Tim Burton's Big Eyes makes a strong case that Walter Keane was a first-order marketing genius and his wife Margaret, whose paintings he appropriated and promoted as if they were his own, used his marketing talents up until the moment she could safely dispense with them. Given that Margaret Keane apparently cooperated with the making of Big Eyes (she painted Burton's then wife Lisa Marie in 2000, and I think she appears at the end of the film alongside Amy Adams, who plays her), this seems sort of surprising. On the surface, the movie tells the story of her artistic reputation being rightly restored, but that surface is easily punctured with a moment's consideration of the various counternarratives woven into the script. Then we are dealing with a film about a visionary who turned his wife's hackneyed outsider art into one… Read More...

Taking selfies is routinely derided as narcissistic, a procedure of solipsistic self-regard in which one obsesses over one’s own image. But selfies are not solipsistic; they are only selfies if they circulate. The term selfie not only labels an image’s content (though this usage is slipping, as when TD Bank invites me to “take a check selfie” to deposit it), but it also describes a distribution process. Selfie is shorthand not just for pictures you take of yourself but instead for one’s “self in social media” – one’s self commoditized to suit the logistics of networks. As art critic Brian Droitcour writes: Producing a reflection of your image in Instagram always involves an awareness of the presence of others, the knowledge that your selfie is flaking and refracting in their phones. Labeling this reflection #selfie tacitly recognizes the horizontal proliferation of reflections,… Read More...

1. Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it's the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. "Being yourself" is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing "self-expression" and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means… Read More...

Nicholas Carr's forthcoming The Glass Cage, about the ethical dangers of automation, inspired me to read George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which contains a lengthy tirade against the notion of progress as efficiency and convenience. Orwell declares that "the tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and soft." It assumes that a human being is "a kind of walking stomach" that is interested only in passive pleasure rather than work: "whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working — that is, of living." Convenience is social control, and work, for Orwell at least, is the struggle to experience a singular life. But the human addiction to machine-driven innovation and automation, he predicts, fueled apparently by a fiendish inertia that demands progress for progress's sake, will inevitably lead to total… Read More...

Frédéric Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital helps clarify how two of the fantasies that feed neoliberal ideology — liquidity and authenticity — interrelate. The two concepts represent two opposing faces of the same hyperindividualism around which neoliberalism is organized. (Liquidity: I want to do whatever whenever; authenticity: who I am is inviolate and is all that really matters.) As we become the atomized, entrepreneurially fixated personal-enterprise selves that neoliberalism prompts us to be, we are supposed to be so flexible as to be molded into suiting whatever profitable opportunity comes along, yet we are also expected to be entirely invested in our activity and derive pleasure from the presumed autonomy we have in "choosing" to be molded or to mold ourselves. Under neoliberalism, workers must be authentically liquid; their "real selves" must also be infinitely malleable. Lordon defines "liquidity" in much the way I… Read More...

There has already been a lot written about the Facebook mood-manipulation study (here are three I found particularly useful; Tarleton Gillespie has a more extensive link collection here), and hopefully the outrage sparked by it will mark a turning point in users' attitudes toward social-media platforms. People are angry about lots of different aspects of this study, but the main thing seems to be that Facebook distorts what users see for its own ends, as if users can't be trusted to have their own emotional responses to what their putative friends post. That Facebook seemed to have been caught by surprise by the anger some have expressed — that people were not pleased to discover that their social lives are being treated as a petri dish by Facebook so that it can make its product more profitable — shows how… Read More...

(These are my opening remarks from Rhizome's Internet Subjects #1 panel yesterday at the New Museum.) The sharing economy’s rise is a reflection of capitalism’s need to find new profit opportunities in aspects of social life once shielded from the market, in leisure time once withdrawn from waged labor, in spaces and affective resources once withheld from becoming a kind of capital. What sharing companies and apps chiefly do is invite us to turn more of our lives into capital and more of our time into casual labor, thereby extending capitalism’s reach and further entrenching the market as the most appropriate, efficient, and beneficial way to mediate interaction between individuals. For the sharing economy, market relations are the only social relations. Though the sharing economy appropriates a language of progressive change and collectivity (e.g., “collaborative consumption”) to proselytize for their… Read More...

