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Soylent Culture

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 37 on September 22nd, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15791252-e0037-soylent-culture

What is Soylent Culture? Whether it is in the mass media, the new media, or the media consumed by the current crop of generative AI tools, it is culture that has been fed on itself. But of course, there’s more. Have a listen to find out how Soylent Culture is driving the potential for “Model Collapse” with our AI tools, and what that might mean.

In 1964, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan published his work Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. In it, he described how the content of any new medium is that of an older medium. This can help make it stronger and more intense. Quote, “The content of a movie is a novel, or a play, or an opera.

The effect of the movie form is not related to its programmed content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.” End quote.

60 years later, in 2024, this is the promise of the generative AI tools that are spreading rapidly throughout society, and has been the end result of 30 years of new media, which has seen the digitalization of anything and everything that provides some form of content on the internet.

Our culture has been built on these successive waves of media, but what happens when there’s nothing left to feed the next wave? It begins to feed on itself, which is why we live now in an era of soylent culture.

Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode, we’re going to draw together some threads we’ve been collecting for over a year and weave them together into a tapestry that describes our current age, an era of soylent culture.

And way back in episode 8, when we introduced you to the idea of the audience commodity, where media companies real product isn’t the shiny stuff on screen, but rather the audiences that they can serve up to the advertisers, we noted how Reddit and Twitter were in a bit of a bind because other companies had come in and slurped up all the user generated content that was so fundamental to Web 2. 0 and fundamental to their business model as well, as they were still in that old model of courting the business of advertisers.

And all that UGC – the useless byproduct of having people chat online in a community that serve up to those advertisers – got tossed into the wood chipper, added a little bit of glue and paint, and then sold back to you as shiny new furniture, just like IKEA.

And this is what the AI companies are doing. We’ve been talking about this a little bit off and on, and since then, Reddit and Twitter have both gone all in on leveraging their own resources, and either creating their own AI models, like the Grok model, or at least licensing and selling it to other LLMs.

In episode 16, we looked a little bit more at that Web 2. 0 idea of spreadable media and how the atomization of culture actually took place. How the encouragement of that user generated content by the developers and platform owners is now the very material that’s feeding the AI models. And finally, our look at nostalgia over the past two episodes, starting with our look at the Dial-up Pastorale and that wistful approach to an earlier internet, one that never actually existed.

All of these point towards the existence of Soylent Culture. What I’m saying is is that it’s been a long time coming. The atomization of culture into its component parts, the reduction and eclipsed of soundbites to TikToks to Vines, the meme-ification of culture in general were all evidence of this happening.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing. We’re not ascribing some kind of value to this. We’re just describing how culture was reduced to its bare essentials as even smaller bits were carved off of the mass audience to draw the attention of even smaller and smaller niche audiences that could be catered to.

And a lot of this is because culture is inherently memetic. That’s memetic as in memes, not memetic as in mimesis, though the latter applies as well. But when we say that culture is memetic, I want to build on it more than just Dawkins’s original formulation of the idea of a meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission.

Because, honestly, the whole field of anthropology was sitting right over there when he came up with it. A memetic form of culture allows for the combination and recombination of various cultural components in the pursuit of novelty, and this can lead to innovation in the arts and the aesthetic dimension.

In the digital era, we’ve been presented with a new medium. Well, several perhaps, but the underlying logic of the digital media – the reduction of everything to bits, to ones and zeros that allow for the mass storage and fast transmission of everything anywhere, where the limiting factors are starting to boil down to fundamental laws of physics –

this commonality can be found across all the digital arts, whether it’s in images, audio, video, gaming. Anything that’s appearing on your computer or on your phone has this underlying logic to it. And when a new medium presents itself due to changing technology, the first forays into that new medium will often be adaptations or translations of work done in an earlier form.

As noted by Marshall McLuhan at the beginning of this episode, it can take a while for new media to come into its own. It’ll be grasped by the masses as popular entertainment and derided by the high arts, or at least those who are fans of it. Frederick Jameson, who we talked about a whole lot last episode on nostalgia noted, quote, “it was high culture in the fifties that was authorized as it still is to pass judgment on reality.

to say what real life is and what is mere appearance. And it is by leaving out, by ignoring, by passing over in silence and with the repugnance one may feel for the dreary stereotypes of television series that high art palpably issues its judgment.” End quote.

So, the new medium, or works that are done in the new medium, can often feel derivative as it copies stories of old, retelling them in a new way.

But over time, what we see happen again and again and again are that fresh stories start to be told by those familiar with the medium that have and can leverage the strengths and weaknesses of the medium, telling tales that reflect their own experiences, their own lives, and the lives of people living in the current age, not just reflections of earlier tales.

And eventually, the new medium finds acceptance, but it can take a little while.

So let me ask you, how long does it take for a new medium to be accepted as art? First they said radio wasn’t art, and then we got War of the Worlds. They said comic books weren’t art, and then we got Maus, and Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns. They said rock and roll wasn’t art, and we got Dark Side of the Moon and Pet Sounds, Sgt.

