Transition Culture

19 Dec 2013

Annie Leonard on stuff, "citizen muscle", and what she’s giving this Christmas

What better way to close our month’s theme than to talk to Annie Leonard, creator of the ‘Story of Stuff’ series of videos, who has done more than anyone to popularise the idea of “stuff”?  She now runs the Story of Stuff project, “a community of problem solvers – parents, community leaders, teachers and students, people of faith, entrepreneurs, scientists and more – working to create a healthy and just world”.  Here she talks to us about citizen muscle, Glen Beck and what she’s giving for Christmas this year. But before we begin, in case you might not have seen it before, here’s The Story of Stuff:  

As is usual, if you’d like to download or listen to the podcast of my conversation with Annie, here it is.  If not, read on … 

I started by asking Annie how she would describe what she does:

“What I do is I work to change the way that we make and use and throw away stuff, or in fancy lingo I say I’m transforming systems of production and consumption. But making, using and throwing away stuff is a lot more accessible.  Before The Story of Stuff, I really did spend about 20 years travelling around the world in my work for different environmental groups and I was investigating the factories where stuff is made and the dumps where stuff is dumped. I got to see first-hand the often hidden environmental, social, health, emotional, spiritual, economic, all the problems of the way that we use stuff and making new stuff.

When I came back from all those travels I was frustrated at how little people were talking about these issues. If you go through day-to-day life, the only relationship we have with stuff is the advertisements and the buying it, and maybe throwing it out often 10 minutes later. I was experimenting with different ways to talk about the underside of our consumption patterns without being a drag. So many environmentalists are so whiny and wonky and so much of the discussion about stuff is either super-technical and data-heavy, or really about guilt and fear – “shame on you for having a cell phone”. I just thought there must be a better way to talk about this stuff.

So I experimented and came up with this film, The Story of Stuff, which is a 20 minute, fast-paced, fact-filled, even funny look at systems of production and consumption. I put it online in December 2007, thinking that hardly anyone would watch it. I thought that the main avenue of distribution would be mailing DVDs to people who wanted me to come and give this talk live, and I didn’t want to fly there. To my amazement, we had 50,000 views in one day. We’re now at over 30 million views from every country in the world. I can actually go on line and see a map of the world with a dot everywhere someone has watched it, and it is now every country in the world. What I do now is run a small non-profit organisation that harnesses the energy that this film created.

Our theme this month has been “stuff”.  What do you mean by ‘stuff’?

My focus is on consumer goods, all the stuff in our day to day life. Our furniture, our clothes, our electronics, our personal care products. Everything you see when you go to the shopping mall and the supermarket, all this stuff that we have in our lives. I haven’t looked at food. Increasingly, the food production system looks like the industrial production system of other things, but I just haven’t looked as much at food; more the things that clutter our house. All the things we’re untangling the cords for and trying to figure out how to store in our closet and all that junk we have around.

That junk makes us happier though, doesn’t it?

That is such an interesting issue. We were raised, definitely in my country but also in yours, increasingly everywhere, to be told that the more stuff we have the happier we’ll be. We are bombarded with messages that tell us that our professional life will be better and we will be better loved and people will find us more attractive if we have whatever the stuff of the day is, clothes or makeup or cars or furniture or whatever it is.

The relationship between stuff and happiness is not that simple. If it was, the US would be the happiest country in the world because we have so much stuff. We have stuff that only royalty could have imagined, indeed they couldn’t have imagined all the stuff that we would have in our country. Yet happiness levels – our country and a lot of industrialised countries are actually declining and that just confused me. I looked more deeply into this relationship between stuff and happiness and it turns out that there is a relationship – that more stuff makes you happy if you’re really in deprivation. If you don’t have enough food, if you don’t have access to healthcare, if you don’t have a roof over your head, absolutely more stuff will make you happy.

But that relationship becomes more murky and then actually starts to diverge. The example I like to use is shoes, because I personally like shoes, and I know that the second pair of shoes that one gets adds more to your happiness than the twenty-second pair of shoes. The per unit of stuff increment of happiness shrinks. Then say you had 222 pairs of shoes, or 2,222 pairs of shoes. At some point along this shoe accumulation path, more stuff or more shoes actually undermines your happiness for a number of reasons.

One is that you have to work all those extra hours to buy those shoes, then you have to stress about whether you have the most fashionable shoes. Then you have to repair them and sort them and have a storage place for them. The increasing amount of time and energy and attention that it takes to manage all this stuff begins to undermine our happiness and take away time and energy and attention from the things that actually produce happiness. Those are not a new pair of shoes or a new iPhone or a new car or whatever.

If you look at what actually provides happiness across so many different age groups, ethnic groups, nationalities, incomes, once your basic needs are met the things that most provide happiness are the quality of your social relations, having time with friends and family. Another big one is having a sense of meaning or purpose in your life beyond yourself. Another big one I thought was really interesting is the act of working together with others, of collaborating towards a shared goal, be it a civic endeavour or a sports team or anything.  The act of working together with others towards a shared goal.

But we’re in this crazy situation in our hyper consumerised society that we are spending more and more time working and shopping to get more stuff, and less and less time on those things that actually provide more happiness. That’s why the relationship between stuff and happiness is not as clear as “more stuff equals = happiness”.

The film, as you said, has been watched by 30 million people. Has it had much in the way of negative reactions? Have you found yourself on the end of Koch Brothers-funded smear campaigns or anything?

It’s been watched by 30 million people online. We don’t even know how many millions in total, because it’s being used in tens of thousands of schools, it’s been on television in a number of different countries. It’s being used in classrooms and even corporate human resources trainings. I recently met a woman who was a sustainability officer at a huge computer company and she came up to me and said that every single employee in the US in the computer company has to see it as part of their orientation. We really don’t know how many millions of people, but far beyond 30.

It was interesting – I was bracing myself for more critique when it first came out, because the film doesn’t soften its message. It’s fun and it has cute cartoons but it really lays out a pretty systemic critique of our consumeristic society and economy right. I tried to distil it without dumbing it down. I was waiting for people to attack us. For the first year we got nothing but positive feedback, and really interesting positive feedback. A lot of people said I knew that, I just didn’t know how to say it. I felt like the film touched a sense of unease that so many people had, rather than telling them something new. But others wrote and said I never even thought about this and now I can’t stop thinking about it – really positive feedback.

I was glad to have that buffer of a year of love from our movie viewers before the second year. Because in the second year, Glen Beck found out about it. I hope that you in the UK are lucky enough to not know who he is…

… unfortunately I do know who Glen Beck is …

I’m sorry! He had a daily television show, I think it was even on twice a day. He had a huge following, which to me is just an indication of the lack of critical thinking provided in our educational system in this country. He just was a hateful, fear-mongering crazy guy, but was very entertaining. He used to be an entertainer before he had this so-called ‘political’ show. He really latched on to people’s sense of economic insecurity and blamed in on everything from communists to immigrants to terrorists. He really stoked a culture of fear and hatred and paranoia.

