One of the more compelling arguments for the value of social media is Clive Thompson’s Wired piece, published – stunningly – almost three years ago, titled “How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.” I remember reading this article when it first came out, and just intuitively agreeing with his thesis. Constant updates (on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) allow a group to develop what Thompson calls “social proprioception,” a kind of feeling about what everybody’s up to that can spark “weird, fascinating feats of coordination.” Here’s Thompson:
When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.
It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
It really is a fascinating article, and worth the read. And I think Thompson’s one of the best commentators on social media – and the social effects of social media – out there today, so read his other stuff, too. So that should be enough to say that I think Thompson is quite right about this, but I want to suggest that “social proprioception” also costs us something, and I hope I can do that without sounding a nostalgic or mournful tone. I really don’t want to be the grumpy Luddite on this point, largely because I almost always disagree with grumpy Luddites, so hopefully this is a sufficient qualifier.
So, what gets lost? I think to some extent, what gets lost is the art of catching up. By catching up, I mean those times when you sit with somebody you haven’t seen in some time, and you exchange stories. There is, to my mind, an art to such occasions and performances, and they require a whole set of language and mental abilities, an everyday narratology. You can’t just tick off a list of updates; you have to blend them into a well-told and entertaining story or set of stories, you have to pick up on connections, and make the particular story you tell at any one time relevant. The negative and degraded version of the art of catching up can be seen in any airport, when people who don’t know each other start talking to each other. Almost invariably, they will hit on a topic (say, their kids’ sports participation), and will then proceed to talk exclusively about themselves, not even really listening to the other people, except to the extent that whatever is being said might furnish an entry for them to talk about themselves again. It’s conversational masturbation. But the art of catching up, though ostensibly about the self in the same way, always includes a history with the other person or people, a repertoire of shared knowledge and experience that is specific to the group, maybe even care. Together with shared knowledge and experiences, you have some absence that you need to fill – that’s the catching up. But you have to tell your story in the context of these shared experiences, and you have to make it entertaining. That’s why it’s an art.
Maybe I just grew up in a story-telling culture; most of the time I spent with friends was occupied with either story-telling or insults – and both require equal shares of creativity. People make fun of the New Yawkah version of “Howyadoin’,” but it’s really not a greeting; it’s an invitation. Tell me something funny.Tell me something new. Tell it well. And you’re judged, socially, by your skill in telling a story, the way you shape a narrative, your descriptive capacity, your skill with language. This all goes on miles, metaphorically, from any creative writing or composition classes, and it’s even possible that the best storytellers would immediately flunk in either of those settings. But you’ve all seen it – sitting around in a bar, and somebody starts in on some tale, and they’re gesticulating and assuming roles, hitting punchlines with exquisite timing, saving connections for maximum impact, and you’re hooked in and laughing and the whole thing is so perfectly constructed. Good narrative is not rare. These are the sources of value in any oral culture.
What I’ve been noticing lately is that the social proprioception thesis actually seems to hold, but what you gain in positive knowledge comes packaged with what you lose in terms of that absence to be filled, the negative space that provokes catching up. Just one example, although I could post many. A bumped into a guy I know from graduate school at a conference recently. He’s one of my Facebook friends, though, admittedly, he came in several years behind me, so we were never really that close. So we’re sitting at a table, and he starts telling me how he’s gotten really into Korean cooking, and making really complicated dishes, and etc. The problem is that I know all this already – he posts about it constantly. What could otherwise have turned into an interesting conversation about Korean cooking just ends up being a recitation of the already-known. I don’t mean to pick on him; he’s a good guy, and the example should be generalized. The more “granular” the update apparatus, the more effective the installing of social proprioception, the more tedious become these opportunities for narrative. If that’s the case, it strikes me as a serious loss indeed, not least because the skills required for telling good catching-up-stories appear to me to be generally valuable. Of course, the same updating regime may lead to better stories, and it’s probably never fine-grained enough in practice to really eliminate the art of catching up. But I’ve seen it happen again and again in the last few years, and maybe this is where I’m at my most nostalgic, but it worries me.
It took dominion everywhere.
- Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
So I had a therapy session with she this morning on the drive into work, and we reached some interesting conclusions. Here’s the deal: I am perhaps the worst person to drive with that you’ll ever meet. I constantly critique other drivers, often in loud tones, for their various failures on the road. This habit makes my wife crazy, since it becomes very stressful to be sitting next to somebody who is essentially yelling at the world non-stop. She often says this: “In all the other areas of life, you seem overly generous to people – so why is it that as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car you become this angry hyper-critic?” That’s what we were getting to the nub of, therapy-wise.
We decided that the specific personality trait is simple: I cannot stand uncertainty. All the behaviors that set me off when I drive have to do with uncertainty; it’s for this reason that my major statement while I drive is “What the fuck are you doin’, dude?” or “Where ya goin’, ya fuckin’ nut?” So, for example, some driver in front of me slowed down today next to a Starbucks on Lincoln, apparently ready to double park and run in. But the driver didn’t stop quickly enough for me. He or she just sort of rolled at about 5mph, crawling, crawling. Should I go around? Should I wait? Should I slam into the back of this nut’s car on general principle? What the fuck are you doin’, dude? This diagnosis made sense, not least because my ultimate driving hate is reserved for fuckers who don’t know how to use their turn signals. Guess what, asshole? I don’t care where you’re going, so putting your signal on after you already break is a worthless procedure; put it on before you break so I know that I will have to break! Grrr. Ah, she says, but just a little while ago you yelled at somebody who didn’t pull far enough into the intersection while making a left turn (I had to really squeeze to get around): “Nice fuckin’ left turn, you dipshit!” “Well, yes, that’s an execution problem,” I say. No, no, she says. That’s also an uncertainty problem: you know they’re going left, but you don’t know when you’llbe able to pass. It’s not, therefore, uncertainty in general, but uncertainty about my ability to go. Other people are blocking my plans! I do not have total mastery over my environment! She also decided that this pathology manifests itself when I lose something. I first fly into a minor rage, as in “Where the fuck is the X?” I search for it for some negligible period of time (the uncertainty about my ability to use the item now in full swing), but I almost immediately decide that it is gone and lost for good, finis. “That’s why you give up on the search,” she says, “Because as soon as it is lost for good, you are no longer uncertain, or rather, you’re certain that the item will not be available for you!” Agreed.
