The Great Seduction

On (in)authenticity

I pride myself on my own inauthenticity. All my role models -- Machiavelli, Hitchcock, Dylan, Bunuel -- are artists of the inauthentic, of inventing one's inner life, of not being quite who we appear to be. Unfortunately, however, it's not a great time to be a peddler of the inauthentic. Indeed, while Wikipedia has a long entry on authenticity, there is no entry at all on "inauthenticity".

That's because, in the murketing age, personal authenticity sells. As I argued in my post on Arianna, what elevates the individual Huffington brand is its mastery of appearing authentic. Like Blair, Obama and Oprah, the spiritual Arianna has mastered the priceless ability to appear as if she has an inner core -- otherwise known as a "soul". To be a really viable politician or business executive, you need to demonstrate that you possess this inner core, an essential identity. That's why so many of our commercial and political elites embrace religion. It's increasingly hard to be a successful leader these days without being able to demonstrate that you have a soul.

This message is repeated by the FT's Stefan Stern today in a piece entitled "A Brand New Me." Stern writes about the new industry of "personal brand management" and goes for his own brand evaluation to personal-brand consultant Louise Mowbray. According to Stern, Mowbray, who runs a London based consultancy called "Mowbray by Design", is a popular lady:

Her services are in demand from bankers, lawyers and other business people, all pondering ways to improve how they are perceived at work she says: “How can you make yourself compelling to your target audience? Can you establish a personal brand that is well-known, consistent and authentic?”

Yes, authenticity sells. Here is Mowbray's take on personal-brand building:

The premise of building, developing and managing our brands in authenticity. There is no point in attempting to be something that we are not. It will not sit well and it certainly won't be believable.

So the professional service Mowbray offers is helping us discover who we are so that we can wrap our personal brands around this identity. What was once accomplished at the confessional or on the psycho-analysts' couch is now taking place in the offices of the personal-brand consultant. I wonder how this priestess of the digital age would go about curing me of my own affection for the inauthentic.

English character

Justin Webb, the BBC's North American editor, responded to my End of Pessimism post. Here's why Webb has faith in America:

We are not "pro-American" in the sense of being cheerleaders for a nation and its people (at least Matt Frei and I are not) but nor are we blind to the simple incontrovertible fact that America is a stunningly successful place whose ability to prosper in almost every year since its inception must surely have some link to the energy and vitality of the people who come here and make it work and the system (brutal sometimes) that allows them to achieve their potential.

Perhaps one reason that English emigres like Webb and myself appreciate the United States is because the country's seriousness (which critics misinterpret as humorlessness) creates character. Americans are generally much morally hardier than Englishmen -- which explains why, in Webb's language, they are better at realizing "their potential". Americans take themselves, their country, their history and their future more seriously than English people. It's the Puritan legacy, of course, a moral calling that is cavalierly satirized by the disrespectful English. Americans are much more successful at controlling their worst impulses -- which means that, in contrast with England, there are far fewer displays of public debauchery, violence and other manifestations of anti-social activity. Defying national stereotypes, Americans are much more polite and respectful to one another than the English. And that makes life in America both more civil and exciting than it is in England.

The English journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in this morning's FT, pursues a similar theme in a op-ed entitled "Hypocrisy, booze and the British: 80p a shot":

Nations cultivate images of themselves that they successfully foist on others but that are sometimes the exact opposite of the case. Nothing is more amusing than the contrast between the supposedly laid-back, easy-going Americans and the uptight, hidebound English. Maybe a new book is needed, an answer to Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, a catalogue of unrecognised truths. One might begin, for example, with this: the Americans have better manners than the English, but they are much more snobbish.

And more restrained. When told that my countrymen are essentially reserved or even repressed, it is tempting to ask: Have you ever seen the London tabloids? For that matter, have you ever seen British boys and girls on a Saturday night spree? Not so much in desolate inner cities or ethnic ghettos as in the most genteel cathedral cities and county towns, they can be quite a sight; drunken 18-year-olds shrieking and vomiting as they stagger out of pubs and clubs.

