authenticity, influence, and innovation

The website "I write like" has been making the rounds (apparently Kim Kardashian writes like James Joyce),  even though the site's founder says there's nothing remotely scientific about it and that he was just goofing around. (For those who missed it: you paste a short writing sample in a box and click the "analyze" button. The site examines word choice and writing style and tells you what famous author the writing most resembles.)

Toronto Star writer Katie Daubs had some fun with the site last weekend, plugging in text from Dalton McGuinty, Yann Martel, and yours truly (apparently my blogging style is closest to that of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk). But behind the fun is the question of influence, which for many writers is a matter of utmost seriousness. I spent most of my twenties trying to write like David Foster Wallace and Martin Amis, and maybe Palahniuk is their bastard child. I like to think that I've evolved my own characteristic writing style, one that is authentically mine. What does it matter if I haven't?

Harold Bloom coined the term "the anxiety of influence" to refer to the sense that every artist or writer has at some point, that everything has been said, that nothing they do is original. The desire to fight free of one's influences and say something completely new is one of the driving forces of artistic creation. The downside to this, though, is that it tends to overstate the role of originality in all spheres. The fact is, even as we fetishize the authentic, the truth is that most innovations are incremental advances or simple reworkings of ideas that have been around for ages.

Keith Richards famously brushed off accusations of plagiarism by saying that he just grabs riff out of the air as they go by; Noel Gallagher of Oasis once said that when he's stuck for a song idea, he just starts playing "Octopus's Garden" until an idea comes to him. On that note, here's another passage from my chat with Matt Ridley that got cut from the print version:

CB: You have this phrase you use: innovation happens when “ideas have sex.” In Canada and elsewhere, a big locus of debate for both government and business is over “innovation”: what it is, how to invest in it and foster it. But you seem to be arguing that there is nothing rare or mysterious about it. Given a critical mass of humans and open markets, innovation happens as almost a natural process.  

MR: I do, and there are a number of things going on here. The first is that we have a tendency to overestimate the grand leaps in innovation at the expense of the small steps. We do that partly because the patent system rewards us for doing that, and militates against recognizing incremental steps. And second, there is the quest for fame and glory. If you go back to any great discovery – DNA, the steam engine – you find people are pissed off because they didn’t get the credit. And you discover that the story was far more about perspiration than inspiration. To that extent, the innovation we need to be looking at is often low-tech, often small steps, often happening in small firms not ivory towers, and is often process rather than product, often boring. For example, cross docking for suppliers to Walmart is not like the laser, but might have done more for mankind.

But to your general point, I want to point to the inexorable nature of economic growth. Whatever is happening, the wars and the depressions and the dictators that are throwing it off course, whatever the picture you look at, the more global the number, the smoother the line. And whatever is going on, it is bottom up or crowd-sourced, not ordained from above, and it does look like the inevitable product of people being in the situation where they exchange is that you will get these inching forwards of technologies and ideas.

hutongs, progressives, and handmade knives

1. "Black conservative" John McWhorter looks at how American lefties are unhappy with the demonization of the term "liberal", but don't much like "progressive" either.

2. Artisanal is the new organic: Do-it-yourself butchery

3. Artisanal is the new organic: Handmade cutlery

4. An update on the ongoing destruction of Beijing's hutongs:

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, some of my favourite times as a tourist, anywhere, are the hours I spent walking through the hutongs, once in 2000, and again in 2008. The difference was tremendous -- when I was there two years ago, the whole area was undergoing a massive construction boom. But there was still an undeniable authenticity to the place that was clearly disappearing.

But how much of the concern is driven by nostalgia, mostly by people who don't actually have to live there? As the article points out, lots of residents of the hutongs are happy to leave. But some aren't:

“It’s a treasure to live in a place where you know the people and where your family has lived for generations,” said Mr. Liu, 55, who shares his home with three others, including his 81-year-old father. “Who wants to live in a place where you can live next door to someone and not talk to them for years?”

Gentrification always generates gains and losses, winners and losers. The trick -- and it is a trick that is almost never successfully pulled off -- is to permit development and renovation while preserving, as much as possible, what is valuable about the old neighbourhood. I'm afraid that in this case, the hutongs will simply disappear, except for a few blocks that will no doubt be preserved as a tourist destination and a theme park of "olde Bejing".

