Can You Convince The Plutocrats That Their Monopoly of the Economy And Culture Is Not In Their Best Interest?

Culture Crash: The Killing Of The Creative Class, Scott Timberg (Yale University Press, 2015)

“Kodak — a company that once employed 144,000 people and supported an entire region of upstate New York — has been sold to Instagram, an online photo sharing service with thirteen employees. What happened to all those middle-class jobs, all of that wealth?” — Jason Lanier (77)

“Every single person I’ve ever talked to has said that doing Kickstarter is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. You have to live it everyday — you’re not a songwriter anymore, you’re planning, you’re making promises, you’re going to people’s houses…It becomes an all-consuming thing to get that money. It’s like the grind of going on tour, without the joy of performing.” — Stew, The Negro Problem (84)

“But I won’t be homeless; I can teach. I’m really concerned about a generation who won’t get a chance…But as an educator, I feel like an ayatollah sending kids running into the minefield” — Oliver Toraine (132)

These quotes, and many more like them, are a few of the “fragments” Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash gathers together from hundreds of interviews done since the great Crash of 2008 to show the effects, the devastating human toll, of what Thomas Frank calls The Wrecking Crew’s diligent dismantling of America’s Middle Working Class Culture (which includes deejays, bookstore clerks, theater set designers, publishing houses in addition to musicians, journalists, and sculptors). Yet, in contrast to Frank, Timberg does not focus on the agents who’ve caused this dismantling (It’s not called, The Culture Crashers, The Killers Of The Creative Class). Thus, while Frank shows how the destruction of America’s economic infrastructure was a policy designed by the ruling elite, Timberg tries to spread the blame around, including targeting the self-inflicted wounds that made many culture workers forget that culture is a negotiation, struggle or war (and, as a result of this forgetfulness or hubris, the 1% is winning, while the rest of us are losing).

In discussing the Wrecking Crew, or the 1% who hires them, Timberg characteristically uses the passive voice, as seen, for instance, in this sentence: “Citizen’s United, the 2010 Supreme court decision that dropped limits on political spending by corporations, means that plutocratic influence on U.S. politics will only increase.” (221). This could be translated as: The Plutocrats and Corporations have been successful in gaining control of US Politics, and its culture. Therefore, we must stand up for our rights against its tyranny!” Pick your tone—-both, I believe, are needed.

Culture Crash tends to emphasize the language of negotiation over that of war, clearly preferring a capacious inclusive bipartisan American culture, which he passionately terms the “middlebrow consensus.” Yet, despite his rhetorical use of the passive voice, which has earned praise by M.G. Lord for its “coolness and equanimity,” Timberg does show how it’s not an accident that the corporations have been able to take over the politics, economy, and culture of this country, but the result of policy. At the core of this book’s class analysis of how this culture crash occurred is Timberg’s insight:

When the affluent class shifted from owning land to owning part of a business, the wealthy “proprietor” began to dislocate himself from a town or community. Multinational corporations took this a step beyond. When the world economy went global in the 1990s, and digital technology pushed it even further along,….the changing culture at the top…lead to an abandonment of public spaces as well as the notion of shared culture.” (232)

Timberg is careful to concede that today’s billionaires may be “intelligent and decent,” but adds: “Plutocrats of the 21st century have no real hometown or home team of any kind. Their dedication is entirely to capital and to its frictionless international exchange.” (233) The result is a world in which local prestige, and local culture, no longer matter. No wonder that this class consolidates its power with the rise of the placeless, globalized, internet. Cultural institutions like book, record, video stores, art centers and locally owned newspapers and radio stations clearly provide too much human “friction” for these capital loving plutocrats.

But why did local prestige, or even national culture, ever matter to the super rich? Part of the reason for this is that corporations had been regulated by a government which, to some extent, looked out for the interests of the working class. This occurred most profoundly in mid-20th century America. In “the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and most of the ‘70s — the United States did not have a winner-take-all society. It had instead what economists call the Great Compression, a structure of wages, government investment, and progressive taxation that led to a large and solid middle class, as well as steady economic growth.”(230).

