Noise Filter

Swine Flu Fear (SFF) Now a Pandemic

2009-05-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Palo Alto (AP*) --- Invariably newspapers spread terrifying information that undermines the emotions. The Centers for Fear Control and Prevention (CFC) reported today that the number of confirmed cases of Swine Flu Fear (SFF) in the United States may have surpassed 100 million amid increasing global anxiety over a menace that authorities around the world are struggling to contain.

The increase is not surprising. SFF is highly contagious, and even a brief exposure to someone afflicted can produce the condition. For days, CFC officials have said they expected to see more confirmed cases and more severe forms. Officials across the country have stepped up efforts to look for cases, especially among people who had traveled to Mexico.

Already, SFF has led to school closings, store shutdowns, and travel restrictions. Economies are teetering as a result. Confirmed cases of swine that have died due to the fear pandemic have been reported in many countries, and the number is expected to swell dramatically.

Hospitals and hotlines have been flooded by people who fear they may have been exposed to or are suffering from symptoms of swine flu, which can mimic everyday conditions such as the common cold and seasonal allergies.

The world has no vaccine to prevent SFF. Prior exposure to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) fear does not appear to confer sufficient protection against swine flu fear. The SARS fear (SARSF) pandemic in 2003 failed to be contained and sent the continent of Asia into a momentary recession as schools closed, factories shut down, and travel came to a halt. In the recent avian flu panics, millions of chickens and other birds lost their lives in an attempt to treat human fears.

The cause of the SARS fear epidemic, the SARS virus, was purportedly implicated in the deaths of 774 people, which represents only about 2% of the approximately 36,000 people that die yearly from the common flu, which does not progress to a fear pandemic due to sufficient natural immunity.

CFC issued the statement, Swine flu fear may end up revealing more about the viral nature of memes than the viral nature of viruses in our interconnected world.

*Angst Press, (copyright) 2009

cost of not living here is higher than cost of living here

2007-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

email me at jyun@pa-investors.com if you have questions about this title for upcoming book

real estate squeeze

2007-04-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

we may be about to see an ugly real estate squeeze in the mid peninsula. not downwards, but upwards. experts have called a 50% price decline, 30% decline, 10% decline, flat, 10% gain. no one has predicted a >50% gain, which means this is the most likely scenario.

the inventory is miniscule. every smart person i know is waiting for prices to fall. which means the exact opposite is going to occur.

london has doubled in 6 months despite calls for pricing collapse. NY boom has started. there are signs everywhere that bay area prices are poised to make a historic run upwards.

headlines are focused on bubbles and subprimes, etc.

stealth tech boom

2007-04-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

2005 was 1995. 2006 was 1996. 2007 so far feels like 1997. we're in the middle of a tech boom. signs are everywhere. you can feel it in coffee houses and bbqs. you can see it in traffic. commercial real estate is tight.

the boom should be bigger and more durable than the last given experienced entrereneurs, memories of bust, and real business models. there are jobs everywhere.

the headlines remain negative to silent. we're in year 3 of a silent tech boom.

the hand that cradles the rock

2007-03-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

what word describes the feeling of being envied?

2007-01-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

Was interesting to hear a pitch onluxury furniture online catalog company. She says selling to wealthy is all about selling the exclusivity experience. It’s the same old furniture but how you shape the experience. Large premium on having what others can’t get.

Someone recently bought an Aston Martin. His favorite part of the car is that the parts have “made for John Doe” written on them. That is a low-cost, high-value way to sell the exclusivity experience. Nice margins.

What would be a good neologism for the counterparty of envy? It’s what the envied pursue. They want to have something others can’t have and thus will envy. What do you call the pursuit of something for the purpose of making others envious?

What word describes the feeling when one has something and someone else doesn’t have it? (whereas envy describes the feeling when someone else has something – be it a car, girlfriend, skill, feature --- and one doesn’t).

Once you define the word, you are ready to start a luxury-goods consumer franchise.

golden age of consumerism

2007-01-17T06:25:00.000-08:00

Basic Tenets of Consumerism
Consumerism is a supply-side phenomenon. Those who purchase are consumees. Envy is the basis of human consumerism, not greed. Proliferation of communication technologies has expanded distribution channels for fear, then envy. Sell fear or sense of inadequacy, juxtapose product that creates envy, then sell product. Product differentiation has enabled further confusion of the public and increased exploitation of envy. Globalization is enabling export of fear, then envy, then product.

Favorable trends for consumerism
1) increasing stress among the masses. Mass distribution of fear, inadequacy and desperation through social isolation, negative news, and adulation of the wealth class
2) wealth polarization: 20 years ago there was 1 billionaire in the fortune 400, now all 400 are billionaires. There is burgeoning wealth polarity throughout the world through maturation of finance, buffeted by common law which enables wealth hoarding. In the old world you could only keep what you could physically protect. Now lawyers and police help protect what you keep.
3) There is a fallacy that economic stress will keep a lid on consumerism, such as inflation, debt, oil prices. however, according to recent article by Ajay Kapur of Citigroup, 60% of consumption is done by top 20% in wealth while the bottom 20% only accounts for 3% of consumption. This is a massive change since even 15 years ago when the numbers were more like 35% and 10%. This is a tectonic shift in consumerism that few seem to have noticed. In other words, those that are sensitive to economic cycles (the bottom 20%) account for a negligible amount of consumption while those that are immune to economic cycles (wealthy 20%) do most of the consuming.

Thus, we are entering the golden age for consumerism, especially if you are dealing with products or services with real or perceived scarcity. Take a look at the price of any luxury item or collectible. It has been inflating the last 20 years much faster and CPI. Now we are globalizing all of these trends.

It all hinges on the definition of prosperity which ought to be “how one feels about oneself”. Once people are made to feel inadequate, and are given products to compensate, consumerism takes hold.

trade "deficit"?

2006-12-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

there is always fear-mongering about our trade deficit. that's the wrong question. even if we buy more goods from others than we sell, it is what you do with it that matters. we have a net trade deficit with China. however, we derive more value for goods we buy from china, than the value china creates with the cash we give them (which is basically to buy US treasuries at low yields, putting capital back in american hands who create far more value again with that cash).

again everyone is obsessed with what is measurable and ignore the intangile values.

US as the NY of the world

2006-12-30T20:37:00.000-08:00

others make our stuff and buy our stuff, while we do all the high value work such as R&D, marketing, design, and distribution. that's why the bulk of the profit stays here.

convenient lies

2006-12-30T20:26:00.000-08:00

global cooling
peak oil
market bubbles
rising tigers of the east
decline of the american empire

many are probably aware of our skepticism with "peak oil" theories. was the second conversation stephanie and i had in 2004 when she joined our firm. "peak oil" theory, like the oil industry itself, is a cyclical industry with a 10 to 20 year cycle time that leads to spasms of panic, self-righteous gas conversation movements, momentary infatuation with hideous electric vehicles, and doomsday scenarios. let's get some facts straight:

1) earth is awash in energy, through the one-time deposit by the sun to make the earth and the constant showering of energy. our planet is a reservoir for energy, waiting to be converted.

2) hydrocarbons are not made from dead dinosaurs. we are not using up dead biomass faster than biomass is dying and being compressed into hydrocarbon stores.

3) we have not tapped out on accessible stores of earths hydrocarbons. data that supports this view gets tons of air play during peak periods of "peak oil" fanaticism, and countering views get squashed.

4) gas conservation movement is one of emotional feel-good rather than actual do good, similar to recycling. it should be encouraged since it reflects the best of human intentions, but it is not obvious it acheives its end. the amount of gas saved driving a prius for one-year is less than the pro-rata portion of gas consumed by taking one extra cross country flight on a commercial jet per year.

5)amount of excess energy spent to develop, deliver, install, and maintain solar panels could offset it's savings. plus, this robs the earth of the increment of sunlight that would have been captured by the planet in some other way to provide energy in the future.

6) the highest value use of energy will be the powering of medical devices that allow humans to continue to function at a high level. specific example would be neurostimulators. information would be the second highest use.

7) i personally would welcome the end of the petroleum age, as it would eliminate the communication and transportation age. what would be left is a tribal society that is oriented around walkable communities, kindness, accountability, attention to people in front of you, better health related to increased walking. if only "peak oil" were true. sigh.....

global cooling

2006-12-22T16:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.john-daly.com/cooling.htm

I hate traveling commercial airlines

2006-12-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

image001.gif (GIF Image, 200x300 pixels)

In a handbasket.

2006-11-23T23:52:00.000-08:00

The pornification of America

From music to fashion to celebrity culture, mainstream entertainment reflects an X-rated attitude like never before

By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | January 24, 2006

Actors having real sex in art-house movies. Erstwhile child star Lindsay Lohan appearing barely clad on the cover of her new album. Teenage girls strolling down Main Street USA attired in ''Porn Star" T-shirts. A bikini-wearing Jessica Simpson bumping and grinding in the music video for ''These Boots Are Made for Walkin.' " College-age women flashing for the ''Girls Gone Wild" video series with nonchalant exhibitionism.

Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.

Even cooking shows on the Food Network -- the Food Network! -- contain distinct parallels with the cinematography, dialogue, and body language of pornography, according to an article wryly headlined ''Debbie Does Salad" in the October issue of Harper's magazine.

Chances are the republic will survive gastro-porn. But on a more serious level, a growing number of critics are raising concerns about the way an X-rated atmosphere is making its way, in diluted but unmistakable form, into popular entertainment. ''The standards and aesthetics of pornography have really infiltrated the mainstream culture," says Pamela Paul, author of ''Pornified," which examines the role pornography plays in contemporary life. ''It's not just that the culture has gotten sexier. It's that the culture is directly referencing pornography."

Of course, some of this is simply the eternal desire of the young to shock the old. And it's not exactly stop-the-presses material that sex sells. It always has -- for beer, for convertibles, for linoleum -- and it probably always will.

What is new and troubling, critics suggest, is that the porn aesthetic has become so pervasive that it now serves as a kind of sensory wallpaper, something that many people don't even notice anymore. The free-speech-versus-censorship debates that invariably surround actual pornography do not burn as hot when the underlying principles of porn are filtered more subtly into the mainstream. And those principles, critics say, often involve reducing women to subjugated sex objects while presenting men in dominant roles.

Braving the inevitable accusations of prudery -- which they reject -- critics such as Paul are sounding the alarm. They say the current hypersexualized climate distorts the attitudes of young people toward sex and relationships. In particular, they contend it has a damaging effect on the self-image of young women and girls, who are confronted with a culture that objectifies them while disguising it as female empowerment.

''We have an aging society and an adolescent culture," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a social historian and author of ''Why There Are No Good Men Left."

''It's the beer commercial writ large across every medium you can think of. We want to titillate 50-year-old men, but we've ended up demeaning young women, and sending them a message that what matters about you is the size of your breasts."

It seems to be a message that some young women have internalized. Paul, who interviewed more than 100 ''pornography consumers" for her book, says she found that ''the standards of pornography have become something that not only men but women see as totally acceptable. It's gone so mainstream it's barely edgy."

Yet some dispute the link between the growth of the pornography industry and the growth of mainstream depictions of sex. ''I think Pamela Paul overstates the point," says Bryant Paul (no relation), who teaches telecommunications at Indiana University and has written about media images of sexuality.

''What we're talking about is more sexually explicit content; definitely, that's happened," says Bryant Paul. ''But that's not just a function of more pornography. It's largely a function of the expansion of the media industry. We are just inundated with media messages, so what message makers have to do is come up with messages that are likely to get attention. The thing that is likely to get attention is sex. You could use fishing, but it's not going to be interesting to many people."

''You've seen this throughout history," he adds. ''Every time a new medium comes around, there's an explosion of sexual content. It happened with books, it happened with movies, it happened with the VCR. And now the Internet allows it to happen to an even greater extent."

But the Internet is far from the only venue that does a thriving risque business. From the newsstands peek not just the usual randy suspects (Playboy, Hustler) but also general-interest ''lad mags" such as Maxim, whose covers feature actresses and models in soft-core poses, surrounded by leering headline copy. Even august Harvard University and its neighbor across the Charles River, Boston University, have recently become home to student-run sex magazines. Video games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were found to contain sexually explicit scenes, and an audience-building buzz surrounded nonporn movies such as ''The Brown Bunny" and ''9 Songs" when it was learned that their actors had real, not simulated, on-screen sex. Howard Stern brought his own obsession with porn to a daily radio audience of millions, and HBO's ''Sex and the City" accustomed TV viewers to racy sexual adventures.

The career of heiress Paris Hilton has prospered, not faltered, since a publicity whirlwind involving sex tapes, and actor Colin Farrell is embroiled in a lawsuit against a former girlfriend who allegedly is seeking to publicly distribute a sex video they made together. Such tapes, amateur porn of a sort, have so thoroughly permeated public consciousness that late-night TV host David Letterman recently did a hilarious ''Top Ten Signs You're in a Bad Sex Video" (No. 6: ''Plumber shows up to fix your leaky faucet . . . and then leaves."). When porn actress Jenna Jameson was on tour to promote her best-selling 2004 memoir, ''How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," Pamela Paul notes, ''12- and 13-year-old girls went up to her and told her she was their role model." Brazilian bikini waxes -- a staple of contemporary porn -- have grown increasingly popular.

But it is perhaps the world of popular music where the lines between entertainment and soft-core porn seem to have been most thoroughly blurred. It is now routine for female performers to cater to male fantasies with sex-drenched songs and videos. In ''Pornified," Paul points out that hip-hop and rock stars such as Eminem, Kid Rock, Metallica, and Bon Jovi have featured porn actors in their music videos. ''Trying to keep up, Britney Spears, Lil' Kim, and Christina Aguilera emulate porn star moves in their videos and live concerts," Paul writes.

All in all, perhaps it's not surprising that film producer Brian Grazer, who released a documentary last year about 1972's ''Deep Throat," has labeled this an era of ''porno chic."

In the view of Cynthia Eller, author of ''Am I a Woman? A Skeptic's Guide to Gender," Madonna was ''a pivotal figure" in this transformation of popular entertainment into something that often resembles soft-core porn. ''I remember at the time being confused by this idea that acting like a porn star, acting out porn fantasies, was somehow empowering for women," says Eller.

She speculates that the current climate is partly ''a backlash to feminism, a way of protecting male egos, and men insisting on retaining a power structure sexually if they can't retain it in areas of employment and parenting and so forth. It's a way to hang on to a male-dominated paradigm."

But Eller says there is plenty of blame to go around. She and Pamela Paul point also to a schism in the women's movement several decades ago. Some feminists campaigned against pornography, but others viewed that as tantamount to censorship, or did not want to be perceived as anti-men. It divided the women's movement, they say, at a moment when it could have decisively changed the national dialogue on pornography.

Eller also contends that the ''conservative right, in its eagerness to keep sexuality forbidden, is really just stoking the fire of an appetite for porn, for naughtiness, for the whole lust for sexual transgression." She maintains that if conservative forces were to ''give up their repressive game where sex is concerned," the mainstream manifestations of porn will lose their appeal to a lot of people.

Whether or not that happens, Paul hopes that porn's hold on the culture will eventually be weakened as the ramifications of its watered-down versions sink in.

''Our culture once glamorized cigarette smoking to a large extent. It was promoted by the medical establishment, the film industry, TV," she says. ''But once the evidence of harm began to be disseminated by the government, and by schools and the private sector, the number of people who started smoking went down. My hope is that once people realize the negative effect that pornography has on individuals, their children, their wives, and society as a whole, there will be a mind-set shift."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.

Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents

2006-11-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents: "Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders."

Amazing how Microsoft lawyers could figure out a way to extract a fee from users of Linux. Of course, even the US government couldn't beat their lawyers either, so it's not a surprise that the Open Source movement would be easy pickings for the Hegemony in Redmond.

The interesting questions is this: if Oracle will provide indemnification for users of Red Hat Linux that's re-branded under the Oracle name, will MSFT sue Oracle after they go after RedHat?

diagnosis of exclusion.

2006-09-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

link to original piece.

The non-denial of the non-self

Aug 31st 2006
From The Economist print edition

How philosophy can help create secure databases

IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement "all ravens are black", you could derive the equivalent "all non-black objects are non-ravens". Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage. However, a number of computer scientists, led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel's notion as the germ of an eminently practical scheme. They are applying such negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data. The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that information.

The concept of a negative database took shape a couple of years ago, while Dr Esponda was working at the University of New Mexico with Paul Helman, another computer scientist, and Stephanie Forrest, an expert on modelling the human immune system. The important qualification concerns that word "everything". In practice, that means everything in a particular set of things.

What interested Dr Esponda was how the immune system represents information. Here, "everything" is the set of possible biological molecules, notably proteins. The immune system is interesting, because it protects its owner from pathogens without needing to know what a pathogen will look like. Instead, it relies on a negative database to tell it what to destroy. It learns early on which biological molecules are "self", in the sense that they are routine parts of the body it is protecting. Whenever it meets one that is "not self" and thus likely to be part of a pathogen, it destroys it. In Hempel's terms, this can be expressed as "all non-good agents [pathogens] are non-self".

The analogy with a computer database is not perfect. The set of possible biomolecules is not infinite, but it is certainly huge, and probably indeterminable. The immune system does not care about this, because it has to recognise only what is not in its own database. Make one adjustment, though, and you have something that might work for computers. That adjustment is to define "everything" as a finite set, all of whose members can be known—for instance, all phrases containing a fixed maximum number of characters.

A database of names, addresses and Social Security numbers (a common form of identification in America) might require only 200 characters to contain all possible combinations. That would limit the total number of character combinations. A positive database containing all the data in question would be a small subset of those combinations. The negative counterpart of this database would be much larger and contain all possible names and addresses that were not in the positive database plus a lot of gibberish. But it would not be infinite. By looking at the negative database, it would be possible to deduce what was in the positive database it complemented.

That would not guarantee security against a search for the presence or absence of a particular name and address. Indeed, the whole point is that such searches should be possible. But it would prevent fishing expeditions by making it impossible, for example, to look for the Social Security numbers of all the people living on one street.

Dr Esponda sees great potential for using negative databases when there is a need to look at the intersection of many sets of data owned by different parties. Two or more banks, for example, might wish to work out which transactions they have in common without revealing the whole contents of their databases. Using negative databases to do this would, according to Dr Esponda, provide a robust back-up to traditional cryptography, which relies on codes that can be broken.

An interesting extension of the idea might be to use negative surveys to collect sensitive information privately. Dr Esponda gives the example of a negative survey in which respondents are asked to tick the box of one sexually transmitted disease they do not have. He reckons that this would be sufficient to estimate the population frequency of each disease, without having to ask people whether they actually suffer from such diseases—which is intrusive and also invites lying. As he puts it: "In Hindu philosophy, to find out who you are, you ask what are you not. Then you are left with what you are."

This is not your childhood origami.

2006-09-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

link to original piece.

The Extreme Sport of Origami
A physicist's computer program speeds the creation of stupefyingly complex paper sculptures.
By Jennifer Kahn
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 07 | July 2006

Robert Lang was still working at his day job as a physicist in Silicon Valley when the bug wars broke out. Back in the early 1990s, the skirmishes were mostly local, the contestants mostly Japanese. "The first year, someone had a six-legged bug," he recalls. "The next year, it was a six-legged bug with antennae." A few years later, Lang joined the fray. For a formal bug-design challenge, held in 2004 on a muggy June in Manhattan, Lang and two competitors agreed to test themselves by creating a Eupatorus beetle. Eupatorus beetles are not simple insects. Sometimes called rhinoceros beetles, they have five horns of mixed length on their heads, tiny, vertical spurs at the joints of their six knees, and delicate, complicated toes. The contestants had to reproduce all these features on the Eupatorus, along with the rest of the beetle, out of a single uncut rectangle of paper. For the serious student of origami, making a Eupatorus is an extreme challenge.

In the dojo of the origami purist, there are only two rules: The folder may use just one sheet of square paper, and the paper cannot be cut or torn in any way. Following these rules to make a figure like a peace crane, with four basic features—a head, a tail, and two wings—is relatively easy, and origamists traditionally proceeded by trial and error, unfolding and refolding a piece of paper until it started to resemble, say, a swan. For hundreds of years, origami's most complex patterns topped out at 20 steps.

These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art by writing a computer program that can generate the blueprint for ultracomplex origami sculptures. Even with digital assistance, figuring out the sequence of folds that will create a beetle and all its ornaments is a mathematical problem of staggering complexity. Still, the reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.

"It's like an extreme sport," says Tom Hull, a mathematician at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, and longtime origami enthusiast. The escalation in difficulty has grown so severe that OrigamiUSA has been forced to add a new difficulty rating to the four (simple, low intermediate, high intermediate, and complex) it has traditionally used. "People showing up to the complex sessions were getting blown to smithereens," Hull explains. "So now there's a new category: supercomplex."

At its core, origami consists of just two folds, mountain and valley. A mountain fold is what you get if you crease a piece of paper so that it stands up like a pup tent. A valley fold is the same thing turned upside down. Valley folding each corner of a square so that they meet in the center creates something that looks a bit like a cheese blintz and is therefore known as a blintz fold. Beyond these two basic folds, the grammar of origami proliferates rapidly. It's possible to blintz a petal fold, or double blintz it. Likewise, combining a series of squash and petal folds yields a frog base—one of the four traditional bases (called kite, fish, bird, and frog) from which many traditional origami animals are fashioned.

"All the parts of a base are linked together and can't be altered without affecting the rest of the paper, so that's the part you have to calculate just right," Lang says. A base with four flaps is relatively easy to make. Each flap is formed from one of the corners of the square. Making a base with 17 flaps of the right size and in the right places—what you'd need to create Lang's flying rhinoceros beetle—is exponentially more difficult. "Figuring out how to make good legs was all people did for years," Tom Hull says. "Doing a six-legged beetle was a big, big deal."

Lang resisted the challenge for a while. He spent most of the past two decades working as a laser physicist—first at Caltech, then later for private firms in Silicon Valley—and devoted his off-hours to origami. By 2002, his interest in origami won out. He quit his job and began folding paper for a living.

Since then, he has created everything from a ruby-throated hummingbird to a full-scale human (commissioned for a German trade show). The jobs are sometimes banal—there's a lot of demand for cardboard fast-food containers that change shape—but every now and then Lang gets tapped for a more challenging project. He has been asked to simulate the folds of a car's air bag when packed into a steering column and to design a telescope lens that could be shot into space packed into a nine-foot cylinder and then unfurled to the size of a football field. He also recently consulted on the development of an origami-inspired medical implant, which he can't talk about other than to say that it was "big, permanent, and what keeps the person alive." Origami also turns out to be useful for biological problems, such as determining how proteins fold in the body.

Over the past 15 years, Lang has been perfecting a program he wrote called TreeMaker, which can render a stick-figure sketch into a crease pattern—the web of lines that would be left if a finished piece of origami were unfolded and then smoothed. The software converts the sketch into a set of equations that calculate how the appendages of a complex animal form, like a deer, should be distributed on the paper in a way that ensures they will neatly emerge during folding without leaving excess paper or creating areas so wadded up that they can't be folded.

Riffling through some papers on his desk, Lang pulls out the crease pattern that TreeMaker generated for a white-tailed deer. More than 200 equations factored into the algorithm. The resulting crease pattern—a network of lines running over a collage of circles joined by crenellated segments that Lang calls rivers—resembles a deer about as much as a cotton bush looks like a pair of jeans.

"Those are the ears," he says, indicating two small circles in opposite corners of the page. He taps some wavy lines that look like linked Japanese footbridges. "And that's the neck." He sees the uncomprehending look on my face and seems slightly embarrassed. "You just have to take it on faith, that when you collapse it down the right way, you'll get a leg."

Among origamists, TreeMaker is a revolutionary tool that saves hours formerly spent on folding and refolding just to get a simple animal's proportions right. Lang, however, is quick to point out that the program does not tell the artist what steps to take to get from the crease pattern to the final shape. An origamist is left to puzzle out the folding sequence, deciding upon the correct order and direction, out of literally millions of possible combinations, in which to make each crease.

Calculating this, as mathematicians like to say when facing a daunting challenge, is not trivial. Fold a square piece of paper diagonally, then fold it in half, and the result will be a small isosceles triangle. Switch the order of those folds—in half first, then diagonally—and you end up with a squashed pentagon.

The more folds a pattern has, the harder the problem of finding a folding sequence becomes. For one of his TreeMaker-guided designs—a life-size, anatomically correct Maine lobster—Lang was able to generate the crease pattern on the computer in just a few hours. Figuring out how to fold the 120-step pattern on a sheet of paper about 20 inches square took him almost two years.

"The mind-set to do advanced design is fragile," Lang says soberly. "You have to hold all these complex surfaces in your mind and figure out how they interact. If you're pushing the edge of the envelope on something like this, you need total concentration. Sometimes you'll have 5, 10, 20 creases, and you have to make them all happen at once. You need to develop an intuition about it."

To perfect their folding technique, Lang notes, rookies must also attend to details, like not creasing folds too sharply. "Do that and your piece will end up looking tatty. Plus, if there's a point where a lot of those creases come together, the paper can burst. It just puts too much strain on the fibers."

Lang gets many of the raw materials for his designs from Michael LaFosse, a master papermaker in Massachusetts. Among the exotic varieties are hairy paper, shiny paper, and paper so ethereal it seems to be made of fireplace ash. Nepalese lokta, a handmade fiber paper studded with tiny, grassy knots, is one of Lang's favorites—although he is also partial to abaca, a veiny material made from banana fiber. He almost always uses papers made from plant fibers other than wood pulp because they take a crease better and are less likely to rip under stress.

Origamists also toy with color, using papers that are irregularly mottled or that are one color on the front and another on the back. This aesthetic detail adds another layer of complexity to the crease pattern, which must then be designed so that the final animal—a bumblebee, perhaps, or a zebra—ends up with the right colors in the right places. In one famous example, origamist Neal Elias created a dancing couple from a single sheet of paper, folded so that the man was dressed entirely in black, the woman entirely in white. Lang recently made a lion out of fiber paper and folded it so that the paper's four original edges all ended up in the lion's mane. The edges were frayed, which made the mane authentically shaggy.

Although Lang is one of the world's top origami folders, he admits that his pole position is anything but secure. "The current generation is really remarkable," he says cheerfully. "Satoshi Kamiya, for instance, is just brilliant. He started as a child prodigy and came to the attention of the world origami community—the world community—by the time he was 15."

Unlike most elite origamists, who are often engineers or mathematicians, Kamiya is simply a genius. In Japan, where elementary origami is a popular pastime, Kamiya started folding with his mother when he was 2 years old. Early on, he showed a preternatural talent for visualizing complex geometric shapes. By age 10, he was designing his own sculptures. Last year he published a book, Works of Satoshi Kamiya: 1995–2003, which includes all his original designs. And he recently began making his own paper, which he engineered to be exceptionally thin and strong. "It was the only way he could make something so complicated," Tom Hull says. "The designs he's coming up with exceed the properties of ordinary paper."

For four years running, Kamiya has been crowned Origami TV Champion in a contest hosted by a Japanese game show. Some competitive events are almost maniacal in their intricacy. One year, he had to fold a fish underwater using waterproof paper. The next year, he was asked to fold animals that he first had to catch: a dog, plucked from a pen of 20 different breeds, and a fish scooped from a tank. The judges were fishermen and dog breeders; the winner folded the most animals whose breed was unmistakable.

Origami aficionados agree that Kamiya's most extraordinary sculpture is a dragon he created in 2004, at age 20. Coiled and rearing, the dragon has the lithe energy of a living snake, with overlapping scales, thornlike teeth, and tiny, grasping, clawed hands. Asked how he manages to create something so complicated without the help of a computer, Kamiya pauses to consider. "I see it finished," he says finally. "And then"—he stares off, as though visualizing the imaginary object—"I unfold it. In my mind. One piece at a time."

Lang and Kamiya meet often at exhibitions, but their methods remain distinct. Lang continues to tinker with TreeMaker, sticking with the computer-aided approach. Last year he devised a tricky algorithm to solve whether folds in a TreeMaker crease pattern were mountain or valley. Kamiya, too, continues to experiment, but he has no interest in learning to use TreeMaker. In halting English he says: "Right now, human way is better."

Meanwhile, the bug wars go on. At OrigamiUSA's annual convention in New York City this summer, Lang goes up against half a dozen other folders, including Kamiya, in a bid to make a sailing ship. Lang is mulling over a couple of approaches, but "frankly," he says, laughing, "I'd be putting my money on Satoshi Kamiya."

What children read.

2006-08-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Let Sleeping Beauties Lie
By Dorothea Israel Wolfson
Posted August 2, 2006

A review of The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature: The Traditions in English edited by Jack Zipes, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and Gillian Avery

Parents have always fretted about what to read to their children, and experts have always been ready with advice. In their educational writings, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau together mentioned only three books worthy of a child's mind. Locke recommended Aesop's Fables and Reynard the Fox, while in Emile the tutor Jean Jacques offered his charge only Robinson Crusoe. How times have changed. The new 2,471-page, lap-crushing Norton Anthology of Children's Literature includes several hundred entries, both old and new. But far from representing an efflorescence in childhood literature, this volume marks the genre's sad end.

The editors of the anthology acknowledge in passing their debt to Locke and Rousseau—who in a sense created our modern understanding of childhood, permanently influencing all subsequent children's literature. The editors, however, wish to promote a revolution of their own: a new, more candid, and frankly, more nihilistic corpus. Despite heralding children's literature as "life-enhancing" and "life-changing," the Norton editors aim in fact to dampen children's enchantment with the world, forcing them to acquiesce to the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults.

Of course, this could be because the book was never meant to be read by or to children. The editors, all scholars of some sort, with backgrounds in literature, education, and history, describe their handiwork as a "more scholarly" anthology, one that incorporates "profound changes" from earlier collections, and is intended mainly for the college student. Whereas editors of previous anthologies "favored classic authors" and "canonical texts," with a minimum of reader notes and introductions, the Norton edition aims to be more inclusive of "emergent" literature. As the editors state, "Our critical perspectives, like those of scholars in other literary fields, have been greatly influenced by the research and criticism rooted in the feminist and multicultural movements." Their real hope is "to revolutionize the undergraduate curriculum."

The anthology is divided into 19 chapters covering various divisions within children's literature ("Chapbooks," "Primers and Readers," "Fairy Tales," "Classical Myths," "Legends," "Fantasy," "Verse," "Picture Books," "Books of Instruction," etc.). Each chapter begins with a long introduction in which the editors supply an overview of the genre's historical trajectory, and discuss its defining works, including many hitherto unknown. The chapters contain at least one "core" text in full, along with shorter or excerpted "satellite" texts. Each text is preceded by laborious reader notes, many of which are longer than the text itself. There is also a 32-page section of illustrations from some of the great picture books, including Beatrix Potter's Tales from Peter Rabbit, Jean de Brunhoff's The Story of Babar the Little Elephant, Marjorie Flack's Angus the Duck, Ezra Jack Keats's Snowy Day, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

The editors included some genuine classics, to be sure, some excerpted and some in full, like The New England Primer, A Child's Garden of Verses, Peter Pan, Ramona and her Father, chapbook versions of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Defoe's Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the poetry of Charles Causley and Robert Graves, to name just a few. One could certainly quibble with the editors about omitted texts. Why no poetry from Emily Dickinson, for instance, or any meaningful mention of Shakespeare, whose plays were re-written into children's story form by Charles and Mary Lamb? But such quibbling is to miss the larger problem with this volume. It is not so much an anthology as a postmodernist manifesto.

* * *
As the editors declare in the preface, "In our choice of texts and in our introductions, we have paid close attention to…perceptions of race, class, and gender, among other topics, in shaping children's literature and childhood itself." Practically every text and every author (save for the "emergent") is subjected to a wicked scolding from the editors for its racism, sexism, and elitism. Forget about ogres, witches, monsters, and evil stepmoms; today's villains are gender stereotypes, white males, the middle class, and the traditional family. Retrograde literature must therefore be replaced by a new one, one that is, as it were, beyond good and evil: "In our postmodern age, in which absolute judgments of 'good' and 'evil' are no longer easily made, the distinction between heroes and villains is often blurred."

The editors herald this as a great advance, one they wish to promote by burying the stories under a ton of commentary. To read a children's story out of context, say the editors, is so passé (so childish?): "Discourses such as reader-response theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory have proven to be valuable in analyzing children's books." Thus the editors introduce Fun with Dick and Jane by noting that the "world of Dick and Jane was the idealized image of white, middle-class America." The introduction to the chapter on "Legends," which includes The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, warns that "history has generally been written by the victors and the elites, who tend to view those like themselves—white males, for the most part—as heroes."

In the chapter on "Classical Myths," the editors ponder whether myths are being "kept alive" "by unreflective adults." After all, myths are prone to "strong gender stereotyping—females are passive, males are active.... The protagonists are devoted to a ruthless elimination of the 'other' and to a savagery that is scarcely tolerated" in other children's literature. The genre of domestic fiction—which includes works like Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and The Bobbsey Twins—"showcased white middle- or upper-class families." But the editors are happy to report that "the genre has come to reflect ethnic, racial and class diversity." Nor are they above offering advice to would-be authors: "still more change would be welcome here."

All this Sturm und Drang over children's stories is hardly new. Ever since Socrates took on Homer by banning poets from the Just City, philosophers have well understood that, as Shelley put it, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." But to understand how we got here, we need not go back so far. There have been three revolutions in modern children's literature.

The first was instigated by John Locke. In founding a new political and intellectual order—a liberal, tolerant regime—he believed that reforming children's education was of the utmost importance. Notably, he advised against reading Scripture to children, because, as he wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the Bible was ill-suited to a "Child's capacity" and "very inconvenient for Children." Locke's aim was to take education from the hands of the clerisy, and to overcome its domineering and persecutory spirit.

Contrast Locke's sensibility with that of a contemporaneous textbook. The God-fearing New England Primer (c. 1690), included by the Norton editors, drilled children in their ABCs thus:

A: In Adam's Fall
We sinned all
B: Heaven to find
The Bible Mind

C: Christ crucify'd
For sinners dy'd

This was an education not simply in reading and writing, but in living and dying, one that did not condescend to the limited understandings of children. Locke rejected all this, mischievously suggesting that children learn their letters by playing dice. In the wake of Locke's reformation, a more humanistic educational literature gradually blossomed. Unlike the somber New England Primer, the stories were secular, rational, and geared towards children. Though entertaining, these stories were meant to impart a moral message, to help children grow into responsible adults. In this sense at least, Locke still had something in common with the authors of the old New England Primer.

In the late 19th century, another revolution took place, this time marked by a wholesale shift away from moralizing. A new genre of children's fantasy emerged, seeking only to entertain. One of its most prominent voices was Lewis Carroll. As the editors explain, his "mockery of instructional verse, rote learning, and moralizing school curricula helped move the genre from eighteenth-century concerns with the instruction and correction of children toward modern celebrations of play." This era is known as the "golden age" of children's literature—golden precisely because it celebrated the innocence and playfulness of childhood, and sought to free children from the grief and worry of adults. Carroll's Crocodile, a parody, "seemed to license childhood playfulness, fantasy, laughter, and even idleness." "The change was welcome," add the editors.

Alas, golden ages never last, and children's literature was no exception. The third and last great change occurred in the 1970s, when writers started to "push the boundaries" of material considered acceptable for children. According to the Norton editors, "In the wake of this revolution, writers for the young can deal with sex, violence, disease, and death—in particular because many believe that the innocence of childhood has been destroyed by the media and the commodification of childhood."

* * *
Indeed, it's hard nowadays to tell children's literature from adult literature. As the editors correctly observe, this is partly because the lines between childhood and adulthood have themselves become blurred. Locke thought that the "tender" minds of children should be protected from the corruptions of the adult world—and yet these are now the genre's warp and woof. "Children's literature has also begun to resemble adult literature in subject matter," write the editors, "using frank and provocative language to depict and discuss social problems such as homelessness, drug addiction, abuse, and terrorism and expanding the notion of family to include nontraditional families led by single parents, stepparents, and gay and lesbian parents."

Thus the postmodern adult world, in all its vulgar glory, is visited upon our children. The editors enthusiastically endorse Jonathan Miller's 1984 picture book The Facts of Life, which includes a "pop-up penis." Apparently, alternative families provide especially good material for young readers today. After touting the groundbreaking work Heather Has Two Mommies, and chiding Focus on the Family and the Heritage Foundation for seeing it as a threat to "what they call traditional American values," the editors assure us that "there are today no real taboos in domestic fiction for young adults, and few in books for the youngest readers. Family stories now tackle every painful issue imaginable."