He found out about the film because the environmental writer from the New York Times was doing an article on what schools are using for the educational curriculum around environmental issues today. What we know about the environment now is so much more than 10 or 20 years ago. She wanted to know how education is changing. When she called a bunch of schools to ask them what they were using, they all said Story of Stuff. So she called me up and said “who are you?”

She ended up writing a front page article in the New York Times which is the biggest newspaper in this country about how many schools are using The Story of Stuff. Glen Beck went crazy, and every day for weeks on his show, he would show a clip from The Story of Stuff and he said that I was spreading communism in schools under the guise of recycling. The thing he was particularly upset about in the film, he said it was anti-capitalist because I said we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, and he also didn’t like the part where I said “it’s the government’s job to take care of us”.

I have clarified so many times, I didn’t mean to remind us to brush our teeth and tuck us into bed at night, I meant it’s the government’s job to make sure rules are fair and products are healthy. I believe there’s a very crucially important role in government to make sure that our economy is fair and healthy.

His camp believes that there is no role for government and we should get rid of it., so he began attacking us. He actually told his viewers to find out if their children had watched it in school and then get their teachers in trouble. We got a flood of phone calls from teachers who were being put on semi trial for having shown this film. The great thing is every time he insulted us we got lots of donations and supporter letters which said “if Glen Beck hates you, we love you”. But the part of it that worried me is the element of the political discourse that his camp represents. During that time, we actually got death threats and hate mail. There’s a couple of people who actually made videos critiquing us, and on one of their Facebook pages there was a discussion for a while about how I should be killed, if I should be chopped up or nailed to a tree or all these other crazy things.

I thought isn’t that sad that our political discourse is such that a woman who stands up and says we’re using too much stuff, our society could be better and healthier and more sustainable. These are not controversial no-brainer facts. The things I’m saying are pretty basic – I had to receive death threats for that?

One of the things that drives the economy of stuff is advertising. I recently asked Adam Corner whether he felt we could ever have any hope of achieving the cuts in carbon emissions that we need in order to avert runaway climate change with an advertising industry in place and no restrictions on advertising. His sense was that he didn’t think that was going to be possible. What’s your take on the power of advertising and what we’ll be able to achieve or not achieve with it still being in place?

A lot of people roll their eyes when we critique advertising because they like to think that we are all self-determined beings and that advertising doesn’t influence us. But I agree with the gentleman you spoke with. Advertising is basically the relentless, constant indoctrination into this consumer society. If you think about it, as I said in The Story of Stuff, is that what’s the point of an advert but to make us feel insecure with the stuff that we have. And so the way that we have set up our advertising culture, in the US it’s 3000 adverts a day targeted at each one of us.

They tell us that our hair is wrong and our clothes are wrong and our furniture is wrong and that we are wrong. We’re absolutely bombarded with these messages promoting our inadequacy and promoting consumption as the solution to that. It really is relentless here. I’ve travelled to over 40 countries and have seen that it’s nothing like here. We have advertisements in our schools, advertisements in our textbooks. It is absolutely relentless.

Sometimes I imagine how different things would be if we were targeted with 3000 advertisements per day telling us about the state of our planet, or telling us that we are good people the way that we are, or encouraging different cultural values about empathy and solidarity and civic participation. We would have a fundamentally different cultural undertone if those advertisements contained different messages. The folks who think advertising is not playing a crucial role in our unsustainable and not fun trajectory, I think, are a little naïve.

I really feel that it’s essential that we restrict advertising. I would start with restricting advertising to kids. Kids don’t have that critical thinking capacity to differentiate between advertising and other contexts. We should definitely limit advertising to kids. Get it out of our schools, get it out of our public spaces. When people ask me what’s something they can do to change our culture in this country, I say that we need to reclaim both our mental and our physical landscape from the constant barrage of messages.

In so many ways, we’re fighting an unfairly stacked battle. We’re going out there trying to promote values of sustainability and collaboration and empathy and participation but the other side is just bombarding folks with incredibly well-designed, psychologically sophisticated messages telling them to just keep on that consumer treadmill. Until we can roll that back, it’s really an unfair battle.

In the time since The Story of Stuff came out, do you think in the world around you as you experience it, do you think our relationship with stuff has got better, or worse? Are we going in a good direction or not really?

I think you can find evidence for either and I swing wildly back and forth. There’s lots of things that I think are changing for the better. I think the fact we went through such a tough economic recession and are still going through it, I think even though it’s been a miserable experience and many, many people have suffered, there’s a small silver lining which is that people are re-evaluating their spending priorities. When you have less money to spend, it is less attractive to rack up all that consumer debt for superfluous, disposable fashion items. So I think there’s a shift happening.

Just last weekend in the New York Times, there was an article I found really encouraging. Some social scientists interviewed high school seniors, the last year of high school, and they’ve been doing so for decades. For the first time in four decades, high school seniors are saying that what’s important to them going forward in their life is having a life full of meaning and purpose as opposed to having a life of comfort and wealth. I find that really hopeful. There’s so much data showing that young people are choosing to not even buy cars, that they want to travel much more lightly.

I think there’s an interesting cultural shift happening with some in our relationship with stuff. When I think about my parents’ generation, they were the first generation that came out after World War II, they had experienced that deprivation and it was the first generation who could have a toaster and a bathing suit every year, and a blender and a microwave. All this stuff. There was a bumper sticker that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, I don’t know if you had it in the UK. It said “he who dies with the most toys wins”. I feel like that bumper sticker captures the acquisition-oriented relationship to stuff. And now I feel like young people don’t want to be burdened with all that stuff. It takes a lot of work and paying of rent to have room for all that stuff.

The shift that I’m seeing is from a focus on acquisition to a focus on access. This is where the sharing economy comes in. How can we have access to the things that we need without taking on the burden of ownership, which means the working and the maintaining and the storing and the worrying about? For example, in my town we have a tool lending library. If I need a power drill to fix one thing, I’m not going to go and buy it and then have it cluttering up my garage forever. I’m going to go down to the tool lending library and borrow it for a week for free, then give it back.

Young people can’t imagine this, but when I was in university people had record albums. The more record albums you had, the cooler you thought you were. So many people had a row of record albums that went their entire dorm room, and if they were really cool they had cinder blocks and a piece of plywood and another thousand records on top of that…

You’re describing my sitting room!

That means you’re giving like 10 or 20 square metres to records! If you tell young people today the idea of devoting 10 or 20 square metres of your living space to music, they think you’re weird because they have it all in a matchbox-sized thing now. So I think through dematerialisation, through sharing, I think there’s a hopeful cultural shift away from actually having to acquire and own all this stuff. That feels very positive.

But then I leave my little bubble where I live here in the Bay Area of California and fly across the country for some talk and I read the local newspaper and they’re celebrating on Black Friday that even more people went shopping this year than last. There was such a depressing article in the paper about how Black Friday shopping has become a social activity and how good it is that entire families were sleeping in line from midnight or were leaving their Thanksgiving dinner table, which is our last non-commercialised holiday that is actually about human relations, our last one. People are leaving that dinner table to get in line with their entire family and these newspaper articles were celebrating that fact.  So I think there’s both hopeful and distressing trends. I choose to screen for the hopeful ones because that helps me keep going.