It’s not a coincidence that America’s culture, and its creative class, grew and thrived during this time, for “culture, as we understand the term, tends to originate in the middle class” and “depends on a middle class audience for its dissemination and vitality” (8). Yet the relationship between culture and the economy is symbiotic; such a culture also creates and propagates this middle class: “A broad-based class making its living in culture ensures a better society.”(14). The fate of the middle class and the creative class are linked; they rose and fell together.

Given this somewhat Reichian historical economic/cultural analysis, it’s surprising to hear Timberg argue, “I’m not advocating for a new WPA” (265), a staple of the New Deal policies that not only “kept writers, photographers, theater actors, and others alive during a difficult time” (234), but also laid the groundwork for this Great Compression that characterized America’s mid century cultural flourish. Neither does he advocate for bolder Socialist policies to place checks on the post-Reagan winner-take-all Monopoly Capitalist economy, in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle withers.

Timberg, instead, seeks to rationally persuade the wealthy global elites that they, too, may benefit from the better society. He invokes the largely lost, but once “widespread idea of loss leaders or noblesse oblige — a sense that some culture mattered for reasons outside its exchange values.” (230). Timberg suggests that if we can bring noblesse oblige back (with no strings attached — in contrast to the Koch Brothers buy outs of esteemed cultural institutions), perhaps we don’t need a new WPA, much less socialism. We may, however, need the sense of nationalistic cultural pride that characterized the Cold War era when the U.S. Government underwrote culture — admittedly for dubious reasons (for instance, jazz artists were sent overseas to “paper over racial tensions,” domestically [234]) — but nonetheless with tangible consequences that benefited American society as a whole certainly more than the current state of affairs does.[1]

Such appeals to the wealthy, however, may continue to fall on deaf ears as long as Poptimists, Individualists, Technological Utopians and proponents of “free” culture dominate today’s cultural discussion. In fact, it is this more visible class of faux-populist (151) culture workers that Timberg has the harshest words for, as they serve, whether intentionally or not, as the plutocrats’ propaganda arm. These culture workers follow the corporate line, in part due to fear of losing their job when the corporations are the only game in “town.” Don’t bark at them or they will flee to the Caymans or the Moon. Yet, before investigating how this ideological work has helped cause the culture crash from above, Timberg begins his analysis from the ground up, from the “street level,” (15) the everyday world that the vast majority of us can relate to.

Consider skyrocketing property values, “The boom-bust-flip phenomenon,” in which the housing market has been turned into a Casino, that “benefits the upper class while brutalizing the middle class.”(223) You may picture how the winner of the board game Monopoly bought your little red house on Baltic Avenue with the rent he charged you for landing on his green hotel on Boardwalk. In the real world, this ongoing, unregulated, process has deep consequences for the creative class, and for the culture as a whole.

On The Value of Cheap Rent

When considering the most direct causes for the crash that has eviscerated the creative middle class most dramatically in the first decade of the 21st century, Timberg writes, “next to disruptive technology, it’s skyrocketing rents that are pushing culture merchants out.” (64) This “doesn’t just cut into the number of people who can make a living from working in culture. Every time a shop selling books or records, or renting movies, closes, we lose the kind of gathering places that allow people oriented to culture to meet and connect; we lose our context, and the urban fabric frays.”(64)

This has cultural implications, as the novelist Pico Iyer says, an independent bookstore with its human touch and element of surprise “frees me from my habits as a website seldom does.” (68) As Jonathan Letham adds, “With bookstores, you go in and you find things you weren’t looking for…you develop a loathing for the false canon — the two books each year that everybody is supposed to read.”(56). Store clerks may teach people more about culture than the corporate media and schools combined, and their absence leads a void that an internet algorithm can never fill.

