The Power of Glamour
Ed Driscoll of PJ Media also just released the podcast interview he recorded with me last week. And, in case you missed it, you can watch the PJTV interview Glenn Reynolds did with me here.
No matter how many of these you watch or listen to, however, I can assure you that there is much, much more to the book. So please buy and read it!
Contrary to what you may have read in the gossip columns, I dedicated
The Power of Glamour
In July 2007, barely a week after receiving the final signed contract for the book, I was diagnosed with what turned out to be HER2-positive breast cancer, a particularly aggressive form of the disease. Twenty years earlier, I would have had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival, given the details of my case. Today, I am officially cured. Although I underwent the traditional treatments of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, what made the crucial difference was the pathbreaking biologic drug Herceptin, first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998.
The research that led to Herceptin was funded not by the federal government or a traditional cancer charity but by money from Ronald O. Perelman, in his role as chairman of Revlon, and by fundraising in the 1990s at a series of star-studded events called the Fire and Ice Balls. I am deeply grateful to the many people, only one of whom I know personally, responsible for bringing Herceptin to the world: to Dennis Slamon for his scientific vision; Lilly Tartikoff for her fund-raising energy; my oncologist, John Glaspy, for his persuasive eloquence; the researchers at Genentech for development and testing; and Perelman and Revlon for their financial contributions. In a very real way, I owe my life to the glamour of makeup and movie stars.
The story of Herceptin, one of the few true miracle drugs in the fight against cancer, is a remarkable one. You can read more about it here.
Imagine the horror of entering a mall Halloween morning only to find...Christmas decorations.
What a relief to discover they were only set decorations, for an episode of Modern Family being shot at the mall.
My favorite part: Smart Phone Santa
One of the things I do in The Power of Glamour is distinguish between glamour and such related concepts as charisma, spectacle, and romance. Here's the discussion of romance (not in the boy-meets-girl sense):
In concealing effort, glamour differs from romance, which often portrays hardship. Think of the training sequences in martial-arts movies, the battles in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, the artist’s struggling years in the garret, the entrepreneur’s office cot and diet of ramen noodles. Behind- the-scenes reality shows like Project Runway or The Rachel Zoe Project are essentially romances about the creation of glamorous moments, dramatizing the effort behind the effortless appearance of a runway show or red-carpet look. Romance does idealize reality—it omits the tedious, meaningless, and boring—but it heightens the glory of success by showing the struggle that produces it. Glamour is less narrative. It captures not a story but a scene: the dance, not the rehearsals; the still photo, not the film. Glamour and romance are closely related, but glamour is about being, not becoming. We experience the result, not the process.
The relationship between subject and audience is also different. In a romance, the audience feels a range of emotions along with the characters: excitement, fear, anger, love, grief, joy. Glamour, by contrast, remains an outside view, requiring mystery and distance. In the classic versions of the character, we don’t inhabit James Bond’s mental universe. We project ourselves into his setting and talents. He is “all façade.”We do not feel what he feels but, rather, what the idea of him makes us feel. This distanced identification is why anonymous models or even inanimate objects can be glamorous. We do not need to know them from the inside; we fill their images with our own emotions and desires.
John F. Kennedy's moon speech is a good example of the use of romance for persuasive purposes.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
The glamour-romance distinction is relevant to way the current administration sold Obamacare—to itself and to the public. Instead of portraying the program as worth the sacrifices and transition costs, its supporters largely concealed those to anyone outside what Megan McArdle calls Expertopia. Instead of hardships in a glorious and worthwhile cause, their rhetoric encouraged people to imagine a glamorous version of their ideal health care plan, achieved effortlessly and without cost.
In my most recent Bloomberg View column, I argue that a big reason for the disastrous startup problems experienced by HealthCare.gov was that even smart people who aren't I.T. pros tend fall prey to what TV Tropes calls the "magical database." It seems that the president of the United States and many around him simply have no idea how complicated the systems they were demanding would be to design. Here's an excerpt:
Looking back, it seems crazy that neither the Barack Obama administration nor the public was prepared for the startup difficulties. There’s no shortage of database experts willing to opine on the complexities of the problem. Plenty of companies have nightmarish stories to tell about much simpler software projects. And reporting by the New York Times finds that the people involved with the system knew months ago that it was in serious trouble. “We foresee a train wreck,” one said back in February.
So why didn’t the administration realize that integrating a bunch of incompatible government databases into a seamless system with an interface just about anyone could understand was a really, really hard problem? Why was even the president seemingly taken by surprise when the system didn’t work like it might in the movies?
We have become seduced by computer glamour.
Read the whole thing here. The "nightmarish stories" link goes to this tale of the famous I.T. disaster that made Hershey almost miss Halloween in 1999.
In response, I received a number of emails from I.T. pros, adding their perspective to the argument. One of the best came from Jack Simmons of Denver (emphasis added):
Whatever the merits or demerits of the ACA, your description of the grasp of the common person regarding computer systems is spot on.
