The Stories of Your Life, page 8
Incidentally, thanks to modern neuroscience techniques, researchers are now able to track Schadenfreude in the brain in real time. In a study conducted at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London,9 participants played a gambling game with a partner. As usual in these types of studies, the ‘partner’ was actually in cahoots with the researchers and had been instructed to either play fair – which resulted in the participant winning money – or to cheat, effectively stealing money from the participant. Afterwards, the partner – not the participant – was given a painful electric shock to the hand.* All of this took place while the participant was in an fMRI scanner, to allow the researchers to monitor the activation of different parts of the brain as the experiment unfolded. What they found was that when a ‘cheating’ partner received an electric shock, the ‘reward circuit’ of the participant’s brain (specifically, the left ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens) lit up in apparent delight, though only for male participants. In contrast, when a ‘fair’ partner received an electric shock, the ‘pain circuit’ of the participant’s brain lit up in apparent empathy, though to a greater extent in female than male participants. Indeed, female participants showed some neural evidence of empathy (or ‘pity’) even when a ‘cheating’ partner received a painful shock.*
So, yes, it’s easy to understand why we enjoy sweet Icarus stories in which an anti-hero gets their comeuppance. But why on earth do we enjoy the more complex flavours of Parasite or Crime and Punishment, let alone the downright bitter flavours of Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, Gone with the Wind and Brokeback Mountain? The question of why we take, in some sense, ‘pleasure’ from relentlessly sad, painful works of art – movies and novels, yes, but also music, poems, paintings, photos – has troubled just about every famous philosopher, but none of their answers quite hit the mark.
Aristotle himself speculated that fictionalized tragedies may teach us how to behave in similar circumstances. Yes, they probably do, but why should this learning be pleasurable rather than painful? David Hume thought that the heightened emotions of tragedies capture our interest and stave off boredom, but that is equally true of both ‘sweet’ Icarus stories and those following all of the other masterplots in this book. Why do we love a weepie? A lesser-known philosopher, John Morreall, suggested that we enjoy the feeling of control we get from knowing we can put down the tragic Icarus story at any point. But then why do we pick it up in the first place? This would be like banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop. Many have pointed to our species’ thirst for gossip, which – as we saw in Chapter 1 – has no doubt helped us throughout our history to avoid countless dangerous situations and shady characters. But if that’s our motivation, the gory details are pure overkill. Who, exactly, is watching Titanic ‘for information’?
No, these explanations aren’t satisfying; mainly – I think – because they seem to somehow trivialize and cheapen the deep emotions we feel when we experience ‘sad’ works of art. We are savouring the sadness for its own bittersweet flavour, not merely enduring it because we’re picking up some useful information or looking forward to switching off the TV set. More promising, then, are approaches which acknowledge that hedonistic pleasure isn’t the only emotion worth having. Most lottery winners don’t blow their wad on drink, drugs and prostitutes, and those who try almost always find that the novelty wears off pretty quickly.
But if it’s not pleasure, then what emotion are we basking in when we ‘enjoy’ a full-on weepie? An important clue comes from studies of sad music. When people are feeling sad, what do they listen to in order to cheer themselves up? Upbeat dance music? No, more often than not, sad music. Paradoxically, when you feel sad, sad songs make you feel not sadder, but happier. In a 2020 journal article,10 the musicologists David Huron and Jonna Vuoskoski proposed that sad music evokes compassion, which itself is a pleasurable emotion. Indeed, philosophers including Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant have argued that acts of charity – even anonymous ones – are not completely altruistic, because the giver gets to bask in the pleasurable emotion of ‘compassion’. Perhaps, then, we enjoy listening to sad music because it evokes compassion.