The rising real estate prices have not only affected these gathering places. According to Chris Ketchum, a freelance writer who is struggling to stay in Brooklyn during the onslaught of gentrification. “Rent is the basis of everything. For any artist or creator who wants to live with that dynamism of dense urban spaces, he can be saddled with rents so high that they take up 50% or more of his income. It’s impossible to do things outside the marketplace because you’re constantly working to pay rent.” (80)

It wasn’t always this way. According to legendary art-rocker David Byrne, “Cheap rent allows artists, musicians and writers to live without much income during their formative years. It gives them time to develop…and it gives the creative communities that nurture and support them time to form.” (26). This was certainly true of David Byrne during the 1970s (along with a little money from mom and dad as his song “Pull Me Up” reminds us), but it’s even more true for people not as lucky as Byrne to become rich off their art, and who thus need cheap rent beyond their formative years, as a sustainable middle class life-style.

Consider New Orleans. As late as 2004, this storied city was known as one of the poorest cities in America, but the flipside of that was that it was also cheaper, and thus less difficult for local celebrity street musicians to survive and create a less corporate mediated popular culture. No wonder this city was the birthplace of jazz and, debatably, R&B (and rock and roll). After Katrina, however, it’s a different story (especially after BP’s war on the “small people”).

Thus, if we value culture, we must advocate for stringent rent control, truly affordable housing, and other anti-gentrification strategies…or a recalibration of earnings. Artists and the creative class must make it clear that we align ourselves with the inner-city poor who have been systematically driven out by “urban renewal.” The developers and gentrifiers have too often used the creative class to help make the city more “livable” for the elite class who have been pouring in from the suburbs, and then price us out. As Timberg puts it, “real estate prices have begun to wage the economic equivalent of ethnic cleansing on the middle class.”(65). Indeed, ethnic cleansing, and urban removal, have been an economic policy the Black Creative Class is well familiar with. It just took a few decades to trickle up from the African-American creative class to the middle class. The same process that has made San Francisco rents skyrocket 30% between 2011 and 2013 began many years earlier, as the black population decreased from over 20% in 1970 to less than 4% by 2010, and neighboring Oakland is following suit.

Timberg does not go so far as Ian Svenonius’ “The Seinfeld Syndrome” in arguing that this process is part of a systematic plan that began with the corporate engineered “white flight” during the 1940s, but his analysis of the street level economic consequences gives ample evidence for the necessity of developing strategies to reverse this process. Even culture workers in the creative class who just want to, need to, continue to make their art or entertainment, who don’t have a political bone in their body, inevitably became politicized — if only we had time and places to meet and organize (which is exceedingly different in this “permatemp” economy of content serfs), and were not increasingly separated from each other due to the dismantling of the public sphere, the war against the compact, affordable walking city, and the growth of the placeless, privatized, Web.

If this picture of contemporary reality Timberg reveals sounds like an overwrought horror story, it must be said that Culture Crash is not merely a doom saying tome. Nor is his argument merely utopian. His vision of how culture can be revitalized, of how it can be made better is grounded in models that have worked in the past, and that can still be valuable today:

“What we need to create — which means fighting against the assumptions we inherited — is a world that is not predatory, not coddling, not made up exclusively of feudal lords and struggling content serfs, but one that allows culture to serve human needs.”(252).

The Necessity of Challenging the ideology of Free Lance Nation to bring back the middle class

One of these assumptions is the ontology found in such books as Me, Inc. by business guru Tom Peters (“Where we are all CEO of our company” or twitter feed, [74]). Such slogans underpin the vast majority of TV advertising and are virtually omnipresent in the alleged democratic culture of social media. Yet, Timberg shows how these ideological winds of “Freelance Nation” reveal a profound misunderstanding, or intentional obfuscation, of the words “democracy” and “freedom.” In reality, what the current ownership structures of the internet have created is the kind of negative anarchy that’s presided over by NGO privatized plutocrats.

Restoring, reinforcing, or replenishing what Thom Hartmann likes to call “the commons” or the “radical middle” (or what Michael Moore calls a “we society”) may require a different sense of ontology than the false consciousness of the every-person (or corporation)-for-himself winner-take-all rugged individualism pushed by the Elite class through its cultural outlets (“Smart for one, dumb for all” 228).

