Captain “I Owe”: James Howard Kunstler on Michael Jackson and the Recession

June 29, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Though generally reluctant to pile on the conspicuously deceased, we at Generation Bubble couldn’t allow some recent remarks by notorious peak-oiler and secular apocalyptician James Howard Kunstler escape our readers’ notice. On his blog, the colorfully titled Clusterf*ck Nation, he observes Michael Jackson’s passing. But Kunstler, playing Antony to Jackson’s Caesar, wishes to bury the King of Pop, not to praise him.

Kunstler forges an elaborate analogy between Jackson’s career and the United States’ economic plight. In recent years, Jackson’s fortune transformed into a gaping hole of debt. “Like the United States, Michael Jackson was spectacularly bankrupt, reportedly in the range of $800-million, which is rather a lot for an individual,” Kunstler writes:

Had he lived on a few more years, he might have qualified for his own TARP program — another piece of expensive dead-weight down in the economy’s bilges — since it is our established policy now to throw immense sums of so-called “money” at gigantic failing enterprises.

Kunstler downplays the really staggering figures in Jackson’s case. The upper nine figures, which he deems “rather a lot for an individual,” is an absolutely enormous sum, especially when one considers that this is the amount Jackson was to the bad (the bad, ya know it). This amount, in other words, represents the credit hole Jackson spent himself into. Yet, despite this enormous overhang, he somehow managed to enjoy a standard of living most folks can only dream about. As Kunstler puts it:

Michael Jackson was on the receiving end of one huge bank loan after another long after his pattern of profligacy was set and obvious. They threw money at him for the same reason that the federal government throws money at entities like CitiBank: the desperate hope that some miracle will allow debt servicing to resume. Michael could burn through $50-million in half a year. It didn’t seem to affect his credibility as a borrower. When his heart stopped last week, he was living in a Hollywood mansion that rented for several hundred thousand dollars a month. You wonder how the landlord cashed those checks.

Jackson’s sordid final years, as Kunstler characterizes them, present a portrait of the way Americans live now. Admittedly, Jackson’s tastes and habits were extravagant, as tastes and habits among the filthy rich are wont to be. This would seem to put him a class of his own. But lop a few zeros off Jackson’s expenses, and they begin to resemble those of the nation’s Joe and Jane Sixpacks,’  the expenses of folks jumbo-mortgaged to the hilt, kiting one credit card with another, dyspeptic every time the car won’t start or the next round of layoffs begins — all because for many years now the United States has had little to offer the world beyond smart bombs and finance (which is arguably just another type of smart bomb).

Bubbles: not the only thing Jackson and the US economy have in common.

Bubbles: one thing Jackson and the US economy have in common.

The country really doesn’t produce much besides debtors anymore, because, in a service economy, the only way to make it to the top of the heap — if one can’t croon a tuneful falsetto while moonwalking and gripping his‘nads — is by offering financial services to various and sundry service-mongers in the larger economy. The Reagan administration, in additon to giving the nation an inactivist government, saddled it with HBS and Wharton hordes, mad for rents and seigniorage, on the lookout for some opportunity to skim a little cream from others’ toil. The US economy became the very inverse of the oogy symbol on the dollar, the one which sets conspiriologists’ fantods a-howling. It became an inverted pyramid where one’s wage had stories of claimants set above it, each angling to wrest it from the rightful owner’s grasp. Debt became nearly a physical principle, a fifth force to keep markets humming and fat cats fat. Jackson’s own career took on a similar cast. Or so says Kunstler:

[Jackson] spent the last years of his life wandering a few steps ahead of his creditors, gulling concert promoters into “comeback” schemes (with walking-around money up front), and with three bought-and-paid-for children, obviously not his own, for consolation.

For Jackson, trading on his wilting celebrity for a plush per diem and additional lines of credit was a priori. In this he showed himself a true son of the soil. Behind the American dream lurk myriad Americans’s schemes, each as exotic as the next, yet each truly only a variation on a familiar Ponzi theme. Bernie Madoff gets sent up the river; Michael Jackson buys the farm. What unites them, beyond a general dodginess of person, is that neither of them need worry of being put out of a place to sleep.

Kunstler’s peroration tropes Jackson’s song, “The Man in the Mirror.” In the King of Pop’s countenance, nipped, tucked, and nipped, and tucked again, one discovers a nation bleached, deracinated, hermaphrodized, bearing little resemblance to its former self:

When he dropped dead last week, the nation’s morbidly maudlin response suggested a cover story for the relief of being rid of him and all the embarrassment he provoked. One CNN reporter called him a genius the equal of Mozart. That’s a little like calling Rachel Maddow the reincarnation of Eleanor Roosevelt. A nation addicted to lying to itself tells itself fairy tales instead of facing a pathology report. Yet, like Michael Jackson, the undertone of horror story still pulses darkly in the background. The little boy who grew up to be the simulation of a girl was really a werewolf. The nation that defeated manifest evil in World War Two woke up one day years later to find itself stripped of its manhood, mentally enslaved to cheap entertainments, and hostage to its own grandiosity. Maybe in grieving so exorbitantly over this freak America is grieving for itself. All the loose talk about “love” from the media and the fans gives off the odor of self-love. America is “the man in the mirror,” the gigantic, floundering Narcissus, sailing into the stormy seas of history.

To borrow the words of Z-Man, the villain of Russ Meyer’s immortal Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, pop superstardom was Michael Jackson’s happening, and it freaked him — as well as us — out.

*     *     *

Postscript: Rob over at Marginal Utility has linked to this post. Check out his comments here. — 4:26 PM

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Bubble Culture: MC Hammer Flash Mob Proves Capitalism Is 2 Legit 2 Quit

June 26, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

A question we at Generation Bubble ask ourselves time and again is: When will Americans emerge into consciousness of their real situation? Each day’s news cycle presents a smorgasbord of recreancy, infamy, fraud, casual brutality and magnified trivia. Wars dribble on without ever petering out, wealth flows out of treasuries and pockets without ever flowing back into the larger economy; yet nary a peep of concerted and sustained protest attends these things.

A beggared present prohibits considerations of a mortgaged future. Today, more tears are being shed over Michael Jackson — whose passing, while in one respect unfortunate, likely spared many boys the trauma of dodgy sleepovers at Neverland Ranch — than will ever be shed over the passing of modernity, which, cannot and will not survive Wall Street’s Wehrmacht.

One moonwalking millionaire dies and a nation reaches for the Kleenex; many fast-talking billionaires survive and a nation reaches for the TV remote.

