Brad Fidler is a PhD candidate studying psychiatry economics and Internet history at UCLA. He has researched the ARPANET and the early stages of the commercial Internet. Brad has been a speaker at a number of high profile tech conferences and his views on technology reveal a profound understanding of the innovative process as it relates to capital markets and democratic institutions. He is sharp, uncompromising, and original. We sat down recently to discuss some of the trend topics of the day. The interview below is a summary of that conversation.

Max Zeledon: I wanted to talk about the so called post-marketing age. The writer William Gibson brought up a very interesting point recently (Atlantic Monthly). He said there was no differentiation anymore, because the Internet made it possible for everyone under thirty to look the same everywhere. Are we really losing our individuality because of the Internet?

Brad Fidler: If people could actually lose their distinctiveness that easily, then it will only be a short time until everyone is overwritten again. We’d also have seen these different patterns of cultural and religious transmission throughout history, rapid shifts and historical breaks.  But even insofar as Gibson is referring to a new level of cultural uniformity, I’m not concerned.  People express themselves by modifying and re-using cultural baselines, and if more people use a single baseline, that’s fine with me because I don’t think it hurts individuality. It is interesting, though, that we focus on consumer practices as an indicator of individuality.  I’m also speaking as someone who hasn’t been on the receiving end of imperialism, so that limits the applicability of what I say.  For example, I’ve bought Starbucks coffee in the Forbidden City, with a very global-consumerism vibe.  But I don’t think I am any worse at being an individual than someone from that part of Chinese history. What past would I want to privilege as more unique than the present? The Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, nationalist, communist, capitalist period, or what? Each overwrote the other to some extent.

MZ: In marketing and popular culture, “novelty” is very much about keeping up with the latest trends.  For this we used to depend on critics, magazines, rankings, etcetera. Now we have Twitter and Facebook. Both have a global reach, but aren’t we killing originality?

BF: Will Twitter kill our dependence on sources of cultural authority?  [hyper-serious tone]  Depending on who you ask, doing so might usher in amazing levels of autonomy and creativity, or ruin society.  Either way, it would be a social, political, economic, and whatever revolution, reconstructing humans way beyond Skinner or Robespierre or Lenin’s dreams.  But I don’t think that’s going to happen; we’ll still gravitate to sources of particularly strong cultural, and other, influences.  And the entertainment industry might have a few years of instability until they nail down their next business model.

MZ: Looking back at the last decade, it’s hard not to make certain connections between the Internet and the great recession. Virtual malls were created so we could buy more shit from China, and high-speed, computerized trading made it possible to destroy billions of dollars in wealth in a matter of seconds. I can’t help but think this was all tragic for a lot of people.  What’s your take on this?

BF: The first public description of what the Internet might accomplish was a UCLA press release dated July 3, 1969 – about five months before the ARPANET would go online and eventually grow into the Internet.  In this context of a growing welfare state and comparatively strict financial regulation, people thought this network could eventually serve individuals in the manner of a telephone or electric utility.  Then we deregulated global finance, and put modern telecommunications to work for that system, too.  We can run countries into the ground with or without the Internet, and the same is true for administering a utopia.  Or, you can just stalk everyone; anything goes, really.

MZ: Are we suffering from overproduction? We’re taught to consume from day one. Can’t afford it? Don’t worry, buy it on credit, or take out a second mortgage. As a Canadian, did you grow up around this, too?

BF: Yes, but I don’t think we ever got Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. Just the Diet.
[laughs]

MZ: I only ask because I don’t see this as uniquely American. We consume the most, but we’re hardly alone. The Chinese are doing it, too.  Far more successfully.

BF: Back in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx was interested in what would happen if China became capitalist in terms of changes to or the survival of global capitalism.  Answers to this question usually go back to our preconceived notions about how many undeveloped or vaguely capitalist labor markets are required for the whole system to keep going.  Even though domestic demand is strategically low in China, this kind of neo-authoritarianism, by which I mean capitalism mixed with State communism or whatever, it’s a good lesson that capitalism doesn’t necessitate democracy.