The question of an Englishman's character is also richly addressed by Richard Reeves in this month's Prospect. Reeves, the biographer of John Stuart Mill and the director of the Demos think tank, makes the connection between the corrosion of English character and the decline of the country's civic life. Reminding us that "good societies need people", Reeves argues for a re-emphasis on the value of character development and suggests that we can learn from 18th century moral theorists like Mill and Adam Smith.

So where did all that English character go? It went west, of course, sailing toward that little city on the hill. I wonder if England ever really recovered from Puritan hejira of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Certainly this great migration left England a much less morally serious place with less faith in the ideal of character. To learn about their past, English people should come to America. It might be a character-forming experience.

Arianna Huffington: The non liquid version of Red Bull

My feature on Arianna Huffington is published today in Prospect -- a 3,500 word jaunt around Ariannaland which hopefully bring a little topographical clarity to this genius.

It's not just me who thinks that Arianna is a genius. A few months ago, I was chatting with Eric Alterman, the normally hard-headed media critic of the Nation magazine and an occasional contributor to the Huffington Post. When our conversation turned to Huffington, he grew unusually pensive. "A genius," he said, quietly. "Arianna is a genius." What he meant is that she can't be measured by the conventional metrics with which we rate normal intelligence. She's not just smart or intellectual or perceptive. Her genius extends beyond all that.

So what, exactly, is Arianna's genius?

She is what all of us -- at least those of us who make our livings writing books and blogs, appearing on the radio and tv and speaking around the world at conferences -- aspire to be. She's turned herself into a brand.

That's the obvious bit. To understand Brand Arianna,  I turned to Rob Walker's brilliant new book about brand building in the digital age: Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are." Walker, who writes the  "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine, acknowledges that the traditional rules of branding -- of running huge tv advertising campaigns around glossy products -- is no longer the most effective way to create successful products. Instead, success contemporary brands, are created by what Walker calls "murketing" (ie: murky marketing). Overt, self-promotion from above is out; undercover, dialogue-rich products, branding-from-the-underground is the new fashion. Murketing, then, is marketing 2.0 -- it's making products seem authentic by radically inauthentic means. This is the post-modern version of marketing in which we all are fully conscious of the new rules of the game -- and yet continue to play as if all the old rules still apply.

The one thing missing from Buying In is a section on successful individual brands like Arianna, Oprah or Obama. But Walker gives us enough material to write our own chapter (let's call it "reader-generated-content") on what it takes to become a successful brand in the post-ideological murketing age. One of his case-studies is the Red Bull energy drink, another is Toyota's Scion motorcar. Both Red Bull and Scion have been meticulously engineered by their marketing teams to enrich the dialogue between the consumer and the consumed. They are textbook examples of inauthentically authentic products.

That's the secret of the Arianna Brand, of course. This Hollywood socialite and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post is the most brilliantly inauthentic example of authenticity. She's manufactured Walker's concept of murketing into a personal brand. She is the non liquid version of Red Bull.

So what's my role in this as a consumer of Arianna? What Walker tells us is none of us, however clever we might think we are, we can never escape from the complex interaction between what we buy and who we are. I'm part of this secret dialogue then. I've bought into Arianna's genius (and so have you).

The end of pessimism

Is everyone ready to cheer up now?

Obama is going to be the next President, we are a couple of years away from mass produced electric cars, the economy will rebound, the war in Iraq and against terrorism is being won (see Edward Luttwark's provocative piece in Prospect on this) and, as Frank Rich so brilliantly argued yesterday, Bush-Cheney have become history before they are history. The news is pretty good. It's time to start smiling again.

So enough already with all the bad news about America. I came to this country in 1983 from dark, dismal England to be cheered up. I don't want to read kvetchers like Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Wolf or Morris Berman comparing America with Nazi Germany and Ancient Rome. I don't want to hear about imperial decline or the End of America. Its boring. And fundamentally wrong.