It’s an interesting theory, but how can we test it? The key, argue Huron and Vuoskoski, lies with the fact that not everybody enjoys sad music, and this seems to be true the world over. These researchers surveyed taxi drivers (some of the world’s most strongly opinionated consumers of music) in China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Haiti, Kashmir, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Punjab, Russia, Serbia, Somalia, Tunisia and Vietnam. Just over half (58 per cent) said that they liked listening to sad music, with the remainder saying they didn’t. So, what differentiates those who do and don’t enjoy sad music? After running a battery of surveys and personality tests, Huron and Vuoskoski had their answer, and it was exactly as they predicted: people who enjoy listening to sad music score highly on measures of compassion. Those who tend to feel lower levels of compassion don’t enjoy listening to sad music, and often find it puzzling that others do. Sad music is enjoyable, then, because it evokes feelings of compassion, and those feelings are themselves pleasurable.
But this is music. What does it tell us about stories? Quite a lot, actually. Listeners who enjoy sad music scored higher not just on compassion, but also on a measure of fantasy. That is, they tend to feel absorbed and transported into the narratives of novels and movies. In all likelihood, then, the picture is similar for music and narratives. Those of us who enjoy stories that follow the tragic version of the Icarus masterplot – and, as with sad music, not all of us do – enjoy the feeling of experiencing compassion for the protagonist. As far as I know, nobody has yet directly tested this enjoyable-compassion theory with narratives, but it is very promising in one respect: it offers a plausible explanation of why we find fictional tragedies enjoyable, but real-life tragedies horrific. When we watch a real-life tragedy – say a documentary about starving children – we find ourselves in an unpleasant double-bind. We must either decide to turn away, and so endure feelings of guilt, or to help, which is not only costly, but often causes even more guilt: say we decide to donate £50, couldn’t we afford £100? And if not, why not? Do we really need that £2,000 holiday more than these starving children need food? Shouldn’t we cancel the holiday and donate the money instead? In contrast, fictional tragedies like Romeo and Juliet, or stories based on real but historical tragedies like Titanic, allow us to enjoy feelings of compassion without the counterweight of guilt: no matter how much we might want to, there is simply nothing we can do to help Juliet or Rose.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
The Icarus masterplot recipe is unique amongst those in this book, in that nobody would ever choose to follow it consciously. The closest we see perhaps is when people or organizations – while ostensibly aware of their Achilles heel – see this character flaw as a strength rather than a weakness, and double down when they should instead cut their losses. This is seen most easily not with individuals, but corporations.
For all my adult life, I’ve been in bands. First was the deeply unpopular Starla, which morphed into the marginally less unsuccessful post-rock band Advances in Mathematics, when I belatedly decided to spare audiences – such as they were – my attempts at singing. After stints with Below The Stars (Sixties pop) and The Angel Hurricane (Stone Roses-wannabe indie) came Help Stamp Out Loneliness (indie pop), which did manage to carve out something of an audience, albeit in the corner of the nicheiest niche imaginable. These days, I content myself with occasional cover band gigs. In the background to all of this – or actually, I suppose, the foreground – was a Premier League of more popular, successful and – damn them – talented bands doing the same Manchester indie circuit: Polytechnic, The Longcut, The Answering Machine, even The Courteeners who, to their undisguised dismay, somehow found themselves playing my night at the woefully named Bar XS (now a Sainsbury’s cafe).
Whether big (eventually) or small, all of these mid-2000s indie bands had something in common. ‘Yeah, we’ve got a MySpace,’ they’d mumble embarrassedly between songs, ‘it’s MySpace dot com, forward slash – all one word . . .’ It’s hard to imagine now, but MySpace really was the biggest website in the world for a while.
If you’re a Millennial, you almost certainly had a MySpace profile. But if you’re any younger, you’ve probably never heard of it. So just what was MySpace exactly? Basically, it was a social network, quite similar to Facebook (which I know you don’t use either, but hey), but it had a Spotify-like element too, in that a high proportion of profiles were bands, and you could listen to their songs on their profile pages. Individuals could also borrow these songs for their own profile pages and even set them to play automatically whenever anyone visited (this would be a big no-no these days, but didn’t raise an eyebrow in the mid-2000s). It also had a dating-site element, with teens posting their grainy, poorly lit thirst traps, taken on flip-phone Motorolas and Nokia bricks. Yet MySpace was much bigger than that makes it sound. These days we have social media apps, music apps, video apps, messaging apps, dating apps, and several competitors to choose from in each category. At the peak of its powers, MySpace was Facebook, X, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp and Tinder, all rolled into one.