Now, all this is ironic because the major line in critical theory and philosophy I’ve read since I was an undergraduate reading Heidegger and American literature with Bill Spanos is pitched precisely against this mode of comportment. Acceptance of contingency, understanding of social complexity, critique of Subject as final arbiter, against mastery of the social ecology. And yet, that’s precisely how I operate in my driving, and probably in many other areas of life (“Does anyone know what happened to the fuckin’ stapler?”).
OK, I’m going to break my unstated and inconsistent rule about commenting on day-to-day political and media spectacle here to rant a bit about uber-dick Terry Moran, ABC news journalist. The story goes like this: Obama is being interviewed by ABC news, no doubt relating to health care or somesuch, and in an off-the-record moment after the interview is apparently chatting about stuff when he calls Kanye West, of award-show-interrupting fame, a “jackass.” Well, if it was off-the-record, how could we possibly know this? Because Terry Moran, former White House reporter, Bush ass-kisser, and Nightline host decided to tweet this little tidbit to his Twitter account. Three cheers for transparency, right? Oh, he of course added his own very professional snark to the tweet, noting “Now THAT’S Presidential!” (What’s the implication here? That Obama isn’t otherwise “Presidential” – whatever the eff that means – or that Obama is not living up to the gravitas of the office in the very serious manner of Richard “Go-Fuck-Yourself” Cheney?) Needless to say, the principle of off-the-record communications is so crucial even to a cub reporter interviewing the local dog catcher that Moran had to delete the tweet and ABC apologized (did Terry Moran?), and I guess we’re all supposed to pretend that this sniveling right wing tool simply didn’t know how to work that crazy Twitter machine, la di da.
But Terry Moran is very much a guy who demonstrates endless concern for the journalistic profession when outright propagandists and warmongers like Judy Miller and Michael Gordon want to either rev up the war-machine or keep it running, and O Lawd how sacred is the concept of a journalist’s anonymous sources when they are brutal little DC despots seeking revenge on (the non-making-a-fool-of-himself) Joe Wilson for having exposed their sicko prevarications. In this piece, for instance, Terry Moran gets all pomo on the modern-day fetish for journalistic “objectivity,” wondering how-o-how can a journalist not want his or her country to kick ass and take names, and is it really a feasible proposition that Michael Gordon should have to deny his firepower fetish when it’s his job to write news articles informing propagandizing the public about the little war he so loves? Quoth Moran, sounding for all the world like your average pomo theorist: “There is no such thing as a person who is so untethered to any community–national, racial, religious, etc–that she or he is able to gain a truly ‘objective’ view of things. We are all contingent creatures.” This in defense of a snarling jingoist like Michael Gordon, whose kooky theories on Iranian involvement in Iraq made Curtis LeMay sound like John friggin’ Lennon. Oh, the tension inherent in Moran’s profession! One suspects that this philosophical conundrum derives directly from Moran’s tendency to puff up his chest and distinguish himself from all the supposedly “anti-military” journalists who presume that “the American projection of power around the world must be wrong.” I know, I haven’t ever seen one of these exceedingly rare creatures either, but I may have been distracted by Katie Couric crushing on some Navy SEALs or something.
And this guy’s gonna tweet off-the-record statements about Kanye fucking West by the President? And say “oops, my bad?” Come on, now. I’m not all “Oh, let’s respect the Office” and all this other imperial presidency nonsense that so many liberals are now spouting, nor do I find the whole Kanye West thing anything other than a matter of monumental irrelevance and supreme unimportance. But come on, now. The great philosopher of journalistic objectivity in wartime and defender of the sacred character of the anonymous source is printing off-the-record remarks by the President of the fucking United States on his Twitter account?
ABC should fire that fucking guy effective yesterday. Come on, now.
What? My peoples if you wit me where the fuck you at? – Method Man, Triumph
Every year, the Brooklyn Famiglia gears up for one of the big events: Hooligan Day. It’s the day when everybody wears their hooligan kit, watches the FA Cup, then gather at The Gate on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope for the big doo. And every year since 2002 I’ve missed it, since I’ve been away. And even though it’s just a little afternoon beer drinking kind of thing, it’s the time that I most miss New York. I think we had such a tight community when we were there that it just stings more now that we’re not there, but especially on those real occasions of off-the-wall solidarity. And this year especially, since we’re missing not just the community, but my two nieces who I haven’t seen yet, and the whole transformation of the event into a far more family friendly sort of affair, which it pretty much had to become, all these years later.
And so you’re in graduate school in my field and you have to sign on to this idea that you can’t be very specific about where you end up. But it’s easier to sign on to that than to live it. And it all seems so temporary, until you’re looking down the pike at tenure and buying a place and thinking – is this it for us now? Are we now from here? Certainly, we’re very lucky to end up in a kind of place that’s like the kind of places that we like. But a place isn’t a people. On a night like this in Brooklyn I would call my brother and just head up to the bar to catch a game. No plans. No planes. And there’d be people, and we’d know them, even from just around. You know that guy? Yeah. How you know him? From around. All the Facebook friends in the world don’t match that, I’m coming to understand, technological evangelism and general distaste for the usual technophobia notwithstanding. So you sign on to this thing, but you only sign on to the concrete social dislocation in a very abstract way. Yes, I know this is griping. Or pitiful. Maybe both. A friend said to me last year: “We have a name for people who get jobs where they grew up: the working class.” Well, yes and no, I guess.