Class consciousness seems about as relevant a concept as phlogiston these days. What signifies “oligarchy,” when black, brown, white and yellow, male and female, rich and poor fuse into one nation under American Idol? What means “wage slavery” in light of one’s fealty to the Burger King, who decrees one can have it her way?

The slogan made popular during the last election, “Yes, we can!” — What can it mean? If Americans have shown they can do anything, its’ that they can chant “Yes, we can!” nigh unto doomsday, but not much else. They have put paid to Chaucer’s apothegm, “The word is cousin to the deed,” by showing that the deed can be cozened by the word.

Thesis: spectacle forecloses all critique by arrogating the latter’s positionality and content.

Only this can explain the recent goings-on at Live! On Sunset, an LA fashion outlet. Via the blog Loyal K*N*G comes this video of a flash mob that laid siege to the store. Bedecked in signature MC Hammer regalia, dancers stormed the store during business hours to re-enact en masse Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” video.

Loyal K*N*G’s writer marvels at the happening, which was conveniently committed to video and uploaded to YouTube, naively believing it a spontaneous expression of hip, cheeky subversion: “If ever in someone life needed a reason to scream out the ‘WTF’ phrase, this would be that moment,” he (she?) writes:

I mean if you’re just an innocent hipster custumer [sic] at an innocent hipster clothing retail then you didn’t ask for what had occured, which, by the way, was rather hilarious [sic]. Just check out the video for a group of crazy people of all ages (Yes, even a Grandpa got into the fun action) put on their MC Hammer pants and start dancing to the classics.

Questions as to whether an “innocent” hipster exists notwithstanding (to our mind, nothing bespeaks of our culture’s necrosis more than the hipster), the fact that this flash mob converged in a boutique like Live! should strike one as anything but surprising. It’s nothing if not drearily typical. Close scrutiny reveals very little that’s spontaneous about this Hammer mob; the costuming is too uniform, the choreography too perfect, the video too well edited to convince one that this was all the impromptu brainchild of bored, edgy twentysomethings.

All hammer, no sickle: guerilla marketing late capitalisms latest coup.

All hammer, no sickle: flash mob late capitalism's latest coup.

No, our Hammer mob obviously represents a guerrilla marketing stunt. We at Generation Bubble consider guerrilla marketing one of the most perfidious developments of contemporary life, because, unlike traditional marketing methods, which confront certain insurmountable constraints (a billboard, for all its blighting of the landscape, remains identifiably a billboard), guerrilla marketing makes Machiavellian use of public space by imposing on it the regimes of spectacle and simulacrum in order to undermines its familiarity.  Astute types consequently begin to develop  a sort of Truman-Show epistemological paranoia that to guerilla marketers is simply an externality of the marketer’s exchange with the vendor hiring them — if not, in fact, a desired reaction.

Guerrilla marketers malignly invert Situationist practices, which were intended to restore to onlookers a modicum of critical awareness. In guerilla marketers’ hand, however, these practices become the kabuki of spectacle. Guerrilla marketers have banished public space to the desert of the Real. Authentic subversion in the streets, now occulted by its simulation, loses its political efficacy.

And all the while Capital to its opponents proudly exclaims: “Dat’s how we’re livin’, and ya know U can’t touch this!”

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The Divergence of the Twain: Fifty Years of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”

June 24, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

The blog ideonexus recently presented some musings on C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures.” Snow, who wore two professional hats (scientist and novelist), argued that both the matter and methodology of science and the humanities stood irreconcilably opposed; because science, which places supreme important on the scientific method and the reproducibility of experimental results, achieves coherence by distancing itself from cultural contexts and individual belief, whereas the humanities achieve coherence precisely by addressing themselves to these things.

The loss of a common culture thus arose as science began to distinguish itself as a mode of inquiry to which subjective, non-empirical factors proved inimical, even damaging. And, as it moved away from them, it soon began to leave the humanities behind.

However, in another one of those instances in which base lags behind superstructure, academic prestige remained with the humanists. Science was deemed inferior, a technical language one could be excused for not speaking, while the humanities — arts and letters, specifically — remained the supreme arbiters of one’s acumen.

Snow, whom ideonexus quotes on this point, claims that the urge to tackle this issue came from his experience as both a scientist and a novelist, which offered him a unique perspective on the situation:

“[C]onstantly I felt I was moving among two groups — comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all.”

One trusts the irony of Snow’s remarks is not lost on the reader. That he “felt [he] was moving among two groups […] who had almost ceased to communicate at all” means that his entire lecture proceeded from hunch, an intuition — not the sort of rigorous hypothesizing that creatures of the second culture would welcome or even expect.

Catching his drift: Two Cultures coiner C. P. Snow

Catching his drift: "Two Cultures" coiner C. P. Snow.

The folks at ideonexus are a little less circumspect. They dismiss Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture as ultimately much ado about nothing:

A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities, but that debate accounted for only a portion of Snow’s lecture, and it was so poorly argued and narrowly focused that it’s a wonder why it continues to stir feelings today.

The enduring, outsized effect Snow’s lecture had on the sciences and humanities suggests to the folks at ideonexus that people in those disciplines found it an opportune excuse to start erecting walls between them, because one can find no other reason why the“two-cultures” assertion, spurious and tangential as it is, could find purchase in the minds of ostensibly educated people. Again the folks at ideonexus:

It’s odd that so many Western academics are swept up in Snow’s description of this academic cultural divide, embracing what is basically a false dichotomy. There is science and there is the humanities, but there is also soft science, like psychology, and hard science fiction literature, like Isaac Asimov. There are transhumanists, makers, technical writers, science bloggers, Enlightenment historians, and numerous other academics out there representing the hybridization of the humanities and the sciences to varying degrees. There are two cultures in another sense, those who unthinkingly embrace false dichotomies and those who don’t have their heads up their asses.

This latter cultural division the folks at ideonexus find as closer to the truth of the situation. At the very least, it offers a more faithful account of the psychological and egoïc factors at work. Boundaries blur; borders shift. One indeed finds in the popular domain all kinds of syntheses and fusions of science and the humanities (a cursory glance at an issue of The New York Times Book Review reveals this). But when it comes to institutional prestige, that most precious source of social capital, the feel-good universe of science-humanities many hybrid forms pointedly takes a back seat, especially when funding is at stake. In this respect, one could argue that in the years since Snow’s factious lecture the hard-nose disposition of science has served it exceedingly well, allowing it eventually to dictate how funding is awarded.