Operating as a “free agent” against this, the so-called individual is simply no match for the coordinated efforts of the large corporations. From the plutocrats’ perspective, the fact that many in the working class have drunk this Kool-Aid of “self” has been a brilliant strategy to divide the enemy, an enemy who may have been blindsided and has forgotten that there’s a war. As Thomas Frank points out, this ideology of “free agent society” wasn’t just sold to management, but also to the laborers. “They think it’s cool to not have health insurance or benefits.” (75).

To be sure, since the Crash of 2007, an increasing number of middle-class citizens colonized by “Free-Lance Nation” have made the connection between the Kool-Aid and the fact that we must “fight to keep a home (or even a flat), a livelihood, or medical coverage” to say nothing of a community or family. Such freedom is not really free (just as “free” downloading is not really free when you need to have a $1,000 laptop, a $500 iPHone, or a $400 Samsung Tablet” as David Lowery points out, [104]).

Yet, just because one understands this selling, this branding, this ideological indoctrination, as a disenfranchising lie, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to even know how to reverse it (as Frank points out). Timberg’s Culture Crash, by drawing on a few representative examples from different arenas of how culture worked well in the past, points to possible ways of reversing this trend—-if we can circle our wagons (while resisting the Technopoly’s tools like Facebook if we hope to create a collective think tank like what the press was once able to do when it was locally owned and each town had a Pro-Labor “progressive” paper alongside its pro-business “conservative” paper).

Looking Back To Look Forward

Once these problems are diagnosed, we confront the question: How can we cast aside our differing aesthetic and ideological allegiances and make common cause to reground culture in a vox populi (even if this voice only, at best, includes 99% of us, and the elite deign not to be part of it, find unprofitable or, for some reason, feel threatened by)?

Timberg’s got some answers, and all of his positive examples occur during that era of The Great Compression and the relatively stable middle-brow consensus that was in place before the city’s social fabric frayed and the working class become more divided from itself (as the broad middle class turned into a mere niche [221]). Whether it’s the heyday of Boston’s literary scene in “the first decade or so after World War 2” (30)….”decades before Boston’s conquest by hedge-fund managers when a life of genteel poverty was still possible (32), the LA Art world of the 1960s, or the “Outlaw country scene in Austin in the early 1970s, “these were the days when wealth got passed around in a nation with a swelling middle class.”(38)

Yet we must acknowledge that in the broader historical scheme of things, it turns out that this middle class world that generation-exers like Timberg and myself caught the tail-end of was a historical anomaly in the history of Euro-American culture. This middlebrow world was only achieved through immense populist collective struggles during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unfortunately, subsequent generations forgot (or were never taught) this lesson, took the middlebrow consensus for granted, as if it were our American birthright, and helplessly watched it “fade away like a pale ghost” (255) during the last few decades of the 20th century.

In this sense, the “American Century” may be summed up as a rags to rags story (from Trust Busting to Union Busting) and this affects the way culture is disseminated, as well as the ways culture workers conceive of themselves, branded as isolated individual commodities and cut off from the social creative source, from the clash of cultures, that potentially productive negotiation, the churn of culture (“if everything is flat and even, the winds don’t blow” [50]). A culture clash, culture wars (even if it’s as seemingly benign as the clash between Motown and white album oriented artists in the 60s), is needed in order to avoid a culture crash!

Jazz, too, is a great example of how beautiful art of enduring value resulted from a clash of Euro-American culture, and African-American culture. But such a harmonizing cultural miscegenation also characterized the TV variety show during this time (in stark contrast to American Idol), Top 40 Radio (in contrast to the Pandora Algorithm), the downtown department store, academia, and even Time Magazine — a particular favorite of Timberg’s (especially once they put Thelonious Monk on the cover during the height of the British Invasion, 264).

As Timberg paints his picture of what was good about mid-century America’s domestic culture, he invites the reader to consider whether something like this is possible today. This is not primarily a nostalgic “get a horse” argument. Timberg is realistic enough to know it would be an atavistic endeavor to wage war against the dominance of the internet technocracy, or return to modes of cultural production that characterized the Great Compression. The modes of cultural (re) production may have irrevocably changed since the “tech revolution,” but the bigger battle is over who owns the means of cultural production.

