Le roi est mort. Kodak is getting out of the film and paper business, having already decided not to make any more film cameras on January 13th. The switch, of course, is to digital photography equipment, which is cheaper, easier to use, and finally approaching the quality of film images.

I can’t help but be a little disappointed. Not in Kodak, which after all is only a corporation (headless and subservient to that vast aggregate of desire, the market), but in the movement of society as a whole from the physical to the ephemeral, the dynamic to the kinetic, from the concrete temporal to the abstract eternal.

The remarkable thing, however, is that it is difficult to even express what I would rather have than digital cameras and mobile telephones with cameras and MP3 players with mobile telephones. I can voice my objections, but they are largely aesthetic and purely negative: I just happen to like photographs the way they were. If I were a hundred years older, when Kodak unveiled the famous Brownie for $1, I probably would have wondered if “just pushing the button” wasn’t going to spoil the physicality of painting or large format photography. The objections are not meaningless, but if I were somehow put in the position of coming up with something better, it’s not clear that I could.

We must admit to the magic of free markets: the king of France could not have commanded someone to build him a camera, or a computer, or a portable music player. I, on the other hand, can buy any one of those things for the equivalent of about a week of work. My esoteric and largely underpaid job commands more action than all the knights of France. But the rub is this: I am no clearer in my desires than the king of France. The only reason I know that I want some piece of consumer electronics is that it already exists. Yes, the market gives people what they want, but what people desire is to a large extent determined by what is available.

I do not agree with either the collectivist or the individualist orthodoxies here. Agency does not reside alone in the consumer, nor in the market. I think it is particularly odious to suggest that individuals are puppets of marketing. What people desire is determined by what is available, but in turn what is available is determined by what people are willing to buy.

This codetermination is a balance with which the vast majority of people are comfortable. But we still have to explain why the market makes bad choices, why we get obesity, lung cancer, disillusionment, and, in general, the Least Common Denominator.