What do you think this relentless treadmill of accumulation and pressure to consume and debt accumulation, what does it tell us about the deeper underlying psyche, do you think?

I think it tells us that something is hurting inside us as individuals, and as a society. We are tribal animals and we want to have a sense of belonging and a sense of community and a tribe. If we don’t have that through strong family ties and healthy social relations and participation in different civic activities, then we go buy that sense of belonging through a shirt that has a particular logo on it. To me, when I see people spending 50 or 100 dollars on a t-shirt that has a particular logo on it, I feel sorry for them that they feel the need to purchase that social proof or social access.

I have a teenage daughter who loves buying these clothes, so I get to watch the dynamics unfold right here in my house. What I see among her and her friends is the kids who have strong senses of self and strong identity – my daughter is on a sports team so she gets a strong sense of meaning and community and identity through that, those kids are so much more resistant to the advertising messages, that they have to have a certain article of clothing to be cool. I feel that the more that we can invest in our social relations and our sense of identity and our sense of civic participation, the less people will be trying to fill that hollowness inside them with more stuff.

You talked somewhere I read, you talked about the loss of ‘citizen muscle’. What does the reclaiming of that look like, do you think?

I used the term “the loss of citizen muscle” in contrast or corollary to the consumer muscle. I came up with this theory after travelling across the country showing The Story of Stuff to incredibly diverse audiences. It was so interesting to me that the number one question by far also the number one question that we get in our inbox at work, that people ask us, is “what can I do?”

First, I rattled off all these ideas of what people could do, but I just thought it was interesting that people were at such a loss of what to do. The problem is so pervasive that there is an almost infinite number of things one could do to help. I was curious what people were thinking, so I started turning it back to them when they started asking me what can I do. I started asking them – what can you think of doing? The answers that came back were really consistent and to me quite worrysome.

Everyone would say things like: I can recycle, I can carry my own bag to the store, I can buy organic, I can support fair trade, I can stop buying bottled water, I can compost, I can get a clothes line. These are all things that are very, very good to do but they’re not about working together for big, bold, collective, systemic change. They’re about changing our consumption habits and our day to day lifestyles. I want to be really clear, I’m not disrespecting those things. Of course we should be doing those things. But we really need to move from these individual consumer-oriented changes to these collective citizen engagements.

I realised that each of us has two parts. We have a consumer part and a citizen part, a consumer muscle and a citizen muscle. The consumer muscle is what we use when we’re out there consuming. That consumer muscle is spoken to and validated and nurtured so much through these relentless advertisements we were talking about, and we’re called upon to exercise that consumer muscle many times during the day.

Just think about your day. You are presented with a huge number of opportunities to engage with the consumer and use that consumer muscle, so our consumer muscles are really well developed. We can really identify with that consumer muscle. So much that it often becomes our primary identity. The media often uses the words consumer and human being interchangeably as if that is the totality of who we are.

But we have this other part of ourselves, our citizen muscle that we are not called upon to use as much as our consumer muscle. That citizen muscle has atrophied and what worries me about that is that when we’re faced with problems as enormous as the disruption of the global climate, or babies being born pre-polluted with the 160 industrial chemicals already in their blood at the moment of birth, these are really big systemic problems – and the best we can think of is carrying our own bag to the grocery store?

What I say is of course do those responsible consumer things, but those are a good first step, a good place to start, not a good place to stop. What we really need to do is engage our citizen muscles. What that looks like is thinking about people beyond your household. Thinking about making change beyond your kitchen and into your broader community and into your country. It involves things like working together to change the rules of the games, rather than trying to perfect your day-to-day behaviour within a fundamentally unsustainable context, let’s change that context so that the more sustainable choice becomes the new default.

When I think of engaging our citizen muscles, it’s really about how we show up in our community. It can be anything from getting your neighbours together to turn a vacant lot into a garden, to getting folks together to change the law that allows community garden CSAs to sell their food. Anything that’s just about making change beyond your household but in your broader community. Talking to people. Networking to find people to get involved. It could be political lobbying, it could be protesting, it could be supporting those who do the protesting. There’s really an infinite number of ways how being a citizen can actually show up. But the point is we’ve got to start showing up in those ways if we want to implement bigger, bolder change than we can in our kitchens or in our supermarkets acting alone.

My last question is what does Annie Leonard buy her friends and loved ones for Christmas this year?

I’m so lucky that my friends and loved ones share these values. I know a lot of people who just can’t get their relatives to stop sending them all this schlop. In my community, we only do gift exchange for kids, and they have to be a used gift. For kids, they don’t care if the book or the game or the toy is new or used. That’s great, so in my community – I live with a bunch of neighbours and we’re all really good friends, all the kids draw a name from a hat, so they each have to give one gift and it has to be home made or used.

Within my family, we do the same thing. We draw names, so you only have to give one gift, and anything you want to give beyond that one gift has to be used or handmade, but there’s absolutely no pressure to do that whatsoever. We have a 25 dollar limit on purchased gifts. So when I look at all these people standing in line and stressing about their long lists, I just feel so sorry for them. What a chore! Holidays should be a time about relaxation and rejuvenation and if I had to go to the mall, it would be neither relaxing nor rejuvenating. We turn to gifts of experiences, used gifts, home made gifts, anything that allows us to participate in the joy rather than the frenzy of the holiday period. 

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18 Dec 2013

Oliver James on ‘affluenza’, Love Bombing and strengthening our "emotional immune systems"

Over this month of looking at “stuff” from different angles, I came to see that one of my first lightbulb moments in terms of understanding consumerism and the roots of our relationship with “stuff” was Oliver James’ books Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist.  Both books pulled together a remarkable case for the psychology that underpins our consumer culture, and the extent to which it exploits our pursuit of happiness to sell us something designed to never make us happy.  It felt like this month wouldn’t be complete without a chat with Oliver …

Oliver James is a chartered clinical psychotherapist registered at the Bowlby Centre. He has written a number of books over the past 10 years, including They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life, Affluenza, The Selfish Capitalist, Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks and Love Bombing: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat.  He is also writes magazine columns and appears on TV. You can either listen to/download this podcast, or read the transcript below: 

The first book that you wrote that I became aware of was Affluenza and in that book you describe ‘affluenza’ or consumerism as a modern-day virus. Could you give us a sense of what the symptoms of that virus are?

Placing too high a value on money, possessions, appearances including ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, fame, places you at greater risk of the commonest emotional distress and disorders. Depression, anxiety, personality disorders like me-me-me narcissism and substance above.  People who have placed too high a value on these things are more at risk of suffering the commonest emotional problems that people have. In Affluenza, I explored how this was working out in 8 nations, obviously the UK, but then New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York.

I used anecdotal stories to illustrate the scientific evidence. The most important scientific fact comes from the World Health Organisation international survey about mental illness, which shows that the countries which are English-speaking, in particular America and New Zealand, but if you also include Australia, Canada and the UK, on average, averaged across those 5 nations you get an average of 23% of the population having suffered a mental illness in the last 12 months. Compared with mainland Western Europe, the six nations studied in that survey, France, Italy, Germany and so on, the average there is 11.5%.

