How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life 
By: Lisa Levy
Los Angeles Review of Books, May 11, 2013
IS THE VERY IDEA of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat: “How to Have Better Conversations,” “How to Realise Your Potential,” “Developing a Compassionate Mind: One Day Intensive,” “Philosophy Slam,” “Learning How to Say No,” “Getting Better at Online Dating,” “Resilience: One Day Workshop.” Before long, I was ready to sign up for “How to Stay Calm.”
De Botton himself is a divisive, if not easily dismissed, public intellectual. The author of bestselling books about many of the broad topics the School of Life curriculum covers — love, work, religion, happiness, and philosophy itself — de Botton is often accused of being a purveyor of Philosophy Lite (see, for example, Victoria Beale’s January 3, 2013, attack on him in The New Republic, “How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual”). His works are securely aimed at the insecure middlebrow reader, the kind of person who knows that Proust can change her life but maybe would rather read about how Proust can change her life than slog through seven life-changing volumes. Indeed, there is something ersatz, if not quite fraudulent, about de Botton’s entire intellectual enterprise: he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own. He is constantly quoting and alluding to great figures — Jane Austen, John Stuart Mill, Stendhal, and Freud, among others, all get name-dropped in his self-help book, How To Think More About Sex (about which more below) — but he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward.
De Botton has, however, up until recently, been a great champion of philosophy as a way to work through life’s conundrums. His The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) is a charming and, in its own way, useful book that dissects the lives and ideas of major philosophers like Socrates and Nietzsche and applies them to everyday problems like “unpopularity” and “difficulties.” De Botton claims in Consolations that it is possible to “take on a task at once both profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy.” In this he has positioned himself in a long line of thinkers about the care and maintenance of the self, such that the editing and writing of “intelligent self-help books” would not seem like such a stretch.
Yet the real issue with de Botton’s new book, and the others in the How To series, is not simply a lack of depth but one of purpose: they are certainly shallow in their philosophy, but they are not particularly useful either. The books are combination platters of soft science, anecdotal case studies (some real, some fictional), and exercises or suggestions about steps the reader could take to further his or her goal. Along with de Botton’s volume purporting to inspire more (but not deeper, note) thought about sex, the School of Life series includes How to Stay Sane, by Philippa Perry; How to Change the World, by John-Paul Flintoff; and How to Find Fulfilling Work, by Roman Krznaric. Krznaric’s volume is by far the most successful, perhaps because he is the only one of the authors who does not seem embarrassed by either his topic or the means of treating it. Perry, a psychotherapist, and Flintoff, a journalist, retain a tone like they should be doing their work by more highfalutin means. And de Botton’s book makes an enraging little study (all the books clock in at around 200 pages) of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships, regarded strictly from the point of view of a bored, married, middle-aged man who maybe dabbles in philosophy and fancies himself an intellectual. It’s like being hit on by a paunchy, balding European guy at an office party who tries to seduce you with, well, quotes from Jane Austen and Stendhal, and empty proclamations about the place of sex, marriage, and relationships in contemporary society.
Maria Popova - have you made $1M on affiliate ads while soliciting $500k in donations for your “ad-free” site? Then maybe go easier on your fellow writers for how they make a living.
Maria Popova is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, regular author for The Atlantic, and was named to the Fast Company 100 Most Creative in Business list. I let her know I was a regular reader of her site when I sent her an email a few months ago after she wrote an article about the dangers of advertising in journalism. She detailed a scenario in which a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist was offered money from Xerox to write an article. I sent her a message to ask for clarity in what she meant, given that I was aware of her practice of putting affiliate advertising links in her articles while at the same time asking users at the end of each article to donate to her site by telling them that she runs an ad-free site that is subsidized by user contributions (screenshot). It is often controversial for a site to make money off of affiliate ads without notifying users in any terms of use (i.e. Pinterest), or to write reviews on products without notifying users they are making money when the reader clicks and purchases those products (the FTC enforces laws for certain types of blogs), but Popova has been going a bit further - while keeping the ads undisclosed, she also writes at the end of each article and in each email newsletter that the site is ad-free and needs user donations to support it.