Indeed, they do. Fairy tales, which have always dealt with dysfunctional families, especially wicked stepmothers, now take on a hard modern edge by tackling perhaps the last taboo, incest. The Norton Anthology contains ten versions of Little Red Riding Hood, beginning with Charles Perrault's classic and ending with Francesca Lia Block's Wolf (1998). Block, unlike Perrault, isn't satisfied with the sexual undertones and imagery of the original; her heroine is the victim of rape at the hands of her mother's boyfriend ("he held me under the crush of his putrid skanky body") whom she kills with a shotgun at her grandma's house. The editors tell us that this "story shows how a young girl can take charge of her life, while at the same time exposing the sado-masochistic ties that exist in many dysfunctional families."

Well, perhaps, but is this really a story for children? "Once upon a time" used to be a gateway to a land that was inviting precisely because it was timeless, like the stories it introduced and their ageless lessons about the human condition. But this invitation must now apparently read, "Once upon a time when women were powerless and exploited and white male hegemony ruled the world, and when the sky was dark…."

In a strange way, completely unappreciated by the anthology's editors, we have returned to the pre-Lockean age of children's literature. Locke wished to scrub stories clean of horrific images and premonitions of death—not because he was a naïf or a utopian, but because he believed it possible to build a more rational, humane world. The Norton editors break with him on this central issue. They do not believe in the possibility of a more rational world, or even, it would seem, in childhood itself. And so they have more in common with the New England Primer than they dare to admit. They, too, are obsessed with death and the apocalypse, only they don't believe in redemption.

Dorothea Israel Wolfson is a teaching fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Washington, D.C., Center for the Study of American Government.

Making and re-making.

2006-08-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

From DigitAll, the Samsung Magazine.

Raising the Floor.

by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
illustration by Derek Stukuls

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Almost since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1750s, engineers and managers have sought to make factories more efficient and productive. Industrial engineering and operations research developed in the mid-twentieth century to put factory design on a more scientific foundation. Total Quality Management and Six Sigma brought a new focus to these efforts: they made quality improvements the centerpiece of factory reform, and made quality a key consumer benefit. They also generated vast quantities of information about factory operations, and required large amounts of information to succeed. Likewise, robotics and supply chain management made manufacturing more information-intensive.

Industrial engineers are now looking beyond the production line: Georgia Tech dean William Rouse argues that industrial engineers will design supply chains and entire enterprises, not just factories. Meanwhile, new technologies are moving into the factory floor. Put most simply, they’ll make products more intelligent; make manufacturing more information-intensive; and turn the factory floor into a center for a new kind of knowledge work.

Products will become more intelligent thanks to the emergence of pervasive computing. Ever-smaller and more-powerful processors, sensors, and memory are increasing the power of handheld devices like cell phones. Soon, flexible and printable electronics and displays will let us put electronics on clothes and packaging. At the same time, the growth of wireless networks and IPv6 (a new Internet protocol) will give devices greater opportunities to communicate with users and each other, and to cooperate in ways we can only dimly imagine today. These capabilities will also give manufacturers the chance to learn more about how their products are used. In some cases, networked products will report back to manufacturers throughout their lives; in others, products will keep digital diaries that companies can recover in eco-friendly takeback programs. (At least one printer company is quietly gathering data from recycled printer cartridges, and breaking down used printers to look for consistent failure points, causes of breakage, and overengineered areas.)

Manufacturing, meanwhile, will become more information-intensive thanks to rapid prototyping, which allows engineers to make precise working prototypes from CAD files. Two methods for rapid prototyping (or, alternately, freeform manufacturing or layered manufacturing) have become especially important in the last decade. Both are additive processes, which build up objects one layer at a time, like rows of bricks in a wall; neither requires any tooling, which virtually eliminates the setup times and costs of conventional manufacturing processes. In inkjet manufacturing, an inkjet printer sprays fine beads of plastic or resin instead of ink, eventually building a freestanding structure. In laser sintering, a laser draws the shape of an object in a layer of powder. The laser fuses the powder into a solid; the object is then covered with another layer of powder, and the process is repeated.

Rapid prototyping has already had a significant impact on product design. It gives designers the opportunity to work faster and catch problems in products before they reach production. It also allows users to participate in the design process, something that appeals to industries with demanding customers and a taste for ethnography. Snowboard manufacturer Burton and white-water sports company Watermark give working prototypes to fans, incorporate user feedback into the CAD files, then generate new prototypes in a cycle lasting days rather than months.

Rapid prototyping is now morphing into rapid manufacturing. Hearing aid manufacturers Siemens and Phonak are laser sintering silicone earbuds encasing supersmall hearing aids, and makers of artificial limbs and orthodontics are following suit. Aerospace companies are bringing rapid prototyping to the factory floor to make small runs of highly complex aircraft parts. Boeing even spun out an On Demand Manufacturing subsidiary in 2002. Experts predict that machines that fabricate electronics and displays along mechanical structures will be available by decade’s end.

Rapid manufacturing will let companies produce new goods more rapidly, and ethnography will bring them fresher and more detailed knowledge of what consumers want; but translating that knowledge into products is still a challenge. High-tech consumer products in particular have a perverse genius for encompassing conflicting demands. The first Apple mouse developed in the early 1980s had to be more reliable, easier to use, and 98 percent cheaper than the $700 Xerox PARC prototype that inspired it. Ever since, users have demanded products that are faster, more powerful, and more functional—and smaller, cheaper, and easier to use. Add networked, energy efficient, sustainable, and recyclable, and you have a perfect storm of contradictory demands. Balancing these needs—or better yet, finding new technologies that satisfy them all—requires more than conventional problem-solving techniques. Problem-solving tools such as TRIZ offer ways to balance conflicting needs, by analyzing problems in ways that reveal hidden continuities between them.

New fields in science and technology are also emerging as sources of solutions. Advances in materials science, nanotechnology, and computing are obvious ways to boost power, speed, or strength; but designers and scientists across a range of fields are discovering that biomimicry—reverse-engineering natural materials and processes—has a lot to offer. Nature’s designs constantly balance competing demands. Nature self-assembles biodegradeable materials into objects stronger and faster than anything humans can engineer; creates composites and microstructures that exceed the capabilities of engineered materials—and does so without any pollution. Materials scientists and chemists are learning how to improve designs and products by copying natural structures and compounds; architects are learning how to emulate natural processes. The prize-winning Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe, has a zero-energy ventilation system based on the climate controls in giant termite mounds.

Taken together, these trends point to a factory as different from Ford’s assembly line as a modern office is from its nineteenth-century predecessor. The office of yesteryear was a giant information-processing machine, organized to produce standardized information products and services. But vast rows of desks or cubicle farms are unsuitable for modern, knowledge-intensive industries that need innovation and creativity, not better paper pushing, to stay ahead of the competition. Call centers can have cubicles; R&D centers, in contrast, need space for collaboration and gently encourage exploration and chance discoveries.

So what will the factory of the future be like? It will be aware of how users are reacting to both its latest products and still-under-NDA prototypes, feeding off streams of information coming in from prototypes, recycled units, market-watching software agents, and blogs and discussion boards. It will be able to shift production lines in a matter of days or hours, and will constantly incorporate the latest insights from the lab and the natural world. The combined effects of cascades of information and pressure for constant innovation will turn the
factory floor from a space populated only by machine-tenders, into a space in which production and innovation happen simultaneously. The factory will follow a transformation similar to the recording studio. Until the 1950s, music studios were places where groups just made recordings: they were production lines. Then, rock and roll musicians like Buddy Holly and the Beatles turned the studio into a place to write songs, improvise, and experiment with new sonic effects. As Brian Eno put it, the studio became an instrument, a space for creation and experimentation as well as production.

But where will these workers come from? Where will they have learned the skills necessary to do well in this world? The unexpected but most likely answer is online games. Part of the appeal of massive multiplayer games like Entropia and Second Life is that they allow players to build all kinds of interesting virtual stuff, from bodies to buildings. Turns out they’re fun-ride versions of computer-aided design and computer-aided architectural design systems. Thanks to these games, a generation of kids is becoming intimately familiar with design and manufacturing-skills that, thanks to 3-D printing, can move straight from the living room to the factory floor. In other words, countries with the most advanced game cultures today may take the lead in rapid manufacturing tomorrow.

This leads to a radical conclusion. The industrial world of rapid prototyping won’t be one that rewards cheap labor, but smart labor. Countries that compete on the basis of labor costs and nonexistent regulations may find that the game has changed. In a world in which factories print or grow their products and pollute far less, and need workers who are imaginative enough to redesign products on the fly, cheap wages and lax environmental regulations won’t be attractive. They won’t even be incentives. Countries with more expensive but better-educated workforces, with well-developed consumer and gaming cultures, will be much more attractive. As it has everywhere else, the triumph of mind over matter, of brains over brawn, is coming to the factory floor.

Donald Schon on Educating the Reflective Practitioner.

2006-08-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

We are in the midst of, in our cyclical American way, we are in the midst of a new wave of school reform, and as usual we are blaming the schools for issues that properly belong to the society as a whole. Japanese imports and competitiveness have replaced references to Sputnik and Russian competition of the late ‘50s. The buzzwords, some of them, are old; some of them-- "excellence," "accountability," are new. There are some counter-voices that speak to the fact that teachers are badly paid and under-respected and inappropriately blamed. But underneath the debate about the schools, as it cycles through our history, certain fundamental questions keep coming up: "What are the competences that teachers should be trying to help students, kids acquire?" "What kinds of knowledge and what sort of know-how should teachers have in order to do their jobs well?" What kinds of education are most likely to help teachers prepare for effective teaching?" We may be ready to re-examine questions like these and, as we do so, it may be comforting to notice that we’re not alone among the professions. In fact, if I’m right, all of the professions, even Nathan Glazer’s major professions, are currently in the midst of a crisis of confidence which has to do with a rather fundamental issues, namely our view of the nature of professional knowledge, our view of what I call "the epistemology of practice." In this talk I want to talk about a version of that epistemology of practice which I am going to call "school knowledge," and I’m going to contrast it with the kind of artistry that good teachers in their everyday work often display, which I’ll call "reflection-in-action." I do want to point out that these ideas of mine are very much part of a tradition; in fact, I think you can really look back at the history of the schools and of educational reform and see a dialectic between a school establishment, on the one hand, and I’m talking over centuries, from Rousseau onward, and a tradition of reform and criticism which begins with Rousseau and goes on to Pestilotsy and Tolstoy and Dewey and then, as we approach more contemporary times, Alfred Schultz and Lev Vygotsky and Kurt Lewin, Piaget, Wittgenstein and David Hawkins today. So I see myself not as saying anything really new at all, but as drawing on this tradition and talking on how we might put it to use.

Let me begin with this business of school knowledge and reflection-in-action. I want to take an example from "The Teacher Project," which was a project initiated in 1978 by Jean Bamberger, who is here, and Eleanor Duckworth. And it was a project of in-service teacher education. The teachers were chosen from elementary schools in Cambridge; they attended seminars once a week. The vignette I want to pick is one in which these seven teachers are sitting watching a videotape. And on the videotape they’re seeing two boys playing with pattern blocks--you know what pattern blocks are? And there’s an opaque wall between them. One boy has a pattern in front of him; the other boy has a bunch of blocks. And the first boy, looking at his pattern, is trying to give the second boy directions for completing the pattern. And the teachers are watching this videotape. And the first boy gives a series of directions, and pretty soon it’s clear that the second boy begins to go horribly awry, and his pattern gets more and more divergent from the ones that the teachers can see in front of the first boy. And the teachers begin to talk about what’s going on. And they say the second boy is clearly a slow learner, and he doesn’t know how to follow directions. And he seems to lack basic skills. And in the midst of that, Maggie Cauley who was assisting Jean and Eleanor, and who was watching, said, "Wait a second: I think the first boy gave an impossible instruction." And they went back and played the tape again, and they saw that indeed the first boy had said, "Put down a green square," and there were no green squares, there were only orange squares, and the only green things were triangles. And then the teachers began to see the whole tape in a completely different way. And they perceived that the second boy was, in fact, a virtuoso at following instructions, a virtuoso at improvising instructions. And they said, "You know what we did was we gave the kid reason." And that notion of giving the kid reason became a slogan for much of their work thereafter in the seminar.

This idea of "giving reason" is associated with a view of kids’ knowledge, a view of kids’ learning, and a view of kids’ teaching, which is very different to what I take to be the prevailing view of those things in the schools and, I might add, in the schools of education. And I want to use the term "school knowledge" to talk about what I take the prevailing view of knowledge to be which is built into the schools. I think we can correctly call it an "epistemology of the schools." It’s keyed to predictability and control which are essential features of ALL bureaucracies. It is also keyed to a certain view of educational reform and is, I think, centrally associated with why it is that educational reform fails to reform. Because the centre-periphery model of reform through large scale government intervention, for example, also demands the packaging of knowledge and the presentation of replicable methods which are to be stamped in through rewards and punishments which mirrors the view of knowledge built into the epistemology of the schools. The features of school knowledge that I want to point to are these.

First of all, there’s the view that what we know is a product. There is a body of knowledge. It is a set of results which are, at best, the results of research carried out in the universities. It’s knowledge that is determinate in the sense that there are right answers: questions have right answers. It’s the business of the teachers to know what the right answers are and to communicate them to students. The knowledge is formal and categorical; it is explicitly formulable in propositions that assign properties to objects or express in verbal or symbolic terms the relations of objects and properties to one another. And let me tell you a story: the Russian cognitive psychologist, Vygotsky, who worked just after the Russian Revolution, worked with peasants, some of whom had been to the collective schools and some of whom had not. And he gave them little tests. And the basic pattern of the test was "Put together the things that go together." So he showed this peasant a hammer, a saw, a hatchet and a log of wood, and he said, "Put together the things that go together." And the peasant said, "Well, clearly, what goes together is the log of wood and the hatchet and the saw because you use the hatchet and the saw to cut the wood for firewood." And Vygotsky said--and this was his regular strategem--"I have a friend who says that the saw, the hammer and the hatchet go together because they are tools." And the peasant answered, "Then your friend must have a lot of firewood!"

The categorization of knowledge in terms of a category like "tool," as distinct from the ordinary, familiar coherences of objects as they go together in our everyday life, is what I mean by the formal categorical character of knowledge. And it is one of the key features that separates schools from life. The ways in which things are grouped together, the way in which things are treated as similar and different, are not the way in which they are grouped and treated as similar and different in our ordinary life experiences. There is also, in this view of school knowledge, the notion that the more general and the more theoretical the knowledge, the higher it is. I remember once being quite recently at a school of education, and a graduate student was in a seminar that I was doing, and she was working with nurses, and she said something I thought was interesting. And I asked her if she would give me an example. And she then gave me a proposition which was just as general as the first proposition. So I asked again for an example, and she gave me a proposition which was just slightly less general. And I asked again, and I finally got an example. And I asked her afterwards if she thought it was strange that it took three or four tries to get an example, and she said she DID think it was strange, and she didn’t understand why she’d done that. And I think it is because she had been socialized to an institution where, tacitly and automatically, we believe that the only thing that really counts and the only thing that’s really of value is theory, and the higher and the more abstract and the more general the theory, the higher the status it is. Under such conditions it’s very difficult to give more or less concrete examples.

This view of school knowledge also includes the notion that knowledge is molecular, that it is built up of pieces which are basic units of information or basic units of skill which can be assembled together in complexes of more advanced and complicated information. And there IS the notion that it is the business of the teacher to communicate this knowledge, and it is the business of the students to receive it or absorb it. It is the business of kids to get it, and of the teachers to see that they get it. And if the kids do not get it, then there’s a need to explain why they’re not getting it, and categories like "slow learner," "poor motivation," "short attention span," are ways of describing what Clifford Geertz has called "junk categories" to remove their not getting it from the range of things with which the teacher would have to deal.

In contrast to school knowledge, there’s the kind of knowing-in-action which the second boy displayed when he responded to the first boy’s directions, and there’s the kind of reflection-in-action as he improvised when the directions began to leave him puzzled. This reflection-in-action is tacit and spontaneous and often delivered without taking thought, and is not a particularly intellectual activity. And yet it involves making new sense of surprises, turning thought back on itself to think in new ways about phenomena and about how we think about those phenomena. And examples lie in ordinary conversation, making things, fixing things, riding bicycles, and I’m now going to give you my venerable example, and I’ll apologize to anybody here who’s heard it before. Probably most of you have.

If you are riding a bicycle, and you begin to fall to the left, then in order not to fall you must turn your wheel to the ___? Quick! I’m about to fall!

How many think ‘right'?
How many think ‘left’?
How many don’t know?
How many think this is an irrelevant question?
All right, without being dogmatic, if you turn the wheel to the right you’ll likely fall off; if you turn the wheel to the left you’ll likely not fall off because you’ll be turning into the fall. It has to do with where your centre of gravity is. You’re going to bring the bicycle underneath it. It also has to do with the fact that the bicycle is a gyroscope. However, I don’t want you to take this on authority. I want you to go out and test.

And those of you who said, "You turn to the right," I presume you frequently fall off the bicycle. No, you don’t? So it raises the question of how it is that you could give the wrong answer and do the right thing. And this capacity to do the right thing, as my old friend Ray Hayner used to say, "knowing more than we can say, thank God," exhibiting the more that we know in what we do by the way in which we do it, is what I mean by knowing-in-action. And this capacity to respond to surprise through improvisation on the spot is what I mean by reflection-in-action. When a teacher turns her attention to giving kids reason to listening what they say, then teaching itself becomes a form of reflection-in action, and I think this formulation helps to describe what it is that constitutes teaching artistry. It involves getting in touch with what kids are actually saying and doing; it involves allowing yourself to be surprised by that, and allowing yourself to be surprised, I think, is appropriate, because you must permit yourself to be surprised, being puzzled by what you get and responding to the puzzle through an on-the-spot experiment that you make, that responds to what the kid says or does. It involves meeting the kid in the sense of meeting his or her understanding of what’s going on, and helping the kid co-ordinate the everyday knowing-in-action that he brings to the school with the privileged knowledge that he finds in the school. And on this view teaching becomes very much like what Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy described in his famous essay on the rudiments of reading, "Teaching the Rudiments of Reading," which he wrote in connection with the peasants’ school he founded at Yasnaya Polanya in between the writing of "The Cossacks" and "War and Peace." He said, "Every individual must, in order to acquire the art of reading in the shortest possible time, be taught quite apart from any other, and therefore there must be a separate method for each. That which forms an insuperable difficulty to one does not in the least keep back another, and vice versa. One pupil has a good memory, and it is easier for him to memorize the symbols than to comprehend the most rational sound method. Another has a fine instinct and he grasps the law of word combination by reading whole words at a time. The best teacher will be who he has at his tongue’s end the explanation of what it is that is bothering the pupil."

These explanations give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods, the ability of inventing new methods and, above all, not a blind adherence to ONE method but the conviction that all methods are one-sided, and that the best method would be the one that would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred by a pupil. That is, not a method, but an art and a talent. And this is teaching in the form of reflection-in-action. It involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. And reflection-in-action need not be an intellectual or verbalized activity. If you think about--my favourite example of reflection-in-action is jazz, because if you think about people playing jazz within a framework of beat and rhythm and melody that is understood, one person plays and another person responds, and responds on the spot to the way he hears the tune, making it different to correspond to the difference he hears, improvisation in that sense is a form of reflection-in-action. And so is good conversation which must be neither wholly predictable nor wholly unpredictable. If it’s wholly predictable, it’s boring and not good, and if it’s wholly unpredictable, it’s crazy. Good conversation, which all of us have some gift for, involves a moving between those extremes in a kind of on-line observation and action which is so natural and spontaneous to us that we don’t even think about the capacity we have to do it. And in much of this activity we need not think about what we are doing in explicit, verbal or symbolic terms, but sometimes we must. For example, when we get stuck. Or, for example, when we want to teach somebody else to do what we know how to do. I don’t know about your experience as teachers, but mine is--the thing I find hardest in the world to do is to teach a student what I know how to do best. For example, to see interesting patterns in data, which I know how to do, I cannot teach my students to do, or I have to work very hard, or I ask myself, "What is it that I’m really doing when I do this?" And I find I’m asking myself a surprising question: I don’t know the answer to it. In order to get the answer I have to actually think about what I do, and observe myself doing it. My theories about it don’t work very well.

Reflection-ON-reflection-in action IS an intellectual business, and it DOES require verbalization and symbolization. And when the teachers talked about giving the kid reason, they were doing a bit of reflection on reflection-in-action. And when Tolstoy wrote his paragraph, he was reflecting on the reflection-in-action that he was displaying in his school at Yasnaya Polanya.

Now, if we ask the question, "What hangs on this difference between school knowledge and reflection-in-action?", I think it is in fact a revolutionary difference, and it has to do with healing certain splits that deaden the experience of school. They are splits between school and life which make many kids--perhaps most kids--believe that school has nothing to do with life. They are splits between teaching and doing which makes it true for most of us who are teachers that what we teach is not what we do, and what we do is not what we teach. They are splits between research and practice, which means that the thing we call ‘research’ is divorced from, and even divergent from, the actual practice in which we engage. Now all of these things are associated with the argument I made in The Reflective Practitioner [1983], not about teacher education specifically but about ALL professional education in the modern research university. And let me just recapitulate that.

There I argued that the modern research university, as Alfred Schultz has shown us, was derived from the doctrine of positivism as it had affected the German universities at the end of the 19th century, incorporated into the modern research university initially at Johns Hopkins, migrating out from there to other places like Michigan and Columbia, and eventually to the Ivy League. It was based upon the view, then revolutionary, that the university’s business is to produce new knowledge, preferably scientific, certainly systematic. And then there was the issue of what to do with practice, and the initial intent was to keep the professions out of the schools, well out of the schools. Thorstein Veblen, when he wrote The Order of Higher Learning in America, was actually angry at the University of Chicago because it was entertaining the idea of admitting a business school. And he argued that if you admit a business school, or indeed any professional school to the higher school of learning, you’ll simply embarrass the poor fellows, and they’ll put on a specious appearance of scholarship, and they’ll be unable to produce the real thing. And that the lower schools of the profession should be kept out of the higher school of the university.

Well, Veblen lost his battle, and the business school got into the University of Chicago, and then these other professionals also got their schools in and, eventually, police, and library science and so on. And Harold Wohlenski wrote an article in the ‘50s saying, "The professionalization of everything? The professionalization of every one."

But the price for getting in was a buying into this Veblenian bargain which was from the higher schools, their knowledge--from the lower schools, their problems. And the professions, as a ticket of admission to the university, had to agree to the epistemology built into the university, and to construe professional knowledge as the application of research. And so from this comes the notion of the normative professional curriculum, which Edgar Schein has pointed out in his book on professional education: First teach them the relevant basic science, then teach them the relevant applied science, then give them a practicum in which to practice applying that science to the problems of everyday life. And it also produced the institutional separation of research and practice because, if your model of research is that of scientific method in the laboratory sense, with its experimental controls, practice is a confounding environment in which to experiment. You can’t establish controls in that sense, nor can you provide analysis of statistic correlations in the sense that you can do in your study when you have access to the data.

And so the separation of research and practice. And the consequence of this is, I believe, that if you find yourself in university, you find yourself in an institution built around an epistemology--technical rationality--which construes professional knowledge to consist in the application of science to the adjustment of means to ends, which leaves no room for artistry and no room for the kind of competence that the second boy displayed in my example of giving the kids reason, or that a reflective teacher displays when she responds to the puzzling things that kids say and do in the classroom. No room for these indeterminate zones of practice--uncertainty, situations of confusion and messiness where you don’t know what the problem is. No room for problem-setting which cannot be a technical problem because it’s required in order to solve a technical problem. No room for the unique case which doesn’t fit the books. No room for the conflicted case where the ends and values in what you’re doing are conflicted with one another. And so you can’t see the problem as one of adjusting means to ends because the ends conflict.

These indeterminate zones of practice are ones that are becoming increasingly important, increasingly visible to us, and I believe they have a great deal to do with declining confidence in the professions on the part of the public. There’s also no room for the ordinary art by which people apply theory when it IS applicable to concrete situations of action. An old colleague of mine at MIT, Ted Martin, used to say--he was a teacher of calculus--"I can teach kids how to differentiate only I can’t teach them how to set up the problem." In order to differentiate, they have to be able to set up the problem, but setting up the problem is something for which there aren’t rules and no theory. On the contrary, you have to be able to set up the problem in order to apply the rules AND the theory. The challenge to the professional schools, I think, is this challenge of educating for artistry. Helping people become more competent in the indeterminate zones of practice, at carrying out processes of reflection-in-action, and reflection ON reflection-in-action. And helping them to coordinate that artistry with applied science, because I’m not arguing that applied science should be thrown out the window. I’m arguing that it has a special zone of relevance which depends on our ability to do these other things, on the one hand to set problems in ways that the categories of applied science can fix and fit and, on the other hand, to fill with art the gap between theory and technique and concrete action.

I think the source of insight and of invention in thinking about the reforms of professional education are not so much to be found in the professional schools but in certain deviant traditions of education for reflection-in-action. Education for artistry in athletics--coaching in athletics--apprenticeships in the industry and the arts--and especially education for the arts in the studios of painting and sculpture and architectural design, and in the conservatories of music and dance. And here what we find at hits best is what I would like to call a "reflective practicum." And its main features are these. It’s a situation in which people learn by doing, and I hope the ghost of John Dewey is circling just over my head. In which they do this together, with one another, who are trying to do the same thing. Where they learn by doing in a practicum which is really a virtual world. A virtual world in the sense that it represents the world of practice, but is not the world of practice. A virtual world in the sense that, in that world, students can run experiments cheaply and without great danger. They don’t have to actually go out and build a building to learn about designing a building. And they don’t have to go out and kill a patient to learn what the carotid artery is. And they can actually go back and do it again, and they can control the pace of the doing. And within these virtual worlds there are certain crucial media which they must also learn how to use. And they learn by doing with others in the virtual world of the practicum in interaction with someone who is in the role of coach, more like a coach than like a teacher, because that coach is trying to help them do something. And in a kind of dialogue with that coach where the dialogue consists not only in words but in doing, in performance, so the coach’s demonstrations and the students’ performances are messages which they send to one another. The student’s performance, for example, indicating, telling the coach, "This is what I make of what you have said. This thing that I’m doing now is what I make of what you have said." And the coach, observing that and seeing the problems, the difficulties that the student has. At its best this dialogue between coach and student becomes a dialogue of reciprocal reflection-in-action where each of them is reflecting on, and responding to, the message received from the other. And in a moment I’ll give an example.

This idea of reflective practicum is a very general idea, and I think it takes very different forms in different fields and the cultures of different professions in the economic constraints offered by different professions. And what I’d like to look at now is what it would mean to have one for teachers. What would it mean to educate teachers in the capacity to teach reflectively and to think about their own reflection-in-action with kids. And here again I want to draw on the teacher project which Jean Bamburger and Eleanor Duckworth devised and ran for several years in Cambridge. And I want to choose another vignette. This was an event that occurred in the early sessions of the project, and Jean Bamburger was working with the teachers with Montessori bells. And Montessori bells are bells which look the same but they produce different pitches. And there was a collection of bells on the table, and the teachers had been building, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" out of these bells. And each bell played a different pitch except for two pitches, G and C, of which there were two bells. And after the teachers had practiced doing that themselves, there was a videotape of a 14-year-old boy, Ricky, who was trying to build "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." And the way he did it was something like this. He would strike the first bell, and many bells, until he found one that he liked--’bom’--he called that ‘twinkle, twink." Then he would reach for the others: ‘bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom’--find the other one and put it right next to it. Then he’d reach for the next one, and he’d go back to the beginning: ‘bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom.’ Then he would go back to the beginning again, and then search: ‘bom, bom, bom, bom, bom-bom.’ The teachers watched this, and they zoned in very quickly on the fact that Ricky kept starting from the beginning again. And Jean, who was observing it, and observing their reaction, said this was a puzzle, and the rest of that session was devoted to working on that puzzle. And the teachers gave a set of responses to begin with. They said that what Ricky was doing was exhibiting ‘rote learning.’ They took it to indicate a lack of mastery of the tune, and they felt that he lacked basic music skills. They thought it was a sign of poor auditory memory, perhaps, and seemed to show an inability to follow directions, and the need for a ‘security blanket’--these were different phrases. And one of them said, "It’s like learning your ABCs. Until you know your ABCs you have to say them all at once. But if you really know them you can recognize an A anywhere or an M. You don’t have to go through the whole thing all over from the beginning in order to get it." So that they were seeing, or some of them were, basic musical skills as the ability to produce and recognize an element, a pitch, no matter where it appeared. As one of them said, the same eight notes in "Twinkle" must be mastered so that they can be recognized in ALL songs. And they believed these were the basics, the primary skills, that Ricky lacked.

Now Jean, who understood Ricky starting over in a very different way, played a very short portion of the tape again just at the point where he began, so she played, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," and stopped, and asked the teachers to sing the next note. And none of them could do it. And they were shocked. And she asked, "Does that tell you anything about tunes, about why he needed to start over again?" And one of the teachers said, "When Kitty and I did this last week, we certainly went back and played the whole thing from the beginning. I was humming it in my head; I think I used that as the way I found the next note." But another said, "If you’d asked ME to play the second phrase, I doubt I’d have gone all the way back to the beginning." And after some further discussion, Mary, one of the teachers, said, "You know, you’re looking for intervals; it’s the relationship between the tones that counts, not the actual tone or where it appears in the octave or anywhere else, but it’s the relationship between it and the one next to it and the one before it." And then later she said, "So in other words, all this discussion about weakness and learning mode and everything is basically down the drain, because what you’ve said is that nobody could do it any other way, right?" And still later she said, "I realized, when you were talking about that, that music is about building. Without building, you can’t have the fourth block without the first. I realized that repetition in music must be necessary because you can’t build--well, it’s like a tower, and so I visualize it with kids in the kindergarten with blocks. But it came out only because of the probing. I think you were pulling teeth, pulling it out of us."

Now, in my view, what the teachers were getting in this session was moving back between Ricky’s thinking and their own, and they came to see both his thinking and their own in a new way. They came to see that, starting over from the beginning as a way of orienting yourself in the tune is something that everybody has to do. Jean, when she stopped the tape and asked them to sing "How" was carrying out an on-the-spot experiment which she had not planned ahead of time but invented in order to respond to what she saw as their false theory of what was going on. They began by being faced with a kind of diabolical inconsistency. If Ricky lacked basic skills, they lacked them too. And so they had to see starting over in a new way, and they constructed for themselves an image which allowed them to hang on to that new way, which was Mary’s tower. And that image became a name, like giving kids reason, which they could hold.

Now, in my experience in teaching, naming is extraordinarily important--the ability to give a name, not take a name or accept it from someone else, but give a name. And I find that my students, one of the hardest things for them to do, is to be willing to give their own name to the phenomenon which they have seen. It’s as though they believe that if any thought goes through my head it must be automatically wrong, which was the opposite of Marshall McLuhan who used to believe that if a thought ran through his head it was automatically true. Forgive me, Marshall; you were great, anyway.

But the teachers were at that point trying to import their received school knowledge into the interpretation of Ricky’s behaviour. The experiment that Jean carried out helped them to see that what they were doing was not what they were teaching; what they were doing was different to the way they were interpreting Ricky’s behaviour. And she produced what I would call a "hall of mirrors." And I think the reflective practicum in teaching, as in certain other fields like managing and consulting, must be a hall of mirrors because the teacher of the teacher is also doing the thing that she is teaching. And so the kids--the teachers saw their own confusion in the kids’ confusion; they saw their own competence in the kids’ competence, and in Jean’s reflective teaching, her on-the-spot experiment that she produced for them, she was doing for them what she also hoped they would come to learn to do. But at the first instance they were not appreciative. In fact they were extremely angry, and they called the experience a "trial by fire." They said it was devastating; they said it made them profoundly uneasy. In the break after that session, nobody would talk to her.

My experience in other kinds of reflective practicums such as the design studio in architecture is that the phenomena of confusion and mystery and anger are endemic at the beginning. And everybody feels confused. And people keep on asking, "What are we really doing?" In architecture it takes the form of asking, "What is designing, really?" "What are we supposed to be doing?" What does it mean to be thinking architecturally?" And I even had one student who said he was going to leave the studio and go out and work and try to find out what it was they were arguing about. And another student who said, "It’s a sort of Kafkaesque thing. At the crit, at the end of the term, you listen to the inflections and the tone of the voice of your critic to see if anything is really wrong." And this experience, I think, goes to a paradox which is at the heart of learning any new, any really new skill which is at the heart of learning a kind of artistry when you cannot in principle know what it is you’re supposed to be learning, and yet you must learn it. And nobody described this paradox better than Plato in his dialogue, "The Meno." And you remember, in that dialogue, Socrates is talking to Meno, who is the Socratic fall guy for that one. And Meno pretends to know what virtue is. And Socrates quickly shows him that he hasn’t the faintest idea what virtue is, and Meno becomes absolutely furious, and he finally bursts out with this: "But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn’t know?"

I like to tweak my friends in artificial intelligence with the notion that the Meno will be around long after artificial intelligences are forgotten! The experience of the students in the architectural studio, like the experience of the teachers in the teacher project and, I believe, the experience of the students in any reflective practicum is that they must plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is they’re trying to learn. The teachers cannot tell them. The teachers can say things to them but they cannot understand what’s meant at that point. The way at which they come to be able to understand what’s meant is by plunging into the doing--the designing, the teaching, the examination of their own learning--so as to have the kinds of experience from which they may then be able to make some sense of what it is that’s being said. But that plunge is full of loss because, if you’ve taken that plunge yourself, you know the experience. You feel vulnerable; you feel you don’t know what you’re doing; you feel out of control; you feel incompetent; you feel that you’ve lost confidence. And that is the environment in which you swim around, trying to design or trying to teach or trying to do whatever the hell it is you’re trying to learn to do until you get to the place where you can understand what people are saying to you. And you become angry and you become defensive. Or defensiveness, at any rate, becomes a very present danger--"a clear and present danger." And what’s extraordinary is that, for the same students in this design studio, for example, after six months or a year, they were understanding perfectly well what was being said. They could complete their teachers’ sentences; they could speak elliptically, using shortcuts that were mysterious to ME, but they understood what they were talking about. So many of them, not all, teachers and students, coach and students, had achieved a kind of convergence of meaning which came after the pervasive confusion and mystery after the early part of the process. And in between the two comes the dialogue--what I will call a dialogue--between coach and student which is a dialogue of words and a dialogue of actions like the dialogue of "Twinkle, twinkle little star," and Mary’s tower--a dialogue in which, when it works well, student and teacher, coach and student, are communicating through demonstration and description combined, responding to one another’s performances as indicators of what they understand and what they present to be understood. And the coach’s task is a threefold task, I think.

It requires always substantive attention to the specific problem that’s being worked on: the design of this school; the presentation of this videotape. The coach has to be able to demonstrate and describe in relevant ways about that.
Moreover, he has to be able to describe and demonstrate in ways that are particularized, as Tolstoy said, to the difficulties and possibilities of THIS particular student at this time, to say the things, to discover the things, that will allow THAT student to understand.
And thirdly, to do it by building a relationship in which defensiveness is minimized. He can’t guarantee it, of course, because if a person chooses to become defensive, in the end there’s nothing you can do about it. But the things that I do influence the possibilities for defensiveness for others.
And in the coaching process I argue these three problems--the substantive problem-solving, the particularizing of description and demonstration, the reduction of defensiveness--are happening all the time together in combination. And a really good coach is one whose artistry involves being able to do those three things in combination.

Now, the introduction of a reflective practicum into a professional school is an uphill business. The introduction of reflective teaching into a primary or secondary school is an uphill business. If you think about introducing a reflective practicum into a school of education you must work against the view that practice is a second-class activity, because in the school of education I think it is.