The explanation I offered for that, the primary reason was that we are more materialistic, or what I call ‘the affluenza virus’. The reason we’re more materialistic is because of our form of political economy. Since 1979 in this country, 1980 in America, we have had free-market economics or what I would call ‘Selfish Capitalism’.  Selfish Capitalism jacks up levels of materialism. It follows that if greater materialism always goes with greater levels of mental illness, if you increase the materialism of a population you would expect there to be an increase in the amount of mental illness in that population.

There are also cross-national studies which show that mainland Western European nations are less materialistic than English-speaking ones. It’s not surprising that we’re more mentally ill than mainland Western Europe. In fact, this has been going on for around about 50 years. America spent four times more per capita on advertising to its population than mainland Western Europe. In the UK and other English-speaking countries it’s twice as much per capita. Of course, advertising’s purpose is to try and persuade you that you need something which you don’t actually need. It’s a want, it’s an affected want.

So the affluenza-stricken Selfish Capitalist society is all about generating false means and getting people to conflate what they really need with what they want, or at least what the advertisers want them to want.

One of the things that you recommend in The Selfish Capitalist is that people need to “increase the strength of their emotional immune systems” in that context. What does that process look like, do you think?

Part of it is a shift away from extrinsic motives and goals towards intrinsic. Extrinsic means doing things to please other people and for rewards. That, of course, can start in early childhood and frequently does. It even starts in early infancy. So you have what I would call essentially Selfish Capitalist methods for shutting babies up, like Gina Ford, where you leave babies to cry onwards through into the education system.

You have love conditional on performance in the Selfish Capitalist system. That of course also happens in Asia. As we saw yesterday, the Asians put an awful lot of pressure on their children from a very young age to do well academically, so it’s not exclusive to Selfish Capitalism.

But increasingly, in contrast to 30 years ago, the education system is a sort of battery farm for creating extrinsic motivation. You don’t really care about your homework so long as you tick the boxes. The exam system has become similarly box-ticking, quite extraordinary really if you have children. O-Levels and A-Levels have become a ridiculous exercise in just finding out what the examiner wants and giving it to them. It has nothing whatever to do with scholarship, learning, just about going through hoops.

There is extrinsic motivation of course in the workplace. I wrote a book recently about office politics, which was arguing that because we now have a service sector based economy thanks to Thatcherism having destroyed our manufacturing base, office politics become critical. There is no objective matching for measuring your performance, it’s really all about the subjective evaluation of your boss.

In terms vaccines against the materialistic affluenza virus, the fundamental principle is you need to rediscover the intrinsic; accentuate the intrinsic and eliminate the extrinsic. The intrinsic being things that actually interest you, things that give you what’s known as ‘flow’, in other words when you look at your small children when they’re playing, they’re completely lost in that world, completely absorbed by it. As adults, we frequently, and from all too young an age, we’re not in that state. We’re basically in a state where we’re worrying about whether we’re pleasing other people, if we’re going to achieve things and get our reward.

You wrote recently about an idea called ‘Love Bombing’. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that and also because Transition is something which is designed as a community-wide response, whether you could imagine something like that working on a community scale, and if so what it might look like?

The idea of Love Bombing is very simple. It’s something that really people of any educational level can do. It’s simply the idea that – it works with any kind of child, your child doesn’t have to have problems, although all children do of course have some problems – it works pretty well for things like ADHD. Even somebody, there was one case described in the book of autism. What it is, is essentially giving your child an intense, condensed experience of feeling in control and of feeling loved.

The book itself doesn’t really get into the question of why children might need this, although it does explore the causes in the individual cases. It’s essentially illustrated through case histories. But the method itself is not really the same thing as ‘quality time’. People sometimes confuse it with that.

What you do is, you say to your child, your 3 to early puberty child, “would you like to have a bit of time away with me?” This might involve going away for a night or two. You can go to a B&B or something, or it might involve having the house to yourself and getting rid of the family, perhaps swapping with the grandparents, getting them to look after the family so you can go to their house. Any practical arrangement that you can fence up to get you alone with your child.

“Would you like some time away with me? You will decide what we do. It will be completely up to you and you can do anything you like, within reason. Obviously things we can’t afford are off the agenda but anything within reason”. So it’s not a hard sell to most children.

You then set about planning it. Obviously a proportion of children will say let’s go to the sweetshop and buy all the sweets in the shop. But actually, interestingly, that very rarely is where the children start. If there’s a lot of antagonism between the parent and the child – I have come across one case out of thousands where the child did actually just use it as a way of completely maliciously upsetting the parent, so I assume that something pretty ghastly had been going on between the parent and the child, but this is the only example I know of. In every other case I’ve come across, the child very quickly gets the hang of it. It really appeals a lot, to have the exclusive attention of the parent, it’s nearly always the mother.

If you go away for a night, the parent is forced to check themselves from trying to control the child, and forced to check themselves from their usual pattern of relating. Most of us get sucked into a pattern of “have you done this, have you done that”.  It’s not how we want to be as parents, but partly because the system requires us to regulate our children in order to make them do their own work, in order to make them extrinsic.

Love bombing rather surprised me. I first did it actually for a TV series, and I was amazed at the results. I did a modified version of it. You go away, you hang out with the child and you’re forced to stop yourself telling them what to do. They’re in charge, you tell them you’ll love them whatever they say. It’s unconditional love. It sounds like a prescription for catastrophe, especially if your child is very needy, which often they are. But interestingly, it has the opposite effect to the one you might expect. They stop being so interested in screen time. If they want to spend hours watching telly you just sit and watch it with them but eventually they do get fed up with that and they do want to relate to you, to be with you, be cuddled by you, you to sleep in the same bed as them, and at the end of it you have an emotional top up and you or they give it a name.

It’s important that they choose the name, ‘mama time’ or ‘love time’ whatever they choose to call it. You then can institutionalise it as a period when the two of you hang out together and they’re in charge. Having established the principle they very quickly like that idea of having some brief time, even if it’s just watching an episode of The Simpsons. My son is quite happy if I sit and watch it with him, it’s so different for him than watching it on his own.

Very surprising changes seem to take place. The child, I think it resets their cortisol, resets their emotional thermostat. But also I think it does the same for the parent in relation to the child. The parent comes back home and suddenly notices that they’ve got into this pattern of trying to control the child and of forgetting to express affection and to start to try and express affection and stop just trying to control them all the time. A much more benign cycle is started. I’ve thousands of examples of this. It’s very gratifying to see.

And could you imagine that same principle being extended beyond the family? Could you Love Bomb a community, do you think?

When it comes to communities, the idea that the people who are in charge, who are in a sense making us extrinsically motivated, you could say through the rule of law. I would put it more in terms of democracy. What has happened in the Selfish Capitalist world particularly but also because of globalisation and the extent to which corporations are now taking over, there is a huge problem of control. The people are not in control.

