Feeling Big and Small (i)

I spent my 20s haranguing about everything I saw wrong with the world of music and musicians, and now I am spending my 30s realizing, one by one, that none of those things are unique to that narrow world.

As with so many contemporary musical organizations and individuals, expansion is a frequently declared priority in Scrabble circles. One candidate for leadership has howled that Scrabble will one day be played only in nursing homes if nothing is done to expand its reach. This is an alarm which exponents of similarly unfashionable musical styles and spectator sports have heard sounded many times, possibly verbatim. One of my abiding projects here has been to pose the two questions that such pronouncements most immediately invite: Is this true? And (why) does it matter?

This series is yet another effort at bringing into plainer view the ethical and practical concerns which the Nursing Home adage artfully conceals. I am weary of repeating myself at this point, but in comparison to previous efforts I do feel much better equipped, both in terms of book learning and life experience, to hone in on what bothers me so intensely about cultural expansionism. I do not deny that the impetus for the present effort is affinity-based. Its underlying motivation is psychological rebellion against an outer world which grates intolerably against my previous conditioning. I take it as a given, incidentally, that this is precisely the mechanism underlying the more strident expansionist pronouncements. In clashes of mere affinity and acculturation, sometimes no one is "right" and it can be pointless to continue talking past each other in ever more inflammatory language. Like so many musical style wars, the tournament Scrabble scene is littered with awkward jeremiads, gratuitous personal attacks, and ungrounded assertions which present elective affinities as eternal ones. I release this latest TLDR diatribe into the virtual world with full knowledge that collectively we have grown rather numb to such things, that there seems little left to do but agree to disagree, and that personal biases will always make full reconciliation elusive. "Biases" per se can of course never be eliminated entirely, but I insist this is not the fatal flaw it is so often made out to be. If everyone saw every issue from the same perspective, societies would be even more vulnerable to unforeseen crises than they already are. I do not wish to put forward my own acculturation as somehow superior, but it would also be rather strange if it did not uniquely sensitize me to issues which others are less apt to notice (and vice versa of course). I will be saying a lot about what I believe, but also about what I've noticed. If we cannot yet come to believe the same things, perhaps we can at least notice more of the same things.

Unfortunately I am not well equipped to objectively address whether or not tournament Scrabble, like so many dodo birds and symphony orchestras before it, is in fact headed for extinction. In theory it should be possible to gather objective evidence on this question. I confess that at the moment I do not have anything convincing gathered, that I wouldn't know where to start, and that I'm not particularly convinced by the somewhat less-than-objective "evidence" of fatalistic proclamations and anecdotal comparisons to other tournament gaming scenes. Remediating this lack of firm evidence would indeed seem a fitting, practical, beneficent task for those formal Scrabble organizations which, for now, do still exist. 

I would certainly be interested to learn the results of such a process, but not nearly as interested as I am in tackling the second question above. Against the expansionists, I believe that the answer to the second question is not dependent on the answer to the first. Whatever the prospects for tournament Scrabble to thrive or survive, and whatever my personal stake in those prospects, I cannot convince myself that Scrabble indeed <i>matters.</i> Each time the issue of expansion arises, I notice something new, based on my acculturation no doubt, which further congeals this inference into a belief.

How could I, as a dedicated/addicted Scrabbler, even consider answering that "it doesn't matter" whether or not tournament Scrabble survives? Would I ever claim that jazz, orchestras, and baseball "don't matter" either? These other things have been even more important to me for a longer period of time than has Scrabble, yet I may indeed respond this way, because the question is not whether these things matter <i>to me</i>, but whether they matter in a larger sense. I have noticed that Scrabblers as a group, like true-believer classical and jazz musicians, demonstrate no exceptional aptitude for minding this distinction, yet it is the <i>only</i> aptitude that might qualify them to understand their own predicament without being able to truly step outside of it. If you attend enough Scrabble tournaments, pretty quickly you will lose patience for people talking at you and over each other about what matters to them. Usually it is something really good or really bad about their most recent game, and usually attribution bias features prominently in their narrative. The chatter around expansion is very much of a piece with this aspect of our community, an aspect which I am neither the first nor the only one to notice, and which is not unique to us. I myself can't help but be much the same mosaic of implicit biases and blinkered perception as my acquaintances in music, Scrabble, and sports fandom. What is different about me, it seems, is that I am more sensitive to (or perhaps just more fixated upon) this distinction between things that matter to me and things that matter in a larger sense. If you want to argue against this distinction, for example, as some seemingly very smart people have held, that "greed is good," I can at least listen. To debate even this quite debatable assertion, though, the two of us first need to agree on our terms before we can consider whether the two notions can in fact be reconciled. In asking whether Scrabble matters "in a larger sense," I am counting on my readers to share my conception of what that "larger sense" is. If, on the other hand, our disagreement extends to this area as well, then we have bigger problems than Scrabble.

What does <i>not</i> need to be reestablished and reiterated in advance is just how fun, useful, artistic, heady, clever, or diverting Scrabble, baseball, or jazz all can be. <i>Fun</i> things deserve to <i>exist</i>. Only <i>necessary</i> things deserve to <i>expand</i>. What is <i>necessary</i>? Start here: The reason that any particular fun thing is not necessary in and of itself is that it does not take all the fun along with it to its grave. If baseball were to suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, we would still have plenty of spectator sports, ball sports, field sports, sports which are slower than hockey, faster than curling, and so on. We would even have a few untimed sports, a few where explosive athleticism is not an absolute prerequisite to high-level skill, a few where the dimensions of each playing field are not fully standardized. And to be sure, there would remain plenty of competitive spirit and aesthetic sensibility in general circulation, and from time to time these two seemingly incongruent human instituions would merge, taking the form of various, as yet unforeseeable cultural productions. The more specifically a given combination of attributes is thought to belong to baseball, the more deeply it pains baseball fans to grant that even then it is not perfectly unique to baseball. But if your argument that baseball is <i>necessary</i> hinges on the fact that it is the last or the only sport which exemplifies a particular trait, I challenge you to prove that this is actually the case. And if you succeed that far, I challenge you to show that the given trait is <i>necessary</i> in and of itself.

There is a simple reason why this two-part challenge cannot be met: when something is <i>necessary</i>, human beings create and recreate it redundantly throughout culture. This is why the inventory of things people do for fun is orders of magnitude larger than the inventory of untimed sports or contrapuntal musical styles. And so, good luck getting any two people to agree as to which contrapuntal musical style is the most fun; but I'd bet you can find a wider consensus that fun, generically, is not just a good but indeed a necessary part of life, and within that a sizable cohort for whom some form of sports and/or music comprises all or part of the answer to this need. And so, while something certainly is lost anytime an object of elective affinity passes into oblivion, this is a loss of the contigent, not of the universal. In other words, individuals who have developed around a given cultural form may experience its loss as profound, perhaps overwhelming, yet in terms of society at large the loss may not be felt at all. What matters to us doesn't always matter quite as much or even at all to the vast majority of our social cohort. This stance is enshrined in the very foundations of majoritarian democracy, for better or worse, and we have a whole sublexicon of dirty words for groups who attempt to subvert these foundations to favor their own minoritarian interests, whether religious, economic, political, or aesthetic.

All of that being as it is, the question remains of which types and degrees of loss people can reasonably be expected to endure, and of how policy ought to reflect the answer to that question. This is a very complex and sensitive topic. It may not seem nearly so complex or sensitive in the particular cases under discussion here, but I am less sure now than I was before beginning work on this series that this is actually the case.

At the opposite extreme of what I have called the "elective" lies what might be called the "ordained," identities which individuals inherit by circumstances of birth rather than by conscious choice later on, and the loss of which can be intensely traumatic once these identities are fully formed in adults. While different facets of identity certainly come with different degrees of attachment, there is no doubting that an ever-accelerating pace of change in all such areas has defined modernity, that it's quite unclear what can or should be done to slow down this pace, and that such a pace represents a new and ever-escalating source of trauma for human beings caught up in its wake, this because human beings are seldom able to adapt at such a pace.

Migration and technological change are two of the most visible and oft-discussed arenas from which I think those of us caught up in seemingly less urgent cultural matters may nonetheless be able to extract some important guidance. In this connection I am following closely the work of Yale Psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler, who has brought an unusual combination of authority and sensitivity to bear on such questions in his book <i>Brain and Culture.</i> For Wexler,

<blockquote>The world presents an immensely rich and varied stream of stimulation (information) to the individual. Internal neural structures are created that correspond to those aspects of environmental stimulation that are most commonly experienced by a particular individual. These structures then limit, shape, and focus perception on aspects of the information stream that are most like themselves. This increases the sense of correspondence between the external world and the internal one, and progressively limits the power of sensory stimulation to change the structures. Concordance between external stimulation and internal structure is experienced as pleasurable, and individuals preferentially place themselves in situations in which incoming stimulation is likely to be in agreement with their internal structure. When discordant information is encountered, that information is ignored, discredited, re-interpreted, or forgotten.
(p. 169) </blockquote>

Of course the consequences of this can be cruel, a curse of the human condition as often remarked upon in literature and the humanities as within neuroscience. Namely,

<blockquote>Learning and action are in an inverse relationship throughout the life-span. We learn the most when we are unable to act. By the time we are able to act on the world, our ability to learn has dramatically diminished.
(p. 143)</blockquote>

Wexler indeed might as well have written this last bit specifically about artists, or perhaps about contemporary Scrabblers or baseball fans who watch in horror as the walls of their cultural niche seem to be collapsing in on them against the imagined backdrop of the good old days. For Wexler, though, the great contemporary crisis of neural rigidity is nothing less than a humanitarian crisis, borne of the age of mass migration which cannot help but land many millions of people in circumstances bound to be intensely uncomfortable for them.