If you lived through the demise of MySpace, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that although it’s deep, deep into its destruction, it isn’t dead, exactly; more undead. If you try to visit your old MySpace page you’ll find it’s still there, but it’s a spooky hollowed-out shell. Your frozen-in-time biography is up, along with flyers for gigs that you went to in 2007, but most of the photos – and just about all of the songs – have been lost over the years in various server migrations and clean-ups. You can click on them, but they won’t play. Where did it all go wrong?
The key to understanding any Icarus story is the central character flaw of the main protagonist. MySpace’s flaw is that, unlike Facebook, it didn’t start out as a social networking site. As Sean Percival, the company’s former vice president of online marketing tells it, MySpace actually started out as the project of a company that sold tat online: diet pills, remote-controlled toy helicopters, nothing fancy. Looking for ways to expand the reach of their adverts, they hit upon the idea of copying Friendster, one of the very first social networks. Right from the very start, then, the whole raison d’être of MySpace was to create a network of customers to show adverts to.
Of course, this wasn’t the face it showed to users, for whom MySpace was a network of friends. The concept is so everyday now, it seems bizarre even trying to explain it, but it was on MySpace that me and millions of my generation first came across the idea of a virtual friend: someone who is your friend on social media, but who you’ve never met in person. I made my first friend, Tom, as soon as I set up my MySpace account. Of course, I soon realized that Tom – Thomas Anderson, the founder of MySpace – was set to appear by non-negotiable default as the first friend of all new users. Soon, however, I was sending friend requests to people I knew – or at least half knew – in real life, and much ink was spilled in the serious newspapers about this disastrous trend amongst young people of swapping ‘real’ for ‘virtual’ friends, and where would it all end?
The pivotal dilemma came in 2005 – just two years after the site’s founding – when Rupert Murdoch put in an offer of $580 million (that’s almost $3 per friend). In an Underdog story, Tom and friends would have thumbed their noses at the old man. But this being an Icarus story, the sale to Murdoch was inevitable, preying as it did on the character flaw or Achilles heel of the protagonist: in this case, MySpace’s origins as a marketing ploy. The company’s better-than-anyone-could-have-expected elation stage peaked in 2006, when it racked up more visits in the US than any other website, including Google.
At this point, insatiability reared its inevitable head. Nothing is ever enough; with such a huge investment, the site quickly came under pressure to make money. As the anti-hero always does in this situation, it doubled down, doing the thing that had won it early success, only more so; much more so. For MySpace, that thing was showing users adverts. Lots of adverts.
If your only experience of social media is the sites that came after – and learned lessons from – MySpace, you won’t believe the adverts. Modern social media sites favour promoted or sponsored content that, often, hardly looks like adverts at all. MySpace was the Wild West, with adverts all over the page and no restrictions on formats. The nadir was an ad called ‘Punch the Monkey’; you had to click on the monkey to punch him, then complete a survey, sign up for a credit card and so on to – maybe – win a prize. If you’ve never seen it, be grateful – it was almost as if someone had been given the task of coming up with an advert that would annoy users as much as possible. This ‘anything goes’ approach extended to users’ profile pages: users could embed music, animated GIFs, website links – anything at all – just about anywhere in their profile page. Sites like pimp-my-profile.com made it their business to ensure that every MySpace page was an unreadable mess of flashing, scrolling text on top of pictures, over a backdrop of music and sound effects. And – again – adverts: no restrictions were placed on what could be left in the ‘comments’ section of users’ profile pages, meaning that they were swamped with adverts and spam.