Pepper’s and many, many others. They said films weren’t art, and we got Citizen Kane. They said video games weren’t art, and we got Final Fantasy VII and Myst and Breath of the Wild. They said TV wasn’t art, and we got Oz and Breaking Bad and Hannibal and The Wire. And now they’re telling us that AI generated art isn’t art, and I’m wondering how long it will take until they admit that they were wrong here, too.

Because even though it’s early days, I’ve seen and heard some AI generated art pieces that would absolutely count as art. There are pieces that produce an emotional effect, they evoke a response, whether it’s whimsy or wonder or sublime awe, and for all of these reasons, I think the AI generated art that I’ve seen or experienced counts.

And the point at which creators in a new medium produce something that counts as art often happens relatively early in the life cycle of that new media. In all of the examples I gave, things like War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, Final Fantasy VII, these weren’t the first titles produced in that medium, but they did come about relatively early, once creators became accustomed to the cultural form.

As newer creators began working with the media, they can take it further, but there’s a risk. Creators that have grown up with the media may become too familiar with the source material, drawing on the representations from within itself. And we can all think of examples of this, where writers on police procedurals or action movies have grown up watching police procedurals and action movies and they simply endlessly repeat the tropes that are foundational to the genre.

The works become pastiches, parodies of themselves, often unintentionally, and they’re unable to escape from the weight of the tropes that they carry. This is especially evident in long running shows and franchises. Think of later seasons of The Simpsons, if you’ve actually watched recent seasons of The Simpsons, compared to the earlier ones.

Or recent seasons of Saturday Night Live, with the endlessly recycled bits, because we really needed another game show knock off, or a cringy community access parody. We can see it in later seasons of Doctor Who, and Star Trek, and Star Wars, and Pro Wrestling as well, and the granddaddy of them all, the soap opera.

This is what happens with normal culture when it is trained on itself. You get Soylent Culture.

Soylent Culture is this, the self referential culture that is fed on itself, an ouroboros of references that always point at something else. It is culture comprised of rapid fire clips coming at the audience faster than a Dennis Miller era Saturday Night Live weekend update. Or the speed of a Weird Al Yankovic polka medley.

It is 30 years of Simpsons Halloween episodes referring to the first 10 years of Simpsons Halloween episodes. It is the hyper referential titles like The Family Guy and Deadpool, whether in print or film, throwing references at the audience rapid fire with rhyme and reason but so little of it, that works like Ready Player One start to seem like the inevitable result of the form.

And I’m not suggesting that the above works aren’t creative. They’re high examples of this cultural form; of soylent culture. But the endless demand for fresh material in an era of consumption culture means that the hyper-referentiality will soon exhaust itself and turn inward. This is where the nostalgia that we’ve been discussing for the previous couple episodes comes into play.

It’s a resource for mining, providing variations of previous works to spark a glimmer in the audience’s eyes of, hey, I recognize that. But even though these works are creative, they’re limited, they’re bound to previous, more popular titles, referring to art that was more widely accessible, more widely known.

They’re derivative works and they can’t come up with anything new, perhaps.

And I say perhaps because there’s more out there than we can know. There’s more art that’s been created that we can possibly experience in a lifetime. There’s more stuff posted to YouTube in a minute than you’ll ever see in your 80 years on the planet.

And the rate at which that is happening is increasing. So, for anybody watching these hyper referential titles, if their first exposure to Faulkner is through Family Guy, or to Diogenes is through Deadpool, then so be it. Maybe their curiosity will inspire them to track that down, to check out the originals, to get a broader sense of the culture that they’re immersed in.

If they don’t get the joke and look around and wonder why the rest of the audience is laughing at this and say, you know, maybe it’s a me thing. Maybe I need to learn more. And that’s all right. It can lead to an act of discovery; of somebody looking at other titles and curating them, bringing them together and developing their own sense of style and working on that to create an aesthetic.

And that’s ultimately what it comes down to. Is art an act of learning and discovery and curation? Or is it an act of invention and generation and creation, or these all components of it? If an artist’s aesthetic is reliant on what they’ve experienced, well, then, as I’ve said, we’re finite, tiny creatures.

How many books or TV shows can you watch in a lifetime to incorporate into your experience? And if you repeatedly watch something, the same thing, are you limiting yourself from exposure to something new? And this is where the generative art tools come back into play. The AI tools that have been facilitated by the digitalization of everything during web 1. 0 and the subsequent slurping up of everything into feeding the models.

Because the AI tools expand the realm of what we have access to. They can draw from every movie ever made, or at least digitalized. Not just the two dozen titles that the video store clerked happened to watch on repeat while they were working on their script, before finally following through and getting it made.

In theory, the AI tools can aid the creativity of those engaging with it, and in practice we’re starting to see that as well. It comes back to that question of whether art is generative or whether it’s an act of discovery and curation. But there’s a catch. Like we said, Soylent cultures existed long before the AI art tools arrived on the scene.