In this, science was inestimably abetted by legislation that changed the complexion of American universities. No longer simply citadels of human learning, they became outsourced research and development for the much maligned military-industrial complex. Science showed itself far more robust to this change, and in fact exploited it in order to consolidate its hegemony over many of the nation’s research institutions. Indeed, the U. S. government, bestower of fat grants, remains far more interested in launching missiles than sonnets into enemy countries. In her 2006 exposé, University Inc., Jennifer Washburn identifies as the catalyzing event for this turn corporate-ward the passage in 1980 of the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, now commonly known as the Bayh-Dole Act. The Bayh-Dole Act conferred patent and intellectual property rights on small businesses, universities and nonprofits as a way of promoting sustainable profitability.

Or such was the theory, anyway. Problem was that, in practice, this sustainable profitability amounted to monopolistic double-dipping. Small businesses, universities and nonprofits, which receive public monies in the form of start-up loans or ongoing funding, could upon patenting the fruits this public support made possible and then charge the public for the resulting product. The had to pay twice for the same product, in other words.

Bayh-Dole essentially enabled universities to maximize profit by externalizing as much production cost as possible — the time-honored modus operandi of corporations. As President Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter’s successor in 1981, began his war on big government, ebbing trickles of funds from federal and state legislatures meant Bayh-Dole represented universities’ only means of survival.

Profitability became the watchword as universities became essentially publicly funded, outsourced research and development for defense, technology as pharmaceutical corporate sectors. Any university program that did not directly contribute to patent milling either had to content itself with greater austerity as budget monies flowed away from them or find other ways to pay the bills.

Such fiduciary Realpolitik came to mean that university science programs’ power to generate profit independently of other sorts of funding vaulted these programs to the top of the departmental pecking order. One of this country’s reigning axioms is that to whom much is given more is given. Humanities programs, themselves incapable of putting anything in orbit or through a tank, found themselves derided as unprofitable, and admonished to make do with whatever kindness the sciences deigned show them.

Blinded us with science: Bayh-Doles patent formula for profit.

Blinded us with science: Bayh-Dole's patented formula for profit.

Dependent on the kindness of colleagues estranged by the very divorce Snow did much to promote simply by pointing out, the humanities has slowly watched its prestige trickle away with its institutional clout. Humanities, desperate to seize the mantle of technical sophistication that came to rest on science’s shoulders, have kicked against the pricks primarily by abandoning philological and aesthetic methods for the pseudo-empirical ones of the social sciences and the esoteric ones of French literary theory. Yet the makeover did little to persuade the grandees of science that humanist academic inquiries, erudite, often impenetrable, accomplished more than students’ “personal enrichment” or “growth.”

Since then, the humanities have labored under the suspicion aroused by the scientistic Weltanschaaung tirelessly promoted by those who interest lies its hegemony. The humanities, poor relations of the sciences, find themselves increasingly marginalized in both universities and the culture at large. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the fact remains that the humanities imitate their richer cousin but badly.

One can perhaps seek consolation in noting that a lot has changed since Snow’s 1959 lecture. Though its doubtful how ultimately beneficial the net effect of this change has been. Once upon a time, literacy rates stood as a measure of progress. Now, prevalence of technology serves that function. One could thus plausibly argue that western culture is returning to a single culture, one dominated by science, not the humanities.

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A Humanities Halliburton: The Govindaraj Sisters’ Minerva

June 22, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

A reader brought to our attention this article in the March 10, 2009 edition of The Buffalo News. It features the Govindaraj sisters, founders of Minerva, a company which aims to deliver “education in the humanities … to people whose careers lie in business, nonprofits, or in education at the secondary and elementary levels.”

Sisters Deepa and Preethi cherish no pie-in-the-sky vision of a world where Botticelli and the bottom line get equal fuss. They market their humanistic intervention as “bring[ing] the humanities to people in order to make them better at their jobs.”

The Govindaraj sisters cite as Minerva’s raison d’être the time-crunch commonly experienced in the Information Age, its generally accelerated nature militating against the reposeful, contemplative delights of arts and letters. This, the article continues, epitomizes “the brave new world of the humanities in 2009”; though, given current conditions, how brave this new world proves remains in doubt, particularly as an opinion prevails that “the humanities, in an Internet universe, are less important than before.”

Fortunately, there persists a dissenting opinion of equal force “argu[ing] strongly for the place of humanities education in preparing Americans for careers and civic life.” The article quotes National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Bruce Cole’s justification for this dissenting opinion:

“To really be prepared for a job — any job — you need to have some understanding of who you are and what your history is, and where you want to go. You need to be able to think clearly and write a good English sentence, to have a good critical awareness, and that is fostered by a liberal arts awareness.”

Yet opinions pro and contra converge on one point: namely, “that humanities training can barely be squeezed into today’s college curricula, which tend to skew toward the professional and technical fields.”

There’s a specter haunting humanities, the specter of worker productivity. Technology marches ever onward, demanding that skill development keep pace. Expectations of having to retrain at regular intervals in the future only motivate university students to maximize the amount of know-how acquired in the present, meaning the humanities, which emphasize general over specialized knowledge, only get more and more marginalized.

Gods plenty: the latest refuge of humane letters.

God's plenty: the latest refuge of humane letters.

The ongoing institutional marginalization of the humanities essentially makes for a brave new world resembling more that of Huxley’s John the Savage than Shakespeare’s Miranda. University humanities departments, having become veritable reservations, offer quaint spectacles of antiquarian primitivism the dwindling trickle of funding has reduced them to, while the larger world continues its button pushing and number crunching.

The Govindaraj sisters, however, mean to deliver the humanities from this fate, and they go about doing so in an utterly modern manner — by creating a private-sector solution. If anything, their Minerva resembles a sort of humanities Halliburton, an outsourcing option that today’s streamlined college course offerings all but cry out for. “Minerva’s mission of “provid[ing] a solid humanities education in accessible, though intense, seminar settings,” conjures images evocative more of corporate in-services than college lectures.

Such forward thinking has apparently served the Govindaraj sisters well:

Minerva started small but has grown steadily. It now encompasses up to eight instructors at a time and has worked with more than 3,000 participants.

The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote, “The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk,” which essentially means one can never understand an event’s significance until the event has completely transpired. The humanities find themselves in crisis, to be sure, and the Govindaraj sisters offer one possible solution. But we at Generation Bubble believe theirs does not represent the most desirable solution, because a Power-Point humanities education is really no education at all.

