it conjures the joint qualities of clarity and nostalgia—a cheesy country singer’s rehab retreat, or perhaps something closer to a Scientology center. In physical terms, the museum most closely resembles the latter, with a ground plan and facade that suggest a newly landed spaceship in the Arkansas hills. Like the fever dreams of a Plutocrat Pollyanna,
Incredibly, by denying a connection to WalMart. The executive director of Crystal Bridges, Don Bacigalupi, argues that the museum has virtually nothing to do with the corporate behemoth just down the road. Apart from a
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! Walton’s raptures about the American spirit deny the mayhem that the corporate cult casually externalizes into the public sphere. Its hoard of Americana flaunts the scalps of a culture conquered by “pro-business” depravity. A celebration of the American spirit, indeed.
Teaching to the Test of Time The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.
—Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover
Don your pith helmet and bullshit waders and follow me, gentle readers, into the jungle of the feral rich—a.k.a. downtown Los Angeles, where Eli Broad, the biggest art-accumulating billionaire, will soon open his own robberbaron-style museum. The eponymous facility—no Oz-like reveries of transparent suspension structures for this mogul—will house Eli and Edythe Broad’s two-thousand-piece collection. It will also, of course, double as an agitprop advertisement for its namesake’s philanthropic career as one of the nation’s leading privatizers of public education. The so-called school reform agenda of the Broad Foundation, like the Walton family fortune, exemplifies the race to the bottom for everyone except the “honorific exploiters.” Eli Broad, one of the richest art philanthropists in America (worth $6.9 billion as estimated by the “Forbes wealth team”; go wealth!), has been described as a “venture philanthropist . . . who wants to see results.” And the results he likes best are naturally of the quid pro quo variety. “Eli’s middle name is ‘Strings Attached,’” Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight told Morley Safer in a 60 Minutes profile of the accountant turned art accumulator. The strings attached to Broad’s own fortune, unsurprisingly, are deeply entwined with the worst elements of the 2008 meltdown; one of his companies, SunAmerica, was sold to AIG in 1999. As Artnet noted after the 60 Minutes profile aired, Broad’s $2 billion 82 1 The Baffler [no.24]
philanthropic empire sprang from the earlyaughts feeding frenzy in “cheap housing and insurance . . . two vast industries that soak the lower and middle classes at their most vulnerable.” Thus engorged, the Broad Foundation (with its allies the Gates Foundation and, yes, the Walton Family Foundation) dabbles in social engineering and transfers public resources into private coffers by replacing public schools with market-based charters. The Broad Foundation, in short, is underwriting an ever-spreading fiefdom of teach-to-thetest mills that squelch the creative potential of the non-rich and hollow out the teaching profession into micro-managed, low-paid dronehood. But lo, the patrician hand of art washes all these contradictions away. The hard-hitting investigative producers of 60 Minutes, who reverently focused on Broad’s $1.6 billion art collection, declared: “There is no one quite so civic minded in America.” In one exchange during the segment, Morley Safer eyes a sculpture dubiously—a ramshackle man supported by the wall: BROAD: “Well, it’s Tom Friedman—who’s quite an accomplished artist, I’m told.” SAFER: “I’m told?” [His reporterly skepticism at last roused by the market for contemporary art, if not by the education reform racket.] BROAD: “You know, some of these artists, I’ve gotta learn more about.”
Wielding the purse-power to make or break careers, this guy is one of the most influential people in the art world. He knows as much about art as he does about education—but that hasn’t stopped the billionaire from imposing his world-conquering “vision” on both spheres of influence. The experts and practitioners who seek his funds (curators, dealers, art advisers, artists—and even more alarmingly, his legion of school reform advocates) are inclined to coddle him, not to question him.
Don your pith helmet and bullshit waders and follow me, gentle readers, into the jungle of the feral rich— a.k.a. downtown Los Angeles.
9 Hard and Fast It wasn’t art that initially drew the high-flying former accountant to collecting. He got hooked when he discovered art accumulation “brought entrée to a different kind of social life,” Connie Bruck tells us in her fascinating and (for a change) aptly skeptical New Yorker profile “The Art of the Billionaire: How Eli Broad Took Over Los Angeles.” “Initially, Broad found a lot of contemporary art ridiculous,” Bruck writes, and then quotes Broad’s former curator: “But Eli is a quick learner. . . . Eli would ask everybody who was informed what their opinion was and put together his world view based on that. That’s what a good C.E.O. does.” His venture philanthropy in L.A. uses his vast hoard of art and money to exploit his influence over public institutions for his own private benefit. As Bruck lays out Broad’s take-no-prisoners approach to the art market, it soon becomes apparent that Broad is pursuing much the same plan of business dominance that has propelled a Mark Zuckerberg or a Jeff Bezos to the front ranks of moguldom: putting his name on as much as possible, while he drives hard bargains with rivals and the public sector, hires star architects, and presses them to cut corners. (“When you’ve got one eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, you’re scared to death . . . nobody wants to alienate him,” Christopher Knight told Morley Safer.) A museum trustee likened Broad’s antics on the board of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008 to “an attempted hostile takeover.” After drama with an alphabet soup of classy institutions, including LAC-
MA, MCAM, MOCA, UCLA, and even the Geffen and the Hammer, the Broad Collection, the great man’s ego-museum, will open in 2014 to anchor a development project that will transform the Grand Avenue area, Broad hopes, into downtown L.A.’s Champs-Elysées. Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Broad as a dealer and later as the ill-fated director of MOCA, is politic: “Eli is very conscious of value—he does not overpay.” One example of Broad’s ingenuity: he paid $7.7. million for the land where his ego-seum is sited—and because of a deal he struck with a city agency, he will receive a rebate on his construction costs that may exceed $10 million. As Bruck sums up: “In art as in business Eli found ingenious ways to pay less.” “And, yes, he admits that it’s easier for him to analyze the price-per-square-foot of a museum building than to interpret a painting inside,” goes a Los Angeles Times puff piece on the collector at home. “My first career was in public accounting,” Broad explains. “So if I look at a spreadsheet I understand it quickly. Numbers are hard and fast.” Hoarding art is not only a power move for the predatory philanthropist; it’s a rewarding hobby. “Collecting for me isn’t just about buying objects,” Broad enthuses. “It’s an educational process, and I think it’s made me a better person. I’d be bored to death if I spent all my time with other businesspeople, bankers and lawyers.” Broad’s favorite artist is often trotted out in his profiles: the irrepressible maker of market-glorified kitsch Jeff Koons. Koons’s deluxe banal objects—Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Rabbit, Balloon Dog—are go-to status The
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Art collecting, like every form of shopping, is a sport that steeps our Masters of the Universe in the thrill of the hunt.
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badges for the biggest spenders. The Broads own thirty-three Koonses. Glorifying banality and conspicuous consumption, the pieces require an absurd level of maintenance, and a “commitment” from the collector, as Koons the master-marketer phrases it. “Free of the vulgar taint of productive activity,” as Veblen would say, the artist, an ex-Wall Street broker himself, speaks Broad’s language of CEO micromanagement, overseeing more than eighty in-house employees in a relentless quest for aesthetic efficiency. “My responsibility,” Koons has said, “is to educate people on what I’m looking for—every moment of the day.” Koons’s work and sensibility have become so infused with titan-pleasing shibboleths that the Koons brand is all but identical with the billionaire id. Whether he’s free-associating about “accepting yourself” and other self-help platitudes, comparing his various luxe-kitsch pieces to Old Masters, or making vague remarks about the sexual aspects and anthropomorphism of appliances, Koons’s unflappable, peculiar Tony-Robbins-meetsart-CEO shtick, all delivered in the soothing, condescending tones of a nurse in a mental ward, is clearly a formula that works on billionaires. Demarcating a comfort zone of guilt-free privilege for the artist’s collector client base, the Koons oeuvre creates the overarching impression that all aesthetic value is vaguely farcical and ever contingent, and that ambitious and worthy social virtues can be ascribed to whatever you’re peddling with just the right verbal formulation. These are all also defining traits of the fortunes on which Koons collections are founded: the work and the patron’s worldview enjoy a perfect state of mutual self-regard. Here, in short, is a sentimental education that be84 1 The Baffler [no.24]
guiles even the maniacal, test-based control freak Eli Broad.
Homo Ludens; or, the High-End Hoarder Shopping Club Art collecting, like every form of shopping, is a sport that steeps our Masters of the Universe in the thrill of the hunt. Whether at auction or at art fairs, deep-pocketed collectors flock to the buzz of the purchase—a sacred destination “where you can spend enormous amounts of money quickly and people will know,” as a veteran observer astutely notes. Here is how that great Anglophone tip sheet of the investor class, The Economist, describes the moguls-at-play spirit of one of the best known shows: Art Basel, a Swiss art fair that is a regular stop for many collectors in June, is certainly about having fun. . . . The sociability of the fair contributes to the aversion that collectors have to going home empty-handed. Jay Smith, an investment adviser . . . and an important donor of art to museums, admits: “When I don’t buy anything, the fair feels dull. Buying makes you feel connected to what is going on.”
In dissecting the surplus spiritual value attached to the art-buying ritual, The Economist channels Veblen minus his irony: Buying art doesn’t just offer a sense of community, it engenders feelings of victory, cultural superiority and social distinction. Some say that it even fills a spiritual void. The term most commonly used by collectors, however, is that buying art gives them a “high.” . . . Buying expensive art is very competitive, which for a successful purchaser adds to the sense of conquest at acquisition.
For the High-End Hoarder Shopping Club, art fairs are a way to best rival consumers in a prestigious public venue—to achieve, in Veblen’s parlance, “invidious distinction.” Unloosed before the legitimizing canons of art, the instinct of pecuniary emulation runs amok: “Some collectors always want what other collectors want,” explains Andrew Kreps, a New York dealer. By cultivating an inflated star system of artists like luxury brands, the art market enables the herd mode—and in this fashion, acquisitive types not sufficiently moved by connoisseurship can easily learn to covet brand names. In the New York Observer, an art fair veteran clues in a novice thusly: “The key is everybody wants what everyone else wants.” “Which is?” “That’s part of the game, figuring out what everyone else wants.”
Competitive buyers needn’t trust their own eye or taste; they can hire personal shoppers, a.k.a. art advisers, to run around the fairs to scout out art for them, snapping photos to document the investment’s appeal. Like fashion consultants, they tell clients what’s trending or hot, what will best suit their artuser needs and budget. If this all sounds disconnected from actually experiencing art, it’s because all the excess wealth sucked into the global art markets has fatally blurred the line between collecting and luxury retail. The art fair is thriving in recent years as a shopping spectacle where the meritorious consumers (collectors) are the VIPs, while mere artists are accorded the welcome that, say, truffle pigs would get in a four-star restaurant. A mid-career artist at a respectable gallery said his dealer could hardly bother to acknowledge him at Frieze London, the luxe art fair—the dealer only wanted to talk to the collectors. Another artist marveled at the dubious skill set of her own name-brand dealer: “I don’t even think he understands art—he’s just good
at making rich people feel comfortable buying. He’s not too intellectual or weird.” At this point, she gestures toward her head, and adds, apropos of him, “There’s nothing in there.” Art fairs now teem with glitzy side events, and ooze luxury sponsors and celebrities. It’s no wonder, then, that they are starting to eclipse galleries as major showcases for work. Tom Wolfe, our great journalistic connoisseur of status anxiety, has giddily portrayed the frenzy that ensues at the opening of Art Basel Miami. In Back to Blood, entitled consumers anxious to make the scene first (when it’s most prestigious to be seen inside) are motored by fear of missing out; the collectors strain toward the art like maggots swarming on a carcass. The whole spectacle represents a delicate balancing act of social hierarchy: art fair hype now threatens the snob appeal the events possess for the collecting class. Prominent and relentlessly self-promoting collector Adam Lindemann complains that buzz has dinged the specialness that formerly enveloped art fairs as super-exclusive shopping clubs for the rich. A native informant of entitled consumer petulance, Lindemann published a hissy fit in the New York Observer in 2011 demanding that the fairs do more to distinguish real “merito-
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Koons, Hirst, and Richter are marketed like Gucci, Prada, and Chanel.
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rious consumers” from looky-loos. “First and foremost,” he wrote, “art fairs should be for collectors only; if you’re not coming to buy art, get the hell out.” What’s more, Lindemann threatened to boycott Miami Basel unless the riffraff were expelled: Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach is a new movement designed to correct the ills of global art fairdom once and for all, and to send the dealers, the artists and especially the art-fair companies our message of protest: hell no, we won’t go! . . . We don’t want to see one gawker, two socialites and three wannabes for every collector in the room. . . . Occupy Art Basel Miami starts now, so, this year, join me in boycotting the damn thing. Let’s flex our muscles. It’s our collecting dollars fueling this perverse tchotchke bazaar on steroids, and if these people don’t fix their fair, next year we’ll riot.
After all that, Lindemann showed up anyway. And he needn’t have panicked. The art market, like the rest of society, has already made itself over to pamper the 1 percent. The big box-ification of art galleries, and a carefully constructed system of art stars (monitored and enabled by gallerists, auction houses, curators, and personal art shoppers) appeals to the fashion victim in the honorific predator who wants a recognizable luxury brand. “In the big box model,” William Powhida writes, “every show has to sell well to cover the staggering operating costs of these museumlike operations from staffing to producing publications that confirm the value of the artists’ work. In this model we face a kind of homogenization of taste oriented toward the 1% who can afford the attendant high prices like a $100k Dan Colen gum painting. Whether or not you like what Gagosian or Zwirner show is almost irrelevant to the situation.” In other words, the excess wealth thrown 86 1 The Baffler [no.24]
around by the predators has hollowed out the middle of the market. Mid-range collectors and artists are marginalized, starved of resources and support, in a shift that tightly parallels the post-Keynesian American economy in general; in both cases, the existing social contract has been reconfigured to serve the hoarding instincts of the lords of the market as they compete with rival predators for big-ticket trophies and drive prices out of all proportion. Koons, Hirst, and Richter are marketed like Gucci, Prada, and Chanel. Signature styles “immediately identifiable” as a brand-name artist’s creations make “them easy status symbols,” as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2012: “San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier says, ‘Collectors want an iconic work in a format that everyone recognizes. Monkey see, monkey do.’” “The great dealers used to be small,” James Mayor, the Mayor Gallery’s namesake owner, told an audience at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art earlier this year. “Now all the big galleries don’t have time for the artist unless they’re making millions.” As the art world adapts to the neo-Gilded Age by recasting itself as luxury retail, the power of the purse has effectively vanquished the last vestiges of the old art world: criticism, and the aesthetic judgment that informs it. Instead, deluxe bean counters coddled by their courtiers simply want what other honorific predators have always wanted—to distinguish themselves from the other assholes. As to what their gladiatorial shopping rivalries mean for the rest of our common world, well, the last word properly belongs to Veblen. “The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniarily unfit,” he observes, “results in a more or less thorough elimination of that considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform to the pecuniary requirement.” Buyer, beware.t
Learned 3 Fa n n y How e My brain is a baby. And all the ancients are in it still. My heart is a brain emptied of them. Both brain and heart need oxygen, one more extremely than the other. My fourth infant was an orphan who lived between my ears. Its cries could only be heard when it echoed around the pump. How it hurt! Another infant lived like an octopus fully exposed with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought. It was my arms. A heart is a brain that is only trying to think without any defense. The tentacle is a brain too. And its adaptable jelly’s just as intelligent as human blood. Sometimes you look into a baby’s eyes. “Bless her,” you suggest to passersby yourself being old and unnecessary. But no one does. Please, you cry. The tears of an infant can be bottled and hidden for special occasions. One drop on your tongue and you won’t ask for more. I’ve said this somewhere before.
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! i C H I LD’ S P L AY
Play, Dammit! 3 Heather Havrilesky
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he vigorous exhortation to “play” now haunts every corner of our culture. Typically issued as an imperative along with words like breathe and meditate and dance and celebrate, the word play, in its catchall generic form, has a curious way of repelling the senses, conjuring as it does all manner of mandatory frivolity, most of it horribly twee and doggedly futile. Yet Johan Huizinga, the Dutch cultural theorist who tirelessly examined “the play element in culture,” asserted that the one defining feature of play is that it’s voluntary. “Play to order is no longer play,” he declared flatly. “It could at best be a forcible imitation of it.” What would Huizinga make of the many forcible imitations of genuine, self-actualizing play that now overrun American culture like a pack of angry, corn-syrup-addled toddlers? When NBC can simply lease a building and fill it with money for something called The Million Second Quiz, the results feel much closer to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? than to the harmless charms of Password or Match Game ’75. Can the sinister-clown fits of sexual selfredefinition now convulsing the brand known as Miley Cyrus really qualify as “fun”? When the young-adult pop-culture sensations of the moment oscillate between the grisly rigors of Call of Duty and The Hunger Games, it’s clear that a perverse imp of destruction lurks at the heart of the supposedly carefree franchises of American amusement. A second-order definition of play, Huizinga notes, is its close correspondence to the serious adult activities of work. “Play must serve something which is not play,” he observes—which is why so many children’s pastimes openly mimic adult pursuits, from the near-universal rituals of doll nurture to 88 1 The Baffler [no.24]
games that reenact the aims and provisional alliances of war-making. But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry. Franchised recreation of the Dave & Buster’s variety cruelly turns both game-playing and drinking into an exercise in perfunctory high-fiving. (Imagine the multilayered Walk of Shame awaiting singles who let their judgments become clouded enough to hook up after a night of two-player Dream Raiders and vodka-spiked “Snow Cones.”) The mirror image of this play-as-drudgery problem is Silicon Valley’s utopian vision of all-purpose “gamification.” The notion of converting social goods into digital playthings is a beguiling goal for lucre-sniffing software designers. But as a solution to the inequalities of wealth, education, and life chances that are now sinking whatever remains of the American middle class, the deployment of game incentives—chits for losing weight, acing a school exam, or mentoring an at-risk kid—is less empowering than demeaning. (And that’s not to mention what tokenizing otherwise internally generated emotional rewards does to our understanding of our place in the increasingly bewildering high-capitalist maze.) Here the idea of play isn’t so much serving non-play pursuits as mastering them—fostering the illusion that the stubborn social ills of our day can be miniaturized, incentivized, and frothed up into delectably familiar morsels of privi-
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Anxious to be reassured of their unique-snowflake status, “rejuveniles� find sustenance in rock-paper-scissors tournaments, Zombie Tag matches, and kickball leagues.
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! leged consumption. These pursuits are thus “gamified,” in the most pejorative sense of the term. Hoping to land a secure job, a pension, a college diploma that won’t reduce you to serfdom? Keep tapping away on your smart phone, kid—it’s bound to turn up somewhere.
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ut technology isn’t required to induce arrested development in America’s adult population; they’ve enthusiastically embraced that goal for themselves. Consider the somewhat debased folds of what author Christopher Noxon terms the “rejuvenile” movement in his book Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up. By indulging in activities like dodgeball, Risk, and three-legged races, rejuveniled adults refuse “to give up the cherished qualities of childhood,” an impulse that’s “partially driven by a desire to stay young in a culture that equates being young with being cool and being old with being irrelevant.” Whether heralded by the adult “tribes” of Po Bronson’s overactive imagination or championed by the novelty-fixated hordes who’ve treated Boing Boing as their personal lifestyle manual since Madonna still had baby fat, this compulsion seems to flourish the most among aging hipsters distrustful of the mainstream’s ethos of embracing personal commitments and adult-sized responsibilities. Anxious to be reassured of their unique-snowflake status, “rejuveniles” find sustenance in rock-paperscissors tournaments, Zombie Tag matches, and kickball leagues. “All sports are ultimately ridiculous,” Noxon argues in one detailed assessment of the movement. “The beauty of kid games is how they make a mockery of all attempts to take any of this shit too seriously.” It’s quite odd, then, that “taking this shit too seriously” appears to be a defining characteristic of playfixated adults. From the rejuveniled grownups who train for water gun assassination tournaments to those who cede their daily 90 1 The Baffler [no.24]
lives to the relentless impositions of complex role-playing games, the movement conveys distinct undercurrents of escapism and regression. It often seems to be the terrain of adults who’ve gained enough confidence—and entitlement, and time, and money—to want a do-over of their worry-plagued childhoods. There’s also a willful awkwardness in play here, perhaps reflective of its participants’ impatience with the mundane conversations of mainstream adults. Instead of exchanging small talk about football, rejuveniles seem to ask, why not play paintball and Chinese checkers and refer to each other by absurd nicknames? Of course, there are plenty of other outposts of childlike (and childish) self-infatuation in the notional alt adult subculture, from the calculated innocence of Zooey Deschanel to the halting comedic stylings of Demetri Martin. And the palpable longing for simpler, less stressful pleasures among our reluctantly aging urban elites certainly possesses a kind of poignancy. Maybe those who endorse the ethos of lost play the most vehemently are just trying to secure some safe ground that hasn’t been polluted by the defeatism and hypocrisy of adult life. If so, they’ll find a ready-made cure in the crash course in regression known as American child-rearing. Hipsters may frantically juryrig diversion out of kickballs and board games, but nothing brings a person face to face with our culture’s incoherent quest for joyful play and perpetual engagement quite like parenting. Sadly, though, the whole exercise of amusing our offspring feels more and more like, well, thankless work. Part of the problem is that bewildered parents of a certain class profile face an armada of professional voices—psychologists, talk show hosts, Angelina Jolie—patiently instructing them in the procedures of child-identified play. In The Opposite of Worry: The Playful Parenting Approach to Childhood Anxieties and
Hipsters may frantically jury-rig diversion out of kickballs and board games, but nothing brings a person face to face with our culture’s incoherent quest for joyful play quite like parenting.
9 Fears, psychologist Lawrence Cohen offers an entirely representative description of the task at hand. “Play is one of the best ways for a parent to reconnect with a child, because it is joyful, fun, and it requires us to join them in their world,” he writes. Cohen recommends that parents gain entry into this enchanted world via games like “The Coast Is Clear,” which can help kids feel less anxious: “I start the game by hiding dramatically behind a piece of furniture or underneath a blanket. Then I whisper to the child, ‘Is the coast clear?’ I make up something outrageous that frightens me—something absurdly nonscary, like tiny puppies, or something extremely unlikely to appear, like pirates. Don’t use something your child really fears; otherwise the game can become really scary instead of pretend-scary.” This game already feels really scary instead of pretend-scary. And why is it so easy to picture the author “hiding dramatically”? The point, apparently, is to stop reasoning with children and instead join them in a rollicking land of make-believe. And to be fair, most parents already engage in these practices with their four-year-olds, if only to slightly offset the learned helplessness that arises from being bossed around by adults all day long. “Oh, you’re so strong and powerful and I’m so weak and afraid!” is the natural followup to “Stay in this dark room by yourself and sleep for two hours, or else.” So why does reading the commonsensical instructions for Cohen’s exercises still incite feelings of revulsion? For starters, making a formal, scripted effort to connect with one’s children and calling it “playful” feels like a pretty disingenuous approach to parenting.
Then there’s the tacit message for parents behind the play-at-all-costs industry: whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong. One of Cohen’s central points is that parents create a great deal of anxiety in children—a strange and sweeping indictment considering that a large slice of that anxiety arises from the pervasive suggestion (particularly in advice books like Cohen’s) that parents are fully responsible for every dimension of their children’s development. If anything goes wrong, parents are to blame. Yet if parents have the audacity to behave consistently like grown, responsible adults, they are, perversely enough, failing their kids. For the terminally anxious middle class, this insinuation casts a serious pall of guilt over day-to-day life. And clearly that guilt is working. Because our parks and grocery stores and restaurants are currently overrun with parents who coo and coax and applaud and speak some crazy coded language of play, finding dorky ways to get their kids to throw away their trash or quiet down without ever saying “Throw that away” or “Be quiet.” Because telling a kid what to do directly, or explaining that tornados don’t visit Los Angeles and wild bears never attack and eat kids on suburban streets, is not acceptable. According to Cohen, parents should verify that their kid’s feelings are legitimate, even when those feelings spiral into total hysteria. Emotional expression should be welcomed, even when it involves screaming at the top of one’s lungs. “I call it Getting Unscared,” Cohen writes (apparently giving things cloying names is one way of hiding dramatically from their banal import). “Try not to hush children when they are getThe
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This is the tacit message for parents behind the play-at-all-costs industry: whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.
9 ting unscared,” he continues. “It isn’t always pleasant, but it is healthy.” Learning about such playful methods of taming a child’s anger and fear and anxiety has a curious way of inciting anger and fear and anxiety in a parent. Because unlike former generations, who could comfortably issue the command “Go play outside” without invoking the wrath of Child Protective Services, today’s parents are commanded to “get down on the floor”—and stay there, or else.