During the Great Compression, these means were owned by more folks in the middle class who had no “winner-take-all” ambitions and were content to work “successfully in a single city”(229). This is simply not possible in today’s economy in which ownership and wealth is concentrated at the top. Yet, the web, as mode of production, may have yet untapped possibilities the current ownership obscures. In this regard, it’s instructive to note that during the 1920s (before the great depression forced an economic recalibration) the broadcast medium of radio, in its infancy, was also owned and controlled by the elite class as the internet is today.

Bertolt Brecht argued against the tech-utopians of that time, “the problem with the radio is that it’s one-sided, where it should be two-sided,” and lamented that it wasn’t — but could be—used to organize its listeners into cultural producers. During the Great Compression, however, radio did come much closer to being able to organize its listeners into producers. If radio could do this then (decades before the faux-populism of Rush Limbaugh took hold), perhaps the internet could be used to achieve these ends today.

It could conceivably become a more democratic cultural tool despite the fact that, as a medium, it lacks 2 advantages radio had: 1) a finite number of broadcast frequencies, and stations and 2) a physical basis in a local community. Thus, even though Timberg has harsh words for the internet’s cultural economy as we know it today, it needs to be emphasized that it is not the root problem, or root cause of the culture crash. Nor are the self-inflicted wounds, such as poetry’s being inhaled back into academia (40) by culture workers who were banished from the cultural mainstream.

The killing of the creative class may very well be an “unintended consequence” of corporate control of the means of production, as Timberg argues throughout — but it may very well have been intended. Either way, it certainly has been a boon, a perfect storm, for the plutocrats. Either way, we must struggle to take it back — or at least be afforded equal time (and not through something as ineffective as The Fairness Doctrine) with the likes of, say, Dr. Luke Gottwald or American Idol. The burning question is how!

What Is To be Done?

Timberg closes his book by stating that even though “technological and economic trends work against the creative class” and the culture he values, that “some things are within our control.” (267) He claims “it’s pointless to offer specific solutions” because “conditions are changing so fast,” but he does offer a vision for what he’d like to see happen. Though his list doesn’t read like a manifesto of demands, I believe that taking this list as a starting point, we could start a Culture Crash discussion group or think tank devoted to considering ways to get from where we’re at now to this envisioned world.

To put it another way, Culture Crash, like any good book, needs a sequel — ideally a collaboratively written sequel, perhaps to be published on Timberg’s website in a discussion board format, along with videos of Q&A sessions that occur during his book release parties. This considering of “ways and means” to go along with unmet hopes and deferred dreams will require the collective communal effort, and would be open to anybody with a stake in culture. So-called “hair-brained” ideas are welcome. In fact, I’ll offer up a few to put on trial. One of the things Timberg would like to see is:

A world in which people who aren’t poets read poetry and draw sustenance and wisdom from it. In which non-dancers attend dance concerts, and folks who are neither professional musicians nor foreign businessmen go to jazz shows.

In thinking about how we could achieve this world, I feel we have to start with the young just as the corporations and the culture crashers do. We may not have access to the mass media that can reach kids in their preschool years, but we still do have access to the schools, and I don’t want to feel like that ayatollah sending kids running into the minefield that teaching the creative arts have become these days.

I am reminded of an ex-student of mine who wrote a brilliant, beautiful paper titled, “Life Is Dance.” She hopes to be able to work as a dancer, dance teacher and writer, but she is forced into to choose a specialized field to work in. She chooses dance, and her passion for writing atrophies, just as another student chooses writing and loses his balance as his passion for dancing atrophies. I see this consequence of the specialized education system over and over. People don’t complain about it too loudly because that’s just the way things are, yet many people struggle with the necessity to overspecialize in our society, and this is one of the main causes for why dancers and poets don’t patronize each other’s art as much as Timberg would like.