It's curious that the most obstinate defenders of America are English. Three of the most positive books about America that will published this year -- Matt Frei's Only In America, Bronwen Maddox's In Defence of America  and Justin Webb's Have a Nice Day... Behind the Cliches: Giving America Another Chance -- are all by English journalists living in America. Perhaps it's because, having had the misfortune of growing up in dark, dismal England, we can fully appreciate the remarkable optimism and vitality of the United States.

Back in 1983, when I arrived as a graduate student in America, there was a similar pessimism about the country. America, the kvetchers predicted, was about to be eclipsed by Japan, the economy no longer was innovative, the Post Watergate  political system didn't work, blah blah blah. The end-of-America pessimists were wrong then and they are wrong now. Today, the smart money is going into American business, American real-estate and the American dollar. Now is the time to invest in America. By next year, everyone will be doing it.

Is the Internet killing the American reader?

The big debate in America this summer isn't Obama versus McCain, free trade versus protectionism or the Boston Red Sox versus New York Yankees. It's the digital literacy debate -- the debate about whether or not the Internet is killing reading.

This brouhaha began with the cover story of the current issue of Atlantic magazine. In an article entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid" the Internet's most erudite and articulate critic, the New England based writer Nicholas Carr, argued that the Internet has been "tinkering" with our brains. It's a scientific rather than moral argument. The Internet, Carr explains, is eroding our ability to intellectually concentrate and contemplate -- the key mental requisites that enable us to effectively consume and digest books. Instead of readers, the digital revolution is transforming us all into skimmers -- highly agile at mentally jumping from hypertext to hypertext link, but increasingly unable to digest long or complex textual information, particularly in book form. Quoting Maryanne Wolf, the Tufts University developmental psychologist, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain",  Carr reminds us that we are not only "what we read" about also "how we read". Thus, he says, today's online skimming generation is more and more illiterate -- unable to think in anything beyond the intellectually infantilizing currency of instant-messaging, emails and short blog posts.

Carr's article caused a viral eruption of intense debate in America, both and on and off the Internet. Two other popular books released this summer also support Carr's thesis --  Emory University Professor of English, Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future" and Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson's "Distracted: The Explosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age". Unlike Carr, both Bauerlein and Jackson's argument is ethical rather than scientific. They both fear the end of Western Civilization in the digital revolution's destruction of reading culture. Jackson even suggests that we need to historically posit our current predicament in AD 410, that notorious lights-out year when the Goths sacked Rome thus destroying classical civilization and inaugerating a thousand year Dark Age in western civilization.

Not surprisingly, the pro digital camp dragged out its heavy hitters to pull apart Carr's apocalyptic argument. In "The Reality Club", a discussion group on the scientific website Edge, a online group of leading digital thinkers such as Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and popular novelist Douglas Rushkoff all critiqued Carr's article. The incorrigible Kelly even had a chutzpah to publish a counter essay on his blog entitled "Will We Let Google Make Us Smarter". Meanwhile, the Encylopedia Britannica website also ran a debate on its website featuring New York University digital media idealist Clay Shirky  who argued in "Why Abundance is Good" that the growing irrelevance of a text like Tolstoy's War and Peace had more to do with the fact that it was "long and uninteresting" than because of the Internet.

And now America's most venerable newspaper, the old lady herself, the New York Times, has entered the fray. In this Sunday's Times, book publishing beat writer Motoko Rich wrote a 3,500 front page piece entitled  "Literary Debate: Online, R U Really Reading," which, in meticulous detail, laid out the complex battle lines of the great debate. Amazingly, Rich's piece is just the first in a series of articles about the impact of technology on reading that The Times intends to run over the next few months. This debate, then, is only just beginning. My guess is that its narrative will soon grow longer and more twisted than War and Peace.