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y older daughter recently received, as a gift, a “homemade” rag doll craft kit that essentially amounted to five tedious hours of sweatshop work for me while my daughter played elsewhere, wandering by occasionally like a supervisor to make sure that I wasn’t slacking off. Even after I’d threaded a tiny needle several times and created an elaborate hairstyle out of yarn and double-sided tape, the doll looked terrible. Eventually my fingers seized up and I had to quit, leading to tearful recriminations from my supervisor. “Next time,” I gently suggested, “we can buy a rag doll at the store made by someone else” (e.g., someone who really does work in a sweatshop). “That way, we’ll spare us both the agony.” This is what most labor-intensive craft projects mutate into eventually: yet another heartwarming lesson in consumerism imparted to the young future shopper. Indeed, much of what now passes for participatory parental play is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the degraded labor of the high industrial age. While crafts and crafting are widely regarded as a fulfilling way to commune with children, it’s tough to identify the sheer joy and whimsy in gluing tiny sequins on tiny boxes, or sewing together pre-cut shapes 92 1 The Baffler [no.24]
to make something that looks less handcrafted than ill constructed. Which brings us to the central flaw of our culture’s pervasive admonition to “play”: unlike its cousins, celebrate and eat and dance, play is not meaningful as a generic term. There’s a pretty big divide between stacking blocks with a toddler and, say, throwing a basketball into a hoop, giving a bossy voice to an ugly baby doll, or sitting down for an extended game of Monopoly. In truth, play often boils down to hard work. And ironically, tedious work-like forms of play may be the easiest for the productivityfixated adult to embrace. Angrily searching for the optimal thirty-point word at Scrabble, for example, appeals to one’s competitive drive and obsessive leanings. Constructing giant houses out of Legos might feel both redemptive (Who ever had enough Legos as a kid?) and soothingly repetitive. And nothing can quite match the inexplicable gratification of digging a giant hole on the beach and building an enormous sand castle next to it. The sprawling range of the amusements that pass for play may be what makes general incitements to embrace “play” and “playfulness” feel faintly unsavory. When “play” is championed without qualitative distinctions between, say, a game of Hearts and a fort made out of couch cushions, the mind naturally seizes on the image of a rejuvenile hellscape of hipsters in knee pants—or a grown adult, hiding dramatically.
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hankfully, a stirring rebuke to the barren functionalism of today’s modes of play can be found in the pleasure-inducing relics of the long-ago time before mass-consumer society. Take the lyric reminiscences of All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours, in which
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, an archivist of the ghost of leisured pursuits past, digs into centuries-old examples of play, from small-town audiences watching traveling circus performers in turn-of-the-century America to poets strolling in extravagant Persian rose gardens to Oscar Wilde drinking whiskey in a mineshaft. Instead of thrusting these pastimes into the present in order to measure them by our own play-to-order standards, Jenkins savors the unhurriedness of aristocratic hobbies of the Old World—without of course suggesting how we might cultivate a more democratic version of the same ethos amid our own acquisitive and harried personal regimes. Still, on page after page, Jenkins mines the past for jewels and then describes them in passages so detailed and lush that they almost come off as comedic. The Roman baths of the first century BCE, for example, sound like a combination of food truck, massage parlor, and water park: “There were promenades, gymnasiums, hot rooms and cold plunge pools, masseuses who gave rubdowns, and snack vendors who served eggs, lettuce and sausages.” From her recipe for a rose julep to her descriptions of Henriette D’Angeville climbing Mont Blanc in a black feather boa and a fur-lined cape, Jenkins paints leisure in such glittering colors that it’s impossible not to be seduced by a sense of endless possibility. Play begins to seem less like the doltish realm of child-focused dullards and more like a rich well of experiences to explore: the “celestial” strains of the glass harmonica, Duchamp’s exotic costume parties, ice-skating on the Thames River in 1813. As it turns out, being urged to be more “playful” pales in its effectiveness next to reading about the artist Ray Johnson’s habit of mailing friends disassembled chairs or chewing gum, or the scent of three hundred pineapple trees growing in Napoleon’s glasshouses in 1800, or the habit of mid-eighteenth-century
aristocratic ladies to sip hot chocolate in bed first thing in the morning. And what could sound more enticing than dorveille, a period of relaxing wakefulness in the middle of the night, during which people smoked or wrote or reflected but rarely left their beds? Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of this time, “You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take a breath.” It bears repeating, of course, that most such leisurely reveries were the exclusive province of an aristocratic overclass. But it would behoove a hardy utopian populism to expropriate the enviable embrace of leisure more common to ages past, even as it would banish the social regimes of work and play that originally gave them life. Indeed, in an age where we routinely speak of the clock-watching industrial workday and the idea of a languid private sphere as archaic concepts, cleaving to this vanished spirit of a small personal eternity seems like a more urgent social need than ever. This is what we want from our amusements, after all: we want the passing moment to linger, and become truly the present. In this light, play looks further than ever from another though-the-motions bender at Dave & Buster’s—and, not coincidentally, it recovers at least the spirit of Huizinga’s directive that while play must serve something beyond itself, it can’t be mandated. This is what we might teach our children, rather than joining them in on-the-nose exercises triggered by invading emotions. Because nothing soothes the anxieties of our existence quite like total engagement in an experience that lies far outside our gamified, rejuveniled compulsions. If this is what it means to play—to relish strange musical instruments, to sip rose juleps, to listen to birds singing in the early morning— then count me among the frolicsome. t The
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Narcissus Tweets 3 A ir e a D. M at t h e w s @NarkeHunts Followers 646 Following 0 @Artemis Looked down into the silvered water and there he was. The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. I’m in love. @BrizoSees Had a dream last night—a nymph saying my name over and over. A rock skipped across the sea. A blinding flower. Thoughts? @Calliope @Homer says you’ve helped his writing. Heard about @Ares demanding the DNA tests. Girl, war gods are full of drama. @Dionysus Prune these wild river loti. My lover’s head is festooned. At first, ok. Now too much. I like him clean-shaven, like me. @Eros I want him inside me, but he only offers water. I’ve said: I’m not parched, but I’m parched. He doesn’t grasp nuance. @Echo Fuck off Fairy (fuck off fairy) repeat (repeat) after me (after me): he’ll kill you before you have me (he’ll kill you . . . have me) @GaiaNature Turns out my water-spirit lover is a boy. Me too! I guess I’m gay. At least I am in good company, ask @Zeus. #ganymedegame @HeraCurses That damned nymph @Echo rests near; my words rattle through her, falling back to me. Why do I suffer her curse? #stalkerblues @IynxCharm The squalls displaced the pond. My lover is gone, again. He was not made for storms. What god do I beg to bring him back? @Aegaeon Just a quick plea—please stop the jinx-storms. My lover leaves when it rains. @KaikiasBlows Could you keep the wind still? Your kind kinks my lover’s skin, makes him turn from me. You are unwelcome here. @Leda Messed up what @Zeus did. But, honestly, fucking a god seems better than fucking a swan to me. Damn. Do you. 94 1 The Baffler [no.24]
@Maenads When @Dionysus claps your breasts like cymbals all night, sleep is impossible. He’s not looking for wifey in the club, ok? @Nyx Why is night’s dark so long? Seems like you and @Chronos could collude to make the night shorter, less shadowy. #missmyboo @Odysseus Do sirens sing in chorus? When my lover speaks, I speak. I can’t hear him without hearing myself. It’s getting old now. @Poseidon Did your trident strike this spring? The water is shallow. But, get this: when I kiss my lover, I drown. @Rhesus The river runs with great strength now. He moves so swiftly. I cannot keep up. @Sisyphus Oh. My. Zeus. I know the feeling. Play some Billy Bragg. Helps me. @Tethys Everyone in your life moves. Do you chase after, or let them go? If what you thought was a brook is a puddle, do you mourn? @Uranus Do we convene in the heavens after we fade or fall? Do we fade or fall? Do my words ricochet off this water? @Aphrodite @Venus Two-faced bitches, who are you really? What do you know about love? @Xanthus @Xanthos I wish I could lead a chariot in battle. But I’m too vain to fly, too fine to fight. @YourMomLiriope The seer said I’d live long if I didn’t look at myself. False prophet! I’m dying and I’ve never once seen myself. @Zeus Who will forget my bones’ bloom, earth’s lust for me? Or who will remember one god of many? Not the crocus. Not the daffodil.
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! i SNOT- NOSE SWIN DLES
Rage Against the Machines The real danger of videogames isn’t violence; it’s swindling 3 Ian Bogost
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fter Adam Lanza gunned down twenty children, six staff members, and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in late 2012, authorities began the kind of forensic investigation reserved for airplane crashes and sites of murderous terrorism. The details of Lanza’s life become catalogues of potential deviancy. He had made his bed that December morning. His armoire held five matching tan shirts and five pairs of khaki pants. An empty cereal bowl flanked damaged computer parts on his desk. And as any veteran of America’s periodic sagas of horror and grief wrought by young white men would expect, the investigators announced they had found the black box, the clue to the riddle, salvaged from the abyss: “thousands of dollars worth of graphically violent videogames,” according to one media report, inside the Newtown home Lanza shared with his mother, whom he also killed. The announcement played perfectly into the hands of the consensus view. After all, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre had delivered a statement following the Newtown massacre in a desperate attempt to stiff-arm gun control regulation efforts. In it, he called out “vicious, violent videogames with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and Splatterhouse” as evidence of a “callous, corrupt, and corrupting shadow industry,” which was the real cause of violent slaughters like Lanza’s. Television news shows had fallen into line and ran segments about local Newtown children voluntarily forsaking videogames. Vice president Joseph Biden had 96 1 The Baffler [no.24]
established a gun violence task force, inviting media executives from film and game companies to White House briefings to answer for themselves. And now shades of Wayne LaPierre’s diatribe fell across leadership-class opinion like a closing curtain, the audience murmur on the last act of the indescribable mystery. Videogames made him do it. Newtown’s aftermath offered another example of the bipartisan view that videogames are stimulants to the most pernicious real-world depravities imaginable, their fantasy violence cutting a hole in America’s soul. The Columbine massacre, you may recall, was a watershed moment in this particular blame game. The murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were known to play Doom, the first-person shooter that effectively inaugurated that genre and that was later licensed to the U.S. military for training purposes. Adam Lanza hadn’t forgotten. Even if Lanza didn’t carry out the Sandy Hook murders under the influence of videogames, the investigation said he had “an obsession” with Columbine, a connection that allows the specter of videogames in the backdoor of the demonology. Doom was the plaything of Harris and Klebold, but it wasn’t the first game to attract unwanted publicity. Mortal Kombat ignited controversy in 1993, six years before Columbine, over its absurdly gory depictions of hand-tohand combat and its lethal finishing moves, called “fatalities.” And the original moral panic over violence in videogames came decades earlier, via the 1976 coin-operated game Death
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! Race, inspired by Paul Bartel’s cult film Death Race 2000. There, two players steered vehicles around a course, attempting to run down fleeing “gremlins.” The graphics were extremely rudimentary, but in the mid-1970s, the idea of a game in which players ran cars over stick figures was enough to provoke a frenzy. How far we haven’t come. Anybody who grew up in America can tell you it’s a pretty violent country, and every consumer knows that our mass culture was reflecting that fact long before it began spewing the stuff in videogames. So on the surface, it seems strange that special powers should be attributed to games. What gives? One point to keep in mind is that moral outrage over videogames’ violence was possible only once they could make reasonable claims to realism—once games, like movies and television shows, were understood in terms of their content. In 1994, in the wake of the Mortal Kombat controversy, the leading videogame industry trade association established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) as a self-regulatory rating body. The ESRB was charged to adopt, assign, and enforce age and content ratings for videogames, which, like other products of mass culture, became potential “murder simulators” that had to be regulated by a board of constituted authorities, for all the crazy reasons Wayne LaPierre enumerated. But if there is something dangerous about videogames now, it’s not the specter of players transforming into drooling sociopaths by enacting depraved fantasies. Instead of forensically dissecting the content packaged in games, we should look closely at the system of design and distribution that’s led them out of teen bedrooms and into the hands of a broader audience via computers and smartphones. It’s not Doom or Mortal Kombat or Death Race we should fear, in other words; it’s Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and FarmVille. To understand what is really distinctive 98 1 The Baffler [no.24]
about videogames, it helps to see how their operation runs like a racket: how the experience is designed to offer players a potentially toxic brew of guilty pleasure spiced with a kind of extortion and how they profit by stoking addiction. We might remember why we looked sideways at machine-enabled gaming in the first place—because it was a mode of play that seemed to normalize corrupt business practices in the guise of entertainment. Because the industry often seems like just another medium for swindlers.
An Offer You Can Reuse Coin-op videogaming first emerged in the 1970s in the same venues that had previously hosted other coin-based machines like pinball: bars, Laundromats, bodegas, and other humble but slightly seedy corners of everyday life. In their heyday, coin-op video games were parked in mall arcades, and, like most cash-based businesses, the cabinets came under suspicion for money laundering. In the early 1980s, though, videogames spread from the tavern to the arcade, where they became a family affair, even if arcades were seen as disreputable venues for kids and teens. Pong and Death Race gave way to Space Invaders, PacMan, Defender, and Donkey Kong. No matter its theme, every coin-op game operates according to the same basic commercial logic: you pay to play with the understanding that the game will do its best to eject you as quickly as possible. You play against both the game and the machine. Your playing, in fact, creates part of the game’s very structure: a challenge that you can understand, accept, and sometimes overcome through a combination of good fortune and expertise. Your reward is time. And just as slot machines have odds tables, coin-op videogames are programmed to distribute the reward of time in managed increments—around three minutes for an average player. You play the game, and the machine plays you. Manufacturers tuned
Mortal Kombat ignited controversy in 1993, six years before Columbine, over its absurdly gory depictions of hand-to-hand combat and its lethal finishing moves.
9 the design of coin-op games to yield maximum “coin drop.” An arcade machine doesn’t pay out slot-machine winnings, but it does dole out its own form of gratification and “payout” as you eclipse your score and dive further and further into the game’s structure before it boots you out again. Marginally improving your performance requires another fistful of coins. In their 1983 book Mind at Play, psychologists Geoffrey R. Loftus and Elizabeth F. Loftus pointed out that the era’s games relied on partial reinforcement, a type of operant conditioning that provides a reward intermittently. Partial reinforcement, you may recall, was the logic behind B. F. Skinner’s infamous behaviorist rat experiments. It’s also the rationale employed by casino slots. Indeed, according to the Loftuses, the earliest video arcades were designed to operate on the same principle as the slots—scheduling payments for a short-term play experience. While the content of a game might offer an initial lure to different kinds of players—women and girls, for example, were presumed to be fonder of PacMan than of the space combat game Galaxian or the sci-fi shooter Robotron: 2084—the real draw of videogames could be found in timemanaged capitalism. But this was always a minority view in the culture wars of the eighties, especially as videogames left the arcade. By the mid-eighties, games became media consumables like the cartridges and discs on offer from Nintendo, designed to be played in front of the home television. Coin-op games persisted (Mortal Kombat was first released as an arcade cabinet), but by the early nineties, the memory of
gaming as a weird, multibillion-dollar family casino experience was a distant memory. From the industry’s perspective, the sale of consoles, cartridges, and discs for a fixed price offered a far more lucrative, predictable, and growth-oriented marketplace. Why erect a nationwide network of Huxleyan drug sensoriums, after all, when users can tie off in the privacy of their homes?
From Coin-Op to Free-to-Play to the End of the Line The new model of videogame delivery is “free-to-play” (F2P). At first it was limited to massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like Neopets and MapleStory, which primarily relied on kids pestering their parents to fund their accounts so that they could buy in-game goods. These games always offer the first taste for free, and then ratchet up the attraction of paying for a more robust or customized gaming environment. In 2007, Facebook released a platform for developers to make free-toplay apps and games run within the social network’s ecosystem. Then came the iPhone, the Apple App Store, and all the copycats and spinoffs that it inspired. By 2010, freeto-play had become the norm for new games, particularly those being released for play online, via downloads, on social networks, or on smartphones—a category that is now quickly overtaking disc-based games. The point is to sell, sell, sell; the games give users opportunities to purchase virtual items or add-ons like clothing, hairstyles, or pets for their in-game characters. In 2009, Facebook gaming startup darling Zynga launched a free-to-play game called The
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It’s not Doom or Mortal Kombat or Death Race we should fear; it’s Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and FarmVille.
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FarmVille that went on to reach more than 80 million players. It offered a core experience for free, with add-ons and features available to those with enough “farm cash” scrip. Players can purchase farm cash through real-money transactions, earn it through gameplay accomplishments, or receive it as a reward for watching video ads or signing up for unrelated services that pay referral fees to game operators. Former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus sought out every possible method for increasing revenues. “I knew I needed revenues, right fucking now,” Pincus told attendees of a Berkeley startup mixer in 2009. “I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away.” Every horrible thing in the book included designing a highly manipulative gameplay environment, much like the ones doled out by slot machines and coin-ops. FarmVille users had to either stop after they expended their in-game “energy” or pay up, in which case they could immediately continue. The in-game activities were designed so that they took much longer than any single play session could reasonably last, requiring players to return at prescheduled intervals to complete those tasks or else risk losing work they’d previously done—and possibly spent cash money to pursue. Players were prodded to spread notices and demands among their Facebook friends in exchange for items or favors that were otherwise inaccessible. As with slots and coin-ops, the occasional calculated anomaly in a free-to-play game doesn’t alter the overall results of the system, but only recharges the desire for another surprise, another epiphany; meanwhile, the expert player and the jackpot winner are exceptions that prove the rule. 100 1 The Baffler [no.24]
FarmVille’s mimicry of the economically obsolete production unit of the family farm, in short, proved all too apt—like the hordes of small farmers sucked into tenantry and debt peonage during the first wave of industrialization in America, the freeholders on FarmVille’s vast virtual acreage soon learned that the game’s largely concealed infrastructure was where all the real fee-gouging action was occurring. Even those who kept their wallets tucked away in their pockets and purses would pay in other ways—by spreading “viral” invitations to recruit new farmers, for example. FarmVille users might have been having fun in the moment, but before long, they would look up to discover they owed their souls to the company store. Zynga made hundreds of millions of dollars consuming smaller developers and building a gaming empire that boiled the blood of incumbents still wedded to the hits-and-commodities model. Big game titles in the console era, such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, took years for designers to develop and for sales teams to market—and now they were being handed over to the new industry model of shipping discs in boxes and hoping for impressive first-week sales, in the same way that the film industry counts on huge opening-week box office returns for big-tent film releases. On top of that, the legacy gaming industry still had to fend off all the old culture-war complaints about violence and delinquency— accusations that miscarried against a wholesome-looking, cartoonish farming game. Meanwhile, overnight successes like Zynga managed to enjoy the media-darling status of the technology startup world. FarmVille had cows and tractors. Your mom probably played it. It was wholesome.
Paying a dollar for a virtual avocado tree or a reprieve to retry a level may not seem troubling. But just as the original coin-op cabinets structured their challenges to fit a new kind of gameplay, one that started only to end as quickly as possible, free-to-play games are altering the experience of games. In the worst cases, like the card battle game Rage of Bahamut, gaming becomes a “pay to win” affair, in which the players who pay the most perform the best. Developers have realized that such tactics burn out players fast, though. The fashionable games of today more often offer gentler, soft-sell proddings. Yet these soft sells are even more insidious, despite the surface impression that they are making the competitive environment somehow more forgiving.
Take, for example, the immensely popular Candy Crush Saga, a puzzle game developed by apps giant King. Its core gameplay is derived from PopCap’s Bejeweled, a popular matchthree game that first gained popularity online in the late nineties. In Candy Crush, players match candies instead of gems, and each level requires the player to complete specific requirements—eliminating a specific number of a particular type of candy, reaching a score threshold, and so forth. The early levels are a cinch, but King has carefully designed each subsequent level to become increasingly demanding. When you fail, you lose a life, arcade-style, and losing all your lives ends the game—the emotional equivalent of seeing your last dollar disap-
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Th e Ji g Is Up ! pear down the gullet of a Vegas slot machine. To continue after death, you can wait a halfhour for a new life to regenerate, pester a Facebook friend to play the game (in which case you receive a new life), or buy one as an impulse purchase. Meanwhile, you can always purchase special upgrades that assist in the completion of a level. The results are remarkable, from a business perspective. Reports suggest that King makes between $500k and $850k per day from Candy Crush— or about half as much every day as the latest Grand Theft Auto made during the crucial first week of retail sales. Some free-to-play advocates reason that getting to try a game for free and then later choosing to pay a few dollars—or a few hundred—is basically the same thing as making an outright purchase of a media product or series. And free-to-play publishers insist that most players pay little to nothing; a King representative told the Guardian that “70 percent of the people on the last level haven’t paid anything.” Of course, as with the casino gambling model, most of Candy Crush’s revenues come from a minority of habitual players. The free-to-play structure isn’t just a business model that somehow got hurriedly tacked onto a game that might have been commercialized in any number of other ways. Rather, it’s a sophisticated new gloss on the classic playing-for-time model pioneered by the coin-op games of the seventies and eighties—only instead of coaxing pocket change from users, it extracts a kind of surplus value that, in the new digital economy, is infinitely more valuable: it embeds within the actual gaming experience the relentless quest for attention, word-of-mouth, and (ultimately) remuneration that drives virtually every other overcapitalized form of online activity.
United States of Swindles When Zynga went public in late 2011, it failed to exhibit the rocket-ship liftoff that Wall 102 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Street had come to expect from hot tech company IPOs. Zynga shares rose from their $10 initial offering price to a high of $14.69 in March 2012 before falling hard. During 2013, the stock languished between $2 and $5 per share. The company shuttered studios and laid off workers, but for at least one central group of players with (financial) skin in the game, matters of market performance didn’t matter all that much. Thanks to the topheavy equity structure of the venture-capital model of capital formation, FarmVille’s early investors, directors, and executives had taken advantage of secondary-market sales and new venture investment to cash out part of their positions long before the company had to disclose its financials to the SEC and the public. Even after the IPO, Zynga insiders sold off hundreds of millions of dollars in a secondary offering unavailable to the company’s employees, many of whom had been granted options and stock grant incentives as part of standard Silicon Valley operating procedure. Required SEC disclosures reveal that then-CEO Pincus cleared $200 million alone through this secondary offering. But the truly amazing outcome of the Zynga case study is that it hasn’t changed anything about how players and investors approach the contemporary gaming market. Despite Zynga’s fall from grace, the dream of free-to-play still tempts game creators and players alike. Given the structure and history of the gaming world, it’s not hard to see why. Like most gamblers, players believe they are exceptions who will resist being duped into spending money on in-game items or energy, or else they’ll be especially market-savvy entrants who will rationalize small payments as a reasonable concession after being backed into a corner. Rank-and-file game developers, unprotected by organized labor and wary of ever-impending layoffs in an industry as fickle as it is fashionable, have resigned themselves to free-to-play as the new normal: the
The real purpose of the videogame business—and of American business writ large—is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to create rapidly accelerating value and convert it into wealth.
