While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.
For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.
Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.
I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.
Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.
A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.
That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”
(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)
And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.
My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.
Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:
“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”
That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.
Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.
And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.
But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.
Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known.
So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?
Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.
No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.
This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.
Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.
But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.
Get the fuck out.
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