You must work against the view that theory is a privileged form of knowledge.
You must work against the doctrine that teachers are to be taught the results of research carried out by researchers, which I think helps to account for a widespread sense of the irrelevance of courses in schools of education.
You work uphill against the notion that the teacher is a blank slate who needs to be trained and has nothing to bring.
And you work against what I am describing as the ‘squeeze play’ currently operating in the profession as in many professions where, on the one hand, the actual institutional conditions of practice restrict what it is that a practitioner can do--how many degrees of freedom. If Michigan passes a competency testing law for teachers, and bases that law on prevailing views of school knowledge, it doesn’t make it easier for a teacher to engage in reflective teaching. And if at the same time there is a resurgence of technical rationality in the university, which there is, the combination of those two things squeezes what I’m calling for.
But on the other side of the ledger there is this, I think--I mean, you’ll tell me in a moment--a general uneasiness about the schools of education, a general uneasiness as though, you know, "We may not be doing it right; we may need to think again." There is a nucleus of people who are already engaged in the business of trying to help teachers become reflective teachers. I know many of them myself, and I don’t know the field very well, so there must be many more. There are many others who WANT to move in this direction, and the current, cyclical iteration of the educational reform provides a window, an opportunity, to move in this direction. Against it there is the Balkanization of the schools--the division into pieces that don’t talk to one another. The little camouflage of this Balkanization with the surface cordiality of academic institutions which drives me nuts, as it may you, and the normal cynicism of the schools which leads people to believe that of course it’s all unchangeable--"too bad, but unchangeable." And yet I think there’s plenty of evidence that it IS changeable, and there are people who I think are wanting to change it in the direction such as the one that I’ve been trying to describe today. I think the ways IN to the development of a reflective practicum could come through internships for teachers. It could come in very interesting ways through the introduction of the computer, not that the computer’s so wonderful but the computer provides an opportunity for looking at education in new ways. And Jean Bamburger’s recent work on what she calls "the laboratory for making things" is an example. And in my own work at MIT, looking at Project Athena there, which is to do with computers in education, I see other examples. Continuing education for teachers provides yet a third kind of example, and work like Gaalen Erickson’s at the University of British Columbia or Tom Russell’s and Hugh Munby’s at Queen’s, are cases in point. But all this depends on there being at the heart of the school a core of people, at least a small group of people, who are prepared to create a new kind of research presence, who want to produce experiences and knowledge which is usable by teachers. I think that's the crucial feature--that their research would be usable. That it would be engaged collaboratively with teachers, that it would be conducted on line in experience with teachers, and that it would be aimed at healing the splits between teaching and doing, school and life, research and practice, which have been so insidiously effective at deadening the experience of school at all levels.

Thank you.

A genius in his time.

2006-08-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

link to original piece.

Guilty as charged?

2006-08-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

From Harper's.

Breaking the Chain
The antitrust case against Wal-Mart
Posted on Monday, July 31, 2006.
Originally from July 2006.
By Barry C. Lynn.

There is an undeniable beauty to laissez-faire theory, with its promise that by struggling against one another, by grasping and elbowing and shouting and shoving, we create efficiency and satisfaction and progress for all. This concept has shaped, at the most fundamental levels, how we understand and engineer our basic freedoms—economic, political, and moral. Until recently, however, most politicians and economists accepted that freedom within the marketplace had to be limited, at least to some degree, by rules designed to ensure general economic and social outcomes.

From Adam Smith onward, almost all the great preachers of laissez-faire were tempered by a strain of deep realism. Most accepted that a national economy ultimately served a nation that had to survive in an often brutal world. So, too, did most accept that all economies are characterized by struggles for power and precedence among men and institutions run by men; in other words, that all economies are fundamentally political in nature. And so most accepted the need to use the power of the state—most dramatically in the form of antitrust law—to prevent any one man or firm from consolidating so much power as to throw off basic balances. The invisible hand of the marketplace, and all that derives from it, had to be protected by the visible hand of government.

It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America's century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in a world dominated by immense global oligopolies that every day further limit the flexibility of our economy and our personal freedom within it. There are still many instances of intense competition—just ask General Motors.

But since the great opening of global markets in the early 1990s, the tendency within most of the systems we rely on for manufactured goods, processed commodities, and basic services has been toward ever more extreme consolidation. Consider raw materials: three firms control almost 75 percent of the global market in iron ore. Consider manufacturing services: Owens Illinois has rolled up roughly half the global capacity to supply glass containers. We see extreme consolidation in heavy equipment; General Electric builds 60 percent of large gas turbines as well as 60 percent of large wind turbines. In processed materials; Corning produces 60 percent of the glass for flat-screen televisions. Even in sneakers; Nike and Adidas split a 60-percent share of the global market. Consolidation reigns in banking, meatpacking, oil refining, and grains. It holds even in eyeglasses, a field in which the Italian firm Luxottica has captured control over five of the six national outlets in the U.S. market.

The stakes could not be higher. In systems where oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, competition itself is transformed from a free-for-all into a kind of private-property right, a license to the powerful to fence off entire marketplaces, there to pit supplier against supplier, community against community, and worker against worker, for their own private gain. When oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, what is perverted is the free market itself, and our freedom as individuals within the economy and ultimately within our political system as well.

* * *

Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what should concern us today even more is a mirror image of monopoly called “monopsony.” Monopsony arises when a firm captures the ability to dictate price to its suppliers, because the suppliers have no real choice other than to deal with that buyer. Not all oligopolists rely on the exercise of monopsony, but a large and growing contingent of today’s largest firms are built to do just that. The ultimate danger of monopsony is that it deprives the firms that actually manufacture products from obtaining an adequate return on their investment. In other words, the ultimate danger of monopsony is that, over time, it tends to destroy the machines and skills on which we all rely.

Examples of monopsony can be difficult to pin down, but we are in luck in that today we have one of the best illustrations of monopsony pricing power in economic history: Wal-Mart. There is little need to recount at any length the retailer’s power over America’s marketplace. For our purposes, a few facts will suffice—that one in every five retail sales in America is recorded at Wal-Mart’s cash registers; that the firm’s revenue nearly equals that of the next six retailers combined; that for many goods, Wal-Mart accounts for upward of 30 percent of U.S. sales, and plans to more than double its sales within the next five years.

The effects of monopsony also can be difficult to pin down. But again we have easy illustrations ready to hand, in the surprising recent tribulations of two iconic American firms—Coca-Cola and Kraft. Coca-Cola is the quintessential seller of a product based on a “secret formula.” Recently, though, Wal-Mart decided that it did not approve of the artificial sweetener Coca-Cola planned to use in a new line of diet colas. In a response that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, Coca-Cola yielded to the will of an outside firm and designed a second product to meet Wal-Mart’s decree. Kraft, meanwhile, is a producer that only four years ago was celebrated by Forbes for “leading the charge” in a “brutal industry.” Yet since 2004, Kraft has announced plans to shut thirty-nine plants, to let go 13,500 workers, and to eliminate a quarter of its products. Most reports blame soaring prices of energy and raw materials, but in a truly free market Kraft could have pushed at least some of these higher costs on to the consumer. This, however, is no longer possible. Even as costs rise, Wal-Mart and other discounters continue to demand that Kraft lower its prices further. Kraft has found itself with no other choice than to swallow the costs, and hence to tear itself to pieces.

The idea that Wal-Mart’s power actually subverts the functioning of the free market will seem shocking to some. After all, the firm rose to dominance in the same way that many thousands of other companies before it did—through smart innovation, a unique culture, and a focus on serving the customer. Even a decade ago, Americans could fairly conclude that, in most respects, Wal-Mart’s rise had been good for the nation. But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market.

One of the basic premises of the free-market system is that actors are free to buy from or sell to a variety of other actors. In the case of Wal-Mart, no one can deny that every single firm that supplies the retailer is, technically, free not to do so. But is this true in the real world? After all, once a firm comes to depend on selling through Wal-Mart’s system, just how conceivable is the idea of walking away? Producers own and maintain machines, employ skilled workers, lease land and buildings. Even with careful planning, most would find the sudden surrender of 20 percent or more of their revenue to be extremely disruptive, if not suicidal.

Another basic premise of the free-market system is that the price of a commodity or good carries vital information from actor to actor within an economy—say, that cherries are scarce, or vinyl floor tiles abundant, or the latest iPod includes a new technology. Again, no one can deny that, technically, every firm that supplies Wal-Mart is free to ask whatever price it wants. But again, we must ask whether this holds true in the real world. Every producer knows that Wal-Mart is, as one of its executives told the New York Times, a “no-nonsense negotiator,” which means the firm sets take-it-or-leave-it prices, which as we know from the previous paragraph are far harder to leave than to take. Every so often Wal-Mart will accept a higher price, but then the retailer’s managers may opt to punish the offending supplier, perhaps by ratcheting up competition with its own in-house brands. Price, within the consumer economy, increasingly carries but one bit of information—that Wal-Mart is powerful enough to bend everyone else to its will.

Those who would use the word “free” to describe the market over which Wal-Mart presides should first consult with Coca-Cola’s product- design department; or with Kraft managers, or Kraft shareholders, or the Kraft employees who lost their jobs. These results were decided not within the scrum of the marketplace but by a single firm. Free-market utopians have long decried government industrial policy because it puts into the hands of bureaucrats and politicians the power to determine which firms “win” and which “lose.” Wal-Mart picks winners and losers every day, and the losers have no recourse to any court or any political representative anywhere.

* * *

Antimonopoly sentiment in America dates to the nation’s founding. We see it in the acceptance by the thirteen newly independent states of English common law, with its rich antimonopoly tradition. We see it in the most vital statement on industry in American history, Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, itself deeply influenced by Adam Smith’s antimonopoly writings in The Wealth of Nations. We see its citizen-centered nature in a 1792 essay by James Madison, in which he condemns monopolies for denying Americans “that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called.” We see it dominating many of the great political battles of the nineteenth century, from Andrew Jackson’s war on the Second Bank of the United States to William Jennings Bryan’s populist campaign of 1896.

It would be wrong, however, to regard America’s powerful antitrust law of the twentieth century as especially populist in nature. By the time Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, the industrial explosion that began during the Civil War had resulted in the rise of hundreds of big firms, which often proved far more efficient than their older, smaller competitors. The phenomenal productivity of these newcomers tempered support for more radical antimonopoly proposals. The result was a sort of compromise, engineered mainly by the progressive wing of the Republican Party. The Sherman Act came to be seen not as a license to destroy all big firms simply because they were big but as a very big stick with which to convince the average firm not to overreach, and on rare occasions to break companies like Standard Oil, which had developed reputations for grossly abusing power. Most big firms were allowed to remain big as long as they avoided outright collusion with competitors, or extreme abuse of their consumers, or overly rapid predation against smaller property holders.

Thus did antitrust power come to serve as a sort of constitutional law within America’s political economy. The goal was to enforce a balance of power among economic actors of all sizes, to maintain some degree of liberty at all levels within the economy. In recent years it has become a truism that antitrust law is designed to protect only the consumer. But the fact that Congress intended these laws also to preserve both competition per se and to shelter entire classes of entrepreneurs (among whom is the individual worker) was clear at the beginning and has been made clearer many times since. The text of the Sherman Act itself is famously vague, but the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1911 Standard Oil case was based flatly on the assumption that the need to ensure robust competition sometimes outweighs the benefits of near-term efficiency. Standard’s roll-up of the oil industry cut the cost of kerosene by nearly 70 percent, and yet the justices shattered the firm into thirty-four pieces. For many legislators, this was not nearly enough. Three years later, Congress greatly strengthened the rules against inter-firm price discrimination, in the Clayton Antitrust Act. Then in 1936, Congress did so again, even more resoundingly, by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. Wright Patman, the Texas Democrat who was the main force behind the bill, made sure everyone understood Congress’s intent. “The expressed purpose of the Act is to protect the independent merchant,” he wrote on the first page of a book he published to explain the law, “and the manufacturer from whom he buys.”

During the twentieth century, antitrust law shaped the American economy more than did any other government power. Over the years, many thousands of antitrust cases were filed, by federal and state governments against particular firms and by one firm against another. Antitrust law determined not merely how big a firm could grow but where it could do business, how it was managed, how it could compete, even what lines of business it could enter. As the industrial scholar Alfred D. Chandler has noted, the vertically integrated firm—which dominated the American economy for most of the last century—was to a great degree the product of antitrust enforcement. When Theodore Roosevelt began to limit the ability of large companies to grow horizontally, many responded by buying outside suppliers and integrating their operations into vertical lines of production. Many also set up internal research labs to improve existing products and develop new ones. Antitrust law later played a huge role in launching the information revolution. During the Cold War, the Justice Department routinely used antitrust suits to force high-tech firms to share the technologies they had developed. Targeted firms like IBM, RCA, AT&T, and Xerox spilled many thousands of patents onto the market, where they were available to any American competitor for free.

When Ronald Reagan took power in 1981, one of his first targets was antitrust law. The new administration put forth a variety of arguments—not least that international competition, especially with Japan, had rendered moot the old fears of monopoly. Yet the driving motive clearly was the philosophical antipathy of the Reaganites to the idea that the American people, acting through their representatives, had any business whatsoever telling business what to do. And the practical effect was to harness the institution of the corporation to that administration’s larger project of shifting power and profit from the working, middle, and entrepreneurial classes to the powerful and rich. The radical nature of Reagan’s attack on antitrust law is, in retrospect, astounding. Early in the administration, Attorney General William French Smith declared that “bigness is not necessarily badness.” Antitrust enforcer William Baxter held that big firms were more efficient than smaller and said he had the “science” to prove it. When the Reagan team published its new Merger Guidelines in 1982, the document formalized two revolutionary changes: it redefined the American marketplace as global in nature, and it severely restricted who could be regarded as a victim of monopoly. From this point on, only one action could be regarded as truly unacceptable—to gouge the consumer. Any firm that avoided such a clumsy act was, for all intents, free to gouge any other class of citizen, not least through predatory pricing and the blatant exercise of power over suppliers and workers.

* * *

If a single business deal illuminates the degree to which Wal-Mart has centralized control over America’s consumer economy, it was last year’s takeover of Gillette by Procter & Gamble. Gillette would seem one of the last firms likely to find itself unable to protect its pricing power; its 70 percent share of global razor sales gives it some weight at the negotiating table. Yet the Boston-based firm discovered that it could no longer keep its profit margins safely out of the grasp of the Arkansas retailer. And so was conceived the largest in a long list of buyouts due at least in part to Wal-Mart’s power, including Newell’s takeover of Rubbermaid, Kellogg’s purchase of Keebler, and Kraft’s buyout of Nabisco. And of course there is the long list of firms that have ended up dead or in Chapter 11 reorganization at least partly because of their dealings with Wal-Mart. Some are small fry, like Vlasic Foods. Others were once powers, like Pillowtex. Some were beloved brands, like Schwinn. Others were family enterprises, like Lovable Garments.

Even with Gillette in hand, Procter & Gamble itself is anything but safe. For decades, P&G was regarded by retailers as the “800-pound gorilla” among suppliers of home products. It was one of two firms that most spurred Sam Walton as he built Wal-Mart—the competitor to beat was K-Mart; the supplier to tame, P&G. By the time Walton died in the early 1990s, he was able to brag of how he had forced P&G to accept a “win-win partnership” based on the sharing of information. Had he lived a few years longer, though, Walton would have witnessed what amounts to the outright capture of his foe. And for a man who spent much of his life scrounging for deals on lingerie and hawking hula-hoop knockoffs, he would surely have relished how this struggle for the heights of the consumer economy was decided by the power to price toilet paper and detergent. In recent years, Wal-Mart beat P&G into submission by mercilessly pitting its in-house brands against top P&G brands; the retailer, for instance, introduced not one but two detergents to compete with Tide and, in a particularly audacious move, grabbed outright the copyright for the White Cloud line of toilet paper, after P&G unwisely forgot to protect its own brand’s name.

With the purchase of Gillette, P&G has achieved a new scope and scale, vaulting past Unilever to become the world’s biggest maker of consumer goods. Yet the new balance of power is unlikely to last. Wal-Mart has become so strong, so sure of the invulnerability of its position, that not only does it not fear consolidation among its suppliers; it actually forces many of them to form fully self-conscious, collusive oligopolies with their rivals. Not that these relationships are advertised as such. The key here is the innocuous-sounding term “category management,” and it describes a practice that is now common to all large retailers. But it is a practice that grew out of Wal-Mart’s original “partnership” with P&G, and it is a practice that has been pushed especially hard by Wal-Mart.

Until recently, every retailer would draw up its own merchandising plan, detailing which brands to promote, how much shelf space to grant each, which products to place at eye level. These days, Wal-Mart and a growing number of other retailers ask a single supplier to serve as its “Category Captain” and to manage the shelving and marketing decisions for an entire family of products, say, dental care. Wal-Mart then requires all other producers of this class of products to cooperate with the new “Captain.” One obvious result is that a producer like Colgate-Palmolive will end up working intensely with firms it formerly competed with, such as Crest manufacturer P&G, to find the mix of products that will allow Wal-Mart to earn the most it can from its shelf space. If Wal-Mart discovers that a supplier promotes its own product at the expense of Wal-Mart’s revenue, the retailer may name a new captain in its stead.[1] Not surprisingly, one common result is that many producers simply stop competing head to head. In many instances, a single firm ends up controlling 70 percent or more of U.S. sales in an entire product line, such as canned soups or chips. In exchange, its competitor will expect that firm to yield 70 percent or more of some other product line, say, snacks or spices. Such sharing out of markets by oligopolies is taking place throughout the non-branded economy—in grains, meats, medical devices, chemicals, electronic components. But nowhere is it more visible than in the aisles of Wal-Mart.

In essence, Wal-Mart has grown so powerful that it can turn even its largest suppliers, and entire oligopolized industries, into extensions of itself. The effects of this practice are most obvious in Wal-Mart’s horizontal competition against other retailers. Retail experts sometimes talk of a “waterbed effect,” which takes place when a supplier insists on collecting from weaker retailers at least some of the rent a more powerful firm refuses to pay. One recent study of how such power plays out within an entire system shows that a small retailer can expect to pay upward of 10 percent more than a powerful firm for the same basket of items. The effect also explains what takes place economically between communities served by Wal-Mart and those served by less powerful firms—the more power Wal-Mart accrues, the more it is able to shift costs from, say, suburb to city. And so every day the competitive landscape tilts just that much more in Wal-Mart’s favor. And so, every year, the landscape is littered with that many more dead or half-dead retailers—including such once-big names as Winn Dixie, Albertsons, K-Mart, Toys R Us, and Sears.

This advantage is simply what can be quantified in price. Many of the benefits Wal-Mart extracts from its suppliers lie in a realm far beyond the market economy. If Wal-Mart’s aim were simply to dictate the price it will pay for a product, then leave up to its suppliers all decisions as to how to get to that price, it would cause far less economic damage than it does now. But that is not Wal-Mart’s way. Instead, the firm is also one of the world’s most intrusive, jealous, fastidious micromanagers, and its aim is nothing less than to remake entirely how its suppliers do business, not least so that it can shift many of its own costs of doing business onto them. In addition to dictating what price its suppliers must accept, Wal-Mart also dictates how they package their products, how they ship those products, and how they gather and process information on the movement of those products. Take, for instance, Levi Strauss & Co. Wal-Mart dictates that its suppliers tell it what price they charge Wal-Mart’s competitors, that they accept payment entirely on Wal-Mart’s terms, and that they share information all the way back to the purchase of raw materials. Take, for instance, Newell Rubbermaid. Wal-Mart controls with whom its suppliers speak, how and where they can sell their goods, and even encourages them to support Wal-Mart in its political fights. Take, for instance, Disney. Wal-Mart all but dictates to suppliers where to manufacture their products, as well as how to design those products and what materials and ingredients to use in those products. Take, for instance, Coca-Cola.

We should be most disturbed by the fact that Wal-Mart has gathered the power to dictate content, even to the most powerful of its suppliers. Because no longer is the retailer’s attention focused only on firms that produce T-shirts, electrical cords, and breakfast cereal. Every day Wal-Mart expands its share of the U.S. markets for magazines, recorded music, films on DVD, and books. This means that every day its tastes, interests, and peculiarities weigh that much more on decisions made in Hollywood studios, in Manhattan publishing houses, and in the editorial offices of newspapers and network news shows. Americans who favor abortion have much to worry about these days, between South Dakota’s recent ban and the appointment to the Supreme Court of Justice Joseph Alito. But at least these battles are taking place entirely in the public eye, and the decisions are being made by democratically elected representatives. Such was not the case when Wal-Mart recently decided to allow each individual pharmacist in the company to choose whether or not to stock the “morning after” pill. Given the degree to which Wal-Mart has rolled up the pharmaceutical business in many towns and regions across the country, this act amounted, for all intents, to a de facto ban on these pills in many communities. This political decision was made and enforced by a private monopoly.

* * *

To appreciate just how blatantly Wal-Mart defies America’s antitrust tradition, consider how our grandparents handled the last retailer to gather extreme power: the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Better known as the A&P, the grocer at its height operated more than 4,000 supermarkets in nearly forty states and wielded immense influence over the entire food economy. The A&P was famous for its innovations in discount retailing, in distribution, in advertising. And it was infamous for its use of monopsony power, not least its perfection of the art of setting in-house brands against producers who resisted its will. Relative to Wal-Mart today, the A&P a half century ago was a far less awesome force. The firm sold only groceries; it was only double the size of its nearest competitor; and its total workforce was, as a percentage of the U.S. population, only a fifth as large as Wal-Mart’s is now. Even so, the A&P was widely and vociferously denounced by local communities, state governments, newspapers, and labor unions as a threat to the American way of life.

Over the years, the federal government repeatedly hauled the A&P into court for abusing its market power. The government first began to scrutinize the firm in 1915, when Cream of Wheat refused to sell to the A&P because of its pricing policy. Then in 1936 came the Robinson-Patman law, which was popularly known as the “Anti-A&P Act.” A year later, the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against the A&P, charging that the company had forced a Maryland vegetable packer to grant it a special 4 percent discount. In November 1942, the Antitrust Division filed a Sherman Act case against the retailer, one section of which detailed how the A&P had used “several turns of the screw” to coerce Ralston Purina into granting it a discount three and a half times what the cereal packer offered any other firm. Three years after winning that case, the Justice Department was back in court in September 1949 with another Sherman Act suit, this time asking for the dismemberment of the A&P. Filed at a time when the grocer was already clearly in decline—not least because of antitrust enforcement—the 1949 case was dropped five years later. But this was only after the A&P admitted guilt, agreed to dissolve an internal company that traded in agricultural products, and signed an outright prohibition against “dictating systematically” to suppliers. The final antitrust case against the A&P was not resolved until February 1979, a month after a West German grocery mogul bought control over the remnants of the once-huge firm.

Antitrust enforcement against the A&P and other big firms like Sears prevented any twentieth-century American retailer from ever growing nearly as powerful as Wal-Mart is today. But since the Reagan Administration, the only effective constraints on Wal-Mart have been set by investors and revenue flow. Even during the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration targeted a few companies for abusing their pricing power, the Arkansas-based retailer somehow managed to avoid any action. It is unclear whether this was in any way due to the close relationship between the Clinton family and Wal-Mart, on whose board Hillary Clinton served for many years. But even as Staples and McCormick & Co. were sued, a firm with vastly more power over the American economy was left entirely free to extend its domain in whatever direction and to whatever extent it wished. In fact, in one of the highest-profile antitrust cases of the 1990s, an FTC suit against Toys R Us for colluding with toy manufacturers, Wal-Mart emerged as one of the biggest winners.

The Reagan Administration’s assault on antitrust enforcement had an even more dramatic effect on manufacturers. Complete license to expand horizontally resulted, in many industries, in the virtual collapse of the vertically integrated firm. Once they consolidated control over their marketplaces, scores of big manufacturers shut down or spun off most or even all of such naturally expensive and risky activities as production and research. These firms opted instead to purchase components and other manufacturing “services” from smaller companies whose main or only path to the final marketplace passed through their offices. This is true of corporations as diverse as Nike, Boeing, 3M, and Merck. Although it has become commonplace to trace the phenomenon of “outsourcing” to the emergence of new technologies and changes in the global “marketplace,” it is much more accurate to trace it back to the disappearance of antitrust enforcement. The change in law that gave Wal-Mart license to grow to such a huge size also gave to many manufacturers the license to recast themselves in Wal-Mart’s image and become retailers themselves. The result? More and more production systems are run by companies designed not to manufacture but to trade in components manufactured by other, smaller firms, over which they can exercise at least some degree of monopsony power.

* * *

Some of Wal-Mart’s more sophisticated boosters will defend the company by defending the exercise of monopsony power itself. Wal-Mart, in their view, should be seen as a firm that aggregates our will and buying power as consumers in much the same way that unions once aggregated the interests of workers. One of the better known versions of the argument was put forth by Jason Furman, a former campaign adviser to Senator John Kerry, who last year published a strong defense of Wal-Mart. The huge retailer, Furman wrote, is “a progressive success story” that has brought “huge benefits” to the “American middle class.” Sure, this argument goes, Wal-Mart may employ its power with a certain Stalinist flair; but it does so in our name, and the result is to make the production system on which we all rely more efficient. This efficiency is good for all society, and it is especially good for those poor folks who cling to the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

There are two great flaws in such thinking. The first and most obvious is that it ignores the effects of monopoly on our political system—the consolidation of vision and voice, the de facto merger of private and public spheres, the gathering of power unchecked and unaccountable. It is to view American society through an entirely materialistic prism, to measure “human progress” only in terms of how many calories or blouses can be stuffed into an individual’s shopping cart. It is to view the American citizen not as someone who yearns to decide for himself or herself what to buy and where to work in a free market but to say, instead, “Let them eat Tastykake.”

The second flaw is economic, and is of even more immediate concern. Even if the American people did choose to bear the extreme political costs of monopoly, the particular type of power wielded by Wal-Mart and its emulators makes no economic sense in the long run. On the surface, it may seem to matter little who wins the great battles between such goliaths as Wal-Mart and Kraft, or between Wal-Mart and P&G. Yet which firm prevails can have a huge effect on the welfare of our society over time. The difference between a system dominated by firms built to produce and a system dominated by firms built to exercise monopsony power over producers is extreme. The producers that dominated the American economy for most of the twentieth century were geared to build more and to introduce new, to protect their capital investments against overly predatory investors, to raise price faster than cost, to show some degree of loyalty to workers and outside suppliers and communities. Wal-Mart and a growing number of today’s dominant firms, by contrast, are programmed to cut cost faster than price, to slow the introduction of new technologies and techniques, to dictate downward the wages and profits of the millions of people and smaller firms who make and grow what they sell, to break down entire lines of production in the name of efficiency. The effects of this change are clear: We see them in the collapsing profit margins of the firms caught in Wal-Mart’s system. We see them in the fact that of Wal-Mart’s top ten suppliers in 1994, four have sought bankruptcy protection.

In a world of rising tensions within and among nations, of accelerating climate and environmental change, we would be wise to design the production systems on which we rely to be able to evolve as rapidly as the human and natural worlds around us evolve. Instead, we have programmed the dominant institutions within our economy to eliminate all the wonderful chaos of a free-market system. Rather than speed up the random motion and serendipitous collisions that have for so long propelled the American economy, Wal-Mart and other monopsonists are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock. To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than twentieth-century America. It is to celebrate rationalization to the point of complete irrationality.

* * *

There are many ways to counterbalance the power of Wal-Mart and the other new goliaths. In the case of Wal-Mart, we could encourage yet more mergers among its suppliers and its competitors. Or we could make it easier for its workers to unionize. Or we could micromanage the firm through our state and municipal governments (e.g., requiring it, as Maryland recently did, to devote 8 percent of its payroll to health insurance). Yet every one of these approaches runs the risk of only further warping our economy and perhaps even reinforcing Wal-Mart’s power by creating new allies for it. After all, super-consolidated suppliers already share many of Wal-Mart’s political interests; labor unions now committed to Wal-Mart’s destruction could overnight become equally as committed to the further extension of Wal-Mart’s power; and new bureaucracies will generally tend to sympathize with the firms they regulate. We can also, of course, choose to do nothing, and surrender to the immense retailer all the decisions that in the past were made within the marketplace itself or by democratically elected legislators. In other words, we can cede to Wal-Mart the role it so relentlessly seeks for itself—to be dictator over the central functions of the U.S. consumer economy.

If, however, we choose the path of the free market, and of individual freedom within the market; if we choose to ensure the health and flexibility of our economy and our industrial systems and our society; if we choose to protect our republican way of government, which depends on the separation of powers within our economy just as in our political system—then we have only one choice. We must restore antitrust law to its central role in protecting the economic rights, properties, and liberties of the American citizen, and first of all use that power to break Wal-Mart into pieces. We can devise no magic formula or scientific plan for doing so—all antitrust decisions are inherently subjective in nature. But when we do so, we should be confident that we act squarely in the American tradition, as illuminated by the cases against Standard Oil and the A&P. We should act knowing that the ultimate fault lies not with Wal-Mart but with our last generation of representatives, who have abjectly failed to enforce laws refined over the course of two centuries. We should act knowing that much similar work lies ahead, against many other giant oligopolies, in many other sectors. We should act knowing that to falter is to guarantee political and perhaps economic disaster.

As we make our case, we should be sure to call one expert witness in particular. Last year, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott called on the British government to take antitrust action against the U.K. grocery chain Tesco. Whenever a firm nears a 30 percent share of any market, Scott said, “there is a point where government is compelled to intervene.” Now, Wal-Mart has never been shy about using antitrust for its own purposes. In addition to the Toys R Us case, the firm was also the instigator of a Sherman Act suit against Visa and MasterCard. And so such a statement, by the CEO of a firm that already controls upward of 30 percent of many markets and has announced plans to more than double its sales, sets a new standard for hubris. It also sets a simple goal for us—elect representatives who will take Citizen Scott at his word.
About the Author

Barry C. Lynn is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation..
Notes

1. Such blatantly enforced collusion has not gone entirely unnoticed in Washington. Toward the end of its time in office, even the merger-happy Clinton Administration allowed the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation of these practices, and an FTC report in early 2001 identified four ways that Category Management may violate even the remarkably loose antitrust guidelines of the last generation. All four of these violations cut right to the core of the free-market system. As the FTC put it, a category captain might “(1) learn confidential information about rivals’ plans; (2) hinder the expansion of rivals, (3) promote collusion among retailers; or (4) facilitate collusion among manufacturers.” In Wal-Mart’s world, all four violations are present to at least some extent. [Back]

Overstimulation leads to undercontentment.

2006-08-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

If you have seen everything, what is there left but boredom?

Underwhelmed by It All
For the 12-to-24 set, boredom is a recreational hazard.
By Robin Abcarian and John Horn, Times Staff Writers
August 7, 2006

With their vast arsenals of electronic gear, they are the most entertained generation ever. Yet the YouTubing, MySpacing, multi-tasking teens and young adults widely seen as Hollywood's most wanted audience are feeling — can it be? — a bit bored with it all.

A new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, the first in a series of annual entertainment surveys, finds that a large majority of the 12- to 24-year-olds surveyed are bored with their entertainment choices some or most of the time, and a substantial minority think that even in a kajillion-channel universe, they don't have nearly enough options. "I feel bored like all the time, 'cause there is like nothing to do," said Shannon Carlson, 13, of Warren, Ohio, a respondent who has an array of gadgets, equipment and entertainment options at her disposal but can't ward off ennui.

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They do seem to be passionate about their electronic devices, though, especially their computers, which ranked even above cellphones when respondents were offered a "desert island" choice of one item. Still, the poll suggests that the revolution in entertainment, media and technology for which many in Hollywood are already developing strategies has not yet taken hold.

For example, respondents say that traditional sources such as television advertising and radio airplay still tend to drive their decisions about movies and music more than online networking sites. Those interested in keeping up with current events report a surprising interest in conventional news sources, especially local TV news. And although many see their computers as a perfectly good place to watch a TV show or a movie, there does not appear to be widespread desire to take in, say, "Spider-Man 3" on their video iPods.

But there's little comfort here for movie theater owners. The multiplex isn't very popular either.

Even though 2006's box-office grosses are running 7% ahead of last year's, the poll found waning interest in seeing movies in theaters. Although the youngest teens say they're hitting the multiplex as often as ever, many young adults report that they're seeing fewer films in theaters. The main complaints are expensive tickets and concessions, but rude moviegoers and "bad movies" are factors too.

"It doesn't seem like there's anything good," says Emma Standring-Trueblood, a 16-year-old who is soon to start her junior year at Oak Park High School near Agoura Hills. "I'd say a good episode of 'The West Wing' is better than most of the stuff that gets out there."

A signature trait of those surveyed is a predilection for doing several things at the same time, with a majority of females in every age group and males from 15 to 17 and 21 to 24 saying they prefer to multi-task rather than to do one thing at a time.

Nathaniel Johnson, a 17-year-old senior at Claremont High School who took part in the survey, spoke for the 62% of boys in his age group who like to multi-task. He's a big fan of what the computer allows him to do: "You can open five or six programs simultaneously: work on a project, type a report, watch YouTube, check e-mail and watch a movie."

Unlike some of his peers, who report doing as many as four or five things simultaneously — such as homework, instant messaging, surfing the Net, talking on the phone and listening to music — Nathaniel discovered through trial and error that he could do only three things well at a time. "Generally," he said, "you feel overwhelmed at some point if you are trying to do too many things at once."

Like many others surveyed, Nathaniel rarely does his homework in a quiet environment. For him, homework and hard rock are inseparable. "Most people think it's horribly distracting," he said, "but I did get a 4.0 GPA." (A small number of the multi-taskers managed to fit in a video game too, but a great majority of young males who play video games — including 74% of younger teens — do not engage in other activities while doing so.)

Young people multi-task, they say, because they are too busy to do only one thing at a time, because they need something to do during commercials or, for most (including 64% of girls 12 to 14), it's boring to do just one thing at a time.

The poll, under the supervision of Los Angeles Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus, interviewed 839 teenagers (ages 12 to 17) and 811 young adults (18 to 24) from June 23 to July 3 using the Knowledge Networks' Web panel, which provides a representative sample of U.S. households. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for both age group samples.

Maybe it is part of the human condition that the young are bored, but some think that this generation — children of baby boomers, sometimes called millennials — has been spoiled by the sheer volume of entertainment and technology choices available.

"I think there is more media gratification that younger people feel entitled to," said Jordan Levin, who should know. Levin, a former chief executive of the WB network, was instrumental in developing the hit young adult shows "Felicity" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Levin is now a partner in Generate, an entertainment company whose programs, thanks to an exclusive deal with MTV Networks, will be seen on television, cellphones and the Internet. Kids, Levin said, "have grown up in an environment where they expect to get what they want, where they want it, when they want it."

Throughout Hollywood, the race is on to develop entertainment that captures the attention of this distracted generation. The head of MTV Films just left to start a Viacom division that will make episodic shows for cellphones, iPods and computers. BitTorrent, once known as a top site for Internet pirates, has begun serving original — and lawfully shared — programming.

The studios also are looking to video games for artistic inspiration, which makes sense given the poll finding that 67% of boys ages 12 to 17 regularly play games on their computers. Among the game-inspired movies in the works: "Halo," "Hitman" and a sequel to "Resident Evil."

Some theater owners have taken notice of the huge teen demand for video games. National Amusements is renovating a theater to create a CyberZone video gaming site in Ypsilanti, Mich., which will offer nearly 80 PCs, PlayStations and Xboxes in an area adjacent to its movie screens.

Despite the technological advances that are changing the way entertainment is delivered and consumed, good old-fashioned word of mouth — with a tech twist, thanks to text messaging — continues to be one of the most important factors influencing the choices that young people make.

As the Times/Bloomberg poll found, those recommendations (or pans) play a significant role in determining attendance. When asked how soon after seeing a movie they told their friends about it, 38% of teens and 40% of young adults said they told their friends the same day.

"Those text messages are a very powerful tool," said Jeff Blake, chairman of marketing and distribution for Sony Pictures Entertainment. "You certainly have the feeling that what they say in their text messages is just as important — if not more important — as the quote we put at the top of our ad. These kids listen to each other."

When it comes to the content of their entertainment, those surveyed tended to be quite tolerant of violence, gross-out humor and swearing in movies.

Yet a surprisingly high number of teenage boys (58%) and even more teenage girls (74%) said they were offended by material they felt disrespected women and girls. (How they reconcile that with their preference for the often-sexist aesthetic of rap music, the top music choice among respondents who specified a genre, is a topic for another poll.) Respondents who considered themselves religious were much more likely to be offended by gay and lesbian content. Young men 18 to 24 aren't offended by much; even material that disrespects women bothers only about 40% of this group.