No, the humanities’ survival depends on their withstanding all compulsions to profitability, and not on their adapting themselves to whatever humble capacity corporate imperatives ordain for them. The success of Govindaraj sisters’ Minerva is, ultimately, symptomatic of a creeping technocratic hegemony. This, friends, we must resist.

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Ur Gr8est Fan (4 2day N E Way): “Microstardom,” “Tactical Fandom” and the Attention Economy

June 19, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Over at the P2P Foundation site, Michel Bauwens presents this meditation by one Julian Kücklich. Kücklich considers how social media have engendered “microstardom” and “tactical fandom,” twin phenomena that, as he writes, “[call] into question the classical power relationship between fans and stars.”

This “classical power relationship,” the point of departure of his discussion, Kücklich nowhere explicitly defines. Which is unfortunate, because the subsequent development he later discuss turns on the idea that Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and related entities dissolve the typical  star–fan mediation. As everyone knows, the “Hollywood star system” emerged as a way for film studios to promote their product. Executives plucked comely young aspirants, cast them in roles, fitted them with burnished prêt-à-porter “images,” and paraded them through gala spectacles as a way of arousing in the hoi polloi a profitable amount of mimetic desire.

The “power relation” is, then,  not between star and fan. The star is simply a pawn in the game, enjoying limited agency in the sense that she finds herself constrained to those activities conducive to enhancing her image. The power relationship is, rather, primarily between the movie studio — or more accurately, the multinational entertainment conglomerate — and the fan.

If what social media call into question is the classical power relationship between multinational entertainment conglomerate and fan, then Kucklich’s point becomes much clearer. He essentially identifies an economy prior yet related to the attention economy he later invokes. This prior economy involves the following give-and-take: One can become a star the traditional way by appealing to Hollywood studio execs, but this entails surrendering a measure of agency with regard to her image. She gains in the bargain, however, the amplifying and disseminative might of the Hollywood publicity machine, whose power depends on the fact that the means of production rest almost exclusively in its hands. Or, one can rely on the amplifying and disseminative might of nascent social media, whose power, while orders of magnitude less than that of the Hollywood publicity machine, affords her the very agency the Hollywood star necessarily cedes to the publicity machine.

Greater access to means of production means greater amounts of product. This shakes out at the consumption end into what Kücklich claims isn’t one undifferentiated attention economy, but effectively two: “a mass media attention economy (in this case, TV) and a multitudinous media attention economy.” The latter characterizes the sort of celebrity one realizes in social media. A multitudinous media attention economy traffics in banality, and in this ordinary people have it all over celebrities. “The recent influx of ‘real celebrities’, such as Oprah Winfrey, into the twitterverse provides a good example because it draws attention to the difference between a mass media attention economy (in this case, TV) and a multitudinous media attention economy,” writes Kucklich:

Oprah barged into twitter, expecting that people were actually willing to pay attention to the mundane details of her life, but as it turned out the mundane details of non-celebrities’ lives are actually more interesting (Oprah of all people should know).

Seeing celebrities founder in the twitterverse offers Schadenfreude aplenty; their grubbing after additional minutes of attention when they already command hours of screen time comes across as greedy and overreaching. Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, both twittering celebs, fail to recognize that criteria for twitterverse microcelebrity are antithetical to those of traditional mass media. The former rest on banality and ordinariness, while the latter banish these qualities as a matter of course. Mass-media celebrities’ most quotidian activity has an air of significance and import. Ashton’s dining at Spago with Demi is appropriately momentous (according to the pretzel logic of celebrity, that is) when duly reported in the pages of People magazine, but to have Ashton tweet, “8 w/ D @ Spago 2nite,” seems almost an affront — gods meddling in the affairs of mortals. Ordinary people expect celebrities to remain accessibly remote, sealed off in hermetic fishbowl glitz, dating, mating and procreating for the formers’ amusement.

A thousand points of light: microcelebrities and tactical fans gather.

A thousand points of light: microcelebrities gather.

It’s thus tempting to regard social media as founding a people’s republic of celebrity, one which has overthrown the czars and czarinas of Hollywood and redistributed fame like so much grain. As Kücklich characterizes it, however, twitterverse celebrity, in its achievement and apportionment, resembles more a permanent revolution than an egalitarian celebritopia:

In numerical terms, Oprah and Ashton Kutcher may be the “stars” of the twitterverse, but they are stars only in the sense that they provide a kind of background radiation for the real action. While indigenous microfame is rare, twitter often amplifies attention capital acquired elsewhere, and consolidates distributed and fragmented microaudiences. At the same time, however, the agency of microaudiences is heightened in multitudinous media such as twitter, and they can use this agency tactically as well as strategically, and often do. In this context, it is significant that while “friending” is the basic unit operation (to use Ian Bogost’s term) of facebook, the basic unit operation of twitter is not “following” but “blocking”. So if someone is perceived as abusing their microfame this is sanctioned not just by a denial of attention but by a reduction of that person(a)’s sphere of influence.

Twitterverse fame is not only faint and fleeting, but subject to immediate censure by plebiscite — all positive virtues, as far as Kücklich is concerned. The binarism through which one expresses agency as both microceleb and tactical fan, “friending” or “blocking” as the need arises, seems weirdly robotic. Indeed, like so many cheers for cyberspatial democracy, Kücklich’s skirts the issue of the potentially alienating effect of it all. Doesn’t microcelebrity and tactical fandom merely represent the latest stage in a progressive “loss of the creature,” as Walker Percy famously termed it? Doesn’t all this talk of micro-stardom and -fandom simply highlight the impoverished Imaginary of late Capital, one which now sputters toward utter depletion as we narrowcast to an ever-changing – and potentially vindictive – fanbase our latest mall purchase?

We at Generation Bubble can think of no staler existence than one devoted to commodifying oneself, especially if that commodity has a shelf life measured in nanoseconds. Wired’s Clive Thompson has a different opinion. To him, social media are simply the latest juju in a long-standing ritual de lo habitual:

You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest.

Thompson’s deontology is curious. What many people see as social media’s march toward to vanilla existence of computer-enhanced consumerist banality is really just a refreshing dose of honesty. This is like saying that humans have always visited atrocities on other humans. The Nazi’s just did it a little more overtly. Dirty deeds overtly done remain preferable to ones done covertly, not because the overtness pleases us with its “truthiness”(to quote Stephen Colbert), but because it shows us where to direct our resistance.

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Let’s Kill Off the Copyright: The Mellon Seminar’s Digital Humanities Manifesto and the Future of Intellectual Property

June 17, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Aprópòs our previous discussion of digital humanities comes UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities’s recently issued manifesto. (Actually, it’s the second the Seminar has issued — version 2.0.)