9 will of the market. As for the executives, they have embraced the trend wholesale—and why wouldn’t they, with the beguiling specter of a $200 million public-offering payday before them? There’s also a far broader—and, as is ever the case in the gaming world, insidious—reason for the enduring appeal of the free-toplay model. As any casual student of the 2008 market meltdown and its aftermath well knows, swindling is now a common byword in American business and culture. Games publishers have come to believe that they deserve the more predictable, generous revenues that free-to-play games offer; such paydays will finally rescue them from the terminally unstable professional niches they’ve carved out in the hits-based entertainment industry. As I write this, King, the developer of Candy Crush, is reportedly planning a $5 billion IPO, making assurances along the way that it won’t fall into the same chasm Zynga did after going public (mostly by virtue, it seems, of simply not being Zynga). Meanwhile, King is taking advantage of new, confidential IPO filing rules that let it hide business data it would have previously had to disclose—the same sorts of off-the-books dealings that allow tech insiders to operate surreptitiously before regulators notice. Like Wall Street, Silicon Valley is already a kind of mafia. And in this sense, free-to-play games are a kind of classic racket. They create a surge of interest by virtue of their easy access, followed by a tidal wave of improbable revenue that the games coerce out of players on terms that weren’t disclosed at the outset. The
game knows more than you could ever hope to about the stakes it presents, and it uses the logic of its own immersive environment to continue generating reasons for you to pursue its skewed stakes. The creators use your attention to build collective value that they cash in before anyone can see inside the machine that produced it. Like free digital services more broadly, the real purpose of the videogame business—and, indeed, of American business writ large—is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to create rapidly accelerating value as quickly as possible so as to convert that aggregated value into wealth. Bingo! Despite all these distressing trends of upwardly distributed wealth tortured out of the market for human attention, perhaps there’s still a kind of perverse virtue embedded deep within the free-to-play trend. Games are powerful and important partly because they help us test out the limits of ordinary life. That’s why we play. And these free-toplay games allow us to feel the edges of the unholy reality of our current winner-take-all neo-Gilded Age. Indeed, the gaming economy and the financial sector have perhaps merged to the point that we need these freeto-play games, to help us see and understand the social and economic structures of the early twenty-first century. But, then again, if we do need them, it’s only because the technology industry has thrust such a profane era upon us—a form of unlicensed gambling with the house’s money that can disclose its actual character only through the artifices of play.t The
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Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse 3 Chris Lehmann
B
y any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt. Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity. Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively marketbased reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace. In one dismal week this past spring, for example, a virtually unregulated fertilizer facility immolated several blocks of West, Texas, claiming at least fourteen lives (a number that would have been much higher had the junior high school adjoining the site been in session at the time of the explosion), while a shoddily constructed and militantly unregulated complex of textile factories collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, with a death toll of more than 1,100 workers. In the face of all this catastrophism, the 104 1 The Baffler [no.24]
placid certainties of neoliberal ideology rattle on as though nothing has happened. Remarkably, our governing elites have decided to greet a moment of existential reckoning for most of their guiding dogmas by incanting with redoubled force the basic catechism of the neoliberal faith: reduced government spending, full privatization of social goods formerly administered by the public sphere, and a socialization of risk for the upper class. When the jobs economy ground to a functional halt, our leadership class first adopted an anemic stimulus plan, and then embarked on a death spiral of austerity-minded bids to decommission government spending at the very moment it was most urgently required— measures seemingly designed to undo whatever prospective gains the stimulus might have yielded. It’s a bit as though the board of directors of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the tsunami-ravaged Japanese interior decided to go on a reactor-building spree on a floodplain, or on the lip of an active volcano. So now, five years into a crippling economic downturn without even the conceptual framework for a genuine, broad-based, jobs-driven recovery shored up by boosts in federal spending and public services, the public legacy of these times appears to be a long series of metaphoric euphemisms for brainlocked policy inertia: the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the shutdown, the grand bargain. Laid side by side, all these coinages bring to mind the claustrophobic imagery of a kidnapping montage from a noir gangster film—and it is, indeed, no great exaggeration to say that the imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a
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The imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a grinding, miniaturizing agenda of neoliberal market idolatry. DAV I D M c LI M A N S
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grinding, miniaturizing agenda of neoliberal market idolatry. As our pundit class has tirelessly flogged the non-dramas surrounding the official government’s non-confrontations over the degree and depth of the inevitable brokered deal to bring yet more austerity to the flailing American economy, we civilian observers can be forgiven for suspecting that there is, in fact, no “there” there. For all their sound and fury, these set-tos proceed from the same basic premises on both sides, and produce the same outcome: studied retreat from any sense of official economic accountability for, well, anything. But the neoliberal flight from public responsibility is actually a tangled, and curiously instructive, tale of strikingly otherthan-intended consequences—something akin to the fables of perverse incentives that neoliberal theorists themselves love to cook up in their never-ending campaign against the prerogatives of the public sphere. The world of neoliberal market consensus that we now inhabit would likely strike many of the movement’s founders as a grotesque parody of their own aims and intentions. But because it is a fable of intellectual overreach, as opposed to narrow economic self-interest, the neoliberal saga also bears an oddly hopeful moral. The seemingly impermeable armature of terrible social and economic thought that has bequeathed to us our present state of ruin is really a flimsy and jury-rigged set of market superstitions, and could readily be discarded for sturdier wares.
Open and Shut To be sure, policy consensus is one of the premier breeding grounds of irony in our time, but the mid-twentieth-century movement that became known to us as the neoliberal rebellion is steeped in the stuff. For starters, the original cohort of neoliberal apostles conceived of themselves as an insulated, elite group of critics who were able to approach the 106 1 The Baffler [no.24]
great machinery of government and popular political discourse only at a fastidious remove. They began the project of combining their intellectual labors, oddly enough, out of their shared embrace of The Good Society (1937), a treatise on the limits of state planning by New Republic columnist Walter Lippmann, who, like many of his successors at that “contrarian” journal, advertised his growing disenchantment with New Deal liberalism and the whole endeavor of economic policy-making in the public interest. But Lippmann soon fell afoul of the more doctrinaire members of his new fraternity of mostly European fellow travelers—notably German economist Wilhelm Röpke and French publisher Louis Rougier, who would later come into bad odor as a fascist collaborator. The group’s early association with both Lippmann and Rougier underlined the perils of overexuberant detours into the political arena, and when they made a fresh stab at affiliating as transatlantic defenders of market liberty once the interregnum of the Second World War had passed, their formal alliance, now called the Mont Pelerin Society after a resort in the Swiss Alps, began life as something of a standoffish debating society. The first major irony in the annals of neoliberalism is that a clutch of publicity-averse intellectuals would, within three decades of the group’s founding in 1947, end up running a very big chunk of the Anglophone capitalist world. The Mont Pelerin faithful congregated around the Austrian anti-Keynesian economist F. A. Hayek, an Old World polymath who was eager to integrate his (strictly theoretical) vindication of individual liberty not merely into the heart of the economics discipline, but also into the full sweep of public life, from moral philosophy to scientific research. With the zeal of the ardent émigré, Hayek embraced the skeptical empiricism of conservative British thinkers such as Edmund Burke and David Hume—and also seconded
v The public legacy of these times appears to be a long series of euphemisms for brain-locked policy inertia: the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the shutdown, the grand bargain.
9 the broader British reverence for political custom and cultural tradition, which he saw as the outcome of adaptation across the generations. As economic historian Angus Burgin writes, Hayek maintained that “traditions were products of extended processes of competition, and had persisted because in some sense—which their beneficiaries did not always rationally comprehend—they worked.” The focus here remained, as it did throughout Hayek’s career, squarely on the radical limitations on knowledge available to individual human agents. In The Constitution of Liberty, the work he regarded, far more than the bestselling polemic The Road to Serfdom, as the summation of his thought, Hayek wrote that “civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess”—and thereby the “freedom and unpredictability of human action” were to be tempered by “rules which experience has shown to serve best on the whole.” It speaks volumes about Hayek’s own sense of intellectual tradition that he initially proposed the group be called the Acton-Tocqueville Society—a suggestion overruled on the grounds that these particular avatars of noble European tradition were both too Catholic and too aristocratic for modern tastes. Like many European intellectuals of the time, Hayek was also haunted by the recent terrors of totalitarianism; both he and his harder-line Austrian colleague, Ludwig von Mises, were exiles from the Nazi regime, and the group of like-minded intellectuals they recruited to form the Mont Pelerin Society shared their sense that market-based liberalism remained the only sure refuge from com-
munism and fascism. It was an obvious corollary of this faith that the philosophic values associated with such liberalism—skepticism, open inquiry, and historical contingency— were the most reliable antidotes to totalitarianism. Hayek, for example, argued that the halting and contingent nature of all human knowledge laid bare the conceits of state economic planning and demand management as so much bitter and destructive farce. In a 1936 lecture called “Economics and Knowledge,” he sounded an early note of epistemological skepticism in public affairs that was virtually postmodern: “How,” he demanded to know, “can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?” Clearly, nothing about such radical skepticism entailed an ironclad commitment to free-market fundamentalism. Any brand of liberalism that forced humans into free market relations would be self-contradictory, as liberal theorists from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to John Dewey, all of whom shared Hayek’s epistemological stance, understood. Indeed, Karl Popper—the thinker who inspired Hayek and many other Mont Pelerin founders—was himself a social democratic defender of the welfare state with decidedly socialist leanings. As Popper explained in a 1994 interview not long before his death, his conception of individual liberty was not antithetical to principles of economic democracy: In a way one has to have a free market, but The
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v Multiple crackups of the Keynesian model helped to create an opening for the figure who would be the new economic order’s zeitgeist on horseback: Milton Friedman. I also believe that to make a godhead out of the principle of the free market is nonsense. . . . Traditionally, one of the main tasks of economics was to think of the problem of full employment. Since approximately 1965 economists have given up on that; I find it very wrong.
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Clearly, too, the “open society” that Popper famously envisioned permitted ample room for the adoption of egalitarian, even redistributionist, policies. Even as Hayek himself inveighed against the “collectivist” ideology of New Deal economic reforms, he also took pains to distance himself from a devil-take-the-hindmost model of unregulated market competition. The challenge, as Hayek saw it, was not merely to mobilize the resources of the economic policy elite and its intellectual fellow travelers to ratify a complacent, status quo vision of business civilization, but to collaborate on a far more ambitious project. In a 1949 paper called “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” Hayek sketched out a visionary, classically liberal mandate that became the animating mission of the Mont Pelerin Society: We must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which
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does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realisation. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their realisation, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians.
There is, of course, a contradiction at the heart of Hayek’s vision: How is a utopian free society supposed to pursue its own ambitious battery of universalized mandates while remaining ostensibly founded on the radically unknowable nature of all human experience? But the real irony of Hayek’s utopian longings is that they were fully realized—albeit, of course, in nothing like the form he envisioned. As Daniel Stedman Jones argues in his incisive study of the neoliberal rise to power, Masters of the Universe, “it is hard to think of another ‘utopia’ to have been as fully realized” as Hayek’s came to be in the powerful neoliberal regimes taking shape in Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain: “The free market became the organizing principle for microeconomic reform, especially through the privatization of state assets, nationalized industries, and public services. Trade unions were vanquished and the power of labor was diluted. Exchange controls were abolished. The financial markets were progressively deregulated. Market mechanisms became the models for the operation of health care.” While it’s true, Stedman Jones notes, that “the purity that Hayek advocated was meant as an optimistic and ideological and intellectual tactic rather
v than a blueprint,” it was to become that and much, much more: neoliberals went on to erect a permanent edifice of postideological assumptions about the natural predominance of markets and the just as rigid limitations of government. “The results,” as Stedman Jones sums things up, “have been extraordinary.”
Interesting Wishes In retrospect, Mont Pelerin’s guiding spirits probably should have put a lot less stock in Adam Smith’s comforting policy-fable of the Invisible Hand and heeded instead the counsel of the old Chinese curse “May all your wishes be granted.” That aphorism is also rendered in English as “May you live in interesting times,” and both renderings hold with equal force in the neoliberal case. For as the (fairly recondite and academic) proceedings of the Mont Pelerin set were gaining wider traction in the policy world, multiple crackups of the Keynesian model of coordinated economic planning helped to create an opening for the figure who would be the new economic order’s zeitgeist on horseback: the diminutive University of Chicago monetarist-for-all-seasons, Milton Friedman. When Paul Volcker—Jimmy Carter’s appointee to chair the Federal Reserve—adopted a modified version of Friedman’s theology of the money supply to tame the two-digit inflation of the late 1970s, Friedman was suddenly the policy visionary who could do no wrong. He soon served as an informal adviser to both the Reagan and Thatcher governments (and, less prestigiously, to the dictatorship of Chilean general Augusto Pinochet). He reached a popular audience via a column in Newsweek, a hit series on PBS, and several bestselling tracts of unalloyed free-market sloganeering. While demure Europeans such as Hayek distrusted the allure of popular renown as a temptation to oversimplify their ideas and pander to the public, the robustly entrepreneurial Friedman embraced a mass-
cult platform—and for the most part on the very grounds that aroused Hayek’s suspicion. When he succeeded Hayek as chairman of the Mont Pelerin group, Friedman brought it, and the broader project of neoliberal thought, into its high propaganda phase. As he cultivated a high media profile, Friedman positioned himself at the nexus of an influential new group of transatlantic conservative think tanks that would go on to supply much of the concrete policy agendas for the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions: the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; the Hoover Institution at Stanford (where he would spend the balance of his career after retiring from the University of Chicago); and the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. And as the institutional platforms for Milton Friedman’s free-market gospel multiplied, the vaunted intellectual range of neoliberal inquiry vanished into a stagnant pool of confident and absolute assertions of the market’s unchallenged sovereignty as the arbiter of all life outcomes. Friedman converted Adam Smith’s classical doctrine of the invisible hand—whereby all self-interested actions mystically possess a benign or munificent social payoff—into an inverted demonology of the public sphere. There is, he said in an address honoring the two-hundredth anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, “an invisible hand in politics that is the precise reverse of the invisible hand in the market”: In politics, men who intend only to promote the public interest, as they conceive it, are ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of their intention.’ They become the front-men for special interests they would never knowingly serve. They end up sacrificing the public interest to the special interest, the interest of the consumers to that of producers, of the masses who never go to college The
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to that of those who attend college, of the poor working-class saddled with employment taxes to the middle class who get disproportionate benefits from social security, and so down the line.
It’s hard to imagine a purer statement of the founding principles of neoliberalism as we have come wearily to know it in this advanced stage of market collapse. It is pitched, first of all, in a counterintuitive rhetoric of worldly cleverness, a spirit of seminar-room one-upmanship. Not only is Adam Smith right about the hidden virtues of business interests, but the same paradox operates, by a virtually metaphysical law, to transform every action of every individual putatively serving the public interest into a parody of his or her stated intent. Here is a hermeneutics of suspicion that far outstrips the wildest excesses of the death-of-the-author acolytes of high postmodern critical theory. Not only is it the case that public servants will fail to advance the public’s interest out of some depressingly common shortcoming of character—susceptibility to bribery, say, or short-sighted ideological delusion. No, the central idea here is far more radical than that: government, by its very nature, can’t serve the public interest, because of the innately condescending and imperious character of the act of governing. Friedman’s claim owed its origins in large part to the work of George Stigler, a colleague at the University of Chicago. Stigler helped pioneer the famous neoliberal doctrine of regulatory capture, which in turn is its own ultra-cynical academic appropriation of what seems, at first glance, like a muckraking Marxist’s indictment of the bourgeois state. Stigler and other advocates of the so-called public choice school of economic theory maintained that regulatory agencies inevitably became hostage to the interests of the industries they oversaw. In a 1971 journal article bearing the deceptively wan title “The 110 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Theory of Economic Regulation,” Stigler airily dismissed reformist complaints about regulatory corruption as “exactly as appropriate as a criticism of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company for selling groceries, or as a criticism of a politician for currying popular support.” Stigler’s disdain for pandering political leaders did not, however, prevent him from summarizing his theory in a policy paper for then-president Richard Nixon. And, like most of the leading lights of neoliberal theory, Stigler went on to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. To be sure, the problem of industrycaptive oversight is a common failing of the modern regulatory state, as any cursory glance at the recent track records of, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will sadly demonstrate. But in promoting regulatory capture as a bedrock law of public-sector enterprise, the neoliberals performed a neat trick; they posited corruption as a permanent condition of the regulatory state. And in so doing, they casually relegated a fistful of traditional Progressive and New Deal reforms—the cause of good government, upgrades in civil service appointments and public-sector unionizing, the punishment of graft and fraud, and (not least by a long shot) the tighter regulation of corruption in the private sector—to the dustbin of history. Such measures, they preached, could breed only perverse and self-defeating outcomes, and would indeed grievously multiply double-dealing in the public sector. Only by harnessing the superior explanatory power of “profit-maximizing” in public life, Stigler argued, could the sad pieties of reformism be laid aside in favor of the sterner and more confident guidance of the true masters of realpolitik—the lords of the economic profession. Because “reformers will be ill-equipped to use the state for their reforms, and victims of the pervasive use of the state’s support
v Milton Friedman brought neoliberal thought into its high propaganda phase.
9 of special groups will be helpless to protect themselves,” Stigler reasoned, “economists should quickly establish the license to practice on the rational theory of political behavior.” Thus was born still another pet piety of the neoliberal counter-reformation: the notion that economics is “the imperial science,” duly licensed to dispense its marketpleasing wisdom in every sphere of life, from crime prevention and education policy to dating and food preparation. In the brewing theology of the modern conservative backlash, the moral hazards of the captive regulatory state were entirely the creation of the bad actors in the public sector. The bagmen for the industries seeking to purchase regulatory favors from the agents of the state were, after all, only acting in accord with the sainted Smithian dictates of selfinterest. What fault could it be of theirs if the state had provided them with an open market in graft, kickbacks, and influence-peddling? Indeed, Friedman, ever alert to opportunities for rhetorical one-upmanship, floated the proposition that critics of free-market policies were foisting a bad-faith “double standard” on the rightful workings of market self-interest. “A market ‘defect,’” Friedman explained in a tribute to Smith’s Wealth of Nations, “whether through an absence of competition or external effects (equivalent, as recent literature has made clear, to transaction costs) has been regarded as immediate justification for government intervention. But the political mechanism has its ‘defects’ too. It is fallacious to compare the actual market with the ideal political structure. One should either compare the real with the real, or the ideal with the ideal.” Got that? The notion that the public
and private sectors both bear “defects”—a completely banal supposition conceded by any Galbraithian on the economic left—is here elevated to a metaphysical affront to the market’s sovereignty. In fact, the double standard that Friedman calls out is nothing of the sort. No progressive-minded supporter of government intervention had staked out the absurd position that the state is morally immaculate, or itself unsusceptible to any constructive outside intervention when its practices are out of line with the public interest. Friedman writes as though Congress had never appointed an inspector general, passed legislation to reform the civil service, and improved regulatory safeguards—or as though the various federal employees’ unions had never pushed for improved hiring practices or better working conditions to upgrade their work product. And that’s because, for critics in the neoliberal camp, such external controls on the state’s behavior simply cannot exist; the regulatory-capture school of neoliberal theory already ruled out, on principle, the possibility that such interventions could yield anything other than market-distorting outcomes. In other words, Friedman’s lament about the mismatched moral standards of state and market is the phony protest of a card cheat seeking mainly to stoke up the theatrical appeal of an already rigged game.
Who’ll Stop the Rana? You’d think that our recent bruising encounters with the devastating fallout from the deregulators’ handiwork in the housing market of the early aughts should, by rights, render Friedman’s complaints about the public sector’s assaults on market virtue the deadest of dead letters. But, if anything, the ritual The
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v The dogmas of neoliberal market prerogative have proved far sturdier than a collapsing factory or a raging fire on the production line.
9 defense of the market’s sovereign prerogative has dug in that much more intractably as its basic coordinates have been discredited. As critics such as Dean Baker routinely point out, the stalled recovery out of the Great Recession is almost exclusively a function of the failure of our neoliberal economic establishment to speak honestly about a collapsed housing bubble that created a yawning shortfall in demand—a shortfall that, amid the paralysis of credit markets in the same recession, could be jumpstarted only by government stimulus. All sorts of absurdities have flowed from this magisterial breakdown in comprehension. Since the neoliberal catechism holds that stimulative government spending can never be justified in the long run, much of our debate over the recovery’s prospective course has been given over to speculative nonsense. Chief among these talismanic invocations of free-market faith is the great question of how to placate the jittery job creators. At virtually every turn in the course of debate over how steeply to cut government spending in this recession, our sachems of neoliberal orthodoxy have insisted that any revenue-enhancing move the government so much as contemplated would spook business leaders into mothballing plans to expand operations and
add jobs. It became the all-purpose worstcase scenario of first resort. If health care reform passed, if federal deficits expanded, or if marginal tax rates were permitted to rise for the vapors-prone investor class, why, then the whole prospect of a broad-based economic recovery was as good as shot.* And since neoliberalism is most notably a global—or properly speaking, the globalizing—ideology, such pat distortions of economic reality are no longer confined to the Anglo-American political economy. Nor are they confined to strictly cognitive errors in policymaking. The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh has yielded commentary from neoliberals that might well merit entry into the psychiatric profession’s DSM-5 as textbook illustrations of moral aphasia. Here, after all, was a tragedy that would appall even the darkest Victorian imaginings of a Charles Dickens or a Karl Marx: factory workers earning a monthly wage of $38 crowded into a structurally unsound multistory facility built on a foundation of sand above a drained pond. Three stories of the factory had been hastily erected on top of an already unsound existing structure just to house the fresh battalions of underpaid workers demanded by bottomfeeding international textile contractors.
* Meanwhile, the actual state of the labor economy told a different story—that corporate profits had spiked to record highs
and that, instead of scaling back entirely on job expenditures, employers were in fact adding hours to the average employee workweek, rightly calculating that they could continue getting more value out of the existing workforce in an artificially slack job market with anemic, and declining, union representation. (Once again, Dean Baker was virtually alone among economic commentators in noting this important shift.) Never mind, as well, that when significant provisions of the allegedly business-killing health care law finally began to kick in, health care spending in the private sector started to slow and stabilize on what looked to be a permanent and structural basis, with a projected decline of $770 billion over the next decade. In other words, government intervention in the economy—even via a mechanism as compromised and graft-riddled as the 2010 Affordable Care Act—was showing a striking capacity to even out and stabilize one of the most stubborn and devastating inequalities in the American economy, access to affordable health care. And far from producing a steeper drag on broader conditions for recovery, the stabilization of health care spending occurred amid a pronounced spike in health care hiring, and indeed a long overdue (if still altogether too weak) rebound in the labor economy generally.
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v Government inspectors repeatedly demanded that the facility be shuttered on safety grounds, but the plant’s proprietors ignored their citations, reckoning that the short-term gains of maintaining peak production outweighed the negligible threat of a fine or safety citation. Nor was there likely to be any pressure from Western bastions of enlightenment and human rights. The ceremonial stream of Astroturf labor-and-safetyinspecting delegations from Western nations made zero note of the cracked and teetering foundations of the Rana Plaza structure. Lorenz Berzau, the managing director of one such industry consortium (the Business Social Compliance Initiative), primly told the Wall Street Journal that the group isn’t an engineering concern—and what’s more, “it’s very important not to expect too much from the social audit” that his group and other Western overseers conduct on production facilities. And, as Dave Jamieson and Emran Hossain reported in the Huffington Post, labor organizers have long since learned that the auditing groups serve largely as pro forma conduits of impression management for consumer markets in the West. The auditing of manufacturing facilities in the developing world “ends up catering more to the brands involved than the workers toiling on the line,” Jamieson and Hossain write. Yes, factory owners and managers well understand the permissible bounds of discourse in such Potemkin-style inquiries—and instruct their workforce accordingly. “What to say to the auditors always comes from the owners,” a Bangladeshi line worker named Suruj Miah told the two reporters. “The owners in most cases would warn workers not to say negative things about the factories. Workers are left without a choice.” Sumi Abedin, one of the survivors of an earlier disaster—a factory fire in the nearby Tazreen plant that claimed the lives of 112 workers in November 2012—told the Huffington Post that
on the day of an international audit team’s visit, management compelled workers to wear T-shirts designating them as members of a nonexistent fire safety committee, and had them brandishing prop fire-extinguishing equipment that plant managers had procured only for the duration of the audit. What this disaster ought to have driven through the neoliberal consensus’s collective solar plexus is something close to the polar opposite of its cherished, evidence-proof theory of the captive regulator: a largely cosmetic global watchdog effort funded overwhelmingly by private-sector concerns, far from delivering oversight and accountability, has incentivized fraud and negligence. And conveniently enough, it’s the race-tothe-bottom competitive forces unleashed by the global workplace that ritually sanctify all of this routine dishonesty. In their malignant neglect of worker safety measures, local factory managers are able to cite the same market pressures to maximize production and profit that have prevented the ornamental Western groups conducting audits of workplace safety practices from releasing their findings to the workers at risk of being killed by the neoliberal regime of global manufacturing.
Barking Dogmas Still, the dogmas of neoliberal market prerogative are far sturdier than a collapsing factory or a raging fire on the production line. If the dogmatists have thrown overboard Hayek-era intellectual values like experimentation and skepticism, at least they can stave off their inevitable extinction by shoring up Friedman-era platitudes and, from the mantles of the nation’s most prestigious universities and op-ed shops, try to pass them off as the nation’s highest common sense. So former University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who helped found the influential law and economics movement that essentially transposed the shibboleths The
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of public choice theory into legal doctrine, has patiently explained that the just and measured response to the collapse of Rana Plaza is to seek enforcement of preexisting building codes across the Bangladeshi private sector. Writing on the heels of the disaster, in the Hoover Institution’s web journal, Defining Ideas, Epstein takes pains to rule out the passage of any “new laws” to improve workersafety standards or international monitoring efforts. But lest even this minimal recourse to regulation sound like too heady a plunge into statist remedies, Professor Epstein also cautions that the aggrieved and grieving workers in the Bangladeshi garment trade must not veer recklessly into unionism or other non-market-approved modes of worker self-determination. After all, he reasons, “in order to stave a shutdown off by improving factory safety, the savvy firm will have to raise its asking price from foreign purchasers . . . and may have to lower wages to remain competitive.” (This is another classic myth of the neoliberal faith—the rational “tradeoff” between personal safety and wages that the independent broker makes when he or she contracts with an employer to freely exchange time and skills for wages. Only, of course, the notion of such rational choice has been reduced to a bitter farce in workplaces such as Rana Plaza, where the basic human rights of workers are only acknowledged theatrically, for the purposes of Potemkin auditing tours.) A more activist approach to the crisis in global worker safety would create intolerable distress to Epstein’s utopian vision of the carefully calibrated relations of global market production. Sure, the EU might ban exports of clothes bearing the taint of labor exploitation—but such a measure would just perversely create “undeserved economic protection” for EU economies that are net clothing exporters (and by implication, would deprive consumers of the sacred right to 114 1 The Baffler [no.24]
the cheapest possible attire that bullied and undercompensated labor can provide). And do not get Epstein started on the mischief wrought by unions, which are all but certain to multiply calamities like the Rana Plaza disaster: It is not as though the only thing that a union does once it gains its dominant position is to advocate for the safety of its workers, even if that item is at the top of its agenda. Unions also bargain over wages, work rules, seniority, pensions, benefits, and other conditions of employment. In dealing with these issues, they exert a monopoly clout that can easily raise wages and reduce productivity. In a market with many firms, they can exert that force only if they are prepared to take retaliatory action against the firms that refuse to bow to their conditions. And they can only do so if they induce the government to take measures to restrict the entry of non-union firms that could underbid them.