The Brain Pickings “Support” page reads: “Keeping it all ad-free…means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you.” In a revealing email exchange outlined below, Popova told me that 25% of her book recommendations come from the data that she receives from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to). I found this to be interesting given that she made waves in the journalism and blogging community by publishing the “Curator’s Code” last year which urged website owners to be more upfront in attributing where they found the content they post. It was also ironic given that she regularly writes diatribes in publications such as The Atlantic and NY Times railing against the “filter bubble” which is the common practice of websites using algorithms to recommend to users things that similar users have also read or purchased.
An interview in The Guardian last month drew me to revisit our weeklong email exchange from last Spring. I had inquired about whether she would notify users of her ad practices, and I was surprised to receive a defensive response coupled with a condescending sign off that read, “I wish you the very best as you continue to explore and navigate the world of media and morality.” Not being the open letter type, I wrote back with a few reasons why she may be misleading users, and after we had exchanged 7 or 8 more emails, she agreed to change her pitch to “banner-free” instead of “ad-free.” When she changed it back to “ad-free” within 6 weeks, I was disappointed, but still not the open letter type. When she ignored my next three attempts over the summer to ask her why she still claimed to be ad-free, I figured she must have just really need the donations to keep the site going.
But then I read The Guardian article last month which quoted Brain Pickings user numbers (millions per month) that point to potentially millions of dollars in deception on the table, then I did a google search and found out that a for-profit LLC was formed in New York called “Brain Pickings LLC” just one month after my email inquiry to her (odd timing for a site in its 7th year at the time), and then I saw more articles by Popova condemning media, journalism, writers, and the filter bubble….and then I realized it was time for an open-letter and thought this was a worthwhile place to start a much needed discussion about affiliate advertising, Pulitzer Prize winners, the journalism and blogging industries, how E.B. White started all of this and how Richard Feynman can end it.
Describing how affiliate ads affect writers is necessary given that the reason Popova told me she uses the “ad-free” pitch is that she claims her affiliate advertising links are not ads. Popova uses Amazon’s Affiliate links program - which means if I click a book or product link from her site and buy that book, and another book, and a movie, diapers, a shirt, and anything else - she receives up to 10% of my entire shopping cart’s value from that trip to Amazon…and she also gets to see what I purchased. Given the non-Silicon Valley nature of her site, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she didn’t realize that these are a form of advertising (even though the first feature in bold on the Amazon Affiliates page is “Advertising,” and in every description of the service, Amazon calls the revenue made by partner websites “advertising fees.”).
Maria informed me she doesn’t define the links in her articles as ads because they are all “books that I would feature anyhow” and that her “different intention” means that she is not seeking to sell the books. I pointed out that in Google’s quest to organize the world’s information, there are tens of millions of times per day where the top Google result is also the top Ad that they display, but in these cases they don’t say “this is the one we were going to show you anyway” and hide the fact that it is an ad. Advertising is a business process defined by the way money changes hands - intent does not play a part in the definition. Roger Federer probably already likes Rolexes, but as soon as they pay him millions of dollars, he is considered to be advertising their product. Aside from the fact that businesses don’t get to create their own definition of advertising, Maria’s claim that they were all books she would feature anyhow was contradictory to the statement she wrote in the same email thread, which proves that her advertisements do in fact change what books she offers to users:
“a major reason I use Amazon is…data they give me - it tells me what other books Brain Pickings readers are buying on Amazon…I’d say I’ve found at least a quarter of the books I myself have purchased and read over the past few years through Brain Pickings readers that way.”
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harrison Salisbury was the subject of an E.B. White letter featured by Maria last Spring that spawned our correspondence. In 1975, Xerox offered Salisbury $55,000 to write an article in Esquire magazine. White expresses his concern about the erosion of press if writers start accepting money from advertisers this way. In her commentary, Popova noted that she “has been publishing an ad-free curiosity catalog supported by reader donations for the past seven years.” Reading the article I could only think what reader response would be if the article concluded with “Disclaimer: I make money each time you click a link in my articles and buy a book.”
