“Creating Your Own Economy” means that you order information to both develop and meet “[your] own specific needs,” as the dust jacket would have it. The argument hangs together around its central idea, but the component parts range far afield, and consequently I’ll begin by elaborating on the overall theme, then analyze some individual chapters and end with some larger generalizations.
I should note, however, that Create Your Own Economy more than passes the fundamental test I have for nonfiction by making me think about the world in a new and stronger way than I had. Still, the tone of this post is probably more negative than it should be because most of what I have to write is an effort to refine the book’s ideas rather than undermine them altogether.
Wait – what exactly does it mean to create your own economy?
Your own economy seems to be a regulated and ordered “list” (although I do not like the metaphor—I would prefer “tree” or “database”) of the wide, deep information flows that are increasingly important to the economy and to the sense of self. Note two key words I use: “increasingly important,” rather than all important. One flaw in Create Your Own Economy, it seems to me, is that Cowen wants to overstate the pervasiveness of those information flows and ease of access to them: blogs, books, movies, culture, and information more generally are easier to obtain, but still often not easy to obtain, and increasingly important doesn’t map to all important. Our challenge can also often become figuring out what to reject and how to define the world.
In defining the world, let’s refine what it means to create your own economy. Some samples:
* “… when it comes to being an infovore, we need to know what kinds of biases may hamper our ability to create our own economy of real internal value” (91).
* “It may sound like I’m talking only about literature but I’m also talking about economics. I think of people as creating their own economies inside their heads” (121).
* “Why buy an expensive brand when you can make your own economy in your head?” (141).
* “… if we understand this idea of creating our own economy, we will be better suited to appreciated and also creating beauty in today’s rapidly changing culture” (41).
(Warning: potential spoiler ahead.)
* “But when I look up at the sky and gaze at the stars, I am joyful. I see a happy ending. I see interiority.
It is the secret of the best kind of prosperity, no matter how disordered you find the world. It is the secret of creating your own economy” (228).
As these quotes should demonstrate, Create Your Own Economy does range far from its central premise. This isn’t a bad thing, but one should be remembered, especially to those who find themselves lost in how Buddhists and professors are alike.
Ever-smaller bits
In this new world, the lower cost of culture and information make us less likely to invest in a single place and more likely to graze—hence the term “infovore.” Cowen’s economic argument regarding costs of production and consumption are quite strong and persuasive, but I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion: the growing ease of accessing culture and information might make deep, long-form experience more valuable because your depth relative to others’ shallowness therefore makes you more unusual. Becoming an expert in one field is more valuable than being an amateur in many. There’s an obvious counter to my argument in that learning about many fields might contribute to being an expert in one, but I’m not convinced skill acquisition genuinely works in such a way.
The idea that deeper learning might be gaining value parallels another of my pet theories, which is that the ability to concentrate for long periods of time will increasingly become a competitive advantage; the post “Laptops, students, distraction: hardly a surprise” discusses it in more detail. Cowen sees multitasking as fundamentally beneficial, however, in contrast to someone like Paul Graham in Disconnecting Distraction. But Cowen gets around some of the standard arguments against distract, however, when he says:
There are also plenty of lab experiments that show that distracting people lowers the capacity of their working memory and thus lowers their capacity for intelligent decision-making. It’s much harder to show that multitasking, when it results from the choices and control of the individual, is doing us cognitive harm.
(Notice the awkwardly repeated word “that” in the first sentence; it’s the kind of problem I’ll take up later.)
I suspect that some people find having music playing, blog posts in a browser, a text editor open, and a book on the table thrive in such an environment, but, like Graham, I’m not one of them. In Cowen’s descriptions of multitasking, which I almost want to describe as rapturous because of how he sees multiple information streams as enriching, Cowen moves against the arguments made by, for example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience or Winifred Gallager in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, both of whom argue, in one way or another, that we need to decrease the shallow external stimuli we’re exposed to. One could argue that Tweets, text messages, IMs, and so forth fall into that category. In turn, we need to become better at reaching a state like what Csikszentmihalyi describes:
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we usually make happen
He calls this state “flow,” and sees it in a variety of fields: rock climbing, cycling, math, and so forth. In this state, all other concerns fall away and one is focused on a single plane, causing time to drop away. One feels like the master of one’s state and that one can surmount any barriers between yourself and one’s object.