Like all manifestos, the Mellon Seminar’s is by turns oracular, confrontational and unclear. Manifestos have always been more about effect than exegesis, and this is particularly true in the present instance. A veritable stew of discursive styles, the Mellon Seminar’s manifesto seeks to be at once an envoy and emblem of its age.

As such, the Mellon Seminar’s manifesto begs comparison to those famously issued by the Italian Futurists nearly a century ago. Their first, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” was soon followed by a second bearing the more fractious title, “Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight.” Not ones for understatement, the Futurists traffic in sanguinary grandiloquence. Case in point:

See the furious coupling of war, this enormous vulva inflamed by the lusts of courage, this shapeless vulva that splits wide open to offer itself more easily in the terrible spasm of imminent victory! Ours is the victory … I’m sure of it, for the mad are already hurling their hearts at the sky, like bombs!

Though perhaps not so lavishly violent in their rhetoric as their Futurist forebears, the folks of the Mellon Seminar don’t exactly shrink from bellicosity either. Their manifesto outlines “(guerilla) action items,” which they situate on a scale of subversive force:

weak = ignore the well-intentioned “voices of reason” that will always argue for interpreting scholarly or artistic fair use in the most restrictive manner (so as to shield the institutions they represent from lawsuits, no matter how improbable or unfounded); adopt vigorous interpretations of fair use that affirm that, in the vast majority of cases, scholarship and art practice: a) are not-for-profit endeavors whose actual costs far exceed real or potential returns; and b) are endeavors that, rather than diminishing the value of IP or copyright, enhance their value.

medium = circumvent or subvert all “claims” that branch out from the rights of creators to those of owners, the photographers hired by owners, places of prior publication…

strong = pirate and pervert materials by the likes of Disney on such a massive scale that the IP bosses will have to sue your entire neighborhood, school, or country; practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright, mashing up media, recutting images, tracks, and texts.

The anarchic streak runs as strongly through the Mellon Seminar digital humanists as it does through the Futurists; but, whereas the latter conjure readers to kill off the moonlight, the Mellon Seminar digital humanists exhort them to murder copyright. Yet, these bloody deeds both serve a life principle. For the Futurists, throwing off the hidebound plangency of Romanticism leads to poetry’s renewal; for the Mellon Seminar, throwing off the dead hand of copyright law — life plus 70 years (deserts of vast eternity in our accelerated culture) — leads to the humanities’ renewal. “Digital humanists defend the rights of content makers, whether authors, musicians, coders, designers, or artists, to exert control over their creations and to avoid unauthorized exploitation,” the partisans of the Mellon Seminar write,

but this control mustn’t compromise the freedom to rework, critique, and use for purposes of research and education. Intellectual property must open up, not close down the intellect and proprius.

A rosy outlook lies behind the Mellon Seminar’s various injunctions, one which its member humanists openly characterize as utopian:

Digital Humanities implies the multi-purposing and multiple channeling of humanistic knowledge: no channel excludes the other. Its economy is abundance based, not one based upon scarcity. It values the COPY more highly than the ORIGINAL. It restores to the word COPY its original meaning: abundance. COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE, an age where, though notions of humanistic research are everywhere under institutional pressure, there is (potentially) plenty for all. And, indeed, there is plenty to do.

Such sentiment is common to liberal–anarchic point of view. The age of virtual reproduction, where the costs associated with making cultural artifacts have in many cases become negligible (just about anyone can, with a little bit of know-how, record studio quality music on a desktop, for instance), has engendered an unprecedented situation. Gatekeepers of intellectual property now appear as veritable dogs in the manger. Each time they encode a sound-file to prohibit its copying, or each time they install crippleware on an electronic device to inhibit its full functionality, they betray the fact that scarcity is now more a matter of insistence than fact.

Future-present: the Mellon Seminars red holidays of genius have begun.

Future-present: the red holidays of open-source genius have begun.

According to the Mellon Seminar digital humanists, then, these gatekeepers stand guilty of obstructing humanity’s digital liberation. What they prescribe is a wholesale reevaluation of prevailing economic theory, which, since Adam Smith, has been predicated on dearth:

Digital Humanities have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture intertwinglings of the 60s and 70s. This is why it affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive, the university/museum/archive/library without walls, the democratization of culture and scholarship, even as it affirms the value of large-scale statistically grounded methods (such as cultural analytics) that collapse the boundaries between the humanities and the social and natural sciences. This is also why it believes that copyright and IP standards must be freed from the stranglehold of Capital, including the capital possessed by heirs who live parasitically off of the achievements of their deceased predecessors.

Unfortunately, it appears that the stranglehold of Capital on copyright will prevail, at least for the time being. The June 9, 2009 edition of The New York Times reports that Google’s settlement with various copyright holders has hit a snag by drawing the attention of the US Justice Department. “The Justice Department began its inquiry into the sweeping $125 million settlement this year after various parties complained that it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan books,” the story reads:

Orphans are books still protected by copyrights, but that are out of print and whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Attorneys general in several states are also investigating the settlement.

The complex settlement agreement, which is subject to review by a federal court, was aimed at resolving a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from major academic and research libraries for use in its Book Search service violated copyrights.

Under the settlement, announced in October, Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Critics said that the settlement would unfairly grant Google a monopoly over the commercialization of millions of books.

Google’s bid for monopoly control of digitized printed matter seems a retreat from the utopia envisioned by the Mellon Seminar — unless, of course, Google intends merely to curate a collection it has made widely and unconditionally available. Given Google’s famous ethic, “Don’t be evil,” it is entirely possible that, instead of representing the Mellon Seminar digital humanists’ latest adversary, Google may prove their most powerful ally.

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I Peggior Fabbri: Millenial Versifiers and the Decline of Poetry

June 15, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

For today’s post we at Generation Bubble hand the reins over to a guest editor, a certain individual who came to us looking to air his opinion on contemporary poetry. Emboldened by our tangle with poet Annie Finch a month ago, we were eager to jump back into this subject to see what further controversy we could stir, so we gladly availed him of our forum. Our guest editor’s credentials check out. He knows of what he speaks. We should, however, add that his opinion is not necessarily ours.

The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno may have claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but, were he alive today, he wouldn’t worry. For writing poetry — good poetry — seems nearly impossible these days, if the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century is any indication, especially when it comes to practitioners who belong to my own generation. I used Legitimate Dangers recently in a literary analysis course I teach. My assumption was that, because poetry grows an ever more specialized and obscure mode of literary expression, the only thing which could offset such a drift toward irrelevance was to teach poetry written by my students’ near contemporaries in the hope that at least the often racy and timely subject matter would capture their attention.