I am going to be on a panel at the New Museum on Thursday, June 19 about the "sharing" economy, and why that name is highly misleading. Here's the flier for it:   Here are some points about the sharing economy that I listed this afternoon on Twitter: And below is a book review of "sharing" economy "bible" What's Mine Is Yours that I wrote in October 2010. Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community. — Karl Marx, Grundrisse Like capitalism, consumerism has proven adept at assimilating critiques and adapting to them. In so doing, it cuts away the ground underneath the complainers who don’t appreciate its dynamism. When complaints arose that mass markets forced a stultifying conformity on consumers, the market responded with brand campaigns organized around an ethos of individualism, offering superficial options for customization… Read More...

The Economist's website has an article about Record Store Day, a marketing stunt during which a bunch of vinyl-only releases and reissues are choreographed in hopes of driving music buyers to support some brick-and-mortar businesses. Every label wants to piggy-back on the hype of every other release, leading to an overwhelming hodge-podge of material record stores are supposed to carry to be full participants in the event. This creates problems for the stores that the event is supposed to help, saddling them with stock whose appeal to non-hardcore record collectors may already be questionable. I have never understood the point of Record Store Day, in part because I have not traditionally been sentimental about record stores. I tend to associate them with judgmental clerks and aggressive taste peacocking and stereos playing the most confrontational music the workers could get away… Read More...

With social media, the compelling opportunities for self-expression outstrip the supply of things we have to confidently say about ourselves. The demand for self-expression overwhelms what we might dredge up from “inside.” So the “self” being expressed has to be posited elsewhere: We start to borrow from the network, from imagined future selves, from the media in which we can now constitute ourselves. This doesn’t guarantee “personal growth” however. The more we express ourselves for self-definition, the more we limit the self to what we have the means to circulate. The sort of self we can imagine ourselves to be becomes contingent on the available media. Social media offer a wealth of new resources (images, links, likes, screen grabs, image macros, serial selfies, emoji, etc.) to continue to bait us into “becoming ourselves.” These seem to let us express the… Read More...

I'm participating in a seminar at the ACLA conference in New York this weekend, called "Culture and Real Subsumption." Here are some hastily typed thoughts inspired thus far by it. I am always hazy on what constitutes real subsumption as opposed to formal subsumption (I tried to wrangle with it a little bit here; the terms stem from Marx's "Results of the Immediate Production Process"); as I understand it, formal subsumption is when pre- or noncapitalist production processes are modified to accommodate the divide between capital and labor, whereas real subsumption is when the production process depends on capital from the get-go and is inconceivable without it, without its scale, its sort of factory organization and division of labor and staging of expropriated cooperation between workers and so on. I've been interested in this terminology as a way to talk about… Read More...

It's not so strange to compare avant-garde artists to social media users. They both produce a lot of content that few people bother to look at. And some commentators might be inclined to regard early adopters of social-media apps as avant-garde consumers, seizing on new possibilities for gratification, evasion, and status distinction. (Be like André Breton and install Secret on your iPhone 5S!) In The Weak Universalism Boris Groys offers a  somewhat counterintuitive definition of "avant garde" — one that is the opposite of "making it new." Since novelty is the status quo of consumer culture, the avant-garde seeks to advance from that, Groys claims; they must challenge and change the disposition of perpetual change. This is a bit self-defeating. Groys argues that avant-garde artists, to evade this, aspire to make work that is "weak," in the sense of not being contingent,… Read More...

I bought poet Elisa Gabbert's most recent book The Self Unstable because I like her Twitter feed. I mention this not because I want to espouse the efficiency of social media as marketing, but because Twitter is one of the primary forces making my experience of the self, at least, unstable. It also shaped the way I read the book at first, as a series of Tweets only incidentally composed into half-page paragraphs. These lines are like tweets I would like to favorite: "If you find anything other than food or sex interesting, it's signaling." "To have enemies is a coming of age." "Regret is a kind of certainty." "In the moment, we value stability, but we prefer our painful memories." "Schadenfreude complicates utilitarianism." I am conditioned by Twitter to read this book in what is certainly the wrong way, assuming… Read More...

The Jogging is an art Tumblr that used to predominantly feature clean, punny images like this: But a few months ago, it began to be flooded with content along these lines: And this: At first I took these as an ironic homage to and appropriation of the naive and clumsy design aesthetic and shock tactics of conspiracy-theory propaganda. It seemed too easy a target, in a way, too obvious to conflate Geocities/MSPaint/chain-email-style bad design with offensively racist right-wing paranoia motifs and make fun of them both. It didn't feel deadpan enough; the irony wasn't unstable enough. There was no mistaking the mockery, so it just felt smug to laugh at them. It seemed too obvious what buttons were being pushed. But a chapter on conspiracy theory in media scholar Mark Andrejevic's recent book Infoglut changed my hermeneutic for these images.… Read More...