There are important differences that make affiliate ads more subversive than the Xerox-Esquire scenario. The Affiliate form of advertising invites more detriment to quality writing because it actually requires an author to interrupt the reader with a link and it incentivizes authors to change their tone such that they convince the reader to go all the way through with the purchase (which is necessary for them to receive their kickback). At least in the golden days of tainted journalism the author was paid upfront, and the ad was on the opposite page, not in the article itself, so they were still incentivized to write a quality article about anything they wanted - health, art, sports - that people thought was interesting enough to read, while hoping that wandering eyes would bring eyeballs to the Xerox Ad on the facing page. I’m not saying this offer was a good thing, simply noting that if Brain Pickings is building a brand based on anti-ad sentiments, it might be fair to explain how the revenue generating practices of the site work. The Guardian article described the site as an “antidote to Google” - ironic given the identical business models of Brain Pickings and Google, both of which make money as users click links in the normal course of using each site…the difference being that Google makes it known which links are ads.
What kind of user and ad numbers are we talking about? Where do the numbers in the title come from? The Guardian author asked Popova why she didn’t let advertisers onto her site even though it draws 1.2M readers and 3M page views per month. Not acknowledging the affiliate ads, Maria referenced a 1923 letter to a newspaper editor about integrity in writing, and responded by saying “It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first…I don’t believe in this model.” Working out the math, and knowing how display advertisements work (those are the ones on the sides and at the top of many websites - including the websites of The Atlantic and NY Times, where Popova is a regular contributor) it turns out Popova would most likely lose money if she switched from her current affiliate ad model to the display ad model that The Guardian writer refers to. Assume that Popova used an ad network like Google Adwords which is the typical way websites make money on display ads. The average click value of display ads in the book industry is typically worth less than affiliate ads - and if Popova added display ads to her site, it would take readers off of the page prematurely, preventing them from clicking the in-article affiliate ads. Reducing the number of conversions through the more lucrative affiliate funnel is why Brain Pickings would likely lose money if they switched to a display ad model from the current affiliate ad model, and why the response to The Guardian’s question could have been “there are no display ads because the site makes more money off of affiliate ads.”
Let’s work with The Guardian’s quote of 3M page views, and the knowledge Brain Pickings has been around for 8 years. An index of Brain Pickings showed approximately 5-6 Amazon ads per article, and there are typically 3 articles published per day. Most pages have more than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions let’s assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M impressions per year. Placing the average book that Brain Pickings links to at $17-$20 and accounting for a few extra bucks for the other items that users are clearly placing in their cart, the assumption is that the average Amazon purchase is $20-$25, of which Popova likely gets between 7-10%. Let’s use this to make the assumption that $2 is the amount Brain Pickings makes on each Amazon customer originating from her site. With 216M impressions, a 0.1% conversion rate on those ads at $2 per conversion would bring in $432,000 per year. Looking from another direction - with 1.2M monthly followers, if 10% buy something from Amazon each year, we’re at 120k users bringing in $2 of revenue each, or $240,000. Over 8 years, ad revenue of $200k-$400k would total $1.6M-$3.2M, but assuming it took 4 or 5 years to get the user base ramped up to significant numbers, maybe the total is half that amount, on the order of $1M. As for donation numbers, Maria has said her biggest donors are her email followers - a newsletter with over 180,000 users. Only looking at this group, ignoring the site visitors, if 5% of the newsletter readers donate $10 per year, it’s $90k in donations. If 10% are donating, it’s $180k, or if they’re donating more on average, the guesses change in different ways - in a recent NY Times article a reader was quoted who gives $25 per month ($300 per year), saying that it was like “donating to a public radio station” to her. If donations have been around $50k-$100k for 8 years, are total donation revenues upwards of $500k? Retrospective numbers are difficult given unknown growth to the current reader following of over 1.2M, but looking out 5 or 10 years, if donation and ad revenues are in the $200k-$500k range, then the total dollars changing hands will certainly reach seven figures if it hasn’t already.
