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"On the one hand, Wojcicki highlighted her desire to empower consumer-patients by circumventing the medical establishment and making data available; on the other, she insisted on the role of 23andMe as a research platform, arguing that its unique dataset rendered it invaluable as a partner and model for further research.
There's a potential tension here, one increasingly central to the modern biomedical establishment and, more generally, to the longer history of the interaction between patients (or subjects), science (or medicine), and capitalism. Who owns what? What's the impact of information asymmetries? Who is this research (or data) for?"
"This post is a sequel of sorts to The Gollum Effect. You can read it stand-alone, but you will probably get more out of it if you read that first. Within the Lord of the Rings metaphor I developed in that post, “baroque unconscious” is basically my answer to the question, if extreme consumers are Gollums, who is Sauron?
This idea of a baroque unconscious helps clarify things about the phenomenon of technological refinement that have been bothering me for a while. In particular, it helps distinguish among three kinds of refinement in technological artifacts: refinement that is useful to the user, refinement (often exploitative) that is useful to somebody besides the user, and refinement that benefits nobody at all."
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When I first started thinking about refinement, in the context of addictive consumption (as in, refined cocaine), I had examples such as American fast food in mind: precisely engineered concoctions of key refined substances (salt, sugar and fat) designed to cause addictive over-consumption.
The pathologies of consumerism can be traced to an entire universe of such refined goods. I offered the term gollumized to describe humans who end up being entirely defined by a pattern of such consumptive behavior, much like the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, with his addictive, enslaving attachment to the One Ring: a highly refined, pure essence.
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So interchangeability creates a social network of (say) machine guns. There are functional linkages within complex artifacts that make them useful, and substitution and reuse linkages between them that make them reliable (redundancy inside an artifact is merely a semantic distinction: think of it as carrying interchangeable spare parts inside the boundary of the artifact, with the capacity to automatically switch out broken parts). Interchangeability and standardization make every machine gun less unique, and more a part of a sort of hive-machine-gun beast.
Dramatic as this effect is, it pales in comparison to the effect of commonalities across the needs of different types of complex systems. This connects all complex artifacts into a giant social network. The One Machine.
A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies.
This creates a refinement surplus. Industrial technology, unlike craft work, runs a continuous refinement surplus. The surplus was initially triggered by the need for interchangeability to solve the reliability problem, but that turned out to be a case of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.
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"The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect. It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption."
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Our food choices are only a subset of our overall mode of consumption, which I call combinatorial consumption. Combinatorial consumption reduces the universe of human potential to a deeply-impoverished ghost of itself; a potentially infinite range of creative consumption behaviors reduced to paint-by-numbers consumption. Our lives are about choosing within the confines of a giant macro version of the Starbucks drink-construction decision tree. The dizzying, but finite variety on offer, helps distract us from the general impoverishment of what’s on the decision tree, with respect to the unbridled bounty of nature that is not on it.
We live in a cartoon universe where Claritas PRIZM psychographics categories have morphed from partial description of a population of human beings to a nearly-complete, Procrustean prescription for the construction of a universe of Gollums.
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On one side of the line separating those fighting for their souls and those who have lost it, you have the deadly game of existential chess played by the protagonists of Extreme Couponing, who exult every time they game the system and manage to buy $1000 worth of groceries for $20.
These are people who spend all their spare time collecting, organizing, investing in, and analyzing their coupon collections, to mount weekly attacks on grocery stores, like card-counting blackjack players at casinos. This is what Gollumized raving-fandom looks like.
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"Review of James Livingston's Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011). ISBN: 9780465021864. 288 pages."
"But why do we spend too much time on comfort goods and ordinary consumer spending and not enough on creative activities? One reason, says Pugno is that the latter require investment in “leisure skills” - the ability to play an instrument, garden or appreciate art. Such investment, like any other, is costly. At any point in time, therefore, we might prefer the zero-cost option of comfort goods. But this means we never acquire the skills needed to make best use of our leisure."