<blockquote>More tragic still is the plight of the adult members of these disappearing cultures. Their world is being pulled out from under their feet and most are unable to learn and adjust to the ways of a new culture. Even when they make the effort, their neurobiological development is out of synchrony with the opportunities for skill and role development in the new culture. There is no match in their new environments for the knowledge and skills they developed in their original environments.
(p. 236)</blockquote>

Doubly tragic is the difficulty these people's new neighbors can have in understanding or even perceiving their loss.

<blockquote>It can sometimes be difficult to believe that people from cultures very different from our own have feelings of hope, disappointment, fear, loss, and depression like ours. Or that they feel happiness, peace, and satisfaction in realizing childhood goals, contributing to and receiving the approval of a vital community to which they belong, and assuming the roles of the parents and other community elders they had admired. However, all evidence is that such feelings are universal, and so they must be if the neurocultural hypotheses developed in this book are accurate.
(pp. 236-7)</blockquote>

Scrabblers and jazzers alike can at least be thankful that our dilemma pales in comparison to the challenges posed by mass migration and the larger question of the viability of truly multicultural societies. But I am not here to argue on grounds of relative privation; that maneuver is properly labeled a fallacy. Saying "it could be worse" is meaningless when, quite obviously, things could also be much better too. Rather than abandoning all hope to the relative, my guiding conceit here, as for Wexler above, is to tease out the absolute. From a physiological perspective, Wexler lays out an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the differences between elective and ordained cultural refugees are differences of degree and not of type, and sometimes not even that. This includes, apropos of the present topic, studies which track behavior against the performance of favorite sports teams. "The physiological correlates of these subjective and behavioral responses," he writes of the elective and the ordained, "are remarkable." (146) Indeed they are, most of all because such close correlation testifies that physiologically we are rather indifferent to the question of what matters in the larger sense and, instead, overwhelmingly governed by that of what matters to us, all the same if the two domains overlap greatly as if they don't overlap at all. This much we cannot change. And yet, given some time and space for conscious reflection, I think that very few of us are actually quite as indifferent to the distiction between personal and collective interests as our physiology would indicate, even if we do not all draw this distinction in the same place. I will not be proclaiming a correct way to draw it, but I have noticed a tendency for devotees of niche culture to behave as if such a distinction did not exist at all. Perhaps they will notice that I noticed.








Feeling Big and Small (ii)

Disallowing relative privation from the dialogue protects the extremely vulnerable from the charge that they should accept their circumstances as long as a few other people can be pointed to who have it even worse. But it also dictates that an overall high standard of living does not in and of itself warrant a shifting of the baseline proportionally upward. No one should have to accept remediable deprivations just because these deprivations "could be worse;" but nor does an overall high standard of living mean that "it should be better" for those living just above the baseline. The world owes us the baseline; it does not owe each of us the cultural porridge we deem to be just the right temperature, especially not when our own tolerance of difference in our midst has a direct and tangible impact on those whose basic needs are in danger of not being met. 

Tolerance means being willing to sacrifice all the way down to the baseline, not just within a certain distance of it, and not just a certain distance away from our current position. Remember Wexler here: "It can sometimes be difficult to believe that people from cultures very different from our own have feelings of hope, disappointment, fear, loss, and depression like ours." The reason this can be difficult to see is that different cultures develop different forms for expressing and meeting these needs. Nonetheless, I am casting my lot with Wexler in holding that there is <i>something</i> essential underlying so many contingent cultural constructions that only appear incommensurable in their aesthetic surfaces. This is why universal needs matter. It is why fun, creativity, release, and communion matter. As long as tournament Scrabble is around, I plan on meeting these needs of mine that way. By some accident of happenstance, my cultural wiring developed in such a way that at the more or less fully-formed age of 31 I found myself happily addicted to a new, culturally contingent form of release. But if tournament Scrabble does not survive, my compensatory claims against the new cultural forms are weak claims indeed. Culture can break my heart many times over without falling below the humanitarian baseline I am owed.

I would insist that the satisfactions of Scrabble are nothing like "satisfaction in realizing childhood goals, contributing to and receiving the approval of a vital community...assuming the roles of the parents and other community elders," or anything else that <i>matters</i>. Game addiction is one thing, but if Scrabble matters to you as much or more than the things on this latter list, I think you need to check yourself. You may be irreparably attached to something the world does not owe you, with an affective intensity befitting only the things it does owe you. <i>All of us living today are trapped relying on contingent cultural forms to meet universal needs, while at the same time the pace of cultural change has accelerated to the point of being inhumane.</i> This much can be said in much the same terms regarding ethnic identity as regarding sports fandom and games playing.

We are all vulnerable to change, and physiologically such changes affect us very similarly even when their respective social implications are highly incommensurate. What is perfectly avoidable in theory, and yet in reality is emerging as an extremely volatile and hazardous element of post-industrial society, is that many games players' "childhood goals," "vital community," and "community elders" <i>are</i> one and all confined to the gaming circle they inhabit. And, not surprisingly, the things we place at the center of our personal cultural universe become the things we tend to feel quite justified in proselytizing for, more or less offensively in good times and defensively in bad ones. At that point I confess that nothing I have said here so far is of much help. While from a moralistic perspective refugees of war and genocide may be easier to forgive than relatively wealthy consumers of niche culture for losing sight of the distinction between wants and needs, from a coldly pragmatic perspective it seems that post-industrial society is within itself quite able to churn out cultural refugees much faster than these refugees can, by any measure, be accommodated. We currently see this dynamic almost everywhere, along with the peculiarly postmodern phenomenon of what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" ballooning into veritable Culture Wars of all shapes and sizes. In its most pedestrian guise, this condition manifests itself in a constant barrage of thinly-veiled or barely-veiled persuasion campaigns: pop-up ads, flash mobs, billboards attached to most any structure, vehicle, or organism which can support them. These campaigns are rationalized by their executors as endemic cogs in the machine of commerce. I think they are better understood as sub-clinical forms of intolerance.

<center><b>---</b></center>

To be sure, you need not be raised in a foreign country or religious sect to feel intensely out of sync with the time and place you have been thrust into by birth; rather, a mere dash of brain and culture will suffice perfectly well. The high misfit quotient among games players in particular is an old trope. Certainly I have come to appreciate that I rarely feel more normal than when I am around other Scrabble players; also that this has not necessarily enabled me to enjoy much "normal" social interaction, since I may in fact be <i>too</i> normal for most them. A cruel irony in my case, but merely one of many which I must learn to live with. The reason I must learn to live with it is because, sad as it is, it doesn't quite fall below the threshhold of basic human dignity I am owed. When it comes to needs, rights, and dignity, it is to abstract baselines and not to other people that I choose to compare my situation. The Western world has done a terrible job of actually extending its citizens these basic dignities, but at least it has produced a staggering array of intellectual effort towards codifying what they are. If it is not possible to get the whole world to agree here, it at least becomes proportionately easier to find agreement the smaller the community one is dealing with and the greater the freedom of people to "sort" themselves accordingly. Conversely, a moving moral target based on the ever-changing circumstances of other people in one's midst (be it a modern, "Western" midst or any other) can only run aground on the "narcissism of small differences," perhaps also on the enduring human tendency to "want what you can't have," and both of these ever more acutely the greater the pace of change.

I submit, then, that it is high time for Scrabblers, jazzers, and baseballers alike to quit worrying about what other people have and instead rededicate ourselves to the beauty of what we do have. I want to replace outreach with inreach. I want for us to become the best version of ourselves whether or not there are any more of us in the pipeline. Rather than mounting persuasion campaigns against the unpersuaded, I want for our niche to serve those self-determined individuals (many fewer, no doubt) whose peculiar sensibilities can <i>only</i> be served by us. And where structural barriers exist to marginalized groups, <i>I want to deliver them to self-determination, not to Scrabble tournaments.</i> As for the ultimate fate of word games, board games, variance games, strategy, creativity, competition, community...none of these things die with us even if Scrabble, that pecualiar combination of so many broader elements, does. And if we do not agree amongst ourselves about what exactly Scrabble, jazz, or baseball should be, then that is for the better, not for the worse, because this kind of dissent is precisely how new cultural productions take shape.
























Expansionists fear splintering of this kind simply because it "dilutes" the sheer numbers of followers that any one niche can claim, and because "niche" is a dirty word when all the other "niches" make ours look small and tribal by comparison; but this splintering is precisely the process by which new cultural forms evolve, and I might say typically at a more human pace co-determined by the principals rather than the inhuman pace of minimally regulated post-industrial commerce and the "mass" or "popular" cultures which have arisen out of it. This is just one of the ways that the demands of commerce and culture are antagonistic. Not all splinterings are rational per se, but they are all, definitionally I would say, generative, at least in some small degree.














possible reasons to doubt that recruiting young adherents necessarily equates to future growth:

do all young Scrabblers simply grow up to be adult Scrabblers, who subsequently age into elder Scrabblers? This is assuming more than it might on the surface seem to. It's safe to say that recreational Scrabble does appeal to all ages, but that is not the same as saying that it appeals to the same person at every age. People do change their elective affinities throughout life even as their brain-and-culture becomes rather less plastic. Most people will change their leisure habits more often and more substantially throughout their lives than they will their religion or their ethnic self-identity. If the "life cycle" is indeed anything like Erik Erikson's model, with the dynamic interaction of inner biology and outer society leading to a handful of shifts in role and self-image throughout one's life, it would then be surprising indeed if the less identity-bound elements of cultural production did not also palpably shift from time to time.

Here and now there is one particular aspect of society which looms larger than decreers of the nursing home adage give it credit for: middle-aged people tend to disappear from many elective leisure activities when they have children. My experience, at least, is that orchestra audiences and Scrabble tournaments alike are hardly lacking for acolytes in their teens and early twenties, but rather those in their thirties and forties.