Certainly, there are too many variations in website user bases and site numbers to be accurate about projections of this sort, so the main point of the mathematical exercise isn’t really how much, it’s why is something being hidden? Before spending any more time tweaking which numbers are right or wrong, the timely incorporation last Spring may be more telling than any calculations. Within a month after being asked whether she was being honest to users about the financials of her site, a company called Brain Pickings, LLC was established in New York. In a 2010 article, Popova said Brain Pickings was not-for-profit…not that this would be much better - a one person not-for-profit (different in some states than a non-profit), doing no charitable work that makes money from ads and donations can pay all revenue out in salaries to its single employee, maybe even landing better tax considerations. After our email exchange, Maria changed the wording on her site to “banner-free” for 6 weeks - almost exactly covering the span of time from the last email to me until the end of the LLC formation. If only because I never heard back from her again, it appears a very real possibility that “banner-free” was a great way to quell her one inquisitive user for long enough to hide the financials of the site. Were you ever a non-profit? Would you be willing to include an About section or Terms of Service on your site that shows what kind of organization it is? If there was a change in business formation last year, none of your users were notified - would you tell them if their donations were now to a for-profit LLC if that is the case? For the record, this could be a different company - I would simply be very surprised if there is another Brain Pickings in New York City, and without any legal terms of service or information posted about the entity behind the site, this is an open question.
In the mass of money changing hands around the world each day, as long as I’m not being duped by the donation plea, why do I feel like it’s worth bringing up? Besides potentially being able to save a few thousand people hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years, my mind was altered significantly after reading the quote from Princeton professor and State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter who, in the aforementioned NY Times article, was the one who said she gives $300 per year because it was like donating to a public radio station. This made me wonder which non-profit, which struggling writer, or which innovative startup would have received that $300 of consumer spending money if Brain Pickings readers knew that the site was not funded solely of off their donations? Is there a real public radio station or library that is out $500,000 over the last few years from book lovers? Would charity: water receive $500k more in donations over the next 5 years? There is a disturbing apathy in our culture, especially among the young and tech-savvy, to ignore the economic interconnectedness of things that actually affect them negatively. Hearing about a fraudulent spammer halfway around the world who conned a neighbor into giving up bank account information, a young person trying to build the next big thing in his garage would probably scoff at the non-tech-savvy for getting what they deserve, and laugh at the simple method of the spam-attack used by the scammer. Rarely is there a realization that every time one million dollars is sucked out of the consumer spending pot fraudulently, that’s one million dollars that is now not available in the market for their fledgling startup, their non-profit, or their venture. How many of Brain Pickings’ readers are writers, designers, or freelancers deserving of those dollars?
The average reader of Brain Pickings appears to be in the design/history/bookworm demographic (not exclusively, this is a very superficial stab at the median user), likely in the mid to upper income range, including types who donate to public radio stations (she touts Josh Groban and Drew Carey as users), but also just not quite as tech savvy as your regular Reddit reader who would sniff out an affiliate ad right away and laugh at the Donation plea. Maria knows that her readers are unaware of the affiliate ads - in her emails with me she was impressed that I was “aware enough to bring up these issues.” And in the 6 week stint where she did take down “ad-free,” she told me it was because “it seems to matter to you and it doesn’t matter to me in the least.” Then why did ad-free go back up 2 months later? It would be really disappointing if your donation numbers dropped during those two months, proving that ad-free did make a difference and driving you to change it back, because then you would have proof that the deception was affecting your bottom-line, yet you would still be doing it anyway. Since re-posting “ad-free,” Popova has also added the ability to sign up for a subscription of recurring donations - an interesting feature for an incorporated LLC.
I imagine some readers of Brain Pickings are loyal enough that they’d give money even if they knew there were ads, but it sure seems like they should have all the information at hand to make their own choice. An index of Brain Pickings shows that Richard Feynman is one of the most cited topics. Recently, Popova wrote how much she admired a graduation address he gave in 1974, where he was talking to scientists about the duty they have to make sure to portray things correctly to the layperson so as not to misrepresent something that the layperson may not understand. Feynman said:
“…details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong…you should explain to the layman what you’re doing — and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision…I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
Maria, there are many questions your readers could ask and requests they could make at this point - many of which may even be avoidable with legal or semantic loopholes, so the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think Richard Feynman would do in your situation?