So I just saw these flicks on Facebook, and I wanted to say that I miss my place, and my peoples.
I’ve decided that I want to start cataloguing my general jerkness so that I can see it out there, and maybe stop being so much of a jerk. So from time to time I will describe an event from the day that had me acting like a total jerk. Hopefully, the very act of transcribing my jerk behavior will eventually force me to curtail it, even a little bit. So, my biggest jerk moment of the day.
I went to Blockbuster before picking up Ellie, cuz it’s Friday night, and my readers well know that that’s how we roll. The Blockbuster was strangely empty for 4pm on a Friday, and they had signs all over noting a special on movies, so I guess they’re hurting. In any case, there was only one other customer in there, a guy in his late-30′s, maybe early-40′s. He was walking around looking at the movies, but he had his cell phone, and was describing various options to a woman he kept calling sweetie. I know it was a woman because I could hear her voice through the cell. He was describing options in great detail. A lot of them. Madagascar 2. My Winnipeg. Miracle at St. Anna. That’s just the M’s. Detailed descriptions of each, together with explanations of the other films that the actors had been in, or recommendations from other people they both knew. It was driving me fucking crazy. I know I must have whispered shut the fuck up under my breath about three times. Then he got to the S’s, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Sign-doshe, he kept calling it. “Sign-doshe, New York. It’s called Sign-doshe, sweetie. Sign-doshe, New York. It’s with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sweetie. Yeah, the bad guy in the Mission Impossible. Yeah, the creepy guy. Sign-doshe. I dunno. Sign-doshe New York. I heard it was amazing, sweetie. Sign-doshe.” He decided on the film, so returned the last copy of Bill Maher’s Religulous to the shelf, near where I was standing. “Are you looking for a copy of this?” he asked nicely. I nodded. Sure. Then it was jerk time:
“Sin-ek-duh-key,” I said. “It’s sin-ek-duh-key. Synecdoche, New York.”
“What? Oh. Thanks! Hey sweetie, I was pronouncing it wrong. Some guy just corrected me.” (That’s right, that’s right, it rhymes with “corrected me!” Sin-ek-duh-key) “I feel stupid. It’s sin-ek-duh-key.”
I guess on the scale of anti-social behavior, correcting the guy on an admittedly difficult word is somewhere lower than, say, ripping that cell phone out of his hand and smashing it under my foot. But it’s still pretty dicky. God, I’m terrible. And moments after such episodes, of course, I think, wow, I was just a total fucking dick to that person. Sometimes even during.
My colleague posted this story on Facebook, about Facebook. The premise is that thirty-somethings have a far different relationship to Facebook than “Millenials,” or whatever the fuck they’re called. The writer learns this when she finds out about her husband’s life as a teen through his Facebook friends. Here’s what she says:
And it seemed as if half of them confessed crushes on him. These were girls frozen in his memory with teenaged breasts, AP English minds, and a sense that anything was possible. Like this one girl from seventh grade. She friended my husband on Facebook and then reminisced about the day his family moved away. She had put on her favorite dress, painted her nails purple, and worked up all her courage to hug him good-bye. “Isn’t that SO funny,” she wrote, “How silly we are as kids.”
You’d think I’d be mad, or at least threatened by all this nostalgia. But I wasn’t. For a split second at least, my husband was less familiar to me, and I mean that in a good way.
Wouldn’t this story have been more interesting if the husband had turned out to have been some misogynist dick or something? And people were friending him just to tell him to fuck off, finally? Instead, she learns that he was like, totally hawt and cool and all the girls loved him. Is she experiencing nostalgia, or straight-up regression?
Going back to the governance issue and its material genesis, it is necessary to understand what making the mechanism of financialization work in the function of social production means. Like governance, the government of financialization is open to a series of antagonisms the solution of which is not so much strictly economic as political. – Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism
Or rather, rhetorical. CNBC has been in the news a lot lately. Interestingly, the attention is starting to turn on the network itself. This sort of attention is always bad for propagandists; as soon as their position is denaturalized, the game is essentially up. The latest blow-up stems from Friedmanite propagandist Rick Santelli’s absurdist reverse rabble-rousing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, an event that is turning out to be much more planned than it had at first appeared. But that’s really just the most visible form of the network’s general purpose, which is not so much to present so-called “financial news” as it is to argue for Friedmanite free markets 24 hours a day. Just a house organ of an exploiter class. So Maria Bartiromo is now qualifying her rhetorical performances by noting that she is not interested in politics, but markets, as if the two are completely unrelated. That this is the core of the CNBC argument in the first place should be obvious enough. That this ultimately political conceit is more and more exposed as the politics swings away from the CNBC position is also obvious.
So I wanted to imagine what CNBC would look like if it took a different position, say, The Leninist Economics Network (TLEN). Imagine if there was a network that had twenty or thirty anchors and shows doing Leninist economic critique 24 hours a day. All the anchors would be essentially state socialists of the Leninist variety, say Ernest Mandel style analyses of production and labor, all day long. They all agree on the basic Marxist principles, and perhaps have minor disagreements on this or that “scientific” point (say, two versions of the falling rate of profit, or something like that); these disagreements develop into “debates” or “controversies” that play out on the various shows in happy banter, but none of the anchors take them particularly seriously, since the axiom holds regardless. Maybe they have a kind of kooky Leninist Jim Cramer, who discourses sarcastically with a bust of Milton Friedman while beating a copy of Capitalism and Freedom with his shoe (Cramer famously pretends to understand Leninism for having putatively read What is to Be Done?, and sports a bust of Lenin on his set). The shows have names like “Vanguard,” “The Lunch Pail,” “The New Imperialism” (their globalization show), and “Trends in Constant Capital” (their tech round-up). One of their anchors is The Labor Babe. She claims to be interested not in politics, a word she utters with a sneer, but in the extraction of surplus value. Does it sound ridiculous? It is no more ridiculous than what is happening on CNBC all day, every day. And no less discredited. One would imagine that a network spouting state socialist themes all day would be ludicrous, of course, given the general trajectory of Soviet style socialism. But the Friedmanite position is as abject a failure in practice as is the Stalinist.
