Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Mass manipulation (part 2)

I was reading a New Yorker article about Taylor Swift's masterfully orchestrated rise to fame (again, apologies that it is not publicly available). The key seems to be authenticity.
Swift is sometimes called a twenty-one-year-old 2.0--the girl next door, but with a superior talent set. She has an Oprah-like gift for emotional expressiveness. While many young stars have a programmed, slightly robotic affect, she radiates unjaded sincerity no matter how contrived the situation--press junkets, awards shows, meet and greets.
***
The car door opened, and Swift got out to chants of "Tay-lor! Tay-lor! " Easing herself onto the sidewalk, she proceeded to the base of the stairs, and struck a pose before a phalanx of cameras: a sultry, fierce expression, one hand on her hip, her eyes narrowed, her head cocked back. She seemed to age ten years.
***
She is in the midst of her second world tour, and every show begins with a moment in which she stands silently at the lip of the stage and listens to her fans scream. She tilts her head from side to side and appears to blink back tears--the expression, which is projected onto a pair of Jumbotron screens, is part Bambi, part Baby June.
***
"Swift is a songwriting savant with an intuitive gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture that . . . calls to mind Swedish pop gods Dr. Luke and Max Martin," Jody Rosen wrote in Rolling Stone. "If she ever tires of stardom, she could retire to Sweden and make a fine living churning out hits for Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry."

Like Parton, Swift writes autobiographical songs, a technique that, in the Internet era, is a clever marketing device.
***
Swift is tolerant of her fans' interest in her love life, as she is of gawkers who approach her on the street. "It's human nature!" she told me. While she doesn't talk about dating in interviews, she helps amateur sleuths along, using capital letters to spell out coded messages throughout the lyrics in her liner notes that indicate which boyfriend the song is about. Swift has an affinity for codes and symbols. Onstage, she shapes her fingers into a heart--"I did it at a concert one time, and people screamed, so I just kept doing it," she said--and appears with her lucky number, 13, written on her right hand in Sharpie. More recently, she has been scrawling lyrics, such as U2's "One life, you got to do what you should," on her left arm; deciphering the references has become another fan activity. Swift's ability to hold her audience's interest reflects, in part, a keen understanding of what fuels fan obsession in the first place: a desire for intimacy between singer and listener. She told me that the best musical experience is "hearing a song by somebody singing about their life, and it resembles yours so much that it makes you feel comforted." Her Web site includes video journals and diary-like posts to her online message board, which Swift does not outsource. Her fans, who call themselves Swifties, respond with passionate testimonials--"i would drink her bathwater"--and confessions about their own crushes: "Jake. Jake.Jake. Jake. I can't say it enough. I just love the sound of his name."
Laughing all the way to the bank

Swift's aura of innocence is not an act, exactly, but it can occasionally belie the scale of her success. She is often described using royal terminology--as a pop princess or, as the Washington Post put it recently, the "poet laureate of puberty." In the past five years, she has sold more than twenty million albums--more than any other musician. And, in an era of illegal downloading, fans buy her music online, too. Swift has sold more than twenty-five million digital tracks, surpassing any other country singer, and she holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling digital album, for "Speak Now." Forbes ranked her as last year's seventh-biggest-earning celebrity, with an annual income of forty-five million dollars--a figure that encompasses endorsements, products (this month, she releases a perfume with Elizabeth Arden, which is estimated to generate fifty million dollars during its first year of sales), and tickets. Her concerts, which pack both stadiums and arenas, regularly bring in some seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a night.
I do a lot of consulting. Each time I show up at a new place, everyone is suspicious of me, looking for reasons not to like me or see me as a threat. It takes a while to build up a rapport with them. At first I am very straightforward, efficient, and professional. I don't want to seem presumptuous, but nor do I want to seem overly available, as if they are on my same level. Because I am talented at what I do, they quickly start respecting me. People become interested in me as a person--what makes me so good at what I do. They develop little crushes on me, which I feed with the selective disclosure of more and more personal information--that I am a musician, that I have a unique background, little stories in which my modesty prevents me from name dropping, but from which it is apparent that I have unexpected credentials/experience/connections. I am never explicit about anything, I make people work for it--draw their own (unavoidable) conclusions, which makes the information seem all the more authentic and valuable to them. Less is more, but I also don't want to seem standoffish. As long as they ask, I will disclose some interesting tidbit to continue to whet their appetite for M.E.

Now if I had shown up on the first day of my consultancy touting my credentials, talking about my personal life, nurturing people's crushes, it would be disastrous. Every once in a while I forget and make a joke too early, show familiarity too soon, and have to immediately back off again with a renewed period of neutrality, but I've gotten better. Now it's like cooking an old familiar recipe.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Mass manipulation (part 1)

Recently I attended an "air your grievances" work meeting. I was only tangentially related, but was called in out of an abundance of caution or some other nonsense reason. People started asking questions and within minutes were erupting in angry accusations. Although each person's grievance wasn't much on its own, the sheer number of them surprised everyone there. People were incensed against management who remained heedless to the most pressing concerns (albeit other people's concerns), rigidly refusing to adapt any of their policies. Everyone left riled up with grievances that they never knew they had before. I thought this was absolute idiocy. I can't imagine a meeting being run more poorly. The idea that if people could only get together they could come to sort of an agreement is absurd.