When ideas have sex: My interview with Matt Ridley (UPDATED)

A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview science writer Matt Ridley for Canadian Business about his new book The Rational Optimist. I really like his writing on evolutionary biology (especially Genome), and from the reviews, the argument of RO looked like it would dovetail nicely with the conclusion of my book The Authenticity Hoax, about the virtues of progress.

His book has received fairly polarized reviews. An early piece by John Tierney was very positive (and contained this great line: “Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list”). George Monbiot, on the other hand, has been trashing the book, largely on the grounds that Ridley is supposedly a hypocrite for writing endless state-bashing columns for the Telegraph while having the “chutzpah” to take public bailout money when he was chairman of Northern Rock. He dismisses Ridley as a “cornutopian” (cornutopians are people who envisage a utopia of limitless abundance).

I don’t think the book is nearly as bad as Monbiot says, though it is true I didn’t get that much out of it. It’s  Guns, Germs, and Steel as told by Adam Smith. So instead of environment being the primary factor in human development, Ridley says that it is trade. I hate the phrase he uses (“when ideas have sex”) but it does highlight the way Ridley is essentially adapting the mechanism of sexual selection and applying it to economic and technological evolution. That’s not a super-new idea; what is somewhat novel about Ridley’s thesis is the deeply teleological element to his analysis: As he sees it, when you have a critical mass of humans who are free to exchange, innovation happens almost as a matter of course — It’s like Wisdom of Crowds meets The Selfish Gene.

The one aspect that Monbiot is right about is the off-putting anti-government snarkiness that runs through the book. Ridley’s account of history is one long tale of energetic and insightful entrepreneurs having the fruits of their labours appropriated by lazy and jealous governors and bureaucats. I asked him about it, and he replied:

But you’ve nailed me right, there’s not a lot about government in my book. But I don’t regard myself as anti-government; I’m inherently skeptical of the power of monopolies of any kind to pick winners. And looking back at history, the past 200 years and indeed the last 2000 years, the threat of too much government is greater than the threat of too little government. It is hard for me to even think of an example of a country that suffers from too little government today.

Even beyond this, though, Ridley’s account suffers from what is sometimes referred to “catallactic bias” — the privileging of gains from trade as the primary mechanism of cooperative benefit, which tends to relegate the state and other institutions to the status of mere redistributors of wealth. If you’re interested in a corrective to that position, Joe Heath’s paper “The Benefits of Cooperation” is a good place to start.

Artisanal is the new organic (an ongoing series)

Artisanal pencil sharpening; I can't tell if it's a joke.

Raw-milk reactionaries; this really is a step backwards.

Authenticity Watch: Hipster Moonshine

At what point are hipsters going to concede that their politics are indistinguishable from those of the Michigan Militia? Running moonshine, as we all know from movies like "Thunder Road" and songs like "Copperhead Road," is a serious business. Or at least it was until the Brooklyn hipsters ginned onto it. Now it's "cool", according to the BBC: 

Today's moonshiners are a diverse bunch. They include home distillers, high-end "mixologists", small businesses making cheap liquor to sell locally and bigger operations which sell across state lines.

One anonymous Brooklyn resident says she makes moonshine in her tub, according to an old family recipe. While most of her colleagues at the museum know about her hobby, she says ""You've got to be careful about who you tell. I wouldn't go blabbing about it to someone I'd just met." 

Like, for instance, a BBC reporter?

At any rate, first they're refusing to fill out the census, now they're runnin' Gowanus Lightning across state lines. Forget "artisanal is the new organic," it's more like Williamsburg is the new Lynchburg. 

(via Gawker, duh)

The Manhattan Cupcake Bubble

New Yorkers obsess about three things: Real estate prices, the lousy subway service, and where to find the latest novelty food. From lobster rolls to miniburgers, ramen noodles to meatballs, one of the certainties about life in Manhattan is that cool comfort food fads don't wait around for long. 

Which is why I'm surprised to see the WSJ report that one of the main drivers of the jobs recovery in Gotham is... cupcakes:

David Arrick, founder of Butch Bakery, which bakes and delivers ‘masculine cupcakes’ (varieties include Beer Run, a beer-infused concoction, and Tailgate, a salted caramel flavor) from its commercial kitchen in Long Island City, said he’s gone from a one-man to a five-person operation since opening last November. “Cupcake businesses are the paradox of the recession,” he said. “We are in a recession but yet the cupcake industry is thriving.”