This is why CNBC looks like an increasingly dubious proposition, and its various well-paid spokespersons seem increasingly unhinged as they carry water for not only failed businesses, but an ultimately failed philosophy. Turn it on at any hour of the day, and you will find some besuited clown hem-hawing that the “current situation” (which is to say, the crisis of their very social formation and privilege, the crisis in value itself) might lead to “excess regulations.” It’s a constant refrain, like the clicking of some background lever that runs the whole machinery of the network. Like these Reaganists have any credibility to speak on the matter? It’s not surprising that they would grow increasingly shrill as their program for society exposes itself as catastrophe and failure. But what may really be at stake is a form of capitalist rhetoric being exposed as rhetoric. What Bartiromo, like the Leninists before her, really insisted on was the “scientific” character of her analyses. Once it opens up to a broader series of antagonisms, she and her cohort may actually have to contest with others for their vision of a market, even at the definitional level.
2. House of Cards - In the New York Times on Friday, this article, titled “Propping Up a House of Cards,” on the continuing saga at American International Group. Caught in the center of the storm, AIG is the poster boy for systemic risk, and for good reason. The entire business strategy at AIG seems to have been one of gaming the ratings agencies and the regulatory arms (both with tacit approval, of course) by essentially distributing their once unassailable AAA bond rating to MBS junk. They called this ratings and regulatory arbitrage, both excellent financial terms for completely mystifying risk. Nocera notes the following:
If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.
One would think that it takes some doing to collapse a structure that’s been in place since the mid-1500′s (imagine, for example, if the fundamental theses of modern science took a header in a six-month period), but leave it to the rampant idiocy of the corporate lawyers and investment bankers to make a run at such an ambitious project. Nocera again: “Other firms used many of the same shady techniques as A.I.G., but none did them on such a broad scale and with such utter recklessness.” Here’s how the deals worked. AIG was solid as all get-out as an insurance concern, so the ratings agencies graced them with AAA, which makes borrowing cheaper and generally comforts investors. The idea is that there’s no way in hell you can default. So AIG started handing this rating out for fees by “insuring” what were essentially junk, high risk securities. Since they were insured by AIG, they subsequently earned the AIG rating (or at least improved what would be their own rating), and ta-da!, junk is transformed into gold by the pure alchemy of financial shenanigans. They were truly polishing turds over there. As a second consequence, banks were able – under the delusional “self-regulatory” regimes devised by the imbecile Reaganites and their cohort – to assess their own risk based on the safety of their securities. Since all this junk they were buying on leverage was “insured” by AIG (which, incidentally, didn’t bother to keep reserves for default events, since these credit default swaps were pure fees, and no risk!), the banks could construct completely nonsensical, but cheerily optimistic, balance sheets. Call it postmodern accounting. When people ask “Where did all the money go?,” this is the answer: There was no money. The creation of wealth for the last 10 years or so was largely illusory, a theoretical operation. Of course, it always is, but sensible people manage to keep the social contract of invented value within the stratosphere. Once you breach that barrier, as these clowns did, you’re in lala land, and there’s no air up there.
Needless to say, these uber-capitalists now need another block of cheese from Uncle Sugar, and here they come for it. There’s not a lot more comical than the CPAC conference goers yelling about “socialism” for a few days, followed by AIG coming hat in hand to the big bad government for hand-outs, lest the “entire Western banking system” collapse. Some Reaganite numbskull was at CPAC intoning that Obama was “the best salesman for socialism” – a statement that sent the requisite chills down the spines of the utterly out-of-touch attendees. Clearly, he’s wrong. The best salesman for socialism has always been capitalism itself. In any case, the so-called fiscal conservatives who invented all this bullshit can now pretend in public (at both CNBC and CPAC) that they just want the market to play itself out, since they know damn well that no government in its right mind will allow that to happen, and, in fact, they don’t want it to happen either. In an op-ed today meant to forecast the length of the recession, titled (appropriately enough) “The Long Goodbye,” economist A.Michael Spence notes the following in support of his thesis that the recovery will be drawn out:
Global growth is approaching zero, and the economies of all the advanced countries are likely to shrink in 2009. The prices of stocks and real estate continue to fall, and thus it will take more time for consumers and companies to pay off debt.
These factors have led to, first, reduced consumption and then declining investment and employment. This has lowered sales, profits, credit quality and, completing the loop, asset values. This interacting spiral is what makes this recession exceptional.
Governments and central banks are the only major sources of credit, liquidity and incremental demand — private capital and sovereign wealth funds, having experienced losses, are largely sidelined. [...]
Everyone knows this, however much the conservatives want to still proclaim their fantasies of markets. So, a long goodbye, but what are we saying goodbye to?
3. Houses in Ghost Towns
Here’s the man with teeth like God’s shoeshine
He sparkles, shimmers, shines
Let’s all have another Orange Julius
Thick syrup standing in lines
The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns
Well so long, farewell, goodbye – Modest Mouse
This article describes the plight of the Elks Grove Promenade project, a mall planned for suburban Sacramento. Its construction, which has been stopped for months, was put on “indefinite” suspension Friday by its owners, General Growth Properties (GGP):
The mall site is a freshly paved ghost town these days. Tall chain-link fencing surrounds deserted buildings lacking the finishing touches to cover their yellow-and-gray construction materials. Blinking traffic lights greet the few travelers who drive by.