-T.B.
Contact: onads.blog@gmail.com
According to herself, my grandma used to be thin and happy. I never believed her as she was always fat, bitter and made everyone around her miserable. I never saw her eat, so she must have been fat because of all the hatred and guilt she kept inside. She used to secretly feed my grandfather valium with his breakfast in order to “keep him quiet.” We were forced to spend holidays with her but hated every minute, her voice and look heinous enough to spoil every chance of happiness — the best china and best behaviour never good enough to generate a smile. Occasionally, between the waves of fear and resentment, I would feel so sorry for her, tried to understand her and make her happy. But to no avail. She was a valuable lesson in how not to be. RIP.
Photo by: Christopher Sharpe for romka magazine
What to Expect When You’re Expecting: An unnerving, WTF project of Lynchian proportions, the poster campaign for What to Expect When You’re Expecting would make for great wallpaper, so long as you like pretending you live in a Soundgarden video. Like the wide-eyed weirdos who rome the suburbs in the rock band’s clip for “Black Hole Sun,” the ladies in these one-sheets hide nutjob transgression beneath their cutesy smiles, serving you rom-com giggles when all they really want to do is barbecue a Barbie. The twisted minds at Lionsgate, who continue to bankroll B-grade horror and the works of Tyler Perry, really outdid themselves when selling this how-to adaptation as something naughty and cute, extending their pinkies while putting filth in the mouths of expectant characters. Whether you prefer Anna Kendrick’s crack about peeing on a stick, Cameron Diaz’s revelation about her pregnancy-enhanced rack, or Brooklyn Decker’s declaration about being “crazy horny,” there’s something for everyone in this string of character posters, excluding, of course, anyone with an iota of sanity or good taste. (The House Next Door’s “Worst Movie Posters of 2012”)
A Trans-Atlantic Trip Turns Kafkaesque
By GARY SHTEYNGART
NY Times Published: September 29, 2012
You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.
Flight 121 from Paris to New York began on a clear autumn afternoon. It ended over 30 hours later. For those of us without miles, it is probably still going.
The initial delay was a mere hour or two. Some were told that our aircraft possessed faulty tires and brakes. Others were told that the crew could not find their way in from Paris. Neither scenario was particularly encouraging.
The aircraft was indeed an interesting one. One of the overhead baggage compartments was held together with masking tape. Halfway across the Atlantic you decided to turn Flight 121 back because your altimeter wasn’t working. Some of us were worried for our safety, but your employees mostly shrugged as if to say, Ah, there goes that altimeter again.
And so you took us to Merrie England for a spell.
At Heathrow, fire trucks met us because we landed “heavy,” i.e., still full of fuel we never got to spend over the Atlantic. At the terminal, a woman in a spiffy red American Airlines blazer was sent to greet us. But the language she spoke — Martian — was not easily understood, versed as we were in Spanish, English, Russian and Urdu.
Using her Martian language skills, the American Airlines woman proposed to take us “through the border” at Heathrow, for a night of rest before we resumed our journey the next morning. An apocalyptic scenario: an employee of the world’s worst airline assigned to the world’s worst border crossing at the world’s worst airport.
The Martian took us to one immigration lane, which promptly closed. Then another, with the same result. A third, ditto. Despite her blazer, the Martian was obviously not the ally we had made her out to be. So, ducking under security ropes, knocking some down entirely, we rushed the border with our passports held aloft, proclaiming ourselves the citizens of a fading superpower.
Come morning, you, American Airlines, provided us with a free, daylong tour of Heathrow Airport. By bus. The bus brought us to our new plane, but the doors of the bus would not open. We stood, pressed to one another, in sweltering heat, as the plane was sprayed down for no reason we could discern. It would have been nice, in retrospect, had you sprayed us down, or at least given us something to drink. After an hour, we were told this flight would be canceled because this plane, too, had caught ill. Back to the terminal once more.