The results of the course were uneven, because the anthology itself is terribly uneven — something I should have expected, since the contributors are, as the anthology’s subtitle indicates, “poets of the new century.” I’m not suggesting that ce jeune siècle is without matter to be poetically treated; it’s just that the poetry in this anthology tends to be … well … a bit predictable, and, in many cases, more than a bit puerile. Much of it seems workshopped to death, membra disjecta of some MFA program that have had all the expressive marrow sucked from them, leaving only the hollow bones of contrived formal novelty — evidence of possibilities lost as opposed to opportunities seized. And others seem a bit too precious and shallow for my taste: identity–political catechisms of an annoyingly petit-bourgeois sort, as if the guilty poets deliberately set out to confirm my suspicion that poetry has become a boutique industry, a playground of the mind for New–Urbanist bohos as they absently wipe lattè foam from their iBooks and survey their not-as-remarkable-as-they’d-have-us-believe psychic panoramas.

The songs of themselves: Legitimate Dangers a haven for self-regarding poetasters.

The song of myself: a Legitimate Dangers contributing poetaster.

Not all the poetry is bad, though. I recommend Dave Berman’s contributions (full disclosure: I’m a Silver Jews fan), as well as Mark Bibbins’s and Jeffrey McDaniel’s. And there are a few others that stand as nimbly executed exercises in PoMo self-consciousness. But, all in all, the “poets of the new century” represented in Legitimate Dangers suggest to me the only real danger is the creeping decline of poetry itself.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is that poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs, or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone (“It’s a cell phone and mp3 player … and so much more!).

I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalization and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. It may just be that our engagements with poetry and ad-copy are fundamentally not so different after all. Each involves a complex tangle of knowingness, naïveté, envy and attraction, among other things.

This sounds like some limpid New-Critical insight, I know, but perhaps its in the unique configuration and intensities of the encounter between a particular poem and a particular reader that constitute authentic experience. Authenticity resides in the event of reading the poem, not in how we digest it the poem for our own purposes or for the edification of others.

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Destructive Creation: BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis on Internet Disintermediation and the Rise of Efficiency

June 12, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Via Jos Schuurmanns’s site comes this post by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. In it, Jarvis basically offers a précis of his book, What Would Google Do?, a manifesto for the rapidly approaching post-scarcity age. (Irony: Jarvis has authorized no preview on Google Books.) Jarvis’s thesis is that  Amazon, craigslist, eBay and Google have radically challenged the fundamental assumptions of current economic theory. Most economists cleave to the notion that resources are scarce, and that economies develop as a means of dealing with this scarcity. Economists of a free-market bent contend that the competition to which capitalism compels a population to leads to an adequate if not optimal allocation of resources via price discovery in the market, whereas economists of a more command-and-control sort claim that the contradictions and disequilibrium inherent in capitalist market relations tend toward squandering and waste of resources (one need only read news accounts of new housing developments being plowed under because developers can find no buyers to understand this). Yet either contingent agree on the basic fact that resources are indeed scarce.

According to Jarvis, however, Google et al. have, not to put too fine a point on it, put paid to these fundamental assumptions. Making good the pronouncement that the internet will prove “The Great Disintermediator,” web powerhouses have carved out substantial cyberspatial niches for themselves not by managing scarcity, but by circumventing the structures that make for scarcity. Jarvis puts it this way:

as I thought through the major innovations of the last decade, many of them have not led to economic growth; they haven’t added money to the economy but left it in the economy. Thus measuring innovation’s impact in the revenue, growth, productivity, and market cap of large companies may not be valid. Instead, we are seeing innovation take money out of their pockets, leaving it with their customers. What they, in turn, do with that extra money and what impact it has on the economy is an entirely different question – and that impact is likely seen in any case not in large companies but in individual consumers and in small businesses. But I think the proper measure of the changes in the last decade is the innovation dividend.

One notices a homology here between the way internet entities engross the economy and the way many Republicans (of all people!) propose to do the same: namely, by reducing the number of claimants on one’s bank account. For Republicans, it’s public interests, i.e., governmental bodies, that are the greedy culprits looking to beggar the citizenry. But seldom do they direct their polemic at the private interests seeking to do the same (nothing says “bloat” like an HMO bureaucracy). Into this ideological blindspot swoop online entities like Amazon, craigslist, eBay and Google, literally decimating exchange value, and in so doing, saving consumers a bundle. Jarvis offers some hard numbers drawn from craigslist’s success:

craigslist is blamed for destroying (that’s from the publishers’ perspective) $100 billion in classified ad value, replacing it with its reported $100 million revenue. Newspapers act as if that was their money — as if they had a God-given right to it — but, of course, it wasn’t. When Craig Newmark spoke with my students at CUNY, and they asked him why he didn’t maximize revenue at craigslist and sell it for billions and then use that money for philanthropy, he told them that he thought he was doing more good for the country and the economy by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who were doing the transactions he now enabled. He cut out a gross inefficiency born of the monopoly that newspapers held over the means of production and distribution. If you try to measure his innovation’s impact on the economy with old methods and metrics — built on the assumptions of the old economy— you can’t see it. He didn’t make companies grow or become more productive. He added efficiency.

Adding efficiency represents a sort of immanent growth as monolithic, revenue-hungry institutions are progressively undermined by swiftly running data-streams. And immanent growth makes sense in these times of ecological and economical poop-out — peak oil, real-estate collapse, financial meltdowns and whatnot. Verily, the Big Three automakers would do well to emulate these practices, if they are to satisfy President Obama’s demand that they become “leaner and meaner”; or even  the U. S. itself, if it is to transition to a zero-growth economy, which economic geographer David Harvey says it’s high time it did.

What, me worry?: the internets post-scarcity revolution.

"What, me worry?": the internet's post-scarcity revolution.

If nothing else, the internet and its progeny have forced folks on both the left and the right to reconsider their core ideological convictions. Hidebound notions as to whether it is the transnational corporation or the state that safeguards opportunity or prosperity slouch toward obsolescence. And it’s a good thing, too; all of Thomas Friedman’s stumping for Pax Corporaticana ultimately won him a pie in the face, and the Obama administration has shown a strong distaste for New-Deal-style dirigism, opting instead for the soft power of libertarian paternalism. Such events are to Jarvis harbingers of change — change as a force of revolutionary transformation, and not as simply a hollow slogan:

capital, once freed, may not go to building huge new ventures. It may go to building small new ventures. It may stay in the pockets of people doing transactions and now instead of spending it on Toyotas, it may go to banks. You won’t see all the impact — except negatively — on the Dow Jones Average and the Fortune 500; those were the measures of the old economy. We need new measures.