When I have little insurrections in projects that I run, I target the biggest complainers individually. I schedule a meeting or write them a quick email saying things like, "I noticed that you seemed really frustrated by x." I let them talk for as long as they need, commiserating with them without necessarily committing to any particular position, i.e. not trying to overly justify or entrench myself in any particular position nor agree with their own position. As part of the commiserating, though, I focus on their feelings, "that must be so exhausting," or, "I understand, it's very demanding." I try to use words that sound sympathetic but also make the problem sound either surmountable or something that should be expected from such an important/valued position/employee. I figure that most people just need to vent, but I am also trying to subtly shame them, implying that they are being a crybaby and that they should toughen up. By isolating the potential instigators and stealing their thunder, I never give them the chance to speak publicly and gain support. Without a chance to speak publicly, everyone else is left knowing only about their own particular struggles, assuming that it may have more to do with their own personal failures than a larger institutional failure. Assuming that maybe theirs is an isolated incident, they don't divulge their shameful failure to their colleagues and the mutiny never reaches the necessary tipping point of participants.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Sociopaths in the news: Jon Roberts


From a book review by the NY Post:
Jon Roberts was a made man, a drug smuggler, a killer. He hobnobbed with OJ Simpson and Ed Sullivan, rubbed shoulders with Pablo Escobar and Carlo Gambino, and made enemies out of John Gotti and Ronald Reagan.

He tortured college students for fun, helped snuff-out “mob accountant” Meyer Lansky’s stepson and admits to brutalizing his ex-girlfriend with a belt when she tried to leave him. He flooded the country with cocaine in the 1980s.

Regrets? He has none.

“So would you call yourself a psychopath?” The Post asked him on Friday.

“Well, that depends on how you define psychopath,” Roberts said.

“A lack of empathy or remorse.”

“Well, then, yes I am,” he said. “I enjoyed my life. How many other people lived the life I did? Maybe that Bernie guy, but who else?”
Among other indulgences, Roberts whose run-ins with famous people of all types made him a sort of self-styled "“Forrest Gump of crime and depravity,” claimed to have "drugged Ed Sullivan (here with Jayne Mansfield) and tried to blackmail him with a prostitute." The most memorable quote from his father was "“The evil path is the strong path because evil is stronger than good.”

Why can't all sociopaths be this glamorous? ;)

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Fencing: A sociopath sport?

Im considering taking up fencing, based on the following from the Wikipedia article:
At the most basic level, fencing revolves around the opening and closing of various lines of attack and defense. In order for one fencer to hit, the other must make a mistake and leave an "opening." Fencing tactics rely on a mixture of "open-eyes" opportunism and deliberate "set-ups", where the opponent is systematically fed false information about one's own intentions.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Another view (part 2)

(cont.)
Your story of the socipath woman who was persecuted by the Aspies really struck a chord. I was bemused by your confusion at why such a person would approach Aspies for help understanding neurotypicals. To me it's entirely reasonable and even brilliant: Her style was probably wrong, but she was groping in the dark. The thinking would be simple: "Neurotypicals don't understand me. I thought I understood neurotypicals but now I realize I don't and a lot of my life has been fucked up because I misunderstood shit. Here is a group that gets together and strategizes on how to deal with neurotypicals. They may be able to help me." That's not dumb dude, that's way fucking smart. Aspies and socios should be able to offer each other all sorts of insights, actually, as any two people looking at the same problem from different perspectives will often help each other. Both could help each other overcome where they are weak, and also identify where they are stronger and better than neurotypicals.
I suspect extremely sadistic sociopaths (i.e. deriving strong pleasure from inflicting suffering for one reason or another--enjoying the sounds of screaming and the sight of blood spurting and the feeling of power caused by cruelty) are probably dangerous to the point where they probably need to stay watched at all times. But otherwise, I begin to suspect that if more sociopaths "outed" themselves a whole hell of a lot of them could be made useful to society and have happier, more productive lives for themselves.

Why should you care if you're more helpful to neurotypicals? First so you don't have to hide; hiding may be fun sometimes but is probably exhausting much of the time. Also, because you can have a life you just plain enjoy more and which allows you to accomplish more of your goals in straightforward, no-bullshit fashion.

A cynical stereotype would be to say that we use you when killing and other nasty business needs doing, but that's ridiculous oversimplification; a person lacking empathy could do all sorts of positive things that aren't in the least bit destructive, and wherein lack of empathy has no more particular value than the inability to see the color red or a tendency to be easily sunburned; just not relevant. A socio who has fully concluded, "it is in my rational self-interest to help people in ways X, Y, and Z, and to not engage in A, B, and C" could be a tremendously productive in all sorts of fields where their sociopathy would be irrelevant. In other areas, it could be an outright asset in an endless number of subtle areas where your blunted or nonexistent empathic reponse would allow you to clinically analyze and recommend in areas where other people's emotions cloud their judgment. If I were a manager I'd probably want at least one of you on my team, and not necessarily for "dirty work." I don't need "dirty work," I need someone who thinks dispassionately and logically and can see shit other people can't. At minimum, you'd be the guy to tell me in a business negotiation, "Stop with the goody-goody reasoning with that guy. He doesn't care. You're just irritating him." Or better yet, "You don't know how to deal with this guy, I do. Just let me do it. I'll close the deal, watch."

If you are a sociopath, for whatever reason you have a blunted or nonexistent sense of empathy. Although this has multiple ramifications, in the end that's all it amounts to. It may amuse you to know that I discussed this with a very serious-minded Christian (Catholic) friend and he said (at first to my surprise but not now) that indeed, there's absolutely no reason a sociopath could be not just a good Christian but an outright Saint; his basic line was "emotions are overrated, it's actions that matter. It doesn't matter how you feel about it, it's what you DO that counts."
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