It became clear that the older and more feeble of us would be at a disadvantage. A 70-year-old cannot rush past 140 gates to check in for yet another canceled flight with the same brio as a 20-year-old. Some of us started to cry. Not because the journey was never ending, but because you can be told that you are not a human being only so many times.
And then you stopped telling us. The American Airlines representatives we were promised failed to materialize. One passenger told us this was all part of the union’s strategy to destroy the airline. All I know is that with each encounter, I steadily began to feel that your employees were prisoners just like us, armed only with their little walkie-talkies from which issued tinny instructions, lost communiqués from some distant Oz.
“This used to be a great airline,” one old-timer said as we were sweltering to death on the bus. I know you were. And I know you are not alone in failure. An American diplomat based in Moscow tells me he prefers flying Aeroflot to Delta. But Delta is a futuristic paradise of working altimeters and braking brakes when compared with you, dear American Airlines. So what can you do? Empires rise and empires fall. A metaphor you may need to consider closely.
First and only entry some joker typed in on the Notes app on my iPhone. It’s so sinfully ugly that I have it buried in an iOS folder called “ugly apps”. I only discovered it today because I heard Notes would work with iCloud in the new Mountain Lion release.
It’s sad to hear that it’s still dominated by a yellow text-entry area that resembles a legal pad. The second-grader icons. There’s even a hint of torn paper at the top of the window, and yes, the app’s title bar offers a leather texture. Lame.
Edit: I’ve moaned about this before.
Stephen King: tax me, for fuck's sake!
Stephen King is rich, wants to pay more federal taxes, and is pretty pissed off about it. (via Kottke)
Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want — those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money — is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that — sorry, kiddies-you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay — not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay — in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.
The Current Rage In Branding: Fake Authenticity Is Now A-Okay
BY: Michael Raisanen
Fast Co. Design, March 15, 2012
FAKING AN AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE IS NOW LAUDED, AND COMPANIES SUCH AS J. CREW ARE EXPLOITING THE TREND, WRITES MICHAEL RAISANEN.
A haircut should cost less than 20 bucks and be over in under 10 minutes. That’s my opinion. A couple of years ago, I came across a storefront in the West Village with an old-school rustic sign complete with spelling error announcing a barber shop—a perfect signifier for a fast and inexpensive cut by perhaps an older foreign gentleman who views his trade as a craft as opposed to an art. It turns out I misread the subtle cues of hipster branding. The barbershop in question belongs to a chain of three shops called F.S.C. Barber, which in turn is part of the Freemans brand, including at least one New York City restaurant and a men’s clothing label (custom flannel suits made in Brooklyn). It’s neither cheap, nor fast.
“LIMITED-EDITION WOOD-AND-CANVAS CANOE”
Freemans is a pioneer in a trend that we have seen happening for a while now, striving for a sort of refined, woolly, arts-and-craftsy, anachronistic Americana feeling. Think taxidermy, hand-cobbled brogues, and cocktails made with rye instead of whiskey. The common denominator in this trend seems to be a yearning for the “authentic.” Interestingly, things don’t need to actually be authentic as long as they feel authentic. In fact, they can be completely fake. Take Hipstamatic or Instagram, apps that let you simulate the look and feel of different types of old film photographs right in your iPhone, transforming your life as seen through Twitter and Facebook into a French new wave cinema storyboard. People have the ability to edit and broadcast their lives, and a lot of them are choosing to do so through an idealized analog retro filter in which they candidly appear as if they weren’t aware of being watched.
Perhaps a postmodernist would call this inauthentic authenticity.
But is inauthentic authenticity more than a mere nostalgic trend? A cycle in the speeding pendulum that swings between the futuristic sportswear made of high-tech fabric and the retrospective L.L. Bean limited-edition wood-and-canvas canoe? Or is there something real in the zeitgeist: Are people reacting to an overproduced reality in which Hollywood fake is held up as an ideal? I think it is too early to tell.