As the article goes on the discuss, an entire town incorporated behind the idea that this mall would be completed and serve as a kind of town center. Now it’s just half-completed shells and empty parking lots. You know who I’d like to hear from about stuff like this? My good friend who is probably Texas’ current leading expert on the concept and history of the suburbs. When alternative-heads and other Lefties were generally falling into the trap (like the Modest Mouse song, to some extent) of replaying the same tired critiques of the suburbs that have been with us since William Whyte (that is, since the suburbs have), this guy was thinking through the suburbs as a positive phenomena. That doesn’t mean valorized, but asking what they do rather than bemoaning how they don’t do other things. But this brings me back to the same point. The crisis does seem to follow the predictable pattern of observers returning to something like a “real economy,” with the concomitant return to a discussion of limits – where your suburban McMansions would be the chief excess, along with these newly incorporated communities and their mall centers. This is certainly the theme of the Lefty blogs. Now, it should go without saying that the crisis seems to have little to do in either its origin or operation with a “real economy” as distinct from putatively “speculative” (that is, unreal) finance capital. If anything, it shows us in the clearest way possible that such distinctions are poorly constructed for contemporary analysis. But I think the status of the suburbs is where the thing comes to a head.
It’s never been a Wall Street – Main Street problem, because there is no Main Street anymore. It’s a Wall Street – Teaberry Ridge problem, or whatever these lunatic developers were naming their cul-de-sacs during the Bush Years. Elk Fucking Grove. Come on, now. But that would seem to be the point of intersection , since the suburbs are nothing but symbolic capital in bodily form to begin with, and more so as the home shifted its accent as commodity from the disciplinary space of the family toward the investment vehicle side. If anything, the credit default swap is more real than the abandoned shell of the Elk Grove Promenade, and the whole community thus exposes itself as the actual speculative economy. They were, after all, in their so-called “real” economic behavior, investing in GGP, JC Penny’s, and Orange Julius as surely as were the traders in their exchange smocks. That these communities did so through houses and pot lucks and Little league teams rather than with equity and debt securities only intensifies the affective and bodily tilt toward speculation. They didn’t “buy” shares. They literally were the shares in both their real social location and ghostly physical existence. But now I guess a specter is haunting Elk Grove, or at least the Promenade…
Poor Hank Paulson. That’s the lesson we are to take away from the Frontline special on the meltdown that was so hyped even I bought into it here. (Don’t be fooled: I buy into 70% of That-Which-Is-Hyped). But sheesh. The doc set up a conflict between systemic risk and moral hazard, which were apparently the code words for Keynesian and Friedmanite responses to the financial crisis, where systemic risk required government intervention, while moral hazard resists seemingly incentivizing bad actors by removing the punishment for their bad behavior. Tra la la. These categories are typical enough, I suppose, and the way they played out in the doc was more typical still, with a fairly detailed discussion and definition of moral hazard, but only the vaguest notion of sudden, unforeseen “interconnection” between the big banks as a pseudo-explanation for systemic risk. The result is predictable enough: a notion of market actors comes through clear as day, while the systemic dynamics of finance capital are relegated to the hazy background of near total mystification. Would that any of us could understand such things! Silly me thought it was the purpose of the documentary to do just such explaining. Instead, the whole thing turns into some weird passion play around the yellow-toothed personage of Hank Paulson, caught in the grips of a struggle between his Free Market God and damnable exigencies of the crisis. Despite the bad effects, I must admit that it was funny to re-live the moment (hilarious at the time) when Paulson is forced to nationalize Fannie and Freddie, then returns to the Friedmanite fold long enough to send Lehman Brothers to hell, only to have to reclaim the mantle of the apostate by saving the sorry default swapped asses of AIG. Oh, the sorrows of Hank Paulson! I remember a conversation I had with a friend some years ago in which I derided all war movies for being too personalized. He’d name a movie and I’d say, no, no! No fucking characters! A real war movie would have characters at the large unit level, the company and battalion level, and would show flashes, movement: hammer and anvil sweeps in the Mekong Delta, not little morality plays about individual soldiers and their two fathers (yes, Oliver Stone only ever made one movie, which involves a guy choosing between his two fathers: Catholicism never gives up). No characters! It is the anti-Private Ryan, I said, where the trajectory of that film takes you from the utterly anonymous large unit level (undoubtedly the best part of the film as a war film), down and down until we learn Tom Hanks’ back story, and finally, with Matt Damon in the rubble, we reach the individual, the character. No. Not a good war movie, I said, except the first two minutes. I want the anti-Ken Burns style, where everybody gets to confess: I was there, and this is what happened. No! None of that. No characters. No personalities. Try, for once, to do pathos without the individual. Can we try? My friend said, sensibly, “But then it wouldn’t be a story.” Maybe not. Maybe that’s a good thing. And I’d apply the same logic to Inside the Meltdown. No goddamn characters! I don’t want to see a silly movie about Hank Paulson choosing between his two fathers, tortured by his choice. I would rather have watched a simulation of the money transfers flickering on screens in Luxembourg clearing houses, anonymous traders, the flow of documents through Lehman, through Goldman. No. We get stories about Hank Paulson and his personal struggle with his faith. Pointless.
First Story: You’re getting off the bus with your friend K. at Main Street Flushing. Your friend goes to one of the local Catholic high schools, where he’s developed some beef with a group of kids, call them XYZ. They don’t know you, and they really have no problem with you, but they’re looking for K. off school grounds, and if they see him, he can pretty much count on an ass kicking. So you’re stepping off the bus, and talking, but you don’t notice eight or nine XYZ kids hanging out in the doorway of the old Alexander’s, right where you’re getting off. You see them too late, after you’ve already disembarked. And they see you. Your friend tells you to jet. It’s fairly crowded, so you could walk away easily, just blend in. So K. says “Walk, dude.” He knows it’s coming down on him, but why should you get it, too? You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. And then they’re on you.