In other words: Bangladeshi workers can either be more safe or starve more rapidly. But according to Epstein, they assuredly aren’t entitled to earn a living wage without the threat of being crushed or burned to death at any given moment. The pertinent market trade-offs simply won’t permit it. Indeed, if you want to know the truth, Epstein claims, “labor agitation was . . . one of the contributing causes to the collapse at Rana Plaza.” Even the threat of union-related disruptions to established work discipline can be Kryptonite to the beleaguered clothes barons of Bangladesh. We find ourselves confronted yet again by the torments of the heroic job creator. Prospective labor agitation, Epstein contends, “places enormous strains on the firms that have to deliver goods to foreign purchasers in order to remain in business. The threat of a repeat protest has led many firm bosses to step up the pace of work in the factories, which in turn means longer
v You see? One minute you’re protesting for a wage increase or a work regime less likely to injure you, and before you know it, you’ve frightened your employer into stockpiling inventory at such a frenetic pace that he kills you.
9 shifts, more workers, more extensive use of heavy equipment in order to make up for lost production, and stockpiling goods. That maneuver turned into a fatal insurance policy against future labor disruptions.” You see? One minute you’re protesting for a wage increase or a work regime less likely to injure you, and before you know it, you’ve frightened your employer into stockpiling inventory at such a frenetic pace that he kills you. Could the tonic discipline of market preferences really be any clearer? One can only hope that future no-goodnik labor agitators will heed this tragic lesson and recognize “foreign purchasers” as the remote, punitive, and awesome deities that the market meant them to be.
Trapped in the Moneybox It is not all that surprising, in light of the trajectory of neoliberal ascendancy, to see rigidly orthodox market apologists like Professor Epstein driven to such extremities to tease out a neoliberal moral from the bloody, smoldering squalor of the Rana Plaza disaster. But the neoliberal consensus has long since transcended conventional divisions of party and ideology; the axiomatic assertion of market dominance is a conditioned reflex among nearly all established pundits. In a now-infamous April 24 write-up of the Bangladeshi catastrophe, Slate’s Moneybox columnist Matt Yglesias—an eager Democratic partisan brandishing pious Washington credentials from The American Prospect and the Center for American Progress—tried his own hand at an Epstein-style
vindication of the market’s undeviating wisdom. In a post bearing the reassuring freeto-be-you-and-me headline “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK,” Yglesias framed his defense of the status quo regime of erratic standards for worker safety in the hoary rhetoric of the public choice “trade-off.” “While having a safe job is good,” Yglesias chirped, “money is also good.” OK, then! But note again the pinched moral universe in which employees are permitted only to have a safe job or a (barely) sustenance income, and never both at the same time. It seems a modest social goal to demand that the exchange of labor value for a paycheck in non-mortal conditions be accepted as an incontrovertible human right. If a rapidly globalizing market order is unable to secure that baseline personal and financial security, its support for wildly varying models of job safety should be regarded precisely as the problem—and not as the taken-forgranted standard for phony assertions about what individual workers (let alone “the Bangladeshis,” tout court) are purported to be choosing. But Matt Yglesias, like many of Washington’s market-besotted, faux-contrarian pundits on the notional left side of the partisan aisle, will not be rushed into stating the morally obvious. Yes, he concedes, there could well be an abstract case here for collective action aimed at upgrading the safety conditions of Bangladeshi workplaces—but like Epstein, he frets that the collective-action models of richer, Western workplaces create prohibitive costs of doing business and therefore may not The
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fall within the ambit of choices that workers in Bangladesh should reasonably be permitted to make. “Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans,” Yglesias writes. “Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh.” So, not to worry, Mr. Moneybox confidently asserts. The trade-offs have yielded optimal gains in each diverse market setting, in this, the best of all possible neoliberal worlds: “American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.” As an authority for this sweeping claim—which, by the
way, is untrue in what Yglesias sees as the argument-clinching “safer” U.S. end of the spectrum; Bureau of Labor Statistics data on workplace fatalities show steady increases over the past five years, with right-to-work states such as Texas leading the grisly toll— Yglesias cites the work of Robert Frank, a public-choice enthusiast who, in his recent book The Darwin Economy, seeks to lay the groundwork for a terrifying entity he calls the “libertarian welfare state.” Social media scourges wasted little time in calling out Yglesias’s smug, fatuous, and opportunistic effort to advertise his market contrarianism on the ruins of the Rana Plaza collapse. Eventually the scribe was hounded into publishing a passive-aggressive followup post averring that he’d been misread and
“Bunny,” I said, “I’m gonna build you a car that creates jobs and saves the environment.” ZO H A R L A Z A R
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v unfairly castigated by his critics. The stalwart wonk remained unbowed, however; Yglesias wrote that he still “absolutely” stood by the conclusion that, in matters of workplace safety, it’s “appropriate for rich countries to have more stringent standards than poor ones.” Now, Matt Yglesias is not a doctrinaire neoliberal thinker—certainly not in the sense that a disciplined propagandist like Milton Friedman was (even though he longs, absurdly, for a revival of “Friedman-style pragmatism” to bring the economic right to its senses).* But that’s precisely the point. Neoliberal orthodoxy has leached so deeply into the intellectual groundwater of the nation’s political class that it’s no longer a meaningful descriptor of ideological difference. That’s why Yglesias’s erstwhile American Prospect colleague Ezra Klein, over at his prestigious post atop the Washington Post’s economic blog shop, can marvel at the tough-minded budget “seriousness” of serial Randian liar Paul Ryan—or why the Obama White House can confidently slot offshore billionaire Penny Pritzker as its second-term commerce secretary while it continues to mouth empty platitudes about saving the nation’s middle class.
All Friedmans Now It was Milton Friedman himself who famously announced, during his tour as an informal adviser to Richard Nixon, that “we’re all Keynesians now”—but that oftquoted maxim has been badly truncated from its full context. What Friedman actually said, in a 1968 interview with Time magazine, was “in one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer.” He went on to spell out the paradox more fully: “We all use the Keynesian language and
apparatus; none of us any longer accepts the initial Keynesian conclusions.” Now, more than four decades on, Friedman’s savvy rhetorical dodge is the watchword of all mainstream macroeconomic thought. Even putative liberals who pay lip service to the efficacy of government intervention dig in behind their own pet postulates about the market’s transcendent wisdom and beneficence—about the need to temper the alleged excesses of the social-democratic usages of social wealth with sterner, more austere pieties about the real-world trade-offs mandated by the lords of neoliberal market liberation. It is an undeniable species of gibberish, one that would have likely appalled even as firm a market stoic as Hayek, who, whatever his other intellectual handicaps, well understood the mischief wrought by a glib and self-seeking centrism. During the Mont Pelerin group’s tenth anniversary gathering in 1957, Hayek delivered a controversial speech called “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” It was designed, among other things, to distance the group from the steady accretion of self-insulated and untested right-wing bromides that would later be the hallmark of Friedman’s successor reign. Today, however, Hayek’s oration sounds a much more sobering note of prophecy for our political culture at large. “Advocates of the Middle Way with no goal of their own, conservatives have been guided by the belief that the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes—with the result that they have shifted position every time a more extreme movement appeared on either wing,” Hayek announced. The one true road to intellectual serfdom, in other words, was the one that Hayek correctly saw lurking within the heart of the neoliberal revolution.t
* Yglesias has offered qualified support for the Obama stimulus plan and health care overhaul, and on this past May Day,
even ventured a classically coy Slate post where he pretended to flirt with Marxism. (Hipster-trolling headline: “Capitalism is looking pretty shabby.”) The
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wS T O R Y
Bcc: Dridge 3 Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner B: There’s an asp. A: I follow you. B: You knew? A: No. B: But you follow; you do follow. A: Yes, now. B: I see. A: I failed to mention that reportedly there was some mix-up. Maybe I should have said this in the meeting just now, to everyone. It’s nothing to concern yourself with, just some irregularities along the way, the way we normally do business, you know. I had assumed we would just make adjustments to the policies later, but given the circumstances with endless qualifications and the turgid pace of the operation, we decided against it. So, going forward, we should probably consider other avenues when we’re employing such usages, even in increments, piecemeal, even if we’re going by the letter, as it were. I was hoping to nail all this down today, but perhaps there are other matters we may have to think of before getting to this. B: I don’t understand. You told me you were going to move a mountain—your words—to get this done, and now you say there was a mix-up, reportedly? Does Dridge know? A: We tried to push forward in the usual direction, but the mix-up was more than a mountain, ultimately, though this would have to be measured. Ideally, what we’d need are more well-adjusted people, seemingly pointed in the right direction, and working together with a purpose. Certainly, these purposes still need be created, identified. Well, identified and then created. In that order. I was put in the position of addressing the complexities to staff and others, and yet there is always something missing from the discussion, 118 1 The Baffler [no.24]
things which can never be fully understood, itemized, processed. You know the drill. B: We can get you more people—Krill, Mawktock, whoever—that’s not a problem. But I need to know a) how many people you need, and b) is there a managerial oversight problem operating here that more people is not going to fix, because c) we still need this done now. Dridge is asking. A: Reportedly, some of the people are not well adjusted, as I implied previously, and it is not yet certain what this all entails—for instance, if the well-adjustment is to the present situation of the operation, or whether they are behind or ahead of the adjustment sought. None of these expected adjustments are actually in the handbook, which needs revision, or even a new chapter, as here, or several. We are certainly aware that this needs to be done. We are on the same page on this, certainly, though one assumes at one’s peril, as the handbook makes clear in chapter four, and even, to a less threatening extent, in chapter nine. The managerial oversight is going to be tackled, as they say, in the next meeting, I believe, by the managers themselves. We feel, or they feel, I should say, that that is their job, really, and I can’t say that I blame them. B: Who is not well adjusted, reportedly? Krill, who? And to what? To being mismanaged? To being poorly led by uninspired Captains who do not possess the intestinal wherewithal to whip the staff into line—just really whip them all—and get us that Total Effort we’re going to need on this one? A: In a word, yes. To being not well adjusted to the adjustment levels of the managers, who are, to different degrees, not managing the operation or themselves properly. A few
J O N ATH O N ROS E N
Do we not all go tinkle? Do we not all go boop-boop? Do we not all sit there straining over our turds, crouching like animals on the bowl?
9 seem to have risen too quickly to the positions, and so there is the thought among two or three that these few may themselves not be properly well adjusted, at least not to the standards heretofore thought consistent with the level they are at. Likewise, however, and to the point, there seems to be disagreement about this level and what it means. Again, a handbook, or something like what we are hammering down here, for instance, might well put us on a path, a lighted path, perhaps, toward understanding what they are really
trying to get at first, so from there we can go forward. Because we intend to move forward. There’s no dispute there—at least none that I’m aware of. B: Are you well adjusted, do you think? A: I don’t follow. What are you getting at? B: I’m just trying to identify the problem here, the Whole Problem, so I can get a handle on it and then we can together strategize some solutions. I believe, as I’m sure you do as well, that “The Only Good Conversation Is an Honest Conversation,” and so I want to The
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w know if you consider yourself well adjusted, both as a person and as a manager. A: This sounds like shrink talk. I don’t rightly know the answer to this. There are reports, or there were reports, that I saw, that they had done on me. Reports from a kind of consultancy group. The Company had this done with everyone there, and I’m not sure the point of them, unless it was to have them on hand for some later reason that they hadn’t expected in the present, but just to be safe. Anyway, on these sheets of paper, it became clear that I had been monitored during snack times, even. The upshot of this was that there were disagreements. Purported disagreements. These were mentioned on the second page, but someone had taken a marker to various words, like in a redacting way. So I’m not sure now what the final thoughts were on me. I would defer to these papers, though, because that’s down on paper, and they are really the experts. I really don’t know beyond this my level of adjustment. B: Do you by chance recall any of the words that had not been redacted? I’m interested particularly in the words which appeared—or didn’t appear—toward the bottom of that second page, words such as “prone” and “to” and “use” and “tape” and “excessively,” just as an example. Another example might be “masturbates” and “into” and “toilet.” These are just examples, to spur the memory. A: There were vestiges, or memories of these vestiges. I mean to say that I have memories of the vestiges of these redactions and those pieces still left standing, which always makes me wonder, Why? Why were these words left standing and others not? Were they trying to point me toward some understanding of myself, something they were hinting at? In any case, in comments outside of the cameras—they have been spotted tucked beside a wall sconce in two locations by other people—people have suggested, coworkers, that they believe, some of them, that they 120 1 The Baffler [no.24]
are being recorded still, past the need for the consultancy reports. One person, though, stated he/she felt that no one was actually viewing or listening to the recordings, but the procedure, the steps, was, were, taken to ensure against “crimes against humanity.” We all laughed at this overstatement, in a circle, but the one who said it was not laughing. So we didn’t, or I didn’t—I’m not sure what the others thought, were thinking—I didn’t know what to think. B: A non-response response, perhaps even evasive. I am recording this. I don’t mind your knowing. I find that recordings produce Greater Honesty. Don’t you? Recordings— by which I mean audiovisual monitoring synced up with one’s heart rate, one’s thermal imaging profile, and so forth—produce more information, and more information creates a more honest state of affairs, and so we can therefore all be friends and share our appetizers, just like real friends do. Several years ago, the Board was less than convinced when I brought this formulation to them along with my plan to install high-definition digital cameras and sensitive microphones in the toilets. The men’s and the women’s? I heard. Yes, I said, of course, both. I mean, why open yourself up to charges of discrimination? Well, but the toilets, I was given to understand, are private, severely off-limits, and yet my feeling was, Why? Do we not all go tinkle? Do we not all go boop-boop? Do we not all sit there straining over our turds, crouching like animals on the bowl? To placate the Board, I offered to have the cameras and microphones installed in my personal washroom. There were some on the Board who felt that that would be the end of that. Or that I was misleading them, that I would never go through with my rashness, that I was, as they say, “Coughing into the Wrong Monkey.” But I did the Board one better: I had the equipment installed without haste, and what’s more, at the beginning
Wear your camera, keep it “on” all the time.
9 of every meeting, we all watched the latest recordings of me at my labors, producing my tinkle-tinkle and my boop-boop. It must be said that I enjoyed the cameras almost as much as I relished viewing the raw footage. Sometimes, facing the onset of a difficult turd, I gazed into the cameras and made an expression that, well, I can’t demonstrate it now, here, for you, because the moment is not right. The light is not good, and I do not need to shit, sir! The best way that I can explain it is that I let my animal come forward. The recording and the viewing went on for several years, and it got to where I didn’t think of the cameras and even the most delicate members of the Board seemed not to mind my exertions, while others became true fans of my work, so familiar with my daily rhythms that they could predict my business before I did it. This was when I began masturbating into the toilet. I cannot say why except that I have since read in various books of management theory about how men in my position require relief several times a day. It is not unusual, in fact, for a man of stature to seek relief seven or five or eighteen times a day—the number is immaterial—and so that’s what I was doing. There was no element of fantasy that I recall, no exquisitely appointed bedrooms in my mind, no invisible lingerie to wring with my hands. It was just and simply and always a transaction between me and the bowl. Some on the Board indicated surprise that I would never flush, electing instead to leave the squiggle-squiggles there, but I will tell you exactly what I told them: I have always thought it important that we as a people—I am speaking of the human race now—do our best to conserve water. Water is so precious. A: No, this is fine. Being recorded, I mean. In
fact, off and on, I have begun recording myself at irregular intervals. I try to not ever get caught in a pattern, so I am always irregular in these matters. To explain, I like to have my own copy of what I’ve said, in case someone brings forward, like perhaps you yourself, an audiovisual reproduction of myself, speaking on whatever subjects and objects, just so I can have the comfort of knowing that I have an unedited copy. They can do so much now with editing, you know, that you end up sounding almost too much like yourself. I try to minimize this. I have a friend who works in archives at a government building, the work of which he cannot talk much about, and he has helped me create a kind of harness of lightweight material to wear. On the right shoulder, he was able to tap into the plastic a tiny machine screw threading so that a threeinch flexible rod could be screwed into it. On the top of the rod is an eye-shaped camera. The flexibility of the rod may need to be adjusted to something firmer, however, because it tends to bounce a bit too much, and the eye hits me in the ear if I turn quickly. It was the only way presently, though, that I could ensure that my face was being recorded as I was saying the words I was saying, so I am—well, we are—going to stick with this set-up. B: It is a fine practice to record oneself, and I commend you for that, particularly if you are recording yourself unexpectedly, building in the whole surprise factor. The irregularity of your recordings is fine, too, of course, but unexpected irregularity would produce the best of all possible worlds. You see, one can’t—or shouldn’t—know when one is being recorded. You must wear your harness all the time, whether the camera is “on” or not, just to create familiarity, so that the harness feels like a part of you, like skin. Recording by itself, however, even good recording, is not enough. One should also watch oneself, the more regularly and studiously the better. Do you watch yourself much? You can’t just make The
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w these recordings and stockpile them like the squirrel does his nuts or the librarian does obscure journals published on the bleeding edge of neuroscience. Since the age of nineteen, I have recorded my sexual activity, all the boom-boom time. I have also viewed this footage many times over, most recently, last night, before sleep. This is not, please understand, out of any prurient fascination on my part. There is in me no slow working out of some deep kink. I merely want to see myself in a realistic light. I am seeking ultimate realism here, Life Unadorned by Fantasy. I wish, in fact, to destroy fantasy. In my recordings, one finds no heroics, no boasting, no pouting and panting for the lens like some fucking porn star, the sexual athlete, the bounding gymnast, lithe and limber, prancing about the bedroom. Nobody does that shit. But that is precisely the allure of porn, I feel. Not just the fantasy of instantly available sex, the partner always ready for a roll, though the promise of sex without windy preamble or sex without dinner first or a feature-length movie is, undeniably, something. No, the true allure of porn is sex without dirty dishes in the sink, sex without arguments or “a migraine coming on” or arriving home from work and having to cook dinner yet again. I speak of sex without those nights when sex seems vaguely possible, in the air, as it were, only to find oneself detoured by flashing arrow signs and construction cones into another pointless fight, another evening of it’s too late, why don’t you cuddle up and hold me? Porn, finally, is sex without life all around it, and I am uninterested. I want none of it. I want rather the jiggle of fat, the cellulitic ass wrinkles, vaginal farts. I want moments of awkwardness, too, and accidental discomfort, the untimely charley horse. I want to hear myself say, That’s my arm, you’re pinching my arm, Jesus. I want dicks going limp and premature ejaculate drying on my leg. I want the long seconds of embarrassed quiet, you see, 122 1 The Baffler [no.24]
I am seeking ultimate realism here, Life Unadorned by Fantasy. I wish, in fact, to destroy fantasy.
9 the whispered apologies. I am only craving a bit of honesty, to see myself as myself, not as I might wish myself to be. This is a good thing, this exercise, this standing outside oneself and watching. Look at my face, the expression on it, the pained, ecstatic stupidity. We are monkeys humping in trees. Look at your face. It is the same. We are the same; we are irretrievably ridiculous. Why deny it? A: Yes, well, I mean, certainly. I think. I can sort of see what you mean there, with the honesty, and maybe what you say about the gymnast too, though my ardency is perhaps not as keen. I’m not as finely developed as you, I dare say, in general—I was raised among large-armed women, for instance, who smoked before seven in the morning. I’m also not one to make speeches either—full-throated, ambitious things—like what you have just said to me. It almost sounds prewritten, like you’ve written it down before speaking to me, but maybe it has been brewing for some time. I can get that itch to speak out about things, but I mostly keep it in my head. Sometimes, though, I mumble these thoughts, and the camera will pick up my mouth moving a bit. Completely inaudible, or quietly garbled. But sometimes when I think of others possibly viewing these things, on the off chance that I misplace the recordings, I worry that one of the people viewing will be a lip reader, and therefore he or she will be able to transcribe something I only mean for my mind. For myself. B: You’re too hard on yourself, though being hard on yourself is another good exercise and does, oftentimes, produce a Greater Honesty. You remind me of myself, actually, when I
was younger. I’m not conversant in the ways of large-armed women, but in other respects we are like brothers who have grown up in separate households and rarely see each other. It’s not just that the harness you made for yourself is similar to the apparatus I fashioned for myself years ago, using packing tape, a Styrofoam cooler, and a mess of those six-pack rings. No, I see in you the habit of the recorder, perhaps still nascent, maybe a bit fitful yet, but no matter, takes only a year or a year-plus of careful repetition—repetition, that is, and reinforcement—until the habit becomes like a passion within you, a burning. What would you think—this just occurs to me—about me giving you a new project? A: I am open to this project you mention, without knowing of its intention. Would I be able to continue using my shoulder camera during the project? I’d like that. As I mentioned previously, I was particularly aggrieved by my former employer’s one-way surveillance—did I mention this previously?—an incredibly enormous Mormon who shoveled nuts of all kinds into his mouth while talking to me and pointing the remote control at the CCTV monitor, from which we watched all manners of amorous affections between his son, an angry ex-football player, and a coquettish coworker who often smelled of dope and baby diapers. I felt this was a kind of larger crime at work, but being beneath the fat man, I couldn’t say it clearly enough, not that he’d even listen. A customer found her thong in the bathroom, entirely compromised, twisted, and so on, and this was given to the manager with a smirk and a wonder of what all went on there. Like with most things, she would never find out, and so was left to her own devices, like everyone else, you know. B: I am, as you probably realize, opposed to one-way surveillance. Such regimes are popular, however, with the churchgoing set, and it’s no wonder: these people, people like
your enormous Mormon, or Dridge for that matter, spend their lives worshipping their god, singular, suspended there up in the heavens, and they hear all through childhood, God is watching you, little Dridge. God sees you even when you’re alone. And Dridge, bright boy, asks, Even at night, in the dark? Even at night, Dridge. Even when Mommy and Daddy are sleeping. And so what does Dridge do? Dridge grows up, comes to work at the Company, and first thing on his agenda is he sets himself up as god, observing over CCTV while his people—let’s call them the warehouse crew—have forklift races, in effect. Now Dridge sees all. Well, this is no way to be, no way to live, no way to work. Far better, I think, to promote everyone to God Status, with everyone watching everyone and everything recorded all the time. Now everyone feels equally powerful and equally worried. It all balances out, you see? As for my new project, I appreciate your willingness to take it on, not knowing a thing about it. So fearless! Or are you just that desperate? What if I had said I’d like you to sort the Company’s garbage by color and then alphabetize the piles by first letter of said colors? Or what if I said, congratulations, you’ll be sexing kittens in the dark? Maybe you are just the trusting sort. I should not abuse that. A: I don’t know why you’re being so secretive. What is this about? Are you speaking about matters here in the subfield office or out in the field itself? We have our cameras here, you know. Or I can get mine. I know that there are enormous server farms hidden inside a corpse of trees, a forest, really. And these servers, just over the border, are heavily guarded at all times. I happened to be putting my nose where it shouldn’t have been, some months ago, and though we broke up—I with her, for the record; too complicated—she had many aerial images of these servers, and other servers in classified areas of the country. I remember her mentioning some boy, maybe ten years old, in The
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w rural Virginia, biking into this one area, and they just made him go away, permanently. The regional office even cynically put out a Missing Persons report for the family, and the family thanked them for this gesture. B: Well, without going into too much proprietary detail, I can tell you that I’ve invented a glove which is now being field-tested overseas, if you follow me. A person can wear this glove and, by making certain gestures and finger motions, perform nearly all of the functions of a satellite cellular phone. The glove also acts as a universal remote control for even the world’s most ridiculously elaborate home-theater system. All in a glove, which is not a cumbersome glove, by the way. I have no idea what you’re picturing. This is not like a spacesuit glove. This is a thin, snug-fitting glove, made of something like Lycra except more durable and not as sparkly. The gestures and finger motions are adapted from American Sign Language and International Sign, or Gestuno, and with just a few dozen simple commands, the wearer of this glove—which is called The Glove, incidentally, capital-T, capital-G—can phone his favorite restaurant, scroll through the TV listings, and so forth. It works off Bluetooth technology, so anything that you have that’s Bluetooth-capable will work just fine with The Glove. My car stereo, for instance, is Bluetooth-capable. Some high-end toaster ovens are Bluetooth-capable, so if you set out your bread the night before, when you wake up, you can slip The Glove on—a number of users reportedly wore The Glove to bed, it’s that comfortable—bring up the toaster with the “select application” gesture, and, in a few minutes, you’re eating toast, chief. A: Beyond toast, though, does it Deliver? B: What do you mean? A: You know, how Dridge always wants to know if things Deliver for us. B: Dridge appreciates The Glove, if that’s what you’re asking. The thing is—and this 124 1 The Baffler [no.24]
brings me to your new project—I have two parallel programs going right now: one a team that is supposed to be readying The Glove for the consumer electronics market—big money there. A: And the other? B: The other is a different team, separate. They’re working on, let’s say, noncommercial applications for The Glove. Certain parts of the military, our agency, Other Government Agency—these are some of the interested parties. There are people who believe The Glove can, with some programming, operate unmanned aerial vehicles, or any vehicle really. In the past, technology went from the military, say, and then eventually flowed into the consumer market. In a broad sense, that’s the story of the Internet, right? Or take those GPS devices. GPS is just repurposed missile guidance software. Toned down, of course, but the same idea. The same principles. What we’ve done, and what I’ve been wanting to do for years, is flip that script. So instead of developing The Glove for our interested parties, only to have someone else dilute it and capitalize on it down the road, why not do that now? Sell it to everyone, two versions, and—this is the good part—the consumer end of things actually funds the requisition for all interested parties. You needn’t get bogged down in the financials, but it’s like a discount, basically. Think of it that way. Everybody’s very happy. A: I would like to see your User Surveys. Were you leading them to your conclusions? You’d want to be careful about that, before Mawktock and Krill get wind of it, because they’ll dig into those surveys like badgers, and they’ll question you for hours about what you’re trying to do, what you’re really trying to do. This happened to me, and they had it on that consultancy report, referring to a separate document. I made a photograph of it on my iPhone, as Dridge came in to say hello, a nice distraction, but then I lost the damned
Look at my face, the expression on it, the pained, ecstatic stupidity. We are monkeys humping in trees. We are the same; we are irretrievably ridiculous. Why deny it?