A tiny ruling elite who loot corporations and loot the taxpayers are in control. Personally I think it’s very unlikely that this ruling elite are going to give these things up very easily. What I predict, and I think it’s very dangerous to predict these things; I personally think the present situation is unsustainable not only ecologically.  The sooner East Anglia goes under water or something the better, but unfortunately it’s probably not going to happen for some time. Especially because of fracking – we were told oil had run out, OPEC told us that Peak Oil had happened some time in the last decade. Unfortunately that’s not the case because of fracking.

We’re going to fry because, as George Monbiot pointed out, we’re stuffed. The oil’s going to keep coming or the gas and the ecological problem is going to get worse. It might happen quickly but it’s probably not going to happen quickly, in such a way that people really change their behaviour. For me, what is unsustainable is Selfish Capitalism. I think neo-liberalism is being completely disproved as indeed neo-classical economics is being disproved. Just as genes have been shown by the human genome project to be unimportant, but nobody’s paying any attention to this.

I think there’s a point at which a population has had enough.  We’ve seen it in the Soviet Union, we saw it just disappear, up in smoke with hardly anyone predicting that. We’ve seen the Arab Springs happening. In the media, nobody’s pointing out that we don’t have democracy. Russell Brand stood up and said it and look at the reaction. He got a strong positive reaction from the population and then a load of censorious, patronising drivel from the commentariat.

I honestly would question whether the present situation is sustainable and I think there’s a very significant possibility that at some point, although it’s impossible to predict how or when, I think at some point there will just be an uprising. I don’t think, I certainly hope it isn’t a violent revolution. I think there’ll be a downing of tools and saying “we’ve had enough of this. We’re not putting up with it any more.”

One of the things that’s been very interesting in terms of that, recently, has been the beginning of a kick back against Amazon. In terms of a company that builds on those extrinsic values, and the recent Panorama programme and so on and so on. What’s your sense of what a company like that, although it all seems very quick and very simple and “one click and you’re done” and all that sort of thing…what does a company like Amazon do to us?

I remember when the internet started and thinking, this is just going to be a commercial thing. Everyone said it’s going to be so exciting, it’s going to be liberating. Actually, to some extent it has. As a scholar, it’s fantastic. You’re able to go to Google Scholar and find scientific papers. Of course, there have been huge benefits, maps, all sorts of things.

But the reason Amazon is a problem is purely because of the way that corporations have managed to destroy national identity, and the globalisation of corporations. The problem with Amazon is not the business, not the principle of being able to click on something and being able to get things delivered. Ecologically, the fact that superstores are now delivering saves journeys and saves a lot of petrol. It’s not a bad model actually, to have things delivered. The journey to the bookshop, obviously people like me are going to be slightly weepy about the loss of bookshops but I think if the Amazon platform was better developed it could be like a bookshop.

The problem isn’t the model in and of itself of a platform on an internet site, the problem of course is the way the tax system works and also the monopolistic dangers, and they are very considerable. I didn’t see the Panorama programme so I don’t know exactly what it was talking about, probably about the way they don’t pay tax and the way they have the potential to ultimately control what DVDs we see and what books we read.

No, it was about the working conditions in the factories and the degrees of psychological stress that they put workers under.

I didn’t know about that. Funnily enough I did manage to make contact with an employee at Amazon who said it was terrifying. But I didn’t know about that aspect of it. It doesn’t surprise me in the least. But what I’m more concerned about is the monopolistic risk. There will eventually be books that we can’t get hold of any more because they’re not on Amazon because there aren’t any bookshops.

How are corporations going to be controlled? The only way I think ultimately it’s going to be done is if you have a meeting of minds amongst powerful countries in the world. And that’s actually not going to be easy to see how that’s going to come about, because as we saw with Leveson, there really is a revolving door within the ruling elite. The politicians move in and out of business, the businessmen move in and out of politics. So politics has no longer become the mechanism by which these problems are going to be dealt with.

Again you come back to, at what point does it become apparent to the population that this system doesn’t work and in what way will they apprehend it? All I can say is that people are not going to put up with it. If you’ve got The Daily Mail baying against the amount that bankers are paid, that must tell you something.

One of the things, you mentioned Google and Amazon, and I suppose the way in which that now, or a Tesco Clubcard, knows more about us than probably our partners do in terms of what we do on a daily basis and the degree to which it enables advertising targeted to you to be popping up in your email every time you open your email. There’s an extrinsic values machine that’s almost able to read our minds these days. How important is it that we somehow create space in our lives where those things can’t reach?

To a certain extent it doesn’t really matter if my wife knows if I’ve bought this or that on Amazon. The most alarming purpose that information serves is partly to be able to advertise to us, so we get an increasingly limited view of the world because when you go for information on Google it uses your past history to control the search terms. So if you’re very right wing and live in America, you’ll only get ‘right wing live in America’ information. If you’re left wing and live in England, you’ll get the same thing. You get a rather limited world view.

That’s a worry. But more irritating than practical is the differential pricing. Although they can’t tell your IP address, through your past usage they pretty much know who you are. Using that you get differential pricing. You could say there is no such thing as an air fare. If I googled for an air fare on my computer now, I would be offered a different price than somebody who lives in Brixton who’s never tried to get an air fare before or who’s only able to afford very cheap ones, whose expenditure and consumption pattern shows that they’re a young person, they will get offered a lower air fare. You could say that’s democratic but I would say it’s very startling and not how it should work at all.

I think also the Edward Snowden, that kind of snooping stuff is also potentially worrying and certainly in some respect we are living in Oceania, Big Brother has come to pass. If you’re on a computer that contains a camera, if GCHQ want to watch what I’m doing it’s very easy for them to do that. If for some reason they wanted to, they’d be able to switch on my camera and watch me and hear what I’m saying and doing. That is spooky and in the wrong hands, but I think one doesn’t want to get carried away with conspiracy theories either.  But the means by which Oceania could come about is now all there, it’s all sitting waiting to happen in a sense, if you want to get paranoid about it.

One of the things that I’ve asked everybody this month is given your analysis of things, what are you buying for people this Christmas?

Hopefully very very little. My take on Christmas (I offered it on You and Yours recently) is that if you’ve got children, club together with other family members and choose something that they’re still going to want in three months’ after Christmas.  So it’ll probably be a fairly high-end, expensive item. Then just ask everybody to contribute to it. Whether it’s an iPad or a bicycle or whatever it is, keep it simple.

Obviously if you’ve got under 5 year olds or small children, in a way it’s even more important, because that pile of plastic and paper that you end up with on Christmas morning or on birthday mornings is just such a nightmare. It’s so depressing for everyone including the child.

That’s my top tip for avoiding that happening. Indeed, we have agreed in our family to do a ballot. We did a ballot and each person is going to be given one present by the group. I can’t remember who I’m giving my present to, and I can’t remember who’s giving me my present, but only one present is all I’m going to get or give within the group of people who I’ll be together with on Christmas day. That’s a way to control it.