Feeling Big and Small (iii)

Previously I argued that individual cultural loss does not necessarily rise to the level of social injustice. If it surely would be asking too much of a displaced person to simply adopt a new religion on the spot to meet their generic religious needs, nonetheless it must be meaningful that a common label like "religion" is noncontroversially applied to a great many mutually antagonistic and incompatible belief systems. What it means, I think, is that there is <i>some</i> area of overlap, however small, which permits this label its validity and establishes its currency. This area is far too small to permit simple interchangability, but it must also be coextensive with some human need which, on the basis of the overlap, presents itself as a major force in human life, if not quite as a true "universal." The variations are dispensible on a social level no matter the general importance of the theme, and this no matter their importance to any given individual's development. 

The ostensible weightiness of religion seems to contrast sharply with the triviality of elective leisure choices, but physiologically and psychologically it is the absolute intensity of the attachment more so than the relative valuation dictated by social norms which determines individuals' ability to cope with loss. As leisure time and consumption have increased, attachments in those areas have become ever more central to people's identities; indeed, for many of us they have themselves become our "culture" from which the ever-accelerating pace of change constantly threatens to cut us loose. At the same time as wars, development, and environmental change are displacing people faster than the rest of the world can accommodate them, post-industrial society is itself an equally profligate generator of internal cultural refugees whose "first world problems" may look trivial from the outside yet are plenty potent enough to land them in the depths of despair. The international backdrop of war and displacement invites commission of the fallacy of relative privation; and yet there is an enormous amount wrong with the way the rich world lives, despite how rich we are. The sociological evidence for this is not far seek. Ethical coping then becomes a paramount postmodern skill, lest we descend further yet into persuasion saturation and Culture War.

Fully-formed adults face the greatest difficulty in abandoning the contingent, surface elements of their culture, even though it is the deep, universal elements which form the base of their hierarchy of needs. Indeed, we meet our basic needs through cultural forms which are perishable; a precarious situation and a human irony as cruel as anything out of Hobbes or Nietzsche. Elective affinities like play and spectatorship are not (quite) religions, but as cultural constructions they exhibit most of the same intrinsic dynamics, whether or not they actually bear quite the same psychological weight that religion typically does. This is to say: even where the social consequences of being left behind are not as severe, the difficulty in evolving along with the times is as difficult in the most trivial matters of leisure as it is in the most weighty matters of spirituality. Here is another irony as supremely cruel as the first.

What exactly <i>is</i> lost, then, when transient cultural phenomena like Scrabble, baseball, and jazz reach their late autumns? The indispensible human instutions of play, competition, and art surely will live on. And though true believers may cry foul at the suggestion, many of the finer nuances will live on too. Anagramming, irregular playing-field dimensions, and musical counterpoint were around before, and they'll be around after these linchpins of twentieth-century American culture have decayed (or more likely transformed) beyond our culture-bound ability to recognize them. Future cultural production will no doubt take off in directions we can scarcely imagine today, reflecting needs we can scracely imagine, reflecting circumstances we can scarcely imagine. Much will be gained this way. What will be lost? Scrabble-<i>ness</i>. Baseball-<i>ness</i>. Jazz-<i>ness</i>. As an intellectual exercise I previously have broken these <i>nesses</i> into smaller component parts. In my view this is the only way to reveal what the rhetoric of expansionism artfully conceals. But like mathematical operations which reconfigure an equation into yielding up the value of its variables, this has involved some severe smudging of the surface. So, I now want to reassemble these cultural phenomena from the semantic hash I have made of them.

What is lost when culture moves on is the <i>-ness</i>, the surface, the whole which is more than the sum of its parts. In Wexler's terms, we might say the <i>-ness</i> is what we seek when as "individuals [we] preferentially place [our]selves in situations in which incoming stimulation is likely to be in agreement with [our] internal structure." When our neural "structures then limit, shape, and focus perception on aspects of the information stream that are most like themselves," it is the integrated <i>-ness</i> and not the isolable components that we are responding to. The <i>-ness</i> is the transient surface of culture. The transient surface of culture, though, is the inessential part of culture, the part which majoritarian democratic institutions have no inherent obligation to protect, at least by their own internal logic. The <i>-ness</i> matters to us, but it doesn't <i>matter</i> in any broader sense.

At the current rate of cultural and technological change, it is more possible than ever to be made a cultural refugee in one's own time and place. The good news, though, is that unlike refugees from real-life wars and genocides, we are likely to find many safe harbors welcoming us. That's because we are, to extend the analogy yet further beyond the bounds of good taste, the right kind of immigrant. There is no shortage of tournament gaming scenes, startup spectator sports, or starving artists lining to enjoy our patronage. Unlike most romantic breakups, a cultural breakup casts us headlong into the role of buyers in the broadest, deepest buyers' market human culture has yet known. As one jagged nugget of relationship advice would have it, nothing cures a broken heart faster than a brand new piece of ass.

The sellers want us so badly, in fact, that they court us relentlessly with targeted ads online and all manner of publicity stunts IRL. They deputize the gatekeepers of the internet to collect as much information about us as possible. They weaponize the findings of social psychology and behavioral economics in order to exploit our weaknesses; to activate our fast, impulsive brain and preempt our slow, deliberate one; in short, to cause us to lose sight of our own own self-interest and temporarily (mis)align it with theirs. The advertisers have spent a century and a half perfecting the art of misleading without lying. They quickly became much better at it even than the politicians, who have a far longer history on which to draw but less room to maneuver. All of which is to say that advertising, though it nominally lives in the realm of commerce, is in practice highly antagonistic to market efficiency, rational self-interest, and most every other theoretical ideal underlying the conceit to ethical capitalism.

When we are cut loose from an elective cultural relationship, we are not merely hurt and confused but indeed <i>vulnerable</i> too. Here we would be best served not to rush into anything too quickly. We are not in a very good frame of mind to judge whether a prospective rebound is anything more than that; and if it is not, we can end up much worse off than we were before. Having taken as a given that tournament Scrabble is dying out, I have cast the Scrabbler as the bereaved party here. Expansionists, however, are more interested in clinging to the broken relationship, and are willing to become advertisers themselves in order to do so.

In a past online exchange, one of the most vocal Scrabble expansionists wrote to me that:

<blockquote>The entire tournament gaming sector over the last 10 years has grown, year upon year, including games that fit within Scrabble's genre (chess, poker, go, etc.)

These scenes have grown largely by expanding more into technology, marketing their tournament scene and their players, through video, content creation, promotion, marketing, etc.</blockquote>

He previously has made the obligatory point about smartphones and social media creating a connected, untapped mass of word game players just waiting to be marketed to.

And about the inability or unwillingness of Scrabble organizations to undertake anything of the sort, he adds that

<blockquote>any of the players who care about and/or understand anything about growth, technology, and/or marketing are frustrated</blockquote>

with this lack of movement.




A couple of points here strain credulity. Most of all, the positing of a "genre"-like affinity between Scrabble and any of these other games is a supposition which fails precisely at the point that formal tournament play begins. Formal tournament play rarefies the air; it magnifies the differences among these games and conceals the similarities. I think it is intrinsic factors like, say, the lack of a challenge rule and not extrinsic ones like promotion which explain why the Words With Friends app has spread like wildfire while tournament Scrabble remains a relatively lonely place.

It is also worth pointing out that chess and poker are not exactly tasting popularity for the first time only now. Both games have been through multiple sensation cycles within living memory.













































Feeling Big and Small (iv)

These are tough times for lovers of niche culture that used to be mainstream culture. It is tough enough to be the baseball purist, the jazz nazi, the conservatory brat, or the word nerd; to be all of those things all at once or on a rotating basis is a recipe for thoroughgoing alienation. At that point the desire to expand or popularize the things that you think are cool becomes very understandable. I would like nothing more than to never have to hear another hockey or esports fan heap scorn on baseball for being "boring," or another idiot savant games player declare that XU is not "really" a word. But then come the devilish details of actually achieving expansion, at which point for me it becomes intensely <i>un</i>appealing.

I have argued that universal needs <i>matter</i> in a way that contingent cultural forms for meeting these needs do not. Even if this is granted, the question still arises of what, exactly, is quite so wrong about a group of people banding together to willfully conserve or expand the cultural practices they hold in common importance. It would be easy to point to much past history of such projects both originating in and terminating in spectacular moral failure. It would be easy to rely too heavily on Levitt and Dubner's conclusion that "The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists...but the principle is the same" (<i>Freakonomics</i>, p. 64), or on dime store leftisms such as "The difference between a salesperson and a mugger is that the mugger is at least honest about his intentions." I happen to believe that both of these assertions speak truth to power. Still, it remains to be proven that new expansionist projects are bound to reproduce these same moral failures. As with investing, "past performance is not indicative of future results." Mustn't it be possible to advertise without manipulating? To sell without deceiving? To promote without pridefulness? To desire without avarice? Alternatively, as Jane Jacobs proposed, is there not in fact a "commercial moral syndrome" which is internally coherent and just in these very respects, so long as it is applied <i>only</i> to commerce and not mixed with other pursuits to form "monstrous moral hybrids?" Or, against Jacobs, is past history in fact all the indication we need that no such end runs can be made around the moral minefields of commerce in the age of constant contact?






Marketing is a form of intolerance. Again, a difference of degree rather than type.

And really, what are marketing and promotion but sub-clinical forms of intolerance?










In chronicling the emergence of early capitalism, Lewis Mumford wrote that "the capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity...into positive social virtues." Mumford must not have been particularly religious himself, and he must have been writing off the cuff, because he rather spectacularly botched the list, but the three (not five) he seems to be pointing to are pride, envy, and avarice. Capitalism has shape-shifted many times since the late middle ages, but these specific accusations have dogged it continuously. That fact in and of itself does not prove anything, but it does provide context and invite reflection. "Marketing [our] tournament scene and [our] players, through video, content creation, promotion" sounds perfectly innocent in comparison to the more brutal episodes of resource extraction and human enslavement which have marked recent centuries. But once again, arguing relative privation gets us nowhere useful. In more absolute terms, what remarks such as these betray is that, as Scrabblers, we are <i>proud</i> of our game, we <i>envy</i> the tournament scenes that other gamers enjoy, and we <i>covet</i> a piece of that action. I realize I am now at risk of putting words in other people's mouths, so if there is any other reasonable way to parse these comments I would like to know what it is. For now I cannot see one. At that point, it matters not that we feel our pride to be honest, our envy to be enlivening, and our greed to be good. What does matter, I think, is whether this kind of moral relativism is really, truly something that we are at peace with. Moreover, if we are committed to an elective affinity with a fervor befitting an ordained identity, is this really the moral posture we want to project to the outside social world?