Jarvis would likely agree with the line from Fellini’s 8 ½ ,“It’s better to destroy than create what’s unnecessary.” The question becomes, then: if Google and its ilk deliver humanity to a post-scarcity paradise by supplanting costly, ponderous brick-and-mortar mediatory institutions with cheaper, more efficient virtual ones, what will humanity do with the surfeit of leisure such a transition entails? It will find itself confronted with the problem of technological unemployment. John Maynard Keynes addressed this problem back in 1930. His outlook was decidedly gloomy:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

[…]

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard — those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me — those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties — to solve the problem which has been set them.

Whether the proles can handle their free time is something only time will tell. We at Generation Bubble, unlike Keynes, see no reason not to let them try. Life is short, and the world is large and wonderful — not just hot and crowded, as Friedman would have it. Even an ordinary person with no special talents can be made to appreciate this!

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An Embarrassment of Riches: Digital Humanists and the Rise of “Distant Reading”

June 10, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Over at the blog, Clio Machine, proprietor Sterling Fluharty surveys the ongoing debate concerning the humanities’ relative worth in what Zbigniew Brzezinski famously dubbed “the Technotronic Era.”

On this issue, Generation Bubble maintains the position that the humanities — or, more specifically, the protocols and procedures of academic humanities — find themselves in jeopardy; because the debate, which centers on issues of profitability, places them at a profound disadvantage from the outset.

Should champions of academic humanities prevail against their bottom-line-minded antagonists, however, they may just find themselves under assault from another quarter. “Some commentators would point to the recession as the primary reason for why these questions are being asked,” Fluharty writes:

We should also consider the possibility that the mainstreaming of the digital humanities over last couple of years is another (but overlooked) reason for why questions about the value and worth of the traditional humanities are being taken more seriously.

The profitability issue, in other words, may be mooted by the march of technological progress, as the latter completely transforms scholarly practice.

Humanities scholars, slow to countenance the changes wrought on their disciplines by computer technology, remain mired in the pre-internet convention of “close reading,” a mode of textual criticism that involves parsing words and phrases with (typically obscure far-Left) ideological ends in mind. Close reading, with its emphasis on words and phrases minutely and extensively considered, finds itself at odds with the information-age realities. The internet’s overwhelming abundance, ready at hand to anyone with a computer and an ISP, makes close reading appear as time absurdly misspent.

Artifacts of a communicative act no longer, humanities texts have become data. So-called digital humanists, sensing the sea change, have already altered their practice accordingly. Influenced by maverick literary scholar Franco Moretti, these digital humanists have instituted as their method “distant reading,” which, as the name suggests, is the very antipodes of close reading. “Distant reading […] allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems,” Moretti writes in “Conjectures on World Literature,” his distant-reading manifesto:

And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more.

Indeed, Moretti goes so far as to characterize distant reading as a sort of unreading. Where a close reader sees a literary text, a distant reader sees a “system” whose literary devices represent so many bits of quantifiable data.

Fluharty throws his support to the digital humanists’ distant reading, believing that they promise to offset what he considers close-reading humanists’ shortcomings. He asks:

How would traditional humanists react if they knew that various digital humanists have searched Google Books to test the arguments set forth in some monographs and found them lacking when text mining revealed an significant number of counterexamples that were missed or ignored by the authors?

Fluharty thus calls upon all humanists to begin “thinking seriously about the advantages and disadvantages of relying so heavily on anecdotal, case study, and close reading research methods in the humanities.

Close reading being really a sort of selective reading has for some time now been something of an open secret among humanities academics. In fact, they consider such selectiveness vital; it tends to spice up otherwise dull conferences. Tweedy antiquarians love a good bout of recondite oneupsmanship. Fluharty, however, by wanting to turn the humanities over to statisticians and “supercrunchers,” threatens to rob old-guard academics of job security. Rendering obsolete close-readers, whose work is often prolix and impenetrable, may seem a commendable aim, but just how charting metaphors or graphing similes illuminates … er … literary systems remains unclear. One could argue that such a method simply leads to a data glut. Distant reading thus strikes one as a kind of inforrhea.

Take me to your reader: humanities future belongs to the supercrunchers.

Take me to your reader: supercrunchin' digital humanist.

Someone who anticipated the myriad excesses of contemporary existence is French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his indelible work, Fatal Strategies, he presents the example of Exxon as illustrative of how unmanageable information quickly becomes. “Exxon: the American government asks the multinational for a general report on all its activities throughout the world,” Baudrillard writes:

The result is twelve volumes of a thousand pages each, which would take years of work to read, let alone analyze. Where is the information?

Given that a single multinational oil company’s operations fills twelve thousand pages, one wonders how many would a statistical analysis of all the tropes of world literature. The mind fairly boggles.

Fluharty himself seems unconcerned about such proliferation. He is optimistic that the humanities will eventually assimilate themselves to the new age of data and statistics. On data’s revolutionary promise he is unequivocal. “Data and databases have become the holy grail of the new class of information workers, he writes:

One recent books [sic] applies the term super crunchers to these data analysts. Recent articles in the popular press describe how large data sets allow trained professionals to find new patterns and make predictions in areas such as health care, education, and consumer behavior. In fact, we have probably reached the point this country where it is impossible to change public policy without the use of statistics. Even the American Academy of Arts and Sciences jumped on the statistics bandwagon when it launched its Humanities Indicators Prototype web site last year, presumably in plenty of time for congressional budget hearings. The fact that the humanities were the last group of disciplines to compile this kind of data raises some troubling questions about the lack of quantitative perspectives in the traditional humanities.

Fluharty admits that there’s work yet to be done, mostly in the area of academic legitimacy. Digital humanists have suffered the peremptoriness of old-guard close readers. But, now, as the sun sets on the latter, digital humanists find themselves primed for primacy. “Traditional humanists distinguish their scholarship from that produced in the social sciences, which they often think lowers itself to the level of policy concerns, continues Fluharty:

Digital humanists, by contrast, are almost universally oriented towards serving the needs of the public. And while traditional humanists place a premium on theoretical innovation, digital humanists have so far focused much more on embracing and pioneering new methodologies.

