Why Is Everybody Selling Out?

I could hear the soft buzz of it, a low grade conversation coming off the backlit fuchsia T-Mobile sign staring back at me. In an otherwise gray, dull, empty room, I wondered why there wasn't even elevator music to warm a space that, without the pink, could have been a hospital corridor or a jail cell. It was the only color in the room, and quite frankly, it was a bit obnoxious.

I wondered whether the next generation will collect this sign. Whether somebody will hang it in a building someday and think, ah, the good old days, standing in line at a mobile phone store.

We collect Ex-Lax thermometers, so anything is possible.

Then Robert's phone rang. We were there to get our kid a flip phone. The old kind, not the fancy screen flip. The woman at the counter was getting the same basic phone for her daughter, per her daughter's request. The kind where you hit the 5 three times to get an “L”. No talk-texting. Nine keystrokes for “LOL” alone. A phone.

By now, Robert had made his way out the door.

I watched him through the glass front, walking the sidewalk one direction and then the other. Robert is loud. It is part of why he was good at calling an auction, and in a room that empty, everyone in the store was working on deciphering the conversation. I could tell he was taking in something while he was still deciding how to feel about it.

He came back and told me. A man we know is selling out. All of it.

Robert had been out there not long before. Several buildings, a collection built over a lifetime, and the man had walked him through all of it, how he had hung things, why this was next to that. His wife came along the whole way, filling in the parts of the stories he'd forgotten. He told Robert the stories, where each piece came from, what he had been chasing when he found it.

Now it goes to auction, and it goes to strangers, and the man is done.

Robert stood in the middle of a phone store and said, well. And then he didn't say anything else for a while.

He didn't lose a customer. He lost the reason he knew someone.

It sits strangely. Nobody died. Nothing bad happened, technically. A man made a sound decision about his own property and every person involved would tell you it was his to make. There are no flowers to send. Nobody to call or write a card for. You cannot say out loud that you are grieving a man who is alive and fine and probably relieved.

A psychologist named Kenneth Doka gave it a name. Disenfranchised grief. Loss the world around you does not recognize as loss, so you carry it without any of the things people usually get when they grieve.

Robert has been carrying a fair amount of it lately.

Everyone in this business has watched this happen at least once in the last few years, and everyone says the same thing about it. It’s the drama. The nonsense. Somebody good got tired of the negativity and got out.

I've said it myself. And it is true, but it explains nothing.

Because these are not fragile men. They negotiated for a living. With people trying to do the same. They were up before the sun, traveled the miles, stood in the weather. They lost money and shook hands anyway. Whatever is running them off, it isn't softness.

So it is worth asking what changed, and the answer is not the people.

You stood next to a man for six hours a year and you knew a great deal about him. What brands he chased, how much patina he'd tolerate, what he would and would not pay. You knew his grading system better than he could have explained it. You knew whether his boy's ball season went well. Whether his mother was still living. You knew where he set up and you knew he would be there again next year, and the returning was most of what the relationship was made of.

You did not know his politics. You did not know about his divorce. You did not know what he thought about much of anything, except whatever was standing on the table between you.  

There's a word for those people. In 1973, a sociologist, Mark Granovetter, called them weak ties. He meant the people who are not your friends and not your family, but who are in your life anyway. The barista. The UPS driver. The man behind the parts counter who has been there for eleven years. The guy who sets up two spaces down at the Indy show.

Granovetter found that weak ties are where new information travels, precisely because those people are not close to you. The ones close to you have mostly been where you have been. The man two spaces down has been somewhere else entirely, and what he knows does not overlap with what you know, and standing next to him for six hours is how new information gets to you.

Those shows ran on weak ties. Proximity without intimacy.

That was not distance. That was the exact condition that made a man easy to stand beside for twenty years.

Online it runs the other way around.

You know a man's whole interior. What he thinks about the election, what happened with his second wife, how he feels about people like you, what he had for dinner. And likely as not, you have never been in a room with him.

Intimacy without proximity. All of the friction of knowing somebody, and none of what holds a person steady when they are standing in front of you.

Somebody studied what happens when the face goes away. Take away eye contact, take away the reply arriving in the same second, take away the body, and ordinary people say things in a comment thread they would never say across a folding table. He called it the online disinhibition effect, and it has held up for twenty years.

So a man who spent forty years being reasonable is now in an argument at every Tuesday night auction, in a room that isn't a room, with people he has never met, about things that have nothing to do with signs, and he cannot work out why he is so tired.

He is tired because he accidentally became an intimate of four thousand people he only ever needed to stand next to.

Nobody can carry that. And it isn't a character flaw to decide to put it down.

I don't have any standing to be pious about the internet.

I came into this sign world around 2010, when the auctions were still full and the shows still ran, and none of this had happened yet. But I did not arrive as a collector. I arrived for work, and the work was helping a man list his signs on eBay.

I sat in the back of an auction, understanding almost nothing, and I was one of the people changing it.

I wasn't watching it arrive. I was carrying it in the door.

People like to say that collectors live in the past.

I have never once found that to be true. The people I know who collect are the ones running the earliest diagnostics on the present. They are the first to notice when something is off, because noticing is the whole skill. They spend their lives deciding what is worth keeping and what is not worth keeping, and then they look at the world and do the same thing, usually years before anybody else says it out loud.

They are not trying to go backward. They are trying to figure out what we set down without meaning to.

And we have done this before, and more recently than we tell ourselves.

There are men in this business whose great-grandfathers watched electricity, the automobile, and the telephone all arrive inside one working life. They had no framework for it either. They were probably insufferable about it at the dinner table. Nobody handed them a name for what had changed about their neighbors, their daily rituals, the way they interacted with people, and they sorted it out slowly and badly and eventually.

It isn't us. We're just early.

The rules always come after the collateral.

So when a man puts thirty years into a building and then sells the whole thing, and cannot fully explain why, and everyone standing around says it was the drama, I don't think the man got thin-skinned. I don't think he got too old for it. I don't think he lost his taste for something he loved for nearly half a century.

People didn't get worse. The room got worse. -Liz Smith