The Problem with False Consciousness (and false desire and false choice)

There is a strain, one might say a dominant strain, of cultural theory (derived from Marxist theory) that claims that individuals immersed in a culture, exposed to certain information via media while other information is kept from them, are unable to know the truth about how the world works and thus make decisions that are not in their collective or individual best interests but rather in the best interests of those in control of the information flow. On the face of it, the theory of false consciousness seems possible, even likely. But here's the rub: the theory itself is just another way of looking at the world supplied and supported by individuals with interests of their own, some of which run counter to those of people reading about the theory. It is possible that those who are exposing others as having pulled the wool over our collective eyes are, in fact, pulling a different kind of wool over our eyes. The new illusion of "seeing the world as it really is" is all the more convincing given that the revelatory nature of the theory. How do we know it is not another illusion, one more pernicious than the last? We don't, and most cultural theory provides little evidence to suggest one way or the other whether it is just another bias looked at human nature. Are we naturally competitive or naturally cooperative? Are corporations and advertisers in charge of telling us what to desire, or are charismatic leaders/writer/artists the ones pulling the strings?

I like to use two movies from 1999 as convenient illustrations of false consciousness and (if you'll pardon the unwieldy double negative) false false consciousness. The Matrix is a classic good v. evil story of false consciousness. A handful of good guys need to clue everyone else into the fact that they are not acting in their own best interests, but are rather part of an elaborate illusion that serves the interests of a controlling "other." Fight Club issues a similar indictment of mainstream culture, albeit in a less metaphorical more literal manner. However, the bunch of rag-tag rebels that fight The Man inevitably coalesce around a charismatic leader who, as it turns out, is insane. Group-think develops, critical thinking goes out the window, and the group of rebels is even more lost than when it began. I am heartened by the fact that popular cinema can still address (and prompt audience members to debate and think through) important socio-politico-philosophical issues of the day. Just in terms of acting as teaching tools, these movies can liven up a dreary classroom discussion about free will and hegemony.

As valuable as fiction is in helping us understand our socio-political reality, it can only take us so far. In order to really understand things, we need evidence. Most of the crit/cult theory I've read cites cherry-picked instances of people deprived of infinite choice and freedom and/or maintaining a subsistence level of wealth while those in power stay in power via hegemonic, patriarchal culture. The tacit assumptions are that: information desemination - in the form of popular culture, education, and other cultural institutions such as church, the government, or news agencies - is part of the root cause of power imbalances and that the world could be otherwise (i.e. equality is possible given human nature).

In order to further interrogate the line of reasoning behind false consciousness, let's take an ordinary claim. Let's say you think someone who just spent $5,000 on a new paint job for his car but lacks the money to pay for his child's health care, college education, or nutritious diet has somehow been conditioned by culture to value some material goods (e.g. car paint jobs) over others (school, food, health). How can we, as theorists, step in and say that this person is no longer capable of making decisions for themselves? I suppose the crit/cult theorists also assumes that in the long term, the indiviual and the group that he or she is a part of will suffer. His child will be more likley to fall ill or earn less money w/o health care, a healthy diet, or better schooling. As a group, they will have less opportunities. They will live shorter, harder lives - something (and this is crucial) we can all agree is undesirable. If they only saw the connection between their consumption of culture and the long-term undesirable consequences, then they would alter their behavior, rise up against their oppressors, and alter culture.

In order for this to happen, you need to establish that some conditions are objectively undesirable. Is living a shorter life objectively undesirable? Not necessarily. Is being able to retire at an early age if one so chooses objectively desirable? Sure. Even if we reject the notion that a person's worth should be judged solely on their monetary worth, we can accept the fact that the systematic impoverishment of a people is undesirable. So then how do we draw a connection between certain behavior that may give pleasure in the short term (getting that $5,000 paint job) and long term displeasure (impoverishment) in a way that a) everyone can understand and b) does not elevate the theorist to the position of truth-teller?

You need to look for instances when people who hold one opinion about how the world (or some small part of it) works revise this opinion based on information presented to them. We have the dual opposing influences of authority (e.g. the news media, the scientific community, both of which were grossly mistaken about human nature in 1930's Germany) and upstart revolutionaries (which are at least equally likely to become corrupt by power and get things wrong - see The Great Leap Forward, an extension of what was, at the time, revolutionary thought). Charisma and authority go a long way to swaying people about big issues like human behavior and economy, but what about small, manageable issues like, say, the length of two lines?
Maybe this is a shitty example because we're all very familiar with the illusion. My point here is that we initially see that the lower line is longer than the top line. If, however, an authority were to come along and, before our very eyes, remove the diagonal lines at the end of each line, we would see, with our own eyes, that the lines are of equal length. Now, is this proof that the lines are of equal length? Absolutely not. You could get out your micrometer and say, "actually, the top line is shorter than the bottom one." But actual, physical reality isn't what concerns me (actually, I think it is indeterminate, but that's another blog entry). What I'm interested in are the patterns of people's behavior, specifically what precipitates a revision of worldview. In most cases, people will believe that the top line is shorter than the bottom one until you remove the diagonal lines, at which point they will think that they are of equal length.

This example reveals a different kind of false consciousness, a short-term false consciousness. It all happened in front of our eyes. We can acknowledge that we were mistaken. We thought our information about the situation was complete and accurate, but in retrospect, thanks to the revelation from the authority figure, we know that it was not.

Those of us studying culture, information, media and how it relates to freedom, happiness, well-being, and choice need to make the claims about false consciousness more like this. We need to make the connections between short-term pleasure and long-term displeasure more obvious, more indubitable. Impossible, you say? Bullocks! We've got exponentially more data about people's shifting desires than we have had in the past (and by "we" I mean the public, though if we're not careful, it might all end up in the hands of a fortunate few. That really would be hegemony).

Its a hard thing to acknowledge that we're not very good at predicting what will bring us long term pleasure, as individuals and as groups. When we're wrong, we look for scapegoats (The Man, the government, the media, etc), and sometimes we're right, but other times, we made bad decisions based on imperfect information about the connections between those decisions and long-term loss. How do you convince a person that his desire to get a $5,000 paint job was the result of a culture intent on keeping him down? You lay bare the mechanisms of culture, not in some vague way, but in a concrete, indubitable way that shows how all people (not just a gullible few) are capable of being misled when presented with certain kinds of information.

To that end, I'm proposing a new research project (featuring testable hypotheses): Is the abundance and restriction of media choice associated with a greater discrepancy between gratification sought and gratification perceived? You can argue with someone else's definition of gratification (for you, it might be having a big house; for someone else, it might be having a car with a sweet paint job), but you'd be hard pressed to find a person who would argue w/ their own definition of gratification.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.