So who, so far, is winning the great digital literacy debate? Ironically, it's the supposedly endangered species, the American reader, who is the real victor. Carr's remarkably provocative piece has unleashed a wealth of compelling writing, both on and offline, from all of America's most articulate Internet luminaries. The jury may still be out on whether the Internet is killing the poor defenseless American reader, but I'm pretty confident that, over the next year or two, we are going to see a explosion of new books about the impact of the digital revolution on reading by popular American authors like Carr, Kelly and Shirky. And some of these books, I suspect, will even be published in digital form on the Internet.

Always On?

1. New on this week's WSJ's best selling business book list is AlwaysOn: Advertising, Marketing and Media in an Era of Consumer Control by a media consultant at Booz Allen called Christopher Vollmer. It's ahead of such blockbuster hits as Tim Ferris' Four Hour Work Week (#7), Jim Collins' Good to Great (#4) and, of course, Levitt & Dubner's Freakomonics (#15)

Huh?

On Amazon, Vollmer's Always On, which was published by in paperback by McGraw-Hill on 25 March this year, is ranked 33,055 overall on Amazon and #94 in the e-commerce category. Which is about as obscure as it gets. I'd never heard of the book before seeing its name on the list. This is the Always-On's blurb on Amazon:

We stand at the beginning of a consumer-centric age-an era with potentially enormous returns for leaders in marketing, advertising and media-if they get their approach right. The new media environment is “always on,” digitally accessible to audiences from anywhere at any time, and responsive to their control. As consumers get used to this, the world of marketing is shifting to one of constant experimentation, fine-grained insight through new metrics, and continual innovation of the visible advertising message, as well as the changing business infrastructure beneath it.

Yeah, Always-On sounds like a second-rate version of Wikinomics, which is itself a second rate version of The Long Tail, a book which pinched the ideas of Tony Perkins, Silicon Valley founder of Red Herring magazine and the current governor of the Always-On network.

From Always-On to Always On: can anyone hold onto a half decent idea these days and make it their own?

But I'm still intrigued -- and not a little jealous -- that an unknown book which has been on the market nearly six months should suddenly enter the WSJ business book chart at #3. Anyone out there who can help solve this Always On mystery? Seems almost too good to be true. Did Vollmer's friends & family order every copy on the market last week? Or has all of middle America simultaneously woken up to the consumer-centric nature our age and begun to flex its collective muscle?

First five half-convincing answers gets a signed paperback version of my Cult (not in the bookstores till 12  August -- but I've got some early copies for keen literary sleuths).

Obama: Wall-E or The Dark Knight?

Radical optimism, David Brooks tells us in today's Times, is American's contribution to the world. But he's not happy with Obama's current version of American optimism which, the Republican argues, is "saccharine" and lacking almost any attention at all to concrete policy. Brooks' critique was based on Obama's speech in Berlin yesterday:

Much of the rest of the speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems if only people mystically come together. We should help Israelis and Palestinians unite. We should unite to prevent genocide in Darfur. We should unite so the Iranians won’t develop nukes. Or as Obama put it: “The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Brooks is, of course, right to argue that the next American President was guilty yesterday of "playing innocent abroad". While Obama used the word "wall" 16 times in yesterday's Berlin speech, the one word he conveniently forgot to use was Wall-E -- the romantic robot hero of Pixar/Disney's feel-good, left-wing hit about environmental catastrophe in a mindlessly consumer society of the future. And, yes, Brooks is right -- it was a saccarine Berlin Wall-E speech, Disney comes to Europe, all yes we can good and no evil, "the end of history on acid". But what really annoys Brooks is not so much the content of Obama's Berlin Wall-E speech, but it's success. He understands that Wall-E's optimism-for-idiots sells, both here and abroad:

Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

Exactly. And -- as Brooks knows all-too-well -- Disney wins elections.