Twelve-year-old Melina Erkan, a seventh-grader in Monroe, Conn., said she used to watch a lot of music videos on MTV and VH1 but has become increasingly turned off by the prevalent images of scantily dressed women. "Sometimes in the music videos these days, the women they have dancing in the background, they dress really cheap, and women don't really look like that and act like that," she said. "When I see that, I change the channel to something I like."

Hannah Montee, a 21-year-old college student in Liberal, Mo., said she had practically stopped watching TV because of all the vulgarity she saw. "I get tired of hearing all the cussing and the sexual innuendoes," she said.

Younger teens report that their parents keep a tight rein on their entertainment and technology habits. Nearly 3 out of 5 in this group say their parents restrict what they download, whether it's music, movies or other content. And although for many teenagers adult intrusion is unwelcome, parents can take some solace in the fact that about 15% of 12- to 17-year-olds answered "my parents" when asked how they found out about the music they'd most recently acquired.

Only 4% of the 12- to 17-year-olds reported that their parents didn't know much about their entertainment and communication choices. About a quarter of young teenage boys said they fought with their parents about video games or the music they listened to, whereas girls tended to fight with their parents about cellphone use.

(Girls play video games, but fewer than 1% of female poll respondents of all ages said they would choose a video game console if they could have only one item on a desert island from a list that also included a computer, a cellphone, a television, an iPod or an MP3 player.)

Renee Hampton, a 14-year-old ninth-grader in Chapmansboro, Tenn., battles with her parents over the time she spends online. Though most teens her age reported spending less than two hours a day on the computer, Renee said that this summer she was spending eight hours a day online. "My parents think I need to get outside more," she said. "I say that I get outside enough."

Renee loves Japanese cartoons and spends a lot of her online time creating animated music videos with anime characters, which she posts on the phenomenally popular site YouTube.com. Certain websites, she reported, are off-limits, but she wasn't sure why.

"Hey, Mom," she said. "Why are you against MySpace?"

"I have heard too many things about perverts on there and that it's not a good place for children," her mother replied.

"Mom," Renee said, "that's so stupid."

Renee may be frustrated, but her peers reported similar parental involvement. About a third of boys and girls ages 12 to 14 said their parents didn't let them go on social networking sites such as MySpace. About 15% of the kids 15 to 17 said their parents restricted access, but by age 18, parental control had melted away.

Another concern for adults is multi-tasking. For the most part, experts have not looked closely at how teens' and young adults' thinking skills, especially when it comes to homework, may be affected by what one software executive has dubbed "constant partial attention."

"It's like being in a candy store," said Gloria Mark, a UC Irvine professor who studies interactions between people and computers. "You aren't going to ignore the candy; you are going to try it all."

Mark, who has studied multi-tasking by 25- to 35-year-old high-tech workers, believes that the group is not much different from 12- to 24-year-olds, since the two groups grew up with similar technology. She frets that "a pattern of constant interruption" is creating a generation that will not know how to lose itself in thought.

"You know the concept of 'flow'?" asked Mark, referring to an idea popularized by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the benefits of complete absorption and focus. "You have to focus and concentrate, and this state of flow only comes when you do that…. Maybe it's an old-fogy notion, but it's an eternal one: Anyone with great ideas is going to have to spend some time deep in thought."

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Voting power

For young consumers old enough to vote, government matters more than 'American Idol.'

Q: Have you ever voted for an 'American Idol' contestant?

Ages 18-20

Yes, voted for contestant 16%

No, not voted for contestant 84%

Ages 21-24

Yes, voted for contestant 24%

No, not voted for contestant 76%

--

Q: Have you ever voted for a political candidate for a government office?

Ages 18-20

Yes, voted for candidate 37%

No, not voted for candidate 63%

Ages 21-24

Yes, voted for candidate 63%

No, not voted for candidate 37%

Source: Times/Bloomberg poll

**

Attention deficit

Despite an increasing number of choices, young consumers of entertainment still tend to be bored.

Q: How often are you bored with the entertainment choices available to you?

Ages 12-17

Male

Often/sometimes: 69&

Rarely/never: 31%

Female

Often/sometimes: 75%

Rarely/never: 25%

Ages 18-20

Male

Often/sometimes: 73%

Rarely/never: 27%

Female

Often/sometimes: 73%

Rarely/never: 27%

Ages 21-24

Male

Often/sometimes: 65%

Rarely/never: 35%

Female

Often/sometimes: 76%

Rarely/never: 24%

--

Q. In general, do you like to focus on one thing at a time, or would you rather multi-task, that is do more than one thing at a time?

Males

Ages 12-14

Focus on one thing at a time: 50%

Multi-task: 50%

Females

Ages 12-14

Focus on one thing at a time: 37%

Multi-task: 63%

*

Males

Ages 15-17

Focus on one thing at a time: 38%

Multi-task: 62%

Females

Ages 15-17

Focus on one thing at a time: 29%

Multi-task: 71%

*

Males

Ages 18-20

Focus on one thing at a time: 52%

Multi-task: 48%

Females

Ages 18-20

Focus on one thing at a time: 28%

Multi-task: 72%

*

Males

Ages 21-24

Focus on one thing at a time: 46%

Multi-task: 54%

Females

Ages 21-24

Focus on one thing at a time: 37%

Multi-task: 63%

--

Asked of those who multi-task

Q. What is the reason for that? (Multiple selections allowed, top four responses shown.)

Ages 12-14

It's something to do during commercials

Male: 39%

Female: 46%

My schedule keeps me too busy to do only one thing at a time

Male: 14%

Female: 26%

It's boring to just do one thing at a time

Male: 51%

Female: 64%

I like to stay in touch with my friends at all times

Male: 16%

Female: 33%

*

Ages 15-17

It's something to do during commercials

Male: 37%

Female: 48%

My schedule keeps me too busy to do only one thing at a time

Male: 14%

Female: 28%

It's boring to just do one thing at a time

Male: 58%

Female: 47%

I like to stay in touch with my friends at all times

Male: 31%

Female: 32%

*

Ages 18-20

It's something to do during commercials

Male: 42%

Female: 54%

My schedule keeps me too busy to do only one thing at a time

Male: 30%

Female: 40%

It's boring to just do one thing at a time

Male: 40%

Female: 47%

I like to stay in touch with my friends at all times

Male: 27%

Female: 17%

*

Ages 21-24

It's something to do during commercials

Male: 35%

Female: 40%

My schedule keeps me too busy to do only one thing at a time

Male: 25%

Female: 53%

It's boring to just do one thing at a time

Male: 35%

Female: 22%

I like to stay in touch with my friends at all times

Male: 12%

Female: 6%

--

How the poll was conducted

The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll was conducted from June 23 to July 3 using the Knowledge Networks' Web-enabled panel, which provides a representative nationwide sample of U.S. households. Of the 4,466 minors and young adults invited to participate in the survey, 1,904 (43%) responded to the survey, with 1,650 qualifying. The 1,650 qualified respondents included 839 minors (ages 12 to 17) and 811 young adults (ages 18 to 24). The margin of sampling error for both groups is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In order to provide as representative a sample as possible, the survey results were weighted to U.S. census figures for 12- to 24-year-olds in the United States in terms of age, race or ethnicity, gender and region, and for urban or rural residence and Internet access.

--

Source: Times/Bloomberg poll

**

Contrary to expectations

So most young Americans get their news from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show"? Don't be so sure. The first annual Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll managed to bust a number of myths. Among them:

Myth: More young adults cast ballots for "American Idol" than vote in political elections.

Truth: Only 21% of poll respondents ages 18 to 24 said they had voted for an "American Idol" contestant. But 53% said they had voted for a candidate for public office.

*

Myth: Kids run rampant on the Internet, evading the supervision of their parents, who are too old to figure out what their children are up to.

Truth: Nearly 7 in 10 of 12- to 17-year-olds said their parents knew how they spent their time online. Nearly 3 out of 5 12- to 14-year-olds said their parents restricted what they could download. About a third of boys and girls ages 12 to 14 are not allowed to go on social networking sites such as MySpace.com. Only 19% of boys and 13% of girls reported having no parental restrictions on computer use.

*

Myth: It's the rare teen who doesn't have a MySpace account these days.

Truth: More than half of teens ages 12 to 17 don't use social networking sites.

*

Myth: The Internet and MTV play a key role in influencing the music young people buy.

Truth: Fifty-seven percent of teens and young adults said they first heard new music on the radio. At least 3 out of 10 in both groups learned about new music by watching a music video on TV.

*

Myth: Time on the computer has replaced all those hours spent watching TV.

Truth: Almost half of teens said they spent up to two hours on the Internet each day, 29% said they spent up to four hours and 15% said they spent more than four hours. Twenty-three percent said they spent more than four hours watching TV. Many do both simultaneously.

*

Myth: Box-office receipts have suffered in recent years because the movies are bad and young people don't like bad movies.

Truth: The main reason young people give for not liking the theater experience is that tickets and concessions cost too much. Bad movies were ranked below moviegoers who talk during the feature and too many advertisements.

*

Myth: Most young adults get their news about current events from satirical shows such as "The Daily Show" or the Internet.

Truth: Just 3% of teenagers and 6% of young adults cited such programs as "The Daily Show" as their main source of information about current events. Only 10% of teens and 11% of young adults said blogs or other websites were their best source. Teens and young adults said they most frequently kept up by talking with friends and family and watching local TV news.

Source: Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll

**

On the Web

More about the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg entertainment poll at latimes.com/entertainmentpoll.

*

Times staff writer Matea Gold contributed to this report.

Going wild.

2006-08-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

The line between being exploited and exhibiting lack of self-respect.

---

From the Los Angeles Times
'Baby, Give Me a Kiss'

The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worse

By Claire Hoffman
Times Staff Writer

August 6, 2006

Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn't laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

This is not what I anticipated when I signed up for a tour of Joe Francis' world. I've been with him nonstop since early afternoon, listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating fast food and watching young women hurl themselves against his 6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, "We want to go wild!"

Tonight we had spent almost five hours in a sweaty nightclub, crowded with 2,500 very young and very drunk people. Clubs like this are fertile fields for Francis. He's made a fortune selling videos of women who agree to flash their breasts and French-kiss their friends for the cameras. In exchange, a girl who goes wild will receive a T-shirt, a pair of panties, maybe a trucker hat. It had been a typical night for him. He'd scoured the club, recruiting young and, for the most part, intoxicated women. Because filming wasn't allowed inside, he and his newly discovered entourage had stepped outside, heading for the confines of a "Girls Gone Wild" tour bus parked across the street.

Before climbing aboard, he walks in my direction, and the next thing I know, he's acting out his 2003 arrest on me.

I wriggle free and punch him in the face, closed-fist but not too hard.

"Damn," bystanders say. Francis barely blinks. He snatches at my notebook. He is amped, his broad face sneering as he does a sort of boxer's skip around me, jabbering, grabbing at my arms and my stomach as I try to move away, clutching my notebook to my chest. He stabs a finger in my face, shouting, "You don't care about the 1st Amendment. I care about the 1st Amendment, but you are the kind of reporter who doesn't care."

Maybe you've seen the "Girls Gone Wild" infomercials that run on late-night cable, advertising mail-order videos of women exposing themselves ("and more!" as the jackets promise). Francis didn't invent the notion of spring break—and all the binge drinking, flurried hookups, wet T-shirt contests and general you-only-live-once exhibitionism that it entails—but he and his company, Mantra Entertainment, have affixed themselves to this youthful domain and transmitted its middle-American hedonism to the world. By packaging and dispersing it, people close to Francis tell me, Mantra does as much as $40 million a year in sales.

At 33, and after almost a decade as the king of soft porn, Francis says he wants to leave this twilight existence and wade into the mainstream. He is quick to list the projects he says he has in the works: a feature-length film, a series of "Girls Gone Wild" ocean cruises, a "Girls Gone Wild" apparel line and a chain of "Girls Gone Wild" restaurants. He says he's producing a new line of videos called "Flirt" that will be racy, but not explicit, and could be sold in mass-market retail outlets such as Wal-Mart and Target.

In short, Francis wants to insinuate himself and his view of the world into the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the vacations you take and the entertainment—filmed and glossy—that you consume. He sees "Girls Gone Wild" as the ultimate lifestyle brand. "Sex sells everything," he says. "It drives every buying decision . . . I hate to get too deep and philosophical here, but only the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful."

Mantra's headquarters are in Santa Monica, just down the street from MTV, and the décor is bachelor hip: flat-screen TVs, mod lighting, bowls of candy. Francis doesn't show up every day. That, he says, is because a big part of his job is simply to be seen, and not in the office. He doesn't often visit the "Girls Gone Wild" call center in Inglewood, either. I tag along on a day that employees there get the rare treat of a visit from the boss. Avoiding eye contact, wearing a T-shirt and sneakers, Francis looks more like a kid visiting his father's office than the chief executive of his own company. But when he pushes through the double doors, his employees gasp.

"Joe Francis. Wow, I love your work," says one flabbergasted young man who passes him in the hall. Francis smiles uneasily and doesn't stop as the man keeps muttering, "Wow. Wow."

The call center, just past Los Angeles International Airport, is staffed by rotating shifts of 250 employees who earn $9 an hour, plus commission, to hawk "Girls Gone Wild" videos, which sell for as little as $9.99 each. A whiteboard on the wall sets the agenda: "Push That Porn!!!"

The workers are mostly young and African American, and the videos they're pushing are almost exclusively of twentysomething white girls. "You like watching triple-X, right? You seen our doggy-style videos? Well, I'm going to send you out eight of the hottest videos of the year," goes the pitch.

Francis serves in many of the videos as a playboy host, surrounded by members of the opposite sex who appear to be titillated by his presence. "Spring Break 2005: Anything Goes!" is like most of Mantra's video products. Women in bikinis giggle as they stare into the camera and explain just how wild their vacations are getting: group showers, oral sex in bars with strangers, topless dancing. One girl, surrounded by her friends, explains, "I'm ready and willing, and I'm a dirty slut."

For "Spring Break 2005," Francis and his crew prowled the beaches of Miami, South Padre Island, Cancún and other sunny destinations. They filmed women not just taking off their tops but taking it all off, and having sex with one another. Francis is often on the other side of the camera, asking sweetly if he can hold the girls' tops, inquiring about their class schedules, chiding them for being "so naughty," saying he wants to see if they've shaved their genitals, begging them to play with their breasts and bend over to expose their thong underwear. They comply.

Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it's 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.

Francis has manufactured his own celebrity. He has become famous not just by selling soft porn but by affiliating himself with a tribe whose notoriety is perpetuated by the tabloids. He's been romantically linked to heiress Paris Hilton and Kimberly Stewart, Rod Stewart's daughter, and the gossip columns have reported that he's hosted Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn at his house in Mexico.

Until recently, the New York Post's Page Six, the paper of record for this world, treated Francis as an inconsequential hanger-on. Then, in March, Francis hosted a bachelor party in Mexico for Richard Johnson, the page's editor, and within weeks Page Six was wondering if he could be the next Hugh Hefner and even a likely candidate to buy Playboy.

Francis happily acknowledges that he courts attention. The effort, he says, is not about his ego but about selling his product. "Everything that gets covered in my name drives the business," he says. "The two are synonymous. You have to play the image up."

Francis, who grew up in Laguna Beach and went to USC, got his start in the gritty world of reality television, working as a production assistant on "Real TV," a syndicated show of home-video bloopers. He says he came up with the idea for his first commercial video venture after noticing that much of the material submitted for the show was too violent or explicit for network television. In 1997, using $50,000 in credit card debt, he released "Banned From Television," a compilation of footage of gruesome accidents—shark attacks, train wrecks and general gore. Then Francis moved on, releasing the first "Girls Gone Wild" in 1998.

In 2000, Les Haber, a producer who had worked with Francis on "Real TV," sued for breach of implied contract, breach of confidence and unjust enrichment. He accused Francis of stealing the idea for "Banned From Television" after Haber had pitched it to Francis as a potential partner. A jury agreed and found Francis and his company liable for $3.5 million; later the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum.

It seems like Francis spends a lot of money on lawyers. I guess that comes with the territory of filming strangers who take off their clothes. More than a dozen women have sued him, alleging that his company used images of them exposing their bodies on "Girls Gone Wild" videos, box covers and infomercials without their permission. Only a few have convinced the courts that they were unwitting victims. For the most part, judges and juries have sided with Francis' 1st Amendment argument that the plaintiffs' images were captured in public places and that the company was free to use them as it pleased, particularly in light of the fact that the women had signed waivers.

In Panama City Beach, his lawyers successfully fought another battle. Authorities had filed a 77-count complaint in state circuit court that accused Francis and his crew of gathering a group of minors—a 16-year-old and four 17-year-olds—and taking them to the Chateau Motel. There Francis paid two of the girls $100 each to make out in the shower while his crew videotaped them and told two of the girls he would pay them $50 each to touch his penis, according to the complaint. Francis pleaded not guilty to all charges.

After sheriff's deputies arrested him, he spent a night in jail. The deputies impounded his Gulfstream jet, his silver Ferrari and a stockpile of footage that authorities say shows him encouraging underage girls to engage in sexual activity. (Francis tried to use the scandal to a profitable end, coming out with "Girls Gone Wild: The Seized Video," featuring scenes filmed in Panama City Beach.) His lawyers asked a judge to suppress all the evidence, claiming it was illegally confiscated, and she agreed.

The parents of four of the girls in the Chateau Motel case filed a civil lawsuit in federal court accusing Francis and his company of a raft of offenses, including child abuse and sexual exploitation. Eleven months ago, FBI agents conducted a search of Mantra's offices, acting on a warrant issued in Washington. People close to the investigation say the FBI is looking at Mantra in connection with the alleged filming of underage girls. Francis' lawyer, Michael Kerry Burke, says Mantra is aware of the investigation and that similar warrants have been served on other companies.

The more time I spend with Francis, the more I suspect that for all his talk of living the dream, he's pretending at enthusiasm. His franchise is by its nature a constant party, and it can be exhausting. Two tour buses, splashed with the "Girls Gone Wild" logo, crisscross the country every day in search of the latest and hottest footage for the millions of videos the company sells each year. Club promoters pay Mantra up to $10,000 a night for the privilege of hosting Francis' film crews, sure to draw big crowds. And the money keeps pouring in.

But the women are changing, Francis tells me, and that makes him sad. In the beginning, when "Girls Gone Wild" cameramen first popped up in clubs, the women who revealed themselves seemed innocent—surprised, even, by their own spontaneity. Now that the brand is so pervasive, the women who participate increasingly appear to be calculating exhibitionists, hoping that an appearance on a video might catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame.

And Francis is getting a bit old for spring break. He says he's tiring of the eternal vacation. "It's really the worst thing, in my mind," he says, comparing it to a trade show or a convention. "It's fun for everybody else but me. I just get hounded by kids. It was more fun not being famous on spring break." What's more, the press has been omnipresent and, he says, too critical. "I've been anally raped over and over by the media."

It's an odd sort of thing for him to say. In January 2004, as news reports recounted, he was forced at gunpoint to simulate sodomizing himself with a vibrator as an intruder videotaped him in his Bel-Air mansion. A 28-year-old named Darnell Riley was arrested 14 months later, after police received a tip from Paris Hilton. Riley pleaded guilty to robbery and attempted extortion and was sentenced to 10 years and eight months. He is serving his time in Corcoran State Prison.

On his jet, Joe Francis flies above America, fast asleep, curled up on a foldout leather bench and swaddled in crisp white sheets. His tan face is still, his large mouth slack. The Gulfstream is stocked to cater to his needs—a Sony PlayStation, stacks of newspapers and magazines, a cabinet crammed with liquor and soft drinks and drawers full of snacks such as gummy bears, mesquite barbecue potato chips, M&M's and sugarless gum. Nearby, his crew of young men sit quietly, careful not to disturb him.

When he wakes from his nap, Francis pads in white socks to the bathroom. There the fixtures shimmer and the hand towels are plush, white and stitched with his initials in gold thread. His crew is deferential to him, and when he tells them that I am the new "Girls Gone Wild" topless model, they laugh obediently, even though the joke is flat from overuse.

Francis has the confidence, charm and sly intelligence of a back-slapping fraternity leader. He can be persuasive, to a degree, when he argues that "Girls Gone Wild" is just something that gives a good time to all. On the plane, his feet kicked up onto the seat in front of him, he turns to me and ponders what kind of footage his crew will gather that night. He hopes the girls will be pretty, he says. Pretty and wild. He says he loves women, is crazy about them. But sometimes it doesn't sound as though he is. The words he chooses, the stories he tells—they make a different point.

"My favorite is explaining to dumb chicks why the qwerty keyboard is called a qwerty keyboard, and why the letters aren't in order," he tells me. "They're, like, 18 years old, and they're, like, 'Wait a minute, there were typewriters?' And you got to start there."

I give him a look that says I have no idea what he's talking about. I haven't spent much time with 18-year-old girls lately, but the ones I know have usually heard of typewriters. But a qwerty keyboard? Never heard of it.

His eyes register my blank stare and he pounces, full of glee. "Hold on," he says excitedly. "You are a writer for the L.A. Times and you don't know this answer to this question?" He is shouting, turning to the back of the plane, making sure that everyone hears. "Unbelievable, she's 29 years old and she doesn't know about the qwerty keyboard!" It's a game, it seems. He's being playful. Sort of.

"She's going to slaughter me now," he shouts to the group as I keep smiling, writing in my notebook, tape recorder running. Apparently, he wants more of a reaction. He's pantomiming me typing furiously, writing an article.

"She's going to be looking at her keyboard going, 'Ah, you think you're so smart now.' Qwerty keyboard. Who's smart now?" He sounds happy. "She's going to be playing that tape back. It's going to be echoing in her head. Qwerty, qwerty, qwerty. She's going to go all psycho."

In the early '90s, when I was a high school sophomore in Iowa, two senior boys bought themselves a laminating machine and founded an association they named, simply, "The Horny Club." To gain admittance, girls had to unbutton their shirts, unhinge their bras and bare their breasts for a minimum of 10 seconds. They were rewarded with a laminated membership card and a ride whenever they needed one in the cofounder's 1989 red Trans Am.

The two seniors zeroed in on my friends, who were rebellious and too young to drive. I wasn't interested. Although I had often gone skinny-dipping with large groups of kids, the idea of taking off my shirt for two dorky guys in exchange for a badge seemed silly. No one would fall for that.

Then one summer day, my best friend and I were walking to the video store when the Trans Am pulled up. The owner of the laminating machine rolled down the window and pointed to my friend, saying, "She can get in, but Claire, you can't." I turned to her, shocked. She was a shy, straight-A student. Why would she do it? Her answer: "Just for fun."

I know that Francis' assertion that women bare all for "Girls Gone Wild" because they enjoy it—while undeniably self-serving—is at least partly true. But I find myself asking the same question I had put to my friend back in Iowa: Why?

Francis doesn't have an answer. "I've never focused on why they do it," he says. He rattles off suggestions: "It's empowering, it's freedom." Would he do it, I ask? "Probably not," he responds. "I'm too shy."

I call Vicki Mayer, a sociologist and Tulane University assistant professor, for guidance. Mayer teaches a class on the nudity rituals that take place on New Orleans' infamous Bourbon Street. She has studied and written about "Girls Gone Wild," and she contends that it's simplistic to say that Mantra takes advantage of women. "For some women this is liberating, for some women this is something they do on a goof or for a lark to show friends they can, for some it's a way of flirting with the cameramen," Mayer says.

Francis and his staff maintain that it's the "girl next door" they seek out for their videos. In reality, the "Girls Gone Wild" girl is almost always slender and young, with nice teeth and very carefully groomed private parts. At the same time, Mantra recruits hard-working and attractive young men who will be able to sweet-talk women into taking their clothes off for the cameras. (Mantra has released several "Guys Gone Wild" DVDs filmed by female camera crews, but they have not sold as well.)

Mayer has studied the young cameramen, who, she says, often sign up because they hope to break into Hollywood. Usually, she says, they end up disillusioned after spending night after night with women who lose their inhibitions for a T-shirt. "As much as it would be easy to see this as a simple relationship of men treating women a certain way, there are mutual relations of exploitation. I kind of feel like both sides could be seen as exploited."

She's concluded that the winners are "the owners of these companies who are contracting cheap labor and free talent for a media product."

Francis arrives at the nightclub outside Chicago and is waved past a long line of people that snakes in front of the low-slung building. His crew follows him, single file, as he pushes his way through crowds of young women encased in a synthetic Victoria's Secret sexuality and swarms of young men who, though pimple-faced, exude an Abercrombie & Fitch confidence.

His entourage heads for the bar, bypassing an expanse of empty tables, to climb up to a narrow platform surrounded by a metal fence. This is the VIP section. Women in fishnets greet the crew wearing "Girls Gone Wild" tank tops and not much else. They are writhing against one another, their faces fixed in dazed sexual stares. Everyone clusters around a small table stocked with Red Bull, vodka and pitchers of fruity punch. When I turn to the flock of pretty girls, Jillian Vangeertry, a 21-year-old student, offers me a warm smile. I feel as if I'm in a bed of kittens. Why, I ask, is she here?

"Anybody enjoys the attention. T-shirts, hats—we got all the accessories," she says. I ask if she plans on going wild for the cameras later. She shrugs. "If you do it, you do it," she says confidently. "You can't complain later. It's almost like your 15 minutes of fame."

I sip my awful fruity cocktail, one of two that I'll nurse that evening, and turn to Francis' road manager, Chris Parisi. He says his boss is nothing short of brilliant. "He created a monster: the name, the image, the brand—he created something that everybody knows or wants to be a part of. Even my dad knows 'Girls Gone Wild.' The name itself is so powerful, and he's powerful. They all want to feel like they are a part of Joe's world."

Francis returns from his dance-floor foray. He's hyper, like a kid on sugar, talking fast. He says he's discovered the ultimate quarry: a girl who says she will be 17 for just a few more hours and who wants to get wild for the cameras the minute she's legal. "Girls Gone Wild" crew members can receive a bonus of $1,000 if they discover such a treasure, he shouts happily.

I follow Francis and his bodyguard through the crowd to find Kaitlyn Bultema. She's dancing on a podium and leaps off at the sight of Francis. She's wearing a skirt-and-shirt ensemble that exposes her stomach, most of her breasts and much of her bottom. I ask her why she wants to appear on "Girls Gone Wild" and she looks me in the eye and says, "I want everybody to see me because I'm hot."

It's then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America's voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation. "Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me," Bultema says. "If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model."

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. "You want people to say, 'Hey, I saw you.' Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody's house and said, 'Give me this,' I could have it."

Above the dance floor, the stage is full of girls who rotate, twist and shimmy their way up and down three strip poles. One of them is Jannel Szyszka, a petite 18-year-old who prances around the stage like a star. At her feet, a crowd of hundreds is gyrating to the pounding house music. Dozens of polo-shirted boys shout up to her, making requests like "shake your titties" and "get crunk" (meaning crazy-drunk).

Szyszka tells me later that as she was spinning around the strip pole that night, Francis appeared, grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. "You are so going on the bus later," she recalls Francis saying. "I was like, 'Um, OK.' I was shocked. I was like, 'Whoa—Joe's, like, trying to talk to me, like out of all the girls in here.'" Francis invited her back to the VIP area to do shots with him, she says, and she said yes.

Szyszka says the more shots she drank, the cloudier her judgment became. She says she agreed to join Francis and his crew on the "Girls Gone Wild" bus. "I thought 'Girls Gone Wild' was like flashing, and I thought I would flash them and be done. And so when I'm walking to the bus, that's all I'm thinking is going to happen."

At first she felt comfortable, she says. Inebriated and excited, she says she was led to the back of the bus, to a small bedroom. The double bed, with its neatly folded iridescent purple sheets, takes up most of the room. A flat-screen TV faces the bed, and cabinets are filled with remote controls, lubricants, condoms, sex toys in plastic bags, baby oil, a DVD called "How to be a Player" and a clipboard full of waivers for girls to sign. A small bathroom is off to the side, with a half-sized shower with faux marble tiling, and on the floor of the shower is a crate holding cheap and fruity-flavored rum, whiskey, tequila and Kool-Aid.

Footage from that night shows a close-up of Szyszka's driver's license, proving she's not a minor. The camera then captures Szyszka lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a camerman's instructions, she shows her breasts and says, "Girls Gone Wild." She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, "You are so adorable." When she says she's a virgin, he responds: "Great. You won't be after my cameraman gets done with you."

When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she "didn't quite realize" she was being filmed. "But I didn't care because I was drunk and who cares?" Then she adds: "It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. "I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, 'No' twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, 'Oh, my god, it hurts.' I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking."

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore."

Szyszka says Francis told her that what happened had to stay between them. She says she agreed, and they walked to the front of the bus. Szyszka remembers that one of the crew returned her driver's license. Another asked if she wanted to hang out on the bus. She declined, she says, but asked for three pairs of "booty short" underwear that Francis had promised her for appearing on camera. "They gave me a weird look like that was too much," Szyszka recalls. "They were, like, 'Three of them?' and I was, like, 'Yeah, three.'"

Within days, Szyszka says, she told her father, who was angry about what she said had happened but kept quiet at her request. A month after the incident, she says, she told her sister and mother.

She's confused, she admits, about what happened. She feels guilty, she says, for getting herself into the situation in the first place. She says she never would have undressed for the cameras if she hadn't been completely drunk. And she is adamant that she said "no" to Francis. She says she's haunted by that night.

"I feel like it was planned," she says. "Sometimes I'm driving along, and I think about it and all of a sudden feel weird."

Six weeks after that night outside Chicago, when I call Francis on his cellphone and ask him about the incident, he says he doesn't remember Szyszka and that he didn't have sex with anyone that night. He seems to lose control, repeatedly referring to me by a crude word for female genitalia. "If you print that, I will [expletive] sue the [expletive] out of you. If you print that, baby, you just put the nail in your own coffin," he tells me. "You are a [expletive expletive]. You decided to blast me . . . You are a [expletive] bitch . . . I will get my last laugh on you. I will get you." He then refers me to Burke, his lawyer.

In an e-mail, Burke says Francis and Szyszka did have sex—consensual sex—and that neither Francis nor anyone affiliated with "Girls Gone Wild" gave her any alcohol. "Neither Mr. Francis nor any of the GGW staff in or around the bus recall Ms. Szyszka making any complaint or comment about Mr. Francis. In fact, Ms. Szyszka was in good spirits after the encounter, and numerous witnesses have stated that she danced with her friends outside the bus for nearly two hours afterward," Burke writes. He adds: "Though Mr. Francis cannot speak to Ms. Szyszka's discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed."

Francis sounds scared in the message he leaves on my office voicemail: "I've seen some excerpts from your article that I guess you've sent to the photographer and, um, I want to talk to you about it."

No photographer has been assigned to the story, and no excerpts have been sent to anyone.

I don't call Francis back right away, so he calls my editor. He tells her that I have a crush on him, that I have an ax to grind because I am jealous and angry.

"I just felt that Claire may have had a little affinity for me," he says as she takes notes. "It may have come out when she had a few drinks." He describes my behavior as aggressively romantic. "Originally she hit on me. That's how I met her. I took her to a lunch. She called me all the time and it wasn't about work. It was about me. I know when a girl has a crush on me."

He tells her I was drinking heavily—"we all were"—and offers to send photographs to prove it. When my editor asks if he put his hands on me that night, he doesn't hesitate.

"I did absolutely get physical with her—but not romantically," he says. "We were outside standing by a police car. The officer told her to quit taking notes on what he was saying. I said, 'There's no freedom of the press here.' I took her arms behind her back and said, 'Let's take her to jail.' I said she should go to jail and the officer agreed with me. She didn't get the sarcasm. She listened to him. She stopped writing. Can you believe that? That's the 1st Amendment. She's not a journalist. I stand up for the 1st Amendment. But she didn't." My problem, he tells my editor, is that I "wasn't smart enough" to "get" what he was saying.

When I start to pull police and court records, I find that I'm not the only woman who's made Francis mad.

In 2000, the property manager of his Santa Monica apartment, Stephanie Van de Motter, obtained a restraining order requiring that he stay at least 100 yards away from her. According to court documents, she said that Francis, upset about the noise garbage collectors made in the mornings, had harassed and threatened her, twice climbing up to her bedroom window and pounding violently on the glass and screaming obscenities at her whenever he saw her. He appeared in her office several times, she said, asking for her by using the crude word for female genitalia, and left messages with a co-worker: "Tell the bitch this is war." Francis' lawyer says he can't comment on the case.

In 2003, Darian Mathias-Patterson, who scouted locations and arranged for the rental of a space for a Halloween party Francis threw, filed a police report, saying he had threatened to kill her when she told him she couldn't return his $25,000 deposit because the 2,000 guests had trashed the place. He hurled profanities at her, she told police, saying, "I'm going to [expletive] get you, you [expletive] whore" and repeatedly used the same crude word. Two weeks later, Mathias-Patterson, who was pregnant, miscarried. She later sued Francis and his company in Los Angeles County Superior Court for emotional distress, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount. Francis' lawyer says he can't comment on the case.

In 2004, a woman filed a police report accusing Francis of drugging her. She told police that after she met Francis in a bar in South Beach, Fla., where they argued over the morality of "Girls Gone Wild" videos, she went to his room at the Ritz-Carlton for a drink and awoke the next morning in bed next to him. Police dropped their investigation, citing a lack of evidence, and Francis sued the woman for defamation in state court in Miami, where the case is pending. He is seeking $25,000,036—a figure that includes $36 in room-service hamburgers he said he bought the plaintiff and her girlfriend the morning after they had consensual sex.

In a news release, Francis said at the time: "I won't sit back and be called a rapist. Rape is a very serious crime that I personally find disgusting. As a son, and as the brother to three sisters I love very much, I would NEVER have sex with a woman without her consent."

I have two more calls to make, this time about me.

I phone Ementi Coary, a Melrose Park, Ill., police officer who witnessed Francis roughing me up. He says he didn't intervene at the time because he had been told by "Girls Gone Wild" crew members that Francis and I had "hooked up" and that we "had a thing going" and that I was "just jealous."

"I was under the impression that you guys knew each other, that something was going on between you and that you guys were playing around," Coary says. "I changed my mind when he was grabbing your arm. That didn't look like playing around anymore." That's when Francis' bodyguard physically separated us, escorting me to the edge of the parking lot, and when Coary called for backup; a patrol car arrived moments later. "He's one of those guys who has money and does whatever he wants to," Coary continues. "I would've been happy to put the guy in jail." He had advised me to press charges that night, but I declined.

Then I phone Leland Zaitz, who was working for Francis in Melrose Park as a producer and was in the parking lot during the episode. Zaitz says he interpreted the whole thing as Francis being affectionate toward me, despite the fact that the pressure he applied was so intense that hours later, my arms were covered in red hand marks.

"He starts having fun and he realizes that most people can't keep up with him and he gets a little rough. I think it was just Joe's version of being playful and goofy," Zaitz says. "I think he was trying to bring you in closer."

When I think back on that night, our very public scuffle isn't what seems the most revealing. Instead, the moment I saw Francis most clearly—his charm, his rage, his cunning and even his regret—came later, when no one was looking. I was waiting, still shaken, outside the club for a cab to take me back to my hotel. Francis, who had disappeared inside the bus, returned.

Ignoring the two policemen who hovered a few yards away, he tiptoed past them to stand over me. He rubbed my shoulder. His gestures were oddly gentle—even fond. I felt sick.

"I'm sorry," he said, reaching over to tousle my hair. "We love our little reporter. Don't we guys? We love our little reporter."

I stared down at the dirt as he whispered in my ear, "I'm sorry, baby, give me a kiss. Give me a kiss."

Claire Hoffman covers Hollywood and the adult entertainment industry for The Times.

Talent depreciation.

2006-08-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

Great marketing has succeeded without great talent, but great talent has never succeeded without great marketing.

It will be interesting to see if Theyskens now necessarily works back to a large house a la Marc Jacobs, or if he will be content to reside in the long tail of fashion.

---

August 6, 2006
Is There a Place for Olivier Theyskens?
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG

On the first Wednesday of July, in the entry of the Rochas atelier, which is located in a reconfigured three-story house on a residential street in the somewhat unfashionable 17th Arrondissement of Paris, four headless mannequins were wearing some of the most beautiful gowns ever created. One was white lace and, like its twin in black, had an ease in the drape of the fabric that masked the skill of construction. The third gown was a sheer, iridescent gray cotton with chiffon flowers of varying sizes decorating the bodice at irregular intervals. The fourth dress was the most striking: a natural linen accented with a roughly sewn embroidery that from a distance looked like a sort of burlap lace. The halter top of the dress was snug, and yet just below the natural waist, the gown exploded into a wide skirt that seemed to float.

