Who's Getting In On the Reboot & Revival Craze of 2018? (SWWC, vol 4, issue 1)

Hello!

It has been an extremely long time, hasn't it? To make a long story short, 2018 has basically been about trying to figure out why the same trick I pulled off in my twenties (working a more-than-full-time job by day, writing by night) did not work in my forties.

The answer: I had apparently been unable to see exactly how many more moving parts my life had picked up in the intervening decades. (You'd think I'd have noticed the husband and child ...)

BUT. I am back because I have so many things I want to share with you all and it's time to stop thinking, "I should write about that ..." and just get it out there.

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SELF PROMOTIONAL TIME: In 2018, I've been doing a few side projects here and there -- some TV, some podcasting, and not nearly enough side-hustle writing. Catch up with me thusly:

-- I've been on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte a few times (here and here) and tried my hand at live-action tech commentary during the Microsoft Build keynote.

-- I've been podcasting too: Jason Snell has been nice enough to have me on the weekly tech newscast Download.FM seven times this year. Phil and I have continued to Ruin the Movies. I've been on The Incomparable to discuss the Midnighter, talk about Black Panther, marvel at how we've made it to 400 episodes of The Incomparable (meta!), discussed Harlan Ellison's body of work, decompressed after Avengers: Infinity War, and shared the formative works in my childhood canon. I also read Flowers in the Attic for a special edition of subscribers-only edition of Sophomore Lit and talked about reading Little House in the Big Woods through post-Prairie Fires eyes. And I recently talked hockey and hockey movies on a members-only episode of Beginners' Puck.

-- I did do some writing. There are a few pieces at the Motley Fool: I wrote about Tiffany Haddish and Groupon, Groupon vs. UPS, what would happen to small-scale e-commerce when the Supreme Court struck down Quill vs. North Dakota, how Etsy's tech decisions could boost their bottom line, how Etsy's competing against Amazon Marketplace, and a few others I can't find right now. And the writing that prompted me to start this again? Two Bossy Dames who, true to their word, gently bossed me back into the newsletter game with a guest-writing spot.

So that's me for side stuff in 2018 thus far! Let's move on why you really read this.

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Since a trade war is going to affect what we can buy and what we pay for it, what better time to examine the relationships we have with capitalism and identity? Researchers have long been fascinated with the fact that liberals and conservatives have different discretionary spending habits, and now a piece in Fast Company notes that a study has shown "political leanings are a significant indicator of how and why you buy luxury items," the upshot being that self-identified Republicans are more likely to splash out on visibly elite goods.

The researchers wanted to see if these patterns in consumption behavior stemmed from a desire to broadcast a sense of social hierarchy and socioeconomic order (in other words, to use visibly branded luxury goods as a way to show the little people who's on top) and their answer -- based on using ad campaigns to see which ones landed with which side of the political spectrum -- is that yep, conservative consumers are all about making sure you know they've got money and status.

I found this study interesting because it reminded me of one of the critiques I had after reading The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.

Her book is a tour through the ways spending and class indicators have shifted in the past twenty years, and her hypothesis is simple: The cultural capital that goes along with spending now has more status currency than the actual goods or services being purchased.

Currid-Halkett argues that conspicuous consumption has been replaced with conscious consumption. Not conscious in the sense of being aware of the ethical implications in each purchase -- although the chapter titled "Conspicuous Production" does point out that goods' status profiles are often burnished by the story of their creation -- but conscious in the sense that every purchase is meant to broadcast specific cultural capital and general ideologies. As she writes:

The key to most all inconspicuous consumption is that it is nonvisible except to those in the know, and is difficult to emulate without tacit information or a significant amount of money. Inconspicuous consumption is the source of the new class divide.

My reaction upon reading this: What about people who get rich via conspicuous consumption, i.e. Instagram influencers and reality TV? There is literally nothing inconspicuous about a Kardashian, and as we were reminded recently, they're very rich.

So what? The type of elites Currid-Halkett described seemed very squarely to fall into a demographic described as "likely to chuckle knowingly at the Seven Sisters joke on The Simpsons."

But there's more than one type of rich-person culture in the U.S., and we are now in an age where corporations are now expected to demonstrate their political stances as part and parcel of their participation in the public marketplace. Look at how corporations have been put on the spot for support of the NRA; look at the (non-Amazon) companies that no longer advertise on Breitbart or Laura Ingraham's show; look at how tech companies have been dragged into the news cycle around the concentration camps the U.S. government has set up for children.

Corporations make (some) people very rich. This Fast Company piece is a small first step toward examining how everyone -- not just NPR-listening, third-wave-coffee-drinking elites -- puts our money where our mouths are. And it asks us to start paying attention to which messages are selling, to whom, and how those messages can shape public policy in the short and long term.

The other so-what moment: the advertising messages that people are responding raise an interesting possibility about how we construct our identity. There was an interview with photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield, who observed:

We have these curated selves and I think a lot of the insecurity that drives the pathologies in my movie come from not having a sense of self that is independent and rooted away from branding and material things.

We are becoming more aware of the feedback loop between the beliefs we think form our identity and the brands that reference those beliefs in an effort to get us to buy who we are.

Who cares? Americans, who have a vested interest in seeing where and how the roles of "citizen" and "consumer" converge and diverge. The idea of voting with your dollars has really taken off.

And that leads one to start asking, "How, then, in an age of widening inequality, do we make sure everyone's vote counts?"

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Your pop culture recommendation: I have known Linda Sharps for a billion Internet years, since I used to cover Mac-based software and she used to do Mac-based software marketing, and part of my personal pleasure in reading New to Me: A Mostly Ridiculous, Highly Undignified, and Occasionally Heartfelt Diary of Pregnancy and First-Time Motherhood was the time-travel aspect back to our younger selves.

But even if you don't know Linda, you will like this book because it's so funny and irreverent without being mean-spirited. For example:

So, can we talk about birth plans? Because I don’t have one yet. My only real plan is to make it through the birth process without angrily devouring my husband's head like a praying mantis, and beyond that I just can't imagine exerting too much control over the sequence of events.
I mean, I know there is important information you need to communicate with your plan, like you either want a massive canister of heavy drugs shot into your side with an elephant gun or you do not. But some of the birth plan requests I've read from women who have shared theirs are seriously stressing me out.

This is the perfect gift for someone who will not do well with the Motherhood Is, Like, Profound and Magical or the Mommy Martinis Are How I Survive This Hellish Existence parenting-memoir genres. And if that someone is you, more so the better.

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