But it is interesting how different levels of irony, meta-commentary, and self-awareness conflate into one weird mix. In Portlandia, the IFC television series, the show’s creators, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, have built a whole universe around satirizing inauthentic authenticity. And yet, they freely admit that they have a lot in common with the characters and lifestyle they are making fun of. So it seems possible and permissible to live a cliché while simultaneously making fun of it. Or is it merely a defensive attitude, to poke your own balloon before anyone else does?
J. CREW GOES FULL-ON FAUX ANTIQUE
So in terms of brands and branding, can we glean anything significant from this trend? I think as with any trend, it favors some brands over others. However, there are some interesting lessons to be learnt from J. Crew; they have managed to harness the trend and take inauthentic authenticity to the next level, to mainstream America. The narrative they put forth for men in catalogues and advertising is a composite of the following:
• outdoorsy, classical, New England, early ’60s collegiate
• oaky, duck hunting, landed gentry, sheep dog
• waxed mustache, axe-yielding, self-sufficient, eccentric woodsman
The common denominator is, of course, authenticity and nostalgia for a time when things were “real.” J. Crew has been uncommonly smart in leveraging this trend without having to alienate their core customers by changing the brand and products too much. Instead, through an ingenious strategy of co-branding, they have extended their offering and brought in outside brands that possess that singular patina and heritage that we yearn for.
These brands range from Timex (a stealth Waspy way of saying that expensive watches are vulgar and thus avoiding having to buy that expensive watch you want but can’t afford) to Barbour (hunting for ducks on your property), and Sperry Top-Siders (summers in Cape Cod). This strategy is smart, because it gives J. Crew a cost-efficient way to stay constantly relevant through a curation of brands and products. So when Minnetonkas become passé, the company can simply replace the moccasins with something else.
We are indeed living in an interesting age when it is socially accepted, even prestigious, to fake an authentic experience. We have come a long way from frowning at the Italian pavilion at Epcot center with all its fake kitsch. Today’s simulacra are tasteful and only kitsch as an ironic statement.
Very postmodern.
Stop Calling it Curation
langer: Imagine, if you will, a world in which Richard Seaver or Robert Gottlieb had stomped their feet and huffed and puffed every time John Leonard forgot to give them their proper “↬”. Or rather, as I joked on Twitter over the weekend about the new “Curator’s Code,” if Goethe had lived long enough to chide Mann for writing about Faust and giving a “ᔥ” to Marlowe but forgetting to give a “↬” to Goethe.
It’s funny to think about! But only for a minute, since after that it all just becomes too depressing for words, because what we talk about when we talk about curation first of all sure ain’t curation and secondly isn’t even all that special. But mostly it’s depressing because it’s a conversation that happens at the expense of original content itself.
First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept “very good” to mean “has a large audience.”)
But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,” and regardless of how special one might feel about the highly cultivated state of his or her tastes there is no threshold of how many other people are eager to be on the receiving end of whatever it is we’re sharing that somehow magically transforms this act into curation—that is, at least, unless we’re also comfortable with arguing that “curation” is the act in which Buzzfeed is engaged. Or The Huffington Post. Or the top contributor on those weightlifting comment boards.
Remember what it was like way back in the dark ages before the internet? When all sorts of IRL conversations like this would occur?
“Hey I saw the coolest thing in a magazine today.”
“Yeah? What?”
“A bunch of pictures of cats—that all looked like Hitler!”
“OMG I HAVE TO SEE THAT!”
“LOL RIGHT?! I’ll xerox it for you!”
What we do online every day is no different, and neither the introduction of an audience nor the torrent of information we wade through on a daily basis does anything at all to alter or enhance this fundamental behavior. Call it sifting, call it filtering, call it editing even, but it sure as hell isn’t curating.
Which makes it all very curious to me that those most eager to self-desribe as “curators” are often the most vocal in their concerns with “proper” attribution. And attribution I can get behind! Footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies—I’m a big fan! I’m also a big fan of the internet’s native form of attribution, the hyperlink. Yet the Curator’s Code seeks to bolt an additional piece of ultimately vestigial metadata onto this native form—the “ᔥ”—an addition only made necessary so as to distinguish this one particular form of attribution from that other one which Popova and others are so eager to see elevated: the “via.”