Christmas is for children really. For adults it’s when you all get together and there is a sense of community, although a lot of it’s quite tense and bad tempered, but then that’s families for you. But it doesn’t have to be like that and for many families it isn’t and for the adults. But I think it’s primarily for children. It does have a sort of wow factor and it is a magical moment potentially. 

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17 Dec 2013

Adam Corner on the "adverts that want to be your friend"

We’re all far too sensible to be influenced by advertising, right?  For sure, all of the choices we made while doing our Christmas shopping this year were entirely rational, not possibly swayed by distant marketers, right?  Wrong.  Probably.  A recent article by Adam Corner in Aeon magazine, called Ad nauseam: The more we hate it, the more it agrees with us. How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon got me thinking aboutthe impacts advertisting has on us, and what it all means to our relationship with “stuff”.   So I gave him a call. 

Adam is a research associate in the school of psychology at Cardiff University, and also works for the Climate Outreach and Information Network.  In the context of our month’s theme and reflections on why we continue to consume it with such voracity, his article offered a very illuminating perspective.  He writes:

“The industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms”.

The core argument of the piece is that marketing has developed an approach of pretending to empathise with our frustrations with marketing, and then uses that sense of empathy to sell us more things.  I talked to Adam to find out more.  He started by telling me where this insight had come from:

“I was listening to the radio one day and an advert for Kopparberg Cider came on, and it was basically lamenting the fact that you “couldn’t get plain old apple cider these days, where have all those apple ciders gone, you used to be able to get good old apple ciders didn’t you?”  If there’s anyone who’s done the most to widen out the categories of ciders into all sorts of fruity flavours it’s probably them.  Yet they’re using the fact that they flooded the market with fruity ciders to re-introduce the idea of what they call “naked apple cider”.  I couldn’t decide whether I was impressed with the complete blatantness of it, or appalled by it.  Probably a bit of both, but mainly the latter”. 

It led to his thinking that there is now, as he put it:

“a category of advert that wants to put its arm around your shoulder, and sympathise with you, or empathise with you against some kind of problem out there in the world.  Often a problem that actually has been caused by the previous activities of either that brand or that company, or other brands.  It then uses that connection and that sense of personal identity to say “well why don’t you buy this other product instead, wink wink, nudge nudge”.  It’s adverts that want to be your friend.  What that does is completely take the sting out of any sense of cynicism, or any sense that maybe you don’t trust these companies, or even anything as dissenting as just not buying their things in the first place, because they’re siding with you against the big bad evil world that’s out there, and just using that empathy to try and make you buy different stuff instead”. 

None of us believe advertising has any impact on our shopping decisions at all, yet billions of pounds are spent on it every year.  We all believe we are immune, yet clearly we’re not.  Advertising no longer works in the sense that you see an advert for baked beans and then 3 weeks later your kitchen cupboards are full of them.  

It’s more, according to Adam, that advertising provides “the background buzz and hum that’s just there, accompanying everything that we do”.  In terms of those Christmas shopping choices, I asked Adam whether he could ever be sure that his shopping choices this year haven’t been influenced by advertising?

I think you can be sure they they have almost definitely been influenced by the power of advertising somehow!  Everyone markets and advertises.  Even if we were all to buy each other ethically sourced items and products, they’ve often been promoted through exactly the same routes.

As we’ve become more aware of when someone is making a pitch at us, marketers have had to become more creative, and adverts have become more opaque, more indirect, trying to build a personal rapport, a connection, between us and the advert.  As Adam puts it:

It could be things like personalised adverts that try to stoke that idea that there’s some sort of connection between you and the advert.  Whether it’s word-matching on internet adverts where they know what you’re searching for and they promote to you that way, which is more of a relatively recent phenomenon, or the idea of adverts trying to empathise with you against the big bad corporate advertising world out there and saying “yeah we know, we’re your friends, we understand that you’re cynical about the world.  We understand that you’re cynical about advertising, we get that.  We want to share with you that we get that.  But at the same time we’re selling this thing that operates outside those terms of reference, so maybe you’d like to buy it, safe in the knowledge that you can be cynical and buying our products at the same time”.  

What intrigues me is whether, in a world where action on climate change is needed desperately, yet the fierce consumerism that drives climate change is relentlessly promote through an increasingly skillful advertising industry, it is ever possible that we could avert climate change with the advertising industry operating in the way it does today?

Adam told me:

I don’t think so.  I think that for as long as the advertising industry is there telling people what they need to do and what they want to do and what other people who they look up to crucially are doing and are living like, and as long as they are projecting a world to people that is all about very unsustainable, high carbon living, it’s difficult to see how that would be congruent with tackling climate change.  .

Part of the reason for that is around values, and the unspoken values that advertising communicates.   

Advertising is actually founded on quite a small cluster of values, things like materialism, and not things like collective social decision-making, concern for the environment, things that might have more pro-social outcomes attached to them.  It’s this kind of background buzz I think of messages and ideas that tell us that the world is a certain way.  They project a certain image of the world to each other, to all of us, so that even if perhaps we think we’re not completely self-interested, we get the very strong message that everyone else is, because why else would there be adverts for the glitziest watch or the snazziest car, it just sets the tone all the thinking that’s done on top of it. 

So we could just ban it right?  It’s not unheard of.  Campaigners in Bristol have already launched a petition to ban advertisers outdoors, under the banner of ‘Bristol: the city that said no to advertising‘.  In the US, the states of Maine, Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont have all put restrictions in places, as have 1,500 other towns across the US.

Paris recently reduced outdoor advertising by 30% and banned any advertising within 50 metres of schools.  São Paulo in Brazil has banned all advertising in public places.  But if we lived in an advertising-free city, I wondered, would we find that we’ve actually lost anything?  The benefits would be great, as Neal Lawson wrote in The Guardian last year:

A ban would be aesthetically, culturally and environmentally right. But it’s what it says about us that matters too. It would be a sign of collective and democratic power over the market. It would be a signal that says the public interest trumps private interest. That the freedom to be fully human, and not just be subjected to an endless onslaught of adverts, should come first. That we are citizens more than we are consumers.

For Adam, in spite of thinking that a ban on advertising would mean that “we’d probably gain a bit of mental space”, he feels it would be a huge leap, and probably impossible too.  A better place to start, he argues, is with a ban on advertising for children, which he describes as “especially morally questionable”.  

Most parents, even if not inclined to see advertising as detrimental to themselves, most would quite quickly agree that it might be nicer if kids weren’t constantly having their arms twisted to by X, Y and Z.  If for no other reason it’s ends up being the parents who have to go and buy the stuff anyway!  There isn’t really much of a debate about it.  It’s one of those debates where if only it would be talked about, I don’t think it would be that radical, but it isn’t really talked about, and like all things that are very ubiquitous, it just drifts along in the background being nice and invisible. 