I hasten to add that I am not the least bit Christian or religious person. I don't believe in the afterlife or in eternal damnation, and if lust is a sin then I am as much the sinner as any marketer or promoter.

























Marketing is actually a profound subversion of free market principles. Marketing is the deliberate creation of inbalances of information and of market inefficiencies. Marketing deliberately hunts down, targets, and exploits those elements of human decision-making which psychological research has shown most apt to break down. It is a deliberate subversion of the faculties of rational self-interest on which the central conceit of free-market orthodoxy rests. And because all of this can be done better the more money and expertise one is able to throw at the problem, the spoils of marketing accrue most readily to those already possessing great wealth and power. Hard work may make a few people wealthy, but it is through marketing that they stay that way. Economies riddled with skillful elite persuasion campaigns are as unfree as anything Lenin or Mao ever cooked up.

The reason free-marketeers love the internet so much (or at least they did back in the good old heady days of the aughts) is that the internet greatly alleviates a massive practical problem that had long confounded the central theoretical conceits of classical economics. Information is the lifeblood of decision-making, and incomplete, false, slow-moving, or selectively dispensed information too greatly favors the already-wealthy over the barely-surviving. Information asymmetry makes a farce of the very concept of rational self-interest, which can only ever be as rational as the available information makes possible. Now that our collective honeymoon with the internet is over, what has actually unfolded in its wake is that the elite persuasion machine has merely adapted itself to the new information environment. To be sure, certain intrinsic aspects of this environment have shifted the ground a bit. The sheer pace of technological change favors youth, which is a welcome and overdue check on the obstructions to progress which entrenched economic interests have historically presented. It also has, in several notable instances, enabled people near the bottom of the social hierarchy to coalesce into an elite-level force. This latter phenomenon, at least in its recent forms, would indeed not have been possible even 15 years ago, bespeaking a seismic social shift unfolded over a remarkably short period of time. Yet the original sin of marketing is recapitulated even here: ultimately it is not the studied decision-makers but the lizard brain, the culture warriors, the isolated, the bigoted and the intolerant, those whose fervor is strong and absolute enough as to be dangerous, who have proven themselves most reliably and effectively roused to collective action through a computer screen. The emergence of infrastructure for the hitherto unthinkably efficient distribution of information has begotten perverse and unintended applications. The wired mindful practice "slactivism" while powerful state actors and well-funded lobbying groups proceed more or less as they had throughout prior eras of repression and exploitation, but now with powerful new tools at their disposal and the masses literally lining up at the store at midnight for the privilege of installing those tools at the center of their lives.



































The Nursing Home adage is not so much alarmist as it is misleading, serving as it does the premise that <i>something must be done.</i> It frames the decline of a given cultural phenomenon as a failure of agency, whereas such decline actually reflects overarching conditions and forces which are bigger than the biggest cultural interest groups, stronger than the most persuasive incentivization scheme. Of course it also localizes this failure of agency to particular social agents, to people and organizations, to particular policies and decisions, and to decisive moments in time. It makes a <i>tabula rasa</i> of the world-as-it-is, onto which the will of an interest group can be imposed in direct proportion to group desire or motivation. All of this renders the problem manageable for human actors, brings it down to our level as it were; but it is neither a valid nor a true rendering of how mass culture and commerce work. Not just any artifact of culture can be willed into (or out of) existence in such simple terms. The tiny scale of the tournament Scrabble world cannot be explained purely in terms of willful human construction any more than can Scrabble's phenomenal early retail success, baseballs's heyday, or the 42nd Street jazz culture. Culture and commerce are dynamic and intractable. The nursing home adage makes out expansion to be a game of pure skill and will. Really it is overwhelmingly a game of chance.

Despite the veritable retail sensation Scrabble has enjoyed almost continuously since its inception, <i>tournament</i> Scrabble has never actually had a heydey remotely approaching that of baseball, orchestras, or even (yes, this is really saying something) of jazz. I am not saying that track record is supremely meaningful; as the investment adage has it, past performance is not indicative of future results. I grant that it is impossible to predict the future. I also insist that it is possible to study the past; there is no certainty to be had here, but there is a fairly well-documented history and a preponderance of evidence. Even jazz was a mainstream phenomenon for a decade or so! I would bet that this is not coming back any time soon, but if you told me that it is, or that it should, I at least would have something firm to hold up to your assertion. The swing-era culture machine was not so different from the contemporary one that a few connections, at least, cannot be drawn. Comparing tournament Scrabble, meanwhile, to any of the seemingly reasonable models for expansion seems oddly more tenuous. I'm not even sure that Scrabble's own popular retail version has much to teach us about the appeal of tournament play. Are the two not indeed as vastly different as their different histories suggest?

Ironically, the current landscape of internet and social media which makes willful expansion imaginable also furnishes the most damning indictment of its prospects. An internet user who is already interested in tournament Scrabble can quickly find their way to just about any resource they might desire. Whatever the ultimate reasons for tournament Scrabble's niche appeal, it would be absurd to argue that the Scrabble community has not already made resources sufficiently available or accessible. Anecdotally I am led to believe it would also be absurd to argue that Scrabble itself suffers from low brand awareness. In short, I think that lots and lots of people know what Scrabble is and have instant access to an array of Scrabble-related resources. Ditto orchestral music on Spotify, baseball on TV, and Wal-Marts that stock musical instruments. The age of access has touched most every corner of culture and commerce, it has been instrumental in the fantastic growth of a great many cultural and commercial endeavors, yet this age remains the age of sclerotic decline for Scrabble, jazz, orchestras, baseball. <i>Something must be done.</i> But what can be done?






















































If any authoritative, empirical studies exist of tournament Scrabble's appeal or brand recognition, I am ignorant of them. Into this vacuum, then, are bound to rush the usual hash of anecdotes and outliers. In that department, it has been at least entertaining, if not also informative, to find the most recently launched platform for online Scrabble described by one user as "crawling with experts," to see another anguished user post "I have a serious question...is everyone here a tournament player?", and to watch unfold a chat exchange wherein an irate newb accuses a longtime tournament player of cheating only to be set straight by several observers who disclose the player's identity and vouch for this player's integrity. These latter events culminated in an awkward apology, followed by a somewhat less awkward acceptance of the apology, but one wonders if, as the sensitivity trainers would have it, the toothpaste cannot actually be put back in the tube. The accusor found his opponent's words "incredible," and it stands to reason that this feeling, at least, cannot have changed much upon establishing that the opponent found these words without aid of a computer program. This type of exchange is endemic to online Scrabble, but I am not afraid of making too much of it. Rather, I think the expansionists make too little of it.

The inventor of Scrabble is said to have toiled quite intensely over the minutia of board layout and tile distribution. The depth and brilliance of the final product continuously reveals itself to the committed student of Scrabble strategy, but I have come to believe that this is only the second most impressive testament to Alfred Butts' powers of lucidity and invention. What is yet more impressive is that Butts explicitly envisioned the game as diversionary, recreational, a balm for tough times rather the irritant in good times which it is for today's tournament players (to say nothing of any oblivious newbs who might stumble into their path), and in this aspiration he has succeeded to such an extent that most people who come in contact with the game intuitively find the very thought of expert play and sanctioned tournaments rather repulsive.

For the benefit of any dubious readers, be they expansionists insiders or uninitiated outsiders, here are all the instances of such an attitude that I was able to find in the first sixty or so Goodreads reviews of Stefan Fatsis' book <i>Word Freak</i>:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8954.Word_Freak


from Trevor's review:
If you like paying a brief visit to a world that - well - most people would only ever really want to visit, and even then maybe from a distance - this book will do it for you. The guy who wrote this book did more than just visit - and in a sense he paid the price.

Emma's comment to Trevor:
See, I don't really like Scrabble, because it's not about making an interesting word, it's about what word gets you the most points. It's accountancy disguised as literature. Playing Scrabble is less about moving your tiles around to be the most inventive with the letters you have than counting and recounting your available options. I much prefer Pictionary :) but no one will play it with me because I've been to art school! Which misses the point about what wins in Pictionary: the best understanding of how to signify something quickly. Not 'make a good drawing'

from Ulysses' review:
Before reading this, I often wondered to myself: "Hey, I'm half decent at Scrabble. Should I maybe take it more seriously, and devote some of my spare time to trying to reach the next level of expertise? Should I enter tournaments and try to play competitively?" Now that I've read this book, I know the answers to these questions conclusively: Hell no! The author's vivid depiction of the world of competitive Scrabble makes it abundantly clear that one has no hope of becoming a serious Scrabble expert unless one is willing to devote the majority of one's free time (or probably, the majority of one's time, period) over many years to etching the complete Scrabble lexicon into one's memory, and also learning to think in anagrams to the same extent that we normally think in words. The relatively small group of players who form the highest ranks of the competitive world are on a plane that Scrabble hobbyists, no matter how good they are, cannot hope to attain without devoting themselves entirely to the game. Having learned this lesson via this book, I found myself feeling like a massive burden had been lifted from me-- I no longer need to think for even a second about whether I should attempt to more fully realize my "Scrabble potential." And I can thus go back to enjoying the game perhaps even more than I did before, now that I know that it can never be more than a hobby for me. And for this valuable knowledge, I owe Fatsis (and this book) my thanks.