The trouble with the Republicans is that they want it both ways. While David Brooks was kvetching in today's Times about the Disney values of Obama's Berlin Wall-E speech, another pissed-off conservative, the mystery writer Andrew Klavan,was complaining in today's Journal about Hollywood's unwillingness to unambiguously represent conservative values in its movies. Klavan is irritated that the only summer Hollywood movie to rival Wall-E, Warner Bros Batman remake The Dark Knight, is actually a not-too-hidden metaphor for the struggle between good George W. Bush and evil Al-Qaeda. What upset Klavan is that conservative movies aren't allowed to explicitely reveal their ideology. So, as he argues in "What Bush and Batman Have in Common":

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

What Klavan and Brooks have in common is a dark pessismism about the future. They both know conservatism is so radically out of fashion that they are in danger of becoming irrelevant in America today. Thus their critique of Hollywood and Disney. It's a Wall-E world now. Obama is America's newly crowned Dark Knight. He's so radically optimistic that even Berliners love him. 

Buy real estate not newspapers

I was thinking of buying a newspaper this morning, but decided against the investment because it didn't make economic sense. So I bought a new house instead. A joke? Not according to Newsosaur Alan Mutter who argues that short selling is now hotter in the newspaper business than in the mortage sector:

Investor bets against Lee Enterprises and McClatchy were more than twice as big last month as those against the shares of Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage giants whose perceived instability jolted the financial markets.

Mutter wrote this last week, before yesterday's dreadful economic news from the New York Times. It was bad enough that company profits were down to $21.1 million for Q2 of this year, compared to profits of $118.4 for Q2 2007 -- particularly given the significant jobs cuts at the company over the last year. Worse still, however, the Times announced a rise in the newsstand price of the paper of 25 cents to $1.50

So, my decision to buy real estate rather than a newspaper wasn't a joke. This morning, I had my $1.25 all ready to hand over to the nice lady in Berkeley newsstand that I usually buy my morning papers. But, on my way to the store, I walked past a lovely house for sale that I can buy for $1.25 million (it's come down in price from $1.5 million). For a poorly paid amateur blogger like me, $1.25 million represents a lot of quarters, so I figured that I need to make some economies elsewhere. And what better place to begin than newspapers. After all, I can get the Times online for free. So why pay real money for it -- money that I can invest in more substantial brick and mortar?   

Two industries in crisis with opposite pricing mechanisms. Why, I wonder, is real estate dramatically dropping in price while the Times is significantly putting up its newsstand price? Krugman owes us a column on this. Does this make economics more or less of an (ir)rational science? Or might we conclude that the suits at The Times have gone insane and, in order to save themselves, they are committing a very public suicide?

Pay Attention: Here Comes the Dark Age

The dark age is all the rage at the moment. First Mr Enlightenment himself, Clay Shirky, cheerfully waves adieu to it in a typically absurd Whiggish reading of history. Then the deeply anxious Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson argues, in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age that we are on the brink of a new dark age in world history.

Jackson's Distracted is a longer, more academic version of Nick Carr's brilliant "Stoopid" article in the Atlantic and of recent books by Mark Bauerlein, Susan Jacoby and Lee Siegel. The digital age of multi-tasking is eroding our ability to intellectually focus on anything of substance, Jackson suggests. Thus, she argues, Americans of the wired generation are no longer able to synthesize information properly:

They often lack the critical thinking skills that are the bedrock of an informed citizenry and the foundation of scientific and other advancements.

This inability to pay attention is making us medieval, Jackson worries. It's 410 again in her calendar -- the year those unwashed Visigoths, led by Alaric I, took Rome and finally ended the classical age. Referring to Thomas Cahill's idea of a "hinge of history", Jackson thinks we are on the brink of a civilization break-down:

"When a civilization wearies, notes Cahill, a confidence based on order and balance is lost, and without such anchors, people begin to return to an era of shadows and fear. Godlike amid our five hundred television channels and three hundred choices of cereal, are we failing to note the creeping arrival of a time of impermanence and uncertainty. Mesmerized by streams of media-borne candy and numbed by our faith in technology to cure all ills, are we blind to the realization that our society's progress, in important ways, is a shimmering mirage? Consumed by the vast time and energy simply required to survive the ever-increasing complexity of our systems of living, are we missing the slow extinction of our capacity to think and feel and bond deeply? We just might be too busy, wired, split-focused and distracted to notice a return to an era of shadows and fear."