9 phone somewhere in the field, but I distinctly remember Mawktock had used that phrase “crimes against humanity”—and, to be honest, I didn’t understand the usage. I have worried greatly ever since that someone is going to find that phone, or perhaps they already have, and then I will not be protected, won’t know what they know. B: I don’t worry about Mawktock and Krill. Listen, Mawktock has always gone on about crimes against humanity, but you know what? Who cries out about crimes against humanity? Losers. History’s losers are always crying out about crimes against humanity. And Mawktock went to Penn, okay? He is deeply, deeply sympathetic with history’s losers. Krill, I know less about. He poses, I grant you, more of a problem, potentially anyway, which is part of the reason I got both Mawktock and Krill assigned to the consumer end of things for The Glove. It’ll be a great career move for the two of them if and when they decide they want to be buyers for Target— Krill in small appliances, Mawktock lording it over spatulas. This is why I need you. I need you to work with them on the consumer end. Wear your camera, keep it “on” all the time. Everyone there wears a camera already, it’s great, one of my favorite places to visit, actually, all the glorious watching of the watchers, but keep in touch with me, okay? Because the consumer end of things isn’t
supposed to know ass-all about the interested parties. So if you hear anything like that, or if you sense anything like that, or if you maybe see certain persons whispering but you don’t know what’s being whispered, whatever it is, you need to get in touch with me. No one knows about the parallel programs except for me and you and very few others. I won’t burden you with names, most of them you’ve never heard of. You have the main idea. A: The names are the names. I am quite sure we know who we’re talking about, without mentioning them. That damned meeting has made me all the more aware of the burgeoning incompetency here, the stalled efforts from above, even after we’ve provided the data-tel. The Glove seems like it might be just the thing, to maybe get us out of this, this fucking hole, though I don’t really fully understand it, yet. I had a dream the other night, somewhat related to this, where I felt everyone was saying something for the purpose of the next person I’d hear. That these unconnected people were actually part of a larger pattern, one I didn’t understand, and this was normal stuff, taken for granted. Everyone was behaving normally—people would drink juice at tables, a bird would call from a tree, and there were mirrors in stores, just like it is right now, and yet it was part of some other dimension as well. Like a combo of worlds. When you would motion to a person, some other thing would happen, like a window across the street would open, or maybe the window was triggering something, like the dog that kept going around the block, always in the exact same pattern, like it was lost in the street, but not lost in another sense. It was spooky, but I wanted to remain in it. I don’t know why I’m bringing this up, really, now that I have, but The Glove seems like something from that world, like an extrasensory device, and so maybe that’s it. I can’t be around Krill, though, for more than two hours, so don’t put me in a hotel with him.t The
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La c k e y s
Deal Me Out A stacked deck at the New York Times 3 Alex Pareene
T
he New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously. How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative— and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCor126 1 The Baffler [no.24]
micks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose. Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown. In the first column, dated April 18, 2011, Sorkin accused Goldman of lying. Sorkin— sounding wounded, maybe even betrayed— wondered why Goldman had misrepresented its brilliant-but-double-dealing bet against the housing market in 2007. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found copious evidence that Goldman was “shorting” the residential mortgage market as it had begun to fall apart that year. The investment bank had anchored its shorting strategy in its analysis that the complex securities that Wall Street had built around residential mortgages and then proceeded to produce, sell, and hoard for years would soon plummet in value. In Senate testimony, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein insisted that the firm hadn’t sold
A L A I N P I LO N
Today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Andrew Ross Sorkin mold are trafficking in a confidence game: the fiction that our investment sector serves any useful purpose.
9 short. But the Goldman emails the subcommittee obtained and summarized in its report told a different story. “The findings of the Congressional report are straightforward and damning,” Sorkin wrote in that first column, citing a certain em-
barrassing discrepancy in the quotational record. In 2007, Goldman officials had told the Securities and Exchange Commission that “during most of 2007, we maintained a net short subprime position and therefore stood to benefit from declining prices in the mortThe
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La c k e y s gage market.” In 2010, though, the company released a statement saying that “Goldman Sachs did not take a large directional ‘bet’ against the U.S. housing market.” “Reading those quotes back-to-back is the equivalent of hearing someone declaring it is raining when it is a sunny day with clear blue skies,” Sorkin wrote. “It just doesn’t make sense.” But when Sorkin returned to the same subject a couple of months later in a second column, he was able to see ample evidence of precipitation. In his June 6, 2011, column, he told his readers that Goldman’s wildly inconsistent accounts were all just the result of a terrible misunderstanding. Because, you see, Goldman told him there had been a misunderstanding. When you saw the matter in the proper light—i.e., the way that Goldman wanted you to—why, then, you had to admit that Lloyd Blankfein hadn’t perjured himself at all. This second column didn’t call into question the facts that had left Sorkin feeling so sad in the first. It was still not in dispute that the Goldman Sachs “structured products” division had made $3.7 billion in large part from its 2007 bets that mortgage-backed securities—which the firm was selling to investors at the time that its now-infamous Abacus fund was riding high—would soon be worthless. It was also still not in dispute that the trader who ran that division had said in an internal company report that “the shorts were not a hedge.” (This language made it as plain as possible that Goldman hadn’t been pursuing the common tertiary ploy of plowing some of its earnings into a countervailing investment stratagem as a means of insuring the larger sums invested by its big-ticket clients on the premise that housing prices would continue to ratchet their way skyward.) Yet Sorkin now had smoking-gun proof that Goldman’s aims were not as dishonest or self-seeking as they’d seemed to him and, well, everyone else at first blush. He found this proof by retreading the same statement 128 1 The Baffler [no.24]
of denial released by Goldman in 2010, which, on second glance, clearly showed that the short couldn’t have been a big deal. “If Goldman made only $500 million in net revenue from its residential mortgages when Mr. Birnbaum’s [structured products group] unit made $3.7 billion from shorts, it is clear that it also had huge long positions,” Sorkin wrote. “Had it been ‘massively short,’ the firm should have made much more than $500 million.” The $500 million figure was not confirmed by any additional evidence or outside sources. On the contrary, the Senate’s lead investigator presented Sorkin with a document saying the firm had made more than twice that amount. Lloyd Blankfein had said Goldman was “not consistently or significantly net ‘short the market’ in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008” and that the firm therefore “didn’t have a massive short against the housing market.” In April, Sorkin had dismissed such gnat-straining arguments based on comparisons of overall fund performance as a “Clintonian approach to parsing . . . words.” Now, in his June 6 reboot, Sorkin declared Goldman right and its critics wrong by insisting that the short didn’t qualify as “consistently,” “significantly” “massive.” It was just a pretty big net short! Of course, even back in April, Sorkin was confused as to why Goldman would even bother to hide its big short. It had, after all, been a canny move—one that had made the firm a good deal of money (whether one billion plus, or merely hundreds of millions) just before most of its competitors nearly collapsed: But semantics should not be the issue. Goldman should be proud of its prescient call about housing. It was better for its shareholders, and frankly better for the taxpayers, that the firm was smart enough to short the mortgage market. After all, Goldman didn’t require a big bailout like Citigroup or the American International Group.
Sorkin’s compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry.
9 In the end, the columnist muffled his outré outburst of conscience and righted his attitude in the scheme of things, so he could get on with treating the public to the same cynical distortions Boss Blankfein feigned before the U.S. Senate. Goldman Sachs, in point of fact, “required” the same bailout the rest of the financial industry did; it would have collapsed if everyone else (and most particularly, the toxically overleveraged AIG colossus) had been allowed to collapse. Sorkin’s pretend objectivity made him affect not to understand why a firm like Goldman—which thrives on its close relationships with its ultra-rich client base—perhaps wouldn’t want to brag about betting against the worthless churned-up packages of failing mortgages that it was also enthusiastically telling its clients to buy. The widespread outrage over Goldman’s making itself a fortune on the short wasn’t based on the professional jealousy other investment banks might have felt for not hitting on the same strategy themselves. Rather, the pertinently damning fact was that Goldman Sachs purposefully, willingly, and knowingly screwed its own clients.
Original Synergy Sorkin is one of a few journalists and columnists (or hybrids) at the Times who are, at least by the standards of his profession, superstars. They have carved out lucrative niches and have symbiotic promotional relationships with their employer. This cult of mutual enabling is just as important to the Times as it is to Sorkin, since the Paper of Record is in much the same position that most high-profile beat reporters now find themselves in: badly pinched by the media industry’s downturn in advertising revenue but, conversely, ever more powerful as rival newspapers shrink and disappear.
This sliding scale from Paper of Record to Paper of Last Resort accounts for the stunning rise of the brand known as DealBook. The Times, which for much of its post-war history edited the personality out of its reporters, except for certain political beat stars like R. W. Apple Jr., has changed course as the media have concluded that readers are coming to put more trust in individual voices than in institutions. The face of Times gadget coverage until recently was David Pogue (whose relationship with technology corporations is about as adversarial—which is to say not at all—as Sorkin’s with the finance industry), a genial one-person focus group tasked with determining which smartphones well-off middle-aged men will be able to figure out how to use. (Pogue, who this fall defected to Yahoo after thirteen years at the paper of record, declared his uselessness as a reporter by marrying a prominent PR flack in the tech industry—a union that promises to produce all sorts of synergistic new copy, and perhaps a whole new family of algorithmically selfpromoting children.) Sorkin’s former business-section colleague Brian Stelter, over on the television beat, recently produced his own Woodwardian behind-the-curtain book, on some utterly boring machinations involving which celebrity persons were chosen to host NBC’s morning happy-talk show. And Sorkin is the face of financial reporting. Indeed, when future historians explain how frenetic brand synergy came to overtake the stodgy business models of once-prestigious news organizations, Sorkin will likely be recorded as the revolution’s great pioneering prophet. Sorkin joined the Times on a fulltime basis in 1999 (though his association with the paper extends all the way back to a The
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Too Big to Fail was hailed by some reviewers as a definitive account of the financial crisis, but it isn’t that at all.
9 high school internship). After making a name for himself as a dedicated source of scoops on the mergers and acquisitions beat, he pushed his bosses to allow him to create a daily email newsletter collecting the most important business stories of the day. This was way back in 2001. As it turned out, email lists—usually a bunch of stale links to day-old stories with just a smidgen of analysis—are a great way to reach very powerful people, who appreciate having obvious things pointed out to them while being reminded just how important and insidery they are. The viral appeal of such email blasts also makes them great revenue sources, because many firms and industries will pay a premium to reach such an elite audience. (DealBook’s initial sponsor was Brooks Brothers, which seems positively low-rent at this point.) In short, Sorkin saw where journalism as he practiced it was heading, envisioning the newsletter as just one part of an entire ecosystem of content, built around the brand of him. As Gabriel Sherman reported in a 2009 New York magazine profile, Sorkin thought DealBook should eventually include “special DealBook sections in the print paper, a blog, conferences, even a $5,000-per-year premium subscription.” (The inaugural DealBook conference was held in 2012, with BlackBerry producer RIM as the primary sponsor. The week of the conference, RIM produced what Advertising Age referred to as a “print spadia wrap on a special print edition of DealBook.”) The newsletter became a blog in 2006, and as the Times entered the exploding market for online commentary, DealBook was a hit. As Sherman reported, Sorkin became among the most highly paid staffers at the New York Times, thanks in part to the remarkable deal he struck when he 130 1 The Baffler [no.24]
first launched DealBook. Sorkin was to receive “a bonus that is based, in part, on the financial performance of the various DealBook properties.” For the deal to stick, Sorkin had to leapfrog into management in order to avoid the Times union salary scale rules. ( Just a few years later, the paper announced it would introduce sweeping pay cuts, and eliminated one hundred rank-and-file jobs.) In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture: DealBook caters to a high-level audience of CSuite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.
The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible: Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.
So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.
Too Sycophantic to Succeed Which is, alas, more than one can say about Sorkin’s book-length efforts to chronicle the 2008 financial collapse. Sorkin went from Wall Street’s favorite reporter to America’s semiofficial financial journalist of record thanks mostly to his 2009 book, Too Big to Fail, which narrates the dismal events of the preceding year from the point of view of Wall Street executives and Bush administration officials. Sorkin was reportedly paid $700,000 for it. The book debuted at number four on the Times bestseller list, naturally. It was then adapted into an HBO TV movie, starring fartoo-attractive all-star actors as the men who stage-managed the response to the great 2008 meltdown. Too Big to Fail was hailed by some reviewers as a definitive account of the financial crisis, but it isn’t that at all. It’s the story of how the people who caused the financial crisis desperately tried to clean up their mess or cashed out and left someone else to clean it up. Sorkin obviously doesn’t do outrage; he barely does context. Too Big to Fail is written in the omniscient Bob Woodward style, offering impossible accounts of meetings the author didn’t attend and multiple instances of mind reading. (“This is what saving the financial industry is really about,” Tim Geithner thinks to himself as he watches office workers ride a ferry one morning. “Protecting ordinary people with ordinary jobs.”) If you want to know who sat where at a meeting, or what an executive was wearing when he took an important phone call, you’ll find it here. But if you want an explanation of how the entire 2008 financial meltdown came to be, what its roots were, and who, in short, was responsible, you’d best look elsewhere. Sorkin always attributes the best of intentions to his characters.
Scarcely anyone in this oddly prim chronicle is driven by greed. Self-preservation, yes, but greed is nonexistent in the book’s narrative— a tic that’s roughly akin to Jules Verne writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea without bothering to note that his protagonists are surrounded by ocean water. One of the book’s heroes is former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who managed to save . . . the banking industry, as the American economy collapsed into a stupor that it still has not recovered from. Another is JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who is hailed for not losing as much money as everyone else. The closest thing the book has to a villain is the comically inept former Lehman Brothers’ head Dick Fuld, and even he gets a dollop of sympathy: “He had known for years that Lehman Brothers’ day of reckoning could come,” and so on.* (Charles Gasparino’s structurally similar book on the crisis, The Sellout, is much more brutal toward Fuld, and is therefore more fun, if also not much more enlightening.) You may finish Too Big to Fail impressed that the enormous Wall Street boondoggle known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed, but you won’t have gained much insight into the decades of financial and political revolutions and campaigns that led inexorably to the moment when TARP was presented as a world-saving necessity. What’s more, if you’d been reading Sorkin’s Times reporting in the run-up to the 2008 fiasco, you wouldn’t have had much of a clue that the world financial order was fundamentally unstable. As Gabriel Sherman reported, the word “subprime” appeared exactly twice in Sorkin’s columns prior to the implosion of Bear Stearns. Tim O’Brien, then the Times’ Sunday business section editor, even
* In Sorkin’s account, Dick Fuld returns home to his wife after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers:
“‘It’s over,’ he said mournfully. ‘It’s really over.’ Looking on solemnly, she said nothing as she watched his eyes well up. ‘The Fed turned against us.’ ‘You did everything you could,’ she assured him, rubbing his hand. ‘It’s over,’ he repeated. ‘It’s really over.’” The
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La c k e y s told Sherman—on the record!—that Sorkin regularly turned in “thinly reported or loosely written” pieces. This malignant neglect of the financial sector’s impact on the world at large has only accelerated in Sorkin’s DealBook reporting in the aftermath of the ’08 meltdown. Indeed, Sorkin has lately ascended to acrobatic new heights in his double-gainer contrarian efforts to justify the investment class’s true social prerogatives. In a January column, he wrote about a newly announced weakening of and delay in implementing stricter new regulations that would stipulate how much cash or cash-equivalent assets banks must keep on hand in order to prevent highly leveraged firms from once again tanking the entire world economy. “The conventional wisdom is that the banks are the big winners and the regulators are, once again, patsies, capitulating under pressure to the allpowerful financial industry,” Sorkin wrote. But guess what! The conventional wisdom is wrong. Whatever the banks want is the most prudent course of action. Simply put, Sorkin writes, any suspicion of bankers making out under the revised rules “is a knee-jerk response. While there is no question that the original rules would do a better job preventing the next 100-year flood in the banking system, their quick adoption most likely would have created their own drag on the economy because bank
lending would most likely have been curtailed.” This has been the argument for not addressing the systemic causes of the financial crisis since day one: if we hamper the banks in any way, they’ll punish our ingratitude by destroying the economy (again)! Sorkin quotes John Berlau, a right-wing economist attached to an industry-funded “free market” think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, on the slowdown of new international banking regulations: “Basel III has been delayed, and for Main Street growth and financial stability, that is all to the good,” said Berlau, CEI’s “senior fellow for finance and access to capital.” “Mr. Berlau is right,” said Sorkin. Sure enough, Main Street’s inspiring growth has continued apace. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, Sorkin insists that individual merit is reassuringly ascendant—all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. In one August column on the news that the SEC was investigating JPMorgan for bribery for hiring Chinese “princelings”—the offspring of prominent officials—DealBook’s lead brand ambassador doesn’t even bother to try to disguise his total adoption of the worldview of the super-wealthy. The headline: “Hiring the Well-Connected Isn’t Always a Scandal.” Sorkin’s defense of nepotism endorses the cynical argument—these kids are being hired for access to “Rolodexes”—because, after all, these firms wouldn’t do this if it weren’t profitable, and profit is its own justification. But he also, touchingly, endorses the meritocratic argument. Take the case of Sorkin’s friend, Jamie Rubin, son of the former treasury secretary Robert Rubin: I’ve known Jamie for years and he, too, probably would have landed prominent posts even without his name. In some cases, some of these children will tell you that they try to work harder than others at their jobs, just to prove that they earned the position.
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Well, let’s just take their word for it, I guess,
If we hamper the banks in any way, they’ll punish our ingratitude by destroying the economy (again)!
9
and trust the self-assessments of the inheritors of merit. (The next week, Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department had joined the SEC in its investigation, following the uncovering of a spreadsheet linking specific hires to specific deals. Just how business is done!) Such labored justifications of a corrupt status quo fit a common Sorkin column theme, which is, essentially, This may sound outrageous, but don’t worry your little head about it. In March of this year, after quoting attorney general Eric Holder saying that financial institutions were too crucial to the world economy to pursue criminal cases against them, Sorkin went to work: “As you can imagine, both the left and the right made hay of Mr. Holder’s statement, using it as a damning explanation for the lack of prosecutions of Wall Street,” he wrote. When a Times columnist trots out “both the left and the right,” you can safely bet—without hedging—that you are in for a dose of centrist apologetics: Putting aside the important matter of whether our banks are too big to fail, there is a more pressing and difficult question that needs to be answered here and now: Do we want to indict corporations? And is it effective?
Sorkin clearly holds the “no” position on both questions, and in support of his view he cites the prosecution of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, which put thousands of people out of work. Andersen, before the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, had been convicted of obstruction of justice for going on an evidence-shredding spree during the investigation of the Enron scandal. The conviction forced the company to give up its CPA licenses, effectively putting the firm out of business. Sorkin sees the reversal of the conviction (the
Court thought the jury instructions too vague and broad) as proof that those accountants were thrust out on the street unnecessarily. Another interpretation is that Arthur Andersen went out of business not just because it was prosecuted, but because the company had undeniably engaged in widespread fraud and corruption on a breathtaking scale. Before Enron went to trial, Andersen had already been fined millions by the government for fraud related to its audits of Waste Management Inc. and Sunbeam Corp. As for Sorkin’s second question—Is it effective?—well, Arthur Andersen is no longer abetting massive fraud, which would suggest that the prosecution achieved at least one of its desired goals. Still, for Sorkin, the central point remains: we mustn’t punish the banks, or their accounting and credit-rating enablers. As is often the case in a Sorkin column, what should be a sensible response to malfeasance—disgust with the banks and a desire to have them punished and reined in—is shown to be hasty and misguided. It usually turns out that, like Lloyd Blankfein testifying to the Senate, those crazy banks were right after all.
The Haves Mind The conservative perception of the New York Times as a liberal newspaper isn’t totally inaccurate. It’s a newspaper by and for the Northeastern elite, and the Northeastern elite is a pretty liberal bunch, at least about most social issues. But it is by no means a left-wing paper, and while it may editorialize in favor of modest economic redistribution, its coverage and its editorial choices are plainly crafted for the Haves. The paper’s audience is a certain kind of rich New York liberal—the hackneyed shorthand is “Upper West Side”—and the paThe
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The New York Times is by no means a left-wing paper, and its coverage is plainly crafted for the Haves.