The seeds of MySpace’s destruction were sown. Users fled to Facebook in their millions, and Murdoch was eventually forced to sell for a reported $35 million.
In 2021, researchers from the University of Cambridge’s business school published an investigation of the companies that were listed on the London Stock exchange in 1948.11 How many, they asked, manged to survive until 2018? Half? A quarter? A tenth? The answer is just over 1 per cent: 19 out of 1,513 firms. To a first approximation, then, the tragic tale of MySpace is the fate of all companies.
What keeps going wrong? The popular view is that long-established companies are rabbits in the headlights that are paralysed into inaction when a threat arises. But writing in the Harvard Business Review, the economist Donald Sull argues that this isn’t quite right.12 Big companies know their markets well: they typically pick up on threats early and act. It’s just that they almost always do the wrong things. Sull calls this ‘active inertia’. This isn’t failing to move at all (that’s ‘passive inertia’), but doubling down on all the things that have worked well in the past.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Most corporate stories end in tragedy because when the dilemma comes, and firms must choose between the ‘right’ path and the ‘wrong’ path that appeals to the Achilles heel, the character flaw, the ethos of the company, they almost inevitably – like the anti-hero of an Icarus story – choose the latter. Sull discusses the example of Firestone Tires, whose defining ethos was ‘family values’. For example, the founder Harvey Firestone proudly and magnanimously set up the Firestone Country Club, open to all members of the company from the CEO to the humble factory worker. Local plant managers were fiercely loyal to their teams, and were encouraged to bid for additional capacity at their plants, with their requests usually waved through by chummy executives. Firestone was a family firm in the most literal sense: at the point when the crunch came, in 1972, one third of the executive board were the children of former board members.
The crunch came in the form of Ford, Firestone’s largest customer, mandating that all its cars would from now on use radial tyres, a safer and longer-lasting type recently developed by the French company Michelin. Firestone knew this development was on the cards, and did invest in new capacity for making radial tyres, though mainly by tweaking its existing operations. This was nowhere near enough. What it desperately needed to do was to bring in fresh expertise, and close down plants that were still making the old tyres. But its corporate family values – however laudable in the abstract – more or less prevented it from doing so. The path that appealed to the ethos of the firm was always the one that it was going to take, but it was also the one that led to ruin.
A similar fate befell the British clothing and home furnishings firm, Laura Ashley, which was characterized by a rejection of the sexualization of women’s fashion and an appeal to traditional British values such as modesty and restraint, epitomized by a kind of rural idyll. These traditional values were key to the company’s success, but became a millstone around its neck as the world changed and more and more women entered the workplace. Shoulder pads and power dressing were in. Rural idyll was definitely out.
If you run a business, whether it’s a multinational corporation or your own neighbourhood coffee shop, you are no doubt wondering how to avoid falling prey to a MySpace-style corporate tragedy. As we’ve already seen, it’s not easy – most firms fail sooner or later – but we can learn some lessons by following the example of . . . McDonald’s.
Yes, surprising as it may seem, the global megabrand was in serious trouble in the early 1990s, and the cause was a familiar one: relentless doubling down on its core ethos, its personality. Or perhaps, in this case, its lack of personality, since McDonald’s’ ethos is consistency and predictability, across both time and space. The chain prides itself on the fact that the Big Mac that today tickles your tastebuds in Tokyo is identical to the Big Mac that you munched on in Moscow at the turn of the millennium (it is – I’ve tried both!).
Like MySpace’s materialism, Firestone’s family values and Laura Ashley’s aesthetic, McDonalds’ core characteristic – uniformity – became a liability; its Achilles heel. Customers were bored of burgers – they wanted new, healthier options. McDonald’s tried to innovate, but were so used to thinking inside the burger box that their new offerings – the low-fat McLean burger, and the adult-oriented Arch Deluxe burger – were widely seen as more of the same; just a bit worse.
