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| Think Different |
One thing to understand about the rise of consumer-behavior-as-totalizing-definition-of-self is that people know, intuitively, that these definitions are weak; the fact that consumptive choices can be and are mimicked by thousands or millions of others erodes the potential for these choices to create distinctions between people. What's more, because the alternative choices are material and obvious (literally advertised), the paradox of choice that attends us when we buy toothpaste or socks becomes an omnipresent fear that the various bric-a-brac we have assembled as a stand-in for personality are imperfect or inferior to possible alternatives. The widespread tendency to treat personality formation as an act of collage, the stapling together of various consumptive choices into a kind of character quilt, interfaces easily with the material and social conditions of late capitalism. But the fabric is thin.
I've said for some times that more form factors are an inevitability in tech, that the iterative consumption of a new phone every two years, a new laptop every three, a new television every five, etc., cannot possibly sate the revenue demands of the world's largest tech firms. Instead, they must constantly push out into more and more product categories. In order to do so, they must create demand out of whole cloth; the antique notion of "see a need, fill a need" is far too passive. Need can be and is created. This was most obvious in the sudden rise of the tablet. If you're like me, you have many friends who started out being deeply skeptical or even mocking towards the concept of a tablet, once it became clear they were coming to market, who nevertheless ended up at the Apple store waiting for the first generation iPad. And, indeed, it is not unusual for the affluent to own an HDTV, desktop computer, laptop computer, tablet, ereader, and smartphone, despite the claims of many of them to be "all in one." More, of course, are coming. Enter the smartwatch.
Now, it's at the confluence of my first paragraph and my second that comes one of the odder, sadder facets of the internet and its tendency to act as an apparatus for revealing our anxieties to each other. The internet is a network that has the capacity to show us nearly limitless human diversity that is often used to undermine the legitimacy of alternative choice. You will take my word for it that you never need to go far to find someone on the internet claiming that their particular consumptive choices are necessarily better than those of others, particularly when it comes to media. Pick around Amazon, or Pitchfork, or Yelp, or the AV Club, or similar, and you will find the notion of the inherent subjectivity of personal taste a quaint relic of a discarded age. People don't merely assert what they like, but the objective superiority of what they have chosen. "You're doing it wrong" is a meme for a reason; it expresses aggressive judgment of other ways, means, and choices, rather than an equivocal statement of what the individual prefers. The former offers defense of the self; the latter, mere respect for others. Taken to extremes, you get cultures like cosplay, which constantly traffic in self-aggrandizing ideas about how they are the most elevated form of liking things.
What people like must be a matter of rightness or wrongness, because in the context where human beings are nothing but what they purchase, disagreement signals not a minor conflict in subjective tastes but judgement of the individual's basic architecture.
So take this piece on Gizmodo by the whimsically named Mark Spoonauer: "Why You'll End Up Wearing a Smart Watch." This particular title is not an accident. What is to be argued here is not that there are relative merits to wearing a smartwatch which the reader might be convinced of, leading, if he or she has the means, to a purchase. Such a hands-off approach risks failure. Instead, the command is plain: you will buy this product. To entertain any other opinion would risk judging the consumptive choices of Mark Spoonauer, and as a tech writer, Spoonauer is almost certainly of that class of individuals whose consumptive choices are essentially the stitching of the person. There's a perturbed, twitchy quality to Spoonauer's piece; it's as if he is affronted that he even has to make the argument. I think that'll become more common. These people are tired of having to convince you to justify and validate their lives by aping their consumptive habits and would like it if you would please just get on with it. I would argue that real self-possession (and real relaxation) can only come from not letting other people's choices affect you in this way, but perhaps this is beyond the bounds of the possible.
Of course, the reason why demand has to be created for such a product is pretty plain: it is among the most colossally unnecessary objects for which coin has ever changed hands. Spoonauer knows that, they all know that. So while there is exhaustion in their effusive praise, there is also panic. To read tech writers advocating for the purchase of the latest useless gizmo is to be confronted with the tension between the absurd hyperbole of their words and the minimally useful nature of the products for which they wax effusive. So take Brian Ries here. As he strains to evoke the orgasmic power of wearing a little computer on his wrist, he focuses on... the time saved in removing his smartphone from his pocket. He is hardly alone in this focus, as you'll see if you read the many glowing considerations of the smartwatch that are out there. Quoth Brian, "You wouldn’t know the inconvenience of reading your text messages on the phone retrieved from your pocket until they pop up seamlessly on the device sitting coolly on your wrist." Well, I've just pulled my smartphone out five times, just to double check, and I'm gonna tell you... I feel like I do know the inconvenience of reading my text messages on a phone. Specifically, I know that there's no inconvenience at all.
I feel like we should appoint a counsel of Bangladeshi shipbreakers to examine the claims of any tech article and see if they can, in fact, believe the supposedly incredible changes being wrought by the latest jimjaw. Hard to imagine a headline and a subhead that do more to undermine each other; the headline reads, "The Smartwatch Revolution, or How the Pebble Changed My Life." The subhead promises that the article tells us "why he never needs to reach into his pocket to read a text message again." A revolution indeed! We should retire the word "revolution." It has reached its zenith.
Now, though the projection of your preferences onto others is rude, the crime is small, and the punishment baked in. That Brian Ries could actually say that his life has been changed by having a device that projects his text messages onto his wrist means that there's not a lot going on, emotionally, for Brian right now. And, so as not to be too harsh, it also indicates that Brian is generally a healthy, comfortable dude who wants for little. (The fact that Henry Blodget believes the iPhone to be the most important invention in history, when things like food refrigeration and water purification save millions of lives every day, reveals that Henry Blodget lives in the mental universe that could compel someone to think that way and amounts to its own punishment.)
What's more, with tech in particular, I merely continue to observe constantly repeated human nature: many of us become convinced, over and over again, that there is one missing element of our lives, and often it's a better phone or a new computer or our first tablet. We salivate over it, we wait for it, and it arrives, and for maybe a couple days we get the expected rush of endorphins as we play with it. And then, somehow, our lives are still just our lives-- hectic, harried, incomplete, vaguely dissatisfying. Then we decide we need a new product, or a new service (once I use Evernote I will be unstoppable!), and the cycle continues. And we never, ever learn. It just seems that the tech heads are the most likely to engage in unlikely flights of fancy about how cool their lives are going to be, and the most susceptible for falling for their own hype. Brian Ries's revolutionary, life-changing Pebble watch is a couple of months from being the slow pain in the ass that he feels obligated to wear and is tired of talking about.
I am of course whistling past the graveyard. While I flatter myself to believe that I have ethical and moral commitments that define my character in a way that transcends the consumptive, in the context of late capitalism there is precious little non-market context from which to observe this principled living. The power and profligacy of market-based living makes it very difficult to say where consumption choices end and moral choices begin. You can certainly say that my disdain for consumptive choices and what they signal is merely a negative expression of the same phenomenon. And I'd have a hard time disagreeing.
So who knows? Ask not for whom the smartwatch chimes, it chimes for thee. You will end up wearing a smartwatch. There is no resistance. Kneel before Zod.
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