Labor of Love (20 page)

 

CHAPTER 7.
NICHES

“Greed is all right,” the legendary stock trader Ivan Boesky told the graduating class at Berkeley's School of Business Administration. “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” This was in May 1985. A lot had changed since protestors paralyzed the campus twenty years earlier. The student radicals of the 1960s had insisted that they had a right to conduct their private lives as they saw fit. By the 1980s, however, Berkeley students took for granted that they could sleep with whom they wanted, when they wanted. They were less interested in free love than in high finance.

The screenwriters for Oliver Stone's movie
Wall Street
lifted the most famous lines of the antihero Gordon Gekko directly from Boesky's Berkeley commencement speech. Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is engineering a hostile takeover of a family-owned paper company.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” he tells a room of wavering shareholders. “Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

By the time
Wall Street
came out in December 1987, the stock market had collapsed, and Boesky had been convicted of insider trading. He would pay $100 million in penalties, serve a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence, and be barred from working in securities for life. But his mantra
Greed is good
has stayed in the American lexicon. The more surprising phrase that Gordon Gekko coined,
greed for love
, never caught on the same way.

There was always something a little tongue-in-cheek about the decadents who crooned, as Madonna did, that
the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right
. But in the late 1970s and early '80s, shifts in the American economy did begin to turn marriage into a luxury good. The sense that only upper-middle-class and wealthier, college-educated people could manage to get and stay married dramatically changed the landscape of dating. So, too, did another important idea that the '80s bequeathed us. If greed was good, desire works best when it is specific.

*   *   *

Romantics tend to associate love with serendipity. They wait for what the French call the
coup de foudre
, to be stricken by a lightning bolt of attraction. But realists recognize the advantage of strategically cornering the dating market. In order to do it, you have to know your niche. All algorithm-driven dating services rely on the premise that with good enough data, they can match anyone to his or her soul mate. But in order to use these services effectively you must first narrow your search terms.

Since the era of the Shopgirl, the “likes” that daters use to telegraph their personalities have multiplied and become more precise. A friend recently admitted that he had found his last girlfriend by searching OkCupid for W4M in the New York area who had liked Alice Munro. He had planned to go on dates with each of the five results but then hit it off with the second; they were together for four years. I was surprised that the Munro search turned up only five straight women. After all, she is a Nobel laureate. “Oh yeah,” the friend said, and then confessed that he had started with other authors, whose names had not culled his prospects as effectively. “I like David Foster Wallace. But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it's a shitshow.”

In order to appeal to prospective lovers, you must know where to look. You must learn to brand yourself so that you will be searchable by the right people, too. The dating website How about we … relies on the idea that you will get along well with someone to whom your spontaneous flights of fancy appeal. Users propose dates, which then appear in the feeds of other users; if you want to do something someone proposes, it puts you in touch. Successful daters, on this site, must master a push-pull between quirkiness and conformity. You won't get many bites by posting,
How about we go to a movie?
But neither will
How about we play
Mario Kart
at my place while eating leftover Ethiopian takeout and then laugh at how flatulent it makes us?
Even though, with the right person, doing either of those things sounds fun.

Scott Kominers, a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School who teaches about online dating in his courses on market design, explains why the signals that singles send to one another through dating sites and apps tend to diverge. The push-pull effect between suggesting a movie and
Mario Kart
is the result of competing tendencies toward “pooling equilibrium” and “skewing,” or “polarization.”

The first effect explains why so many dating profiles look so boring. For instance, why does almost everyone profess to love travel?

“When there are high costs associated with providing a certain response that is perceived as unusual, people will tend toward giving answers that they see other users give—answers that are average,” Kominers says. For instance, someone who puts down “math rap” under interests can immediately turn off many other users on that basis.

“If I'm a heterosexual man who has listed one of the high-cost responses and not many women I am interested in are responding to my messages, I go and try to find out what other guys are putting. And I see that they said ‘travel' and that they did not mention anything as nerdy as math rap. And I think to myself, ‘Well, travel's okay. I don't
dislike
traveling.' So I add travel to my interests in the hopes of having greater success.”

Eventually, however, the pooled equilibrium can inspire the opposite effect. Users who find themselves flooded with average profiles or feel lost in the sea look for signals to differentiate themselves. According to Kominers, “skewing is an effect of the site, a consequence of and reaction to the fact that everyone looks the same.” Over time, the process leads to the multiplication of niche services like FarmersOnly.

*   *   *

The dream of finding your other half, the one custom-made just for you, is an old one. In Roman mythology, the lonely sculptor Pygmalion spends his days creating a statue of his ideal woman. The goddess Venus eventually takes pity on Pygmalion and brings his marble girl to life. They get married and live happily ever after. The 1980s version of this story is the John Hughes movie
Weird Science
, about two high school geeks who conjure up their dream girl. They are inspired not by Venus but by watching the 1931 movie
Frankenstein
on cable. Instead of stone and chisel, they use a desktop computer, which they connect with wires to a bunch of magazine cutouts. The Frankenbabe who emerges is a little grown-up for them. But by conjuring a cool car out of thin air, and helping them throw wild parties, she raises their social stock to the point where they can score cute human girlfriends.

Weird Science
was science fiction, and it was meant to be funny. But today the Internet dangles out the tantalizing prospect that any man or woman could actually almost do this. Now any of us might dream of becoming Pygmalion 2.0.

*   *   *

On the surface, the beginning of the Era of the Niche looked very different from the free love years that preceded it. When Ronald Reagan first ran for governor of California in 1966, he had promised to get rid of the “Berkeley bums.” During his first campaign for president, in 1980, he scored points with conservative supporters by expressing contempt for hippies who (he said) “act like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah” and indulge in “orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you.”

Most Americans seemed to agree that the free-for-all of the sexual revolution had gone on long enough: Reagan won by a landslide. But however eager conservatives were to return to the “traditional” values of the 1950s, they could not simply undo the real changes that had taken place since then. The thriving manufacturing economy had collapsed. With it, the wages that had let millions of working men support stay-at-home wives, and keep their going-steady kids flush with spare cash for gas, milk shakes, and dances, had plummeted. So, as it happened, the Reagan Revolution did not erase the central tenets of the counterculture. Instead, it spread them.

The press loved to lampoon former radicals who switched teams during the 1980s. They could take their pick. Bobby Seale, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party who had appeared on television during the Watts riots in 1965 chanting “Burn, baby, burn,” rebranded himself as a gourmet chef. Jane Fonda went from being a protest icon to building a fitness empire based on aerobics videos.

It was not just cynicism or disillusionment that drove radicals from rioting to retail. While free-market evangelists dressed differently from free lovers, they shared certain deep similarities. The philosophies of personal freedom espoused by writers like Lawrence Lipton or activists like Timothy Leary laid the groundwork for the worldview in which, as Boesky put it, being “all right” meant being “healthy,” and being “healthy” meant “feeling good about yourself.” Where the point of living in the free world was to pursue happiness, as you defined it, without interference.

Like the Steadies who preceded them, the young people who flocked to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love believed that the goal of life was well-being, and that you achieved it by consuming. The difference was that they refused to accept the limited range of goods and lifestyles on offer. They did not want to go for root beer floats with “one certain boy.” They did not want to marry the first or second girl they parked with and petted, or spend their days working nine to five to pay off the mortgage on a prefabricated house that she could grow old washing their dishes in. They wanted
experience.
This could mean consuming drugs or taking lovers or both.

The radicals who grew up to be yuppies added this twist. Not only should social institutions, like marriage, not stop an individual from pursuing any desire he feels; a well-functioning economy should be able to deliver any kind of love you can imagine. The core principle remained:
greed was good
. You are free to want what you want, whether it is a tab of LSD and an “old lady” to cook dinner for your commune in the Haight, or a Rolex and a fellow law associate to make a quick detour to pick up tuna sashimi takeout on her way home to your co-op. As the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union fell apart, it seemed like the Material Girls had it right. The benefits of deregulated desire would trickle down.

*   *   *

“Niche” became a business buzzword in the early 1980s. In the Era of the Steady, GM pioneered the strategy of using “dynamic obsolescence” to stimulate demand in markets that were already saturated. By introducing new models of their cars annually, and offering payment and leasing plans that made it possible to trade your older model up, car companies convinced middle-class car owners to keep shopping around for new rides, even after they had found them.

By the 1970s, however, marketers started adopting a different tactic: divide and conquer. Whether your goal was to introduce a new product, or to expand demand for something that already existed, the best strategy was to identify a narrow demographic and shape the product to appeal to it.

Some marketing experts had recognized as early as the 1950s that the economic growth based on mass consumption that took place after World War II could not last long. An article that appeared in the
Journal of Marketing
in 1956 proposed that the future lay elsewhere: in what the economist Wendell Smith called “market segmentation.” Soon, more and more managers were saying that it made sense to appeal to people with very different desires rather than try to capture a large swath of all consumers. By the early 1980s, technological advances made it seem as if there might in fact be no limit to how finely a good company could slice its market segments.

In 1983, an article in the academic journal
Management Review
predicted that the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM) would soon allow single companies to cater to a potentially infinite number of niches. The robots that worked in the “factory of the future” could be programmed to turn out variations on products for a fraction of what it would have cost to train and keep human workers to do the same. The rise of a single bar code system across manufacturing industries helped. Making it possible to tag and track components, along the entire supply chain, “Code 39” allowed consumers to specify what they wanted in advance. Not only could you get this year's Buick, you could get it with whatever color, upholstery, and paneling you liked.

Meanwhile, new media technologies were making it possible to advertise to niche audiences more efficiently than ever before, too. In 1980, there were five television networks in the United States, and the big four, ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, commanded 90 percent of the attention of TV viewers. By 1990, there were hundreds of cable channels and none of them had anything like the market share that the big four had enjoyed. A similar sea change had taken place in radio broadcasting, and the Internet was already beginning to amplify its effects. Soon there would be more channels of communication than the advertisers of the
Mad Men
era could have imagined.

During this time, dating also became more targeted. Businesses aimed to attract a particular kind of dater. Like Madonna, they wanted the ones with the most cold, hard cash.

*   *   *

It is not clear who coined the term “yuppie,” but credit usually goes to Bob Greene. The
Chicago Tribune
columnist used it in an article about the Jerry Rubin Business Networking Salon in March 1983. Rubin, the erstwhile radical who had led the Youth International Party with Abbie Hoffman and stood trial with the Chicago Eight, was now hosting weekly “networking sessions” at the legendary Studio 54 disco in New York.