What Comes After Money

by Daniel Pinchbeck

  If we go back a little ways, and think this idea through, we come up with some different issues. What some economists are calling “social capital” comes into play; it gives a sense of dynamism to the way we think about “intangible goods” and comes into direct collision with the norms of a capitalist society based on scarcity. Got it? It’s been a while since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. If we turn things upside down and think about the “values system” of American capitalism versus, say, what’s going on in post-Mao China, we can see things looking like this: In 1989 the claim was made that what had been defeated was not an enemy—the Soviet Union—but rather the entire opposition to capitalism. At the time neoliberal author Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached “the end of history,” because from that point on there will only be capitalism and continuous growth, unrestrained by annoying things like federal regulation, etc. You can see where that got us. Ask Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, or anyone else involved with the financial fictions of the Bush era.

  Recall and rewind: The script of our era is what theorist Arjun Appadurai likes to call the “social life of things,” or what philosopher Alain Badiou has simply called “theory of the subject.” We reflect, we generate intangible links and connections between tastes, styles, and above all, the way we combine those tastes and styles. That’s the catch with digital media and music; there is no “there”—everything is routed between connections, and end points are material for the scrapheap of postmodernity.

  Post-everything music asks this: Why pay for anything? Why not just create the gift economy that we all live in and call it quits? The way the law is written, and the way we live, simply part ways. I tend to think of sampling and uploading files as the same thing, just different formats—to paraphrase John Cage, sound is just information in a different form. The old world production model, scarcity, always seemed annoying and physical. I want to see people’s imaginations take flight; they should create their own values, and a soundtrack to go with it, to inspire new forms for new ways of living. To get rid of the twentieth century’s old physical forms, and to become an emotive, free space. That’s the basic idea for twenty-first-century aesthetics—here and now, as always. Dig?

  Finance of fictions. Fictions of finance. How does music factor into this entertainment industry? What’s the matter with finance? Start with the fact that the modern financial industry generates huge profits and paychecks, yet delivers few tangible benefits.

  Remember when Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko declared, “Greed is good”? By today’s standards, Gekko was a piker. In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, the financial industry accounted for a third of total domestic profits—about twice its share two decades earlier.

  These profits were justified, we were told, because the industry was doing great things for the economy. It was channeling capital to productive uses; it was spreading risk; it was enhancing financial stability. None of that was true. Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.

  For most of us these days, the fact is that much of the financial industry has become synonymous with the term racket—a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors—but which also comes from a humorously resonant term that simply means “to make a lot of noise.” I love to think about credit, finance, and noise as terms that lend themselves to systems of belief—tuning systems, harmony of markets, and utopian derivatives. Stuff like that. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on. That is what I mean when I say free music. Bring the noise. NOW.

  If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

  —John Cage

  16

  I AM … WE ARE … IT IS1

  LARRY HARVEY

  I usually talk about the flamboyant aspects of Burning Man. These are what attract attention. Black Rock City, as many of you know, is a hyperconnective environment. It’s full of interactive art. It’s very antic and it’s a lot of fun. But I’ve decided to focus here on economics, the dismal science, because, in the end, doesn’t everything come down to economics, of one kind or another? I will begin by quoting an almost forgotten author, Richard Jefferies. His writings belong to a British literary genre called “country writing” that flourished in the nineteenth century. In “Absence of Design in Nature: The Prodigality of Nature and the Niggardliness of Man,” Jefferies talks about the law of natural increase, which describes the propensity of living things to reproduce themselves at exponential rates: “There is no ‘enough’ in nature. It is one vast prodigality. It is a feast. There is no economy: it is all one immense extravagance. It is all giving, giving, giving: no saving, no penury; a golden shower of good things forever descending.” Contrast this with the material economy of our world, in which each individual is in order to exist, compelled to labor, save, and compete with other people for control and possession of scarce resources. Such is the iron law of economics in our world: the superabundance of nature and the utter niggardliness of man.

  This is the contrast he draws. It is as if we’ve fallen out of some happy Eden into a world where we must hoard and struggle to wrest what we can from the universe and one another. But I am more hopeful than Jefferies. He was writing about both nature and society in the midst of the first great phase of the Industrial Revolution, a time of massive social dislocation and widespread poverty. Think Dickens. The folkways of rural England and the networks of communal obligation that once sustained it were being brutally uprooted by the marketplace. An anonymous mass society was taking shape, and Jefferies came to feel that the factories and enormous cities of our industrial age represented a principle of evil and selfishness. But I have had the opportunity to observe a very different kind of city with a very different kind of economy, and I’ve come to see that there is more of nature in the social world of human beings than he or any of us today have yet understood.