But given the power that advertising clearly has, and the skills and tools that marketers have at their fingertips, rather than binning the whole thing, should we not just learn how to harvest those tool and use them to market the idea that people consume less, become more mindful about climate change, and get involved with things like Transition?  Adam thinks not:

“If you adopt these techniques and try and do work that you think would be really socially beneficial, there’s going to be a risk that actually you are barking up the wrong tree, going in the wrong direction.  I have written before about the perils of what’s called “social marketing” to engage people on issues like CC.  There’s been a big push over the last few decades around promoting positive health behaviours like giving up smoking, and anti-obesity campaigns. There is, to be sure, evidence that social marketing does work, on limited small specific behaviours, but when you apply it to something like climate change where the challenge isn’t just a set of separate discreet behaviours that people can be nudged into doing differently. 

When you’ve really got to engage with the underlying rationale and principle of what climate change means, or even broadly sustainability means, it doesn’t seem right that you can ‘sell’ the idea of CC to people in the same way that you could sell soap or dog food.  It’s just not that kind of issue.  There has definitely been a tendency among governments, and some of the bigger NGOs to reach for marketing people and advertisers to ask them for help with talking to people about climate change.  I think it’s wrong-headed, because the principles of selling physical stuff are not the same as the principles of engaging people more deeply in the act of thinking about the challenge of climate change.  It’s just not the same thing. 

Surely in times of austerity we would see advertising having less of an impact as budgets tighten and people have less disposable income?  Adam mentioned a trend he has identified on local radio stations recently: 

A huge amount of the advertising is focused on the idea that most people don’t like their jobs and are not very happy in their jobs, they are doing it just to get the money to get to the end of the week.  That everyone is in tough times which clearly many people are,  that everyone can’t wait until Friday to clock off from their jobs and by the way, this holiday here or this new product should alleviate that.  It seems to me the most cynical response to the terrible impacts of austerity and a really inequitable society is that underneath all of that advertising pops up and tries to put its arm around your shoulder.  

It says “we know you hate your job, we know you don’t want to do what you’ve been doing, we know you don’t earn enough money”, and then tries to whisk that away with the promoting of a set of products that you are never going to quite have the set of products that you are completely happy with.  It’s actively stoking that sense of dissatisfaction at the same time as trying to offer a false solution to it, and I think it’s very cynical.

If you’d like to hear the audio of our discussion, here is the audio that you can either download as a podcast or listen to here: 

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16 Dec 2013

Blessed are the PVC makers

Any sense of “we’re all in this together” appears to evaporate when it comes to those industries that use the most amount of energy.  If a recent lead editorial in The Times is anything to go by, there’s a sense that they are somehow above all that.  But given the scale of the cuts demanded by the climate change science, can any institution or company really be seen as being somehow immune?  And is fracking really the golden solution to all our woes?  Read on …

The Times piece was called Energy and Jobs: the transformation of America’s energy market is starting to have a direct impact on vital British industries.  Its argument was that the rush of cheap gas in the US that has lowered prices means that “British energy-intensive industries, chief among them chemicals manufacture, are becoming uncompetitive”.  “The British economy”, they state, “remains yoked to high energy costs and low growth that compare well only with its sluggish European neighbours”.

It gives as an example a PVC company in Runcorn, which used to export to the US but is now increasingly struggling to do so.  The solution proposed, in case you didn’t see it coming, is that:

“the Government should, finally, speed up the growth of domestic fracking by boosting incentives for local communities, and urge the US to shun protectionism and export its own cheap shale gas as soon as global markets make it profitable to do so … if the price is that the coalition’s green credentials are further undermined before the next election it is one that must be paid”.  

“A price that must be paid?”  What? Hold on a second.  Let me put that another way.  The survival of companies making PVC should take precedence over our reining in our carbon emissions?  A quick PVC reality check here.  According to the Healthy Buildings Network:

• In virtually all European nations, certain uses of PVC have been eliminated for environmental reasons, and several countries have ambitious programs to reduce PVC use overall
• By-products of PVC production are highly persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic
• PVC production is the largest use of chlorine gas in the world
• Chlorine production for PVC consumes an estimated 47 billion kilowatt hours per year – equivalent to the annual total output of eight medium-sized nuclear power plants
• PVC is one of the most environmentally hazardous consumer materials ever produced
• Its production leads to emissions of dioxins, heavy metals, mercury, lead, ethylene dichloride (EDC) and vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) and diethylhexyl phthalate to name just a few

“The age of cheap energy may be past, but less expensive energy is still an essential goal”.

That’s an interesting assertion, one we’ll come back to later.  Around the same time, Gabriel Levy was reporting back, over at Climate Code Red, on the Radical Emissions Reduction conference in London (which I had really wanted to go to but couldn’t make).

“The BMA has absolutely no idea who we are: it doesn’t recruit us, it doesn’t train us, it doesn’t pay us, it can’t sack us and it doesn’t know if we’re fairly treated or not. The Serco staff represent the BMA but have nothing to do with the BMA”.

“We pretend our mission is to defend doctors, whereas it’s really only to make sure we answer the phone within three rings and don’t go to the toilet”.  

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12 Dec 2013

Rupert Morrison on what the rebirth of vinyl tells us about "stuff"

The Drift Record Shop describes itself as “an immaculately curated independent music specialist based right in the heart of the Devon countryside”. Picking up on Ruth Potts’ suggestion yesterday that “wherever practical and possible develop lasting relationships with things by having and making nothing that is designed to last less than 10 years”, we thought it might be good to pop into Drift for a chat.  We spoke to Rupert Morrison, who runs the shop, to hear more about the vinyl revival and what it tells us about how people relate to artifacts of beauty.

One of the things that’s been quite marked in music over the last few years has been the return of vinyl back from the dead pretty much. What does that tell us about how people’s relationship with music and how they buy it is changing do you think?

For us, we’ve probably sold about as much vinyl now as we always have. It’s just a case that the awareness is drastically different. Things like Record Store Day and Black Friday have just passed, stations like 6 Music and The Guardian have been particularly supportive as well. The awareness of the format of vinyl, the awareness of independent retailers, the awareness of actually going and buying a record from a local record shop has become a hugely supported thing and I think in this sector, more than any other sector.  You don’t get a network of shoe shops or even book shops, which would seem like a very logical thing, coming together under an umbrella of marketing and support. It’s really just awareness.

More vinyl is being pressed now than for the last couple of decades. The prices are better, the availability is a bit better. But the best part, we always stock a comparable amount and certainly sell a comparable amount, but it’s nice that people want to come and get involved and maybe we’re diversifying in terms of demographics that are getting into it, particularly younger people, the kids.

And why do people buy it?

Vinyl? Because it sounds better. Because it makes them look cool. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? It’s been an easy sell to people. It’s bigger. You’ve got a CD, whereas vinyl’s four times bigger, it’s bigger artwork and you buy it and carry it around and people know you’ve bought something. You can talk about analogue and how that’s what you’re into.

You can look at shops like Urban Outfitters, they’re very canny and their ability to track zeitgeists is second to none. They started selling Nirvana and Sub Pop and Sonic Youth t-shirts around 7 or 8 years ago, and suddenly everybody’s doing that and grunge is back with the kids and now they’re even covering that kind of stuff on X-Factor.

As soon as they started selling copies of hip-hop records, so NWA has just been reissued today. As soon as those records started appearing in firstly Urban Outfitters, I think Topshop even sells a few records now, it’s fashion. It’s a fashion thing and that’s why it’s been such an easy sell.

