Experience Overload
There’s no moment more significant or beautiful than the next
A reporter walks into a Lower Manhattan storefront to explore a “curious experiment in public entertainment.” He is escorted into a studio-like space bathed in colorful lights. Strange music emanates from invisible speakers as toga-wearing staff members pass out toys, kaleidoscopes, and balloons, the purpose of which remain unclear. “We are trying to overturn every entertainment convention,” the charismatic young founder of the place proclaims by way of explanation — except the bloated admissions charge, the reporter will note later.....MUCH MORE
This scene did not take place at the Museum of Ice Cream, Snark Park, 29 Rooms, or any of today’s photogenic, multisensory urban pleasure grounds. In fact, it didn’t even take place in this century. It happened in 1968, when a Time reporter went to a short-lived psychedelic happening in SoHo called Cerebrum. Like its contemporary descendants, Cerebrum was difficult to categorize but ultimately came to be described with a now familiar catch-all. “However defined — and perhaps it can’t be,” the Time reporter wrote, “Cerebrum is an experience.”
It’s often claimed that we now live in the midst of the “experience economy,” a buzzy term coined in the late 1990s to describe the lengths to which retailers and service providers must go to attract customers in a world of endless consumer choice and one-click shopping. More recently, social media has intensified this concern, as people seek out all manner of documentable in-person experiences that bolster their personal brand.
The rise of the experience economy is often framed as an economic imperative: New malls, it is believed, might be able to stave off the retail apocalypse by partnering with an “immersive experiences company” like Meow Wolf. Airbnb can program tourists’ days as well as nights by brokering “Experiences” in addition to lodging. In light of print media’s decline, Pop-Up Magazine presents stories as “vivid, multi-media experiences” in a live stage show.
These examples suggest that the experience economy represents yet another wave of technological disruption that scrambles the old economic order. But it is not simply the product of recent economic transformations or the rise of smartphones and social media. It’s a phase of capitalism that began to emerge in the late 1960s, in the milieu that produced Cerebrum. Out of new values and new technologies came a new kind of economic offering, neither “good” nor “service,” that at first gradually and then massively expanded the purview of the economy....