* * *
It’s really a simple principle: You don’t leave your friend hanging out to dry. Now, the whole history of ethics, from Aristotle to Spinoza to Kant to Levinas to Irigaray to Peter Singer could be considered a set of variations on this theme, with the major disputes really involving definitional arguments about what constitutes “the friend,” and when and to what extent the friend can be said to have been left hanging out to dry. Certainly, the gang version of the friend and the stranger is the narrowest sort of definition: it mirrors the definitions of the State form almost exactly, but in miniature (everybody learns from the State form). As Nas once said, “Brothers on the block posted up like they own it/ That’s they corner, from New York to California…” So that’s a dead end definitionally speaking, but it teaches you something in practice that is as important as the definitional cues. It teaches you that the definitions stage a formal system that, at best, trains you in a particular mode of “decision.” Some people consider decision to be the essence of ethics, and this is the version that gets trafficked in all the ethical culture industry products of late, which I wrote about elsewhere. What I like about Kant – and this is what Adorno adores about Kant as well, though it infuriates him (see The Problem of Moral Philosophy lectures) – is the notion of the imperative. How do you square the imperative with the decision? This is a hanging out to dry question; the friend is, of course, universal for Kant – not your boys on the corner, but everyone in a formal sense. But it’s what you feel in practice, regardless of circumstance, the moment when you can either walk away or stand, but you can’t really walk away either, even though you can. That’s why Kant says, basically, consequences be damned.
I think people completely misunderstand Aristotle when they fetishize the Golden Mean, some half-assed compromise between walking away and standing, where the first is cowardly, and the second is foolhardy, while some laudable middle path makes up “courage” (what would that compromise be in our case?). It sounds like the description of somebody who’s never felt the force of the imperative, and it usually is. Another reading would say that this “middle path” is nothing but Aristotle registering the idea that you can walk away, but you can’t walk away – a problem of the excluded middle in a formal system that requires non-contradiction. How else to stage the imperative for Aristotle? Invent the middle. It doesn’t exist, of course: the middle participates in both the foolhardy and the cowardly; it involves both, in the technical sense. (Nobody is better at playing this out than Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam stories: everybody learns from the State form).
You can walk away or you can stand, but you can’t walk away. That’s an imperative. And as I see more in life, I see it as an imperative that some have the capacity to sense, and some do not. The problem with the whole discourse of “decision” is that it establishes equivalence, as if everybody feels the situation the same way, and it’s merely a matter of hashing out the “right” decision. I don’t think that’s it. I think you either have the capacity to sense that imperative or you don’t. Where something like ontology meets the everyday, maybe average everydayness even, that point of contact, you either feel that imperative, or you don’t. It has very little to do with decision, and this is what Kant is all torn up about in the second critique. Capacity. We don’t even know what a body can do.
Second Story: That you can feel it doesn’t mean that you can always live up to it. We were cruising around one day, Joe, Sulli, and me. We passed by a big group, maybe 50 kids, up on Francis Lewis. They were guys from The Next Neighborhood Over (TNNO), not particularly friendly, but not enemies. Well, not really. I had a little bit of beef going on with one of them – we’ll call him J. – over some blackbook stuff, nothing major, but you never know how these things develop. But Sulli was dating C., whose sister M. was dating Frank, one of the TNNO guys. And there was Frank and M. out near the curb, so Sulli said “Pull over. I wanna talk to Frank about something.” It’s never a good idea to be three guys walking into a group of 50, especially when there’s some minor blackbook beef going on and it’s 11pm and everybody’s been drinking. “I dunno,” I said. Sulli says “Don’t worry about it,” so I don’t. But, of course, after being there 5 minutes, J.’s friends call me over and they’re all like “You gotta problem with my boy?” blah blah, the usual. So we’re about to get beat down, I figure. But Sulli and Frank step in and try to squash stuff and put me back in the car, and I’m keeping my mouth shut for once because there’s 50 of them, and three of us.
A week later, two of the TNNO guys come by the park where we’re hanging out, and they’re basically talking shit because they thought they got the better of us that night on Francis Lewis, so Sulli tells them in no uncertain terms to beat sand if they want to walk away at all, and suddenly Sulli’s up off the bench he’d been sitting on, and the air gets all silent, and other guys are up off benches and walking towards these two, walking without swinging their arms, which is always the sign, the tense-up, the coil. They get the message, and head back toward their car, but they didn’t take it too kindly. You just knew they were coming back with numbers. But our own numbers dwindled through the night, until there were maybe 12 of us left. I walk away, probably to take a piss or something, and that’s when you see them. About 40 TNNO guys coming up the block on the double, roll up time. What do I do? I’m at a distance from the group. I fucking split. I ditched. Took off. You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. When I come back, I see Sulli ended up taking a beating, as did four or five other guys. My friends. Who I ditched. Who I stood with every other time, consequences be damned, but not that night. It turns out, J. was walking around with a crowbar asking everybody “Where’s topspun?” So I would have caught a bad one if I stayed. Utilitarian calculus tells me I made a good “decision,” since I didn’t get my head bashed in. But that shit has haunted me since then. You don’t leave your friends hanging out to fucking dry. It’s a simple principle, and hard to live. But it shouldn’t be hard to feel.
* * *
So, how does this cash out now? Now that I can walk into my office filled with books, and I’m supposedd to have forgotten about the guys walking around with crowbars, or the brawls on Main Street, Flushing. I see a dim shadow of this principle circulating as the professional creed of “collegiality,” which is apparently all the rage these days. I should be clear that I’m not speaking here about anyone at current Employer Institution. I’m speaking in general terms about this famous “collegiality.” A more piss-poor version of an ethics would be hard to develop. And indeed, in my experience I’ve found that the high priests of collegiality in any institution are usually the ones who will leave you hanging out to dry at the first opportunity. Conversely, the people I’ve met who seem to be most intellectually “aggressive” suddenly appear there standing with you when they could just as easily have left you hanging out to dry. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. So this “collegiality” strikes me as essentially cynicism with a happy face, the discourse of the one who not only walks away, but feels no imperative to stand – a justification for that set of capacities that cannot feel the imperative. It is, of course, pretention to say that everything you needed to know about X you learned at Y. And the examples here are hyper-masculinized, to be sure. But this collegiality business doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something utterly reactive about it.
