Shame

Language hat posted about scanners - those guys who "spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner". He quotes someone who wrote for Slate:

If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work? I'm not the only one who feels this way; I see it in the mien of my fellow scanners as they whip out their PDAs next to the politely browsing normal customers. The sense that this is a dishonorable profession is confirmed by library book sales that tag their advertisements with "No electronic devices allowed," though making this rule probably isn't in the libraries' financial interest. People scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops as well, though this hasn't happened to me yet.

And Hat adds,

On the one hand, to the extent these guys rescue books from the trash compactor and sell them to people who want to read them, they're performing a valuable service. On the other, they're incredibly annoying if you're at the same sale; not only are they shoving you out of the way and keeping you from looking at books, they don't even care about the books as such, just about whether they can make a buck off them. I don't wish ill to befall them, but I'm glad they're banned from some library sales.

A number of his commenters agree that they don't like the "rude and horrible", obnoxious behavior, but they don't mind the actual act. And they don't understand why the guy asked "why does it feel so shameful?" For instance,

I don't get it either. He's obviously working very hard at a job that's completely legal and provides a service for others. Why be ashamed about it?

I think this relates to something I posted about a while ago, commenting on something in Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, which was Pinker wondering why we pay extra for expedited shipping or first class seats, and we tip people for better service, all without angst, yet bribing a maitre d' fills us with dread. As I said then,

When you bribe a maitre d' to get you a table when you don't have a reservation, you are stealing that table from the guy who does have the reservation... I think that's the element that really changes the equation.

So, why does this scanner feel ashamed? Note he didn't say he was ashamed of his behavior - he's ashamed of his profession. Over at Hat's place I hadn't read the article, so I had an opinion based just on those two paragraphs. (It's wrong - he's really not doing what I thought - he's just a bulk amazon.com marketplace reseller, making a living but not a killing reselling for a few dollars on each book. His shame is that he doesn't care about the books as books, only as commodities, and that he's surrounded at these sales by people who actually want to read what he's snatching away from them.) But here's what I thought at first:

I think it's because he's using his scanner to discover that the book the person is selling for $1 is worth $100.

And not telling that person.

It's like the antiques guy who buys the $10 vase knowing it's Tang and worth thousands, but not telling the guy who inherited it from his great-aunt and thinks it's garish. Or the Navajo rug that someone's granddad bought for $3 bucks that's now worth hundreds of thousands. Except that he doesn't bring years of antiquing expertise to the sale; he only knows it because he has this little scanner.

It's the "getting over" on the original owner that makes him feel ashamed. He wouldn't if he offered a reasonable price - "I know who to sell this to for $250, and you don't, but I'll give you $200 for it" - he wouldn't. And it's exacerbated by the lingering notion that he's cheating to accomplish this fleecing.

Now, should he feel ashamed? That's a different question. Maybe he shouldn't - lots of people don't. But I think that's why he does.

For me, there's a sliding scale of shame. There are three variables, and they all interact. There's the one Hat mentions, which is the buyer's motive: if all you want is to resell the object at the highest price possible, you're different from someone who loves the book or vase or rug for itself.

Then there's how reasonable it is to think the current owner ought to know the value: buying something from someone selling off his dead grandmother's "junk" at a yard sale is different from a library selling books that no one checks out or an antiques shop that misvalued something. For me, there's a world of difference between buying an unopened box at a garage sale and finding a Tiffany pin inside, and telling the seller that well, nothing here is worth much, what say I give you twenty bucks for all this costume jewelry, all the while cackling inside over the pin. Doing that in an antiques mall, to a dealer, is different.

And finally, there's the question of how the seller got the item in the first place. One of the moments that made this really crystallize for me was watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2004 (There's a transcript here). The guy showed up with a blanket he thought was Navajo: "I don't know an awful lot about it, except that, uh, it was given by Kit Carson-- given to the foster father of my grandmother." If you know about Kit Carson, that's a red flag right there. Maybe Carson gave the blanket to this guy's great-grandfather, and maybe the great-grandfather is the one who looted it, but it's a real good bet that the blanket wasn't "given" by the original owners. So this guy had what the appraiser called "a national treasure" worth maybe half a million dollars: a Ute first phase Chief's blanket.

I remember thinking at the time that I was glad I didn't have anything like that lying around, because I'd be faced with a dilemma I don't know how I'd resolve. This guy sold his blanket to a museum. Personally, I hope I'd have the grace to give half the cash to the Navajo Nation - but I don't know that I would. I just don't know. And I'm not saying this guy should have: he's four generations removed from the original acquisition. And that's all tangential to the point of this post.

Suppose somebody had seen that blanket in his living room and known what it was, and offered him a couple of thousand for it? And then suppose that that somebody had snapped a picture with his phone and emailed to somebody else, who told him to buy it?And then suppose that the buyer wanted to put it in his own living room instead of his gallery? And then suppose that the owner had just been talking about how granddad got a whole bunch of blankets from a village his cavalry unit had just emptied out? It changes things every time you alter a variable, doesn't it?

But the guy who goes to places intending to rip off the naive: he should feel shame. He hardly ever does, but that's a different topic altogether.