9 per’s content naturally reflects this outlook (especially since this demographic also encompasses most of the people who edit and publish the paper). When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal and launched that paper’s first real metro section, the Times responded with an ad campaign promising “Not Just Wall Street. Every Street.” But the Times, in truth, doesn’t bother to cover most New York streets, unless those streets contain either luxury apartments, new restaurants by acclaimed chefs, or at least a decent number of fashionable young people. Recently, the online news startup BKLYNR created a graphic charting the New York Times coverage of Brooklyn—the city’s most populous borough, with nearly as many residents as all of Chicago—from 1981 to the present. In 2012, it turns out, just 4.7 percent of Times articles contained the word “Brooklyn”—and that was up from 1.4 percent in 1981. The jump is not due to increased coverage of poverty in Brownsville. It’s driven by a staggering influx of money into a few Brooklyn neighborhoods. The Times found Brooklyn once Times people started moving there. The two Brooklyn neighborhoods cited most in 2012 were, naturally, Williamsburg (home of the exotic “hipster”) and Park Slope (home of the rich liberal starter family). Williamsburg and Park Slope have been the two Brooklyn neighborhoods mentioned most often in the Times every year since 2001. The New York Times: Not Just Wall Street, Also Sometimes Bedford Avenue. In 2012, Red Hook, a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, saw coverage skyrocket after it was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. But as BKLYNR notes, before the storm, most of the Red Hook coverage was about food and real estate. And afterwards, “a sizable subset of 134 1 The Baffler [no.24]
the Hurricane Sandy stories that mention Red Hook are about food.” Neighborhoods become suitable for coverage once good restaurants open up. Before then, the Times might send a stringer to cover a particularly brutal crime. A regular Times reader unfamiliar with the city could be forgiven for thinking that the entirety of the Bronx consists of Yankee Stadium. (Even its lightweight, whimsical coverage of greater New York fell to the budget axe, when the paper killed its “Talk of the Town”–aping section, “The City,” in 2009.) Widespread, systemic poverty in the city is the subject of an occasional special project. And the Times does have a reporter on the poverty beat—Jason DeParle, who regularly does great work—but there’s no daily email blast for the working poor or the long-term unemployed. Until a decade or so ago, the Times had flattered and entertained its audience with generous coverage of culture, arts, food, real estate, and travel (rich people interests) but had essentially abandoned the world of finance to its (formerly) downtown competitor, the Wall Street Journal. This is the opportunity Sorkin saw when he first pitched DealBook back in 2001, and it’s worked phenomenally well for him and the paper. After all, finance coverage in the mainstream press is intended for an audience of financial professionals, not the consumers of financial products—in much the same way that, say, the paper’s real estate coverage isn’t exactly intended for people who find housing arrangements on Craigslist. (This is the only possible explanation for something like DealBook’s lovingly detailed “Vows”-style account of the March 2013 wedding of Lloyd Blankfein’s son: by treating the investment bank scion as a bold-faced name-cum-nuptial-
tastemaker, Sorkin’s shop was reminding the members of the financial elite, yet once more, that they were an invaluable breed apart.) There is a slight tension, though, between the (ideal) rich, liberal Times reader and the Wall Street titan who religiously refreshes DealBook. The Times reader, while rich, is more likely to accept the notion that Wall Street is corrupt, destructive, and far too powerful. But finance professionals could not function without the delusion that their jobs are beneficial, indeed essential, to society as a whole. This tension has colored the Times’ coverage of business and economics for years, and it has expressed itself in some weird hiring choices. Some of those hires seemed almost designed to repel the paper’s natural longtime audience. A partnership with the Freakonomics guys— University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and his journalist/amanuensis Stephen Dubner—made a certain kind of sense. But having arch-libertarian John Tierney write a sort of science column for years (with a twoyear stint on the op-ed page) seemed like highlevel trolling. Or sometimes very low-level trolling—as when the Times sent Tierney to Zabar’s during the 2004 Republican National Convention to badger rich liberals about their “consciences.” Tierney concluded that Republicans, while perhaps zealots, were “less smug than the Upper West Siders.” When Too Big to Fail was released, Vanity Fair threw Sorkin a party. In an unsurprising display of obliviousness to the pitfalls of access journalism, attendees included many of the subjects of (and sources for) the book, like Jamie Dimon and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack. Also on hand was Steven Rattner. Rattner was once a New York Times reporter, covering business and economics, until he decided that he was smarter than the very rich people he covered. He set out to make himself very rich, which he did. He quit the Times in 1982 to join Lehman Brothers. Rattner did fantastically well for himself in finance, even-
tually founding a private equity fund in 2000 that further lofted his earnings into the stratosphere (even after it was revealed that he’d paid kickbacks to a corrupt official for a greater cut of New York state’s pension fund). Sorkin had just talked to Rattner for a DealBook column in February, detailing his impressive comeback from an equity investor who’d briefly been mildly embarrassed by evidence of corruption to someone who could once again be reverently described as a New York “power magnate.” Rattner had the ambition, and his Times job gave him the connections, to join the global financial elite he covered. Clearly Sorkin also has both. For now, that’s another reason for the Times to make sure he’s happy and well compensated. Indeed, the Times has lately given Sorkin space in other sections to indulge some of his more idiosyncratic interests. The September 14 issue of the Times’ Sunday style insert, T Magazine, teased on the cover, “Andrew Ross Sorkin on Men’s Underwear.” In the piece, Sorkin proclaims his loyalty to a particular $40 undershirt, and even includes some of the priceless access journalism that has brought him so much success in the financial pages. “I know a senior Hollywood executive,” he spills, “who will wear only $58 boxer
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La c k e y s briefs made by Hanro in Switzerland. He too extols their virtues to anyone who will listen.” In another arrangement that would have given an ombudsman fits a generation (or perhaps a decade) ago, Sorkin cohosts Squawk Box, an investor-gossip program on CNBC—the cable news equivalent of DealBook in everything from its relentless cheerleading for the titans of Wall Street to its soiling of a once-respected news brand. One recent autumn morning, Sorkin was reporting live on “The Word From the Docks,” by which I mean that he was literally standing on a dock in Nantucket, where the network had dispatched him to cover a self-flattering corporate confab. Sorkin, with an expensivelooking boat lolling just behind him, gave viewers an update on the condition of Larry
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Summers, who had recently been forced to withdraw his name from consideration for the Fed chairmanship, because no one likes him. Or rather, no one besides his friends on the docks, who, Sorkin reported, regretted not pushing harder and earlier for Summers: “They all look at Larry Summers as a casualty, if you will, of the Syria situation.” The U.N., as of this writing, has not yet sent its inspectors to Nantucket. One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it. The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try. Like a bloated and overleveraged global financial company, he’s far too crucial to be held to a regular standard of conduct. Our subprime lenders proved, in the final analysis, too big too fail; and now, certain of our name-brand financial writers are too big to practice journalism. t
Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned with the Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company of Brooklyn 1893 3 Da r a Wier
I’d accepted the assignment to photograph only Whatever it seemed showed how lonely We really are, calling into question the completely Misunderstood concept of understanding, you understand? Everything was undifferentiated, equidistant, flat, Everything had concept & abstract to spare, Everything all at once came into play, we experienced Passion so big it couldn’t be resisted, we experienced A loss of will in the face of it, we experienced a small marine fossil in a sedimentary rock Lonely is as lonely does, like dark on night, like Like light on glass, like night on life, like love on duty, & time after time, like blue on you, like The time you said to me, we are on the verge Of satisfaction and I didn’t listen, like that time, Like the time I lent you my hand, and took it back.
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La c k e y s i TA B LO I D N E W S
The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke The triumph of Vice 3 Anne Elizabeth Moore
T
hirteen-year-old Milly Dowler, a perky schoolgirl from Surrey, England, never intended to be the undoing of mighty News Corp. The global media conglomerate—famously helmed by expat Australian Rupert Murdoch—had, in Dowler’s day, owned or held major shares in more than 250 separate media companies worldwide, including newspapers, film studios, radio stations, book publishers, and cable and television networks. But one spring afternoon in 2002, the tawny-haired tween set off a sequence of events that would end Murdoch’s beloved company. (Spoiler alert: He gets his vengeance.) That Thursday, Dowler, in her school’s required mini-and-tie uniform, left campus with a pal, grabbed a snack, and disappeared. White girl in distress? This was News of the World’s beat. The Murdoch-owned British tabloid—his first media acquisition outside of Australia—was then in the midst of a salacious run of features outing accused pedophiles. The series started after the murder of eight-yearold Sarah Payne by a convicted sex offender in 2000; the paper’s track record of publishing the names and photographs of rumored sex offenders without attribution or verification prompted police officials to denounce the vigilante-style coverage as “grossly irresponsible” and resulted in more than one violent attack on an innocent. Dowler’s disappearance made the perfect follow-up, and the rag’s coverage spawned so much media attention that southern U.K. grade-schoolers were under claustrophobic parental supervision for months. 138 1 The Baffler [no.24]
When Dowler’s body was discovered a half-year later, the disappearance was reclassified as a murder. It would be six more years before police identified a suspect—and nine total before Levi Bellfield was convicted of the crime. An aggressive, pudgy man, Bellfield had a history of asking girlfriends to dress up as schoolgirls, of driving past bus stops and leering at tweens, of threatening blondes with violence, and of sexual assault. By 2011 he had already been convicted of the murders of two young women and the attempted murder of a third. During the trial, the Guardian reported that the girl’s voicemail had been hacked close to a decade earlier by a private investigator on contract with News of the World. Other phone taps emerged—of Prince William and Sarah Payne’s mother, among many others. Scandalous headlines, even in the non-tabloid press, voiced the mounting public outrage over the intrusion of privacy the paper had committed against victims of violent crime. Blame kept finding new perches. Reporters were fired, and editors quit; executives got arrested. Police, and then members of Parliament, were implicated. Even James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and then-CEO of News Corp.’s Europe and Asia operations—was later revealed to have given a former footballer $1.4 million USD in hush money, proving that corruption and malfeasance went all the way to the top of Murdoch’s empire. To date, the Guardian reports 79 arrests relating to alleged bribes of public officials as-
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La c k e y s sociated with the scandal. Investigations into phone hacking have yielded 24 arrests, and computer-hacking inquiries have yielded 21. Yet even with 124 players implicated so far, the full contours of the scandal have yet to emerge. (Under British law, an arrest can come early in an investigation, well before charges are brought.) News of the World shuttered operations in 2011 amid the scandal’s worst revelations, but parent company News International, now called News UK, has so far agreed to settle 130 of the 167 civil damages claims filed by 180 individuals. Total payout figures are not yet known, although a settlement to the Dowlers in the range of $3.2 million was discussed, and Murdoch has said he’d donate another $1.6 million to charity in their names. Last year a nearly $1 million settlement was paid to phone-hacking victim and songstress Charlotte Church. Metropolitan Police at one point estimated that News Corp. had tapped at least 5,795 phones over the course of its scoop-driven surveillance campaign, though the official count was later revised downward to 4,744. Fallout from the phone-hacking scandal didn’t end when News of the World did, however, and eventually the steady stream of sordid revelations cost Murdoch the chance to close on a takeover bid for BSkyB, a British satellite broadcaster he owned a stake in. More drastic action was needed, and Murdoch took it. This past summer, News Corp. officially split into two companies: the entertainment arm was dubbed 21st Century Fox, and the print-heavy news division became just plain News Corp (no period). The scandal would—finally—be referred to in the past tense. In accord with Murdoch’s agenda were the opinionistas, who quickly named a new culprit: society. The Guardian revealed in 2011 that within a month of Dowler’s death a decade earlier, a News of the World reporter had played Surrey police the girl’s voicemail messages. It was a crime, yet police did nothing. 140 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Some viewed the collusion between the Surrey cops and Murdoch’s paper as a misguided quest for solidarity in pursuance of Dowler’s killer; others suggested that the police feared reprisal from the media outlet. The lamentations came quick and served to normalize the illegal surveillance of crime victims for profit: the culture, all agreed, had changed. Few held News of the World—or Murdoch in particular—responsible for implementing that change. Meanwhile, Murdoch’s empire continued to do everything in its power to erode integrity both on the micro scale (via violations of privacy and bribes to cops) and the macro (by using relationships with toplevel government officials to influence policy), although press coverage of the true criminal proportions of both trespasses can be hard to track down. (A search through the archives of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, for example, turns up only a smattering of hits about the allegations surrounding its owner.) In a long litany of abuses of the public trust, this may not be the most damaging cultural shift that the Murdoch enterprise is responsible for. Yet it’s impossible to overlook the similarities between the lurid upskirt journalism of News of the World and Bellfield’s schoolgirl obsession. In the former, very young women’s bodies were violated, both in the public imagination (on the pages of the tabloid) and in practice (through phone taps). In the latter, very young women’s bodies were violated by a man who was serially raping and murdering them. During the period of public alarm over Bellfield’s crimes, News of the World was offering most of the imaginable details (and then some) of sex offenders’ predations on its front page, with a consistency, reach, and volume few other tabloids approached. If Murdoch and crew capitalized on and cultivated a downward shift in the ethics of the U.K. police force and government officials, does it not stand to reason that they may also have lowered the U.K. standard of
The voyeurism that ended News of the World remains standard operating procedure for the Murdoch machine.
9 culturally appropriate behavior toward young women’s bodies? If so, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Edge Comes of Age Culture may have changed; Rupert Murdoch’s empire, in many ways, didn’t. Following the split, the patriarch continued to run both newly created media entities—and as 21st Century Fox’s first major acquisition in the wake of the scandal made clear, the illicit voyeurism that ended News of the World would remain standard operating procedure for the Murdoch machine. The entertainment division would simply do so with more hipster cred—5 percent of “edgy” Vice Media, in fact, which Murdoch took home for a cool $70 million in August 2013. Jaded observers compared the Vice deal to News Corp.’s $580 million purchase of Myspace in 2005, just as the social-networking site began taking heavy hits from upstart Facebook. The money-losing enterprise sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake six years later for $35 million—6 percent of what News Corp. had paid for it—and Murdoch seems to have learned something about the Internet in the meantime. (New York magazine points out, for example, that he learned how to use email around 2010.) Although Vice started as a print mag, the company found its niche online. The top story on Vice.com around the time of the 21st Century Fox sale was “Kings of Cannabis” (subhead: “You might not know who Arjan Roskam is, but you’ve probably smoked his weed”). Content-wise, this was a departure for Murdoch, whose portfolio of headlines at News of the World tended to implicate media stars and royalty, rather than readers, in drug
use. (“Shamed TV star Leslie is caught snorting cocaine” and “Harry’s drugs shame” ran the headlines on two such dispatches in 2002.) Yet Vice Media does sit on the young-ish end of the tabloid continuum, and as Andrew Neil, former editor of the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, told Frontline of his former boss, “tabloids is what really gets him out of bed in the morning. . . . Not journalism—tabloid journalism is in his veins.” For Vice CEO Shane Smith, forty-three, the alliance with eighty-two-year-old Murdoch was a coming-of-age moment. The Vice operation started in Canada as a magazine called the Voice of Montreal; founders Smith, Gavin “Godfather of Hipsterdom” McInnes, and recovering heroin addict Suroosh Alvi claim they went on the government dole in 1994 to fund the glossy, ad-heavy, free publication. (In one of the many examples of how Vice’s brand of self-promotional authenticity doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, the Ryerson Review of Journalism reported that the trio borrowed start-up money from their parents.) Renamed Vice, the magazine became available in the United States two years later; the staff joined it stateside in 1999, first opening an office and storefronts in Manhattan, then moving operations to Brooklyn shortly thereafter. Today Vice Media’s tidy empire claims magazine distribution in twenty-seven countries, print circulation of 1.2 million, and passalong rates of 5.6 readers per copy. In sum, Vice claims a print readership of more than 7 million (although these numbers are self-reported), together with around 15 million unique web hits per month. The company is more than an ad rag and its companion site, however. It is, to quote from its own heavy-breathing 2013 press kit, a “360, MULTI-PLATFORM, VERTIThe
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In 2012, Murdoch tweeted that Vice Media was a “wild” and “global success” with “millenials [sic] who don’t read or watch established media.” The part of the avuncular mogul’s pineal gland that controls lust for market share had clearly been engaged.
9 CALLY INTEGRATED, GLOBAL MEDIA BRAND”—including a record label originally launched with Atlantic Records; a book publishing arm; the marketing concern Virtue; an ever-evolving series of themed, sponsored websites; retail stores; and VBS.tv, a video partnership formed with Viacom and CNN.com, now going it alone as an online channel integrated into the Vice brand. (VBS was another, albeit more deliberate, example of failed authenticity; its letters don’t stand for anything, but it does sound kind of broadcasty.) Accounts of Vice’s first nineteen years are not long on reliable narration. The juvenile company’s early days are a hazy mix of pud-pulling and boundary-testing, limited in imagination only by an unformed frontal lobe. Founders might pin the absence of clarity on rampant drug use, but confusion about Vice Media often stems from straight-up lies: Smith is usually identified as their originator, but before departing in 2008, McInnes did his part to establish the venture on an unsolid bed of gaseous ooze, the aroma of which still clings to the company’s stolid attempts at Serious Journalism. (“Eric Andre Told Us About the 300-Pound Stripper at His Birthday Party” is a headline story on Vice.com as I write this.)
The Gonzo Gambit “Vice was built on lies,” Wired’s Jason Tanz stated bluntly in 2007. These started as selfpromotional fibs about big-media lawsuits and big-money investors—that the Village Voice was suing Smith and friends, for example, which never happened—but soon became journalistic fabrication. “They also published fake 142 1 The Baffler [no.24]
interviews with car thieves and hooligans who set homeless people on fire, and later ran a gag announcement that they had discovered Osama bin Laden in China’s Pamir Mountains,” Tanz writes. (I recently tried to parse a short video series on the Cambodian garment trade, but inaccuracies mingled so freely with false assumptions, leaps in logic, and inappropriate, sensationalistic footage of transwomen that a fact-check seemed futile.) If the content hasn’t matured much, at least the company’s response to allegations of prevarication has. Smith and crew originally distanced themselves from journalism; later they called the more ballsy falsehoods gags. Then Smith realized that “instead of talking about sneakers, we could talk about real issues,” as he told Spike Jonze for Interview earlier this year. That’s when the stunts became “stunt journalism.” Lie becomes joke becomes stance: the evolution of form is mirrored by readers’ decreasing attention spans in the Internet age. But the company’s manic quest for a business model that distances creators and funders from the content engenders a lack of critical engagement among its consumer base; it also sidesteps the core practices of journalism. In this through-the-looking-glass world of brand-domination-through-truth-bending, the usual questions that govern an investigative reporting project can also be turned on the company proper: Who is accountable? For Vice Media, accountability takes a back seat to accounts payable: the company’s estimated total value, based on the Murdoch empire’s buy-in, is $1.4 billion. The metric of success is “clicks” over “paper sales”—a clear,
and discomfitingly natural, extension of tabloid news values into the digital sphere. Under this logic, nothing matters but the bottom line. However, the genius of the Vice model is that the bottom line, too, has been outsourced: Smith has acted as content supplier for a host of entertainment and journalistic outlets seeking to burnish their hipster accreditation, such as CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., and Viacom. This means that Vice Media’s primary, if not exclusive, responsibility is to attract attention. Accountability, Smith might say, is for crybabies. “Money isn’t the report card,” he told the Guardian in March. That’s reserved for “clicks,” both the motivator and the reward in a media ecosystem without broadcast licenses or cover prices—two outdated systems that, however ineffective, promote at least the appearance of media accountability to a viewing or reading public. The real goal, in Smith’s words, is “putting your imprint on the world’s cultural fabric”—a different game entirely. (Later, in Interview, he amended this goal, suggesting instead that the company’s allegiance to the media profession was purely corporate in nature: “We’re the same as Time Warner. We’re the same as Bertelsmann or Viacom. . . . If anyone asks me what we are, we’re a media company.”) Money may not be the report card, but that’s only because it claims pride of place as the fullblown curriculum. Here’s how Gavin McInnes chose to explain the set-up back in 1999: “This is the first time young people have had a revolution that involves them getting paid.” True enough. Even then, the glossy magazine was packed with ads, and distributed for free in retail clothing stores. The reader of Vice was always its commodity, but the social engineering behind the magazine ensured that at least some nominal part of the profits went into a big party the reader got invited to anyway. Who cares who was being sold out, so long as the revolutionaries were all getting lai—oops, paid?
White Supremacy as Usability Study Nowadays, this payday-as-legitimate-mediaenterprise structure is nakedly visible in Vice’s marketing arm, Virtue Worldwide. None of that joke-or-journalism stuff here: Virtue simply offers Vice Media up for sale. A blurb from Creativity Magazine explains, “The major selling point of Virtue . . . is that it already has a standing army of writers, photographers, artists and producers making cool stuff of their own, why not use them to tell your brand’s story?” Below this—although no fees are noted—are listed all the imaginable services that a multimedia company could provide. (Including entire news-like sites that consistently favor the client’s brand.) Also listed are capabilities such as “Focus Groups,” “Usability Studies,” “Experiential,” “StreetLevel Network,” and “On-The-Street”—all fitting the general category of “Just Give Us Stuff To Hand Out To Our Cool Friends.” But before you call it a revolution (or even just punk rock), check out a few of the companies on the roster of sponsors and partners: MTV, Intel, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), William Morris, Dell, media communications firm WPP, HBO, and media merchant bank The Raine Group. Vice Media is DIY only in the sense that forms for corporate control over content on this scale have not yet been invented, and about as “Fuck You” as a brand-new mass-produced T-shirt, available for $19.99 exclusively from Hot Topic. (Even this joke is stale; that’s how little authenticity Vice Media inspires.) Vice is, however, “edgy” as a marketing ploy, following an utterly predictable strategy to afford loud, mostly white, mostly dudes yet more license in culture to act out at will, to acclaim but little consequence. In practical terms, as any cursory search of the content at Vice.com will show, “edgy” means “racist” and “sexist”— sometimes by accident, although often not. Take Dave Schilling’s ongoing “This Week The
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La c k e y s in Racism” column, which defends or decries various cultural moments elsewhere labeled racist. The listicles begin to point to a general American inability to articulate real fears around race, but the dos-and-don’ts approach to often nuanced instances of oppression serves to shut down cultural discussions of race that may prove fruitful, while evidently also providing rhetorical cover for the representation of genuinely, unabashedly racist content. Vice’s defenders will note that Schilling isn’t white himself, and claim that the representation amounts to an all-encompassing racism—no one gets out unoffended—but the slurs that stick are not about white people, nor do they fully challenge the snarky white supremacy Vice has developed a reputation for parroting. In 2003 McInnes told New York Times reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis, “I love being white. . . . We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” In the interview—rumored to have lead, ultimately, to his separation from the company in 2008—McInnes denounced the idea of sexual consent and suggested women want to be dominated. Such faux-edgy assertions amount to a rank misogyny McInnes recently made explicit in a spot on HuffPost Live. During the proceedings, he called a female panelist a “fucking idiot” who, along with the audience, refused to understand that women “naturally want to” stay at home to have babies instead of entering the workforce. Such views would be easier to dismiss as just another of Vice’s triple-gainer brand of anti-anti-hip postures if the company’s underlying dismissal of women’s intellectual capacity weren’t such a freely trumpeted feature of the site—and one reason the print magazine is banned from the occasional bookstore and college campus. Of the mere handful of women featured in Vice.com stories on Sept. 29, one is called “slutty” and another a “crybaby”; there is an offer to stage a mud-wrestling match between Nancy Ker144 1 The Baffler [no.24]
rigan and Tonya Harding; and a photo of a girl approximately the same age as Milly Dowler accompanies a first-person tale of rape and abuse. (No phone tap necessary here.) The hardline masculine epistemologies that the site indulges so reflexively go hand in hand with real labor issues. According to one count, Vice features about 73 percent male contributors and about 27 percent female. Once you toggle over to the NSFW section of the site—that’s its real name—content is rife with dudes’ “stunt journalism” accounts of things they’ve done to humiliate sex workers. And recent allegations against Terry Richardson, the photographer credited with solidifying the magazine’s aesthetic—overlit, underclad young white women simulating sexual pleasure, mostly, with Richardson occasionally stepping into the frame to give a thumbs-up—have him sexually harassing models. Jamie Peck, who sat for him when she was nineteen, wrote on The Gloss in 2010 that he’d asked her to remove her tampon so he could make tea with it; he then proceeded to remove his own clothes and request a hand job from her, while an assistant continued photographing the scene. The mag’s become known as the Hipster Bible for preaching a jaded worldview, and into such cynicism any combination of products may be injected and celebrated, for a fee. (The Vice-as-Bible meme also comes from another old joke, that the print version is everywhere, no one reads it, and you can’t get rid of it.) Products, however, can’t change what Vice is about—for Vice is about Vice, a media company for selfie-snappers. (Compare the gritty nekkid spreads and party shots to images in, say, Playboy or Maxim. The latter at least make a pretense of listing turn-ons.) It’s no coincidence that eighteen-to-thirtyfour-year-old “urban trendsetters” make up Vice Media’s target demographic, according to the media kit. These are the millennials, nudged into adulthood for legal boob-viewing purposes—the generation whose coming of age
“Eric Andre Told Us About the 300-Pound Stripper at His Birthday Party” is a headline story on Vice.com as I write this.
9 coincided with the removal of narcissism from the DSM-5. It’s a generation that Pew Research describes as less white than their elders but about six times as pierced, and less skeptical of government but more so of people in general. (Vice Media’s own skepticism led to the ousting of one female employee from a $250,000 social gathering she had helped plan.) When Pew asked what makes them unique, millennials said: Technology use; Music/ Pop culture; Liberal/Tolerant; Smarter; and Clothes. Previous generations gave valuesbased responses—Work ethic, Values/Morals, and Respectful—and every generation polled has said Smarter. So whether or not such answers make for an accurate accounting of “generational uniqueness,” a difference is clear: millennials responded to a question that previous generations have understood to be about intrinsic principles of behavior with two different forms of cultural production. Three, if you count “apps.” We can read this as shallowness, or we can read it as millennials having gamed Pew’s plodding model of demographic inquiry. Because they’re right. Every generation’s clothes, music, technology, and pop culture are necessarily unique. My generation just lost points on the test by spewing some values-based claptrap that Smith—exactly my age—disproves. Millennials, in other words, want to make an imprint on the world’s cultural fabric too, but the simple fact of managing to pin down that fabric and give it a thorough dye job seems to count for more than the substance of the design. Indeed, as I asserted in Unmarketable in 2007, the corporate adoption of independent modes of cultural production has left us with a deficit of integrity. The book was generally well received until last spring, when I got a
flood of angry emails about it from young folks assigned it in a college course. My correspondents were appalled that I would delineate a meaningful difference between corporate and independent modes of production—and what’s more, they were downright furious that I would hold the latter in higher regard. Couldn’t I see, several young men some twenty years my junior demanded, that efforts to attract the largest possible mass of people by any means necessary were always virtuous? This surely sounds harsh: some of my best friends, I swear, are millennials. And it’s almost certainly the case that the millennial set’s much-maligned displays of narcissism are rooted in other motivations. These are, after all, folks whose culture is created in large part by Murdoch’s shifty maneuverings and Vice’s kind of pseudo-journalism—not people, like Smith and myself, who recall a media environment before Jonah Lehrer, Mike Daisey, Jayson Blair, and @Horse_ebooks. We now live in a culture of increasingly hostile and invasive media, where getting consigned to an unsure economic future is a far more daunting prospect than getting caught in a lie. Another Pew study from 2013 showed that most teens take evasive measures to protect their privacy online: 58 percent of teens used codes to communicate on social media, and 26 percent deliberately posted false information about themselves to protect their privacy. What I’m suggesting is not that young people are necessarily becoming more selfabsorbed, as many have already, but that they may be abandoning truth-telling as a potential source of protection. I can’t really blame them: we’ve fostered a culture where factfinding is anemic, but consumer products are doing just fine. The
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Vice is a media company for selfie-snappers.