MZ: But when you say this to people they get insulted.

BF: People get anxious about coming out on the other side of the Enlightenment.

MZ: I’ve always been fascinated by how tech changed marketing forever.  I mean, the notion that a company could give away its product for free and kill it before the competition had chance to do it first — that was clever, no?

BF: Giving away a product for free is probably new for consumers.  We’ve got a standard model of making profits by competing with other capitals to produce things as efficiently as possible, and it looks different than that.  But more importantly than that, the history of capitalism has all these corporate collusion, cartels, patents, mergers, and such, all things that seek profitability by different means.  In that context, giving something away for free isn’t that surprising.

MZ: That’s how you establish differentiation, no?

BF: Exactly…and pricing power, etcetera.

MZ: We’re no longer at the mercy of television and the ad agency, but I feel that services like Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new altars of easy virtue. What do you see coming in terms of individual freedoms in the context of social media?  Of corporate versus individual rights?

BF: We’re creating public space within private enterprise.  Facebook isn’t removing the places where our individual rights actually apply.  It isn’t burning town halls or bulldozing parks.  Still, the number of our interactions, the amount of our society, that takes place in public space is shrinking relative to how much we do inside private spaces like Facebook.  One result is that we are learning to accept limits on speech and other rights that go far beyond what is imposed by the state.  We’re not just learning these new limits in movie theaters, but now, in social media environments that are apparently meant for discussion.  I worry that these lessons could also reduce our expectations of government itself.  After all, the Patriot Act is a lot more like a TOS (Terms of Service) than the Bill of Rights is.  [pause]  I think this could be a disaster.

MZ: There’s a lot of anti-government rhetoric these days.  Do you think it is an accurate reflection of how individuals think they are better served by market forces for issues like regulation, access, and advocacy?

BF: Social media firms talk about themselves as communities, and will sometimes even appropriate images of democracy, like the town hall.  It’s good marketing to remind us of community and democracy.  But the only reasonable response to that is to say fine, it’s a town hall, so your Terms of Service is now a political document, and we have all these high expectations of it, expectations that follow from our political traditions.  I think putting pressure on a single social media firm in a time of rapid consolidation, that’s really just getting started — that’s a waste of time.  The government makes and enforces the rules that all social media firms follow.  It is still through the government that these so-called communities might be reformed to be meaningful public spaces, with strong rights for privacy, speech, and other things.  A really enriching exception to this rule was in 2007-08 with early places like 12seconds — for a short time I think it offered promise for new forms of meaningful online community.  But that’s now how new industries evolve; there’s always Walmart.  Relatedly, net neutrality needs to be in place for the Internet to provide healthy social spaces.

MZ: One of the ideas I’ve tried to resist from the very beginning was the notion that social media would promote democracy. Don’t you think this was a naïve expectation on the part of social media advocates?

BF: The Internet can enrich us or make us really base, but I don’t really care how much “high culture” we consume if we’ve lowered the quality of our democracies.  I talked about this in 2009 at a social media meetup.  I had just started on this back medication that turned out to have really significant psychotropic properties.  [laughs]   I sort of remember discussing Alexis de Tocqueville.  And how it wouldn’t be the technical details of social media that would confuse him, as much as why we’d enclosed these new public spaces in private enterprise. That would be the baffling part for all those dead white men.

Brad Fidler can be found here: http://bfidler.tumblr.com/

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Maximo Zeledon Max studies consumer culture and technology. He is specifically interested in how people interact in virtual environments and helps others develop a more reflective approach to technology and the internet. His background is in digital communication technology and the history of science and technology. He works for tech startups, NGOs, and non profits. Max earned masters degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and San Francisco State University.

He blogs here: http://consumerama.tumblr.com/  and he tweets here: http://twitter.com/consumerama

Tagged in: capitalism, china, economics, Internet, marketing, marx, media, Social Media, technology