These four gowns, two of which took around 200 hours to sew, and the rest of the 100-piece spring 2007 precollection for Rochas were designed by Olivier Theyskens. Since taking control of the house in 2002, Theyskens (pronounced tey-skins), who is 29 and was born in Belgium, has imagined a carefully defined identity for Rochas: his clothes conjure a particularly French world, full of femininity and grace. When he took over at Rochas, which was established in 1925, the house was known, if it was known at all, for a perfume that arrived in a pale pink box decorated in black lace. Theyskens took that lace and transformed it into dresses, skirts and jackets (he didn’t show pants at first) that mixed the tight bodices and full skirts of the 50’s with an entirely new sense of proportion and tailoring. Instead of copying the formula established by companies like Gucci, which successfully revived a moribund fashion house by establishing a global brand built on image, Theyskens chose a riskier path. From his first full collection for fall 2003, Theyskens has tried to re-establish Rochas through the power of design, with a romantic, elegant and precisely realized sensibility.

When I visited the Rochas atelier in early July, it was to see Theyskens’s precollection for spring ’07. Precollections, which are presented three months ahead of the official start of each season, have become crucial to the economic health of the industry. Buyers cannot wait for the runway shows in October (and March, for the following fall’s lines), when the full lines are shown, if they hope to get new merchandise in their stores just before the shopping season begins in earnest. The customer for expensive, innovative brands like Rochas, where a jacket can cost $3,500 and a gown up to $100,000, like the one from the precollection for spring ’05 that required more than 500 yards of rooster feathers to be attached to the dress with one long thread, is interested in having the clothes before anyone else.

As models showed off Theyskens’s newest creations — a tan pantsuit with a modified safari jacket, a washed slate blue velvet coat with billowing sleeves, a sleeveless silk sundress with a flirty skirt — buyers from stores like Neiman Marcus and Barneys placed their orders and magazine editors fought over who would get to photograph which gown first. The bright white Rochas showroom was like a small, exclusive fashion party. The weather was unusually hot for Paris, and these clothes seemed to have a cooling effect — if you wore them, you would immediately be lighter, prettier, happier. “It’s a little bit hippie,” said Nicolas Frontière, the public-relations manager for Rochas, who has known Theyskens since he was 20. Frontière laughed, then added, “But it’s Olivier’s version of hippie.” Meaning a very refined Parisian hippie who understands how complicated it is to create clothes that look effortless.

Theyskens did not attend the precollection viewings at his showroom, which lasted for 10 days. He could usually be found upstairs in his office, out of sight, sketching the new spring collection that he planned to show in October, as he has for the past four years, in a large tent in the Tuileries. He was given regular updates from the sales force below — the buyers and editors loved the gowns; they loved the collection.

During the time Theyskens was presenting his precollection, a rumor began circulating in Paris: Procter & Gamble, the American conglomerate that owns Rochas, had decided to close the fashion branch of the company. Soon enough, the story was confirmed. The beautiful gowns would never be shown or produced; the atelier would be shuttered. When the shows of the spring collections began in October, the Rochas brand would exist only as that perfume in the pink box with the black lace. Apparently, P.&G. had been trying to sell off the fashion house for months.

Its ownership of Rochas was a kind of acquisitional accident: three years ago, it bought the German hair-care company Wella for $6.9 billion. Wella also owned Rochas, and P.&G. was thrust into the fashion business. It was an awkward fit. P.&G., based in Cincinnati, specializes in products like Duracel batteries and Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent. Fashion is a different business: a combustible admixture of commerce, buzz and, at its best, art, it does not adhere to the same reliable rules that help predict sales in household essentials. Often the most lucrative part of a fashion company is its fragrance line — after the initial cost of creating a scent, perfume sales can sustain a company for decades, paying for the evanescent world of luxury ready-to-wear. The Rochas scents generate an estimated $44 million a year; the clothing line reportedly had revenues of less than $12.6 million and probably cost more than that to run. The talk in Paris was that P.&G. tried to sell the fashion house while holding onto the perfumes, but no buyers were interested in just the clothes. P.&G. did need to make a decision about the house. Theyskens’s contract was up for renewal, and the company had begun negotiating with him back in December 2005, according to an official I spoke with at P.&G. More recently, P.&G. refused to authorize his fabric order for the spring collection. That was the first sign that Rochas might be closing.

The fashion world is a small world, in size and also in temperament, and the information that Rochas and Olivier Theyskens were (at least temporarily) finished spread quickly, with a mix of glee and dread. There was reason for jealousy: in just a few years, Theyskens had become a darling of the fashion media, especially in the United States. This June in New York, he won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for international designer, which is the fashion equivalent of winning Best Picture at the Oscars. Although Rochas had a policy of not buying advertising, fashion magazines nevertheless featured pages of photos of Theyskens’s exquisite dresses, and stars like Jennifer Aniston (who wore a black Rochas gown to the Academy Awards) and Kirsten Dunst (who wore a blue Rochas for the premiere of Sofia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette” at Cannes) regularly posed on the red carpet in his designs. Suddenly, it seemed, this moment was over.

“My idea for Rochas has always been the same,” Theyskens told me a few days before the story of the company’s demise began spreading. He was sitting at his large white desk in the room where he does all his fittings, wearing loose jeans, sneakers and a half-open white button-down shirt, his long black hair tied back in a loose braid. If he hadn’t taken recently to wearing a scruffy beard, it would have been easy to mistake him for a beautiful woman. As a child, Theyskens took ballet (he quit when he was the only boy in the class), and he moves gracefully — crouching on his studio floor to examine a hem, wrapping a tape measure around his neck as if it were a silk scarf.

“My sense of designing is a mix of intuition and intellectual control,” he continued. Although he speaks nearly perfect English, Theyskens’s locutions can be overly proper and sometimes sound like pronouncements. “I am interested in the idea of taste. And by taste, I mean opinion, inspiration and the craft of creating a personality through fabric and design.” He has never been interested in rushing to satisfy the marketplace or to fit a particular price point, focusing, instead, on what he believes only a designer can provide: a carefully considered creation. “I would like to stop global vulgarity,” Theyskens told me more than once in the days I spent with him.

This was a thinly veiled reference to the world of the megabrands that seek out the universal fashion customer — perhaps most famously, and most successfully, Gucci. In remaking Gucci, the designer Tom Ford pushed a sex-bomb image not just in his designs but also in every aspect of how they were presented, from stores to media events to advertising campaigns. The huge success of that business model has dominated and tantalized the fashion community for the last decade. Through extensive and consistent marketing, Ford sold a jet-set, vaguely kinky, sort-of-70’s image at Gucci. Whether you lived in Kansas or Cairo, you could purchase the same Gucci handbag and thus the same Gucci mood, one that did not depend on fitting into the particular look of the season. As much as anything, you were embracing an understood and easily recognizable symbol of desirability.

The Gucci global paradigm, which has since been copied by nearly every major fashion entity, from Marc Jacobs to Yves Saint Laurent to Balenciaga, requires a few key ingredients and a great deal of luck. It helps to have shops in every major city, a large advertising budget and a well-developed accessories line. In this marketplace, it is becoming almost impossible to be, like Rochas, a highly regarded small house with a high-end international clientele. “Olivier’s best dresses were his gowns,” said one longtime designer, who did not want to comment publicly on a colleague. “And that’s a niche business. That sort of perfect, made-to-measure business can’t exist today, which is really too bad. Everything is about business now, and fashion shouldn’t have to follow normal economic models — that’s not the point. What happened to investing in beauty?”

Because of the respect afforded Theyskens, the closing of Rochas, which became official on July 18, was shocking and symbolic: if business concerns could trump this kind of talent, then what chance did less gifted designers have? The industry insiders and forecasters all offered the same analysis. Theyskens made wonderful clothes, but he was too exclusive to prosper in a competitive global environment. In the post-Gucci age, fashion would need to be instantly commercially viable, even if the line being created was for a luxury brand. The critics complained that Theyskens had never developed a popular handbag or shoe, both commodities that can be reintroduced with slight modifications year after year. Bags do not have a size, and they are more affordable than evening gowns. But some in the business, like Julie Gilhart, senior vice president and design director of Barneys New York, where sales of Rochas doubled in the last year, felt that P.&G. could have embraced another strategy for Rochas —one that developed the line more slowly and steadily. “The Rochas bags and shoes were beginning to develop,” Gilhart said. “Olivier felt, and I agreed, that bags and shoes involved a design process like everything else. He did not want to rush out a bag just to satisfy the marketplace. He is too intelligent for that.”

When Theyskens heard that Rochas would be closed, he at first told friends he was not unhappy. Calling me from his cellphone two days later, he sounded almost giddy. “I am peaceful,” he said, perhaps meaning, instead, sanguine. He didn’t want to say much more, but he seemed to think, or to wish to imply, that someone would come along and put him back in business, perhaps as soon as the fall. A close colleague of his had a different perspective on what might come to pass. “Olivier wants to create a certain kind of world with his clothes,” she told me “and it’s possible that world no longer exists.”

A few days before the news spread about Rochas, Theyskens was drinking jasmine tea on the patio of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He was studying a photomontage of the clothes he designed under his own name in August 1997. The file, along with a collection of articles, had been prepared by the Rochas press office. “I was 20,” he said, looking at the pictures. “It’s very far away.” Theyskens, who was wearing a nondescript gray short-sleeve T-shirt and faded black jeans, pointed to a particular dress. It was, as many of his early dresses were, a kind of Goth extravaganza. Hooks and eyes, which Theyskens once called “jewelry for the dress,” connected the fabric of the bodice in a cross. “I made the pattern,” he said, “and I remember sewing the hem.” Theyskens studied the photo. “My first collection was made from sheets that my grandmother, who lived in Normandy, had been collecting for a long time. There are a lot of flea markets in that part of France, and she knew what I liked. She was the one who first gave me black lace like the kind Rochas used. I used all that in my first Theyskens collection — I loved the idea that you stripped the sheets off the beds and made dresses out of them. It has something of the Marquis de Sade.”

At 19, Theyskens left the prestigious La Cambre school of visual arts in Brussels after less than a year. “I really hated school,” he said. “I had the feeling I was losing a lot of time. And I also had the feeling that my family was losing a lot of money. My parents were serene about my decision. They learned very early to let me do my own things.”

The son of a Belgian chemical engineer and a French homemaker, Theyskens was one of four children. “When I was very young, I wanted to be a girl,” he told me. “I was jealous that girls got to be princesses and wear skirts. It tormented me. When I was 6, I even heard that you could change your sex, and I was very intrigued until the moment I realized that if I changed into a girl, I would be an ugly girl, and this is the last thing I wanted to be.” Theyskens laughed. “At 9 or 10, I realized I was happy as a boy. But my parents were always easy about it. They let me walk around on the street in a dress. They’d say, Our child is so creative!”

From an early age, Theyskens told me, he wanted to be a couturier. “You know, it’s like when you see a child, and before they are 6, you can tell if they would make a good footballer. I loved clothes — I could lose myself in a hem for hours.” After leaving La Cambre, Theyskens decided to create a collection for himself. “It was the hardest I ever worked, but necessary. I wanted to express what I had to say in fashion. There’s a logic to clothes, but there’s also beauty. That creates a perfect marriage.”

Within months, he had designed and created 25 outfits, which he presented as part of a fashion show in Paris. Julie Gilhart, from Barneys, was at the show, which featured dark ball gowns and fitted robelike coats, and she rushed backstage, offering to buy the entire collection. “But I wouldn’t sell it,” Theyskens recalled, pointing to a photo of a striking red gown from that time. The top half of the dress, which is made out of a rooster-patterned cotton toile de jouy, a fabric that is often used for curtains, is a structured capelet that connects to the skirt with long vertical threads, leaving the wearer’s torso exposed. “This dress was never produced,” Theyskens said. “They wanted it, but I said no — wait until my next collection.” Gilhart put the clothes in the store window at Barneys anyway, but they were not available for purchase. “I wouldn’t sell my next collection either,” Theyskens told me, revealing a stubborness that has characterized his professional life. “I didn’t feel I was ready.”

The excitement around Theyskens intensified when Madonna wore a black satin coat dress, from his first collection, to the Academy Awards in 1998. For publicity, Theyskens photographed his clothes and sent the pictures to those he admired in the fashion industry. One of these was the photographer Inez van Lamsweerde, who happened to be working with Madonna and her stylist, Arianne Phillips. Van Lamsweerde showed them Theyskens’s clothes. In less than a year and without a single dress for sale in any store, Theyskens was dressing one of the most famous women in the world.

By 1999, Theyskens was regarded as fashion’s king of Goth. His shows had a dark undercurrent. The models would smash shells strewn on the catwalk, or the stage would break away under their feet. There were a lot of heavy, black tailored clothes: leather corsets that fastened with his trademark hook and eyes, furs made from squirrel pelts and hair used as yarn. One show featured a nude bodysuit embroidered with a heart, arteries and blood vessels. “When I designed it,” Theyskens said, “I thought of a young girl who has so much hidden inside that one day her heart explodes.” He paused, then said, “I wanted then, and now, for the clothes to have passion.”

Not all of the Theyskens line, which was produced until 2002, was as dramatically conceived. Many of the pieces actually presage Theyskens’s work at Rochas. There’s a sense of airiness in the dresses, as well as a careful attention to craft. “My nearest assistant at Rochas has been with me since the beginning,” Theyskens said, still studying the photos of his past collections, “and he truly feels that I’ve returned to my roots at Rochas. When I started out, I was more romantic — the clothes were fluid and longer and a little more fragile.” Theyskens paused, then continued: “Having your own collection is difficult. Even now at Rochas, I’m thinking about what things cost all the time. It’s a reflex. In fashion, you can create, but there are some rules. You need to manage the business, and at the same time, people are waiting for designers to show their freedom and originality. There are a lot of different expectations.”

These remarks would seem to foreshadow future events at Rochas, but they also refer to the recent past. The financial shocks that followed Sept. 11, 2001, were not without their effects on the global luxury business, causing panic even in large companies like Gucci. The nonstop shopping spree of the late 90’s immediately stopped, and for months travel was severely curtailed. This meant that no one was buying perfume in duty-free airport shops, a primary source of income for large fashion houses.

“It was a difficult time,” Theyskens said. The collection he showed that fall was particularly strong. He decorated the shoes with small stuffed canaries, and he kept the clothes very simple. “I wanted the birds to look like they fell out of the nest,” he told me as he searched for photos from the collection he designed in the fall of 2001. His use of 19th-century ornamentation to make a political analogy was well received, but Theyskens, who was living in Brussels and showing in France, was ready for a change. “I wanted to move to Paris,” he said, still searching through the packet in front of him for the pictures of the 2001 collection, the last he designed under his own name.

“Oh, look,” he said, coming across a photo that ran in American Vogue in 2000. Captioned “The Style Council,” it spotlighted 14 designers as “ 21st-century fashion-makers.” “There’s Hedi,” Theyskens said, singling out Hedi Slimane, the current designer of Dior Homme. “And Nicolas,” pointing to Nicolas Ghesquière, who at that time was already designing for Balenciaga. Theyskens looked perplexed. “Comment s’appelle?” he asked in French, pointing to a man in the back row of the picture. “Oh, that’s. . .Joseph Thimister. He was so nice. Where is he now?” The photo is revealing of the fickle nature of the fashion business: very few of the so-called style council fulfilled their promise, and one — Miguel Adrover — is out of the business altogether. Joseph Thimister, too, is no longer designing clothes.

“I remember that day,” Theyskens said. “They had set up some folding chairs for the photo, and I was outside smoking. When I came in, everyone was trying to sit in the first row.” Theyskens smiled. “The photographer put me in the front, on the floor,” he said. “Thank God I am still a designer, or it would be very embarrassing.”

Six weeks before the spring ’07 precollection and eight weeks before the design house was closed, Theyskens was in his office at Rochas, sketching at his desk before a fitting. Unlike many designers, who begin with a pattern or a muslin draped on a model’s body, Theyskens has always started the design process by elaborately sketching each garment. “I use very thin paper,” he said on this sunny afternoon in mid-May, “and for every season I seem to find a new way of drawing. Lately, I’ve been using very soft lead pencils. But in the past, I’d use a crayon or colored pencils.” He paused and shaded in the slightly bent leg of the figure he was sketching. She was wearing flat-front pants with an elongated narrow jacket that looked pliable enough to be a sweater.

The drawing was precise, every button and tuck and seam delineated. Unlike those of many designers, Theyskens’s sketches do not resemble fashion cartoons. They are more like painterly blueprints — exact, architectural guides to the finished garments. “When I drew my own collection, I used to draw the face, the eyes and everything,” Theyskens said while he sketched. “But when I started Rochas, I was so much into this Parisian approach, that I was less interested in the attitude of the individual girl. I stopped drawing the head. I liked the anonymity. It imposed a certain set of rules. I have never had a muse, but this allows me to concentrate on what I think should purely represent Rochas.”

For last spring’s collection, Theyskens also stopped sketching to music. He had started to worry about the role music was playing in determining the mood of the collection, and he decided to sketch in silence. “I don’t like addictions,” he explained. “So in January 2005, I got rid of the TV and decided no more music. I wanted to divorce myself from modern things. And then the collection grew.”

The result was a collection that he showed last fall in Paris and that was inspired by Monet’s paintings of water lilies, although he has not visited the paintings in the newly restored Orangerie, where they are displayed. Theyskens would rather draw from his memory of their loveliness, as if he had seen them in a dream. The sea greens, slate blues and pearly grays of those paintings inspired one of Theyskens’s best collections, a bold show in which he featured only full-length gowns and his first-ever pantsuits. No day dresses, no coats, nothing that hit at the knee. Theyskens has often said that he sees beauty as something “elegant and noble,” and that collection, which was risky and distinctly uncommercial, epitomized his sense of Rochas as a stand against “global vulgarity.”

When Theyskens was offered the job at Rochas in early 2002, he had taken a year off to travel and had, reportedly, just priced himself out of the top job at Givenchy. “It was chemical with Rochas,” he said, still sketching. “You hear the name, and you know it’s right.” Although he is not well remembered as a fashion-world figure, Marcel Rochas was an innovative designer. He not only invented the guepière, a kind of long-line corset that smoothed the curves of women like Marlene Dietrich; he also expanded that undergarment into ball gowns, many of which were accented with lace. “Rochas believed in a sophisticated femininity that was not that girly,” Theyskens said, “and so do I. I also liked that there was no immediate imagery associated with his name. I knew I could have freedom here.”

Theyskens’s first collection for Rochas in 2003 may still be his most thrilling. In just a few months, he designed and executed an entirely new silhouette for the house and ushered in a new movement of refined, French-influenced fashion. Inspired by bees and their hives (although it’s nearly impossible to see how), Theyskens visibly altered the proportions of the clothes. He raised the waist so that the dresses and suits were long and slim. A narrow, oyster gray satin suit was topped by a tiny empire jacket, a satin evening dress was constructed in three triangular layers like a tiered cake and, most notably, a black jacket had a lace bustle that began between the shoulder blades and fanned out. The front of the jacket was close-fitting and then, like a bridal veil that has been tossed back, the jacket suddenly poufed dramatically.

This lace jacket, which cost $3,500 in 2003, sold out. Not only did its surprising shape become a kind of trademark at Rochas, but the fact that it sold briskly emboldened Theyskens to seek out a customer who didn’t mind paying more for a spectacular, unique item. Even before the catchword caught on this summer, Theyskens was creating “demicouture” at Rochas. Unlike classic, traditional couture, which has strict rules about the numbers of fittings and hand-stitching, demicouture implies special pieces, usually evening dresses, that are hand-crafted and too expensive and time-consuming to mass-produce. Last year, Theyskens designed, as part of his Monet-inspired collection, a shimmering dark blue green fishtail gown with long sleeves and an open, oval back that was embellished with water-lily embroidery. It sold for $23,440. Another gown, which seemed to be inspired by Marcel Rochas’s famous corset, was steel gray satin and took 75 hours to sew. That dress was priced at $19,920.

Many fashion-world insiders question Theyskens’s decision to concentrate on such high-end creations. When celebrities wear the gowns, they generally receive them for free, and very few noncelebrity women can afford them. No matter how gorgeous, demicouture may not be practical as an overall business strategy. It is, however, the fantasy version of what fashion can be: a grand pronouncement of grace and beauty. A handbag may make economic sense, but a beautiful ball gown conjures cinematic scenarios. And that’s the predicament that Theyskens presents. His Monet collection was an electric moment in fashion — the designs showed how powerful clothes can be, how they can be a kind of wearable art that has the ability to alter the temperature in the room. Yet, no matter how transcendent, the Monet gowns were not created with an eye to the marketplace. Realistically, most women will not wear floor-sweeping dresses in their day-to-day lives. For Theyskens, that was never the point, and maybe it shouldn’t be. In other houses where brave, influential fashion is encouraged — like Balenciaga or Marc Jacobs — accessories or cheaper secondary lines provide a financial cushion. The purity of Theyskens’s approach and his reluctance to speed up the more lucrative areas of design have both rewarded and cost him.

As Theyskens continued to sketch, a model and four members of his design team walked into the studio. There are 40 employees at Rochas, a small number. Theyskens’s large white desk was cluttered with cans of Coca-Cola Light, button samples, scissors, fat spools of metallic thread, a cellphone, three scented candles and many piles of fabric swatches in a limited range of colors, from pale gray to denim blue to cream. There was a large stack of photocopies of finished drawings placed to the side. Each sketch had elaborate instructions in the margins — covering measurements, hand-stitching, seaming or whatever special treatment was required — giving the 10 seamstresses who work in the basement of the Rochas building directions on how to approach each garment.

The slim, pale model Tamara Cesnovar, who has worked with Theyskens since 2000, was wearing a subtly tailored Rochas silk dress. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and as she walked around the studio, she paused to look at her reflection in the mirror that covered two sides of the room. She then stopped in front of Theyskens, who considered her intently. The dress was clearly too large, and Theyskens began adjusting. “It’s all wrong,” he told me. “You want to cancel a look sometimes. And then you shorten it here or take it in there or move this here, and then it becomes the right thing. One half centimeter changes everything.”

Until this season, Theyskens did all the Rochas fittings himself, literally pinning and repinning the garments. “In the end, my hands would bleed,” he said. “And I also needed the distance — I needed to get a better sense of the look.” Although he doesn’t now alter dresses himself, he is not a passive observer. Three times, he jumped out of his upholstered chair and circled the model. He asked her how the dress felt. He crouched on the floor and adjusted a side seam. He rolled the neckline between his fingers to check how it lay against the model’s collarbone. “Fashion design is mathematical,” Theyskens had said earlier. “I learned that from doing everything myself. And that’s very important, because you know what amount of time you need to make a dress. You know what it is to cut the paper.”

Fabric is a key element in Theyskens’s approach to clothes. The full-time job of one member of his team is fabric research, and he is intrigued by the possibilities that certain fabrics command. His pantsuits in the Monet collection, sewn in cotton and linen, had a slight sheen and a body that felt, somehow, new. For this season, he was also working with some cloth made out of nettles, sheer jerseys and a cashmere-wool blend that is remarkably thin. Nearly all the fabrics are washed, muting their colors and making them softer. Even the trademark Rochas lace, which Theyskens has utilized as a leitmotif in every collection, has been turned into fabric. “If you look carefully at lace, there are floral patterns,” Theyskens said, holding a strip of lace to the light. He has magnified that intricate pattern and transformed it into a print; he has pixelated an individual lace flower until it looks like a pointillist rendering and used that; he has added stretch and color to the lace and then frayed the edges before turning it into the trim on a jacket.

As the dress was taking shape, Theyskens returned to his desk and pulled out his drawing of a simple, loose-fitting, knee-length coat. He scrutinized the image. “The final result will depend so much on the fabric,” he said after a long pause. “One blue can be beautiful, and another can be horrible.” He rummaged through a small box that was filled with fabric swatches in various shades of gray. “Depending on the material, this coat could be less expensive,” Theyskens said. “It has always been one of our best sellers.” This was the first time I had heard Theyskens address the economics of his business. “Of course,” he said “I like something a bit arty in the collection. But I can also think in other ways.”

When Theyskens took the job at Rochas, he decided to stop designing under his own name. His eponymous company had lost its financial backer, and Theyskens, who had always wanted to work for a French fashion house, concentrated on reviving Rochas. “I had to choose my own name or Rochas,” he said months ago in New York, where he was attending the Fashion Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considered by many to be the social event of the year. That day, in early May, was chilly, and Theyskens was dressed in suit trousers, a loose sweater and a long, narrow gray scarf that was looped around his neck and hair. We were supposed to meet for a late breakfast, but we never ordered and instead talked in the lobby of Theyskens’s hotel, the W in Union Square, for an hour.

He had just heard that he had won the C.F.D.A. award for best international designer, and he was pleased. “When I was young, I always dreamed of designing in Paris,” he said. “But the French don’t have the capacity for awards. They are very quick to criticize.”

This outburst was surprising. Theyskens has spoken often about his affection for classic Parisian design. “France is very special,” he continued, “but the French world of fashion is being destroyed little by little. The French factories and ateliers were once dedicated to the little nuances. That luxurious approach and that refinement disappeared in the 80’s and 90’s, and I fear it may be disappearing again.”

Given that P.&G. was trying to sell Rochas for six months and that Theyskens was aware of its plans, his remarks in New York now sound pre-emptive. There is a history in fashion of great designers, from Yves Saint Laurent to Marc Jacobs to Calvin Klein, working with equally visionary businessmen. Most famously, Pierre Bergé steered YSL into lucrative relationships with different product lines, like perfume and shoes, while Saint Laurent concentrated on his vision. But P.&G. never expressed interest in the high-end luxury clothing business, and even within his own ranks, Theyskens didn’t have a strong business partner to advise and direct him.

“Olivier needed some help, someone to say that diversification is the key to a successful fashion house,” said Robert Burke, who is head of a luxury consulting group and was senior vice president of Bergdorf Goodman for six years. “The luxury business is booming today, but the consumer’s buying pattern has changed. You cannot survive in a ready-to-wear business just by creating clothes. Olivier is wildly talented, but there wasn’t a lot of balance at Rochas from a retail perspective. His clothes inched up to couture in terms of beauty and cost, and to be successful, a luxury line needs to be broader.” He pointed to a recent Women’s Wear Daily article, which stated that Oscar de la Renta generated $100 million wholesale from his collection and received $650 million retail through his licensing arrangements. “His name is on everything from bridal wear to china to wallpaper to towels.”

With the closing of Rochas, many fashion observers began to speculate that Theyskens might start designing under his own name again. Belgian designers like Dries Van Noten and Raf Simons have small but lucrative independent labels that do not have the global financial ambitions of Gucci or Chanel. “But those Belgian houses do not make ball gowns,” a top fashion analyst said. “They don’t have actresses wearing their dresses at premieres, and they don’t get 10-page photo layouts in Vogue every month. Their clothes are not rarefied in the way that Olivier’s have been at Rochas. If he went on his own, he would have to change in ways that he might not want to change.”

Yet if he chose to expand his sartorial range and could find a strong business partner, the current economic climate in fashion would likely be welcoming to Theyskens. Lanvin, for instance, was sold by L’Oréal to an investment group headed by Shaw-Lan Wang, a Taiwanese publishing magnate, who supported the designer Alber Elbaz. “Without a really good partner, I don’t think Olivier can prosper,” I was told by a fashion consultant who directs campaigns for several large houses. “Olivier doesn’t need a lot of customers, but those customers need something to wear before 5. Where’s his day wear? Where are his bags? His vision is too narrow for the consumer who wants to spend.”

After the closing of Rochas, the fashion rumor mill buzzed about where Theyskens might land. It was said that his close adviser Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, was suggesting he take over Oscar de la Renta’s company in America. That seemed an odd fit: Theyskens’s romantic vision would very likely clash with the demands of the mainstream American consumer. In late July, another rumor circulated: Theyskens would replace Valentino, who at 74 had recently hinted at retirement from the house he built that bears his name. That match seemed ideal. Valentino has a strong business side and a thriving high-end history.

Theyskens himself would not reveal his plans, if he had firmed them up, but hinted that a big announcement would be made in the fall. He did not sound sad or shocked or worried. Similarly, Nicolas Frontière, his public-relations manager, said he turned down a “big job” to stay with Theyskens — the suggestion being that he was following him into a new venture.

“Olivier Theyskens is one of the most talented designers in the world, and we haven’t heard the last of him,” said Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International, when I phoned him in London. “But what is missing in his story is a business operator who can navigate this world. The fashion houses are doing very well at the moment. They are reaching new markets in places like China, Russia and South America. But you still need patience, a long-term effort and a sound strategy. Unfortunately, great talent is not enough.”

Since it is impossible to imagine Theyskens abandoning his artistic approach to fashion design, there would need to be a shift in the business part of the equation. “You have to figure out how to fix each company on a case-by-case basis,” I was told by Robert Burke. “Early on, Marc Jacobs, who designs under his own name and for Louis Vuitton, had all the earmarks of a wildly talented designer who might not succeed. He was fired from Perry Ellis, and everyone said that an American designer would never excel at a French luxury house like Louis Vuitton. Well, they were completely wrong, and now he’s become the model of how you reinvigorate a brand. There’s no reason Olivier Theyskens’s story could not have the same ending.”

Can Theyskens make such an adjustment — change his story? “It’s a very particular business,” Theyskens told me just days before his company was shuttered, “but it makes you intuitive about the future. I’m forced to think ahead, to imagine what a girl should look like in a year from now. That makes your mind sensitive to signs. And looking for signs makes life more logical in a way: you are always ready for the future.”

Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The tactics of existence (long).

2006-08-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

Fundamental philosophical treatise which examines the role of the consumer as opposed to the producer.

The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau

General Introduction

This essay is part of a continuing investigation of the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. The point is not so much to discuss this elusive yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible; that is, by means of inquiries and hypotheses, to indicate pathways for further research. This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, "ways of operating" or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.

The examination of such practices does not imply a return to individuality. The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit-the individual-on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible. This axiom, which has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research, (although in history that is perhaps no argument) plays no part in this study. Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact. Moreover, the question at hand concerns modes of operation or schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or vehicles. It concerns an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western culture. The purpose of this work is to make explicit the systems of operational combination (les combinatoires d'operations) which also compose a "culture," and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term "consumers." Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.

1. Consumer production

Since this work grew out of studies of "popular culture" or marginal groups,[1] the investigation of everyday practices was first delimited negatively by the necessity of not locating cultural difference in groups associated with the "counter-culture"-groups that were already singled out, often privileged, and already partly absorbed into folklore-and that were no more than symptoms or indexes. Three further, positive determinations were particularly important in articulating our research.

Usage, or consumption

Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior, on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.

The "making" in question is a production, a Poiesis[2] -but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption." The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order.

For instance, the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers' "success" in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it. The strength of their difference lay in procedures of "consumption." To a lesser degree, a similar ambiguity creeps into our societies through the use made by the "common people" of the culture disseminated and imposed by the elites" producing the language.

The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) tells us nothing about what it is for its users. We must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization.

Our investigation is concerned with this difference. It can use as its theoretical model the construction of individual sentences with an established vocabulary and syntax. In linguistics, "performance" and "competence" are different: the act of speaking (with all the enunciative strategies that implies) is not reducible to a knowledge of the language. By adopting the point of view of enunciation-which is the subject of our study-we privilege the act of speaking; according to that point of view, speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech act[3] can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.). An objective is at least adumbrated by this parallel, which is, as we shall see, only partly valid. Such an objective assumes that (like the Indians mentioned above) users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules. We must determine the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of this collective activity.

The procedures of everyday creativity

A second orientation of our investigation can be explained by reference to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. In this work, instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i.e., the localizable, expansionist, repressive, and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these institutions and surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power: "miniscule" technical procedures acting on and with details, redistributing a discursive space in order to make it the means of a generalized "discipline" (surveillance).[4] This approach raises a new and different set of problems to be investigated. Once again, however, this "microphysics of power" privileges the productive apparatus (which produces the "discipline"), even though it discerns in "education" a system of "repression" and shows how, from the wings as it were, silent technologies determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions. If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.

These "ways of operating" constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's book: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of "tactics" articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:" Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline[5] which is the subject of this book.

The formal structure of practice

It may be supposed that these operations-multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions-conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices. We are thus confronted once again by the ancient problem: What is an art or "way of making"? From the Greeks to Durkheim, a long tradition has sought to describe with precision the complex (and not at all simple or "impoverished") rules that could account for these operations.[6] From this point of view, "popular culture," as well as a whole literature called "popular,"[7] take on a different aspect: they present themselves essentially as "arts of making" this or that, i.e., as combinatory or utilizing modes of consumption. These practices bring into play a "popular" ratio, a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using.

In order to grasp the formal structure of these practices, I have carried out two sorts of investigations. The first, more descriptive in nature, has concerned certain ways of making that were selected according to their value for the strategy of the analysis, and with a view to obtaining fairly differentiated variants: readers' practices, practices related to urban spaces, utilizations of everyday rituals, re-uses and functions of the memory through the "authorities" that make possible (or permit) everyday practices, etc. In addition, two related investigations have tried to trace the intricate forms of the operations proper to the recompositon of a space (the Croix-Rousse quarter in Lyons) by familial practices, on the one hand, and on the other, to the tactics of the art of cooking, which simultaneously organizes a network of relations, poetic ways of "making do" (bricolage), and a re-use of marketing structures.[8]

The second series of investigations has concerned the scientific literature that might furnish hypotheses allowing the logic of unselfconscious thought to be taken seriously. Three areas are of special interest. First, sociologists, anthropologists, and indeed historians (from E. Goffman to P. Bourdieu, from Mauss to M. DÈtienne, from J. Boissevain to E. 0. Laumann) have elaborated a theory of such practices, mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks.[9] Second, in the wake of J. Fishman's work, the ethnomethodological and sociolinguistic investigations of H. Garfinkel, W. Labov, H. Sachs, E. A. Schegloff, and others have described the procedures of everyday interactions relative to structures of expectation, negotiation, and improvisation proper to ordinary language.[10]

Finally, in addition to the semiotics and philosophies of "convention" (from O. Ducrot to D. Lewis),[11] we must look into the ponderous formal logics and their extension, in the field of analytical philosophy, into the domains of action (G. H. von Wright, A. C. Danto, R. J. Bernstein),[12] time (A. N. Prior, N. Rescher and J. Urquhart),[13] and modalisation (G. E. Hughes and M. J. Cresswell, A. R. White).[14] These extensions yield a weighty apparatus seeking to grasp the delicate layering and plasticity of ordinary language, with its almost orchestral combinations of logical elements (temporalization, modalization, injunctions, predicates of action, etc.) whose dominants are determined in turn by circumstances and conjunctural demands. An investigation analogous to Chomsky's study of the oral uses of language must seek to restore to everyday practices their logical and cultural legitimacy, at least in the sectors-still very limited-in which we have at our disposal the instruments necessary to account for them.[15] This kind of research is complicated by the fact that these practices themselves alternately exacerbate and disrupt our logics. Its regrets are like those of the poet, and like him, it struggles against oblivion: "And I forgot the element of chance introduced by circumstances, calm or haste, sun or cold, dawn or dusk, the taste of strawberries or abandonment, the half-understood message, the front page of newspapers, the voice on the telephone, the most anodyne conversation, the most anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise, passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on."[16]

The marginality of a majority

These three determinations make possible an exploration of the cultural field, an exploration defined by an investigative problematics and punctuated by more detailed inquiries located by reference to hypotheses that remain to be verified. Such an exploration will seek to situate the types of operations characterizing consumption in the framework of an economy, and to discern in these practices of appropriation indexes of the creativity that flourishes at the very point where practice ceases to have its own language.

Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.

That does not mean the group is homogeneous. The procedures allowing the re-use of products are linked together in a kind of obligatory language, and their functioning is related to social situations and power relationships. Confronted by images on television, the immigrant worker does not have the same critical or creative elbow-room as the average citizen. On the same terrain, his inferior access to information, financial means, and compensations of all kinds elicits an increased deviousness, fantasy, or laughter. Similar strategic deployments, when acting on different relationships of force, do not produce identical effects. Hence the necessity of differentiating both the "actions" or "engagements" (in the military sense) that the system of products effects within the consumer grid, and the various kinds of room to maneuver left for consumers by the situations in which they exercise their "art."