But the actual brass text of why a lot of people buy vinyl is because it’s a great format to listen to music on. I think that again it’s a slightly easy sell to people to invest in physicality when that physicality’s a bit impressive. It’s big. It’s a huge physical thing that you can hold. I think that’s why.

What’s the difference with something like if you bought, say, Metal Box by Public Image Limited on CD or had it as three or four 12 inches in the actual metal box?  You make music as well (Rupert records as R.G. Morrison) and when you make music to be on a CD as a long list of tracks, how different is it, as an artist, when you’re preparing something you know’s going to be on vinyl with 2 sides, 4 sides, 6 sides or whatever?

When we were writing the new record, we programmed it as 2 halves, so it wasn’t just a case of “that’s about the half way mark and which side does the last track fall on, that’s the first five and that’s the second five”. Traditionally always the track 7 is the strong track because it’s the flip, it’s the first track on the B side. You do have to programme things in a certain way. I know a lot of my friends and peers who are in bands actually write in the context of 2 sides, or 4 sides if they’re on a slightly more affluent label! Not to suggest my label aren’t, it just doesn’t require 4 sides.

I think traditionally it’s a format that musicians have grown up with. It’s existed for longer than any of us so the fact that it’s still here is why it’s such an enduring format. The most important records that I own are always on vinyl even though I probably own more CDs and cassettes than I own vinyl. It’s just that that’s always been a cheaper format and a bit more throwaway, so I just, growing up, had all three. But I haven’t got a tape player at the moment. I’ve got lots of boxes!

I think in terms of the quality of actual audio, if you’ve got a good amplifier then you’ll hear the difference. If you’ve got a good stylus you’ll hear the difference. But I think realistically a lot of the more domestic, budget players won’t make that much difference in quality between CD and vinyl. But there’s always a process of how you consume that music. It’s not as easy as to skip forward. There’s certainly no shuffling and you do pretty much have to sit and listen to something and then flip it over and listen to the other tracks. I think when everything’s so disposable and at your fingertips, it’s a different way of consuming music. I think you tend to listen more. I think that’s had an impact as well.

I was watching a video on the Erased Tapes website all about vinyl and what they do, the care and the artistry they put into that, creating these beautiful, beautiful things. What’s your sense of how vinyl has become something that’s really just gorgeous and exquisite?

Those guys are a slight exception because they’re all based in Berlin and they’re completely mad, eccentric German guys who have put themselves in a position where they can do that. But there’s a certain fetish element. With things like Record Store Day, there’s certain customers who queue up and come in who we see once a year, they turn up on Record Store Day and are buying things based on what they’re told is the exclusive nature of the element.

It’s a more laborious process, making vinyl. It’s kind of like alchemy, in terms of mastering the records. There’s so many different factors. It’s a very artisan thing and it’s a finalising part of the process which has been the recording process. Vinyl mastering engineers are amazing. The guy who masters my records, a great guy called Noel Somerville, mastered the Boards of Canada records. He did such a good job when they first made those records making the plates that he pointed out that there isn’t really any point in him remastering those records from tapes, just get the plates he made. As soon as he said that and went ahead with it, he realised that he’d done himself out of a couple of days of studio time!

With somebody like Noel’s work, he went through the process 15 years ago. Those physical plates, they got them, they pressed them, and those records still sound fantastic. It’s a complicated thing, it’s not quite the same as just flattening audio and putting it on CD. It’s an artisan thing.

In terms of packaging, vinyl is bigger. There’s a guy locally, I think it’s called Live Work Unit. What he actually produced for his CD packaging was amazing. It was almost like an A3 size poster that he’d worked out how to carefully fold down so it formed the shell of the packaging. There were tracing paper inserts, it was a really beautiful thing. So you can put that attention in, but in terms of mass producing something, it’s different economics isn’t it?

What difference does it make for a small, independent shop like you as part of a local economy like this? Does it feel like one of the things that’s an essential part of the mix that distinguishes you from, say, Fopp?

I think the biggest thing with us is our actual process of presenting things. Realistically, you could go into our shop or go into any number of independent record shops today and the same records have just come out and will be on the racks. We get the same press releases so if they felt like talking about it they’d probably say the same things, they’d probably play the same records. There’s a fair chance you could go into any of those independents and pick up the same records today, so it’s about how we curate what we get in.

We certainly don’t take everything, I’d say we only take about a third of what’s actually offered to us. There’s a huge amount available and I think a big part is the curating process. In terms of getting people to come in, having limited stock and exclusive stock helps, and they tend to be a bit more expensive so selling those units can certainly help in terms of having a slightly quieter day.

We’re not particularly close to any of the big retailers like HMV or Fopp. Plymouth and Exeter still have HMV shops but I don’t think it really affects us a great deal to be honest. I certainly wouldn’t want them to go. I think HMV is run terribly, and I think the people who have been put in a position to do so are complete idiots and they’ve proved themselves to be incompetent and inept beyond belief, but they’re still there and I just hope that the goodwill they’ve been shown and the support they’ve been shown by distributors and labels that they turn a corner and you do still have a large physical high street retailer.

We’re lucky that we’re able to do what we do where we do it, but there are lots of places that you can’t just rock up and take a fairly big shop space and do something as decadent as we’re doing, because the overheads are just not viable and even someone like HMV are going to get driven out of that equation, and it’ll just become a Primark. You then won’t have that physical retailing and it becomes the norm that people don’t physically see things, which feels like a sad situation to me.

One of the things that you do so beautifully here is the love and care that you put to the Deluxe newspaper that you do and the booklet of the 2013 Records of the Year, it’s all so beautifully designed. What is that ingredient, do you think? Is it just that the people who run the shop are music nerds?

Rupert’s mum: What we set out to do was produce the best shop we could and produce a shop that we would want to walk into, and I think that makes the difference.

There was someone on Twitter the other day (@willrobertcen) who said “if Santa had a grotto it would look like this” (and posted the photo below). That’s something really magical. If you love music, it’s really nice.

We’re very lucky in that we’re able to do it. I don’t say that lightly because it’s a really difficult time. I think globally people are feeling it, so even when you scale it right back to problems of traffic directions and getting people to physically come into the shop, it’s a really hard thing to do and a really hard time to do it. We are supported, and we’re very grateful to be given the time and opportunity to do that but I think as soon as you don’t care about this, it is a job and we are geared around commerce, that’s what we’re here for.

Although it’s nice to have information written on the front of the CDs and booklets produced about things, it’s produced as a mechanism to make the process more svelte, for people to come in and find what they’re after and spend money, because that’s what we’re here for. But at the same time, it’s not got huge profit margins. If we were interested in making huge amounts of money then I think we’d be running off t-shirts and hitting the mechanisms and models that much more successful people do. It’s about loving that we do it. We’re not looking to become as big as Fopp because as soon as you do, you lose the part that we enjoy doing so much. So long as we accept that there’s not any retiring, we’re happy to keep on keeping on. 

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