from Bikeshopgirl's comment to Ulysses:
I love Scrabble. This book documented how some people have managed to suck the fun out of it (and out of their own lives, by the by). I couldn't finish it.

from Tung's review:
as hard as Fatsis tries to make the tournaments come to life and convey their excitement, it isn’t enough. Scrabble tournaments simply aren’t exciting unless you are talented enough to grasp (and interested in grasping) the difficulty of the plays upon which the games are won or loss. Describing how playing a five-letter word instead of a seven-letter word cost someone a game doesn’t jump off the page no matter how good the prose. Second, what Fatsis recognizes about competitive Scrabble also becomes the undoing of this book: Scrabble tournaments are won and lost due to a player’s ability to spit out completely obscure words. Not only does this immediately distance 99% of all readers from this insular world, but it also makes the tournament summaries even less accessible. Fatsis describing someone playing WATERZOOI to win doesn’t resonate with anyone. Lastly, despite the book’s attempts to compare Scrabble to all other competitive pursuits and thus make the subject matter more relatable to readers, the obsessive behaviors displayed by the quirky characters upon whom Fatsis focuses his attention only serves to further emphasize how completely unlike other competitive pursuits Scrabble really is. An interesting read in the same way The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is interesting – you want to read about crazy people.

from meg's review:
i was fully expecting to love this book, but i had to stop a few chapters in. there was some interesting views into the world of competitive scrabble and portraits of its motely competitors, but i was bugged by the emphasis of points over love of new and interesting words. so much of it is about memorization and winning tactics, which, i guess is what the competition part is all about... but it just made me want to go play scrabble for fun instead of reading about all the people who take it so seriously it stops being fun. 

from Vonia's review:
It was a 4 Star for me at the beginning & again at the conclusion, but in between was really simply TMI!!!!!.... It was a play by play... literally... Maybe it's because I'm into Scrabble... but not that into Scrabble... but even merely one one-hundreth of the intensity expressed in this nonfiction work causes me to not only see the board game in a whole new light, but in a negative way... 

from Amy's review:
ultimately, this was so far removed from my scrabble experiences, that I had a hard time relating

from Shannon's review:
The author engaged in scrabble tournaments and one thing I’ve learned is that if you want to take all the fun out of scrabble then enter a tournament. When you think of the game of scrabble you think of words don’t you? Maybe that’s because it’s a word game, but According to the author scrabble isn’t a word game, it’s a math game and your vocabulary doesn’t even matter. You don’t need to know that a Kwijibo is a North American Balding ape, you just need to know that there is such a word as Kwijibo and you need to memorize list after list of these words while giving no thought to their meanings at all. Ugh, what’s the point if I wanted to play a math game I would play, well I wouldn’t play a math game at all, and neither would you. That’s why there are no math games as successful as Scrabble.

from Becci's review:
I enjoyed the portions that covered the history of Scrabble and its ongoing evolution, some of the memoir portion, and occasionally the character studies. But when Fatsis word-geeked out and painstakingly detailed the play by play of all those tournaments, my eyes glazed over. It took me 8 months to finish this book! But I still enjoy the game and may make an effort to study some word lists.

from Emily's review:
I love books that take a tiny subject, make it fascinating, and then satisfy that fascination. Word Freak, for me, satisfied more interest than it ever actually awakened; its main fault is that it's too thorough for the casual reader.

from Laura Zimmerman's review:
I don't mean to detract from Mr. Fatsis' writing by giving the book three stars; it was only the subject that didn't hold my interest

from Jane Hoppe's review:
I thought I was a word freak. After reading the book Word Freak,however, I realize I'm apparently just a lover of words. ...unless you ARE a word freak in the obsessed sense or someone really really really wanting to win at living room Scrabble, this book holds limited interest.

from Evan's review:
I would have been interested in reading the blow-by-blow winning tournament moves, but Fatsis relies waaaay too heavily on just listing words. Words that no one besides 10-20 professional scrabble players have ever heard of.

from Margie's review:
"Although it provides fascinating insight into the world of competitive Scrabble, this book also reminded me that what I dislike about Scrabble is the lack of context for words. I like using words and knowing what they mean; Scrabble involves only memorizing particular patterns of letters."

from Matthew's review:
It was cool to discover how intense the upper echelons of scrabble play are, but it was also deflating. I have no interest in memorizing a slew of words. It makes the game feel more like a battle of who has studied more, not who has more tactics and skill.

from Tim O'Hearn's review:
This makes for a somewhat intriguing story filled with plenty of anecdotes you can share at cocktail parties, but, ultimately, it's the obliteration of the English language at the highest level of play that makes the book so hard to get through. I see why competing for the sake of competing is fun and even cathartic. However, the sheer ridiculousness of the words being used dwarfs all other aspects of the game and makes it difficult to draw similarities to chess.

from Jerry Peace's review:
The history of the game is fairly interesting, but I found the chapters of word lists and memorization techniques and dictionaries increasingly tiring. The strategy discussions are intriguing, with one disturbing exception. Fatsis describes intentionally playing a phony word against a lesser opponenet, who does not challenge it. But when the opponent adds an "s" to the phony, in order to build from it, Fatsis challenges successfully challenges. And he is congratulated for this. But the most startling aspect remains this- we are told that words mean something, are important in our lives, that words convey emotion and knowledge, expertise and ignorance and hatred and love and everything in between. And Scrabble is a word game. But it's not, really. At best Scrabble is a half-word game. It is a game of a collection of letters devoid of meaning.

from Kelley's review:
I picked up this book mainly because I really like to play Scrabble and I thought a non-fiction account of competitive Scrabble players might be interesting. Then, once I started reading I realized that competitive Scrabble players are definitely interesting but the game of competitive scrabble really is NOT. ... The chapters that lost me were the ones that became SUPER technical about scoring and letters and words-- for a casual player like me I was completely lost. So this book is definitely one to pick up if you are fascinated by linguistics or just want to learn more about a niche subject. Besides that, I would just play the game more




Rest assured that there is more tractor plowing than cherry-picking afoot here. I have omitted the rare expressions of enthusiasm, but they are exceedingly rare indeed. This cohort is self-selected to some extent: they not only have opted to read a book about Scrabble, but also to review it, many of them earnestly and at length. Further, since reviews are sorted by "likes," most of these excerpts come from reviews that other users have proactively endorsed, causing them to rise to the top of the heap. Incidentally, the number of readers who found this very journalistic book "too long," "a slog", and/or "in need of judicious editing" is even more maddening than the wrath unleashed at tournament Scrabblers. Is this to be taken as evidence that reading too has a limited appeal? Well...actually, yes!  






for contrast:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113537.Positively_Fifth_Street

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85083.The_Immortal_Game




It also is not possible to <i>prima facie<i> locate a failure in a poor start. The grand opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955 is an excellent illustration of this. If you are a student of entertainment history or of Disney history, you probably can recite the botches from memory: significant areas of the park were incomplete; there were not enough water fountains for such hot weather; women's heels sunk into the wet pavement; the ABC broadcast suffered from myriad technical problems. The publicity that followed was brutal. And yet Disneyland did not take long to make the Disney brothers fantastically wealthy and to put their company on the most secure footing it had ever enjoyed. This suggests that there's no such thing as bad publicity. But it also suggests that Disneyland was simply an idea whose time had come, with an appeal that even a notorious botch could not derail. The retail success of Scrabble is not so different from this, actually. But the tournament Scrabble scene has yet to demonstrate anything of the sort.






Another problem with Sasaki's angle on virtuosity is that it considers only one side of the virtuosic dyad, namely the virtuoso him or herself. I think we must consider the <i>medium</i> as well. In quotidian terms the Scrabble grandmaster and guitar shredder may seem to be pushing the known boundaries, both of human potential and of their respective mediums; but this is a relative evaluation. In a sense it is absurd, since these very accomplishments prove what is latent within both human beings and within the mediums. Of course, just because you can doesn't mean you should, but the reasons Sasaki gives for <i>why</i> you shouldn't are not good ones.

Casual Scrabble players and hobbyist guitarists have something in common with the suburban parent who shuttles children to soccer practice in an off-road vehicle or an extremely fast sports car: all are Sennett's consumers of "potency."























What these comments reveal, and what is revealed by the near-constant accusations of cheating leveled against tournament players by anonymous online randos, and what is revealed by the Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings of so many longtime, low-rated, "casual tournament" players during irl competition, is that casual is as much an <i>identity</i> and a too-convenient mode of <i>self-styling</i> as it is a cluster of behaviors or traits. Casual players in both online and irl settings constantly reveal, in spite of their calculated casualness, that they hate to lose. Casual players will, one way or another, essentially refuse to play when they realize from the outset they have little or no chance to win. And yet <i>under no circumstances</i> will casual players redouble their efforts to learn words or refine strategy.