The relation of procedures to the fields of force in which they act must therefore lead to a polemological analysis of culture. Like law (one of its models), culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force. It develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.

2. The tactics of practice

In the course of our research, the scheme, rather too neatly dichotomized, of the relations between consumers and the mechanisms of production has been diversified in relation to three kinds of concerns: the search for a problematics that could articulate the material collected; the description of a limited number of practices (reading, talking, walking, dwelling, cooking, etc.) considered to be particularly significant; and the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fields apparently governed by another kind of logic. Through the presentation of our investigation along these three lines, the overly schematic character of the general statement can be somewhat nuanced.

Trajectories, tactics, and rhetorics

As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the "wandering lines" ("lignes derre") drawn by the autistic children studied by F. Deligny[17]: "indirect" or "errant" trajectories obeying their own logic. In the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space. Although they are composed with the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspapers, supermarkets, or museum sequences) and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic orders of spaces, etc.), the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop.[18]

Even statistical investigation remains virtually ignorant of these trajectories, since it is satisfied with classifying, calculating, and putting into tables the "lexical" units which compose them but to which they cannot be reduced, and with doing this in reference to its own categories and taxonomies. Statistical investigation grasps the material of these practices, but not their form; it determines the elements used, but not the "phrasing" produced by the bricolage (the artisan-like inventiveness) and the discursiveness that combine these elements, which are all in general circulation and rather drab. Statistical inquiry, in breaking down these "efficacious meanderings" into units that it defines itself, in reorganizing the results of its analyses according to its own codes, "finds" only the homogenous. The power of its calculations ties in its ability to divide, but it is precisely through this analytic fragmentation that it loses sight of what it claims to seek and to represent.[19]

"Trajectory" suggests a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, a flattening out. It is a transcription. A graph (which the eye can master) is substituted for an operation; a line which can be reversed (i.e., read in both directions) does duty for an irreversible temporal series, a tracing for acts. To avoid this reduction, I resort to a distinction between tactics and strategies.

I call a "strategy" the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an "environment." A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, "clienteles," "targets," or "objects" of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.

I call a "tactic," on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other.[20] A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The "proper" is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time-it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized "on the wing." Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into "opportunities." The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements (thus, in the supermarket, the housewife confronts heterogeneous and mobile data-what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and their possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home, etc.); the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is "seized."

Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many "ways of operating": victories of the "weak" over the "strong" (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, "hunter's cunning," maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. The Greeks called these "ways of operating" metis.[21] But they go much further back, to the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes. From the depths of the ocean to the streets of modern megalopolises, there is a continuity and permanence in these tactics.

In our societies, as local stabilities break down, it is as if, no longer fixed by a circumscribed community, tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into immigrants in a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven for them to escape from it. But these tactics introduce a Brownian movement into the system. They also show the extent to which intelligence is inseparable from the everyday struggles and pleasures that it articulates. Strategies, in contrast, conceal beneath objective calculations their connection with the power that sustains them from within the stronghold of its own "proper" place or institution.

The discipline of rhetoric offers models for differentiating among the types of tactics. This is not surprising, since, on the one hand, it describes the "turns" or tropes of which language can be both the site and the object, and, on the other hand, these manipulations are related to the ways of changing (seducing, persuading, making use of) the will of another (the audience).[22] For these two reasons, rhetoric, the science of the "ways of speaking," offers an array of figure-types for the analysis of everyday ways of acting even though such analysis is in theory excluded from scientific discourse. Two logics of action (the one tactical, the other strategic) arise from these two facets of practicing language. In the space of a language (as in that of games), a society makes more explicit the formal rules of action and the operations that differentiate them.

In the enormous rhetorical corpus devoted to the art of speaking or operating, the Sophists have a privileged place, from the point of view of tactics. Their principle was, according to the Greek rhetorician Corax, to make the weaker position seem the stronger, and they claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by the way in which they made use of the opportunities offered by the particular situation.[23] Moreover, their theories inscribe tactics in a long tradition of reflection on the relationships between reason and particular actions and situations. Passing by way of The Art of War by the Chinese author Sun Tzu[24] or the Arabic anthology, The Book of Tricks,[25] this tradition of a logic articulated on situations and the will of others continues into contemporary sociolinguistics.

Reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, etc.

To describe these everyday practices that produce without capitalizing, that is, without taking control over time, one starting point seemed inevitable because it is the "exorbitant" focus of contemporary culture and its consumption: reading. From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring . everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read. The economy itself, transformed into a "semeiocracy"[26], encourages a hypertrophic development of reading. Thus, for the binary set production-consumption, one would substitute its more general equivalent: writing-reading. Reading (an image or a text), moreover, seems to constitute the maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize the consumer, who is conceived of as a voyeur (whether trogiodytic or itinerant) in a "show biz society."[27]

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments 'lost" in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an "invention" of the memory. Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text;[28] the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.

This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own "turns of phrase," etc., their own history; as do pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals. In the same way the users of social codes turn them into metaphors and ellipses of their own quests. The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this creativity (like those "bosses" who simply can't see what is being created within their own enterprises).[29] Carried to its limit, this order would be the equivalent of the rules of meter and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays.

Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive. It resembles rather that art whose theory was developed by medieval poets and romancers: an innovation infiltrated into the text and even into the terms of a tradition. Imbricated within the strategies of modernity (which identify creation with the invention of a personal language, whether cultural or scientific), the procedures of contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of "renters" who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text. In the Middle Ages, the text was framed by the four, or seven, interpretations of which it was held to be susceptible. And it was a book. Today, this text no longer comes from a tradition. It is imposed by the generation of a productivist technocracy. It is no longer a referential book, but a whole society made into a book, into the writing of the anonymous law of production.

It is useful to compare other arts with this art of readers. For example, the art of conversationalists: the rhetoric of ordinary conversation consists of practices which transform "speech situations," verbal productions in which the interlacing of speaking positions weaves an oral fabric without individual owners, creations of a communication that belongs to no one. Conversation is a provisional and collective effect of competence in the art of manipulating "commonplaces" and the inevitability of events in such a way as to make them "habitable"[30]

But our research has concentrated above all on the uses of space,[31] on the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place, on the complex processes of the art of cooking, and on the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires-an art of manipulating and enjoying.[32]

Extensions: prospects and politics

The analysis of these tactics was extended to two areas marked out for study, although our approach to them changed as the research proceeded: the first concerns prospects, or futurology, and the second, the individual subject in political life.

The "scientific" character of futurology poses a problem from the very start. If the objective of such research is ultimately to establish the intelligibility of present reality, and its rules as they reflect a concern for coherence, we must recognize, on the one hand, the nonfunctional status of an increasing number of concepts, and on the other, the inadequacy of procedures for thinking about, in our case, space. Chosen here as an object of study, space is not really accessible through the usual political and economic determinations; besides, futurology provides no theory of space.[33] The metaphorization of the concepts employed, the gap between the atomization characteristic of research and the generalization required in reporting it, etc., suggest that we take as a definition of futurological discourse the "simulation" that characterizes its method.

Thus in futurology we must consider: (1) the relations between a certain kind of rationality and an imagination (which is in discourse the mark of the locus of its production); (2) the difference between, on the one hand, the tentative moves, pragmatic ruses, and successive tactics that mark the stages of practical investigation and, on the other hand, the strategic representations offered to the public as the product of these operations.[34]

In current discussions, one can discern the surreptitious return of a rhetoric that metaphorizes the fields "proper" to scientific analysis, while, in research laboratories, one finds an increasing distance between actual everyday practices (practices of the same order as the art of cooking) and the "scenarios" that punctuate with utopian images the hum of operations in every laboratory: on the one hand, mixtures of science and fiction; on the other, a disparity between the spectacle of overall strategies and the opaque reality of local tactics. We are thus led to inquire into the "underside" of scientific activity and to ask whether it does not function as a collage-juxtaposing, but linking less and less effectively, the theoretical ambitions of the discourse with the stubborn persistence of ancient tricks in the everyday work of agencies and laboratories. In any event, this split structure, observable in so many administrations and companies, requires us to rethink all the tactics which have so far been neglected by the epistemology of science.

The question bears on more than the procedures of production: in a different form, it concerns as well the status of the individual in technical systems, since the involvement of the subject diminishes in proportion to the technocratic expansion of these systems. Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electronicized and computerized megalopolis, the "art" of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days. The fragmentation of the social fabric today lends a political dimension to the problem of the subject. In support of this claim can be adduced the symptoms represented by individual conflicts and local operations, and even by ecological organizations, though these are preoccupied primarily with the effort to control relations with the environment collectively. These ways of reappropriating the product-system, ways created by consumers, have as their goal a therapeutics for deteriorating social relations and make use of techniques of re-employment in which we can recognize the procedures of everyday practices. A politics of such ploys should be developed. In the perspective opened up by Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, such a politics should also inquire into the public ("democratic") image of the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it.

Witold Gombrowicz, an acute visionary, gave this politics its herothe anti-hero who haunts our research-when he gave a voice to the small-time official (Musil's "man without qualities" or that ordinary man to whom Freud dedicated Civilization and Its Discontents) whose refrain is "When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has": "I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras.... You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows."[35]

Notes

[1] See M. de Certeau, La Prise de parole (Paris: DDB, 1968); La Possession de Loudun (Paris: Julliard-Gallimard, 1970); L'Absent de l'histoire (Paris: Mame, 1973); La Culture au pluriel (Paris: UGE IO/ 18, 1974); Une Politique de la langue (with D. Julia and J. Revel) (Paris: Gailimard, 1975); etc.

[2] From the Greek poiein "to create, invent, generate."

[3] See Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generate (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1, 251-266.

[4] Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

[5] From this point of view as well, the works of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life constitute a fundamental source.

[6] On art, from the Encyclopidie to Durkheim, see below pp. 66-68.

[7] For this literature, see the booklets mentioned in Le Livre dans la vie quotidienne (Paris: BibliothÈque Nationale, 1975) and in Genevieve Bolleme, La Bible bleue, Anthologie d'une litterature "populaire" (Paris: Flammarion, 1975),141-379.

[8] The first of these two monographs was written by Pierre Mayol, the second by Luce Giard (on the basis of interviews made by Marie Ferrier). See L'Invention du quotidian, 11, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, Habiter, cuisiner (Paris: UGE IO/ 18, 1980).

[9] By Erving Goffman, see especially Interaction Rituals (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976); The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1973); Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). By Pierre Bourdieu, see Esquisse d'une thÈorie de la pratique. PrÈcÈdÈ de trois Ètudes d'ethnologie kabyle (Geneve: Droz, 1972); "Les StratÈgies matri-moniales," Annales: economies, societies, civilisations 27 (1972), 1105-1127; "Le Langage autorisÈ," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 5-6 (November 1975), 184-190; "Le Sens pratique," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. I (February 1976), 43-86. By Marcel Mauss, see especially "Techniques du corps," in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1950). By Marcel DÈtientie and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les Ruses de l'intelligence. La metis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). By Jeremy Boissevain, Friends o 'Friendv. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). By Edward O. Laumann, Bonds of Pluralism. The Form and Substance of Urban Social Networks (New York: John Wiley, 1973).

[10] Joshua A. Fishman, The Sociology of Language (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury, 1972). See also the essays in Studies in Social Interaction, ed. David Sudnow (New York: The Free Press, 1972); William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973); etc.

[11] Oswald Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972); and David K. Lewis, Convention: a Philosophical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), and Counterfactuals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).

[12] Georg H. von Wright, Norm and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); Essay in Deontic Logic and the General Theory of Action (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1968); Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971). And A. C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action (London: Duckworth, 1972); and La Semantique de l'action, ed. Paul Ricoeur and Doriane Tiffeneau (Paris: CNRS, 1977).

[13] A. N. Prior, Past, Present and Future: a Study of "Tense Logic" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) and Papers on Tense and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). N. Rescher and A. Urquhart, Temporal Logic, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

[14] Alan R. White, Modal Thinking (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); G. E. Hughes and M. J. Cresswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); I. R. Zeeman, Modal Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); S. Haacker, Deviant Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Discussing Language with Chomsky, Halliday, etc., ed. H. Parret (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).

[15] As it is more technical, the study concerning the logics of action and time, as well as modalization, will be published elsewhere.

[16] Jacques Sojcher, La Demarche poetique (Paris: UGE IO/ 18, 1976), 145.

[17] See Fernand Deligny, Les Vagabonds efficaces (Paris: Maspero, 1970); Nous et l'innocent (Paris: Maspero, 1977); etc.

[18] See M. de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel, 283-308; and "Actions culturelles et strategies politiques," La Revue nouvelle, April 1974, 351-360.

[19] The analysis of the principles of isolation allows us to make this criticism both more nuanced and more precise. See Pour une histoire de la statistique (Paris: INSEE, 1978), 1, in particular Alain Desrosieres, "ElÈments pour l'histoire des nomenclatures socio-professionnelles," 155-231.

[20] The works of P. Bourdieu and those of M. DÈtienne and J.-P. Vernant make possible the notion of "tactic" more precise, but the socio-linguistic investigations of H. Garfinkel, H. Sacks, et al. also contribute to this clarification. See notes 9 and 10.

[21] M. DÈtienne and J.-P. Vernant, Les Ruses de l'intelligence.

[22] See S. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, TraitÈ de l'argumentation (Bruxelles: UniversitÈ libre, 1970); J. Dubois, et al., Rhetorique generale (Paris: Larousse, 1970); etc.

[23] The works of Corax, said to be the author of the earliest Greek text on rhetoric, are lost; on this point, see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 11, 24, 1402a. See W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 178-179.

[24] Sun Tzu, The Art o War, trans. S. B. Griffith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963). Sun Tzu (Sun Zi) should not be confused with the later military theorist Hsiin Tzu (Xun Zi).

[25] Le Livre des ruses. La Strategie politique des Arabes, ed. R. K. Khawam (Paris: PhÈbus, 1976).

[26] See Jean Baudrillard, Le Systeme des objets (Paris: Gailimard, 1968); La SocietÈ de consommation (Paris: Denoel, 1970); Pour une critique de l'economie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

[27] Guy Debord, La Societe du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967).

[28] Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 58; The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang)

[29] See GÈrard Mordillat and Nicolas Philibert, Ces Patrons eclaires qui craignent la lumiere (Paris: Albatros, 1979).

[30] See the essays of H. Sacks, E. A. Schegloff, etc., quoted above. This analysis, entitled Arts de dire, will be published separately.

[31] See below, Part 111, Chapters VII to IX.

[32] We have devoted monographs to these practices in which the proliferating and disseminated bibliography on the subject will be found (see L'invention du quotidien, 11, Habiter, Cuisiner, by Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol).

[33] See, for example, A. Lipietz, "Structuration de l'espace foncier et amenagement du territoire," Environment and Planning, A, 7 (1975), 415-425, and "Approche thÈorique des transformations de l'espace franÁais," Espaces et Societes, No. 16 (1975), 3-14.

[34] The analyses found in Travaux et recherches de prospective published by the Documentation FranÁaise, in particular in volumes 14, 59, 65 and 66, and notably the studies by Yves Barel and Jacques Durand have served as the basis for this investigation into futurology. It will be published separately.

[35] W. Gombrowicz, Cosmos (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1971), 165-168; originally Kosmos (1965); Cosmos, trans. E. Mosbacker (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967).

Seats of power.

2006-08-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

Media ownership is typically by either government or by private families. Limited degrees of freedom, indeed.

[The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. XLVI (October 2003)]
© 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-2186/2003/4602-0014$01.50

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WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?*

SIMEON DJANKOV
World Bank

CARALEE MCLIESH
World Bank

TATIANA NENOVA
World Bank

ANDREI SHLEIFER
Harvard University

ABSTRACT
We examine the patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world. We find that almost universally the largest media firms are owned by the government or by private families. Government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media. We then examine two theories of government ownership of the media: the public interest (Pigouvian) theory, according to which government ownership cures market failures, and the public choice theory, according to which government ownership undermines political and economic freedom. The data support the second theory.

* We thank Mei-Ling Lavecchia, Stefka Slavova, and especially Lihong Wang for excellent research assistance; Tim Besley, Edward Glaeser, Roumeen Islam, Simon Johnson, Lawrence Katz, Philip Keefer, Aart Kraay, Rafael La Porta, Mark Nelson, Russell Pittman, Andrew Weiss, and Luigi Zingales for comments; and the referee and two editors of this journal for helpful suggestions.

I. INTRODUCTION

IN modern economies and societies, the availability of information is central to better decision making by voters, consumers, and investors.1 Much of that information is provided by the media, including newspapers, television, and radio, which collect information and make it available to the public. A crucial question, then, is how the media should be optimally organized. Should newspapers or television channels be state or privately owned? Should the media industry be organized as a monopoly or competitively? In this paper, we consider two broad theories of organization of the media and evaluate them using a new database of media ownership in 97 countries.

The first theory of the mediaand of institutions more generallyis the public interest (Pigouvian) theory, in which governments maximize the welfare of consumers. Government ownership of the media, perhaps even as a monopoly, is then desirable for three reasons. First, information is a public goodonce it is supplied to some consumers, it is costly to keep it away from others, even if they have not paid for it. Second, the provision, as well as dissemination, of information is subject to strong increasing returns: there are significant fixed costs of organizing information gathering and distribution facilities, but once these costs are incurred, the marginal costs of making the information available are relatively low. Third, if consumers are ignorant, and especially if private media outlets serve the governing classes, then state media ownership can expose the public to less biased, more complete, and more accurate information than it could obtain with private ownership.2 All these arguments were adduced by the management of the newly formed British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in support of maintaining a publicly subsidized monopoly on radio and television in Britain,3 and subsequently repeated in many developing countries.

In contrast, the public choice theory holds that a government-owned media outlet would distort and manipulate information to entrench the incumbent politicians, preclude voters and consumers from making informed decisions, and ultimately undermine both democracy and markets. Because private and independent media supply alternative views to the public, they enable individuals to choose among political candidates, goods, and securitieswith less fear of abuse by unscrupulous politicians, producers, and promoters.4 Moreover, competition among media firms assures that voters, consumers, and investors obtain, on average, unbiased and accurate information. The role of such private and competitive media is held to be so important for the checks-and-balances system of modern democracy that they have come to be called "the fourth estate," along with the executive, the legislature, and the courts.

Interestingly, even the Pigouvian economists, who advocate regulation or even nationalization by a benevolent government when considering other industries, support the free and private media.5 Ronald Coase points to this hypocrisy of Pigouvian economists: in the very industry where the case for state ownership is theoretically attractive, they shy away from taking it seriously. "It is hard to believe that the general public is in a better position to evaluate competing views on economic and social policy than to choose between different kinds of food."6 Nonetheless, the assumption of benevolent government often stops at the doorstep of the media, perhaps because economists want to protect their own right to supply information without being subject to regulation.

The two theories have distinct implications for both the determinants and the consequences of who owns the media.7 The public interest theory predicts that the more "benign" or "public-spirited" governments should have higher levels of media ownership and that the consequence of such ownership is greater freedom of the press, more economic and political freedom, and better social outcomes. The public choice theory predicts the opposite.

To understand the basic facts about media ownership, and to evaluate these predictions, we collect data on ownership patterns of media firmsnewspapers, television, and radioin 97 countries. Our paper provides a first systematic look at the extent of state and private ownership of media firms around the world, of the different kinds of private ownership, and of the prevalence of monopoly across countries and segments of the media industry. Our basic finding is that the two dominant forms of ownership of media firms around the world are ownership by the state and ownership by concentrated private owners, namely, controlling families.

Many hypothesize that the "amenity potential," also known as "the private benefits of control,"8 arising from owning media outlets is extremely high. In other words, the nonfinancial benefits, such as fame and influence, that are obtained by controlling a newspaper or a television station must be considerably higher than those that come from controlling a firm of comparable size in, say, the bottling industry. Economic theory then predicts that private control of media firms should be highly concentrated: the control of widely held firms with a high amenity potential is up for grabs and cannot be sustained in equilibrium.9 Our findings are broadly consistent with this prediction.

Having described the basic patterns of media ownership, we evaluate the data in light of the public interest and the public choice theories. We find that government ownership of the media is greater in countries that are poorer, have greater overall state ownership in the economy, lower levels of school enrollments, and more autocratic regimes. The last finding in particular casts doubt on the proposition that state ownership of the media serves benevolent ends.

We then consider the consequences of state ownership of the media, as measured by freedom of the press, political and economic freedom, and health outcomes. To this end, we run regressions of a variety of outcomes across countries on state ownership of the media, holding constant various country characteristics. We find pervasive evidence of "worse" outcomes associated with greater state ownership of the media (especially the press). The evidence is inconsistent with the Pigouvian view of state ownership of the media. Still, since we have only a cross-section of countries, we cannot decisively interpret this evidence as causal. Other, unmeasured, factors may account for the observed relationships.

1 Henry Simons, Economic Policy of a Free Society (1948); and George J. Stigler, The Economics of Information, 69 J. Pol. Econ. 213 (1961).
2 Vladimir Lenin, On the Freedom of the Press, 7 Lab. Mon. 35 (1925).
3 R. H. Coase, British Broadcasting (1950).
4 See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1984); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); Timothy Besley & Robin Burgess, The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India, 117 Q. J. Econ. 1415 (2002); and Timothy Besley & Andrea Prat, Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability (CEPR Discussion Paper No. 3132, London 2002).
5 See Simons, supra note 1; W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (1955); and Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1953).
6 R. H. Coase, The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas, 64 Am. Econ. Rev. Papers & Proc. 389 (1974).
7 See also Simeon Djankov et al., The Regulation of Entry, 117 Q. J. Econ. 1 (2002).
8 See Harold Demsetz, The Amenity Potential of Newspapers and the Reporting of Presidential Campaigns, in Efficiency, Competition and Policy (H. Demsetz ed. 1989); Harold Demsetz & Kenneth Lehn, The Structure of Corporate Ownership: Causes and Consequences, 93 J. Pol. Econ. 1155 (1985); and Sanford J. Grossman & Oliver D. Hart, One ShareOne Vote and the Market for Corporate Control, 20 J. Fin. Econ. 175 (1988).
9 Lucian Arye Bebchuk, A Rent-Protection Theory of Corporate Ownership and Control (Working Paper No. 7203, Nat'l Bur. Econ. Res. 1999).

II. OWNERSHIP DATA

This section focuses on patterns of ownership in the media industry. Because ownership bestows control,10 it shapes the information provided to voters and consumers. Ownership, of course, is not the only determinant of media content. In many countries, even with private ownership, government regulates the media industry, provides direct subsidies and advertising revenues to media outlets, restricts access to newsprint and information collection, and harasses journalists. We discuss these modes of control as well.

10 Sanford J. Grossman & Oliver D. Hart, The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration, 94 J. Pol. Econ. 691 (1986).

A. Construction of the Database

We gathered new data on media ownership in 97 countries. We focused on newspapers and television since these are the primary sources of news on political, economic, and social issues.

Data on radio ownership are limited. Radio reaches a high proportion of the population, even in countries with the lowest levels of income and literacy, but it mainly delivers entertainment. The radio market is also highly regional, which precludes any single station from achieving a large market share. As a crude index, we gather ownership data on the top radio station as measured by peak adult audience and on the "all-news" radio station when one exists in a country.

Our selection of sample countries is driven by data availability. First, we identify the countries for which we have information on control variables. Since we are interested in the consequences of state ownership of the media, we need to make sure that our results are not driven by differences in economic development, education, political competition, or state intervention in the economy. To this end, we control for general levels of state ownership in the economy, primary school enrollment, autocracy, and gross national product per capita. We exclude five countries because (1) the country is in civil war (Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone), (2) the entity cannot be classified as a country (Hong Kong), or (3) no daily newspapers exist (Belize, Tajikistan). We also exclude 31 countries that lack sufficient data on media ownership. The final sample of 97 countries includes 21 in Africa, 9 in the Americas, 17 in Asia and the Pacific, 7 in Central Asia and the Caucasus, 16 in Central and Eastern Europe, 11 in Middle East and North Africa, and 16 in Western Europe.Table 1 describes all the variables used in the paper.

TABLE 1 THE VARIABLES

Within countries, we select media outlets on the basis of market share of the audience and provision of local news content for the year 1999. This approach focuses on who controls the majority of information flows on domestic issues to citizens. We exclude entertainment and sport media, as well as foreign media outlets, if they do not provide local news content.11 We include in our sample the five largest daily newspapers, as measured by share in the total circulation of all dailies, and the five largest television stations, as measured by share of viewing.12 We consult three primary data sources to select these outlets. First, we use Zenith Media Market and Media Fact Book 2000 publications, which are organized by region, including Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and the Americas. Zenith Media's rankings of newspapers are checked with the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) World Press Trends 2000 report. The WAN data are also used as the source for total newspaper circulation, which is not reported by Zenith Media. Finally, we use the European Institute for the Media Media in the CIS report as a primary source for countries in the former Soviet Union. Alternative sources are sought in two cases: when there is an inconsistency in data reported by primary sources or when none of the sources covers the country in question. When this occurs, we use local media survey firms, World Bank external affairs offices, U.S. Department of State information offices, and direct contact with the media outlets.

Where possible, we rely on company annual reports and the WorldScope database for information on ownership of media firms. Many of our sample companies are not covered by WorldScope and operate in countries with limited disclosure requirements. Accordingly, we also use business news reports in LexisNexis and the Financial Times databases, country-specific company handbooks, media surveys, and internet information services. In all cases, we verify the ownership and other information externally by contacting World Bank external affairs offices, embassies in Washington, D.C., and regional or in-country media organizations.

Ownership data are for December 1999 or the closest date for which reliable data were available. For the majority of firms in the sample, ownership structures are stable over time. Timing is a significant issue only in the transition economies, where many media enterprises have been privatized or have increasing rates of foreign ownership. For these countries, we strictly enforce the December 1999 date of ownership information, even when we have more recent data.

We follow past work in identifying the ultimate controlling shareholder of each media outlet.13 We focus explicitly on voting as opposed to cash flow rights in firms. For each firm, we identify the legal entities and families who own significant voting stakes.14 This provides us with the first level of ownership. For each legal entity, then, we identify its ownership structure by determining all significant vote holdersthe second level of ownership. We continue to identify vote holders at each level of ownership until we reach an entity for which it is not possible to break down the ownership structure any further.

The entity that ultimately controls the highest number of voting rights, but no less than 20 percent at every link of the chain, is defined as the ultimate owner. Such control can be gained through direct ownership of more than 20 percent of voting rights of a media enterprise or indirectly through a chain of intermediate owners. For example, an individual X may control newspaper Z when he holds over 20 percent of the voting rights in Company Y, which in turn owns over 20 percent of the voting rights in Z. With indirect holdings, we define the percentage of ultimate ownership as the minimum holding along the chain of control.15

After identifying the ultimate owner, we classify each media outlet into one of the four main categories of owners: the state, families,16 widely held corporations, and "other." Examples of other controlling entities are employee organizations, trade unions, political parties, churches, not-for-profit foundations, and business associations. We define a corporation as widely held if there is no owner with 20 percent or more of the voting rights. We also keep track of whether the ultimate owner is a foreign family, entity, or government.

11 We include satellite and cable television if they carry local news content and are one of the top five television stations as measured by share of viewing. Satellite and cable television account for three of the top five stations in China. Out of the top five stations, four in India, two in Hungary, and three in Norway transmit by satellite. We do not include CNN and other global stations because they generally do not carry local news (and typically have a small share of viewers). We cover foreign news stations that spill over to local audiences if they carry local news and are among the top five stations. For example, in Austria, three of the top five television stations are German, but have a "local news window." We do not account for illegal access to foreign and/or global satellite television because we do not have access to such data (but also, there is no local news content).
12 Following the WAN definition, newspapers are considered dailies if they are published at least four times per week. In the initial phase of the data gathering (first 12 countries), we focused on the top 10 media enterprises in the daily newspaper and television markets. We subsequently reduced the sample to five firms per media type for two reasons. First, the difference in market coverage from increasing the sample of companies from five to 10 was marginal. In the first 12 countries, the top five newspapers account for an average of 62.4 percent of total circulation, and the top 10 for 74.1 percent. The correlation between the two is 94.2 percent. For the sample as a whole, the top five newspapers account for an average of 66.7 percent of total circulation. Television markets are even more concentratedon average the top five firms cover 89.5 percent of total viewing. Second, 20 countries in our sample do not have more than five daily newspapers, and 42 countries do not have more than five television stations.
13 For a discussion of methodology, see Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, & Andrei Shleifer, Corporate Ownership around the World, 54 J. Fin. 471 (1999).
14 The cutoff level of voting stakes depends on the mandatory disclosure levels in the country. In no case, however, is that threshold higher than 5 percent.
15 In a few cases, the owner of voting rights in a media firm does not hold the broadcast license. In these cases, we say that firm and not license ownership determines control. We do this because control of all broadcast licenses ultimately belongs to the government and licenses can be revoked depending on the strength of property rights in a country.
16 We use families as a unit of analysis and do not look within families.

B. Examples of Media Ownership

We illustrate the construction of the ownership variables with examples of individual firms. We start with a simple case of family ownership. In Argentina, the third largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of 177,000, is La Nacion. The owner of each share in La Nacion is entitled to one vote. There are two large shareholders in La Nacion (Figure 1): the Saguier family, with 72 percent of capital and votes, and Grupo Mitre, with 28 percent of capital and votes. Grupo Mitre is in turn 100 percent owned by the Mitre family. Although the Mitre family holds an indirect control of 28 percent, we follow the chain of control of the largest shareholder at each level of ownership. Thus we record the Saguier family as the ultimate owner and classify La Nacion as family owned.

FIGURE 1.La Nacion (Argentina)

A more complex example of family ownership is the Norwegian television station TVN (Figure 2). TVN is the second largest television station with local content in Norway, as measured by share of viewing. It is 50.7 percent controlled by Scandinavian Broadcasting Systems (SBS) and 49.3 percent by the largest Norwegian television station, TV2. We follow the chain of control along SBS rather than TV2, since SBS holds the majority of votes in TVN. Although Harry Evans Sloan (the chairman and CEO of SBS) holds a 9.8 percent share of voting rights in SBS, the only voting interest above 20 percent is held by the Netherlands United Pan-Europe Communications (UPC), with 3.3 percent of the vote. The majority shareholder of UPC is UnitedGlobal Com (51 percent). UnitedGlobal Com is in turn controlled by the Schneider family, through a combination of three direct interests totaling 21.9 percent, as well as 50 percent control of a voting agreement with 69.2 percent control of votes. We classify TVN as family owned and the Schneider family as the ultimate owner.

FIGURE 2.TVN (Norway)

State ownership takes different forms. The BBC is classified as state owned. It is funded by government license fees and advertising. The board of governors is appointed by Royal Prerogative, in practice the prime minister, and is accountable to the government. The BBC charter specifies a number of safeguards to ensure its independence from government interference. By contrast, the largest television station in Myanmar is controlled directly by the Ministry of Information and Culture, and the second largest station is controlled directly by the Myanmar military. In both cases, the state retains full powers to manage content and appoint and remove staff. In Turkmenistan, the state maintains direct control over the press: President Niyazov is officially declared the founder and owner of all newspapers in the country.

In a number of cases, we need to distinguish between state and political party ownership. In Kenya, the ruling party, the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), is the ultimate owner of the daily newspaper the Kenya Times, the country's fourth largest daily. Yet we do not classify Kenya Times as state owned, because if there were a change of government the ownership would remain with KANU. In contrast, control of the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) would remain with the state regardless of the political party in power, so we classify KBC as state owned. Ruling party ownership also occurs in Malaysia and Cote d'Ivoire. We place these firms in the "other" category, along with more clear-cut cases of media owned by opposition political parties.

In several cases, family ownership is closely associated with the state. In Kazakhstan, President Nazarbayev's daughter and son-in-law between them control seven of the 12 media outlets in our country sample. In Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family are the ultimate owners of two of the five most popular dailies. In cases where there is a direct family relationship between the ultimate owner and the head of state, and the governing system is a single-party state, we classify the media enterprise as state owned.

Other associations between families and state are prevalent throughout our sample. In Ukraine, the deputy prime minister holds over 30 percent of the top television station, while in Malawi the owner of the Nation newspaper is the minister of agriculture and vice-president of the ruling party. Neither of these positions are head of state in single-party governments, and we therefore classify both media outlets as family owned. Other unofficial links to the state were documented in country files but did not influence our classification of ultimate ownership. In Russia, the close associations between the owner of one of the main television stations, Boris Berezovsky, and then-President Yeltsin are well documented.17 In Indonesia, the daughter of ex-President Suharto still controls one of the main television stations. In an effort to be conservative in our measures of state control, in all these cases we classified the media outlets as family owned, since a change in government would sever the link between the politician and the media owner.

17 Boris Berezovsky wrote that "we helped Yeltsin defeat the Communists at the polls, using privately owned television stations" (Our Reverse Revolution, Wash. Post, October 26, 2000, at A27).

C. Media Regulations and Ownership

Throughout the world, governments regulate media using measures ranging from content restrictions in broadcasting licenses to constitutional freedom of expression provisions. The types of regulations and their enforcement vary significantly within our sample countries.

In some cases, ownership is influenced directly by regulation. In Norway, for example, regulations restrict owners from holding more than one-third of shares in media enterprises. Similar restrictions on ownership apply in Israel. Regulations of foreign ownership and cross-media ownership are also prevalent. Of the 49 countries surveyed by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), 14 have explicit restrictions on foreign ownership of newspapers. In Brazil, for example, foreign ownership of voting capital of media enterprises is prohibited, and foreign participation in nonvoting capital is limited to 30 percent. Not surprisingly, foreign owners are absent from the Brazilian sample. A further 21 of WAN countries regulate cross-media ownership. In Australia, proprietors of major metropolitan newspapers are not permitted to own controlling interests in free-to-air television stations in the same market. As a result, the ultimate owner of the Nine Network television station, the Packer family, is limited to a 14.99 percent ownership stake in the one of Australia's leading publishers, John Fairfax Holdings.

Our data do not account for regulations that can substitute for state ownership as a means to control content. Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) publishes all of the top five daily newspapers in Singapore (Figure 3). Shares of SPH are divided into two categories: ordinary shares, which carry one vote per share, and management shares, which carry 200 votes per share. The ownership structure of SPH is characterized by complex cross holdings, with three major groups of shareholders evident in the data. First, the Lee family controls a total of 47.23 percent of votes through four companies. Second, the state holds a total of 27.23 percent of votes through various intermediary institutions. Third, there are a number of minority shareholdings held in nominee accounts at widely held financial institutions.18 Ownership of nominee accounts is not disclosed. It is possible that they are owned by families or the state, in which case our estimate of their control is conservative. We classify the Lee family as the ultimate owner of SPH. Yet by law, the government must approve the owners of management shares of SPH and can require owners to sell shares. We say that SPH is family owned and note that this is a conservative measure of the true influence of the state over SPH.

FIGURE 3.SPH (Singapore)

We use similar approaches in other cases of structural government influence of media firms. In Saudi Arabia, the government approves the appointment of editors-in-chief of newspapers and also has the right to dismiss them. Although clearly this increases the influence of the state on press content, we do not change the ownership classification because of this rule. In Malaysia, newspapers are required to renew their licenses annually. Editors of newspapers that publish critical views of government have been pressured to resign.19 In this environment, self-censorship becomes the norm. In all these instances, we nonetheless rely on ownership in constructing our measures, thus underestimating state influence.

State subsidies and state advertisement revenues enable governments to influence media content. Such subsidies are common in transition and African countries. In Cameroon, for example, the state refused to advertise in privately owned press after critical coverage of government. Defamation laws also influence content by repressing investigative journalism.

Direct regulations of content may interact with ownership. The North Korean Constitution states that the role of the press is to "serve the aims of strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat, bolstering the political unity and ideological conformity of the people and rallying them solidly behind the Party and the Great Leader in the cause of revolution."20 In the Netherlands, the content of public service programming must be at least 25 percent news, 20 percent culture, and 5 percent education. Italy requires that 50 percent of broadcasting be of European origin. Because of these extensive regulations, our ownership classification is a conservative estimate of the true influence of the state over content.