Turning off Internet access in OS X.
On its face, this seems antithetical to Cowen’s hyperconnected world, with its ceaseless comings and goings. For them, however, hyperconnectedness might be where they experience flow, finding it in multiple information streams and cultural browsing. The aforementioned constant stream of e-mails, blog posts, pinging notifiers, and the like chiefly distracts and disrupts me. Sometimes when I’m writing in longer forms, I actually turn off my Internet access as a barrier, and if my hand reaches to turn it on, as if of its own volition, my conscious mind has time to stop. For me, I’m closest to flow not when I’m connected, usually, but when I’m disconnected. Tom de Marco and Timothy Lister argue in Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, their brilliant exploration of what makes successful knowledge workers, that enclosed offices free of distraction leads to high productivity.
As a side note, Cowen does say that “blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday.” I have any number of dead, or mostly dead, blogs in Net News Wire, but that doesn’t both me much: they’re easy to scroll past, and sometimes one surprisingly springs to life. More likely to get the boot from my feed are blogs that overpost: I used to subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s feed, but honestly, who had time for the 50+ post torrent emerging from his computer daily? A fair number of readers, evidently. I’m reminded of Donald Knuth’s famous quote: “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
Autism and terminology
Cowen devotes a large portion of Create Your Own Economy to discussing what he calls the “autistic” information processing mechanism of intense classification and other cognitive strengths and weaknesses. But he’s careful to distinguish between actual autism and what he’s using when he discusses “autistic” tendencies in talking about ways of dealing with the world, even saying that he “will use the term ‘autism’ because [he] thinks it provides a consistent framework for thinking about both the cognitive and social issues.” Maybe: but here’s where he should have either taken or coined a different term that’s not already been colonized by DSM IV.
In distinguishing what he means by autism from what clinical autism might entail, Cowen says that many high achievers may have “mastered autistic styles of learning… including a good working grasp of social intelligence.” Although I’m not autistic, I find the phrase “good working grasp of social intelligence” amusing because in middle and early high school I had numerous problems in that field. In describing how I overcame them, I often use the metaphor of writing a processor emulator to describe how I learned improved social skills: by painstaking writing what seems built into many people.
Politics, literature, and autistics
The political section is compelling but perhaps overly brief, while the literature section performs some analytic bibliography on a number of authors along with their works. It seems the weakest chapter, perhaps because I am in literature graduate school and would’ve liked to see further development of the compulsive, information-centric tendency in novels with references to the many systems theorists out there whose works apply to literature; Mark McGurl cites some examples of those theorists in his recent book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, for example.
Still, even a relatively weak treatment of the subject might point towards new modes for thought. For example, one could read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris as a clash between the autistic personality Cowen writes about and a world that defies attempts to classify it logically. The intellectual distance of Kris isn’t enough to let him categorize and understand his lover in that novel; one sees the limits of his endeavor in it.
In writing a paragraph about Solaris without developing my ideas further in this forum, I am to some extent guilty of the same sin I perceive in Create Your Own Economy, but perhaps I will give the topic a more systemic treatment at some point in the future: it certainly interests me, and now I find myself scanning my shelves and memory for other examples of the kinds of protagonists Cowen cites. One non-genre example might be the character Alain in author Alain de Botton’s novel On Love, whose efforts to analyze the irrationality of love are both hilarious and show an obsessive interest in a field where many if not most of us are obsessives.
Some kinds of genre fiction, like science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, value analytic, driven characters more than mainstream literary fiction, which makes his choice of Sherlock Holmes as an example quite logical. Dune falls into this category too, as does virtually all of Neal Stephenson’s science fiction output, but most notably Cryptonomicon.
Unfamiliar forms of beauty
At the beginning of his chapter on “Why Modern Culture is Like Marriage, in all its Glory” (another metaphor probably stretched too far), Cowen writes that “… for cognitive reasons, we also tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty.” He’s right, and that’s been something of a preoccupation lately, as discussed most recently in “More words of advice for the writer of a negative review.” Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty is worth consulting on this point. The chapter goes on to describe the book’s major issues, which I’ve already covered in the introduction and will cover more in the conclusion.