9 Shane, Come Back! It’s hard to pinpoint the exact origins of the Murdoch-Smith bromance, but it likely began in May 2012, when Vice pranksters dispatched an unconvincing News Corp. exec lookalike and two dudes with slicked-back hair to disrupt a BBC interview on the Leveson Inquiry, the legal investigation into “the culture, practices and ethics of the press” sparked by the phone-hacking scandal. “We dressed a girl up as [former News of the World CEO] Rebekah Brooks and fucked around with the paparazzi this morning,” @ViceUK tweeted. The telltale slippage here that casually merges news organizations with celebritychasing photographers should be noted for the record, but whether the Vice crew perceives a difference is of little consequence. The more pressing concern here is which party emerged from the prank onto the moral high ground— for once, it was News Corp. A journalist might have used a stunt like the one Vice pulled to gather observations; even a half-decent satirist would have found a message to impart beyond self-promotion. Yet while the Vice hoax drew momentary interest by dramatizing just how little the members of the tabloid pack could be counted on to know who they’re covering, the détournement ended there, adding only another layer of circus entertainment to the big-top-like proceedings. Perhaps it enchanted the Australian expat. In October 2012 he tweeted from @RupertMurdoch that Vice Media was a “wild” and “global success” with “millenials [sic] who don’t read or watch established media.” The part of the avuncular mogul’s pineal gland that controls lust for market share had clearly been engaged, and the long string of replies to his fact-finding tweet foreshadowed the pending investment in no uncertain terms. 146 1 The Baffler [no.24]
When, three months later, the Fox News Network hit a twelve-year ratings low and began hemorrhaging young adult viewers, the solution must have seemed clear. For Smith’s part, the deal is a tremendous boon, offering untold new global reach to the Vice brand, with video distribution in the U.K., Italy, Germany, and India through 21st Century Fox’s Sky and Star networks. Although separated by four decades, the two CEOs are not dissimilar. Following the acquisition of News of the World, his first offshore media outlet, Murdoch moved into the U.S. market in the 1970s, first with print, and then with broadcast and satellite television stations. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1985, a legal prerequisite to his purchase of the 20th Century Fox film studios and several independent television stations in major U.S. cities later that year. Media consolidation followed quickly: News Corp. affiliate stations then reached 22 percent of all households in the United States, and the FCC gave Murdoch on top of that a temporary waiver to operate both print and broadcast media in certain markets. Once licensing restrictions began to loosen—supported by op-eds in News Corp.-owned media—the affiliate stations combined to form the Fox Broadcasting Company in April 1987. Smith brought Vice to the States just twelve years later, and the cultural fabric he intended to imprint at first blush seemed distinct. Smith learned to adapt soon enough, and it’s a safe bet that Murdoch furnished an attractive role model. Murdoch wanted traditional power, and his political chumminess bolstered his media market shares, a lesson not lost on the Vice Media impresario. With heavy lobbying and support from on-again-off-again pals like Mario Cuomo,
News Corp. has regularly won the suspension of FCC regulations that would have impeded Murdoch acquisitions. Similarly, Murdoch’s decision to hire former Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush senior media strategist Roger Ailes to run the Fox News Channel was well calculated (and, as Gawker suggests, may have indicated a longer-ranging GOP plan to create a free-standing media propaganda arm for the conservative movement). Smith has also begun hiring Washington insiders— though whether their chief mission will be to streamline the Vice mini-empire’s access to new global markets or to influence domestic policy remains to be seen. (His agent, Ari Emanuel, is the brother of Rahm, the foulmouthed Chicago mayor currently privatizing public services with astonishing rapidity.) How this new lobbying offensive will comport with Vice’s recent hire of sixty new reporters equipped with Google Glass, who will “cover everything from Middle East war zones to health-care reform” (as the Wall Street Journal reported this November), is also unclear. In even more recent news, former News Corp. CEO James Murdoch, ousted in the phonehacking scandal, just joined the board of Vice Media. It seems safe to assume that unseemly acts of corruption involving media moguls will probably be safe from Vice’s roving lens. The cultural impact Smith covets comes across in Vice-choreographed stunts, like Kim Jong-un and Dennis Rodman watching a basketball game together on HBO’s dime. The stunts are presented as news, and phrases like “basketball diplomacy” have caught on to lend them the veneer of significance. But really, things have changed in the last fifteen years: Vice stopped inviting readers to the party. Smith is now angling for a less traditional kind of power—the power to party anywhere and with anyone in the world. And don’t underestimate it. For what’s being celebrated is unchecked influence, and what we overlook
in being told later how fun the party was is remembering to ask what really happened, or if indeed anything did. There are plenty for whom the MurdochSmith party won’t be much fun to hear about. That’s because the surveillance of underage female victims of sexual violence really did happen, and clearly was News Corp.-sanctioned policy ten years ago. Harassment—verbal, from McInnes, and sexual, from Richardson—of young women continues among Vice alum today. The promise of Heineken and United Fighting Championship sponsorships that Smith brings to his partnership with Murdoch merely ups the stakes of such anticsslash-crimes. The rape joke has already been established as an all-but-official Vice brand. One posted on November 11 under “MILFs Anal Addiction” describes the attempts of an airline passenger to woo a celibate, bornagain, tee-totaling flight companion by getting her rip-roaring drunk, only to be cockblocked by—get this—her daughter! And her parents! All Christians! Coitus coercion interruptus. Sad trombone. You might not find this amusing; you might find it downright boring. That’s because casual bigotry and misogyny for money’s sake aren’t new. They’re being marketed to millennials now—the kids today!—but even that gambit has grown old and stale. t
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Feminism for Them? 3 Susan Faludi
Dell was the socialist who didn’t stuff your brain with -isms, the avant-gardist who spurned affectation, the intellectual who despised dogma and egg-headed bloviation.
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o those casually acquainted with the bad-boy bohemianism of Floyd Dell, the literary radical and “prose laureate of Greenwich Village” may seem an example of the idealist who is better at theory than at practice—like Thomas Jefferson on slavery. Or, in feminist terms, he seems an early example of a declared male ally who is a better friend of women’s equality than of women themselves. Dell’s plentiful and painful adulteries were well known in his circle; he was nearly as famed for his extramarital dalliances as his politics. (Dorothy Day tartly noted that his “love encounters should really take place on the stage of the Hippodrome before a packed house.”) And despite his full-throated defense of equality within marriage, Dell tended to sort the actual women in his life into “girls” (i.e., mistresses) or long-suffering mother hens (i.e., wives), a division that suited—or rather, justified—a cheating heart. “It was now accepted as a fact about me that I fell in love with other girls,” he wrote later about one of his many philanderings during his first marriage to Margery Currey, “and taken, it would seem, by my wife as a fact that had to be adjusted to with tolerance—a tolerance so extreme in its generosity that I was before long in another and then another love affair.” When he trotted out a hypothetical Lothario in his July 1914 essay in The Masses, “Feminism for Men,” did he know he was looking in the mirror? There was once a man—I don’t pretend to approve of him—who had a wife and also a sweetheart, and he liked the sweetheart so much better than the wife that he persuaded his wife to divorce him, and then married the sweetheart; whereupon he simply had to get another sweetheart, because it was just the same as it had been before. The poor fellow never could figure it out.
In short, the leading male champion of feminism suffered, as his biographer Douglas Clayton delicately put it, from “inconsistent attitudes towards women.” Yet, however contradicted by his personal behavior, Dell’s defense of women’s emancipation stands solid, a model of clarity and farsightedness, a powerful avowal of the need for feminism in his age or, for that matter, a century later, in ours. Reading Dell, whether on the moral corrosions of the capitalist marketplace or the mental contortions of industrial warmongers, is a thrilling, wake-the-hell-up experience—like being blasted out of an overheated room onto an ocean shore in January. He was the socialist who didn’t stuff your brain with -isms, the avant-gardist who spurned affectation, the intellectual who despised dogma and egg-headed blovi148 1 The Baffler [no.24]
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We have redefined feminism as women’s right to be owned by the system, to be owned as much as men have been owned.
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ation, the leftist who wrote with wit and panache—the one who deemed Marxism’s grand unifying theories “rigor mortis to the mind.” His work is modern in the best sense of the term: direct, undithering, free of cant and theory. (He would never have gotten tenure in the po-mo academy, though he could have penned a scorching takedown of the poststructuralist professoriate.) And, most of all, radical. Whatever the topic, he aimed for the root. Dell was always after the superstructure that his literary diving rod perceived deep beneath the political flap du jour. Which is what happened when he turned his piercing eye on women’s condition. Dell proposed that the battle between the sexes was a surface manifestation of a deeper, bloodier conflict, a struggle enlisting both men and women to defend “the soul” against the slave raiders of capitalism. He saw women in the vanguard, shock troops in a war that would unshackle men as well. Women’s liberation, in his plain distillation, would “make it possible for the first time for men to be free.” As long as The
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Why hasn’t feminism led to men’s liberation? Why haven’t individual men taken the opportunity to be their larger selves?
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women are men’s childlike dependents—and as long as men can derive a false sense of power from being “lords in a thirty-dollar flat” in which they stash their child-wives—“the bravest things will not be done in the world.” Men will cling to their dollhouse dominance, too fearful to trade that false security for the great grapple with their real oppressors. At the same time, Dell could see—and far earlier than most—that the economic tide was turning, and that it was “taking more and more women every year out of the economic shelter of the home into the great world, making them workers and earners along with men.” The women, he predicted, would take the men with them, emancipating them from the hollow gratifications of their petty domestic tyrannies—and ultimately from the yoke of wage-slave subservience. Feminism would “give [men] back their souls, so that they can risk them fearlessly in the adventure of life.” One hundred years on, how is that battle going? Feminism has secured for women a substantial beachhead in the public realms of education, employment, and professional life. The achievements are well known and endlessly reiterated: American women are nearly 60 percent of undergraduates, 50 percent of law and medical school students, 40 percent of business school students. They are 51 percent of employees in management, professional, and related positions. About 60 percent of women older than sixteen are in the workforce, and more than 70 percent of mothers with children younger than eighteen work. In 2009 women became half of all U.S. workers, a statistic widely hailed as a watershed event in American sexual politics. “The battle of the sexes is over,” proclaimed The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a much-ballyhooed collaboration between the Center for American Progress and former California first lady Maria Shriver. (The report’s evidence: a Time magazine poll that supposedly determined that gender strife had been replaced with amicable “negotiation.”) Has women’s rising prominence in the workplace “freed” men, as Dell hoped? Has it unchained men from the false “choice between being a slave and a scoundrel”? Has it given them back their souls? Granted, it’s hard to quantify freedom, much less soul reclamation. Yet one would be hard pressed to summon evidence of men using women’s newfound independence to embolden their own. Where are the great male revolts against corporate rule, militarism, the rat race? Between the rare flashpoints—an anti-WTO protest here, an Occupy encampment there—the American political landscape is largely quiescent, complacent, and resigned. Our new male “rebels” are generally that in name only—the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses who advocate “breaking things” only to consolidate an even more inequitable division of wealth. Sure, men take a larger role in child-rearing than they used to—or at least more men are proud of announcing that they take a larger role. But that’s hardly the domain Dell had in mind when he imagined fem-
g inism as the catapult that would allow men to risk themselves “fearlessly in the adventure of life.” Judging by the public scene, much of the American male response to feminism has proceeded along one of two tracks: a doubling-down on anti-feminist political campaigns or a hunkering down into an adolescent sulk. On the one hand, we have the never-ending backlash: the war against abortion and Planned Parenthood (and now even contraception), the stripping away of social programs that support working mothers, the vitriol hurled at any woman with serious political or leadership aspirations, and on and on. On the other hand, we have the passive-aggressive, petulant displays of “adult” males with their baseball caps turned back, the screw-you-I’ll-just-bea-boy-forever juvenility that is the centerpiece of so many Judd Apatow films and sniggering reiterations of Dumb and Dumber. Why hasn’t feminism led to men’s liberation? Why haven’t individual men taken the opportunity to be their larger selves and run with it? No doubt, the fact that women became 50 percent of the workforce at the very moment when the nation suffered the worst economic crash since the Great Depression hasn’t helped matters. Nor has the media’s eagerness to promptly declare this downturn the “Great Hecession” or the “Mancession” and to harp endlessly on how opportunistic women were allegedly getting ahead on the broken backs of laid-off male workers. (The claim was dubious: men initially lost more jobs than women in the crash only because the greatest early losses came in the male-dominated professions of construction and high finance. Since then, it’s women who have had the higher unemployment rate— and a higher and record rate of poverty.) But even factoring in mediainflamed male economic resentment, the mystery remains. Didn’t the Great Depression inspire more male radicalism? Why not the Great Recession? Haven’t hard times given men less to lose in following women into a more liberated life? Why defend the privileges of manhood so adamantly when those privileges are yielding so little? Men are no longer defending entitlements they have; they are defending their right to entitlements with no payoff. Why haven’t they rebelled? Have men settled, as Dell feared, for a faux domestic control, preferring the easy facsimile to the hard real thing? “Men don’t want the freedom that women are thrusting upon them,” he observed. “Men want the sense of power more than they want the sense of freedom. They want the feeling that comes to them as providers for women more than they want the feeling that comes to them as free men. They want some one dependent on them more than they want a comrade.” Perhaps that’s why the era of feminist gains is also the era of the trophy wife, and why the right wing’s pretend defense of “family values” seems to appeal to so many more male than female voters. Maybe the Grand Inquisitor’s disquisition on human nature in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov could as easily apply to the post-feminist American male
Men will cling to their dollhouse dominance, too fearful to trade that false security for the great grapple with their real oppressors.
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Feminism took its eyes off the prize somewhere in the middle of the “Me Generation” seventies.
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temperament: “Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” Assuming men wanted to be free, where would be the means and method for their revolt? How to rebel in a time when all the old strategies for political organizing and mobilization are corrupted or in free fall—when electoral politics has sold its soul to the highest bidder, when union membership has shrunk to a pinpoint, when radical movements have the lifespans of fruit flies and the appetites of cannibals? Beyond psychic anxieties and methodological failures, though, lies something more—and worse. What if men have been betrayed by their own vanguard, by the very feminist-inspired women that Dell hoped would be the force to spring men from their imprisonment in a capitalist system? What if American feminism, at least as it’s been reconstituted in the American popular imagination, has taken as its rallying cry the call to join men in their prison? The hot “feminist” books of the last decade are get-ahead-gals management texts—most famously, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which joined a bumper crop of other like-minded entreaties to elbow your way into the executive suite: Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes That Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers; Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn; The Go-Getter Girl’s Guide: Get What You Want in Work and Life (and Look Great While You’re at It). Or they are celebrations of women’s coming superiority in the new “flexible” and “global” job market—most recently, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women and The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family—in which exultations over women’s supposedly new “earning power” slop over into sly putdowns of those sad-sack men who failed to retool themselves for the brave new economy. Women are “overtaking” men to become the dominant breadwinners, Liza Mundy declares in The Richer Sex, and their “slowtrack” boyfriends need to get on board or lose their shot at grabbing the brass—and wedding—ring: Women will take to the skies. High-earning young women who remain determined to marry men who make as much or more than they do will turn to more enterprising measures than online dating. Women will use their earnings to travel far and wide, flying from big cities to other big cities, keeping the travel industry afloat and turning the country—the world—into one big marriage market, one giant globally connected dating pool.
Feminism has “won,” these authors rejoice, because women are going to seize all the fastest-growing occupations—crappy and mind-numbing though those jobs may be—in the bright future realm of Multinational 152 1 The Baffler [no.24]
g World Capitalism Unlimited. More and more, freedom trades in capitalism’s currency. And cancels itself out in the process. As Dell warned in that 1914 essay in The Masses, “Capitalism does not want free men.” The few recent appeals by prominent women to challenge the working world are that in name only—summonses in which feminism is proffered as a tool to soften—very slightly—the work-till-you-drop corporate work ethic, while leaving the corporate walls (and the sixty-hour work week) firmly in place. Witness Princeton political scientist and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter’s solution to the work-family problem, showcased on the cover of The Atlantic last year. “Women in power,” Slaughter wrote, can “help change the norms” . . . by talking in the office about their children and their desire for “a balanced life.” Or media mogul Arianna Huffington’s radical proposal for “the second women’s revolution,” which she recently unveiled in two radical periodicals, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. The revolution would be all about improving working women’s “well-being” . . . by getting corporate workplaces to offer yoga classes, meditation areas, and “nap rooms.” For napping adults, that is; onsite child care did not make the well-being list. (Huffington’s own company, which recently installed two nap rooms, was leading the way: “We at HuffPost launched a free app, GPS for the Soul, to track your stress level through your heart rate variability.”) Company-sponsored “stress reduction programs,” she maintained, would enable women to “become much better at leaning in” and thereby help them speed their way up the corporate ladder. In truth, the old internal struggle within the women’s movement between collective change and individual advancement got decided long ago in the American marketplace. It’s been more than forty years since “Dress for Success” and “Having It All” (neither, by the way, coined by actual feminists) were enshrined in the liberatory lexicon and crowded out the authentic feminist dream of transforming human society. Those endless late-sixties debates within the women’s movement— What should come first, the overthrow of capitalism or patriarchy?— seem as quaint and dust-covered as the horse and buggy. Feminism, or rather its reformulation on the American public stage, took its eyes off the prize somewhere in the middle of the “Me Generation” seventies, right at the moment when male wages began their chronic decline, right at the moment when an economically besieged and betrayed male population might have followed their female scouts into the profound and revolutionary “adventure of life.” Four decades later, we are seeing the sad fruits of that failure of will. We have redefined feminism as women’s right to be owned by the system, to be owned as much as men have been owned. Women have led the charge to join men in the enclosure. Women pride themselves now on a future where, if Mundy’s predictions prove true, they will be the leading inmates. Some sweet freedom. No wonder men don’t want to follow. They’re already there. t
Where are the great male revolts against corporate rule, militarism, the rat race?
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Feminism for Men 3 Floyd Dell
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eminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free. At present the ordinary man has the choice between being a slave and a scoundrel. That’s about the way it stands. For the ordinary man is prone to fall in love and marry and have children. Also the ordinary man frequently has a mother. He wants to see them all taken care of, since they are unable to take care of themselves. Only if he has them to think about, he is not free. A free man is a man who is ready to throw up his job whenever he feels like it. Whether he is a bricklayer who wants to go out on a sympathetic strike, or a poet who wants to quit writing drivel for the magazines, if he doesn’t do what he wants to do, he is not free. . . . And this will be true so long as women as a sex are dependent on men for support. It is too much to ask of a man to be brave, when his bravery means taking the food out of the mouth of a woman who cannot get food except from him. The bravest things will not be done in the world until women do not have to look to men for support. The change is already under way. Irresistible economic forces are taking more and more women every year out of the economic shelter of the home into the great world, making them workers and earners along with men. And every conquest of theirs, from an education which will make them fit for the world of earning, to “equal pay for equal work,” is a setting free of men. The last achievement will be a social insurance for motherhood, which will enable them to have children without taking away a man’s freedom from him. Then a man will be able to tell his employer that “he and his job can go bark at one another,” without being a hero and a scoundrel at the same time. Capitalism will not like that. Capitalism does not want free men. It wants men with wives and children who are dependent on them for support. Mothers’ pensions will be hard fought for before they are ever gained. And that is not the worst. Men don’t want the freedom that women are thrusting upon them. They don’t want a chance to be brave. They want a chance to be generous. They want to give food and clothes and a little home with lace curtains to some woman. Men want the sense of power more than they want the sense of freedom. They want the feeling that comes to them as providers for women more than they want the feeling that comes to them as free men. They want some one dependent on them more than they want a comrade. As long as they can be lords in a thirty-dollar flat, they are willing to be 154 1 The Baffler [no.24]
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The world wants men who can call their souls their own. And that is what feminism is going to do for men—give them back their souls, so that they can risk them fearlessly in the adventure of life.
9 K ATH E R I N E S T R E E TE R
slaves in the great world outside. . . . In short, they are afraid that they will cease to be sultans in little monogamic harems. But the world doesn’t want sultans. It wants men who can call their souls their own. And that is what feminism is going to do for men—give them back their souls, so that they can risk them fearlessly in the adventure of life. . . . When you have got a woman in a box, and you pay rent on the box, her relationship to you insensibly changes character. It loses the fine excitement of democracy. It ceases to be companionship, for companionship is only possible in a democracy. It is no longer a sharing of life together—it is a breaking of life apart. Half a life—cooking, clothes, and children; half a life—business, politics, and baseball. It doesn’t make much difference which is the poorer half. Any half, when it comes to life, is very near to none at all.t First published in The Masses (July 1914). The
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It was the year we turned to dragons 3 M e t ta S ĂĄ m a
snaked our way through harsh fields of sunflowers petals
landing on us heavy & dirty & we were beginning to lose sense of direction became distracted by time the oblivious faces of sunflowers watching themselves shed become bald
we wanted to feast on each other first wanted to put our
own limbs in our bodies bite into our elbows and knees crack every joint between our teeth we were hinged things teetering between upright and indirect flight one of us
ran so fast she burst into a wing the others settled into
envy at the flimsy hardness of her we were hungry and had only our bodies to devour we ran from each other into each other until our feet gave way until our jaws opened as fire we were
scaly things we were blossoming finally we were final
rolling midair soon we’d learn to open our mouth to what
we could only guess
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Tom Clancy, Military Man 3 Andrew J. Bacevich
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ord of Tom Clancy’s passing in October reached me at a local gym. Peddling away on an elliptical trainer, I welcomed the distraction of this “breaking news” story as it swept across a bank of video monitors suspended above the cardio machines. On cable networks and local stations, anchors were soon competing with one another to help viewers grasp the story’s significance. Winning the competition (and perhaps an audition with Fox News) was the young newsreader who solemnly announced that “one of America’s greatest writers” had just died at the relatively early age of sixty-six. Of course, Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator. Both satisfy a quantitative definition of eminence. Although political historians are unlikely to rank Cruz alongside Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, his recent twenty-one-hour-long denunciation of Obamacare, delivered before a near-empty Senate chamber, demonstrated a capacity for narcissistic logorrhea rare even by Washington standards. So too with Clancy. Up in the literary Great Beyond, Faulkner and Hemingway won’t be inviting him for drinks. Yet, as with Ted Cruz, once Clancy got going there was no shutting him up. Following a slow start, the works of fiction and nonfiction that he wrote, cowrote, or attached his moniker to numbered in the dozens. Some seventeen Clancy novels made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, starting with his breakthrough thriller The Hunt for Red October. A slew of titles written by others appeared with his imprimatur. Thus, for example, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Choke Point or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath. Similarly, on those occasions when Clancy partnered with some retired U.S. four-star to craft the officer’s memoirs, the result was a tome “by” Tom Clancy “with” General So-and-So, the difference in font size signaling who was the bigger cheese. And then there is Tom Clancy’s Military Reference series, another product line in the realm of fictive nonfiction. Each title—Fighter Wing, for example, or Armored Cav— promises a Clancy-led “guided tour” of what really goes on in the elite corners of the United States military. Clancy did for military pop-lit what Starbucks did for the preparation of caffeinated beverages: he launched a sprawling, massively profitable industrial enterprise that simultaneously serves and cultivates an insatiable customer base. Whether the item consumed provides much in terms of nourishment is utterly beside the point. That it tastes yummy going down more than suffices to keep customers coming back.
Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator.
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f Clancy was a hack, as he surely was, he was a hack who possessed a remarkable talent for delivering what his fans craved. Nor did the Tom Clancy brand confine itself to the written word. His oeuvre has provided ideal fodder for Hollywood too. Movie adaptations chronicling the exploits of Jack Ryan, Clancy’s principal protagonist, and starring the likes of Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Affleck, became blockbuster hits. Then there are the testosterone-laced videogames, carrying titles like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. Clancy-approved videogames captured the Pentagon’s fancy. In 2007, Red Storm Entertainment, the gaming arm of Clancy’s empire, released America’s Army: True Soldiers, advertised as an “Official U.S. Army Game.” (“Created by Soldiers. Developed by Gamers. Tested by Heroes.”) The accompanying copy assures prospective purchasers/recruits that “combat action doesn’t get any more authentic than this”:
Clancy was Reagan’s literary doppelgänger— what the Gipper might have become had he chosen writing instead of politics.