There is a notable irony here, rooted in the intrinsic dynamics of the game, against which this looks all the more unfortunate, but which I am convinced makes it defensible for me to write such brash, presumptuous things. This irony is that each turn in a Scrabble game, regardless of the level of the player, is a puzzle of sorts for that player to sort out as best they can at that moment; further, chance plays a substantial role in the form of tiles drawn each turn. I know of exactly one casual Scrabble player, B, who has grasped the reality that he can play Scrabble again an expert whom he has virtually no chance of beating and still <i>play Scrabble.</i> He is known to greet his oppenent by saying, "I'll aim for 300 and you aim for 400, ok?" The local club director has mentioned, by way of reprimand, that he has never once in many years of "casual"-ness heard B complain. This is a mindset that I personally can't relate to, and I can't know for sure what kinds of well-tamed inner demons it might be concealing. But however B arrived here, he is indeed far easier to respect than are any number of other casuals who complain about pretty much everything except for their own lack of effort at improving. Instead of asking themselves what they can do to create a more fulfilling game environment, they demand that the environoment provide competitive porridge which is just the right temperature for them. Self-improvement would cause them to become the very thing they despise,

I am not trashing casual Scrabble. What I am saying, rather, is that casual Scrabble and competitive Scrabble demand different moral frameworks. It portends well for the expansion of tournament Scrabble that it is quite possible for a competitive player and a casual player to play against each other and to each find what they are looking for. What does not portend as well is the commonness of what Jane Jacobs called "monstrous moral hybrids," where people pick and choose elements from both sides of a pair of irreconcilable moral "syndromes." Where Jacobs was concerned with "commercial" as opposed to "guardian" morality, here I am concerned with what might be called the "competitive" syndrome and the "recreational" syndrome. Competitors seek to make optimal plays always, playing for point spread even when a win or loss is assured. They eschew aesthetically pleasing or clever plays if a more strategically optimal play is spotted. Their logic of success or failure is zero-sum: games and tournaments can have only one winner; 3rd place is worse than 2nd place, which is worse than 1st place; success and failure are defined in relation to other competitors, not in relation to abstract ideals. Intrinsic factors like board geometry and endgame strategy rule; extrinsic factors like community, recreation, and keeping the brain young are incidental where they are acknowledged at all. At least temporarily, perhaps permanently in some case, life outside of Scrabble ceases to matter, or at least it has nothing to do with determining merit.

It matters not for my purposes here whether any of this is rational or socially constructive. I don't think you have to believe that it is socially constuctive to see that these various nuances hang together in what Jacobs called a moral "syndrome," the latter term having odious connotations but taken here to mean more matter-of-factly a cluster of traits which occur together. Though there is indeed nothing rational or productive about a burning desire to crush your opponent in a word game, the syndrome keeps things civil and ethical as long as it is practiced wholly and unwaveringly.

The extrinsic factors that competitors must ignore in order to compete are the same things which the "recreational" player prioritizes.

All of this sounds so tidy, except for the small problem that I'm not sure the Recreational syndrome actually exists. There seem to be plenty of longime, casual tournament players who are drawn to the social stimulation and repulsed by word study, but most of them hate to lose so much that they are somewhere between annoying and intolerable the majority of the time. The moral framework they bring to tournament Scrabble is a monstrous hybrid of loving their casual identity and hating to lose. The hatred of losing which begets bonds of mutual respect among competitors becomes toxic when it blends with the casuals' stricture to stay grounded in life outside of the game. Though it is perfectly possible for casuals to play their casual game across the table from a cutthroat competitor, the reality in many cases is that they cannot in fact abide this. In B's words, they could aim for 300 while their opponent aims for 400; and in terms of what I am calling the recreational syndrome, they could very well find opportunities along the way to choose plays for aesthetic or emotional reasons, to create an open board which ensures a free-flowing, enjoyable style of play, and to weigh all of this against their point target for the game rather than against the actual point total of their opponent. Believe it or not, competitors themselves occasionally adopt this outlook when a tournament is out of reach. Sound scandalous? It's really not, as long as they adopt the <i>entire</i> moral syndrome rather than constructing a monstrous hybrid on the fly.




On the question of marketing, my misgivings are properly speaking "moral" rather than "ethical," and as such I'm afraid the most I can do in the face of such comments as those above is seek an agreement to disagree. In my moral dialect, the very word "marketing" is a profanity. I consider "marketing" profane both in its abstract concept and in its concrete history. I am one of those people who believes the old adage that the only difference between a salesperson and a mugger is that the mugger is honest about his intentions. I find the classical pop-psychoanalytic critique of the "marketing orientation" from a personality perspective to be compelling and to accord with my own experiences.

All of that said, if I am willing to adopt the moral pragmatism which dominates the real world rather than clinging to the moral absolutism of the true believer, then there must be some degree of urgency which would compel even me to attempt persuasion. To appeal to the extreme, familiar analogy, I am at least willing to consider the moral validity of taking a life in order to save many other lives; and I am willing to consider the possibility that this kind of tradeoff can present itself in matters which are something less that life-and-death. It is at this point that I am completely unconvinced that there is some greater moral good to come from expanding the tournament Scrabble scene.














Do not all successful "commercial" enterprises face the specter of becoming "guardians" of their success? The ability to externalize the more unseemly aspects of guardian morality is really just a privilege happy commercial accidents; as soon as it comes time to engineer success rather than merely letting success come to them, commercial enterprises of all sizes and scopes have historically shown very little aversion to "deceiving for the sake of the task."


In a world where 13 million people play Words With Friends and only a few thousand play tournament Scrabble, 

When I recently mistyped "Dcrabble" into my iPhone, the autocorrect left it alone.


The beauty of the connected world we now live in is that niche culture can thrive without proselytizing. We can better than ever enter into fully voluntary, affinity-based associations, and we can meet our needs better than ever without resorting to deception or exploitation.

Ewen: p. 14 [preface]--"Where advertising once inhabited circumscribed arenas—television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards—today [2001] nearly every moment of human attention is being converted into an occasion for a sales pitch, while notions of the public interest and noncommercial arenas of expression are under assault."



p. 33--Calvin Coolidge: "advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade.""

p. 37--"Exposing an affirmative vision of capitalist production, Calvin Coolidge reassured the members of the ad industry in 1926 that "rightfully applied, it [advertising] is the method by which the desire is created for better things." The nature of this desire, and not incidentally the nature of capitalism, required an unquestioning attitude toward the uses of production. The use of psychological methods, therefore, attempted to turn the consumer's critical functions away from the product and toward himself. The determining factor for buying was self-critical and ideally ignored the intrinsic worth of the product."

p. 38--"Advertising hoped to elicit the "instinctual" anxieties of social intercourse."

p. 39--"Linking the theories of "self-consciousness" to the exigencies of capitalism, one writer in <i>Printer's Ink</i> commented that "advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with <i>ugly things</i> around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones."

p. 143--Horkheimer: "The child, not the father, stands for reality."

--"Advertising directed some of its messages directly at children, preferring their "blank slate" characters to [144] those of their parents whose prejudices might be more developed."












<blockquote>Duchamp not only liked gambling, but indulged in the last, best hope of the true gambler (which he does not seem to have been) and tried to invent the perfect system. He wrote to a friend from Monte Carlo: "I have studied the system a good deal, basing myself on my bad experiences of last year. Don't be skeptical, since this time I believe I have eliminated the word Chance. I would like to force roulette to become a game of chess.
 ...

But...he also wanted the reverse. A contemporary reports that..."When I told Duchamp that I did not fully grasp the relationship between chess and gambling, since the former involves the mind and the latter chance, he replied, 'In both cases it is a fight between two human beings, and by introducing more chance into chess and by reducing the chance factor in gambling, the two activities could meet somehow."
(Cockburn, <i>Idle Passion</i>, p. 192)</blockquote>

Tournament Scrabblers will notice that this describes our Game rather perfectly. And yet we have scarcely achieved the popularity of even an avant-garde artist.




























Sasaki
<blockquote>I even admit to taking delight in watching the professional class squirm and fret over how to regard themselves as “superior” and “undeniably head and shoulders above” the mere “average” work produced by those pestering amateurs on Flickr.</blockquote>

This is totally fair. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. But this is low-hanging fruit. 






<blockquote>A couple of weeks ago I was in a hostel in Ukraine and a group of us were playing guitar and singing along to songs that most of us barely knew the words to. We were having fun, laughing and smiling as we sang. But then someone came into the room, picked up a guitar, and began playing with far more skill than the rest of us. Rather than playing along, everyone stopped to listen. His playing was impressive, but it also became boring very quickly. People started to trickle out of the room and soon he was playing to himself, superior and alone. This is why we have more fun at karaoke than at the opera, right? We like to participate, we like to be involved. Virtuosity can shock and awe, but it also quickly puts us to sleep.</blockquote>


[cont]<blockquote>From the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth century virtuosity was a societal ideal. In business, intellectual thinking, sports, art, music, design, and craftsmanship we built hierarchical structures in which a large support staff – rather than working toward their own aspirations – catered to the needs of just a few special virtuosos who were seen as manifestations of the ultimate abilities of communities and nations. Today – at least in some fields – we see an entropy of expertise in which the virtuoso can not so easily distinguish him and herself from the great mass of ordinary citizens.</blockquote>

A fair enough bird's eye view. But in celebrating the "entropy of expertise" Sasaki will not find any support from Sennett, who has brought a rare combination of empirical authority, eloquence, and smoldering anger to bear on precisely this issue.

As a physical analogy, "entropy" actually signifies quite the reverse of what Sennett has argued about cutting-edge, twenty-first century institutions in his book of lectures, <i>The Culture of the New Capitalism</i> (2006; hereafter CNC). For Sennett, the new paradigm has hardly abandoned either hierarchy or expertise; rather, power and expertise have been increasingly centralized in a small number of elite managers, answerable to a yet smaller number of elite investors and often to no one else in business, government, or civil society. This is a straightforward consequence of changes in financial regulation, of "impatient capital," and of institutions' and managers' quite predictable responses to the incentives created by short-term rather than longer-term investors.

There is nothing at all about cutting the virtuoso down to size, but Sennett does takes aim at pretty much every other faux-progessive rationalization that he has seen offered up to try to make this new paradigm look more just than it actually is. Following Max Weber, Sennett understands Sasaki's "large support staff" as a linchpin of <i>social capitalism.</i> While for both of these writers social capitalism originated as a somewhat cynical maneuver to mollify the citizenry with full employment, it could never have survived or flourished if the day-to-day lives of workers did not afford them certain fulfillments beyond mere material security. "In an army," as in the civic hierarchies that were modeled after it, "orders modulate as they pass down a chain of command," writes Sennett. "What the general decrees, the military staff begins to translate into practice, adapting the command to conditions in the field; sergeants, corporals, and rank privates try in their turn to make sense of the command on a particular patch of ground." (CNC, 34)

Sennett can't fault reformers for taking aim at the inefficient and anti-merirocratic aspects of this system, but he finds that they have overlooked an important aspect of it.

