In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Amazon’s Kindle 2 has more of an Apple iPod feel to it. Found on MobileRead.com

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

In a mashup culture all manner of digital and graphic goodies get mashed. Mashup artists run along a tightrope that is pinned at one end by copyright law and the other by fair use doctrines. There is no safety net not even under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA]. If a copyright holder feels her work has been infringed then out go the takedown letters followed by legal action if the perp doesn’t roll over and submit. See the news about Muxtape being taken down by the RIAA.

Given the RIAA’s jackboot tactics it is heartening to hear that Jim Davis the creator of the popular comic strip Garfield did not automatically send out cease and desist letters to Dan Walsh who created a knock off of the strip called Garfield Minus Garfield. As Walsh has posted in his site’s header “Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

So what did Jim Davis of Garfield fame do? Not only did he embrace the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield but he reached out to Dan Walsh and together they have signed a book deal.

Epic. RIAA, record labels and artists please wise up. [Thanks to Otis for the heads up.]

Related Post: Mashups, Girl Talk and Me

I’ve been a proponent of the Long Tail theory since stumbling upon Chris Anderson’s blog of the same name. Reading the book affirmed some thoughts I’d had about how certain niche products found a life online that they most certainly would not have found in a regular bricks and mortar retail outlet.

Granted, because of my background in online music distribution the theory immediately appealed to me. I saw it as an idea that would help unlock the gatekeepers stranglehold over the discovery of music either as CDs or legal music files. Those gatekeepers being terrestrial radio, the record companies and online music retailers such as iTunes who wrapped their music files with DRM.

A simple explanation of the Long Tail theory is that the internet gives us unparalleled access to more products across the “tail” and doesn’t just expose us to those mass products at the “head.” It suggests that people are willing to search and pull a song from say, Tortoise, an alternative music outfit that sells modestly, rather than sit back and be bombarded by iTunes trying to sell them, or push, a song from Coldplay. As the theory goes, Tortoise could make a living selling its music vertically in its slice of the tail.

Like any good theory it is open to question and discussion. This is where Anita Elberse steps in with her article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Should You Invest in The Long Tail?’ Meanwhile Chris Anderson has been gracious enough to accept the challenge to his theory by responding to it on his blog.

I need to spend time with the article as it is not only lengthy but includes a lot of data and links to sources, as well as concluding with advice to different businesses on how or not to include the Long Tail in their marketing efforts. Anderson’s responses will take some digestion too. Perspective and insight is required before comment. That’s why it’s frustrating to me that people like Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal’s Portals column has jumped in gleefully accusing Wired magazine [where Chris Anderson is Editor-In-Chief] of having a “template” where they “take a partly true, modestly interesting, tech-friendly idea and puff it up to Second Coming proportions.”

Gomes is of course allowed his opinion of Wired magazine articles but I wonder if he has really had time to read and digest Elberse’s paper as well as study Anderson’s responses. It’s also odd that he blames bloggers for “talking up the theory, which is no wonder considering how it held out the promise that even the most obscure among them could win a robust audience.” As a columnist for the WSJ he has been happily debunking the Long Tail theory since it inception as he did in this article from July 2006. Is he more fearful of the Long Tail theory or of the bloggers who may gain audience share along the tail away from the WSJ head?

Whatever the outcome of the debate between Elberse and Anderson I doubt that there will be immediate agreement on the benefits or not of the Long Tail. One things for sure, it is way too soon to be joyfully jumping upon its supposed grave.

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

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