Everything Is Turning to Gold
I grew up on the edge of the suburbs, walking distance from nowhere. Many summer nights, when I was 11 or 12, I would sneak out of the house late to meet up with a friend, but then we wouldn't know what to do. Typically the best we could come up with was to walk 20 minutes to the gas station so we could use the soda machine outside it, the only possible place to "shop" at that hour. The station itself closed early, probably by nine. As we trudged along in the gravel on the side of the road, the soda machine would be the only illuminated thing in the darkness, at least until a car went by. I didn't even want soda — most of the time, there would be cans of soda already in the refrigerator at home. It was just that the possibility of buying something, anything, felt to me then like the only possible indicator that we were actually doing something. Usually we didn't even have money. We'd check the machine's coin return for nickels and dimes.
In Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture, sociologist Sharon Zukin writes of how shopping structures Americans' sense of agency and of what it means to be an adult. "No matter where they shop or what they buy, teenagers use shopping to learn how to be autonomous ... The steps toward autonomy are measured by exercising a consumer's choice." This seems to explain why I was drawn to the lonely soda machine, though it felt at the time more like an experience of the absence of choice, the insurmountable reality of constraints. Not only was it the only place to spend money that was within walking distance of my parents' house; but the machine itself offered few options: Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, maybe Slice.
Shopping, Zukin argues, is a "lifelong learning process: learning about goods, learning about stores, and learning how to be a 'choosing subject.'" That is, it is a ongoing indoctrination into the idea that freedom is mainly a matter of having more exciting things to buy than Mountain Dew, and social participation is being able to converse fluently about the consumer goods we all have in common, even if we all can't afford them.
Zukin describes how self-service supermarkets allowed people to experience a kind of fog of autonomy—not only their own in choosing from the superfluity of goods, but those of the other shoppers around them: "Instead of chatting with merchants and neighbors, they shopped alongside—but rarely speaking to — the 'autonomous presence' of other shoppers. Like going to the movies, shopping engaged them in public culture—but in a private space of their own." In stores, we get to ratify one another's consumer sovereignty by leaving each other alone.
Often, when I see people walking down the sidewalk and looking at their phone, I have a similar feeling. They are so autonomous, they don't have to watch where they are going. It used to annoy me so much, but now it just reminds me of me, makes me wonder if I should check my phone too. Constant connectivity has overlaid the space of the supermarket over all reality, or at least it has made a space for fantasies of autonomy always available to slip into. I can use my phone to generate countless destinations for myself; no more walks to the soda machine.
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I've always loved the album Sucking in the Seventies, a compilation of leftovers, singles edits, and loose ends that the Rolling Stones put out in 1981, around the same time I was making those late-night pilgrimages to the gas station. I was impressed then that they could get away with saying anything "sucks," let alone their own music: Yeah, we half-assed it, we know, what does it matter? I understood that it was a power move, that they were daring people to try to judge how sincere they were about the title. Was it: "We're so great, we can admit when we suck"? Or was it: "You're such suckers that we have to tell you when we suck"? Or was it: "We're great, we all know it, and when we say 'sucking' we mean something dirty"?
Now when I listen to the album, I interpret the title not only as the band's confession of their own detachment, alienation, isolation, and general loss of any perspective, but as a comment on the decade itself, on the spirit of exhaustion and "malaise" that reigned. It seems like it was a time when people felt so selfish in their helplessness, and vice versa, that the best they could do was boast about it. The album opens with "Shattered," which pretty much sums up the mood. Look at me, I'm in tatters.
But the second track, "Everything Is Turning to Gold," is the one I think about all the time. It seems like a rough draft of a song, but the shambolic, first-take feeling of it suits what I take to be its point, that everything is, in fact, turning to shit. And not only that, the band is no longer in a position to be able to tell for sure. They can't make a good song anymore, can't even do another take, because success and sycophants and copious amounts of conscience-muffling drugs have made it so they no longer have access to critical consciousness.
I imagine the Stones being in the Midas-like position of turning a profit from anything (even albums they called Sucking in the Seventies), which over time must have had a dulling effect. When value is created from everything you do, you don't know if anything has any intrinsic value. Everything you touch is spoiled with the mark of your identity. Its value can't be separated from your own, so you can't tell the worth of either. You know only that there is more and more "gold," which must mean it's worth less and less. So no matter how golden you can make yourself look and feel, you still might be shit.
The way we can share ourselves and our status signifiers, the way that data is circulated and mined and repurposed now, it is like everything we touch turns to a sort of gold as well. It's like Zukin's point about shopping as a means of developing cultural capital — just going into stores and looking at goods becomes a way of enhancing value. Now even more value is generated by the way we present ourselves online, by the things we choose to talk about, the product placements we make. But so much status is being asserted, so much gold is being minted, it's in a hyperinflationary spiral.
I read J.C. Pan's review essay "The New Yuppies," about recent books on the contemporary "aspirational class," who are supposedly understated in their status signaling. "Now that conspicuous consumption has lost its prestige, today's elites express their status through inconspicuous consumption." That claim seems incoherent to me; the consumption is still conspicuous, only in a different way, playing to different biases.
The idea is that since anyone can acquire stuff, elites have to signal their specialness by consuming more rarefied things. But this is not exactly a new development — it is how critics have explained fashion since the days of sumptuary laws. If anything, the wide accessibility of goods (real or imagined or faked) as status markers has driven a turn toward finding status in the metrics of measurable influence — social media likes and followers. I used to fantasize about autonomy; now I mainly fantasize about an audience. (This is probably why I find myself writing this newsletter.)
It doesn't matter what you seem to have, but how many people seem to care. Then again, who knows? Maybe owning expensive stuff is the pinned tweet of cultural signaling.