“Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music “actually sound better”—presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions—the organization “pleasure” feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to “get things done.” Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society—i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.
 
Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: “Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths…. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.” In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of “little bits,” as he calls them—memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.

[…] The point is, we want our identities—our cultural investments—recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, “share” our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication—the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.

Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing—it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.”

I used to agree more often with Horning. What happened?

This much is true: “Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing—it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products.”

But I just don’t think we’re coherent enough to make much instrumental sense to the marketers. Or maybe I’m just a slave-drone unhip to the pleasure-prisonment.

Whatevs.