The spiralling financial crisis hit another benchmark today, as evidenced by the panic of the Lehman Brothers collapse. There’s a very good story in the New York Times detailing the “fear” on Wall Street today – a Sunday. This morning, she showed me a wedding announcement in the Times; the groom’s father was a managing director at Lehman. We hypothesized that perhaps the impending bankruptcy of the fourth largest investment bank may put a damper on the joyous event. Quelle dommage.
Fear and greed are the stuff that Wall Street is made of. But inside the great banking houses, those high temples of capitalism, fear came to the fore this weekend.
As Lehman Brothers, one of oldest names on Wall Street, appeared to unravel on Sunday, anxiety over the bank’s fate — and over what might happen next — gripped the nation’s financial industry. By late afternoon, Merrill Lynch, under mounting pressure, entered into talks to sell itself to Bank of America.
Dinner parties were canceled. Weekend getaways were postponed. All of Wall Street, it seemed, was on high alert.
In skyscrapers across Manhattan, banking executives were holed up inside their headquarters, within cocoons of soft rugs and wood-paneled walls, desperately trying to assess their company’s exposure to the stricken Lehman. It was, by all accounts, a day unlike anything Wall Street had ever seen.
Sounds like a lot of fun. I remember working on election day, 2000. We were closing a deal for Allegheny Power, some selling off of generation assets and releasing of transmission assets under a bond, I don’t really remember the details. It all seemed vaguely pomo to me, that you would get rid of the energy production business and get into the energy movement business. In any case, we were in the conference room and on the phone with the in-house lawyer for Allegheny, and the lawyer I was working with asked “So, who do you like for the election?” The Allegheny guy said “Well, I guess Bush would be good for us in the medium short-term as far as dereg, but…” And then he stopped. The lawyer on our side (a good friend of mine still) just laughed. Yeah, he said. I know. We shook our heads, and could practically hear the Allegheny guy shaking his. And so here you have it. Bear Stearns, vanished. Lehman poised for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch peddling itself to any taker whatsoever, desperate to fend off the short sellers. What a monumental mess.
But I think back to election day 2000, the World Trade Center still standing less than a quarter mile behind me, doomed the moment later that night when NBC took Florida out of the Gore column, and our view of New York harbor from the conference room, and the lawyer for Allegheny Energy who knew, but couldn’t say, that a Bush-Cheney administration was a deeply, deeply stupid idea. I often say that the American people – whatever that is – got it right that day. Yes, we often forget, but they did get it right, by 500,000 votes. Bush received fewer votes than Gore by a long shot; there’s something striking and fundamentally appropriate about that, something that usually goes unsaid. It kind of hangs in the air with each disaster that has afflicted us since then. People rejected the cruelty and instability of the Bush-Cheney program that day. It’s often forgotten, and bears repeating. But now I also think of all the neo-cons, free marketers, and Friedmanites at Bear and at Lehman who no doubt thought the same: good for us in the medium short-term. Well, the medium short-term is over, and I hope they relished it.
It’s true that schadenfreude is an unattractive posture, especially when the financial services industry is a route to the middle class for many of the people I grew up with, for so many in the Outer Boroughs and the poor neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles. Yes. And as we well know here at Seven Red. It ain’t all fat cats and neo-cons. Like all groups, it is made up mostly of the decent. So schadenfreude is usually unattractive, sure. But only usually. Sometimes, it’s all that’s left.
On edit: The “guy” who was getting married this weekend was not just any guy, but Theodore Roosevelt V (that is, the fifth). His dad, Theodore Roosevelt IV, is the managing director at Lehman.
When Seven Red lived in San Francisco, I worked as a fraud investigator for P——- Bank, a credit card company. It wasn’t as CSI as it sounds. I basically went to work everyday, where I found a list of about 300 flagged accounts. The accounts had been flagged for a variety of reasons, but it was mostly third party checks and strange large payments on maxed out new accounts. My job was primarily to prevent check kiting, so I would go through the list, calling banks and sometimes the customer or check writer to make sure that the checks were authorized and drew on sufficient funds. About 80% of the checks were fine, somebody’s mother-in-law paying off a large balance, and that sort of thing. It was the other 20% – the fraud cases – that made the job fun.
Of the 20% fraud cases, most were professional check kiters. They committed credit card fraud for a living. These people were ghosts. They would apply for an account under a fake name, run up the balance to the maximum, pay that off with a bad check (usually a stolen “convenience” check either grabbed out of a mailbag or bought on the black market), run up the balance again, and rinse and repeat until the account was shut down. They used post office boxes or Mailboxes Etc, and tried to mask those as apartment buildings. They had cloned cell phones that could not be connected to them personally. They essentially didn’t exist except as accounts. My job wasn’t to “catch” anybody. Rather, I was just there to stop the bleeding on these fraud accounts.I actually enjoyed dealing with the professional kiters, because there was never any bullshit. Sure, they’d try to talk you into accepting the bad check so they could kite the account one more time, but usually they just accepted that that account was dead. Since most of these people had multiple fraud accounts circulating in various banks, they weren’t too concerned when one dried up. It was a volume operation. I even had one guy tell me straight out, “OK, I guess you closed this one. I’ll hit you guys up for another couple thousand next month.” I replied, “Alright, man. Talk to you then.” I admired these guys. They were professionals, and, in a way, so was I. It was a game, and I enjoyed playing it. Needless to say, I didn’t give a good goddamn about P——- Bank or its fraud losses, but the puzzle solving and “competitiveness” aspect of the job meant that I ended up doing well, and stopping a lot of fraud accounts.