18 In particular, Raffles Nominees Pre Ltd. holds 7.74 percent in SPH, 10.11 percent in Overseas Union Bank Ltd., and 19.44 percent in United Overseas Bank Ltd. GSBC Nominees Pte Ltd. controls 3.98 percent of SPH, 5.88 percent of the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, 3.42 percent of Overseas Union Bank, and 4.31 percent of United Overseas Bank. Finally, Citibank Nominees Ltd. controls 1.63 percent of SPH, 3.82 percent of the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, 4.08 percent of Overseas Union Bank, and 2.77 percent of United Overseas Bank.
19 U.N. ESCOR, 55th Sess. Report on the Mission to Malaysia, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/1999/64.Add.1 (December 23, 1998).
20 N. Korea Const., art. 53, ch. 4 (1975).

D. Variable Construction

We construct two ownership variables from these data. First, we compute the percentage of firms in each categorystate or private. For example, two out of the top five newspaper enterprises in the Philippines are classified as state owned, as are three out of the top five television stations. We record Philippine newspaper market ownership as 40 percent state owned when measured by count, and television market ownership as 60 percent when measured by count. Second, we weight the ownership variable by market share. In the Philippines, the two state-owned newspapers account for 22.2 percent and 21.3 percent of circulation for the top five newspapers, respectively, so the newspapers are 43.5 percent state owned when measured by market share. In television, the three state-owned Philippine stations account for only 17.5 percent of the share of viewing for the top five television stations, so the television market is 17.5 percent state owned as measured by market share.

The market share variables, while more precise as a metric of state control, have the disadvantage that, in the countries with regional newspapers, such as the United States, the market share of any single firm is small. As a consequence, the variables we define are not properly compared with those in countries with national newspapers. This criticism, of course, is less compelling for television firms, which are typically national. The regressions presented below use market share variables, but our results are virtually identical using the counts.

For the radio market, we create a dummy equal to one if the top radio station is state owned, and zero otherwise.

III. PATTERNS IN MEDIA OWNERSHIP

A. Descriptive Statistics

Table 2 presents descriptive statistics on the ownership of newspaper and television markets in 97 countries. Countries are organized first by region and then sorted in alphabetical order. Several patterns emerge from the data.

TABLE 2 OWNERSHIP DISTRIBUTION: TOP FIVE DAILY NEWSPAPERS AND TOP FIVE TELEVISION STATIONS

Our first significant finding is that families and the state own the media throughout the world (Figure 4). In the sample of 97 countries, only 4 percent of media enterprises are widely held. Less than 2 percent have other ownership structures, and a mere 2 percent are employee owned. On average, family-controlled newspapers account for 57 percent of the total and family-controlled television stations for 34 percent of the total. State ownership is also vast. On average, the state controls approximately 29 percent of newspapers and 60 percent of television stations. The state owns a huge share72 percentof the top radio stations. On the basis of these findings, for the remaining analysis we classify ownership into three categories: state, private (which is the sum of the family, widely held, and employee categories), and other.

FIGURE 4.Newspaper and TV ownership

The nearly total absence of firms with dispersed ownership in the media industry is extreme, even by comparison with the finding of high levels of ownership concentration in large firms around the world.21 This result is consistent with the insight that the large amenity potential of ownership of media outlets creates competitive pressures toward ownership concentration. In a sense, both governments and controlling private shareholders get the same benefit from controlling media outlets: the ability to influence public opinion and the political process.

We say that the state has a monopoly in a media market if the share of state-controlled firms exceeds 75 percent. As Table 2 shows, a total of 21 countries have government monopolies of daily newspapers and 43 countries have state monopolies of television stations with local news. Table 2 also shows that families and the state control the media regardless of whether ownership is measured by count or weighted by market share.

Television has significantly higher levels of state ownership than newspapers.22 To explain this finding, a Pigouvian would focus on public goods and note that television broadcasts are at least in part nonexcludable and nonrivalrous. Television also has higher fixed costs than publishing and more significant economies of scale. The private sector might then underprovide broadcasting services, particularly in smaller markets serving remote areas, ethnic minorities, or students. These theories are central to many of the laws on public broadcasters in Europe. Alternatively, from the political perspective, privately owned newspapers are easier to censor than privately owned television. Because television can be broadcast live, control of content is more likely to require ownership. In this case, governments that want to censor news would own television.23

Table 3 shows that the data exhibit distinct regional patterns. State ownership of newspapers and television is significantly greater in countries in Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). On average, governments in Africa control 61 percent of the top five (in circulation) daily newspapers and reach 84 percent of the audience for the top five television stations. Seventy-one percent of African countries have state monopolies on television broadcasting. With the exception of Israel, all countries in MENA have a state monopoly over television broadcasting. State ownership of newspaperswhich averages 50 percent share of circulationis also high in countries in MENA.

TABLE 3 TEST OF STATE OWNERSHIP MEANS BY REGION: t-STATISTICS

By contrast, newspapers in Western Europe and the Americas are held predominately privately. In Western Europe, none of the top five daily newspapers are owned by the state. In the Americas, the majority of the newspapers have been owned and managed by single families for many decades. Levels of state ownership of television are also overwhelmingly lower in the Americas than in other regions. None of the top five stations in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and the United States are state owned; this occurs in only one other country (Turkey) in our sample. In Western Europe, in contrast, a substantial number of public broadcasters push the regional state ownership average to 48 percent by count and 55 percent by share.

Countries in the Asia-Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union have ownership patterns closer to the sample mean.24

The simple statistics presented so far raise many questions. The evidence suggests that there are large private benefits of media ownership. Throughout the world, media are controlled by parties likely to value these private benefits: families and the state. In particular, the extent of state ownership of the media (particularly in television and radio) is striking, which suggests that governments extract value through control of information flows in the media. In the next few sections, we examine this evidence in light of the alternative theories.

21 Supra note 13.
22 Only five countries (Ghana, the Philippines, Uganda, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan) have more state control of the top five newspapers than of television stations.
23 A further argument is that the extent of required regulation of television is higher because of difficulties in defining property rights for broadcasting frequencies. It may be optimal from an efficiency standpoint for the state to control television stations directly as opposed to regulating the sector and spending resources in monitoring compliance. These arguments have been disputed by R. H. Coase, The Federal Communications Commission, 2 J. Law & Econ. 1 (1959), and others who do not see any need for government ownership and regulation arising from the particular technological features of broadcasting frequencies.
24 Ownership within each of these regions varies dramatically. Indonesia and Thailand have low levels of state ownership of the media compared with full state monopolies in North Korea and Myanmar. The predominantly privately owned media in Estonia and Moldova contrast with the full state control in Belarus and Turkmenistan.

IV. DETERMINANTS OF MEDIA OWNERSHIP

In this section, we examine how ownership patterns are associated with different characteristics of countries. We examine four determinants of media ownership: the level of development, government ownership in other sectors, primary school enrollment, and autocracy.25 For all of these characteristics, it is hard to argue that causality runs from media ownership to these very basic country characteristics rather than the other way around.

Table 4 presents the results. Levels of state ownership of the press, but not of television and radio, are (statistically significantly) lower in countries that are richer. Levels of state ownership of television and radio but not the press are (statistically significantly) lower in countries that have lower levels of overall state ownership. Levels of state ownership of the radio are lower in countries with higher primary school enrollments. Perhaps most interestingly from the theoretical perspective, levels of state ownership of all forms of media are sharply and statistically significantly lower in less autocratic countries.26

TABLE 4 DETERMINANTS OF STATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEDIA (N = 97 Countries)

This evidence challenges the public interest view of government ownership of the media. In particular, the fact that more autocratic regimes have higher levels of state ownership suggests that the unchecked and unlimited governments, rather than those constrained by the public, come to own the media. This is of course exactly what a public choice theorist would predict.

Table 5 presents data on the incidence of state media monopolies around the world (with the exception of Singapore, there are no private media monopolies in our sample). The data show that state monopoly is largely a feature of poor countriesthere is almost no incidence of state monopolies of newspapers, and relatively few of television, in the upper two quartiles of income distribution. These data themselves do not distinguish among theoriesa Pigouvian can easily explain why television and low income levels call for state monopoly.

TABLE 5 STATE MONOPOLIES IN THE MEDIA

25 We also considered ethnolinguistic fractionalization and latitude, but these variables did not enter significantly and reduced the sample size, so we do not include them in the analysis we present.
26 We also considered how state ownership varies according to the origin of commercial law in a country. Legal origins are classified into five categories: English, French, German, Socialist, and Scandinavian. Two countries (Iran and Saudi Arabia) cannot be classified in any of these groups since they practice traditional Islamic law. Legal origin has been interpreted as a proxy for the strength of property rights and inclination of the government to intervene in an economy as discussed in Rafael La Porta et al., Law and Finance, 106 J. Pol. Econ. 1113 (1998); and Rafael La Porta et al., The Quality of Government, 15 J. L. Econ. & Org. 222 (1999). It could, therefore, be argued that legal origin influences the extent to which a state chooses to control media. We find that, in television, average state ownership is remarkably similar across legal origins. Levels of state ownership of newspapers in countries of German and Scandinavian origin are significantly lower than in countries of French and socialist origin. For every other combination, state ownership of television or newspapers does not vary significantly according to legal origin.

V. THE CONSEQUENCES OF STATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEDIA

In this section, we consider some of the consequences of state ownership of the media for a number of development indicators, such as freedom of the press, political and economic freedom, and health. In this analysis, we control for the factors that we identified as shaping media ownership. Even so, the results should be interpreted with caution, since it is possible that some omitted third factors determine both media ownership patterns and outcomes and we do not have instruments. In our defense, one must recognize that this omitted characteristic of a country must reflect the state's interest in controlling the information flows.

A. Freedom of the Press

Perhaps the clearest way to compare alternative theories of state ownership of the media is by focusing on freedom of the press. After all, the main implication of the Pigouvian theories is that greater government ownership should if anything lead to greater press freedom, as media avoid being captured by individuals with extreme wealth or political views.

Table 6 presents the results from the regressions of "objective" measures of media freedom on state ownership of the media. One measure of media freedom comes from Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and reports on journalists jailed and media outlets closed by governments in 1999. Another measure was constructed from the reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on the actual numbers of journalists jailed during 199799. These measures should be interpreted with caution, since presumably a truly repressive state, with full ownership and control of the media, does not need to repress journalists. We also look at a measure of internet freedom.

TABLE 6 MEDIA FREEDOM (N = 97 Countries)

Table 6 shows that greater state media ownership is associated with a greater number of journalists jailed and media outlets closed by the government, holding per capita income, primary school enrollment, state ownership, and autocracy constant. With one of the measures, the results are statistically significant. In our data, 45 democracies do not jail journalists, but seven (Benin, Malawi, Moldova, Niger, Nigeria, Russia, and South Korea) do. While 17 "near-democracies" do not jail journalists, 11 (Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Iran, Peru, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, and Zambia) do. Of the autocracies, 11 do not jail journalistsperhaps because there is no dissent, but six (China, Egypt, Kuwait, Myanmar, Syria, and Uzbekistan) do.27

Table 6 also establishes that countries with greater state media ownership censor the internet more heavily, as measured by a dummy that equals one if the government does not monopolize internet access and content (as measured by CPJ reports). This association is more naturally consistent with the public choice theory.

27 We have also measured freedom of the press using subjective indicators from Douglas A. van Belle, Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace, 34 J. Peace Res. (1997); and Freedom House, The Annual Survey of Press Freedom 2000 (2000). The effects of state ownership on these measures of freedom were also negative but in general insignificant.

B. Political and Economic Freedom

We examine the association between state media ownership and civil, political, and economic rights of a country's citizens. Under the public interest theory, state ownership of the media enhances these rights; under the public choice view, it curtails them by suppressing public oversight of the government and facilitating corruption. In this analysis, we again control for per capita income, government ownership of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), primary school enrollment, and autocracy.

The results are reported in Table 7. Government ownership of the press is associated with (statistically significantly) lower levels of political rights, civil liberties, security of property, and quality of regulation and higher levels of corruption and risk of confiscation. The effect of state ownership of television is also usually adverse, but only sometimes significant. These results support the public choice view that government ownership of the press restricts information flows to the public, which reduces the quality of government.28

TABLE 7 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM

Studies of election coverage illustrate the effect of state ownership of the media on the supply of political information. In Ukraine, election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recorded significant biases in media coverage related to ownership. Although all major television stations devoted more time to the incumbent than the opposition candidate, the state-owned television was more unbalanced in coverage and biased in content (despite legal requirements for the state-owned media to provide balanced and neutral coverage). Of its total first-round election-related coverage, the state-owned UT1 devoted 51 percent to the incumbent, and 75 percent of that coverage was positive. Each of the six opposition candidates received substantially less coverage (a maximum of 16.7 percent), and the vast majority of opposition coverage was negative. The television channel Inter displayed similar prejudice48.5 percent of coverage was allocated to the incumbent, and 73 percent of that coverage was favorable. Although Inter is classified as privately owned, it has strong informal links to the state because one of the three shareholders is the First Deputy Speaker of Parliament.29 The channel 1+1 is 51 percent privately and foreign owned, with a 49 percent nonvoting minority stake held by the State Property Company. The channel 1+1 devoted 34 percent of coverage to the incumbent, and 50 percent of that coverage was positive. Finally, STB, which is privately owned, was the least biased of the four stations. STB dedicated 23 percent of its coverage to the incumbent, with 40 percent of that coverage recorded as favorable. Similar observations have been made about Mexico,30 Ghana, and Kenya.

Our results are much stronger for the press than for television. For the latter, the effects of government ownership are insignificant. One reason might be that private press, which is more common, provides a check on state television, ensuring freer flows of information than would occur if both were in state hands. The data confirm that the outcomes are worse when the state owns both newspapers and television than when it owns only one of them.

Luigi Zingales31 argues that one benefit of private media is to provide information for stock market participants, thereby improving security pricing and revealing abuses by corporate insiders. The last row of Table 7 shows that greater state ownership of the media is associated with a lower number of companies (per capita) listed on the national stock market. These results suggest that state control of information flow is detrimental to financial development, which is consistent with the public choice theory.

Taken in its entirety, the evidence is broadly supportive of the public choice view that governments own the mediaespecially the pressnot to improve the performance of economic and political systems, but to improve their own chances to stay in power. When the two theories yield different predictions, there is no evidence consistent with public interest.

28 Our results are also unsurprising in a broader historical context. Dictators from Napoleon, to Lenin, to Hitler, to Marcos nationalized the press.
29 The shareholdings are approximately equally distributed33 percent, 33 percent, and 34 percentamong three individuals, with the Deputy Speaker holding one of the 33 percent stakes.
30 For Mexico, see Joel Simon, Hot on the Money Trail, 37 Colum. J. Rev., JanuaryFebruary 1998, at 13.
31 Luigi Zingales, In Search of New Foundations, 55 J. Fin. 1623 (2000).

C. Health

Lenin asked a pointed question: whom is the free press for? Our analysis has focused on political and economic freedom, but a Pigouvian could presumably argue that the true benefits of state ownership accrue to the disadvantaged members of society. Freed from the influence of the capitalist owners, state-controlled media can serve the social needs of the poor. A public choice theorist would argue, in contrast, that the government would use its ownership of the media to muzzle the press and to prevent the disadvantaged groups from voicing their grievances. Government ownership should then be associated with inferior social outcomes.

The contrasting predictions of the two views can be evaluated empirically.Table 8 reports the relationships between state ownership of the media and health indicators, holding constant our usual controls. Countries with greater state ownership of the media exhibit lower life expectancy, greater infant mortality, and less access to sanitation and health system responsiveness. Private media ownership is associated with health as well as economic and political outcomes, which is consistent with the public choice but not with the public interest theory.32

TABLE 8 HEALTH OUTCOMES

32 Earlier studies reached a similar conclusion. Duncan Thomas, John Strauss, & Maria-Helena Henriques, How Does Mother's Education Affect Child Height? 26 J. Hum. Resources 183 (1991), finds that maternal access to the media has a strong and positive effect on child health in Brazil. Sen, Poverty and Famines, supra note 4, argues that the lack of democracy, freedom of information, and an independent press contributed to almost 30 million deaths during China's Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1961. Sen contrasts this with India, which has not experienced a major famine since independence and has stronger democratic processes and press freedom: "The Government (of India) cannot afford to fail to take prompt action when large scale starvation threatens. Newspapers play an important part in this, in making the facts known and forcing the challenge to be faced" (at 76). Besley & Burgess, supra note 4, at 1, tests Sen's proposition empirically. Using data across Indian states, it finds that higher newspaper circulation increases government responsiveness to natural shocks. Supporting this hypothesis as well is David Stromberg, Radio's Impact on Public Spending (Working paper, Inst. Int'l Econ. Stud., Stockholm 2001). Rather than focus on media penetration, our study points to a critical deterrent to media's ability to serve social goalsgovernment ownership.

D. Robustness

We check the robustness of our results in a number of ways. First, we estimate the regressions in Tables 48 using ethnolinguistic heterogeneity and latitude as additional controls. These controls are insignificant and do not affect the results, but we do lose observations.

Second, we ask whether the rich countries, with good outcomes and low levels of state ownership of the press, drive the results, by estimating all the regressions excluding Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. In Table 9, we present the results using state ownership of the press (by share) as the independent variable and using all the dependent variables from Tables 68 that were statistically significantly influenced by this state ownership variable in the whole sample. We find that, with the exception of "number of listed firms," the influence of state ownership of the press on outcomes remains statistically significant, although in many regressions the level of significance diminishes as compared with the whole sample. The magnitude of the coefficients remains very similar as well. The results thus are not driven by the OECD countries. Likewise, the results are preserved if we remove the richest quartile of countries and hold both within the richer half and the poorer half of the sample.

TABLE 9 RESULTS EXCLUDING OECD COUNTRIES

Third, when in addition to all the other controls we include a separate dummy for each quartile of per capita income, the results stay at comparable significance levels.

Fourth, we check whether the results are driven by any particular region. The answer is no: the results hold controlling for continent "dummies," but also within Europe, within America, and within Africa/Middle East, although at lower levels of statistical significance.

Fifth, we check whether the results are robust to controlling for the level of media penetration, and the answer is yes.

Last, alternative definitions of dependent and independent variables yield similar results.

We also try to address the question of whether our results are driven by monopoly rather than government ownership per se (there is no private monopoly of the press in the sample, only state monopoly). To this end, we divide countries into unequal groups with 025 percent, 2650 percent, 5175 percent, and over 75 percent state ownership of the press and reestimate our regressions using the quartile state ownership dummies. In general, we do not find a strong pattern of coefficients, although the results are inconsistent with the proposition that "bad" outcomes associated with state ownership are driven solely by monopoly. There is some evidence, to the contrary, that the lowest quartile of state ownership is associated with somewhat better outcomes than the middle quartiles. Although the evidence is very weak, it does not point to a "monopoly only" story.

VI. CONCLUSION

In this paper, we examine ownership patterns of newspapers and television (and to a lesser extent radio) in 97 countries around the world. We find that media firms nearly universally have ownership structures with large controlling shareholders and that these shareholders are either families or governments. This evidence is broadly consistent with the ideas that there is large amenity potential (control benefits) associated with owning mediabe it political influence or fame.33

We then show that countries that are poorer, more autocratic, with lower levels of primary school enrollment, and with higher levels of state intervention in the economy also have greater state ownership of the media. In addition, countries with greater state ownership of the media have less free press, fewer political rights for citizens, inferior governance, less developed capital markets, and inferior health outcomes (the last result being particularly important in light of the argument that state ownership of the media serves the needs of the poor). The negative association between government ownership and political and economic freedom is stronger for newspapers than for television. Although none of this evidence can be unambiguously interpreted as causal, it obtains with extensive controls and there is no empirical evidence of any "benefits" of state ownership.

At some broad level, these results are unsurprising, as intellectuals since John Milton in the seventeenth century have advocated free press and independent media. Still, the results do provide support for the public choice against public interest theory of media ownership in an environment where, as Coase has argued, the public interest case is especially strong.34 Yet the data are inconsistent with these Pigouvian arguments and reveal no benefits of state ownership.

33 See Demsetz, and Demsetz & Lehn, supra note 8, for the discussion of these ideas.
34 Supra note 6.

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The brand called me.

2006-07-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

A continuation of the transition from gene to meme as the mechanism of self-actualization. Why should I procreate when I can broadcast and retail?

The other part of the story is that the value of brands that represent business conglomerates (as opposed to individuals) will continue to decline. Would you be more likely to trust someone as opposed to something?

---

July 30, 2006
The Brand Underground
By ROB WALKER

Aaron Bondaroff is 29, part Puerto Rican, part Jewish, Brooklyn-born and a high-school dropout. His life weaves through the most elusive subcultures of lower Manhattan. A-Ron, as he is also known, is one of those individuals who embodies a scene. “I’m so downtown,” Bondaroff is fond of saying, “I don’t go above Delancey.”

Even so, he longs for something bigger, like the cultural noise made by the Beats in the 1950’s or Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960’s or the bands and fans who clustered around CBGB’s in the 1970’s. He wants to “make history” and join “the time line” of New York. He is not an artist, an author, a designer, musician, filmmaker or even a famous skateboarder or graffiti writer. So in another era, Bondaroff might have had to settle for his cameos in some of the acclaimed images of youthful outsider debauchery captured by his photographer friend Ryan McGinley. He could be, in other words, a counterculture muse, like Neal Cassady or Edie Sedgwick.

In our present era, however, he may not have to settle. There’s a new alternative, one that’s neatly summed up in a question that A-Ron has been asking himself lately: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

The answer he came up with is worth paying attention to because it speaks to a significant but little-noted development in contemporary culture. Young people have always found fresh ways to rebel, express individuality or form subculture communities through cultural expression: new art, new music, new literature, new films, new forms of leisure or even whole new media forms. A-Ron’s preferred form of expression, however, is none of those things. When he talks about his chosen medium, which he calls aNYthing, it sounds as if he’s talking about an artists’ collective, indie film production company, a zine or a punk band. But in fact, aNYthing is a brand. A-Ron puts his brand on T-shirts and hats and other items, which he sells in his own store, among other places. He sees it as fundamentally of a piece with the projects and creations of his anti-mainstream heroes.

This might seem strange, since most of us think of branding as a thoroughly mainstream practice: huge companies buying advertising time during the Super Bowl to shout their trademarked names at us is pretty much the opposite of authentic or edgy expression. But branding is more complicated than that. It is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

Of course, companies don’t go into business in order to express a particular worldview and then gin up a product to make their point. Corporate branding is a function of the profit motive: companies have stuff to sell and hire experts to create the most compelling set of meanings to achieve that goal. A keen awareness of and cynicism toward this core fact of commercial persuasion — and the absurd lengths that corporations will go to in the effort to infuse their goods with, say, rebelliousness or youthful cool — is precisely the thing that is supposed to define the modern consumer. We all know that corporate branding is fundamentally a hustle. And guys like A-Ron are supposed to know that better than anybody.

Which is why the supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?

And yet thousands and thousands of young people who are turned off by the world of shopping malls and Wal-Marts and who can’t bear the thought of a 9-to-5 job are pursuing a path similar to A-Ron’s. Some design furniture and housewares or leverage do-it-yourself-craft skills into businesses or simply convert their consumer taste into blog-enabled trend-spotting careers. Some make toys, paint sneakers or open gallerylike boutiques that specialize in the offerings of product-artists. Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.

Through aNYthing, A-Ron sees himself as part of a “movement,” a brand underground. And maybe there is something going on here that can’t simply be dismissed just because of the apparent disconnect between the idea of a “brand” and the idea of an “underground.” After all, subcultures aren’t defined by outsiders passing judgment; they are defined by participants.

To try to understand this phenomenon and how it might play out, I sought a test-case category in which I could compare the experiences of several upstarts over time. The T-shirt, a simple commodity, seemed an ideal vessel. While some indie products are handmade, many more are, like T-shirts, manufactured goods that attract consumers largely through branding. Even with this single product as a framework, the variety is dizzying. Some T-shirt branders target high-end consumers, some are attached to the curious world of sneaker collecting and some are harder to categorize. Like A-Ron’s brand.

Bondaroff dropped out of high school at age 15 to spend more time partying, getting into trouble and hanging out with the people who were worth hanging out with. He ended up getting a job in Lower Manhattan at the Supreme store. Theoretically a skateboard brand, Supreme was really an attitude brand, and the store had a reputation as a place where clerks would insult you to your face if you weren’t cool enough. A-Ron was not only cool enough, he was photographed for Supreme ads and became its “unofficial face.” He offered his opinions about what would make the photo shoot work better or which underground artists the brand should work with. Supreme caught on in Japan, and by the time Bondaroff was 21, he was visiting Tokyo and getting asked for autographs by kids who had seen his picture in magazines. “I was always bugged out by that — people are like, ‘Oh, you’re that guy,”’ he told me not long ago. “You get famous for nothing.”

While still basically working a retail job, he was also becoming the cool guy who is flown to Australia to sit on a trend-setter panel or whose elaborate birthday party is underwritten by Nike. He was figuring out that he had the option of becoming, in effect, a corporate muse. But he concluded that there was no reason to rent his coolness and knowingness to other companies. The point of aNYthing was to turn his lifestyle into his own business.

He devised his brand not long after Sept. 11, 2001, and it is deeply tied to his love for New York City and his own status on the current downtown scene. The “NY” in the logo resembles that of the New York Giants football team, and aNYthing designs often blend familiar New York iconography (from The New York Post nameplate to Lotto signs) with the brand’s name. His boutique opened last year on Hester Street on the lower Lower East Side.

One reason an underground brand sounds nonsensical is that countercultures are supposed to oppose the mainstream, and nothing is more mainstream than consumerism. But we no longer live in a world of the Mainstream and the Counterculture. We live in a world of multiple mainstreams and countless counter-, sub- and counter-sub-cultures. Bondaroff’s brand is built on both the sort of microfame that such a finely cut cultural landscape enables and on his absolutely exquisite ability to analyze that landscape. He knows that he is seen by the various trend-hunters or Japanese magazine editors or marketing types who hit him up for the latest news as a professional Cool Guy. He recognizes that taste is his skill.

He and his friends have even turned downtown demographics into a kind of parlor game: there are Cool Guys and the Art-Damaged crowd, the Parent Haters, the Dropouts and so on. “I like to label all the different scenes,” he says. “I coin the phrase, and people use it, and it goes back to me.” In fact, he has a related set of T-shirts coming out in the fall. He called up his friend Futura, the veteran graffiti artist, and asked him to write “Cool Guys”; that will be one of the shirts. “I’m exposing everybody,” Bondaroff says, and includes himself in the critique. (“I’m definitely a Cool Guy — the top Cool Guy on the scene,” he said. “I’ll say it loud and proud.”) This is the quintessence of the postmodern brand rebel, hopscotching the minefield of creativity and commerce, recognizing the categorization, satirizing it, embracing it and commoditizing it all at once.

If A-Ron and his crew are the ideological descendants of the scenesters who clustered around Warhol in the Factory period or hung out at CB’s in its heyday, then perhaps they’re trying a new tactic in the eternal war against the corporate suits who co-opt the rebellion, style and taste of every youth culture and sell it right back to the generation that created it. Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.

Daniel Casarella represents a second iteration of the brand underground. At 28, he is a young man who has something to say. Several years ago, he became fascinated with the gritty, turn-of-the-century New York underworld described in Luc Sante’s book on the era, “Low Life.” His brother, Michael, who is 23, was writing his college thesis about 19th-century New York literature, and the Casarellas came to believe that the depths of the forgotten past offered an intellectual antidote to the superficial, surface-driven present. The first time we met, in early 2005, Casarella told me the story of the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan: drained because of pollution in the early 1800’s, it was filled in and became the brutal Five Points slum. “My brother and I have this theory of the Collect being the original sin of Manhattan,” he said, launching into a riff on man’s betrayal of nature and its consequences.

He wanted to get these ideas across to others, but instead of writing a novel or making a series of paintings, he started making T-shirts. He learned screen printing at the Fashion Institute of Technology, but never considered actually joining the industry to work long hours for somebody else. Instead, in 2003, he founded Barking Irons — the name is 19th-century slang for pistols — a line of T-shirts with stark but intricate graphics that looked like old woodcuts, paired with mysterious phrases that refer back to the secret history of New York. One was inspired by the Collect Pond and another by a Washington Irving story. After he had printed some of his first designs, Casarella dropped off samples at Barneys in a paper bag.

A pricey department store doesn’t seem a likely place for expressing ideas, but the store’s buyer called him the next day. It turns out “new ideas” are exactly what the company was hungry for, according to Wanda Colon, a Barneys vice president. Its “young minded” Co-op spinoff stores cater to consumers who seek self-expression specifically through nonmainstream brands, like Gilded Age or Imitation of Christ, she said. Barking Irons got attention in the fashion trade press and on blogs like Coolhunting.com — and from an apparel distributor called Triluxe. A Triluxe executive told me that what the Barking Irons brand had going for it was “point of view.” Adam Beltzman, the owner of a Chicago store called Haberdash — one of many boutiques serving the same shoppers Colon describes — liked Barking Irons’ aesthetic, but what sold him on the brand were the background narratives. “There’s something meaningful behind it,” he says. “There’s something to talk about.” Soon Casarella was thinking way beyond T-shirts, and he projected confidence. From that first batch of a few hundred shirts in 2003, Barking Irons had seen its orders climb to 12,000 a season.

It is often said that this generation of teenagers and 20-somethings is the most savvy one ever in its ability to critique and understand commercial persuasion, and it is probably true — just as it was true when the same thing was said of Generation X and of the baby boomers before that. (And it will no doubt be true when it is said, again, of those now in middle school.) But understanding or “seeing through” the branded world is not the same thing as rejecting it. What bothers Casarella about mainstream branding are big, blatant logos that turn the wearer into a walking advertisement and are supposed to function as simplistic “badges.” That approach, he suggests, is what makes big brands as shallow as most Top 40 music or Hollywood movies. It is not that these forms are inherently bad; it is that they always seem built for the lowest common denominator, and the contemporary consumer demands more — more originality, more sincerity, more not-in-the-mainstream, a greater goal than just making money. That is what he sees Barking Irons as doing in the realm of the brand.

Barking Irons does have a logo, but it appears inside his T-shirts, where only the consumer sees it. That’s the way, Dan Casarella maintains, to make a deep connection. If it seems a little incongruous to combat superficiality by way of T-shirts that retail for $60 or more at Barneys or A-list boutiques, well, in his view, that’s the best place to find an audience that “gets it.” When Casarella declares that his project is part of a “revolution against branding,” what he really means is not the snuffing out of commercial expression but an elevation of it.

My third example of a grass-roots brand maker is the Hundreds. Its co-founder, Bobby Kim, is 26, one of three children of Korean parents who came to America and made good; his father is a physician. Growing up in multicultural Los Angeles, Kim was into hip-hop, punk and skateboarding. He is the kind of person that the marketing industry chases relentlessly, and he knows it. But of course he scorns mainstream efforts to speak to his generation. In an essay on his Web site, for example, he blasted the “commercialized” version of skateboarding culture that he sees in the X-Games or on MTV as a “big-industry ruse.”

Four years ago, he met Ben Shenassafar, another child of successful immigrants (his father is an accountant from Iran), not while skateboarding but at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where they had some first-year classes together. They bonded over their mutual interests in art, music and design — and their mutual horror of becoming the respectable suit-wearing drones their parents wanted them to be. Seeking a more fulfilling alternative, they came up with the Hundreds (as in “selling by the hundreds”).

Now known as Bobby and Ben Hundreds, they started with T-shirts and a Web site. TheHundreds.com featured Bobby’s essays and interviews with people he admired: “The culture’s finest brands, artists, designers, photographers, retailers and media,” the site says. Department-store chains were too mainstream for the Hundreds; instead, they wanted to get their T-shirts into certain skateboard shops or independent “streetwear” stores. Their bête noir was Urban Outfitters, which they saw as the ultimate corporate vulture.

The first store they set their sights on was Fred Segal, the trendsetting boutique in Santa Monica. They showed up one day in 2003 and “ambushed” the buyer. “There are 50 new T-shirt lines that come out every day,” Bobby explained to me, so they knew that theirs would rise or fall on the strength of the Hundreds as a brand. “We really emphasized that we weren’t just a T-shirt line — we were more of lifestyle” that aimed to “bring this subculture out,” he says.

The Hundreds lifestyle and its components — Los Angeles, skateboarding, music, art — sound a little vague and may be most apparent by analyzing a recent Hundreds T-shirt graphic. The shirt has a title: Jerky Boy. The design takes the logo of Tommy Boy, the pioneering hip-hop label, and reimagines its three silhouette figures in the style of the moshing cartoon teenager used as an emblem of the legendary Southern California punk band the Circle Jerks. Looming over the Circle Jerks mascot, who is repeated in three Tommy Boy poses with props including skateboards and handguns, is “The Hundreds” and the phrase “California Culture.”

Streetwear designers often refer to graphics that riff off some other logo or icon or brand name as “parodies.” Kind of like the Ramones logo, which took the presidential seal but substituted a baseball bat for the arrows the eagle clutches in its talons. But the word “parody” can be misleading: often the visual references are more like a sampled bass line — recognizable to some but not to others — that makes a remix add up to more than the sum of its parts. It can be tribute or mockery or something in between, but the new cultural value that results accrues to the minibrand that did the remixing.

It is impossible to overstate the number of tiny streetwear brands with names like Crooks & Castles or Married to the Mob that are working variations on this territory. And it is easy to see the attraction for the new upstart branders that seem to jump into this realm every day. You don’t have to worry about the credentialing procedures that now define the traditional high arts, like getting a master’s degree from a well-connected art school or hobnobbing on the writer-retreat circuit. For people like Ben and Bobby Hundreds (or the Casarellas or A-Ron), you don’t even need to study marketing. Their apprenticeship was the act of growing up in a thoroughly commercialized world.

The symbols and references and logos these minibrands create are usually said to “represent” a culture or lifestyle. But I found myself asking, What, exactly, did that culture or lifestyle consist of — aside from buying products that represent it?

Bobby did his best to clue me in. “It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious,” he said. “Or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.” Those are familiar answers, and this is hardly the first time that vague rebelliousness has been translated into an aesthetic. The style and iconography of punk, like that of other “spectacular subcultures” (to use the phrase Dick Hebdige coined in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”), arguably did more than music — let alone ideas — to fulfill one of the crucial functions of any underground: group identity. It just happens that in this instance the symbols, products and brands aren’t an adjunct to the subculture — they are the subculture.

Many of the success stories that these minibrands aspire to replicate — like A Bathing Ape, Supreme and Stussy — have been around since the early 90’s or longer. Countless others have come and gone. Among the survivors are Lenny McGurr and Josh Franklin, better known as the graffiti writers Futura and Stash.

McGurr, who recently turned 50, has seen many iterations of the dance between subculture and mainstream. He made the transition from painting on subway cars to selling paintings in East Village galleries back in the 1980’s. The Futura-Stash creative partnership began around 1990. Separately and together, they made T-shirts, and they struggled to get by. Today, the brands and products they create or oversee — from clothes to vinyl toys to rugs and pillows — are sold in boutiques around the world. Franklin has his own stores, Recon and Nort, in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and Berlin; Futura has stores in Fukuoka, Japan, and Bangkok. Futura and Stash’s Williamsburg headquarters is a rambling series of rooms filled with boxes of merchandise, 10 or so employees and a skate ramp.

One thing that has changed since the days when they scrambled to make a living is that Japanese consumers have embraced certain small New York brands as something culturally significant and worth a price premium. Nigo, a Japanese designer, built a fanatical following for his A Bathing Ape brand partly because he collaborated with so many graffiti writers and others who had an aura of authenticity that impressed young, hip Japanese consumers. “The legacy of our history from New York gave us a lot more credibility over there than it did here,” McGurr says. He compares it with the black jazz musicians who had to go to Paris to be appreciated.

The second change is technology, which has allowed production to become more accessible. (It is easier than you think for a two-person brand to work with factories overseas, using computer files and the occasional package.) The technology of the Internet has also acted as an amplifier. Ten years ago, a new T-shirt design could not be flashed around the planet minutes after completion. Now there are blogs like Hypebeast and Slam X Hype dedicated to this practice, reporting dozens of new products or design collaborations from the brand underground every day.