  I’m thinking, of course, about Burning Man and Black Rock City, the civic entity we annually create in the Black Rock Desert. I would like to start by describing the most radical and under-reported aspect of our city. It is under-reported because it’s so very foreign to our current way of life. Reporters simply can’t perceive it most of the time, because it just doesn’t fit with what we’re used to. They see a vitally creative world, filled with a superabundance of art, animated by an electric spirit, and full of a whole lot of eccentric and entertaining behavior. That’s the big story that gets reported.

  But if they peel off the onion skin and peer a bit closer, there is another story. They will find that Black Rock City is one of the most public-spirited places on earth. We have, for instance, an incredible rate of volunteerism. We did a poll on the internet recently and the results were astonishing: 84.7 percent of our citizens contribute some form of volunteer service to our city. I challenge anyone to find another city in America that can equal that. We’re the seventh-largest city in Nevada for eight days, and our crime rate is negligible. Think what the police blotter in New Orleans during Mardi Gras must look like. And Black Rock City is a party that’s certainly equal to that in intensity. We are also committed to a Leave No Trace effort. We say Burning Man is a disappearing act: we miracle up an entire city, it lasts for one week, and then it absolutely disappears. And I mean everything disappears: every sequin, every boa feather, every cigarette butt, and especially those damn pistachio nutshells. Our cleanup crews work hard, but our organization couldn’t possibly cope with this task if it wasn’t for the public spirit of our citizens. There are no trash cans in our city, yet our citizens take the responsibility to pack out their own trash. That’s almost inconceivable, bu
t that’s what happens in Black Rock City.

  And that’s one of the problems reporters have. Burning Man is this wild and abandoned party on the one hand, and it’s the most public-spirited city in America on the other. And this leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t make any sense to them, and that’s because they don’t understand the really big story, the story that lies behind all of this which is the cause of these two things conjoining. And the reason this doesn’t get reported is because it’s profoundly foreign to our current way of life.

  The essential cause of all this is the giving of gifts. We’ve intentionally designed Black Rock City to foster a gift economy. We allow no vending, no advertising, no buying or selling of anything. We discourage bartering because even bartering is a commodity transaction. Instead, we’ve originated both an ethos and an economic system devoted to the giving of gifts. This is a radical departure from the marketplace because, of course, the marketplace invades every crack and corner of our lives today. A gift economy is founded on principles that are diametrically opposed to those that dominate our consumer culture.

  Let me draw a contrast between the market and a gift economy. The value of a thing in the marketplace is based on its scarcity in relation to demand. And capitalism itself is based on the competition to acquire the scarce resource of money. The great utility of this system is that an organized market serves individual desire. A simple act of purchase allows me to command the resources of the world. With a single expenditure, the magnesium of South Africa, the oil of Arabia, and the labor of China can be fetched from around the globe and delivered into my hands as if by magic; all that’s required of me is a sum of money. There has never been a better method for the productive allocation of wealth and the distribution of goods and services. As a result, we live today in a large-scale global economy that continues to expand into every area of human activity. Adam Smith, many years ago, rightly regarded this as a kind of miracle. The market, mated today with our modern system of mass production and mass distribution, has produced more wealth and distributed it more widely than in all other epochs of human history. This has liberated us from toil, but more importantly, it has freed us to pursue uniquely personal visions of happiness.

  At least, this is the version of our modern market that is constantly extolled in our society. But this economic revolution that has occurred so recently in human history has a darker side. The social contract we have signed contains a hidden clause and we have failed to read the fine print. And this is because the very virtues of our system represent its liabilities. The great efficiency of the marketplace depends on the fluidity of value as it flows in one form of commodity to another. If I buy something from you, no relationship and no moral connection is left to relate us to one another. The value of the money I have spent speeds on to take new forms as further goods and services. This is the fuel that powers our economy and produces a flow of never-ending capital around the world.

  But what this transaction does not produce is connections between people. It does not produce what Robert Putnam has described as “social capital.” Social capital represents the sum of human connection that holds a society together, and it is fostered by networks of personal relationships. In Bowling Alone, he objectively charts what all of us intuitively know: the social capital of America has begun to disintegrate.

  Putnam talks about two kinds of social capital. First, there is “bonding” social capital. This consists of our intimate ties with our family and friends, communal relationships with that circle of people you know well. It doesn’t consist of more than one hundred people because you can’t keep up intimate rapport with over one hundred people. And these circles tend to be exclusive. Not intentionally, but when you are huddled with your friends, you turn your back on the world and it’s hard to let the stranger in.

