Generation Bubble

If for G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx the end of History is humanity’s emancipation, for economist Tyler Cowen, it’s information’s — even if it means enthralling human culture to realize it.

Everybody and Nobody

Susan: I wish we could afford a place in the Hamptons. Everybody who’s anybody has one.
Hobie: Yeah, but if you’re somebody who’s nobody, it’s no fun to be around anybody who’s everybody.

– Melinda and Melinda

I hear the word “everybody” a lot, even if it is only implied. Whenever there is discussion of what technologies “we” will be using five years from now, or what effects technology has on “us,” we are talking about everybody. I consider myself fortunate to be an everybody. If everybody is on MySpace, so am I. If they move to Facebook, I follow. Technology replaces technology, the new becomes old and the old recedes in the face of the new. This is the world now. We blog and we twitter, and when Google unleashes the “Wave,” we will probably be swept away by that too, unless and until something else comes along. We will all, also, do whatever comes after that, and after that.

If we occasionally argue or resist, it is only in marginal ways. We look for shortcomings in the new technologies or ways to improve the “app,” to make it more killer. It would meet our needs better if it did this or did that. We ponder whether twitter is here to stay, or how long a certain program can possibly remain state of the art.

Sometimes, turning inwards just so much, we discuss what all this is doing, or might be doing to us. Perhaps we think of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and wonder if it is possible that certain things — thoughts, feelings, ideas — are incapable of being communicated or expressed through these new media. And where will such things go? Is it possible for thoughts, feelings, or emotions to just disappear, to cease to exist? Whatever our qualms or reservations, and no matter how principled we may be in them, we never stop.

It is a sort of cliché to wonder what we did before these wonders illuminated our lives. How did people clean the floor before vacuum cleaners? How did I ever live without a microwave? What did I do before Facebook? Was I different? Did I think different thoughts, have different feeling? These questions, no matter how honestly we ask them, are as useful as trying to imagine eternity, or what the universe was like before the Big Bang. They are thought experiments.

It is hard to tell if or how we have changed. It is so easy to see change in others and so difficult to see it in oneself. When everybody is changing in the same ways, we have no point of reference, and so it is difficult to measure change, or even to know that it is taking place. Have these things changed us? I am sure they did, but I am not really sure what is different. It is so difficult to remember what that old life was like. Better, worse or indifferent, it is gone forever now.

So I am everybody, and the person reading this is everybody. The person without a microwave oven or without Facebook, the person who is not reading this, begins to seem a little bit odd. When people don’t keep up or stop keeping up, they sort of disappear. They are no longer everybody. We don’t spend our time thinking too much about them, because they seem a little bit sad or precious. I don’t know quite the word for how they seem. Maybe I knew it once. Those people have been left behind. Did they even exist in the first place?

When I am unable to find an old friend or an old enemy on Facebook I usually assume the worst. They can only be dead or imprisoned. If they seem, in the haze of memory, to have been weaker sorts, I may wonder if they are now in the grips of a horrible mental illness, and are now living on the streets or in an institution for such people. It is difficult to imagine that they would not want to be everybody. In time, I forget about them and they seem never to have existed at all.

If these people did exist, how would I even find out? Short of drastic measures like missing persons reports or private detectives, there is really no way for me to find them. I am not yet ready to hire a private dick to track down a guy I smoked pot with in ninth grade or the girl I dated when I was seventeen. And maybe they don’t want to be found. At any rate, I cannot ask them the questions that I would like to. Why don’t you take part? Are you too busy for the Internet? Are you in prison or the Peace Corps? Do you think you’re better than me?

I never really consider posing these questions to myself. Why do I need to take part? Am I better than those who don’t? What do I get from keeping up with everything? Oddly, the burden of explaining is always on the holdout, the non-user; he must explain himself, even if he cannot be asked. Perversely, when the holdout has refused the very means of communications that “everybody” now uses, not only can he not be asked, but if he were asked, he would not be able to respond. If he tried to explain, nobody would hear. How would a person refuse blogging or Twitter without doing so on a blog or on Twitter?

The nobodies are a philosophical problem. We can never really know why they are nobody. As technology grows cheaper, their numbers will shrink, but there will still be nobodies. This may be by choice, or it may be that they were never really anybody to begin with. This is easier to imagine: that they were among the nobodies who were already nobodies. When this whole thing started, whenever that was, they must have already been too poor, too lazy, too old, too odd, too crazy, too something. What do such people think about? Perhaps the same things that we do. Perhaps they think things that we do not, or perhaps they feel nothing at all. It’s difficult to say.

The New Brevity

If everybody is everybody and, by definition, along for the ride, it seems strange to expend effort encouraging everybody to stay on board and thereby remain everybody. Is it necessary to send “tweets” encouraging people to twitter? Emails encouraging people to email? The sort of cheerleading found in Tyler Cowen’s recent essay about the media revolution’s effects on culture seems unnecessary. The world is going where it is going, with us or without us. But of course, there are always those nagging questions about what all this change is doing to us.

Mr. Cowen has reassuring words for those consummate pessimists who worry that the future won’t deliver on its promises:

It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful.

The “new brevity,” is Mr. Cowen’s term for the largely technological culture that is now taking shape. His term sounds like something from Philip K. Dick or an art movement that might have been popular in Stalin’s Russia just before the purges. The new brevity will bring boons of all sorts and the naysayers are misinformed or just plain wrong. Concerns that twitter, instant messaging and other manifestations of the new brevity will bring shortened attention spans and cultural collapse are no different from the sort of humbuggery that greeted all the innovations of the past, from the novel to television. Instead of suffering from “information overload,” we will “carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs — a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.” “Multi-tasking” is the term that Cowen uses to describe this process of gleaning and blending.