How number-crunching in the domain of arts and letters stands to serve the needs of the public will remain an item of debate for some time to come. We at Generation Bubble certainly have no ready answers. But until such time as we find one, we’re off to occupy ourselves with our latest critical endeavor: plotting the frequency of characters’ being likened to pea pods in Charles Dickens’s novels.

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Their Vegetable Love: Zombie Banks and the Advent of Japan’s “Herbivore Men”

June 8, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Japan has of late been experiencing an explosion in population of a native ruminant — “herbivore men.” Dubbed this by Maki Fukasawa, a Japanese culture columnist, herbivore men are remarkable for their impecunity, thrift, fastidiousness, and, most bizarrely, their asexuality. CNN.com reports on the etymology of this curious epithet:

“In Japan, sex is translated as ‘relationship in flesh,’” [Maki] said, “so I named those boys ‘herbivorous boys’ since they are not interested in flesh.”

The blog Anxiety Index offers this description of herbivore men, one which highlights the features they share with their American counterparts, hipsters:

In Japan, there’s been a lot of buzz recently around soshoku-kei danshi, which translates as herbivorous or “grass eating” men. Political correctness aside, this term refers to the growing number of men age 20 to 34 who display less “masculine” traits than the “meat eaters” dominating the preceding generation. But before you start envisioning an overdue triumph of feminism in Japan, the reasons for — and results of — this shift in gender attitudes are not particularly positive.

Soshoku-kei danshi are generally considered to have a combination of the following attributes (based on research conducted last year by Tokyo-based market research firm Infinity): lack of ambition at work, preferring to avoid competition; limited life aspirations; low interest or even a negative attitude toward love, sex, dating and marriage; extremely tight with money (saving for the future is a high priority); and sensitivity and concern about their appearance, from fashion to hair and personal care.

Forsaking relationship in flesh doesn’t mean, however, that Japan’s herbivore men seek leafier release (à la the Bible’s Onan); as if taking their cues from Plato’s Symposium, they profess a courtlier love for the fairer sex than is to be enjoyed between the sheets.

Its not easy being green: one of Japans herbivore men.

It's not easy being green: one of Japan's "herbivore men."

Such chastity has become an unlikely fad among young Japanese men, who have done  American metrosexuals one better. Whereas metrosexuals mimic the color-coordinated plumage of the flamboyant set as a way of flying under the gay-dar of wary appletini-sipping urban Gueneveres, herbivore men really, truly just want to be friends:

Typically, “herbivore men” are in their 20s and 30s, and believe that friendship without sex can exist between men and women, Fukasawa said.

The serene detachment from carnality that herbivore men so assiduously cultivate along with their looks has won them as many detractors as admirers. Many of the latter, surprisingly enough, are Japanese women:

The term ["herbivore men"] has become a buzzword in Japan. Many people in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood were familiar with “herbivore men” — and had opinions about them.

Shigeyuki Nagayama said such men were not eager to find girlfriends and tend to be clumsy in love, and he admitted he seemed to fit the mold himself.

“My father always asks me if I got a girlfriend. He tells me I’m no good because I can’t get a girlfriend.”

Midori Saida, a 24-year-old woman sporting oversized aviators and her dyed brown hair in long ringlets, said “herbivore men” were “flaky and weak.”

“We like manly men,” she said. “We are not interested in those boys — at all.”

Takahito Kaji, 21, said he has been told he is “totally herbivorous.”

“Herbivorous boys are fragile, do not have a stocky body — skinny.”

Older men counsel their herbivorous juniors to set aside their ruminant ways. Cultivating a taste for gamine flesh, these older men claim, would reconnect them with their masculine prerogative and teach them the thrill of the hunt.  About such advice herbivore men remain dubious:

Fukasawa said Japanese men from the baby boomer generation were typically aggressive and proactive when it came to romance and sex. But as a result of growing up during Japan’s troubled economy in the 1990s, their children’s generation was not as assertive and goal-oriented. Their outlook came, in part, from seeing their fathers’ model of masculinity falter even as Japanese women gained more lifestyle options.

Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori, a self-described herbivore, said the idea goes beyond looks and attitudes toward sex.

“Some guys still try to be manly and try to be like strong and stuff, but you know personally I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness.”

Older generations of Japanese men are not happy about the changes. At a bar frequented by businessmen after work, one man said: “You need to be carnivorous when you make decisions in your life. You should be proactive, not passive.”

Fukasawa said the group does not care so much about making money — a quality tied to the fact that there are fewer jobs available during the current global economic recession.

The herbivorous lifestyle choice is, then, for many Japanese men a forced one as Japan’s economy remains becalmed in the doldrums following the disaster that befell it in the 1990s. Zero-percent overnight lending rates and “zombie banks” famously led to Japan’s lost decade, the economic lethargy of which has permeated just about every facet of Japanese culture, breeding strange personality tics and tendencies.

Discussing otaku — young Japanese men whose response to Japan’s socioeconomic malaise is near-autistic absorption in computer games, anime or some other electronic pastime as opposed to celibate foppery — Ian Buruma writes in the June 11 edition of The New York Review of Books (warning: gated) that

the lapse into solipsism among young Japanese is too common to dismiss as just another fad. [...] It is a deliberate rejection of reality, a flight into make-believe. And this, in turn, is echoed in the behavior of the Japanese government itself. One of the most commonly cited reasons for the depth and length of the economic slump that started in the 1990s was the refusal of the government to acknowledge the disastrous state of Japanese banks, as though the problems would go away if everyone pretended that things were all right.

Neglect as an expression of wishful thinking stands as the common thread binding together herbivore men and zombie banks. The latter are as heedless of their duty to lend as the former to their duty to couple, a situation leading to dessication of the culture generally — desiccation that the latest worldwide recession has only aggravated. Again CNN.com:

Fukasawa said the group does not care so much about making money — a quality tied to the fact that there are fewer jobs available during the current global economic recession.

Japan’s economy recently saw its largest-ever recorded contraction and has shrunk for four straight quarters. Blue chip companies Sony, Panasonic, Toyota and Nissan all reported losses in May, and most are forecasting the same for the current fiscal year. Though still low by international standards, Japan’s reported 5 percent unemployment is the highest since 2003.

Hori agreed economics has played a role. When he finished university, “a lot of my friends were trying to work for a big company that pays well and I wasn’t interested in that. I am kind of struggling financially and my father is not very happy about it,” he said.

The strange case of the herbivore men represents a peculiar application of contemporary exhortations to environmentally sound practices; in Japan, the greening of the economy starts with young working-age men themselves.

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