I want to tell my student, “Look, there are older people, with some cultural clout, like Scott Timberg, who want to help create a culture in which you’d thrive, who are willing to fight for your need to bring these scenes together. You’re onto something that could help save our culture from such isolated specialization and help make people more productive and happy.” Certainly nobody in her right mind would be against that? Of course, it will be a fight. I personally have been amazed, and frustrated, by how poets seem to be content to huddle in the corners to which they’ve been assigned — but I know many struggle with these institutionally opposed limits.

This is one reason why team-taught interdisciplinary classes that emphasize what the arts have in common is so crucial for creating the better society Timberg envisions. Starting from a students’ passion, and building on that, teaching them about the existing structures and rules the better to change them from within, could also increase—-rather than decrease — students’ employability. I’ve found the most useful template for this necessary rethinking of our education system in Nathan Hare’s proposal for the nation’s first African-American studies program in 1968.

Hare’s proposal emphasizes the shared commonality of various disciplines over their specialized differences — in part because he knew that African, and African-American culture, at its best, is much less specialized than Euro-American culture. In African-American culture, as Dizzy Gillespie points out, the blues are the spirituals and the spirituals are the blues. Beyond that music, writing, and dance represent a unity, and there’s less of a separation between church and state., vocational training and the fine arts.

This philosophy encourages collaboration more than the specialized, individual-centric Euro-American model of education and helps build, and organize, communities. In Hare’s formulation, such a curriculum would require a community service component, an internship/practicum, in which local culture would be emphasized over the all-or-nothing blockbuster culture. In order to graduate, students who hope to work in the culture industry must collaborate with a business student for the creation of a local sustainable bookstore or performance venue, etc.

These ideas have never been discredited because they’ve never been given a chance, yet given the failure of specialized, individualistic, model of education, I believe such a program is worth fighting for in helping to achieve Timberg’s goal and my students’ dreams. And, since it would run on people-power and an already existing institutional setting, it wouldn’t require more money to achieve.

Timberg also calls for a world where adults, not just children, learn to play instruments, supporting music schools and the musicians who teach there. The envisioned society in which more people are permitted, and less people are discouraged, to actively engage in the expressive arts is crucial given how many people are currently discouraged from music for various reasons. Some are discouraged by the burgeoning “pay to play” culture while others are discouraged by the taboo against singing or drumming in public spaces; “Shut up and listen to your iPod. We’ll make an exception in rare cases if you can get on TV first.”

In contrast to this, I turn again to African-American culture. Consider the title of the black national anthem: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is much more democratic than “Oh Say, Can You See.” Nor are these idle words. The storied history of the black church has done more to achieve Timberg’s goal of empowering people as musical agents rather than mere consumers (if you don’t forget that your voice, your hands and feet, are instruments too) than most (underfunded) music-in-the-school programs and music therapists combined. Because there’s less of a distinction between sacred and secular; there’s less of an alienation between entertainment and art; religion can be fun. The congregation’s “response” is as important as the soloists “call.” No wonder so many great musicians “came out of” the church, and a great number also stayed there, bringing the church with them wherever they go. Sure, church attendance is much lower today than it was during the time of The Great Compression, but it’s a crucial aspect of what Timberg calls the middlebrow consensus that is much more vital and democratic than the corporate controlled secular music industry, or the music “that’s supposed to be good for you” that does not appeal to people’s passions and spirit that is taught in the school system.

Neither working through the school nor working within the church will likely be sufficient to effect these changes. Both, however, offer temporary shelter from the relentless push of market values, and they provide that gathering place that has not yet been replaced by MOOCs or on-line churches. Teachers have the power to require their students to attend dance and poetry events, and the duty to make it engaging for their students. We should make use of these institutions before they, too, get defunded as education is privatized. We need to do it soon, if we have any chance of changing culture from the bottom up, especially in a time when the bankers and VCs won’t listen. I’ll listen. Read this important book! And let’s start working on that sequel!

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[1] For A Similar Argument about how the breakup of the USSR caused American culture to atrophy, see Ian Svenonius’ mordantly brilliant The Psychic Soviet (2006)