There is a third factor: manufactured commodities have in fact become accepted as quasi art objects, and there is no more stark example than the sneaker. Hunting for unusual sneakers and modifying them with markers or different laces has been cool for decades, a phenomenon defined in Harlem and the Bronx. (“We were the first generation, and only one, to enjoy sneaker consumption on our own terms,” Bobbito Garcia declares in his book about sneaker-hunting in the 1970’s and 80’s, “Where’d You Get Those?”) Eventually the sneaker companies began to cater to this market, manufacturing rarity through “limited editions,” commissioning small runs of sneakers made for specific stores or designed with the help of people like Mister Cartoon or Neckface. (If you don’t know who they are, these shoes aren’t for you.) Instead of stealing ideas from the underground, the big sneaker makers positioned themselves as supporting it. The strategy seems to work. Both Stash and Futura have designed co-branded products with Nike.

If sneakerheads were willing to treat athletic shoes made by multinational corporations as cultural objects, then new boutiques would treat them that way, too. Today, there are such boutiques all over the country; people sleep on sidewalks outside some of them because they have heard about some new limited-run product and want to be first in line for it. Occasionally things get out of hand and the police are called. There are magazines about sneakers, and there is a sneaker show on ESPN, and a sneaker Podcast called “Weekly Drop,” and a sneaker documentary, “Just for Kicks.” NikeTalk, a community and gossip Web site created by and for sneakerheads, claims to have more than 50,000 registered users.

Several years ago, some sneaker fans in Australia decided to mount a show of their collections, and this became Sneaker Pimps, which has been on a permanent world tour ever since. When it last hit New York several months ago, the line outside the club Avalon, where the sneakers were on display, stretched well down the block. Inside was a cross between a trade show, a museum exhibition and a night club. Walls were lined with notable sneakers, famous customizers were on hand and an artist named Dave White, who paints impressionistic portraits of sneakers on canvas, was on a platform, working under a spotlight while D.J.’s spun. Later, Public Enemy performed. Warhol’s Factory laid the foundation for giving consumer objects fine-art scrutiny, and Keith Haring’s Pop Shop built on that foundation, but it is hard to imagine that either artist could have predicted such a thorough product-as-medium spectacle. A line of Sneaker Pimps clothing is in the offing.

The effect of the Internet on sneaker hunting has been to make the scene more accessible — and more visible. With the Web, a relative handful of fanatics scattered around the world can look like a scene, and if enough people buy into that idea, then eventually it becomes a scene. This has created a new layer — half-consumer, half-entrepreneur — who snap up hot commodities with the sole intention of reselling at a profit. A T-shirt that Futura or Stash designed 10 years ago, made in small numbers because that was all the market would support, might now trade hands on eBay for $100; today some of the most successful minibrands keep production runs well below demand to maintain an image of specialness and rarity (just as the sneaker giants do). You can say the Internet made the market or that it simply made the market visible, but these are the same thing. Nothing draws people like a crowd, virtual or otherwise.

TheHundreds.com is not fancy, but it makes clever use of technology. The site is regularly updated with gossip from the scene and pictures of the Hundreds’ friends (and of parties and girls). There might be a clip from YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, of an evening news report on the crowd lining up to get the latest Stash-Nike collaboration from a boutique in San Francisco or of local teenage skaters showing off in free Hundreds T’s. Bobby also has a MySpace page and more than 3,500 “friends” (in the MySpace sense of the word). “I don’t want us to be a faceless entity,” he says. “People can talk to us.”

People like Scott Litel, for instance. The Hundreds barely existed when he found their site and sent an enthusiastic e-mail message asking to be part of their promotional “street team.” He was 16 at the time, just another kid in Valencia, 40 miles north of Los Angeles. He listened to punk and hip-hop, preferring to seek out lesser-known acts. But skateboarding was basically the center of his social life. Through skate videos, magazines like Mass Appeal, which covers alternative culture, and then the Internet, he learned about Supreme and various Japanese apparel companies. He would make his mom drive him, or when she wouldn’t, he would take a bus to the Union store in Los Angeles, where the coolest stuff was sold.

Litel liked the Hundreds because of the Southern California connection and because it wasn’t a brand that everybody knew about. It was like hearing a great band before anybody else caught on, the familiar yet underrated pleasure of inside information. “When something’s not made for the masses,” Litel told me, “it’s more personal.”

Soon he was part of the Hundreds team, helping out however he could, spreading the word, just being around. By the time I met Scott earlier this year, Ben and Bobby had started to pay him and had given him a column on the Web site. Now 19, he loved talking to the people at the little stores that sold the Hundreds shirts, going to the events and being part of the community — being, in fact, as he is now known, Scotty Hundreds.

Even in a world where the mainstream is less than monolithic, every subculture sooner or later has to reconcile itself with the larger cultural forces around it. A movement has to move somewhere, and the scene makers have to figure out how to make a living. That is what the Retail Mafia was up to last year at Magic, an apparel trade show that filled the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, with an impressive booth arranged to resemble a Coney Island boardwalk. The Retail Mafia was an alliance of brands associated with the downtown New York scene, including Alife, SSUR — and aNYthing, A-Ron’s brand. Boost Mobile, the West Coast wireless company, had just produced a set of limited-edition phones, co-branded with the Retail Mafia members, as an elaborate strategy to impress “influencers,” which is what corporate America calls Cool Guys.

Stash and Futura had a booth across from the Retail Mafia, and the Hundreds were nearby as well. Instead of displaying their shirts, Ben and Bobby had them on a rack blocked by a table and covered by a sheet. Ben explained that the point wasn’t how many stores they could sell to but which stores. This sounds like a strategy borrowed from luxury goods, but the Hundreds framed it as a matter of integrity: the sheet was there to fend off retail buyers representing stores that stocked too many mainstream brands. The Hundreds brand was being sold in about 60 stores, from New York to Paris to Tokyo, and what mattered was that they were the right kind of stores, stocked with other independent, properly underground brands. They would only lift the sheet for people they could trust.

In his 1934 memoir, “Exile’s Return,” Malcolm Cowley asserted that by 1920 the bohemian “doctrine” of Greenwich Village could be broken down to eight key points. Several of these remain fairly timeless markers of counterculture: liberty, living for the moment, protecting one’s individuality from the common fate of being “crushed and destroyed by a standardized society.” Each person’s “purpose in life,” the codification states, “is to express himself.” Cowley wrote that the bohemians saw themselves standing in opposition to “the business-Christian ethic then represented by The Saturday Evening Post,” a mainstream valuing “industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative.”

But that old-fashioned value system, Cowley argued, shifted to a consumption ethic of spending and leisure, and the bohemian doctrine, it turned out, “proved quite useful” to the new mainstream ethic. Cowley posited that bohemian ideas about the primacy of self-expression and living for the moment “encouraged a demand for all sorts of products — modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match.” The shift, he wrote, happened shortly after World War I. So for 80 years or more, the central problem of consumer culture and counterculture has been the same: it is very easy to confuse the two. Which is why, actually, Cowley was not so much praising the bohemian idea as scorning it.

Every subsequent counterculture has wrestled with the same basic predicaments, although the terms of the debate have, gradually, evolved. Punk’s media moment passed by the early 80’s, but it helped inspire a new counterculture, sketched by the music critic Ann Powers in her pop-culture memoir, “Weird Like Us.” She described how under-the-radar fliers and fanzines, small record labels and other modes and tactics “coalesced into practices that went by names bluntly characterizing their hands-on approach: indie, for independent, or D.I.Y., or do-it yourself.” The hip-hop and skateboarding subcultures operated in much the same way. And while Powers has less to say about the visual arts, a generation of designers and graffiti artists in cities and suburbs across America — Barry McGee, Mark Gonzales, Kaws, Ryan McGinness and others — built reputations outside the gallery world and under these very influences.

In “Beautiful Losers,” a catalog for a traveling museum exhibition of those artists, Aaron Rose, a curator, points out that pretty much all the artists in the show “have at some point broken the law to express themselves.” On the other hand, Rose points out that many of these artists have dabbled in the commercial world, whether accepting projects for big companies or becoming de facto brands unto themselves. The 1980’s and early 90’s was a time when certain record shops, small record labels (Sub Pop, SST, etc.) and even logos (like the artist Raymond Pettibon’s for the L.A. punk band Black Flag) started to matter almost as much as the bands. And while some brand-underground participants cite the influence of hip-hop as evidence that their tastes transcend standard demographic categorization (it’s a “mash culture” or a “merge culture” and so on), the real significance of that influence may be that no other spectacular subculture has so exuberantly venerated the leveraging of nonmainstream authenticity into entrepreneurial and material success.

If the dance between subculture and mainstream has always been more compromised than it appears and if every iteration of the bohemian idea is steadily more entrepreneurial than the last, then maybe a product-based counterculture is inevitable. Maybe subcultures are always about turning lifestyles into business — or the very similar goal of never having to grow up. Maybe the familiar corporations-against-individuals dynamic (“They manufacture lifestyle; we live lives,” as The Baffler, the alt-opinion journal, declared in 1993) is simply outdated. In “Weird Like Us,” Powers wrote, “I believe that alternative America becomes stronger by willingly engaging with the mainstream.” Maybe that’s what this optimistic generation is up to and maybe its strategy of engagement is simply more pragmatic than the carefully crafted cynicism of past cliques of self-styled outsiders.

Actually, I’m not sure I completely buy that. Refusing to be the fodder for someone else’s lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own still strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I’m just too old to get it. And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.

When I saw Ben and Bobby with their collection at Magic, the trade show in Las Vegas, they had just taken the bar exam. Their parents — who wanted their kids to take advantage of the American-dream opportunities offered by a good education — were disheartened that the Hundreds was looking less and less like a phase. Of course, to Ben and Bobby, the Hundreds is the American dream.

The thought of ending up a lawyer, stuck in the mainstream world in such a decisive way and forsaking the partying and hanging out with other people involved in the brand-underground scene, had been much on Bobby’s mind as he worked on new designs. He came up with a shirt that borrowed the silhouettes of the Lost Boys from a Peter Pan cartoon, included a quote from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and tweaked the results into a starker, streety style by the inevitable inclusion of the Hundreds logo.

A few months later, they got the official word: they had both flunked the bar. Ben sent out the specs for the spring ’06 line; orders climbed to 4,500 shirts. “We never have to grow up,” Bobby said.

Barking Irons popped up in GQ, Elle Girl, Maxim and elsewhere. The main character (played by Adrian Grenier) on the HBO show “Entourage” wore a Barking Irons shirt, and this fact was reported in People magazine. Late last year, the brand went global: a friend of the brothers’ helped coordinate a miniature trade show in Tokyo, leading to their first sales to Japanese retailers and a full-page spread in a Japanese shopping magazine. The Casarellas included a few more point-of-view brands like No Mas, whose T-shirts and other products explore the deeper meanings of sports culture. And they traveled to Turkey, where they had found an apparel factory to manufacture “better garments,” like polo shirts, thermals, hoodies and belts.

The brothers felt they needed to expand quickly, they told me late last year, because imitators were already at their heels. Daniel showed me a magazine page featuring one of their T-shirts along with several other shirts that knocked off their visual style but paired the graphics with words and phrases like “Crap” or “This Sucks.” This was one of Casarella’s fears: competing against a dumbed-down, meaningless version of his own ideas. Meanwhile, the relationship with Triluxe, their distributor, collapsed. Such firms promote and distribute apparel brands, showing their wares at trade shows and in private showrooms, advising them on sourcing and pricing strategies and taking a cut of the money. The brothers had decided that based on some belated research, they were paying too big a cut. After months of bickering, the partnership melted down for good in April.

By then the brothers had signed a lease on a 3,000-square-foot space on the fourth floor of a building downtown on Bowery, below Delancey. When I visited in May, it seemed like an awful lot of room for a two-or-three-person company. A few antique pieces were lying around, some framed maps, a trunk, a barrel, a fitting dummy. The plan is to turn the back half of the space into a showroom, possibly pulling in some other brands. They were also plotting a Web site — part magazine, part online store for selling some of the antiques they have collected. But the better-garment orders were around half of the minimums that the Turkish factory required, and in late June they were still waiting for deliveries that they had hoped to have a month earlier. T-shirt orders had been around 10,000 — a slight decline from the previous year. The trend-spotting blogs that helped early on had moved on to spotting more upstart brands, with new points of view. Lately, Daniel was suffering from headaches that he couldn’t seem to shake.

One thing that makes these upstarts harder to write off than the familiar waves of M.B.A.’s declaring that Internet companies are rebellious or that being a middle-management “change agent” is the new rock ’n’ roll is that, for all the literal and figurative headaches, they are sticking to their ideas. It just happens that their ideas are tied up in products. The Casarellas are now making jewelry out of some vintage New York silverware pieces they have collected. And printed inside their branded garments is a Walt Whitman quote: “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”

In March, the Hundreds had a breakthrough. Their spring ’06 line, still dominated by T-shirts, included a hoodie with an all-over paisley print. The day these arrived, a number of their cool-guy friends dropped by the new office space they had rented in West Hollywood; Bobby took pictures and posted them on TheHundreds.com. One of these images ended up on the front page of Hype Beast, the streetwear blog. Bobby put the whole line up for sale on the Web site at 1:30 in the morning; then he turned off his cellphone and went to bed. A few hours later, his girlfriend was pounding on the door of his apartment. Ben, unable to reach Bobby, had called her with the news: the entire line had sold out. Bobby posted a new entry on the site: “Which one of you sickos is up at 4 a.m. buying T-shirts?”

Soon the paisley hoodies were going for $250 or more on eBay, two or three times the retail price. Of course, Ben and Bobby had only made about 500 of them and under the orthodoxy of the scene would look like sellouts if they manufactured more. (Ben’s accountant father has softened on the Hundreds as a potential business, but couldn’t understand why they didn’t make more of those “stupid paisley hoodies,” Ben says.) A few weeks later, the retail consulting firm Doneger, whose clients include major department-store chains, sent out a bulletin called “Streetwear — The Next Generation,” naming brands that trendsetting kids in New York City were wearing. The list included Nike and Stussy, but also upstarts like Artful Dodger, Triko. . .and the Hundreds. Their summer ’06 T-shirt orders were up to 10,000.

Not surprisingly, the Hundreds were optimistic; Bobby talked about the brand being around “for centuries.” On the site, he posted pictures of the latest line outside Supreme: “It’s a great sign for our industry/culture/scene/whatever-it-is. It shows how fast we’re all growing. . .another notch for the independents.” In a way, the primary goal that binds together all the disparate entities of the new brand underground is independence: the Next Big Thing will be a million small things.

Even so, sometimes Bobby felt as if something were missing. When he talked about it, he seemed to be grappling with the kinds of things that had bothered me earlier when I had been trying to figure out whether there was more to the Hundreds lifestyle than buying certain products and brands. “I kind of feel like these kids — all they know is sneaker collecting and buying T-shirts, and they don’t think about anything else. Every T-shirt brand is just something stupid — a rapper and some guns.” Bobby said he wanted to steer the Hundreds look in a more “socially conscious, activist-oriented” direction, maybe dealing with issues like the way efforts to defend freedom can curtail freedom. Now that the Hundreds has a voice and a following, he said, “I’d like to say something.”

Just like his subculture and bohemian heroes, A-Ron has an uneasy relationship with the commercial mainstream and its representatives. He sees his brand as something apart from the sneakerhead world, let alone fancy department stores. “I ran into the Boost guys recently,” Bondaroff told me some months after the phone-marketing stunt had ended, “and I told them I wasn’t really happy with the project. It didn’t change anybody’s lives; it didn’t make history.” Maybe it helped Boost, since the phones were written up in Rolling Stone and other magazines, but it hadn’t helped him. The Retail Mafia basically ceased to exist as a concept, and half the brands in what he called “the movement” were scrambling to work with the sneaker giants or other big brands, from Levi’s to New Era. “We’re independent brands, we did this for a reason, not to be like the establishment brands,” he said. “It’s, like, what’s the purpose? Why’d you start your brand — just to be an offshoot of a major company?”

But while A-Ron has figured out how to turn his lifestyle into a business, it is still not a business with much scale. “I don’t want to be sitting at my desk 10 years from now,” he told me, “trying to be cool and witty, better than the next little brand.” He is trying to tie aNYthing to more projects, with more meaning, to more people: music, books, even a documentary. He has opened an online store on his Web site, where his blog announces the latest parties and offers pictures of the cool people dropping by his store. He traveled to Europe for the summer trade shows there and has been thinking about whether he can open a store in Japan.

But lately he has come to the conclusion that to join the time line of underground movements that left a mark on the culture, he has to figure out how to get aNYthing recognized well beyond Delancey Street. To “cross over,” he said, you need “to make your thing official, to stamp it” — the way rap videos did it for A Bathing Ape in the U.S. or how the brief glimpses of Supreme logos in Larry Clark’s movie “Kids” helped that brand. You need access to the mainstream. He would not even rule out shopping malls, under the right circumstances.

“My whole thing now is if you don’t sell out, you sell out on yourself,” he went on to announce. If he could get the money, the resources, he could go bigger, with more creative projects, reaching more people — and he wouldn’t worry about being called a sellout. He raised his eyebrows for emphasis: “I was cool before this thing happened. It didn’t make me cool.” It’s a line of thought that many cultural rebels come around to, sooner or later. “We’re here,” he told me, “to do business.”

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine and is working on a book about consumer behavior.

From 1999: why design matters.

2006-07-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

link to original article in Fast Company.

Why We Buy

Computers are a commodity: They're all the same shape and color. The iMac changes all of that. Jonathan Ive, designer of the iMac, describes the rules behind design that has power, passion, and purpose -- design that makes us buy.

From: Issue 29 | October 1999 | Page 282 | By: Charles Fishman

About the tamest description offered of Apple's saucy iMac computer is that it is "postbeige" -- a neat phrase that is simultaneously descriptive and hopeful.

More typically, the 15-month-old iMac has inspired a blossoming of puns, metaphors, colorful language, and just plain silliness:

The iMac is egg-shaped, gumdrop-shaped, pear-shaped, hood-shaped, and beach-ball-like.

It is cute 'n' jazzy, retro-curvy, funky and snazzy, and extremely friendly.

It is a glowing, fruit-hued, Lifesaver-colored, trendoid status symbol.

It is an accessory, not just a tool.

You want to touch it, to hug it, to tickle it under its chin.

The iMac has put the crunch back into Apple. It is electrifying the entire computer industry. It is a design breakthrough.

Buying an iMac makes you feel hopeful again. It is a revolution in a box.

The iMac's design evokes such an emotional response that it even fires the imaginations of its critics. Tom Wolfe, who might have been prefiguring the iMac when he wrote "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," recently grumped that the iMac symbolized the death of 20th-century American design. The iMac, he said, is a "blobjet." On its own Web site, Apple calls it a "rocket computer."

Call it what you will, the iMac is indisputably successful. In its first year on the market, 2 million iMacs were sold. During most of that time, the iMac was the number one -- selling computer model in the country.

And, not surprisingly, the computer has had a direct impact on Apple's bottom line: The iMac has helped pull Apple back to profitability for two years in a row and has helped boost the company's stock price from 15 to 70.

As no computer has done since the early days of Apple computers, the iMac has captivated consumers. Apple claims that one-third of individuals who bought iMacs never owned a computer before; independent surveys cut that figure in half. Either way, it's an amazing statistic. People have been moved to purchase a first computer because of the image that the iMac conveys -- because of its colors, its approachability, its simplicity. The iMac has even managed to silence the decadelong crossfire -- PC or Mac? Apple seems to be winking broadly at that question and asking one of its own: Which color? It may be difficult to believe, but until the iMac came along, no manufacturer had produced a computer in a rainbow of colors. Colors pose inventory problems. Who needs the extra hassle? Khaki computers work just fine.

The iMac won a spot in popular culture almost instantly -- it has come to represent all turn-of-the-century computers. On shows like "Ally McBeal," office workers use iMacs simply because their appearance says, "I am a cool computer in a cool office."

The iMac's role as icon is no accident. Orchestrated by Steve Jobs, Apple's cofounder and interim CEO (iCEO), the iMac is the labor of Jonathan Ive and the industrial-design group that he heads. Ive, 32, a Brit, started his career in London, designing everything from washbasins and bathtubs to TVs and VCRs for Japanese companies. As a contractor, Ive also helped design Apple's early PowerBooks, and he headed from London to Cupertino, California to join Apple full-time in 1992.

Almost everything that's striking about the iMac -- its unassuming shape, its candy-shop colors, its inviting cable cover -- had been carefully calculated. A case in point: Ive himself talked to companies that produce translucent candy to make sure that the iMac's translucence worked just right.

Ive's development group -- which also produced the iMac's new sibling, the iBook -- is intensely secretive. Reporters aren't allowed to interview Ive in his office because there's too much cool, futuristic stuff lying around. Ive won't say how many people work in industrial design, and he won't hint at what will come after the iBook, except to say, "We feel that we're just getting going."

Fast Company talked with Ive about the design principles that infuse the iMac, the iBook, and the ongoing work of his design group. From bathtubs to computers, here are some of Ive's fundamental rules for creating a design that sells.
Good Design Starts a Good Conversation

The right conversation is one that's meaningful to customers. Part of that is about design. And a lot of that is about making the design understandable. Because the technology is powerful, and because we're very confident about that, we don't have to obsess about trying to communicate just how powerful the iMac is. We can be more overtly concerned about, and put a lot of energy into, other attributes.

When people shop for an iMac, I love that the discussion is now much more egalitarian, more accessible, and more open, instead of being about technologies that many people don't understand. I like that you can go into a store and have a discussion about which color you want. That's something that the whole family can do. That's exciting. We've made the whole process of buying and using computers more accessible.

A Computer Is Not a Teacup . . .

The iMac is a holistic product. The price is right, the performance is right, and the combination of those two attributes, along with the design, has made it a well-balanced, relevant product.

But design alone would not have been sufficient to make it successful. It's important to understand the contribution that design can make. It's significant. But if factors like performance and price are not right, then design would be fairly irrelevant.

One thing that is in the genes of Apple Computer, the company, is connecting people with technology in a friendly and accessible way. If you've got technology on the one hand and you've got people on the other, then an object's design -- no matter what that object is -- defines the nature of that connection.

That's particularly true of high-technology products, because the internal workings of the machine are enigmatic. The majority of people simply do not understand how those things work. And there is no physical expression of the object's function. Unlike, for example, a teacup or a comb, which are what they do.

A washbasin is a good example; that's something I've actually designed in the past. A washbasin's form and function are exactly the same. The object's appearance and meaning are completely accessible: It looks like a washbasin, because that's what it is. You look at it, and you think, "Okay, I understand that." People make an immediate connection with it.

With technology, the function is much more abstract to users, and so the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer. I think that's an incredible opportunity, but with that opportunity comes an enormous responsibility. If you are designing an object, you are defining what it means to people: You are conveying what the object is, what it does, how it does it, where it does it, and how much it's going to cost. So especially if you're dealing with incredibly compelling technology like computers, the responsibility is to make the relationship between people and the technology as effective, as natural, as accessible, and as enjoyable as possible.

. . . But a Computer Might Be an Entire Tea Set

When we started designing the iMac, we were wrestling with the question, What is the function of a computer? One thing that really struck us was that a computer's function can change radically: It can be a digital video-editing station, a content browser, or a typewriter. That's a unique ability -- for something to change its function so dramatically. So we were wrestling with the fluid nature of the object. At the same time, we were trying to make the technology as accessible, as friendly, and as nonthreatening as possible. That involves focusing on a couple of levels.

The first level we focused on was the overall form of the product. It absolutely needed to be about tomorrow, and we really wanted to define something new. But something dramatically new can actually alienate people. That design challenge represented an interesting paradox for us: how to create something for tomorrow that people are comfortable with today.

A lot of energy went into defining an overall form that was in some senses "strangely familiar" but that was also about tomorrow.

Design Is All about Understanding

We didn't come up with an architectural solution. That's one of the things that struck us about how a computer's function changes. The design should be something that feels fluid and dynamic. I think the iMac looks like it's just arrived or is just about to leave. It's not something that's grounded permanently to the surface that you put it on.

A number of details reflect that sense as well. The handle, for instance, clearly makes the iMac something that's not permanent. It makes it approachable, accessible. Obviously, the primary function of a handle is to be able to carry a product around. Another thing about the handle is that when people see it, they immediately understand its purpose. It unambiguously references your hand. So when you first meet the product, you understand something about it, and it understands something about you.

People don't necessarily understand the internal components and the essential function of the machine. But they can look at its exterior and actually understand elements of it immediately.

Beyond understanding the iMac, people want to touch it. When you see a handle, you want to use it: That reaction is instinctive, immediate, and universal. When you look at an object like a handle, you instantly form subconscious opinions about it.

Another attractor is the nature of the surfaces. The surfaces look like they'd be good to touch. There's a real unity to the iMac. There's no traditional front, top, back, and sides. I think that makes it inviting. Most design tends to focus on an object's front -- as the one surface that people will address themselves to. But inherently, when you present the front, people assume that the front is better than the back. The back is merely a consequence; it's just hanging on for the ride. One of the things that we've accomplished with the iMac is to create a design that gives integrity to the shape of the whole: The computer's back and sides are as interesting, arresting, and important as its front.

Also, there's the nature of the translucent material. Most computers are made of materials that keep everything on the surface. But with the iMac, you get this fluid effect, the way the light transforms the material and the color. It's not just about surface, it's about depth.

Sometimes a Designer Has to Think inside the Box

The primary purpose of the handle, of course, is to make the product easy to move, which is what we knew people would want. But it also suggests something else: When you can move something, you dominate it. Making it easy to move helps people feel less intimidated by the object or by the technology, which many, many people are.

In fact, one of our goals for designing the packaging was to have the handle be one of the first things you see when you open the box. The idea is that the first piece of packing foam you pull out becomes a little table for the manual, the keyboard, and the accessories. After you remove that piece of foam, you see the handle. You know what to do next. That's the great thing about handles: You know what they're there for.

Once you take the iMac out of its packaging, you can put the accessory box on the little table. You open that, and it's clear what to do next. One cable is for power, one is for Internet access, and one connects the keyboard.

It sounds simple and obvious. But often, getting to that level of simplicity requires enormous iteration in design. You have to spend considerable energy understanding the problems that exist and the issues people have -- even when they find it difficult to articulate those issues and problems themselves.

So when you ask why the iMac has been such a success, the answer is, the design combined with the Macintosh interface. It's just how easy the product is to take out of the box, set up, and use. That simplicity is about removing the obstacles that have made so many people intimidated by the technology in the past.
Before It Persuades Customers, a New Product Has to Persuade Its Own Company

What drove the design of the iMac was a vision and a commitment to create the best consumer computer that we could. In other words, we made the needs of the customer our highest priority. And when you do that, it places significant demands on different parts of the company.

For example, we found that the right place for a lot of the cable connectors was on the side of the iMac, which is where they are more accessible. You don't have to get up and go around to the back or move the entire machine to get to them. That was an example of trying to address issues of utility and function.

But from an engineering perspective, the easiest place to put connectors is on the back. Putting them on the side was actually very difficult and would mean elevating the concerns of the user way above those of the engineers. That drove having an easy-to-adjust keyboard and also the flip-out foot. It's sort of intuitive.

Another example: We knew people wanted a choice of colors. But if we offered people one color, we knew the next question would be, When can we have other colors? That poses a number of significant challenges for manufacturing, distribution, and managing inventory -- especially if you have demands for a certain color. Color options have never been offered in our industry.

In that sense, I think the iMac reflects the original mission: to create a great consumer product. More broadly than that, it stands as a testament to a company that not only shared the same vision but could also implement that vision. Somebody asked me how we'd convinced the people at Apple that what we were proposing with the iMac and the iBook was the right thing.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we'd spent zero energy trying to cajole the people at Apple into believing that what we were proposing was right. We'd put all of our energy into coming up with the content and into creating just the right design. We'd been incredibly self-critical. And as a result, it took us many iterations to get to the right solution -- the one that we ultimately wanted to develop and to market.

But, by genuinely trying to design a product for people in a very natural way, people were intrigued by the product -- whether they were our managers or our customers.

What You Can't Measure Is Often What Matters Most

The computer industry is immature; it has been preoccupied with technology and driven by technologists. In some senses, the value proposition for consumers has degenerated into an argument that "Five is a greater number than two." Go back a year, and the value proposition was, "Our machine has a larger hard drive than yours," or "Our machine is cheaper than yours."

There was an obsession with product attributes that you could measure with numbers. And that's an easy value proposition to articulate: Five is a bigger number than two. It's much more difficult to articulate the value of product attributes that are less tangible. I think it's at the heart of Apple, in the genes of the company, that these other attributes do matter.

A lot of that is knowing how an object elicits an emotional reaction from people. The response can range from a perception to a physical reaction. That is, people touch it and pat it. One of the things we've seen repeatedly with the iMac is that people in stores want to touch it.

There are a number of simple ways that you can physically connect with the iMac. You can pick it up by the handle. Or you can open the door on the side to get to the connectors. When you open that door, you discover that it's a really simple circle -- a hole. It's obvious. You put your finger inside the hole to pull the door open.

Now there were lots of solutions we could have used to open that door, including discreet, technical latches. But there was something so simple and so human about the solution we eventually pursued.

These are the less-tangible product attributes, but they're still important. We made some major life decisions based on stuff that's difficult to assign a number to.

With the iBook, we're trying to engage people even more. If you think about people touching an object, the iBook takes that experience to another level. We're combining materials with different attributes and properties. We're combining rubber with polycarbonate to get strength and warmth.

We're doing those things because when we started working on the iBook, we defined a list of all the attributes that we wanted the product materials to have. That list ranged from robust, strong, structural, and hard, to attributes like soft, yielding, and warm. We included those attributes because the iBook is something you'll be taking with you. That makes it a highly personal product; you're going to spend a lot of time carrying it.

That list of attributes contained polar opposites. Although we couldn't find one material with all those properties, we found that by developing some processes to combine materials, we could design a case that really did have all those properties.

Another example of less-tangible attributes is the sleep light on the iBook. When traditional products go into sleep mode, the light blinks on and off. That solves the functional problem, which is to describe a state the object is in. But we felt that a blinking light did it in a machinelike way.

For the iBook, we developed a sleep light that glows on and off. When people describe it, they say that it looks like the computer is breathing or beating. Rather than just having it switch on and off in a very mechanical way, the iBook breathes on and off. It's actually been remarkable how many people have commented on that. The design of that one feature has made the iBook seem more fluid, more organic.

That light illustrates the difference we're seeking to make in the industry. The traditional blinking light works; it addresses the functional imperative. But I knew that we could find a more organic, human solution. When you see the iBook, when you pick it up, when you turn it on, or even when you put it to sleep, you get a sense that it was designed and manufactured by a group of people who care -- maybe fanatically -- about the details.

Do we acknowledge that it's not functionally critical to care about all those details? Absolutely. We know that. But we also know that we've got overarching design principles that we're seeking to express: simplicity, accessibility, honesty -- and enjoyment. We're really seeking to design products that people will enjoy.

Why does it matter whether you enjoy using something?

Because it makes you happy. And it's good to be happy.

Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com), a senior editor at Fast Company, set up his mom and dad's iMac. You can read more about the iMac and the iBook on the Web (www.apple.com).

How to be happy.

2006-07-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

Avoid situations both in and out of work where you lack control or have a surplus of choice. Don't dwell on the past and don't indulge to excess. Don't hang around with people who are in your line of work, but do make friends with people who share your interests. Make decisions on the basis of actual evidence and bias towards action. Spouses are underrated, kids are overrated, and sports are definitely overrated.

link to original piece.

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Happiness: A User's Manual

Twenty strategies adapted from the scientific research and applied to New York living.

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

Decide where to go to college by picking two decent schools and flipping a coin.

The relatively unexamined life is worth living. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice documents numerous studies in which thinking too hard about multiple choices leads people to preemptively regret the options they’re going to miss out on. This triggers a stress reaction that tends to focus narrowly on random variables—producing unwise decisions, paralysis, and superfluous law degrees. Those who seize the first option that meets their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.

Don’t go to law school.

Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).

Fire your therapist if he so much as mentions your childhood.

Contra Freud and pro common sense, much of Authentic Happiness author Martin Seligman’s research suggests that rehashing events that enraged you long ago tends to produce depression rather than sweet closure and relief.

If someone tells you he’s still pining for his ex, ask the ex out.

Stumbling on Happiness author Dan Gilbert is currently conducting a study designed to show that the best way to predict how much you’ll enjoy a blind date is to ask the last person to go out with your date how much fun he had.

If you can’t decide what TV to buy, walk across the hall and ask your neighbor if he likes his.

In multiple studies, subjects felt they’d be better able to predict their reaction to an experience by imagining it, rather than hearing somebody else’s testimony. Even regarding such seemingly straightforward activities as deciding whether to eat pretzels or potato chips, they were wrong. Turns out, people are happier following advice.

Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school.

On a day-to-day basis, caring for children creates roughly the same level of satisfaction as washing the dishes. In fact, surveys of parents invariably find a clear dip in happiness after the Blessed Miracle of Childbirth, which continues unabated for twenty years—bottoming out during adolescence—and only returns to pre-birth levels when the child finally leaves home.

But make sure they’re busy once they get there.

Seligman cites research indicating that children who develop hobbies and interests besides loitering and watching TV are much more likely to be satisfied later in life.

If you go on a shopping spree, throw away the receipts.

In one study cited by both Schwartz and Gilbert, photography students were allowed to keep only one picture taken during their course. Some students were later allowed to swap their choice for a different photo, yet those who couldn’t change were much happier. How did they deal with inflexibility? By rationalizing how much they enjoyed their new decoration.

If you’re on the fence about whether to sell your stock, sell it.

Most people predict that they’d be more unhappy if they sold a stock that went through the roof than if they kept one that tanked. They’re wrong—aggressive actions that go awry are mentally catalogued as valuable learning experiences.

Take the local, and don’t wait for the express.

Inaction, on the other hand, gnaws away at the mind relentlessly, like so many rats chewing on an empty Mountain Dew bottle someone dropped onto the tracks as you idly waited for the 4. You should have just jumped on the 6.

Give up the great American novel, and start temping.

Some poor countries (China, Brazil) are happier than others, but few nations are mired in spiritually fulfilling poverty. Money, when used to feel secure about your ability to shelter and feed yourself, can, in fact, buy happiness.

But don’t work overtime . . .

The marginal life-enhancing value of each extra dollar quickly levels off, however; hence the existence of James Bond villains and studies showing that lottery winners and Forbes 100 members are no more likely to be satisfied than anyone else.

. . . As long as you’re content socializing within your tax bracket.

Nevertheless, being aware of how much less money one has acquired than one’s peers is quantifiably frustrating.

Join a church, a yoga studio, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, or an underground fight club.

People who have more friends and belong to community-building groups are happier. To paraphrase the Norm MacDonald–era “Weekend Update,” perhaps that’s the kind of finding that could have been published in the scientific journal Duh, but there it is.

Order from the same takeout menu every time.

Researchers found that subjects asked to choose their meals weeks in advance mistakenly predicted that variety would make them happier, while those who simply decided what to eat on the spot were completely satisfied with the same thing each week. (Although eating macaroni and cheese endlessly, like repeating any pleasant experience over and over, reduces its appeal—so switch it up with cheeseburgers.)

Take advantage of your exercise machine’s “cooldown period.”

One study found that men who underwent short, uniformly unpleasant colonoscopies found them more repulsive than men who had long procedures with a brief respite near the end. Adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience—like a workout—makes you more willing to repeat it in the future, even if it means an increase in the overall gruel endured.

Patronize King Cole’s and other establishments that employ a “mixologist”; avoid any bar named after an Irish person.

Spending your alcohol allowance on a few finely crafted cocktails is probably better than guzzling giant troughs of beer, since the ability to limit one’s indulgence is one of the baseline characteristics of happy people. Researchers aren’t sure whether moderation is chicken or egg, but they do know that teetotaling doesn’t confer any particular advantage.

Ask the next person you meet on Match.com to marry you.

Studies show that married people are happier than unmarried people. Too much choice, whether over tonight’s dinner or your partner for the next 50 years, can create paralysis and anxiety. If you make a mistake, you have the capacity to rationalize the worst decisions. And if all of that doesn’t work, well, we’re able to find happiness in even the most hopeless situations.

Splurge on a restaurant after the Yankees playoff game.

College kids surveyed in the weeks before emotionally high-stakes athletic competitions tended to dramatically overestimate how happy they’d be after wins because they forgot victories don’t eliminate sources of irritation. Similarly, they overestimated how upset they’d be after their team lost because they failed to remember that they could be comforted by other sources of pleasure.

Don’t watch the Knicks.

Not related to any recent scientific findings. Just sound advice.