People really do think of computer systems as some sort of magic easily configured and implemented.
I think back on some of the experiences I've had trying to diagnose and correct relatively simple computer failures. In one case, it took over forty hours of effort on my part to discover a 4 had been entered in a key index definition instead of a 6. The result was a complete systems shutdown for fours days on the accounting system of a major phone company. That was a long weekend.
The Jean Luc Picard analogy was very funny because of its accuracy. I love to tease people with the phrase "make it so" whenever we're discussing the potential solution to a problem.
I really believe Obama thinks all he has to do to solve a problem is do the same thing. He has obviously never worked on a system. If he had done so, he would realize it's going to take more than a campaign speech to get these systems up and running.
To be fair, there are many managers I have met who had no grasp of what was being asked of their systems folks. It was only when their jobs were on the line they took the time to actually sit down to understand the intricacies of even a simple computer system. Some of them didn't make it.
Computers force one to really define what is to be accomplished before beginning. Most times it is not until the system is up and running that the systems analyst really understands the requirements. This is followed by the realization of how many mistakes were made in building the system and how many mistakes still reside within the system.
Anyway, excellent article.
Life is messy and so are our computer systems.
I don't think we're going to get the health care systems up and running in any sort of reasonable time frame.
I would love to work on the systems, but that is not going to happen.
Don Smallidge wrote:
As a software developer who has written similar kinds of software (knitting data from different sources to service a web application) I am well aware of the challenges the administration faced in creating this web site. Certainly I have never been involved with any project on this scale, but I think the issues and decisions required to bring such projects forth as live interactive tools is something many web developers can relate to.
I think your article caught the essence of the problem very well. The comments on the Bloomberg site were more about Obamacare and people's political opinions, not on why the website is having so much trouble (this solution to our healthcare needs has people so polarized they are generally unable to just focus on the specific technical issues at hand). Thanks for bringing this aspect of the program to light.
You can support Obamacare, in other words, and still acknowledge the problems created by the magical database fantasy—as well as the administration's downplaying of the transition costs and tradeoffs.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame interviewed me about The Power of Glamour
Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution has a
brief but glowing post about The Power of Glamour
I believe this is her best and most compelling book. It is wonderfully researched, very well written, the topic is understudied yet of universal import, and the accompanying visuals are striking.
He highlights the distinction I draw between glamour and charisma, which I also discussed in DeepGlamour posts here and here.
I'll be speaking about "The Power of Glamour" (and signing
The Power of Glamour
Check out the Calendar for other upcoming events.
Check out this brief, image-laden interview with me talking about my new book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
Unfortunately, Islamist terrorism doesn't need Rolling Stone to make it glamorous. |
No sooner had Rolling Stone put Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover, looking doe-eyed and rock-star disheveled, than critics denounced the editors for "glamorizing terrorism."
"The cover of Rolling Stone is meant for glorifying rock stars, icons, and heroes NOT murderers!" protested a typical reader in the article's online comments thread. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino decried the magazine for its "celebrity treatment" of Tsarnaev and for sending the "terrible message that destruction gains fame for killers and their 'causes.'"
Unfortunately, Islamist terrorism doesn't need Rolling Stone to make it glamorous. For the right audience, apparently including Tsarnaev, it already is. Understanding the nature of that glamour could offer clues to discouraging future terrorists. But first we have to acknowledge that terrorist glamour exists.
The novelist Salman Rushdie recognized the connection in a 2006 interview. "Terror is glamour--not only, but also," he said, arguing that many terrorists "are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic ... The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives."
The interviewer was flabbergasted, but Rushdie was correct. Glamour is about much more than celebrity, sex appeal or shiny dresses. It's a product of imagination--and a powerful form of persuasion.
Glamour gives its audience the feeling of "if only"--if only I could belong to that group, wear that dress, drive that car, date that person, live in that house. If only I could be like that. By embodying our longings in a specific image or idea, glamour convinces us, if only for a moment, that the life we yearn for exists. That dream can motivate real-world action, whether that means taking a resort vacation, moving to a new city, starting a band or planting a bomb with visions of martyrdom. What we find glamorous helps define who we are and who we may become.
Janet Reitman's Rolling Stone story on Tsarnaev points to several sources of glamour that have nothing to do with celebrity: the allure of military action, utopian causes and a lost homeland and identity. All these things speak to desires that go deeper than fame. "It is not uncommon for young Chechen men to romanticize jihad," Reitman writes, describing "abundant Chechen jihadist videos online" that show fighters from the Caucasus who "look like grizzled Navy SEALs, humping through the woods in camouflage and bandannas."
To be a jihadi warrior, these images suggest, is to be a man. Martial glamour is as ancient as Achilles. It promises prowess, courage, camaraderie and historical importance. It offers a way to matter. The West once recognized the pull of martial glamour--before the carnage of World War I, the glamour of battle was a common and positive phrase--but it ignores at its peril the spell's enduring draw, especially for those who feel powerless and insignificant.