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Become one of America’s bravest in this game developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army. See what it’s like to live life as an infantryman. Take on the role of a Rifleman, Grenadier, Automatic Rifleman, or Sniper. Develop skills including Valor, Marksmanship, Stealth, and more.
Here profit and propaganda blend into a seamless package. Did I mention Clancy-themed board games, music CDs, toys, and apparel? There is even a Clancy line of pseudo-military collectibles. Among the items available for purchase is the Ghost Recon “Future Soldier”—your choice: statuette or stuffed toy. Don’t expect Clancy’s departure to stem this tsunami of stuff. Although the founder himself may have left the scene, Clancy Inc. gives every indication of carrying on. A new Clancy novel called Command Authority arrived in December. And a new Jack Ryan movie, this one not based on previously published material, is in the works. Yet to argue that Clancy’s books and ancillary byproducts offer little in terms of lasting value is not to say that they have lacked influence. Indeed, just the reverse is true. As a shaper of the zeitgeist, Tom Clancy may well rate as one of the most influential creative entrepreneurs of the last several decades. In whatever medium, Clancy’s abiding theme is the never-ending struggle between good guys and bad guys. His bad guys tend to be irredeemably bad. His good guys are invariably very, very good—Americans devoted to the cause of keeping their countrymen safe and the world free. As good guys, they subscribe to old-fashioned virtues while making skillful use of the latest technology. Whether garbed in battledress or trenchcoats, they are cool, professional, dedicated, resourceful, and exceedingly competent. These are, of course, the very qualities that Americans today ascribe to those who actually serve
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in uniform or who inhabit the “black world,” whether as CIA agents or members of highly specialized units such as Delta Force or SEAL Team Six. What’s worth recalling is that the prevailing view of America’s warriors was not always so favorable. In the wake of Vietnam, shortly before Clancy burst onto the scene, the books that sold and the scripts attracting Hollywood’s attention told a different story. Those inhabiting positions of responsibility in the United States military were either venal careerists or bunglers out of their depth. Those on the front lines were victims or saps. When it came to military-themed accessories, the preferred logo was FTA. The
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Clancy contributed to the conditions breeding the misguided military adventurism that has become the signature of U.S. policy.
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lancy was among the first to intuit that the antimilitary mood spawned by Vietnam represented an opportunity. The legions who did not find Catch-22 particularly amusing, who were more annoyed than entertained by M*A*S*H, and who classified Jane Fonda as a traitor were hungry to find someone to validate their views—someone who still believed in the red, white, and blue and who still admired those fighting to defend it. Clancy offered himself as that someone. To be more accurate, Ronald Reagan had already offered himself as that someone. What Clancy did was seize the role of Reagan’s literary doppelgänger—what the Gipper might have become had he chosen writing instead of politics after ending his acting career. Clancy’s own career took off when President Reagan plugged Red October as “my kind of yarn.” As well he might: Clancy shared Reagan’s worldview. His stories translated that worldview into something that seemed “real” and might actually become real if you believed hard enough. Reagan was famous for transforming the imagined into the actual; despite never having left Hollywood during World War II, he knew, for example, that he had personally witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps. Similarly, Clancy, who never served in the military, imagined a world of selfless patriots performing feats of derring-do to overcome evil—a world that large numbers of Americans were certain had once existed. More to the point, it was a world they desperately wanted to restore. Clancy, like Reagan, made that restoration seem eminently possible. Soon after Clancy’s death, the Washington Post published an appreciation entitled “How Tom Clancy Made the Military Cool Again,” written by a couple of self-described Gen-Xer policy wonks. “Clancy’s legacy lives on in the generations he introduced to the military,” they gushed, crediting Clancy with having “created a literary bridge across the civil-military divide.” His “stories helped the rest of society understand and imagine” the world of spooks and soldiers. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who served or aspired to serve found those stories to be especially gratifying. Clancy depicted American soldiers and would-be soldiers precisely as they wished to see themselves. But any understanding gained by either soldiers or society, whether engaged in Patriot Games or fending off The Sum of All Fears, was illusory, rooted in fantasies that sanitized war and conveyed a false sense of what military service really entails. Instead of bridging the civilmilitary divide, Clancy papered it over, thereby perpetuating it. By extension, he contributed in no small way to the conditions breeding the misguided and costly military adventurism that has become the signature of U.S. policy. Clancy did prove to be a figure of consequence. Alas, almost all of those consequences have proven to be pernicious. And there’s no Jack Ryan anywhere in sight to come to our rescue. t
What It Look Like 3 Ter r a nc e H ay e s Dear Ol’ Dirty Bastard: I, too, like it raw, I don’t especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us, by anyone who hopes to rule without reflection. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbage men drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like, for what it is else you end up like that Negro Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don’t you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true? Yes, all liars are cowards, but we all have a little coward in us. Offstage, Iago said what I have been trying to say. You are blind to your power like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king. And that’s okay. No one will tell you you are the king. No one really wants a king anyway. The
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Decently Downward An appointment with John O’Hara 3 William T. Vollmann Books Discussed John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2013; first published 1934). John O’Hara, BUtterfield 8 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1935). John O’Hara, Ten North Frederick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014; first published 1955). John O’Hara, The New York Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1932–1966).
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ohn O’Hara’s themes are alcoholism, infidelity, rape, perversion, child molestation, the yearning for power and financial security (many who knew the author believed this to be his own basic preoccupation), the instability of love and passion, the effects of economic substructures on the superstructures of private life (in method, if certainly not in ideology, he resembles a Marxist), boardroom and statehouse politics, and the secret corruptions of families. In many respects he is a cruel writer; not only does he portray quotidian cruelty unblinkingly and intimately, but his portrayals themselves can be cruel. While critics often prefer his short stories to his novels, my preference is the reverse of theirs. For me, a writer’s highest business is the creation of some kind of empathy, and O’Hara’s short stories rarely permit him to do more than cast his contemptuously bloodshot gaze on a situation, evoking revulsion or pity, perhaps, but nothing more. To be sure, in the stories you will find any number of strange types, such as the sprightly, obese, sexually deviant, not unsympathetic dancer-actor-clown of “The Portly Gentleman,” or the vicious, stupid, smalltime gangsters of “The Sun-Dodgers,” usually encountered at some revealing and decisive moment. A few of these tales—I’m thinking of the bitter brilliance of “It’s Mental Work” or the cheap perversions and double-crosses of “A Phase of Life”—are as effective as the best of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Yet it is only in the novels that O’Hara takes a longer look at his strange characters, showing them in the grip of corrosive social crosscurrents.
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ike most cynics, O’Hara wishes things were different, and he sometimes conveys extreme compassion for the poor, lost, and lonely. But an O’Hara narrative is typically one of failure. “Of course life is not made up of many good things; at least we don’t make milestones out of the good things as much as we do the bad,” says the narrator of BUtterfield 8 (1935), O’Hara’s second novel. The details vary from one case to another, but it’s always essentially the same trajectory. After reading one or two O’Hara books, we can guess how things will turn out. Imagine a man in the driver’s seat of whichever automobile best represents his time and class (count on O’Hara to know the model). Imagine that this driver is on a highway, cruising or speeding 162 1 The Baffler [no.24]
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O’Hara’s short stories rarely permit him to do more than cast his contemptuously bloodshot gaze on a situation, evoking revulsion or pity but nothing more.
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The New York of BUtterfield 8 is not exactly a place that inspires idealism.
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toward ruin. On either side, in place of billboards, lurid personages appear, and sometimes reappear some miles down the road. Other billboard-like elements are O’Hara’s numerous curious facts and aphorisms: “It is a pretty good hangover when you look at yourself in the mirror and can see nothing above the bridge of your nose”; “Women who like golf and play it well do seem to move more deliberately than, say, women who play good tennis”; “The anthracite region, unlike the bituminous, is a stronghold of union labor.” Then these assertions likewise wink out of the rearview mirror, and the driver continues on toward destruction. Why this doom is inevitable is the big question. Because O’Hara can bring alive not only his protagonists but also their foils, antagonists, mentors, dependents, and sometimes even those billboard-like minor characters on the road to failure, his protagonists’ failures are complex in both cause and implication. A common O’Haran female type is Caroline in Appointment in Samarra (1934), the most sympathetic character in the novel, but one who runs up against what she lacks: “There was something wrong and incomplete in her relations with all the men she had liked best and loved. . . . Altogether she was contemptuous of the men she had known.” While poisoned intimacies past and present bear heavily upon his books’ outcomes, O’Hara is especially interested in alienation from society, and it is in the delineation and dissection of rank, class, and ethnicity that he truly excels. The reader may count on learning exactly to which clubs and societies a central male character belongs. Here is a typical passage of scene-setting, from Ten North Frederick (1955): “But even in 1909 there was one marked difference between the people who remained on Frederick and South Main, and the people who lived on Lantanego: it was the difference that no one coming up in the town’s business and social life was moving to Frederick and South Main.” Among the worst punishments “society” can deal its members is exclusion from some highfalutin organization or event. As one vindictive woman remarks to another, regarding a third who scolded their children: “Oh, I can see to it that they don’t get an invitation.” And once this plan has been carried out, the uninvited family promptly finds that “their social indispensability was at an end.” The punishment of exclusion from a class is but one of many acts of social aggression in O’Hara’s America. Class privilege frequently gets enacted against the lower orders, and many characters are bigots in one way or another. Appointment in Samarra opens (on Christmas morning, after a scene of marital lovemaking) with the wife casting hateful thoughts at the next-door neighbors because Jews “hurt real estate values.” Gloria, the heroine of BUtterfield 8, at one point yells at her mother’s servant: “Goddamn you, you black bitch!” Privilege also enables oppression within an economic or social
g class. Ten North Frederick fixes on the codes that sanction this kind of oppression: “Under the unwritten rules of the time, Ben could have beaten and raped his wife with impunity; the screams of violently abused women were heard not only in the poorer districts of the town, where, to be sure, they were heard more frequently.” For O’Hara, there’s no escaping class: “You’re money-conscious because you have it, and I am because I haven’t.” Or as Caroline’s husband Julian says in Appointment in Samarra, “I always think of the ones that really have more money than I’d know what to do with, I think of them as the democratic ones. If you don’t have money you’re not democratic.”
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ociety, as O’Hara sees it, is poisoned by class relations. To be sure, class is only one cause of life failure. A reader of O’Hara’s books will often find an existential or perhaps Chekhovian isolation presenting itself as the fundamental human situation. At the end of a longish short story (“We’re Friends Again”), the narrator asks, “Why must we make such a thing of loneliness when it is the final condition of us all? And where would love be without it?” But this loneliness is frequently a cause or effect of people’s wickedness, which in turn tends to get expressed sociopolitically. The New York City of BUtterfield 8 and the fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, of O’Hara’s other major novels are not exactly places that inspire idealism. Consider the corruptions of Ten North Frederick. There’s the judge who says, “I kill when I send a man to the electric chair, and I knew I was going to do it when I ran for judge. Yes, I have a pretty low opinion of my fellow man. He’s as evil as I am.” Then there is the man who “had himself elected to the boards of directors of the Valley Water Company and the Valley Telephone Company,” not to mention the man who alters a zoning law in order to allow one of his tenants to “install noisy carpet-cleaning machinery,” which drives the housewives so crazy that they make their husbands move away and sell their properties cheaply, leaving the puppet master to buy them up and then flip them at a profit to the owner of an extremely loud planing-mill; of course this fellow becomes mayor. As a habitual liar explains to the liar whom she is hoping to marry, “Mind you, I don’t like to be a liar, but in this rat-race that I been in for the past seventy-five years, I never knew anybody that wasn’t a liar.” In the short stories, such dishonesty, cowardice, and selfishness may play themselves out on a purely personal level, but in the novels, they are mediated through social rules and hierarchies. In a social system of corrupters, exploiters, and worse, there is little reason for someone not to fail—unless he or she is corrupt to the core. I suspect that this trumps existential loneliness as the real reason that O’Hara’s protagonists do not achieve their goals: they are tainted by residual decency.t
“In this rat race, I never knew anybody that wasn’t a liar.”
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How Sweet Is It? 3 George Scialabba
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Hirschman revived the eighteenthcentury idea of doux commerce, or the civilizing effects of nascent capitalism.
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suppose you’re not entirely responsible for your obituary notices. When Albert Hirschman died in December 2012, the time-servers leaped in to claim his legacy, from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker to Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books to the anonymous Economist. Hirschman was their idea of a hero: solid empirical work (in development economics) early in his career, and wide-ranging reflections (mostly intellectual history) later on, sprinkled with allusions to literature and philosophy. He was civilized, polite, and imperturbable, his indignation always muted, his passions always hedged, his criticisms never quite grasping the root. He had a left-wing youth, which found honorable expression in the Spanish Civil War and the Great Anti-Fascist War, and which he never noisily renounced but more or less quietly abandoned. The fifties effectively smothered him, as they did all but a very few academic social scientists. One of Hirschman’s most popular essays, “Rival Views of Market Society,” revived the eighteenth-century idea of doux commerce, or the civilizing effects of nascent capitalism. “It is almost a general rule,” Montesquieu wrote in L’Esprit des Lois (1748), “that wherever manners are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, manners are gentle. . . . Commerce polishes and softens barbaric ways.” Condorcet agreed; even the radical Thomas Paine argued that commerce “is the greatest approach towards universal civilization that has yet been made.” How so? An obscure eighteenth-century writer explained: “Commerce . . . makes him who was proud and haughty suddenly turn supple, bending, and serviceable. Through commerce man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both thought and action. Perceiving the need to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least takes care to appear decent and serious. . . . He avoids scandal for fear of damaging his credit rating.” He might have been channeling the dime-a-dozen contemporary conservative pundits who preach virtue to the poor and congratulate the rich: William Kristol, William Bennett, Charles Murray, George Will, David Brooks. Some writers get downright sentimental. The nineteenth-century social theorist Georg Simmel waxed lyrical about competition, comparing it to courtship. It “compels the wooer . . . to go out to the wooed, come close to him, establish ties with him, find out his strengths and weaknesses and adjust to them. . . . Again and again
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“Modern capitalist life is love-saturated.” Sure it is.
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DAV I D J O H N S O N
it achieves what usually only love can do: it divines the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them.” The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey takes this rhetoric over the top and around the bend: “Markets and even the muchmaligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a traditional village. Modern capitalist life is love-saturated.” Sure it is. The
Baffler [no.24] ! 167
u
W
Capitalism was tonic once. It has turned toxic for exactly the reasons Marx foresaw: relentless, uncontrolled commodification, concentration, financialization, and globalization.
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168 1 The Baffler [no.24]
hat can we make, in an age of anxiety and antidepressants, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, of this chorus of testimony to capitalism’s character- and communitybuilding effects? Why do the eighteenth-century observations sound honest and fresh, while the contemporary versions are plainly vulgar apologetics? The short answer is: mass production. In a society of farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, face-to-face relations were the norm. Virtue had an immediate and obvious relation to material success. Authority was personal and embodied rather than distant and abstract. Above all, there was, for many, autonomy: control over the rhythm and quality of one’s work. And for those without such control, there was a plausible prospect of it. As Lincoln said to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859: The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all, gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.
Lincoln promised, in effect, that there would never be an American underclass. A brief look at Labor Department predictions about job growth, revealing the increasing predominance of dead-end, lowwage, unskilled jobs, makes it pretty clear that Lincoln’s promise has been definitively betrayed. Historian Christopher Lasch spent his brilliant but all-too-short career trying to call attention to this betrayal. Albert Hirschman probably grasped it, but was too polite to make a fuss about it. Malcolm Gladwell, Cass Sunstein, and the rest of Hirschman’s elegists seem not to have a clue. Capitalism was tonic once, as Lincoln’s contemporary Karl Marx emphasized repeatedly. It has turned toxic for exactly the reasons he foresaw: relentless, uncontrolled commodification, concentration, financialization, and globalization. The specter of immiseration already haunts the 99 percent in the United States and Southern Europe; the unions and social democratic parties that held it back previously have been pulverized. The systemwide rate of profit may be falling. We don’t know for sure because so much profit is simply financial rent: the redistribution of income to banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, and the rest of those who’ve designed the financial system. We arrived at this pass not through virtue and restraint but by greed, cruelty, and low cunning. Goodness, as Mae West acknowledged (though at least hers was earned income), has nothing to do with it. t
A Poet’s Guide to the Assassination of JFK [ the Assassination of Poetry] ( an excerpt )
3 Thom a s S ay er s El l is Air Force One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yaddo American Rifleman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . American Poetry Review Anti-Castro Cubans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cave Canem Arlington National Cemetery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AWP Assassination Records Review Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Paris Review Autopsy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diving into the Wreck Autopsy Photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Disembodied Poetics Autopsy Photos (Altered) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exquisite Corpse Bethesda Naval Hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “After great pain . . .” Big Oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nobel Prize Lem Billings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Mistress Bradstreet
9
George H. W. Bush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The Yale Younger CIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PSA (Poetry Society of America) CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kinko’s Earle and Elizabeth Cabell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guns ‘N’ Roses Camelot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Faber The President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lancer The First Lady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lace Caroline Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lyric John F. Kennedy, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lark
9
The Carousel Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Best American Poetry Casket, Bronze Ceremonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First Edition Casket, Metal Shipping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Second Printing John Connally’s Stetson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Muldoon’s Rackett John Connally’s Wounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Four Quartets” Conspiracy Realists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Harriet Conspiracy Theorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scarriet Counterfeit Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Contest Judges Coup d’Etat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . o blek b’ilat The Cover-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
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Dallas Police . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Publishers Weekly Dallas Police Department Basement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Busboys and Poets Fair Play for Cuba Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .VONA
9
544 Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826 Valencia Forgive My Grief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Volumes of Elegies Jim Garrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Directions
9 The
Baffler [no.24] ! 169
LBJ’s Box 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MLA Job List 2013 LBJ’s Psychiatrist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert N. Casper Lady Bird Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara “MacBird” Garson The Joint Chiefs of Staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FSG JFK’s Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Received Forms Jacqueline Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cate Marvin Joseph P. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ulysses Rose F. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ariel Kennedy Compound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fine Arts Work Center Kennedy Half Dollar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Threepenny Review Henry Kissinger . . . . . . . . . “Huffy Henry hid the day,/unappeasable Henry sulked.” Love Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The MacDowell Colony
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The Magic Bullet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pulitzer Prize Eisenhower Warning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cantos Moscow–Washington Hotline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KGB Bar “My God, they are going to kill us all” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lit Crit The National Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Strand Bookstore
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Parkland Memorial Hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MFA Program Parkland Surgeons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Writing Workshop
9
Pepsi Cola Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poets House Photograph of LBJ Being Sworn In . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “In Plato’s Cave” Photograph of Oswald Holding Rifle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imagism Photograph of Oswald Being Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unit of Sound/Unit of Meaning Picket Fence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fence Dan Rather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dan Chiasson
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Secret Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Book Foundation Shadow Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship Sniper and Spotter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grant Application Deadline Sniper’s Nest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Public Space SS 100 X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saratoga Piper PA-32R-301 State Funeral of John F. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “. . . a formal feeling comes—” Stemmons Freeway Sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Freedom of Information Act Oliver Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brian Turner The Storm Drain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Low-Residency Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sinatra Democrats of Texas (DOT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unsolicited Manuscripts Texas Regulars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simultaneous Submissions Texas School Book Depository . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dodge Poetry Festival Texas Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . City Lights Helen Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catalog Copy, Print and Electronic Officer J.D. Tippet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tony Hoagland
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Triple Underpass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lyrical Ballads The Tunnels Under Dallas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tenure Track UFO Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slush Pile The Umbrella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference The United States House of Representatives The Poetry Project at Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . St. Mark’s Church
9 9 Washington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Warren Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Academy of American Poets National Endowment for the Arts Watergate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Book of Nightmares (1973) The White Oak Cliff(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of Dover Beach White Russian Community . . . . . On Grief and Reason/Dancing in Odessa/Factory of Tears Witnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nation Disappearing Witnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of Print Titles
9
JFK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You
N ATI O N A L A RC H I V E S
Bullet found on stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Texas. The
Baffler [no.24] ! 171
6Bafflomathy [No. 24] Andrew Bacevich (“Tom Clancy,” p. 157) is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. Ian Bogost (“Rage Against the Machines,” p. 96) is a game designer and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2010, he created Cow Clicker. Mark Dancey (“Monopsony,” p. 30) is a Detroit-based painter and illustrator. Floyd Dell (“Feminism for Men,” p. 154) was an editor of The Masses. He died in 1969. Timothy Donnelly (“Chemical Life,” p. 40) is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and The Cloud Corporation. Barbara Ehrenreich (“A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a.k.a. Science,” p. 59) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and author of the forthcoming memoir Living with a Wild God. Thomas Sayers Ellis (“A Poet’s Guide to the Assassination of JFK,” p. 169) is poetry editor of The Baffler and author of Skin, Inc. Susan Faludi (“Feminism for Them?” p. 148) is a contributing editor of The Baffler. Her latest book is The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. David Graeber (“What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” p. 50) is a contributing editor of The Baffler. His book Debt: The First 5,000 Years is now out in paperback. Heather Havrilesky (“Play, Dammit!” p. 88) writes Bookforum’s Best Seller List column and The Awl’s weekly existential advice column, Turning The Screw. She’s the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. Terrance Hayes (“What It Look Like,” p. 161) is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award. Fanny Howe (“Learned,” p. 87) has been teaching for four decades. She manages to do this without living anywhere and liking only to be in bed. Jaron Lanier (“Nerds on the Knife Edge,” p. 10) is the author of You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future? (Answer: Not you.)
172 1 The Baffler [no.24]
Chris Lehmann (“Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse,” p. 104) is senior editor of The Baffler, coeditor of Bookforum, and author of Rich People Things. Rhonda Lieberman (“Hoard d’Oeuvres: Art of the 1 Percent,” p. 76) writes for Artforum and recently curated The Cat Show at New York’s White Columns. Paul Maliszewski (“Bcc: Dridge,” p. 118) is the author of Prayer and Parable. His work has appeared in Harper’s and The Paris Review. Airea D. Matthews (“Narcissus Tweets,” p. 94) is a Zell Postgraduate Poetry Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MFA. She lives in Detroit with her four children. Anne Elizabeth Moore (“The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke,” p. 138) is the author of, most recently, New Girl Law: Drafting a Future for Cambodia. She lives in Chicago. Alex Pareene (“Deal Me Out,” p. 126) is a politics writer for Salon and the author of the ebook The Rude Guide to Mitt Romney. Metta Sáma (“It was the year we turned to dragons,” p. 156) is the author of Nocturne Trio and South of Here (published under her legal name, Lydia Melvin). She is assistant professor, director of creative writing, and director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College. George Scialabba (“How Sweet Is It,” p. 166) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and author of For the Republic and What Are Intellectuals Good For? Gene Seymour (“The Billionaires’ Fantasia,” p. 63) has written about movies, music, politics, and other distractions for The Nation, Film Comment, the Washington Spectator, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Washington, D.C. Erik Simon (“God’s Game,” p. 13), originally from rural Illinois, now lives in Nyack, New York. He’s the author of the novel Don Prophet. John Summers (“The Rites of Play,” p. 6; “People’s Republic of Zuckerstan,” p. 20) is editor in chief of The Baffler, author of Every Fury on Earth, and editor of James Agee’s Cotton Tenants. William T. Vollmann (“Decently
L E W I S KO C H
Downward,” p. 162) won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005, for Europe Central. He is the author of more than thirty works, and lives in Sacramento. Dara Wier’s (“Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned,” p. 137) new book is You Good Thing. She teaches for the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s MFA program for poets and writers. Michael Wolf (“The Real Toy Story,” p. 16) is a Hong Kong-based photographer. His work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the German Museum for Architecture. Gabriel Zaid (“Against Merit,” p. 8), poet and essayist, lives in Mexico City. Translations of his work appear in The Selected Poetry of Gabriel Zaid.
Graphic Artists
Translator
The typeface employed throughout the pages of The Baffler is Hoefler Text, with a smidgen of Gotham.
Natasha Wimmer
Melinda Beck, William Bengtson, Joseph Ciardiello, Mark Dancey, Henrik Drescher, Michael Duffy, Mark S. Fisher, Mary Flatley, Patrick JB Flynn, Stuart Goldenberg, Brad Holland, David Johnson, Victor Juhasz, Lewis Koch, Stephen Kroninger, Zohar Lazar, David McLimans, P. S. Mueller, Chris Mullen, Alain Pilon, Jonathon Rosen, Laurie Rosenwald, David Sandlin, Katherine Streeter, Mark Wagner, and Michael Wolf The front cover is illustrated by David McLimans; the photograph on the back cover was made by Lewis Koch.
The
Baffler [no.24] ! 173
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