"The plate-glass shop window of the Romantic era is transformed in the contemporary commercial Web into the idea of three screens and a cloud. The shop window is now the small screen in your pocket and is called mobile e-commerce. Searls’s use of the word “Veal” implies that when we buy into the value of computerized personalization based on algorithmic interpretations of our data exhaust, we’re abandoning the expansive Whitman-esque view of the self and instead chowing down on the self as a calf constrained in the industrial process of producing veal. The word “veal” is meant to provoke a reaction of disgust. It ties a form of mechanized cruelty to a sanitary, abstracted computerized process. "
"And that's the point. This Great Stagnation? It might not just be about greedy bankers, hollow politicians, and glad-handing spin-doctors. Instead, its roots might have a great deal to do with us — and the consumption and investment choices we make, every moment of every day. And it might just be that without fundamentally altering those self-evidently self-destructive choices — well, this is the no-future future."
Now, I don't think Americans will take to the streets to oust their government. The challenge of the democratic, developed world is a quieter rebellion: against a bankruptcy not just of the pocketbook, but of meaning. It's not to take a stand against a dictator, but to take a stand against an unenlightened, nihilistic, hyperconsumerist, soul-suckingly unfulfilling, lethally short-termist ethos that inflicts real and relentless damage on people, society, the natural world, and future generations.
Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
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Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
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Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Pessimism on consumer led economic growth.
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The result was that people gave up saving. Why save from income if rising asset prices did your saving for you while you slept? Why not consume more than you earn if you can borrow cheaply using your constantly rising wealth as the asset to borrow against?
When Volker walked into the Fed 30 years ago, the US national savings rate had been relatively static for decades at around 20 per cent of GDP and total US debt to GDP was about 160 per cent. Household debt was 47 per cent of national income. When the credit bubble burst in August 2007, the national savings ratio had fallen to 14 per cent of GDP and debt had risen to 350 per cent with household debt at just under 100 per cent of GDP. Even today, household debt in the US, although now contracting, still exceeds the level at the beginning of this crisis.
The disinflationary forces that drove the switch from thrift to leverage are over. This means the next decade will be one of replacing leverage with thrift. That will hurt retail spending.
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This will set off feedback loops between the real economy and financial one, in the opposite direction to that we have been experiencing. It will cause consumer incomes and employment to deteriorate, along with the real economy, giving rise to increased defaults on consumer credit, commercial real estate and other loans, as well as, of course, housing mortgages. The default ratio on prime mortgages is already well above the US treasury’s stress test limit set for the banks. And the default rates on consumer debt, including credits, are rising very fast. The credit crisis hit to banks’ balance sheets is far from over.
Ad Nauseam chronicles the manipulative pathologies of advertising culture.
I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.
in list: Modern Art
Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of “primary America.” Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig’s narrator. He’s never happier than when he’s rebuilding a master cylinder or dislodging a stuck oil seal, and his descriptions of the open road can seem slightly anticlimactic. For him, the journey is just the journey; the garage is the destination. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond. His book is called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” (Penguin; $25.95), and it’s intended as a challenge, a declaration of gearhead pride in an ever more gearless world.
In the new book, SPENT: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller reveals the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become more responsible friends and lovers and happier consumers.
"I’d still argue that a sense that the material world around us is dense in objects and spectacle, that we have a sense of what I’ve called fecundity, is important to middle-class well-being." and more nuanced thoughts on consumerism and excess.
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If eventually we settle into a new austerity, that is likely to be partly performative, an identity that we try to communicate to others for some of the same reasons we might have tried to communicate fashionability, luxury, discriminatory taste: because in our local worlds, that identity accumulates some kind of social capital.
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I’d still argue that a sense that the material world around us is dense in objects and spectacle, that we have a sense of what I’ve called fecundity, is important to middle-class well-being.
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an academic gloss on overspending/overconsumption over the last 20 years
in list: Economic Crisis
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