<blockquote>The interpretive modulation built into any bureaucratic pyramid is one reason that, in my fieldwork...I encountered many people who did not conform to the psychology Weber set out for the domestic cage. ... Performing [small translations of orders from above] afforded people in the corporation a sense of their own agency; the institutional narrative of promotion and demotion became their own life story. As in armies so in corporations: unhappiness with an institution can coexist with strong commitment to it; a person, even if generally unhappy, who is given room to make sense of things on his or her own patch becomes bonded to the organization.
(CNC, 34-35)</blockquote>

I don't think Sasaki is wrong to identify an "entropy of expertise" specifically in photography; but in photography this is an old story. The peculiar intrinsic dynamics of the mechanical arts have led thinkers as adept as

<a href="http://fickleears.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20and%20technics%20%28mumford%29">Lewis Mumford</a>

and

<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2012/12/scairquotes-ii.html">Arthur Danto</a>

to make some similarly bizarre overreaches about art and culture in general. Photography is a social art only in the most perverse sense. As evidence in most every matter outside of itself, photography is profoundly incomplete. Meanwhile, if Sennett is correct about today's "cutting edge" institutions, then Sasaki's coinage in fact better describes social capitalism than it does the new cutting edge. In the age of "panoptic surveillance" (CNC, 51) and "rule by e-mail" (CNC, 60), expertise and virtuosity not only live but are in fact less evenly spread throughout institutions than ever before.












"Merit is a far more personally intrusive category than competence." (CNC, 111)

"Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in character than judgments of achievement. ... The statement "you lack potential" is much more devastating than "you messed up." It makes a more fundamental claim about who you are. It conveys uselessness in a more profound sense." (CNC, 123)

















<blockquote>[34], but equally, all interpret. When an order translates into action, the key word is "translates." The larger the army, the more interpretation is required.

The same mediation marks domestic pyramids and is one reason the apostles of efficiency like Taylor failed. His time-and-motion studies produced something like a field marshall's writ about what things should happen and how they were to be done. In practice, each of these precepts was interpreted and negotiated as it passed down the institutional structure. With a childlike innocence, Taylor fretted that his precepts—so clear, so "scientific"—became smudged and messed in the corporations for whom he consulted. Reality failed him.






























<blockquote>The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How [5] could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly servicable goods, rather than the owner who jealously guards what he or she already possesses.
(Sennett, <i>The Culture of the New Capitalism</i> (hereafter CNC), pp. 4-5)</blockquote>


<blockquote>[34]In an army, orders modulate as they pass down a chain of command: what the general decrees, the military staff begins to translate into practice, adapting the command to conditions in the field; sergeants, corporals, and rank privates try in their turn to make sense of the command on a particular patch of ground. All obey, but equally, all interpret. When an order translates into action, the key word is "translates." The larger the army, the more interpretation is required.

The same mediation marks domestic pyramids and is one reason the apostles of efficiency like Taylor failed. His time-and-motion studies produced something like a field marshall's writ about what things should happen and how they were to be done. In practice, each of these precepts was interpreted and negotiated as it passed down the institutional structure. With a childlike innocence, Taylor fretted that his precepts—so clear, so "scientific"—became smudged and messed in the corporations for whom he consulted. Reality failed him.

The interpretive modulation built into any bureaucratic pyramid is one reason that, in my fieldwork...I encountered many people who did not conform to the psychology Weber [35] set out for the domestic cage. ... Performing them ["small translations" of orders from above] afforded people in the corporation [IBM] a sense of their own agency; the institutional narrative of promotion and demotion became their own life story. As in armies so in corporations: unhappiness with an institution can coexist with strong commitment to it; a person, even if generally unhappy, who is given room to make sense of things on his or her own patch becomes bonded to the organization.
(CNC, 35-36)</blockquote>


<blockquote>The growth of communications technology meant that information could be forumlated in unambiguous and thorough terms, disseminated in its original version throughout a corporation. E-mail and its derivatives diminished the mediation and interpretation of commands and rules verbally passing down the chain of command. Thanks to new computer tools for mapping corporate inputs and outputs, information...could pass up to the top, instantly and unmediated. In the auto industry in the 1960s, the time lag of getting an [43] executive decision on to the shop floor was, by one estimate, five months, an interval that today has been dramatically cut to a few weeks. ...

One consequence of the information revolution has thus been to replace modulation and interpretation of commands by a new kind of centralization.
(CNC, 42-43)<blockquote>




p. 51--"...in fluid structures, sensitivity replaces duty."




--analogy to MP3 player vs. record player: "While there is random access to material, flexible performance is possible only because the central processing unit is in control of the whole. Similarly, in a flexible organization, power becomes concentrated at the center... New analytic technologies have enabled...what Michel Foucault has called "panoptic surveillance"...





<blockquote>In bureaucracies in the throes of reorganization, the erasure of intermediate layers of bureaucracy can erase the communication chain by which power is interpreted as it passes downward, and information is modulated as it passes upward.
(CNC, 54)<blockquote>


***p. 55--"The center governs the periphery in a specific way. On the periphery people are on their own in the process of laboring, without much interaction up and down the chain of command... Those at the periphery are answerable to the center only for results. This distanced relation is, <i>in fine</i>, the geography of globalization. ... In terms of wealth and power, a paternalist like Henry Ford was indeed as unequal to workers on the assembly line as any modern global mogul. In sociological terms, however, he was closer to them, just as the general on the battlefield was connected to his troops.  ...inequality translates into distance; the greater the distance...the greater the social inequality..."





"By hiring consultants, executives at the center of the [now-proverbial] MP3 machine can shift responsibility for painful decisions away from themselves. The central unit commands but avoids accountability." (CNC, 57)

"In creating social distances which divorce control from accountability, consulting reveals a fundamental shifting of bureaucratic ground, a reformatting of inequality, increasing social distance. Power can become concentrated at the top, but authority does not thereby increase. (CNC, 58)

"The MP3 institution may celebrate the charismatic leader yet does not invite institutional authority. ... Rapid turnover at the top can have this effect; there is then no one in power who has shown commitment to the organization, who has experience of its problems, who can serve as a witness of the labors of those below. In part, the sheer disconnect between center and periphery dispels the belief, at the periphery, that a particular human being or definable group at the center is really in charge. I found, in this regard, that employees at a financial services firm regarded "rule by e-mail" exceptionally obnoxious; all too frequently people received e-mails informing them they were being shifted, or even fired—"too chicken" as one person said, "to tell me to my face." Pushing away responsibility has a further dimension." (CNC, 60)






"A number of studies in the early 1980s showed there was little difference between manual laborers and non-professional white-collar workers in the desire for job satisfaction. Seniority and titles counted for people who worked with [74] paper in much the same way as for people who worked with their hands. I'd mistaken the world of the professional elite for that of the larger middle class." (CNC, 73)

"What I had got right was the importance of the organizations themselves. The pyramids had relatively clear and stable identities, and this mattered to workers in their sense of themselves." (CNC, 74)

"In those firms which do abandon the structures of social capitalism, the personal consequence of focusing on young talent is that as experience increases it has less value. I found in my interviewing that this slighting of experience was notably strong among consultants, who have a professional interest in thinking so." (CNC, 97)

"Skills extinction is a durable feature of technological advance." (CNC, 98)

"Merit is a far more personally intrusive category than competence." (CNC, 111)

"Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in character than judgments of achievement. ... The statement "you lack potential" is much more devastating than "you messed up." It makes a more fundamental claim about who you are. It conveys uselessness in a more profound sense." (CNC, 123)

"All high-prestige workers have an ability developed within themselves, a skill whether mental or manual not dependent on circumstances. I suspect that if [Otis Dudley] Duncan had substituted "statesman" for "politician," the political class would have risen in public estimation, because then the image is about a project which transcends manipulating circumstances and the public itself. Duncan's research illustrates the equation of occupational prestige with self-direction and autonomy more than with money or power. Merit in the work world is judged on this basis." (CNC, 112)

"judgments of ability are Janus-faced: at one and the same time they single out ability and eliminate incompetence..." (CNC, 113)

"In principle, any well-run firm should want its employees to learn from their mistakes and admit a certain degree of trial-and-error learning. In practice, such big firms do not. The size of the firm indeed makes the biggest difference in this regard: in small service firms (under a hundred employees or so) care of customers is more directly connected to the firm's survival. But in the large medical insurance company superficiality proved functional; taking too much time to straighten things out earned no rewards. The result, [129] within the firms I and my colleagues studied—perhaps invisible to a frustrated customer—was a fair number of employees who also feel frustrated." (CNC, 128-129)

"potency"..."A commonplace in the electronics industry is that ordinary consumers buy equipment whose capabilities they will never use...[ditto] owners of the
infamous SUV machines meant for desert navigation used mostly to shepherd children to and from school." (CNC, 151)

p. 154--likens contemporary employers to consumers of potency: "The talent searcher, we have seen, is less interested in what you already know, more in how much you might be able to learn; the personnel director is less interested in what you already do than in who you might become." (CNC, 154)

"The iPod, I previously noted, disables its user by its very overcapacity; the glut of information generated by modern technology more largely threatens to make its receivers passive. Overload prompts disengagement. Seely Brown again makes a useful distinction in this regard between information and communication. An overwhelming volume of information, he suggests, is not an "innocent" problem; large amounts of raw data create a political fact: control becomes more centralized as volume increases. Whereas in communication, the volume of information decreases as people interact and interpret; editing and elimination are the procedures which decentralize communication." (CNC, 172)















































<blockquote>What is touted as professionalism is often nothing more than a veneer of marketing over otherwise mediocre work. Amateurism evokes humility, participation, and engagement. It relies on a do-it-yourself ethic to do more with less. Yes, amateurism creates a lot of crap, but it creates crap that is always improving, and that process is transformational for each and every amateur. It’s a fun thing to be a part of.</blockquote>

The first sentence here is all too true and more people ought to take it seriously. But ultimately this is cherry-picking, or in professional-speak, the fallacy of incomplete evidence. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) "Transformation" in particular is an awfully high bar, for professionals as well as non-professionals. How much can an "amateur" "improve" and "transform" before they become a "professional"?