How long can this go on? God only knows. But you have to wonder about an analyst who writes, seemingly with a straight face, the following:

“One segment of the industry that seems to be adding the most outlets is cupcake cafes.  This could be a fad, or not,” Barbara Byrne Denham, chief economist at real-estate services firm Eastern Consolidated, wrote in a report Thursday.

"Could be a fad, or not"? Is she serious? Thanks for this insight Barbara, let me cut you your consultant's cheque. Or would you like to take that in poutine futures?

The invention of Tibet

Spiked online editor Brendan O'Neill is on a road trip to Tibet. In a new dispatch, he explores the serious disconnect between the popular western image of Tibet as a place of peace, stillness, and spirituality, and the reality he sees on the ground on Lhasa. It`s interesting throughout, but I especially liked this bit at the end:

What connects the old imperialists with the new Tibetophiles is their desire to have Tibet as a ‘buffer state’ – only where the imperialists wanted to use Tibet to protect their material interests against China and Russia, the new lot want to use it to protect their emotional interests, to preserve an idea of innocent, childlike humanity so far uncorrupted by modernity.

Both sides have indulged in borderline racist fantasies that are all about themselves rather than reality.

Making Publics

One of the themes of chapter 5 of the Authenticity Hoax is the threat to the public sphere from too much sharing. Essentially, I argue that only children have no privacy in our culture, and that a culture that does not value privacy is effectively infantile. I'm still convinced of the merits of that argument, but one issue that I don't get into (because I was not really aware of it) is the opposite problem: Not how publics are destroyed, but how they get made in the first place. 

The excellent Jeff Jarvis brought this to my attention over drinks a month or so ago, and I've been meaning to make some time to start digging into the literature. And so it was with a strange sense of the serendipitous that I found myself listening to the CBC a few weeks ago, during a long drive out of Toronto. The show was Ideas, and the subject was the origin of the modern public. The part I managed to catch didn't impress me too much -- it was largely devoted to the musings of McGill professor Darin Barney, whose warmed-over Heideggerianisms struck me as fantastically juvenile. 

But it turns out that I was catching only the tail end of what turns out to have been an epic 14-part series on the history of the public sphere, from the reformation to the news revolution and beyond. This looks to be amazing stuff, and I hope to find some time to give it some proper attention. The main webpage for the series with links for streaming and podcasts is here; if anyone has heard any of it and has any thoughts, please drop me a line. 

When Memes Collide

The Consumerist reports on a story from Details by Adam Sachs arguing that "artisanal" manufacture has replaced "organic" as the label of choice for the socially conscious consumer. He argues that it stems from a combination of "anti-bling" attitudes, economic uncertainty, and a simple desire for higher quality. I would say that it is more like just another crank in the ratchet (organic --> local --> artisinal) of conspicuous authenticity. 

Speaking of: the NYTimes heds a blog post on the arrival of new Jeffery-West shoes with the phrase "Rebel Sell", and in the last graph draws the obvious connection between The Rebel Sell and The Authenticity Hoax:

“Our shoes are for hell-raisers and the fiercely individual,” West says. “New York guys are typically very traditional, but that’s changing — people really want genuine quality and something authentic.” 

Test-tube steaks and Bad-faith foodies

Critics of the modern, capitalist, consumer-driven economy like to point to its negative effects. It is wasteful and unsustainable, it is bad for the environment, it promotes global inequality, contributes to global warming, and so on. 

Ethical authenticity: the mask becomes the man

My former colleague Dan Gardner sent me this cool little blog entry from Jeremy Dean, alerting us to a new study looking at the relationship between the wearing of counterfeit branded goods and ethical behaviour.  It turns out that the desire to falsely signal one's status to others ends up causing one to behave less ethically, as the mask becomes the reality.

Participants were handed designer glasses and were told that sometimes they were real, sometimes they were knockoffs (but in fact, they were always genuine). The result?

The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time.

Furthermore, participants became more cynical about the behaviour of others. And so it turns out that the desire to falsely signal one's status to others ends up causing one to behave falsely in general, as the mask becomes the reality. Very interesting stuff -- the post ends with a nod to the obvious followup questions 

Dawn of the Loco-wars

It's no secret that I think the locavore movement is largely moronic. To recap: Its environmental benefits are either non-existent or counterproductive, it often contributes to global warming worse, and serves only to make food more expensive while cranking up a notch in the ratchet of yuppie status-seeking.

