The Blind Giant (30 page)

By way of example:
Dan Ariely describes the pricing structure of US subscriptions to the
Economist
magazine – $59 for Internet-only, $125 for a print-only subscription, and $125 for a combined sub – and breaks it down as follows: ‘most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context … the
Economist
’s marketers offered us a no-brainer: relative to the print option, the print-and-Internet option looks clearly superior.’ But the only reason the combination option looks so strong is the presence of the print-only option. In fact, that comparison is the sole reason for the existence of the print-only option. It’s there to
make you think the combination is a bargain. Consider it again without the print option: $59 for an Internet subscription, or $125 for a print-and-Internet combination. Even having gone through the whole process openly, do you suddenly find the choice slightly different? I have read and re-read that section in Ariely’s book. I have used the example repeatedly to friends and in professional discussions of ebook pricing. And yet to me, as I type this, the equation has still changed. Abruptly, the combination option seems more expensive than it did at the beginning of this paragraph.

Perhaps the most important thing is not to get good at making decisions, but to remember to want the opportunity to do so. On 13 July 2011
New Scientist
magazine carried an item on Prodcast, a software system created by Microsoft to help you decide when to buy technological goods. The logic is unassailable: new technological gizmos decrease in price over time and eventually are replaced. There is therefore a sort of perfect window where they’re as cheap as they’re going to get without being outmoded (although ‘outmoded’ is a harsh description for a fully functional item that is fractionally slower than the newer version or takes slightly lower resolution pictures). Prodcast tells you when to strike, while other expert systems advise on what and where to buy.

Taken together, these systems seem to imply that human intervention in the decision is rather unnecessary. The same idea resonates in
Eric Schmidt’s assessment of Google’s ability to predict what a user is thinking and in Amazon’s recommendations: the concept is that the system knows what you will think before you think it, but of course it’s somewhat self-fulfilling, like the old trick of telling someone not to think about purple elephants. It goes beyond advertising, which to me has a sense of being broadcast; it’s an offer of a specific product driven by an analysis of you. The next step in the seamless interaction of the system and your environment is a kind of checklist:
Are you sure you don’t
want object x? Well, no, I suppose I’m not sure I don’t want it … Maybe I do …
And indeed, my online supermarket does exactly that: before I can check out, I have to run a gauntlet of helpful suggestions of things I may have forgotten and things I haven’t tried but which the software is offering me on the basis of an analysis of purchasing patterns across the board.

One step beyond that is the creation of a bank account to which the software has access. You could set up a robot that would check all three variables against whether you had sufficient funds, and place an order if you did, and your shiny new product would arrive before you even realized that you wanted it. It would probably send you an email to let you know the item was ordered, so that you didn’t accidentally buy one in the meantime. Life without the stress of discovering your own amusements; new things just arriving for you to play with. If we follow this road, will we lose, instead of decision-making ability, the habit of volition? Long-term prison inmates eventually lose the habit of opening doors for themselves. Instead they stand and wait for a warden to unlock the door and tell them to step through. It starts to look a little like the nightmare scenario, but it’s a consequence of choice. If we ever arrive at that place, we will have chosen it. It’s not inherent in the technology – but it may be an aspect of our culture. The problem with that, of course, is that the choice is clouded and concealed. We don’t see it for what it is – although we are perhaps beginning to.

Practically speaking, it’s possible to build a strong habit of choice. It’s like learning to fasten your seat belt when you get in the car. You just do it, over and over, until it becomes part of the business of starting the engine. (In fact, of course, what you’re doing is strengthening the relevant neural pathways in your brain – turning neuroplasticity to your own advantage.) In the real world, it might be hard to find evenly balanced decisions with trees of branching possibility to practise on, but, coming right back to the beginning of this book, we know that decision-making
skills are among those emphasized by frequent interaction with digital technology. Both computer games and web use require anticipation, problem-solving and decision. So if you’re already working and playing digitally, you’re solving part of the problem. (Games, obviously, want to present you with hard choices to keep you interested, and deciding whether to click through a link in an article to the deeper information beyond is, as Nicholas Carr describes it, a split-second change in cognition during which you weigh what you’re presently reading against an assessment of the interest and value of what you are likely to find beyond the link.)

US writer and thinker
Howard Rheingold, who chronicled the rise of the WELL in the early days of the Internet, also wrote a checklist for lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreams are dreams in which the sleeper is aware that they are dreaming and can control their actions and environment. The trick is to reach that point without also waking yourself up. Rheingold gives three easy ways of spotting a dream: physical laws don’t work; text changes when you read it twice or is illegible; switches and mechanisms that ought to function do nothing. He advises would-be lucid dreamers to check these things frequently throughout the day so that they do it naturally, and hence while dreaming.