I think that in social practice the stong anti-virtuosity stance Sasaki carves out here is not actually coherent with any possibility of personal transformation or improvement. His hostel anecdote actually illustrates precisely why this is: the self-transformer cannot control others' judgment about his or her transformations; one audience's craftsman is another's soulless technician, and pity the poor fool who deigns appeal to both groups. Sasaki has opened by attacking virtuosos for defining their project in relation to other, presumptively lesser people. I do think it is generally healthier to form one's own self-standards rather than being driven (or, just as likely, enervated) by one's social surroundings. But it is not possible to avoid relative thinking entirely. Sasaki himself cannot avoid it in relating the guitar encounter: the virtuouso-interloper did not play "skillfully" or "at a professional level," but rather, "began playing with far more skill <i>than the rest of us.</i>" What is really important to Sasaki, rightly I think, is the emphasis on the integrity of one's process; but now he can tell us nothing about this guitarist's process, nothing about how thoroughly or for what reasons this guitarist has transformed his guitar playing, nothing about whether this guitarist is in fact a crasftman or a virtuouso. He cannot tell us what this guitarist's intent was, whether he found the guy likeable, irritating, hostile, or friendly in a superficial social sense, the reason for the guy's travels, or any sense of the guy's general moral fabric which could inform how we make meaning of his participation in a musical confab which a self-styled virtuouso would not typically have any interest in joining. This is because Sasaki does not and indeed cannot know these things given only a shallow acquaintance.

Given a baseline of "singing along to songs that most of us barely knew the words to," Sasaki's strong anti-virtuosity position becomes weaponized into reverse snobbery, virtuouso exclusionism reproduced in negative as it were. His idealized amateur would have no trouble rocking this boat.


My personal stake in these matters is that I have lived the alienation of being viewed by others according to their process and not my own. I'm not afraid to start this story at the very beginning. In 11th grade, the girl I had a crush on told me that I had become such a good musician only because I had no life. In my twenties, a pre-teen student of mine was rattled by her friend's declaration that musicians only practice when they are too dumb to figure something out the first time. As a professional I have been the ringer one day and the weak link the next, first the anchor and then the wild card, here the craftsman, there the virtuouso. I have had my music compared frequently to other bands that use tuba but which otherwise I have very little in common with; I cannot recall ever being compared to a musician whose work has actually influenced me. I have had to tread very carefully to win the respect of autodidacts who are suspicious of my technical polish, and also the respect of polished technicians who are suspicious of my improvisational abandon.

When I lived in a bucolic city dominated by striving amateurs of Sasaki's frame of mind, I found this social terrain extremely difficult to navigate. I knew I was not actually the biggest, not locally and not globally, but I often was made to feel big, and was often reminded explicitly and implicitly of how small I was making others feel. Eventually I realized that <i>I</i> needed to feel small again, if not simply to remove myself from a situation where I was too often the bully <i>malgré lui</i>. Feeling small again has been the best thing that ever happened to me. It is something I have come to seek out rather than to avoid. It has enabled me to form relationships of mutual respect which I formerly found elusive. If you never feel small you will never experience anything "transformative," whether you are amateur, professional, or virtuouso. But you cannot simply demand of others that they create a social environment which is optimized for your purposes. Even if others want to do this for you, they cannot do it for you, because only you know your own needs in your own terms. So, you must proactively seek it out, you must accept that you will not always find it, and you must not ascribe hostility to those who are unable to provide it. When your materials are other people, you must become neither a craftsman nor a virtuouso but rather a curator, and curated.






On Taleb's view of cumululative advantage, the Matthew Problem, etc., and various social ramifications:
Already by my first trip to All-State Band there were signs that I was destined for the great scrap heap. The suburban kids had shinier instruments and more seasoning. I risk narrativizing/Platonizing here of course; but if the point is that mathematicians seem to make their contributions at young ages only because this buys them more time to later be cited repeatedly by others, then it is worth observing that by the intensely inflated standards of urgency which prevail in the college admissions race it was indeed already clear that a Black Swan tent-pole was absent from my resume. By the time I graduated college seven years later I had surpassed most of the suburban tuba players, not just in manifest tubability but also, in many cases, in on-paper awards and accomplishments. Unfortunately for me these recognitions are, one and all, artifacts of Mediocristan, whereas the professional arts world is located deep in Extremistan. The connections Taleb draws attention to, to life expectancy and to recognition as a basic human need, certainly bode poorly, but of course there's no point in denying them. In any case, pair all of this with Ericsson's insistence that there are no born chess masters and you get this: chess, scrabble, etc. are the booby prizes for the minority of scrap-heapers who actually feel deeply aggrieved by being overlooked in their Extremistan day jobs, e.g. Matt Graham's statements to Fatsis that comedy is subjective but scrabble tournament results are not. (And of course the scrabble detractors are totally wrong to say that these results are either random or meaningless; but the scabble boosters are also wrong, at least if Ericsson is right, that the pecking order reflects any kind of natural talent.) The thought could at least be entertained, then, that pursuits such as scrabble provide a much-needed infusion, too small but nonetheless large enough to meaningfully ramify at present social scale, of external recognition with which us scrap-heapers might be mollified, might be able to live longer and healthier lives even if we still don't get to mate (likely). I suppose that theory (it is nothing more than a theory) amounts to a leveling-up maneuver, whereas the Sasakian antivirtuoso seeks a leveling down. But if recognition is a human need, it is also dependent for its very existence on the non-recognition of the scrap heap; it exists only in relation to an unrecognized backdrop. Hence there can be no leveling in the realm of recognition, not even after we've done a better job of leveling out the income and rights disparities which continue to dominate contemporary political thought. I have to think this is, as Richard Florida most famously proposed in rather different verbiage, because Mediocristan also is a terrible place to live despite what seem like very prescient, well-considered warnings from Taleb, Ericsson, and many others, about the pitfalls (also severe but defying direct comparison) of living in an occupational Extremistan of haves and have-nots. Taleb does not say so quite so explcitly, but it seems to me to follow from his project that recognition is also quite elusive in Mediocristan. So, is there a Zenistan? Can we mind-trick ourselves out of needing validation?














Building up the infrastructure around a game like Scrabble can richen the experience, but it also hastens the process of "using up" or exhausting what it possible. If enough people train like experts, taking full advantage of the tools that now exist, the actual competition will become less interesting.






































Though jazz has proven itself a niche among niches in its own time, there is no doubting that millions of latent jazz lovers will be born between now and whenever the earth falls into the sun. Some of these people will never find anything in their own time which permits them the equilibriating function that jazz might have. Recordings and revivalists will exist, but a living jazz culture will not. Other musical practices may deploy counterpoint, improvisation, riffing, virtuosity, and the like, but they will not meet these people's needs, or not as fully as jazz might have. This is tragic, and it is also unavoidable. In the next installment, I want to outline the anatomy of the typical attempt that contemporary interest groups make to "avoid" this, and to explain why this attempt can only go wrong.




If I spent my 20s railing about everything I saw wrong with the world of music, now I'm spending my 30s noticing that none of it is unique to music. Such is ever more the case as I sink deeper into the world of tournament Scrabble.



As with music, many fewer people on the Scrabble scene are interested in asking or answering these questions than in making superficial, fatalistic, self-interested pronouncements about ostensibly self-evident truths.



The second question is the more pressing one anytime proactive mobilization of resources is being proposed, anytime blame is being handed down and alarm bells sounded. If a crisis is to be declared, it had better be a 


Each such reliance is a psychological time bomb/ Each renewed call for expansion sounds to me like one of these time bombs exploding. What it does not sound like, to me at least, is oppression or injustice.



=-=-=-=-=-=-=
misc sources
=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Time is the dominant factor in gambling. Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for it there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field.

"Time matters most when decisions are irreversible. And yet many irreversible decisions must be made on the basis of incomplete information. Irreversibility dominates decisions ranging all the way from taking the subway instead of a taxi, to building an automobile factory in Brazil, to changing jobs, to declaring war."

-Bernstein, Against the Gods, p. 15

===

Taleb, Antifragile, Pink, p. 17 has a relevant entry re: recognition, survival, fulfilment, happiness

===

Taleb, Antifragile, Pink
p. 402--"with the exception of, say, drug dealers, small companies and artisans tend to sell us healthy products...larger ones are likely to be in the business of producing wholesale iatrogenics, taking our money, and then, to add insult to injury, hijacking the state thanks to their army of lobbyists. Further, anything that requires marketing appears to carry such side effects. You certainly need an advertising apparatus to convince people that Coke brings them "happiness"—and it works.

"There are, or course, exceptions: corporations with the soul of artisans, some with even the soul of artists. Rohan Silva once remarked that Steve Jobs wanted the inside of the Apple products to look aesthetically appealing, although they are designed to remain unseen by the customer. This is something only a true artisan would do—carpenters with personal pride feel fake when treating the inside of cabinets differently from the outside. Again, this is a form of redundancy, one with an aesthetic and ethical payoff. But Steve Jobs was one of the rare exceptions in the Highly Talked About Completely Misunderstood Said to Be Efficient Corporate Global Economy."

Not much of an exception really if it's true that he wouldn't let his kids use ipads! Iatrogenics+marketing! But the point about artisans holds regardless.

Moreover, to Kenji's contention, not in these words, that Scrabble "requires marketing," to believe this contention you have to disbelieve NNT's contention here that "anything that requires marketing appears to carry such side effects." You have to believe that he has identified, at most, correlation, but nothing like causality.

===