While I'm certainly much more sympathetic to the erudite Jackson than to the cheerfully ignorant Shirky, I am also a bit uncomfortable with using the Middle Ages as a convenient whipping boy for all the sins of our contemporary digital age. Is Jackson saying that the Goths couldn't "think", "feel" or "bond deeply"?  I suspect that the reverse was true. The Goths actually felt more passionately and bonded deeper than the Romans -- thus their military success in 410.

Jackson says that "an epidemic erosion of attention is a sure sign of an impending dark age." But I wonder what happened to attention in the Middle Ages -- that supposed period of darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. In an "era of shadows and fear" how, exactly, are we distracted? By the mythical idea of God? By the great seduction of an afterlife? By an alternative version of reality which defines our identity and moral conduct?

Anyway, if we are to believe Jackson, Second Life was really founded in 410, when Alaric I and his army of Visigoths sacked Rome for the first time in 800 years, thereby switching off the lights in Western Civilization for a millennium. 

History-according-to-Clay

My old sparring partner Clay Shirky is at it again. Responding on the Britannica website to Nick Carr's Atlantic piece about the decline of reading, he tells us that War and Peace and À La Recherche du Temps Perdu aren't significant accomplishments because they are too long and dense. This is a straw man argument, of course, easily made against old-fashioned literary types who fetishize obese, inaccessible books written by over-educated Frenchmen or Russians. I wish Clay had added Joyce's Ulysses to this list -- a real fatty of an inaccessible book which, I think, epitomizes the irrelevance of supposedly "great" modern literature for the vast majority of contemporary readers.

So I'm certainly not going to publicly spank Clay for pissing on Tolstoy or Proust (my own not-so-secret fetish). But there is a more interesting critique of his analysis which gets to the fundamental problem with his argument. Clay is a historical determinist -- as romantically involved with progressive narrative as any 19th century author of long novels with happy endings. He "reads" history in huge optimistic gulps -- just like a middle-brow romantic scarfs down a Tolstoy story. Clay believes that history gets better as it gets newer. That's because he is all-too-confident that technology is inevitably making the world a better place. As I argued in my Prospect magazine review of his latest book, History-according-to-Clay is a forward moving locomotive, inevitably driving us toward more freedom, happiness and prosperity. Clay is a compulsive page-turner. Like so many other techno-romantics dizzy with the Whig version of history, he wants to get to the end-of-history so we can realize ourselves through our liberating new electronic networks and toys. Thus his reading of the 15th century invention of the printing press is cartoonishly progressive:

The printing press sacrificed the monolithic, historic, and elite culture of Europe by promoting a diverse, contemporary, and vulgar one. That upstart literature has become the new high culture, and the challenge today comes, yet again, from the broadening of participation in both consumption and production of media.

I'm no Medievalist, but I would wager my beloved first edition copy of Ulysses that Shirky is wrong here. The idea of the Middle Ages as "monolithic", "historic" (whatever that means) and even "elite" is the Disney version of history. One could equally well argue that pre-printing press Europe was more carnivalesque, participatory, egalitarian and irreligious. Certainly the idea that Medieval Europe was somehow less progressive or inclusive or democratic than the bureaucratized, highly religious, militaristic contemporary West is a childish delusion. Read Chaucer, read Foucault, read Weber & Nietzsche, read Marc Bloch, read John Gray, or just read conventional narrative histories of the two ages in parallel.

If, as Clay says, I'm a "know-nothing" about technology, then what sort of historian is he? The only thing worse than a know-nothing is a know-everything. Clay, I'm afraid, is a know-everything about history. That's because he obviously hasn't really read any. The only cure for this is the consumption of history books -- fat history books, thousands of pages, millions of words. History books for breakfast, history books for lunch, history books for dinner.

Clay: Are you ready to know less than you already know?