For Michael and John, I wanted let you know a new book has just been published from SMU Press, about the creative process and a lot of collected information from successful ad folks. I forget the name of the book.

I think that perhaps for the amoral, engineering aspect this would be for Seth: http://www.idga.org/article.cfm?externalid=3119

The article was critiqued here: http://psyopregiment.blogspot.com/2010/09/social-media-psyop-overrated.html

The rest is a bit of a repeat: I’m a craftsman, a “stone knapper of knowledge”. According to my definition of the word there’s more ‘intellectualism’ in the craft of writers, directors and crew behind movies for HBO than in the amoral science of Ph.D’s working for casinos and Tesco.
Richard Sennet’s The Craftsman, makes no reference to novelists or literature. Most writers know that language in use manifests value and that stated and manifest values often conflict; while science in use is supposedly value free, and scientists imagine their intelligence without subtext.

Literature is always retrospective, whether authors want it to be or not. No speculative fiction has ever done more than describe the times that produced it. Jules Verne was not an avatar of the 20th century in any way not having to do with technology. Whether Marx was better is still a question worth asking. Authors of speculative fiction see literature as propositional, ignoring the conflicts between stated and manifest values. As theorists, they try to will subtext away. Like scientists, they say their values are the values they claim.

Here’s the thing though, I would guess that if a non-profit grocery chain could enter the food deserts and become a viable and profitable chain that would no longer need charitable support, national retailers would soon follow and a battle would ensue. They say in the business world that no profitable market lasts for long.

Now, we know that money is being spent in food deserts and people are eating a lot of food there—the problem, as you’ll recall, is actually over-consumption. Food desert solutions are going to have to compete with and take a piece out of the market of fast food chains and consumer packaged goods companies—national and international brands that have a lot of experience in crafting successful strategies. That’s a tough challenge for a non-profit.

This is all true, but it gets off the subject of the original post about food deserts. Having worked in an urban food desert, so to speak, and listened to the various sides speak about it, the CVS Point-of-Sale system, or Wal-Mart’s high-speed “on demand” supply chain are only going to become involved once a store is at a place. The issue is that the stores that are there are not national chains. There you’ll have a Jerry’s market, or perhaps a Fiesta (Texas chain) market.
One of the biggest problems with these issues that I’ve found is a strange narrative of solidarity in food desert communities. There’s a persistent and compelling naivete among many people outside to such communities that there are in fact a singular group of people with similar goals and like interests, beyond basic material goals and interests. In my research I call this the “Paternalism of Poverty,” which transitioned from the “Paternalism of Development” beginning in the 1960’s. The former was a form of paternalism which sought to make the poor like everyone else, while the later conformed to the task of figuring out how to help people simply live in poverty. The whole transition is complex, so I don’t want to get off the subject. I think it’s suffice to say that when a store with fresh produce gets financed and built in a community it is done very differently in poor, urban areas. I don’t think that Whole Foods tries to get together a group of local residents to try to rally them to the idea of the benefits of fresh, healthy food; or, utilizes extremely low interest loans for entrepreneurs to build them. There is no narrative of charity involved. It is a business decision. When a farmer’s market, or something like that goes into a food desert, it is done in a way little different than putting in a community center. There is a paternalistic feeling of charity involved. There’s also a sense that there are community leaders that can speak for a community in implementing this charity in a way that doesn’t exist in middle-upper class communities. For example, no one goes to middle-upper class neighborhoods and ask to take to the communities leaders, yet that’s exactly what they do in low-income, urban communities.

Designers of slot machines have learned that one of the things that keeps people seated at their machines is the repetitive motion and sense of time, “flow”, and that “flow” is broken by hitting the jackpot. But it can be preserved by paying out less money more often -no sudden shock (defamiliarization)- so that even after winning people stay in their seats and keep playing, and needless to say since slots are a losing game for the player, losing more money.

There’s an amorality to expertise, as there’s an amorality to numbers and to language as grammar. But the use of language carries a moral weight and a moral responsibility. You can’t speak without expressing value. The culture of academic expertise, as engineering and “theory”, has never come to terms with that or the values behind their own forms of speech.

That was too simple. But no, I’m not interested in a “formula.

Frankly, my head is spinning. I thought the intellectual life was cultural critique.

But again, I think it’s important to distinguish the format and concept from the details of what goes on inside of these stores. Fresh & Easy, for instance, has smaller stores and has expressed interest in going into food desert areas, but the message that their stores communicate is focused on a younger and more hip, foodie culture aware audience. Aldi, on the other hand, seems focused on communicating that everything is cheap. To borrow a concept from other successful food retailers, like a Whole Foods, the point is figuring out and being part of peoples’ symbolic investment in food, and not just its nutritional component. Whole Foods is not for everyone—some people, like Rick, above, are completely turned off by it. But then, doesn’t the same issue apply to different groups of people preferring different foods, as much for cultural reasons as anything else?

In a previous message, I described the transformation of our local shopping street in Yokohama as the fishmonger disappeared, the butcher’s attempt to become a general purpose grocery failed, the vegetable seller hangs on and the liquor store on the corner has been replaced by a 7-11 that appears to be doing pretty well. Chains driving out mom-and-pop shops is a global story that lends itself to generic explanations. That said, how the global story works out in particular places may depend on local factors. Our dry cleaner told me, for example, that the fishmonger, butcher, and vegetable seller had been severely affected by the addition of a city bus line with stops around the park at the top of the hill where our apartment is located. Before that bus was available, shopping at Yokohama Station and taking a bus that stopped nowhere near where people at the top of the hill live made it more convenient to shop for groceries on the shopping street and shorten the walk home. The new bus means that shoppers can now take advantage of the greater variety available around the station and catch a bus that is, in effect, much closer to door-to-door service—and they don’t have to carry their groceries up the hill. The shopping street merchants may offer to deliver; but that still means having to negotiate the delivery and wait for groceries to be delivered. Might have worked in the days when full-time housewives did their daily shopping in mid-afternoon and deliveries left them plenty of time to cook meals for their families. Doesn’t work so well for working women who need to grab something on the fly.