But if there's one "benefit" I've been willing to concede it's that contributing to the local economy is something that some people get off on. And while it is an intuition I don't share -- I really don't see why my moral obligation should be to give my money to someone who lives within 100 miles of where I happen to live -- it's a morally arbitrary line that I'm happy to let other people indulge in.

Except that even this is probably not as harmless as it seems. The "love of ones own" over distant others is little more than parochialism, and as a recent story from the New York Times attests, the latent xenophobia is never far from the surface.

It all began when Portland, Oregon found itself hosting a national culinary contest devoted to making the most of heritage pigs. A hyperlocal chef named Eric Bechard took exception to the discovery that not all of the pigs entered in the competition were from Oregon:

“I get there and I get the flier and I’m immediately sickened because I’m seeing ‘local,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘local farms,’ ‘local chefs,’ ‘local wine,’ ” Mr. Bechard recalled, “and then two of the pigs are from Kansas and Iowa? I’m looking at my friend and he said, ‘Eric, just let it go.’ ”

Many hours and drinks and insults later, witnesses told police Mr. Bechard was the aggressor when he encountered Brady Lowe, the event’s Atlanta-based organizer, outside a bar. Words were hurled and fists flew. The police came, firing Tasers and pepper spray.

There's a deep historical lesson in here: It is a short step from seeing a pig as "other" to seeing all "others" as pigs.

RELATED: Banff is looking to preserve its mountain-town authenticity by banning fast food.

Fabulous Freaks

Here are some pics from tonight's Flaming Lips show in Toronto.

Get on your high horse, motherfucker

Today's authenticity must-read: Is jousting the next extreme sport? The hero of the sport is Charlie Andrews, a man who is probably not one with whom to fuck:

He doesn’t joust because he’s attracted to romantic notions of honor and chivalry or because he has an affinity for the medieval period. (“I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care,” he says.) He does it because he considers jousting one of the most extreme sports ever invented, and he likes doing things that most other people can’t or won’t do.

Conspicuous Authenticity: Handmade Axes

My old friend Samuel Dupéré sends along a piece from the New York Times (where else!), by Penelope Green, about the latest hot conspicuous authenticity item coming out of haut-hipsterdom: handmade axes. I wish this had come out while I was writing chapter four of the book. The whole thing is deep down the rabbit hole of disguised status-seeking,  and it hits all the authenticity plot points.

First, the axes are handmade (ping!) by a Peter Buchanan-Smith, who is a Canadian (ping!) with a Hemingwayesque background (ping!). And unlike the "fake" authentic that is being exhalted from one end of Brooklyn to the other (e.g. "like denim or Prouvé chairs"), these axes are the REAL ANTI-MODERNITY DEAL, the "the ultimate antidote to life on the high-broadband lane.” (ping! ping! ping!).

What comes next in the story? Oh right, the inevitable worry that because the axes are expensive and bought primarily as objets-d'authenticité, they might actually be nothing more than some sort of yuppie status good. After all, "seven of his axes are hanging in the Saatchi Gallery in London. Seth Godin, the entrepreneur and marketing guru, has one, and so do Leonard Lauder, David Lynch and Mike Jones, the president of MySpace."

But no: As attested on the product's website, "Even real woodsmen and -women" apparently use the axes for actual woodchopping. Because you know, it takes a $180 axe to split a log at the KOA campsite. One of these bad boys is just not up to the task.

So where were we? Oh right, the full selling-authenticity business plan:

He’d like to work with a Canadian company to sell its Sou’wester, an oiled-canvas rain hat. He is intrigued by the work of two Brooklyn artists, Gabriel Cohen and Jolie Mae Signorile, who collect tropical bird feathers from aviaries and make arrows out of them. And he has commissioned a designer he met at an art camp in Minnesota to make vintage maps stamped with the Best Made Co. symbol, a bright red cross.

But don't call it a business, because making something for profit is just so... modern. This is all about the purity and innocence of the creative self:

“With the ax, I wanted to do something simple and sweet,” he said. “It was like an invitation to this world I wanted to create. The world of making things where notions of courage and fortitude are associated with it, but also playfulness and levity.”

It's almost like we've heard this story before.