Now the “hat-tip” has long been a simple courtesy, not some kind of moral commandment; its omission from any citation is in no way the sort of punishable offense that failing to attribute any borrowed content would be. That’s because usually the greatest sin of omitting a “via” is denying someone else the moment of flattery that comes with the recognition that some other person follows whatever it is they have to share, whereas omitting a link to original content is, you know, stealing.
But as far as value-adds go the “via” generally offers little more than a cookie crumb trail of others who have also read the material in question—the digital equivalent of finding the previous borrower’s name scribbled on the card in the back of a library book. Which is neat, I guess? But come on now, none of us here is Averroes rediscovering Aristotle or Poggio Bracciolini serendipitously plucking Lucretius off a dusty shelf—this is people posting pictures of yawning kittens on Tumblr blogs we’re talking about here.
And yet we see this sort of thing happen all the time on the internet, all these great hand-wringing debates over “proper” attribution (“proper” usually meaning “sending traffic my way as a reward for finding something first”).
And it all stinks to high heaven of self-importance.
Think of how often the words “broke the reblog chain” get bandied about in breathy Tumblr scolds, as if the put-off bloggers behind these scolds are all willfully ignorant of the possibility—hard to believe! I know!—that someone could have run across the same piece of original content elsewhere on the internet. Or think of how often one link aggregator complains that another link aggregator has “stolen” his material without giving proper credit. Aggregators! Arguing about who aggregated what first!!
So much ink has been spilled over something so ridiculously petty. People seem downright incapable of the innocent excitement that comes from seeing other people enjoy a piece of solid writing—and this sadly seems unlikely to change, at least until we change the very language we use to describe it, since by calling the activity of people who traffic in links “curation” instead of “sharing” we imbue it with all sorts of hollow importance and circumscribe it as something wholly apart from the selfless and benevolent sharing of knowledge.
The self-described “curator” of the modern day web seeks special recognition for what is nothing more than a pattern of behavior that distinguishes an individual from those with uncurious, idle minds. Rather than issuing demerits on the latter we’re instead being invited—no! implored, rather, via an “actionable code of ethics”—to heap praise upon the former. And I’m sorry, but I refuse to be bullied into giving people credit for shit they’re supposed to be doing, especially not when that comes at the price of devaluing the most important object of attribution—original content—by setting it up as just one among a multitude of things deserving of attribution. I don’t know what sort of addled reading of Barthes it must’ve taken to get here—to employ phrases like the “creative and intellectual labor of information discovery” and “a form of authorship”—but the often tortuous act of writing compared with the reading of someone else’s writing are two vastly different things, not just simple variations of unicode runes.
Furthermore, Maria Popova was quoted by David Carr today saying that “When we don’t honor discovery, we are robbing somebody’s time and labor.”
Which: Bull.Shit.
People who consider the act of intellectual enrichment to be some sort of currency or property that can be “robbed” have absolutely no business whatsoever telling the rest of us what it means to “honor discovery.” And while I hate to be the guy who’s like “let’s have a look at the etymology!”, well, let’s do that actually! Because it will at least afford us all the opportunity to be outraged together by this sort of talk.
What Popova calls “discovery”—which in simpler times could’ve just been called “reading” or “learning”—can be traced back to the Greek root of the word “scholarship,” which is derived from “rest,” a linguistic heritage which first established knowledge in its time-honored tradition of being something wholly antithetical to commerce, something invaluable in the truest sense of the term.
And one does great injury to knowledge by assuming it to be merely some exchange value in a zero-sum game.
If people want to be celebrated for being smart or for having exceptional taste that’s all fine and good, everyone can go right on congratulating one another in their little mutual admiration societies. But please spare the rest of us all this moralizing on why we should be giving people who share links anywhere near the same amount of credit we afford that singularly special act of original content creation.
Why I left Google
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”
The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.