If, as he believes, our agency will be left intact, or even flourish, then the new brevity is a good thing. Technology will allow each individual to be even more like she already wanted to be. Culture is an individual issue. If an individual desires to be cultured, literate, thoughtful, she can now be all those things without having to take part in the herculean efforts that being such things once required:

Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don Giovanni in one long, expensive sitting, on the Web we pick the moods we want from disparate sources and assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes, and some images — perhaps our own digital photos — capturing the sublime beauty of the Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks very impressive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is a rich and varied inner experience. The new wonders we create are simply harder for outsiders to see than, say, the fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.

What is the difference, really, between a Japanese slasher movie, a joke on YouTube, Mozart, and some random images? When I put them all together and pronounce this bizarre amalgam “me” and “mine,” who will say otherwise? There is no difference between that and this, or this and that. The important thing is that I can now master culture. I can use culture to make myself feel certain ways, and to create my own interior experiences. Instead of taking part in a culture that holds up the mirror to society, itself, and ourselves, we can own a culture that is the mirror image of ourselves, a mishmash of our own creation. The market-place logic of “to each his own” and “the customer is always right” is taken to its logical conclusion. And the old culture that once lorded over me is now my servant, and yours too. Culture now is just another word for individuality, taste or lifestyle.

It is interesting to think about who Cowen means by “we” and who he means by “outsiders.” “We” seems to imply a community and a collective or shared experience, but if culture now constitutes little more than the production of an inner experience, it is hard to imagine anything shared about it. Each individual has her own culture and her own cultural creations that are idiosyncratic and hers alone. “We,” then, well how can there be a “we” at all if this is what culture amounts to? There are only individual creators of culture. It seems like Cowen really means that the “we” posited by the old culture is replaced by “I” and “you.” You can only glimpse my inner experience, and I yours. We are everybody, and we are all outsiders.

Cowen views culture as a data management and storage problem. It is a series of transactions between individuals and that class of “information” that can be broadly defined as cultural. With the rapid depreciation in the value of information over the last two decades, we now have far more information than we know what to do with. and, since some of this vast store of information is cultural information, it follows, logically and unavoidably, that we are now rich in culture as well:

The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing you can do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it. Viewed in this light, today’s young people are very culturally literate indeed — in fact, they are very often cultural leaders and creators.

If cultural literacy is not about possessing information so much as knowing where to get information, can the same be said for ordinary literacy? Can we say that reading is not so much about learning new information, but knowing where to learn new information?

It seems that the fetishization of information is behind much of Cowen’s thought. If we have learned anything in the last two decades it is that information wants to be free. Why should cultural information be any different? Like other forms of information, it wants to be free, and the freer it is the better. If we accept this premise, then the new brevity and the rapid advances in data storage cannot help be a good thing.

By treating culture as just another form of information, we can suddenly muster objective statistical proof that we are more cultured than anybody has ever been. Culture begins to seem like a quantitative thing. If I have more music on my iPod, I am more cultured than you. The same is true if my computer has a faster processor. Without having done anything in particular, without reading books, studying art or music, or learning new languages, we can, simply by using certain widely available devices, become the most culturally literate people in human history.

The possibility that there might be a difference between viewing a Rubens on the 2- by 3-inch iPhone screen and seeing it in person or in a book is not even worth mentioning. We have more culture in our pockets than E. D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom or Matthew Arnold ever imagined. And we can do something that they could not. When we turn on our iPhone to take part in culture and find that we do not like what we see, we can refashion and remix that cultural product into something that we do like. If that fails, we can simply power down the device and return culture to our pockets.

The New Escape

I have not attempted to define culture because I do not know what it is, or what Cowen means when he uses the term. Culture has always been one of those terrible words that seem to float somewhere between the descriptive and the normative. It suffers in the hands of the intelligentsia and the “cultured” in much the same way that “efficiency” and “rationality” suffer in the hands of the neoclassical economist. As long as there are humans there will be culture. At the same time, we talk about culture as though it stands outside of the world of drudgery and daily coercion, representing the possible. We get lost between those two ideas of culture and the word ceases to mean the same thing to any two people.

So, I can hardly use the word in conversation without blushing or covering it up as a bad joke. But at some point, a long time ago, I bought into the ideology of culture. In spite of myself, I believe that the enjoyment of art, literature, music, what have you, is a different thing than consuming breakfast cereal. I also believe that culture has some sort of potential to change human life and make it better.

But I also believe that I am wrong. Culture, which seems to present the solution for the evils of capitalist consumer society — inequality, oppression and unquenchable consumer lusts — seems increasingly to be nothing more than an alibi for those evils and a means of escaping from them. In exchange for disaster, murder, and alienation we get beautiful images, profound thoughts, and sweet music. If we have killed millions, it has been to defend or promote a certain way of life, a certain culture. And so culture exists, expanding and contracting alongside militaristic disaster capitalism. The housing bubble was accompanied by a museum endowment bubble. And when the bubble burst, museums began to sell off their collections to make rent. To point out the relationship between culture and atrocity is to invite the contempt and pity of the cultured class: “it was always thus.”

So it may be that we go to culture not to find our true selves, but to flee from them. If that is so, what makes the new technologies special is that they offer the chance of permanent flight. Escape no longer requires a costly and time-consuming trip to the museum or concert hall. Everybody can now carry a portable technological hole into which we can dive whenever we wish we were somewhere else.

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