  Another form of social capital called “bridging” social capital. This refers to looser ties within a broader social circle that encompasses larger networks. It could be people you meet at parties or at work, people you exchange cards with. Here’s the difference: if you get sick and you need chicken soup, you’ll call someone you are bonded to because they’ll care. On the other hand, if you get fired and need a job, you are probably not going to talk to your brother or your close pal. You’re going to talk to someone who is part of that bridging network because they are connected to an extended network that moves out into the world. This might be a group of people who get together to play cards or hold softball games. More formally, it might consist of civic organizations or other sorts of clubs. As a rule, these groups are inclusive. Anyone who is interested can gain entry. You don’t need an intimate tie with other members. If you’re interested in making ships in bottles, anyone is welcome who wants to make ships in bottles.

  Putnam found that in America today, bonding social capital is eroding rapidly. The average American household spends seven hours a day watching television. A lot of people just turn the TV on to listen to the laugh track so they feel that they are not alone. The average American household possesses 2.4 television sets. And that means that husbands, wives, teenagers, and toddlers are all watching television independently of one another. If you could take the roof off the average suburban home, you would see each family member in a separate room watching a TV that has a separate set of commercials on it hawking a separate lifestyle. And if you looked more closely, you’d see that they’re surrounded, barricaded, by all this stuff they’ve bought to support these lifestyles that are being sold to them. This is hardly connective: 81 percent of Americans say they spend most evenings watching TV, but only 56 percent report that they talk to family members.

  There are more cars in America than there are drivers, and 90 percent of our citizens drive to work alone. In 1992, we each spent nineteen hours per year stuck in traffic jams. We each spent forty hours stuck in traffic in 1997, and I’m sure it’s more than that now. So here you have an entire nation on the freeway, trapped in the metal carapace of an automobile, isolated from everybody around them. I think I’m an affable guy. I think I bond with other people. But when I get into a car I become demonic. “You jerk! Cut me off?!?!?” You know what’s pathetic? Putnam found that people report they like being in their car during these long commutes because it’s a time to think. To think, as they sit in these isolation booths cursing their fellow citizens! Here’s another statistic: Putnam has found that each additional ten minutes of daily commuting reduces involvement in community affairs by 10 percent.

  This leads us to an even darker picture. For when we get to bridging social capital, we find that membership in clubs and civic organizations has fallen by half since 1975. He calls his book Bowling Alone because bowling leagues, which are a form of bridging social capital, have declined so precipitously that, if you follow the curve, in another ten years everyone—even though there is a retro fashion in bowling—could be bowling alone. This pattern also applies to more formal organizations: organizations that do good works in the world, like the Lions or the Kiwanis.

  At the back of the book he features charts that are really quite fascinating. Chart after chart crests at the height of civic involvement in America in the last century, around 1950, and then starts a decline until it reaches a point about twenty years ago, and then it makes a beeline for the drain. It resembles one of those mass die-offs when asteroids hit the earth, and that is what is happening to the civic tissue of our country.

  I think we all know what some of the causes for this are: TV, cars, metropolitan sprawl. In a land of megamalls, cineplexes, gated communities, anonymous fast food outlets, and retail chain stores it’s difficult to connect with anyone or anything. I was born in 1948, and I have seen all of these changes over the span of my lifetime.

  But I think if we take a larger view and look at the character of modern-day capitalism, we can diagnose an even more essential cause. It is in the nature of our mass marketing to cater to the desires of the individual. Indeed, it’s not surprising that th
e social ills Putnam describes have accelerated during the last twenty years, because it’s during this period that capitalism has perfected many marketing techniques isolating us even more radically from one another. Marketers have identified thousands of new market niches allowing manufacturers to gratify each sector of the population. In other words, we have been sorted by age, class, and income much as cattle might be herded into stalls within a feedlot. And the best minds of our generation aren’t writing books like Putnam’s, they’re doing market research and working for ad agencies.

  When parents, teenagers, and toddlers are planted in front of different television sets the commercials they watch do not provide them with a way of life. They merely offer commodities that are presented in such a way that they simulate states of being, which is the sin of simony: an unhallowed trafficking in sacred things. Whereas the only thing I know that is sacred is the immediate experience of being, of belonging to your self, belonging to others, belonging to the world, belonging to the cosmos. And all this stuff that we acquire stands between us and the world beyond ourselves. It muffles our being. The spiritual damage caused by living this way has worked the greatest evil in our world.

  In a final statistic, Putnam finds that Americans born and raised in the seventies and eighties are three or four times more likely to commit suicide as people of the same age at the middle of the last century. If you are a latchkey kid and you’re watching TV in your separate room, and your only way of belonging to other people is through stuff that simulates your being, and you’re feeling really lonely, you might be willing to kill yourself.