The concept lends itself well to training oneself to good habits of decision-making. Each time you’re confronted with a situation that seems to call for choice, check your assumptions. Look at the options in front of you, and remove the ones that seem out of place, like the
Economist
’s print-only option. Now ask yourself whether the options available accord with what you actually want and what you feel able to pay in terms of time or effort or money – or personal data. At each stage, demand more of yourself. Don’t simply wait for time, the system or circumstance to make the choice for you. (This last is particularly important as businesses in all areas confront the digital challenge; there’s a natural caution that urges us to watch and wait and see what it all
looks like ‘when it’s calmed down’. The problem with that is that it cedes the act of creation of the new landscape to others who have different priorities. Once again looking at the publishing trade, the digital giants – Amazon, Apple and Google – have different priorities and business models from those of conventional publishers. A ‘wait and see’ strategy hands control of the book’s new era to entities that need different things from the existing publishing industry. The hard truth is: get involved, or get sidelined. The future is not set. It’s being made right now.)

Broadly, the ‘choice habit’ looks a bit like this:

It’s quite interesting to run different decisions through the list. For example:
Should I accept an interest-only, negative-amortizing, adjustable-rate sub-prime mortgage?

Rendered in English, that’s a loan secured on your house on which you have the option of adding your interest payments to the capital sum as you go along. If it sounds barking mad, that is because it is, as far as I can tell, the worst type of loan created during the sub-prime lending boom, designed in essence for people who could not afford to borrow what they were being offered. It is a loan whose purpose is not to serve the borrower but to form part of a package of loans that can then be securitized and sold on: a loan-as-commodity. It stumbles a bit on question 1, looks utterly alarming on question 2, and brain-shatteringly scary if you can actually answer question 3. (In which case, you can join the five or six people who dared to ask hard questions in
the run-up to the collapse and make a lot of money.) The answer to question 4 would probably be:
Yes, you need to consider a different property or a rental
.

I’m not proposing that this is magic, just that a real decision process, robustly applied, will at least reveal the nature of the choice in front of you. It works equally well on the
Economist
’s pricing scheme, by the way: question 4 has you re-examining the different price bands and asking, if you’re really being serious about it, why the print-only option is included at all.

It’s a longish list, and it requires some brainpower to apply it, but habit makes this kind of thing very rapid – as with the example of starting your car. In that case, the sequence goes something like: seat belt, got everything, know destination, start car, mirrors and road, signal, move – and takes a few seconds. Obviously, a choice-under-pressure list looks different, as we’ve already seen. But in context, part of the point of choice is that you have to construct your own priority list; that very action is an important aspect of deciding where you assign value. And once you begin to use a list like this, you shape your life around the idea that you make your own decisions and it becomes self-reinforcing; feedback once again.

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we’re not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what’s going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn’t like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it’s like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.

Perhaps more, though, you are mutable, and that is good. Your habits and opinions are not written in your brain or your DNA like carvings on stone tablet, although some of your predispositions probably are. Steven Pinker again: ‘When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar.’ Our brains are to a certain extent set, but within limits they are changeable, trainable. So we need to learn to treat our identities as something we make, at least in part, and be sensitive to the possibility that others are using that mutability as a tool to manipulate our actions – while at the same time taking advantage of it to become more who we wish to be. What we can’t change will take care of itself. What we can is up to us.

A
FEW YEARS
ago, a friend of mine was studying for an art history qualification (I forget which kind). She had among other things to absorb the entirety of a wonderful book about Italian art in the Baroque period called
Patrons and Painters
. I had almost no knowledge of the topic, and yet somehow I had to help, at least to glean enough so that I could test her knowledge. I started at the index, looking for a way in that would allow me to find a meaningful path through a foreign land, and noticed that one name occurred a great deal: that of
Consul Joseph Smith.

Smith was a collector and a patron; actually, you could say that he was
the
patron. He knew everyone. He occurs a great deal in Francis Haskell’s book because he’s a pivotal figure, which makes him ubiquitous and therefore useless as a first stepping stone. There’s simply too much of him to absorb without a background. However, in skimming the main entry on Joseph Smith I found someone who was, to me, more interesting:
Giustiniana Wynne.

Giustiniana Wynne was the daughter of a Greek adventuress and an English noble. She attracted – most probably, she sought out and fought for – the attention of some of the most important players in the game of art in Venice during her lifetime. Joseph Smith courted her, lost her, and was so hurt by the rejection that he fell out with his rival and pupil,
Andrea Memmo. Memmo subsequently became a significant patron in his own right.
Giustiniana eventually married the Austrian ambassador; Memmo, incidentally a friend of Casanova and an enthusiastic sampler of life’s pleasures, had long since moved on. I don’t know whether it was he or Giustiniana who terminated the affair; they seem to have been well-matched. In any case, the ambassador, Count Rosenberg, was apparently a man who enjoyed less cerebral activities such as hunting; his wife aspired, in Haskell’s words, to the company of the learned. The final relevant entry in the book has her, older and more respectable but still a force to be reckoned with, keeping company (romantic or simply intellectual is unclear) with
Angelo Querini, the ‘last important patron to emerge in Venice’. Giustiniana was witness to, and binds together, some of the most interesting developments in art and philosophy of the period.

When I began to trace the story of Giustiniana Wynne through Venice, I became deeply and delightedly engaged.
Maryanne Wolf, in
Proust and the Squid
, describes it perfectly in relation to reading a passage from (of course) Proust: