Bubblehead trilogy: the movement.
How it got here, what it is and why.
Guilt is everywhere sought in cases of failure; for failure brings with it a depression of spirits the sole remedy for which is instinctively applied: a new arousal of the feeling of power—and this is to be found in the condemnation of the "guilty party". This guilty one is not a scapegoat for the guilt of others: he is a sacrifice to the weak, humiliated and depressed, who want to demonstrate to themselves on something that they still have some strength left.
—Nietzsche, Daybreak
Nietzsche knew.
Elsewhere I look at the Bubblehead Manifesto and trace the meteoric ascent of Sage, Head Bubblehead. Here I'll look at the history, context and preferred delivery system of the bubblehead movement.
You may think that, as an agent, I'm too close to real estate to get the "bubble" and too un-hip to get the blogs. But I'll show that bubbleheads are as close, financially and emotionally, to real estate as any agent. And whether I or anyone else get the bubble blogs depends less on how hip we are and far more on how fervently we believe that the Internet can make us instant experts on complex and nuanced subjects. Whether we get the bubble blogs depends on how well we understand that concepts like the real estate market are complex and nuanced. Whether we get the bubble blogs depends on how well we understand that the blogs are really an unconscious reflection of larger issues.
We'll look at this in detail in a moment. But first I'll say a few things about the Internet, the medium that brings the bubblehead community together, that may sound either really obvious or really out of it, depending on how devoutly you worship at the altar of technology.
I have a pragmatic and utilitarian—as opposed to ecstatic and mystical—attitude toward the Internet. I see my HP 8510w not as truth and beauty in black plastic, but as a powerful and fascinating tool.
I willingly concede that the 'net is an intriguing medium, but it's only that: a medium. The Internet is the newest of the mass media, but neither its newness, nor the fact that we can now make our pet peeves heard 'round the world, makes the 'net's messages revealed truth handed down from the mountain top. The Internet gives us only what any medium gives us: opinion, man-made and fallible, occasionally truth but more often rationalization when it isn't wishful thinking, conventional wisdom or outright lying. The Internet's openness brings us a diversity of messages, which simply means that it brings us more unfiltered nonsense. The old media may not always have the highest standards, but something—a lingering professionalism, or an older and more conservative audience, or maybe just higher delivery costs—makes it more selective about the messages it delivers.
...until it goes online, which tells me that the difference reflects the audience. Everyone's heard "there's lots of information on the Internet, but you can't believe all of it", but numerous Web-based thrill-seekers don't seem to care what they read as long as it makes their toes wiggle—the tabloid audience gone online.
Pair this audience of sensation-seekers with the power of any mass medium, including the Internet, to turn the most screwball message into divine revelation and you end up with something that resembles a down South tent revival complete with speaking in tongues and faith healings hallelujah!
Skeptical? Try this exercise. Imagine a stranger giving you a message. Would you immediately and unquestioningly incorporate this message into your core beliefs? Then imagine that same stranger giving you the same message but under a newspaper byline, or through your television screen, or on your computer monitor. Now how much more likely are you to accept it?
At least the message of the stranger reporting for a well-known media outlet has the implied warranty of that outlet. This warranty isn't always ironclad, even when it comes from the most reputable of outlets, but the bloggers can't offer even this. To illustrate, let's repeat the above exercise but in an Internet context. A stranger comes up to you and starts complaining vehemently that "they" are out to get you and him. Do you take his message to the bank? Or do you edge away? But on the Internet this stranger finds a ready and receptive audience. Hey, I always thought they were screwing us! Thanks for making it so simple! Whew, that's another tough decision I don't have to make!
Some of these "alternative message providers" warranty their message with one of the oldest and most effective of come-ons: you're getting the message "they" don't want you to hear. This gives them good cover—another Daniel Ellsworth leaking the Pentagon Papers, another Upton Sinclair exposing corporate corruption, another Daniel Riis revealing New York tenement conditions. But peel off the thin veneer of heroics and you may find them standing in a long line of street-corner demagogues, grinding their axes on whatever religious or ethnic or industry group is transfixed by the spotlight, hitching a free ride on the coattails of the latest media event for their own profit and vengeance. Sometimes those coattails take them far, because the line between prophet and wacko is a fine one that not everyone can see.
This might be one reason the blogs find a ready audience. The other goes back, way way back to the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization didn't just bring us global warming, it also changed the social climate and brought with it the first stirrings of technology worship. The migrations that formed modern urban society—from village to city, from frontier individualism to urban conformity, from farm to factory to cubicle—occurred so long ago in this country that most of us don't know they occurred. But we're still feeling the fall-out. These upheavals cut us off from the old beliefs, beliefs that perhaps were limiting but gave order and meaning to life, and we've been instinctively looking for replacements ever since. Over the years some have found their new religion in the temple of this-changes-everything eternal optimism and perpetual renewal: capital "T" Technology, known in Horatio Alger's day as capital "P" Progress.
I can't be the first to wonder if the latest branch of that two-hundred-year-old secular cult is the Internet. If it is, then faith—the willing suspension of disbelief—in the 'net's more messianic claims is the sign of the true believer. But blindly embracing the latest technology as an unmixed blessing has its downside. When someone appears on TV promising whiter teeth, everyone understands that this is a sales pitch. When someone appears on computer monitors promising "ease of information transfer" and "paradigm shift" and claiming that what they sell "changes everything" and "levels the playing field", not everyone understand that this also is a sales pitch, aimed not at the market for personal hygiene but at the market for personal revelation.
I'll share the bubblehead's ecstatic faith in the Internet as "equalizing the opinion of the man in the street with that of Dan Rather" when someone convinces me that either Dan or the man in the street can shed more light than heat on the complex issues of the day. The new medium hasn't erased the old limits on our understanding: having or not having sufficient training, aptitude, attention, perception and the insight that experience brings. The Internet hasn't raised our collective IQ. It has, however, fully exposed the limits of collective wisdom.
The Internet has given the man in the street a voice for Christmas, his own virtual public address system. Now that he's removed the wrapping he needs to read the instruction manual—all of it, including the part that says he has an obligation to know what he's talking about. And even if his audience doesn't care what he says as long it makes them feel better, he has a responsibility to himself, not only as a would-be messenger but as a would-be leader of men. Unfortunately, this responsibility is least understood by the people most willing crank up their virtual PA systems: the hacks, the opportunists, the zealots.
Up in the thin air of the bubble blogs, knowledge is egalitarian. Says Sage modestly, "it's just simple math anyone can do". But down in the marketplace, knowledge is never simple and always elitist, and it resists the straightjacket of the mathematical models. Anything less than knowledge is just guessing, and guessing is something that, to paraphrase Sage, anyone can get wrong.
So does the collective input of the blogs give bubbleheads truth long suppressed, or does it give them wishful thinking and repackaged urban legend? Would they know the difference? Would they care?
Let's set the bubble scene and introduce the players.
Blogs are a high-tech low-touch meeting place to shoot the bull, the latest in a long line of informal forums stretching from the village marketplace to the small-town general store to the city street corner to the suburban mall. I used to post happily for hours on an earlier iteration, bulletin boards, until it dawned on me one day that spending hours talking exclusively to other males ages eighteen to forty-nine with interests identical to mine was less rewarding than talking to my wife while I still had one, working in the real-world community even with all its real-world drawbacks, listening to good music or reading a good book.
Sure, most of what I see on the 'net these days is innocuous and even useful. Online reviews helped me buy two cell phones, a printer, a camera and other small-ticket items. But note that all these items are commodities, and note also that homes aren't commodities. Also note that my decisions were based on simple product reviews, something the Internet does well, and not on amateur reviews of marketplaces in all their subjective and nuanced complexity.
There's no doubt that the Internet's synthetic essence of human contact brings blessed relief to cubicle dwellers and other shut-ins. There are lots of lonely people out there intones the successful Internet entrepreneur—"founded three companies, all three are still in business"—and Daddy Warbucks look-alike, with all the husky tenderness of a Great White eyeing a seal.
But I've found that the more seriously the Internet takes itself, the less it should. The more ecstatic the revelation it promises, the more it pegs my hype meter. And when ecstasy and hype fly off the scale I wonder if the 'net is virtual community or virtual Prozac, the latest blessing of technology or the latest look in alienation and social fragmentation.
"I can talk to someone ten thousand miles away!"
"Swell, but how about talking to your neighbor?"
"Him? Oh, uh, I've been really busy at work. Besides, he doesn't think like I do. He doesn't get it. I can't learn anything from him."
Yes, I wonder if the online community, earnestly tapping away in cubicles and spare bedrooms, doesn't somehow resemble prisoners in solitary confinement tapping coded messages. I wonder if both the strength and the hollowness of the Internet is that it brings us together with nice safe walls between us. I wonder if the allure of online community is that it offers human contact on our own terms, no commitment required. We stay as long as we're stroked, and leave when we're challenged. Despite the high-flown promises of self-realization, online community seems less likely to make us more than what we are, and more likely to make us more what we already are or what we think we are.
All this could be dismissed as Luddite "machine breaker" technophobia, except that I had fun building this Web site and still spend way too much time on the 'net. But the record is clear to anyone who knows that the history of science didn't start with ARPANET. It hasn't been hip since about 1830 to think that technology brings us life-altering benefits without social costs.
One of the many ironies of the bubble blogs is that they're substitute communities founded on questioning the benefits of homeownership, a social good that's long been recognized—and not just by the National Association of Realtors®—as a builder of real community. Online community is as transient as renting. Don't like what's happening on a blog? Just leave. Don't like what's happening where you rent? Just leave in thirty days or whenever your lease expires. Don't like what's happening where you own? Just...well, maybe you do just leave, but by buying you've made a huge emotional and financial commitment to your neighborhood, so most likely you grit your teeth, talk to the neighbors you've never talked to before and work together to straighten things out. That's community building, and it comes only from commitment.
Bubbleheads believe passionately that the real estate boom, or "bubble" as they call it, now winding down is dot-com hype-driven market manic depression all over again. This makes me wonder whether dot-com's real legacy is the fortunes made and lost and the early retirements promised and then deferred. After all, it was mostly funny money years before the dot-bust. Instead, the legacy seems to be the habitual speculator, burned but still hopefully poking markets for angles to work, trading the optimistic naiveté that led him down the garden path in 2000 for a jaded naiveté that leads him down the same path today. The day-trader is older and cynical but no wiser. Back then, the sky was the limit. Now, every market is bubble or bust, stampeding lemmings, greed and fear.
But the bubbleheads are right about one thing: there's been plenty of smoke and mirrors around real estate. But it seems to me that they've mistaken what's essentially the illusion—the mass media's superficial, sensationalistic coverage—for the real event. Certainly there's been speculation in real estate, but perhaps more dangerous has been the speculation on real estate. The media took an organic market event and dumbed it down into a pop culture happening. It turned the upward slope of the age-old market cycle into a salable fad. But two groups, outside the mass audience but at opposite ends of the spectrum, were sure they weren't getting the whole story.
One was the knowledgeable market watchers, who realized that the average reporter has neither the skill nor the desire to cover any story more nuanced than a five-alarm fire. At the other end was, as Sage admits in a recent interview, the speculators who "made a big bet" against real estate: a cadre of market-timers, packing the spreadsheets, too much spare time and blind faith in conventional wisdom they brought to the dot-com wars. Straggling behind them are the usual camp followers: those seeking affirmation, those trying to quiet an inner voice, those looking for someone else to do their independent thinking for them.
So how does a bubble blog work? A bubble blogger pours gasoline on the smoldering fires of alienation and discontent by posting an incendiary comment on the "bubble". If it's combustible enough, other bubbleheads sniff it and fan the flames with their own posts. With word of mouth and a strong dry wind, the fire spreads, bubble bonding begins, bubble friendships blossom (see "online community") and maybe a few ad dollars trickle in. And since the Internet metes out its own rough justice, someone—occasionally an trouble-making "troll" but more often an errant missionary preaching the gospel of homeownership—gets his virtual bell rung with a virtual aluminum baseball bat.
The virulence of the bubble blogs alarmed me until I recognized bubbleheads for the old acquaintances they are. Truly, recognition is the first step in demystification. Now I get them: bubbleheads score high in paradox and unconscious irony.
They're as new as the Internet and as ageless as ancient myths that explained the frightening and unfamiliar. They're as eternal as fable and as ephemeral as fad. The bubblehead movement is large yet inconsequential, wary of illusion yet rooted in it. The bubble blogs empower an underclass with nothing more substantial than the bread and circuses of the Information Age. And while the average bubblehead wouldn't read Thoreau unless he blogged, running through their message is a thread of sturdy Waldenesque anti-materialist anti-commercialism that keeps them firmly under the thumb of that ancient symbol of exploitation, the little guy's friend since the dawn of property rights, the landlord.
The blogs are irrelevant to the market they obsess on yet symptomatic of the social ills they miss. Notes From Underground: "I am a spiteful man...I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do not know for certain what ails me."
I've suggested elsewhere that the Internet excels at repackaging eternal myths for a new generation. The myths don't have to be revamped, just dusted off and reused. Conspiracy theory and easy answers have always found an eager audience.
There will always be those either priced out of homeownership or unwilling to make the commitment, but who emphatically deny that either makes them second-class citizens. Whatever class they fall in, it's telling that Sage's blog tries to laugh off the negative stereotypes of renters (this on a blog fueled by negative stereotypes) in a tone that's discernibly whistling-past-the-graveyard.
I'm sure that bubbleheads have been around since well before the bubble blogs, although without the catchy name. I met proto-bubbleheads when I started selling real estate in the late 1990s, and unless human nature has changed over the last sixty years, they've probably been standing on the sidelines of real estate since the late 1940s when modern financing and rising incomes first gave the average man a choice between renting and owning (women were virtually precluded from getting home loans until the late 1960s).
Bubbleheads reject the real estate market as too risky and accessible, but this market didn't happen by accident. It's the result of seventy years of social engineering aimed at reducing the risks of homeownership while opening it to more people. In fact, the idea that homeownership is a social good government should actively encourage goes back to the 1920s, and I suspect it descends from the Homestead Act of 1868, which reminds me of Jefferson's pre-industrial nation of small independent farmers, which for all I know he got from the Enlightenment.
Bubbleheads equate homeownership with materialism and cynical manipulation, but it was progressive idealism that opened homeownership to the little guy. Watch that Christmas chestnut It's a Wonderful Life year after year and gradually it dawns on you that one of the things that makes George Bailey quietly heroic is that his savings-and-loan breaks the economic stranglehold of Bedford Falls' big landlord, Potter, by making loans to a housing developer and to the ordinary townspeople who buy his affordable homes. The Italian immigrant family deliriously thanking George as it leaves one of Potter's derelict rentals for their new home strikes us today as corny stereotyping if it strikes us at all. But director and co-writer Frank Capra knew that movie goers of the late 1940s would relate this scene to their own hopes for economic freedom and upward mobility. And according to movie buffs, Capra took considerable heat from the political right for Wonderful Life's anti-landlord message.
Yes, the real estate landscape was quite different not long ago, and it's a sign of how far we've come (and of how short our collective memory is) that the bubblehead version of It's A Wonderful World would portray George as a predatory lender. Only a few generations ago most Americans were denied the luxury of thumbing their noses at homeownership. Until the mid-1930s anyone who wanted to buy a home needed to come up with a 50 percent down payment. The few who passed this hurdle got a partially-amortized loan due in just three to five years. When the loan balance was due, the homeowner refinanced into another loan—in good times. In bad times, he lost his home—because before the GSEs and FHA-insured home loans, no one made loans in bad times.
The social engineering begun in the 1930s worked: it's likely that many bubbleheads or their parents grew up in homes financed with 0%-down VA or 3%-down FHA loans similar to the loans they call "toxic". Risky business, yet somehow homeownership rose from 40 percent to 67 percent without bringing this country to its knees. [Note from 2011: 20-20 hindsight says 67% may have been a little too high.]
But even with homeownership far more accessible after World War II, proto-bubbleheads would have avoided it. Some, like now, were priced out. Others, remembering the surge of foreclosures brought on by the credit crunch of the early 1930s, remained wary. Fear of commitment and paralysis by analysis can't be modern developments. Recessions, wars and real estate cycles persuaded others to put off buying until things looked more promising.
So I suspect that bubbleheads have always been a hidden feature of post-war America, with a long if undistinguished history. It's a history unrecorded until the Internet raised their profile. Until then bubbleheads went unrecognized as a class, without a voice, a name or identity. I'm no sociologist, but in the pre-blog days the bubbleheads must have been, if not second-class citizens, at least a bona fide underclass, their identity defined, not by themselves, but by a society that says homeowners are winners and renters are losers, and by a real estate marketplace that asks more of them—more money, more commitment, more risk tolerance—than they have to give.
The bubble blogs brought this underclass together, gave it its own virtual Moose Lodge to meet in, empowered it to repackage itself with a cool(?) name and a flatteringly pro-active identity. But "bubble pride" goes only so far, because the hip new cultural phenomenon has the same old limitations. That today's bubbleheads are yesterday's underclass with a bit more élan and better packaging would be huge if real estate was just a pop culture event in People Magazine. Slapping a big chromed-plated
BUBBLEHEAD
on the trunk lid of the underclass may have solved its identity crisis but it won't improve its performance. As market players—as a group that can and will have a consequential impact on real estate—I take them as seriously as they deserve: I don't. I can't.
I haven't for years. Why start now?
No, I don't like it when bubbleheads dehumanize the real estate industry so that they can hate it with a clear conscience. But I've known for years that the only agents the public likes are the ones they've worked with.
And no, it's not nice to watch bubbleheads beat up homebuyers. Priced out of buying a home? Don't think it's a good time to buy? Don't want to buy? Ever? Fine. These aren't character flaws. But jealousy is. So is dissing someone for having a legitimate motivation you don't share. So is hoping your neighbors lose everything, simply because they have more to lose.
The blogs can get ugly and even destroy whatever faith you have in human nature, but I don't share the real estate industry's concern that any medium, even the almighty Internet, sways buyer opinion. Ascribing magical powers of persuasion to the media, as the industry does, is just as wrong as ascribing magical powers of persuasion to the industry, as the bubbleheads do. I'd be flabbergasted if anyone bought a home because of a NAR press release. I'd also be flabbergasted if anyone didn't buy a home because of what they see on a bubble blog.
That's because the media, including the Internet, doesn't lead. It mirrors. The blogs aren't opinion makers. They're social relief valves and unpaid focus groups. Home sales set a record in 2005 even though bubble bloggers had been thundering dire bubble warnings for two years. What's said on the blogs is what's said at the office or at the backyard barbeque, only publicly. It's the normal background noise of the real estate market, but with the volume turned up all the way. We're losing real buyers in many markets, especially first-timer buyers, not because of what they see on the blogs, but because home prices no longer make sense to them. This always happens in a real estate cycle, and it's happened since long before the first bubble blog.
I can accept the blogs with a certain equanimity because in working with hundreds of buyer prospects over the past ten years, I've found that they (and bubbleheads, and probably all of us) are selective about the information they absorb. Whatever gets past their filters doesn't change their thinking, it reinforces it. Tell me what you're reading and I'll tell you how close you are to buying. If you're forwarding articles on declining sales and rising foreclosures for my comment, my comment won't matter: you've decided not to buy.
Because people go to the bubble blogs, not for information, but for permission to not buy.
The bubbleheads will dispute this, since it challenges the core of their bubblehead existence. They often see themselves as real buyers temporarily boycotting real estate until sanity returns, which means when it's as easy to buy a house as it is to buy a wide-screen TV. But when homeownership becomes a social phenomenon, as it did in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and as it has nationally since 2001, the term "buyer" gets as much abuse as "bubble" until it becomes a meaningless, self-bestowed honorific like "Colonel" is in the Old South.
So let's separate the buyers from the bystanders (Colonels?) by deferring to that impartial arbiter, the market, for our definition:
Call it the "money talks and [wishful thinking] walks" definition. Is it too restrictive? Not when we have "buyers" who've been waiting since the last century for prices to go down. But what if these "buyers" aren't just blowing smoke on blogs but also saving for a down payment, getting pre-approved, hitting open houses religiously and swearing they'd buy today if only prices were 10 percent less? Close but no cigar. Call me the minute they make their first offer at market value and I'll call them buyers. Bubble blogs don't check your credentials. Neither do open houses. The real estate market does. "Buyer" loses all meaning unless you draw the line. Why not draw it where the market does?
There's an irony to the bubblehead movement that escapes the bubbleheads as well as the journalists who cynically prod blogs for signs of life in a dying media event. The very limitations—lack of money and/or motivation—that make bubbleheads bubbleheads isolate them from their raison d'etre and obsession, the real estate market and its attached industry. To anyone who knows much about real estate, slogging through the blogs reveals that real estate is something very few bubbleheads know much about. Of course, anyone who knows much about real estate is invariably part of the industry and therefore automatically part of the "problem", which automatically disqualifies them from taking part in the debate, which is why there is no debate. The bubblehead covers his ears and yells until the other side gives up.
Yes, the more adventurous bubbleheads may have dealt with real estate superficially, hitting an open house, ambushing a listing agent, then beating a hasty retreat into the brush. A handful actually breach the inner sanctum of the market, the back seat of an agent's black Mercedes, where they run head-on into that unyielding Darwinian reality check, buy a house or get out of my car.
Call me old-fashioned or worse, but I don't see how anyone with no hands-on experience in homebuying, either as a professional or as a consumer, can be an expert on homebuying. Sure, bubbleheads are well-versed in conspiracy theory ("Ten Things Your Realtor Won't Tell You"). Bubbleheads are good at bolstering their prejudices with randomly gleaned scraps of information. Bubbleheads are up on the latest alarming trends in real estate, which they take too far and apply too broadly. "Prices Plummet In Modesto" doesn't mean panic-selling in Palo Alto.
But am I the only one who thinks it's really weird that most bubbleheads have never experienced—and virtually none have mastered—the market they stalk so relentlessly and that gives them their identity? How can anyone believe that the Internet's "ease of information transfer" turns them into real estate experts, quickly and painlessly, any more than it turns them into lawyers, programmers or small-appliance repairmen? What kind of people believe this? Is the expertise needed to do their own jobs that easily acquired? "But that's different." How do you know? "I saw it on the blogs."
Watching bubbleheads confidently, passionately, elaborately, venomously explain real estate using nothing more than folklore, found objects and rusty baling wire is both a fascinating and a disillusioning experience. Never have so many been so sure about so much with so few facts. Great stuff for anyone wondering if fable still has a place in the Age of Science.
What about bubbleheads who claim they're homeowners, or even real estate agents, cashing out at the peak of the market? Apparently you have to check your sense of irony at the door when you post on a bubble blog, because it's a bubblehead article of faith that the run-up in home prices was driven by nothing more than mindless speculation. And here these folks are, yes, speculating. "Yeah, but I'm selling, not buying. And it's me, not someone else. So it's okay." No, it's still market-timing speculation, wheeling and dealing your home as if it were shares in pets.com. And you have to wonder what an agent hastily bailing from homeownership tells his hot buyers. "Put that checkbook away. I'm renting for a year and so should you." I have a big picture.
This isn't the only example of the hard-core bubblehead's speculative bent. A tour of Sage's blog reveals a large and apparently sophisticated appetite for financial markets. Two topics—"Goldman builds market for home price derivatives" and "How to profit from the housing crash"—had them happily speculating (pun intended) on which financial strategy would pay off the best. Derivatives got 220 posts, profiteering 292. These guys are into it. And because hard-core bubbleheads are market-timing speculators, they assume that every homebuyer is too. But in fact, bubbleheads prove my theory that those who see real estate only as a speculative play are often the least likely to buy it.
Any good guide to stock market investing warns against timing markets. It's an unreliable strategy because it's predicated on everything going according to plan despite the many market forces beyond your knowledge or control. In fact, market timers are more likely to under-perform the stock market than the stick-in-the-mud, buy-and-hold investors they're trying to out-maneuver. And so far bubbleheads have been proving that market timing real estate is how you under-perform that market too.
But the fact that bubbleheads know little about the real estate they fixate on is irrelevant to the job at hand. Because the role of the bubble blog is not to inform or discuss, but to vent.
Lean close and I'll whisper you a secret: bubble blogs aren't even about real estate.
No, they're about denial and whistling past the graveyard. "I not missing out." "I'm not afraid of risk or commitment." "I don't need to think about the future."
They're about junior-grade cynicism, proof that disillusionment as the ultimate illusion. "It's all hype." "They're lying to me again." "Homeownership is overrated."
They're about personality differences and culture clash. Old Subarus versus new Mercedes. Birkenstockers versus Babbits. Oliver Cromwell versus Willy Loman. No, I take that back; Cromwell had a wit. The keepin'-it-real Roundheads in Engineering bitching about the born-to-sell Cavaliers over in Marketing.
They're the "scientific ethic" with a blown head gasket, two flat tires and a wheel in the ditch. Like all science or pseudo-science, they exclude the complexities of human nature although, in this case, the exclusion comes not from scientific rigor but from honest ignorance that complexities exist.
They're Digital Age humanism writ large, the perfectibility of man (or at least bubblehead) with saintly Science leading the way—the same amoral servant (or master), by the way, that brings you global warming, almost brought you World War III, and makes each war deadlier than the last.
Bubble blogs are about shooting the messenger. The anger, while misdirected and juvenile, is understandable. Some bubbleheads—the ones priced out—can make a fairly convincing case for victim-hood. No, they're not victims of an agent cabal. The real estate industry makes a target as large as a barn, but it's just the hard-selling messenger of a trend that's bigger than it is. Out-of-reach home prices are only the most visible sign of the increasing stratification of wealth in this country, especially in desirable places like the Bay Area. Bubbleheads are often ordinary folks, ill-equipped to compete, financially or emotionally, with the highly-paid go-getter elite elbowing them aside, not just from homeownership, but from the Bay Area.
The trend is nothing new, but it does seem to be accelerating. Call it the Palo Alto-ization of the Bay Area: the average guy who as little as ten years ago could buy a home in that desirable city now can't, and probably can't even afford to rent there either. Even top-end towns like nearby Atherton have homeowners, still relatively young and in their peak earning years, who couldn't afford their own homes today.
On the other hand, I think of the card-carrying ditch digger—I saw his union card—who bought a home in an affordable neighborhood, paid it off in five years and immediately bought a rental. Augustin didn't tap away at a computer warning the world about real estate, that snare and delusion to the unwary. Augustin would laugh at that idea and, besides, he doesn't have a computer. He has something far better: community, real flesh-and-blood real-time community. For those of us glassy-eyed from staring at our monitors, who might have forgotten what real community looks like, here's a glimpse. Here's Augustin over at a friend's house, helping him lay a patio or build a fence. There are Augustin's friends over at his rental, helping him put on a roof or install new windows. Guys too focused to be alienated.
Further up the pay scale, I think of the engineer who quickly recognized that he was priced out of Silicon Valley, transferred to Portland and bought a home there. If it's important, you do what you gotta do. If it's not, you strike poses.
So let's summarize the achievements of the bubblehead movement.
Real community? Not really.
Collective self-education? Not hardly.
Informed and rational discourse, leading to a coherent belief structure at least tangentially related to reality? Not in this lifetime.
Bringing victimhood and scapegoating into the twenty-first century? You bet.