Drivers for Dreams

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 7 Part 1

I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

Chapter 7 of Living Make-Belief is the longest in the book, as Dator examines the drivers of a dream society¹, or in other words the forces that are making dreams more relevant than truth. Many of these have been operating for many decades, and so it’s worth considering whether they are really increasingly relevant parts of society. I want to bring a bit of empirical evaluation to these claims. Because there’s so much content here, I want to split this into two sections to critically evaluate what’s being said.

First of all, Dator points out that universal literacy, or writing down immutable reality as the standard of truth, wasn’t always considered the ideal. For example, neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote anything down (as far as we can tell), teaching via what they considered to be the superior method (in the latter case, the “living” word of God); it was Plato and the Evangelists who later wrote down their words and subtly changed the message by changing the medium.

Then there’s the middle section of history, when the written word was ascendant as the way to scale an idea (the Bible as canon, the university textbook model, etc). The printing press was one example of democratized literacy, and over time this led to a standardization of language and the study of language as its own field. The middle of the 19th century saw the emergence of English departments in universities, both to formalize the rules and ideas of language itself and also to consider contemporary literature (an early form of dream society, as authors’ fantasies are taken as a serious object of study).

And, of course, over the last 50 years we see ourselves in a new pattern. The number of English majors has dropped significantly since the 1970s, despite large increases in the number of people attending college. Dator even faintly suggests that our current moment wrestling with the impact of critical theory on society may be an extended consequence of repurposed English professors turning their ability to deconstruct and reconstruct meaning in text to social issues. If correct, the social turbulence we’re currently experiencing may be at its peak, as English majors fade away; by contrast, Hines’s ConsumerShift suggests we’ll see increasing intensity as more and more people adopt postmodern values². In any event, Dator doesn’t mourn the twilight of the written word’s supremacy, and suggests that we all move on³.

Dator also talks more generally about the education sector. Much ink has been spilled about how the schools, with their schedules, bells, and rote tasks, seem designed to mold children into factory workers; Dator adds committed soldiers and managers to the list, but largely agrees with the diagnosis⁴. Rather than continue to use education to inculcate students in the tools and methods of the past (including deep reading and literary analysis) points to alternative models he proposed decades ago for self-directed learning that resemble Khan Academy and online MOOC/microlearning/etc.

Advertising and credit cards

Dator here points out that advertising of goods for sale goes back to the middle of the Industrial Society. He points out this is because mass production made lots of goods that needed to be sold, compared to earlier eras; I’ll also point out that the foundational logic of advertising — a standard good that exists at scale, a single price, the idea of the consumer, and something like a flyer or newspaper to mass-distribute the ad — is rooted in the reality and logic of industrialism. Marketing, however, is the next step: convincing people that they need what you’re making; this selling of an aspirational idea, or identity, or whatever might call it associated with products you could buy is certainly a “dreamy” idea. It’s interesting⁵ that one of the key technologies of the Dream Society, the internet, is both underwritten by and has led to a dramatic improvement in targeted marketing, based on Information Society logic and algorithms.

One of the ways that reality intrudes on the dream of being able to consume ever-increasing amounts of manufactured stuff is that we have limited or unpredictable disposable income. The development of revolving credit and its extension to all Americans (even women!) gave people access to present goods in exchange for future payment or trouble. This, plus shoplifting⁶, means that goods can keep flowing smoothly from factory to home.

Data time! Note that, adjusting for population growth and inflation⁷, the total amount of outstanding credit being used by consumers in the US peaked before the financial crisis and has been operating in a band of around $300-500 per person (in 1968 dollars) since the mid-1990s⁸. This is consistent with a story of a maturing driver enabling a transformation around the year 2000. It’s also true that housing debts have increased over time and may be crowding out some increases in debt purchasing. It’s also true (I think) that new forms of credit like Klarna are not included in this measure, but Klarna’s 2023 total volume was (I think) $96B, which per person per month (if all their business was US) would be something like $24, so not really changing the story.

Amusement parks and World’s Fairs

Dator identifies World’s Fairs as showcases for industrial advancement and a way to amplify the desire for the technologies of the future in the general public. This is interesting, because it’s using Dream Society logic to advance an Industrial Society agenda. He attended the 1939 New York World’s Fair as a boy and helped with the 2000 fair in Hannover, Germany. The 1939 fair looms large in the story of our vision of the future — I wonder how much was due to the fair itself, showcasing everything from television to a smoking robot, and how much is because of Dator’s personal experience and his use of footage from the fair in his Intro class for 45 years, teaching generations of futurists. In any event, it seems clear that World’s Fairs don’t have the same cultural cachet they used to. However, attendance at these events, while down from the heights of the Paris and has been more robust than I expected, even controlling for the growth in global population:

As for amusement parks, they are 100% in the “Experience Economy” business. Amusement parks have been around for a long time, but theme parks, immersing visitors in some kind of specific intellectual property environment, are the Dream Society apotheosis of the idea. Rolf Jensen in The Dream Society describes theme parks specifically as “one of the growth industries of the twenty-first century” (p. 69), selling carefully curated experiences that families share together, though he also describes the potential for theme-park-ification of the world’s wonders, such as safaris and other forms of “inauthentically authentic” bits of nature. In any event, US spending on theme parks has climbed by nearly 50% in real per capita terms since Jensen wrote his book (global pandemics excepted).

But this trend isn’t inevitable; Disney built a whole hotel to give people a totally immersive Star Wars experience connected to their park, possibly spending a billion US dollars on it, and the whole thing failed so spectacularly that they shut it down in 18 months and are converting it into offices, officially surrendering the space to the Information Society. Disney’s big IP failures, including Marvel Cinematic Universe fatigue, are worth spending more time on in this context, because the theory suggests a bright future for them.

OK this has already taken enough time, so you’ll have to read next week’s post to catch the other drivers. We’ll be talking about sports, drugs, and sex, so there’s something for everyone!

1. Yes I plan to be wildly inconsistent about capitalization on this until both versions look correct.

2. Or, at least, a shift in how Postmodern values are expressed - I need to write more about the “mean green meme” in the near future.

3. Again, yes yes, in a book that costs over $100 to provide the knowledge at the very edge of the field.

4. I am aware that the claim that this was an intentional societal decision is suspect at best, but it stands to reason that an institution will naturally reflect the logic and metaphors of the society that creates it.

5. Yes, I know this is a cop-out word that means “I haven’t figured out the right connection yet”.

6. Dator sees theft as a critical and intentional part of the current system — it not only gives extra goods somewhere to go, but gives lots of people (judges, police, and prisoners) something to do to keep the whole system spinning. I don’t know how literally Dator means this; taken at face value, it suggests that he believes that some unspecified “they” (economists?) are masterminding this whole system, rather than it being the emergent outcome of a complex system. Stores don’t have incentives to permit shoplifting, or hire additional security guards to have to prevent it, etc, to increase total economic output; shoplifters don’t have an incentive to get caught to keep prison guards employed, etc. This strikes me as composition fallacy, but maybe I’m just overthinking it.

7. Which, for the record, required digging around in the data systems of three totally separate federal agencies.

8. As always, if you spot a factual error or misunderstanding in my empirical work, I’d be happy to issue an update.