Intersection of the economy and the economy of the mind
By Cowen’s estimation, I probably have made my own economy—one of books, chiefly, but also of sites of importance to me, and journals, and so on. This doesn’t translate into, say, buying food, shelter, and clothes. As I argued on Grant Writing Confidential, blogging doesn’t pay the bills for most people. If you’re paid to be an information person, as many university professors are, your own economy is great, but it’s hard to build your own internal economy without having at least a modest amount of money. One might have to separate, at least to some extent, the “Own Economy” you have in terms of culture from the economy that makes sure you have somewhere to sleep and eat, at a minimum, and also a way to buy or make signaling goods. Making them is getting cheaper. But the idea that one creates one’s own real economy, as opposed to a prestige economy, isn’t dealt with despite the title.
Granted, a fair number of people merge the two: Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky love to program and follow the field from their sites. The two blogs I contribute to—this one and Grant Writing Confidential—blend personal and professional interests. But I seem to be in the minority, and, judging from the New York Times’ recent article about how few bloggers keep going over the long run, fewer people are creating their own economy so much as they’re looking and needing, at some point, to get paid for their labors.
Novelty
I’m undecided on whether I think Cowen’s fundamental argument is genuinely novel: one could argue that thinkers have always—or, at least, over the last few centuries—created their own economy from what they’ve read, listened to, and so forth. Create Your Own Economy might not really be describing something new so much as something very old but being viewed in a fresh, or unusual, way.
The expanding pool of information in part due to the Internet and in part due to mass education has accelerated this process to the extent that the quality of a thing or idea might become different due to its quantity. One could also see this in the number of people who now want or need to create their own economy: when you had three TV stations, a handful of radio stations, and one or two city newspapers, you didn’t have nearly the kinds of information and knowledge choice you do now.
Hence you now have a stronger incentive to create your own economy using the methods Cowen describes, or at least learn how to order the information that’s more likely to surround you now than it was in, say, 1950. Fifty years ago, a large proportion of the population riveted things together; now that fewer do that and more think about the rivets, or the human condition, or whatever, they need the creative fertilization that before only a relatively limited number of professors, engineers, and artists needed. Is this quantitative change a qualitative one? Tough call. I’m going to punt.
Stylistic quirks and irritations
The comma usage in Create Your Own Economy might be described as quirky or erratic, especially when it comes to conjoining independent clauses using conjunctions like “and” and “but.” For example, my copy of Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, Sixth Edition says one should do so on page 270, while my copy of Jan Venolia’s Write Right! recommends the same but claims that using a comma with “and” and “or” is optional. Take these two examples from Create Your Own Economy:
Pointing this out is not meant as a desire on my part to be a persnickety grammar policemen, but one of clarity: in many of these sentences, I stopped to reread them to make sure a clause that looks dependent actually isn’t. I can still understand what’s being conveyed, but it slows my comprehension. Granted, there could be a reason behind the strange usage; Nabokov was famously prickly about their placement, and Ben Yagoda’s About Town indicates Philip Roth was too. If there is a stylistic purpose, I’m not able to discern it, especially because the usage appears inconsistent to me, although I began hunting for a pattern partway through the book.
One can also see other editing problems in the quote above, which begins “There are also plenty of lab experiments that show that distracting people lowers the capacity of their working memory…” It could easily be rewritten to say, “Plenty of lab experiments show that distracting people lowers the capacity of their working memory…” It’s a better, terser sentence. The difference wouldn’t stop me in a blog post because blogs, at least in my view, have lower standards for writing quality than books. You can probably pick sentences out of this post that ought to be rewritten, but if they were in a book, I’d hope that I or a copy editor would catch them before publication.
I counted the phrase “of course” a dozen times within the first half of Create Your Own Economy. If I’d been the editor, I would’ve written “Find/replace” in the manuscript’s margins. Again, this is hardly the worst literary sin a writer can commit, but the persistence of repeated words, phrases, or, worse still, clichés distracts rather than enhances the message being delivered. Everyone has usage quirks—I’m over fond of “still” and “perhaps”—but good editors should temper them.
Still…
Fundamentally, the length of this post should indicate that there’s a great deal going on in Create Your Own Economy, and trying to summarize all that activity in order to critique it isn’t easy. I would tend to accept what I perceive to be the main argument regarding the growing importance of being able to shape information, as well as some of the “how-to”-like features of the middle chapters. But, as discussed above, this skill, if it is a skill, has been important for a very long time, even if it hasn’t been identified and analyzed using the tools and vocabulary developed here.