One of my favorite stories. When I was a teenager, I had various reasons for wanting to be out all night, as my readers are well aware. I was not, however, allowed to stay out all night. That was a problem. So, we all used to game our parents by telling them that we would be staying at so-and-so’s house that night. Like most parents, my folks insisted that I leave a phone number if I was staying at so-and-so’s house for the night. That’s where the fun starts. In the 718 area code (for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx), there exists some glitch in the phone system. If you dial any real exchange (the first three numbers), and follow that up with the numbers 9970, you get a busy signal. It still works. I just tried. So, for example, 718-539-9970 uses a real exchange (539), and it gets a busy signal. Ditto 359, another real exchange. Go ahead and try it. It will be busy every time. You can, of course, see where this is going. We all used to provide our parents with a phone number of this sort. If they tried to call to verify or location, oops, busy. This was a very useful information tool when you wanted to be out in the city at all hours of the night and up to no fucking good.
So, here I am in San Francisco checking out yet another fraud account, and I look at the address (I always looked at the address first, since Miami, Brooklyn, and Detroit addresses were high prevalence for fraud at the time, and I knew all the Mailboxes Etc locations in those areas). Hey, wattaya know! This guy is listed as living just two blocks from where I grew up in Queens. Huh, here I am all the way across the country, etc. Then I see the phone number listed for the account: 718-461-9970. 9970, I think. No fucking way. That’s a fraud account. Imagine the bad luck of this fraudster to run into me as a fraud checker in San Francisco! I even got to talk to this stooge on his cell phone (cloned), and advised him that I was wise to the trick. He was impressed, but the guy was a pro: talk to you again next month. Maybe, but not with this trick, pal. His account got blocked, and I advised my manager about the old 9970 trick. When they ran a check, they found 32 live accounts using the same dirty home phone. I didn’t get a bonus, but, as you can see, it was kinda a fun job that way.
So now to the small minority of the amateur fraudsters, maybe 5-7% of total. These people I despised. They were uniformly stupid, and always left some trail that led directly back to them, personally. Their stories were often tawdry, kids stealing from their parents or grandparents. People ripping off their employers. One woman worked in the mailroom of a hospital, and tried to kite her account with a check she took right out of the mail in her own station. She literally crossed out the hospital’s name on the PAY TO line, wrote in P——– Bank, and sent it to us. Third party check, instantly flagged and just as instantly confirmed as fraud when I contacted the account holder and the original payee. This woman used her own real name on her account, so the hospital identified her immediately. It was pathetic, and she went to jail, and I don’t like sending people to jail. I truly hated these fuckers, because they were really bad and really transparent. When you got them on the phone – and you always did – they would spew the worst lies and continue with them even in the face of contrary evidence, which I always took as a personal insult to my intelligence. They’d delay you and dodge you, meaning that their obvious fraud accounts would stay on my daily list of 300 flagged accounts until I could make a solid determination, increasing my work for the day. They made me so mad that I would make it my mission each day to be as rude to them as possible – a posture that was certainly encouraged by management. If you’re going to be a criminal, at least be good at what you do.
Why this long post on my old fraud days? That’s the read I get off this Sarah Palin knucklehead. She’s like a bad fraudster, distasteful and the worst sort of liar. She’s caught out there again and again with her ridiculous lies, and yet keeps on with them, insisting against all reason that the lie holds. It actually makes you respect the form of fraud committed by Bush and Cheney, who are at least good at their lies, like our professional fraudsters at P——- Bank. But this Palin? It’s strictly amateur hour with Palin. Atrios noted earlier this week that repeating the lies in the most obvious way is not a bug but a feature of the Palin candidacy. It’s meant to piss you off, and energizes the GOP base whenever liberals or lefties yelp in outrage over the boldness of her lies. That’s probably right. But still. Could such a cheap seat fraud succeed?
One case I’ll never forget. A secretary was robbing an old dentist in Alabama. She had established two credit card accounts, one at P—— Bank and one at MBNA, and she was just charging the shit out of them, paying each off with the other (MBNA was notorious for accepting all convenience check charges, regardless of obvious illegitimacy). Moreover, it turns out she was in cahoots with the dentist’s wife. That meant that we couldn’t reach the dentist himself either at home or at the office, since the secretary and the wife would block our access to him, knowing full well that he had no clue these accounts even existed in his name. Pure amateur hour fraud. She even had it set up so that the alternate number, supposedly to an accountant, led to another line on her desk. She would literally pretend to be the accountant on that line, though it was obviously her. I remember that she used to say “You betcha!” a lot. You betcha this. You betcha that. It made me furious. Funny story. I had another investigator across from me call the accountant’s line while I was on the phone with the secretary. She was sitting there putting us each on hold to talk to the other. So, she would talk to me as the secretary, then put me on hold, and talk to my colleague as the accountant. Back and forth, back and forth. Then we sprung the trap. I exchanged phones with my colleague in the middle of a hold. She thought she had confused the lines, so the “accountant” started talking to me as the secretary, and my colleague as the “accountant.” What a fucking joke she was. But the “dentist” kept paying the minimum on the MBNA account, and they kept paying us, and we had no confirmation, so we couldn’t close his account.
Finally, after two weeks of this (most cases were closed in two days or less), I managed to get the dentist on the line. He refused to believe that his sweet secretary would try to rob him. I faxed him evidence, I explained the whole fraud in detail, I went over it with him again and again. We got the fraud department at MBNA on the line and they confirmed it as well. He was ten grand in the hole to both banks behind this fraud. He refused to believe it. I faxed this guy checks in his name to an account he didn’t know existed, and he refused to believe it. My manager, equally enraged by this fraud, told him that he either pay the balance in full or press charges against the secretary. He opted to pay the balance. I went out and got drunk. We closed the account down that day.
Could such a cheap fraud succeed? Yes. You betcha.
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