The derivative stories of soap operas and police procedurals and comic books and pulp sci-fi. But it has become increasingly obvious that the AI tools facilitate Soylent culture, drive it forward, and feed off of it even more. The A. I. tools are voracious, continually wanting more, needing fresh new stuff in order to increase the fidelity of the model.

That hallowed heart that drives the beast that continually hungers. But you see, the model is weak. It is Vulnerable like the phylactery of a lich hidden away somewhere deep.

The one thing the model can’t take too much of is itself: model collapse is the very real risk of a GPT being trained on text generated by a large language model identified by Shumailov, et al, and “ubiquitous among all learned generative models” end quote. Model collapse is a risk that creators of AI tools face in further developing those tools.

Quoting again from Shumailov: “model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set. of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then misperceive reality.” End quote. This model collapse can result in the models ‘forgetting’ or ‘hallucinating’.

Two terms drawn not just from psychology, but from our own long history of engaging with and thinking about our own minds and the minds of others. And we’re exacting them here to apply to our AI tools, which – I want to be clear – aren’t thinking, but are the results of generative processes of taking lots of things and putting them together in new ways, which is honestly what we do for art too.

But this ‘forgetting’ can be toxic to the models. It’s like a cybernetic prion disease, like the cattle that developed BSE by being fed feed that contained parts of other ground up cows that were sick with the disease. The burgeoning electronic minds of our AI tools cannot digest other generated content.

And in an era of Soylent Culture, where there’s a risk of model collapse, where these incredibly expensive AI tools that require mothballed nuclear reactors to be brought online to provide enough power to service them, that thirst for fresh water like a marathon runner in the desert, In this era, then the human generated content of the earlier pre AI web becomes a much more valuable resource, the digital equivalent of the low background steel that was sought after for the creation of precision instruments following the era of atmospheric nuclear testing, where all the above ground and newly mined ore was too irradiated for use in precision instruments.

And it should be noted that we’re no longer living in that era because we stopped doing atmospheric nuclear testing. And for some, the takeaway for that may be that to stop an era of Soylent culture, we may need to stop using these AI tools completely. But I think that would be the wrong takeaway because the Soylent culture existed long before the AI tools existed, long before new media, as shown by the soap operas and the like.

And it’s something that’s more tied to mass culture in general, though. New media and the AI tools can make Soylent Culture much, much worse, let me be clear. Despite this, despite the speed with which all this is happening, the research on model collapse is still in its early days. The long term ramifications of model collapse and its consequences will only be learned through time.

In the meantime, we can discuss some possible solutions to dealing with Soylent Culture. Both AI generated and otherwise. If Soylent Culture is art that’s fed on itself, then the most effective way to combat it would be to find new stuff. To find new things to tell stories about. To create new art about.

Historically, how has this happened with traditional art? Well, we’ve hinted at a few ways throughout this episode, even though, as we noted, in an era of mass culture, even traditional arts are not immune from becoming soylent culture as well. One of the ways we get those new artistic ideas is through mimesis, the observation of the world around us, and imitating that, putting it into artistic forms.

Another way we get new art is through soft innovation when technologies enhance or change the way that we can produce media and art, or where art inspires the development of new technology as they feed back and forth between each other, trading ideas. And as we’ve seen throughout this episode and throughout the podcast in general, new media and new modes of production can encourage new stories to be told as artists are dealing with their surroundings and whatever the current zeitgeist is and putting that into production with whatever media that they have available.

As our world and society and culture changes, we’re going to reflect upon our current condition and tell tales about that to share with those around us. And as we noted much. Earlier in this particular episode, that familiarity with a form, a technical form, allows those who are using it to innovate within that form, creating new, more complex, better produced and higher fidelity works in whatever medium they happen to be choosing to work in.

And ultimately that comes down to choice. By the artists and the audience and the associated industries that allow the audience to experience those works, whether they are audio, visual, tactile, experiential, like games, any version of art that we might come in contact with. The generation and invention in the process is important to be sure, but the curation and discovery is no less important within this process.

And this is where humans with an a sense for aesthetic and style will still be able to tell. How would an AI tool discover or create? How could it test something that’s in the loop? The generative AI tools can’t tell. They have no sense. They can provide output, but no aura, no discernment. Could an AI run a script that does A-B testing on an audience for each new generated piece of art to see how they react, and the most popular one gets put forward?

I guess so, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, but that isn’t really something that they’re able to do on their own, or at least I hope not.

Would programming in some variance and randomness in the AI tools allow for them to avoid the model collapse that comes with ingesting soylent culture in much the same way that we saw with the reveries for the hosts in the Westworld TV series?

Well, the research by Shumailov et al that we mentioned earlier suggests that that’s possibly not the case. I mean, it might help with the variation, perhaps, but that doesn’t help with the selection mechanisms, the discernment.

AI is a blind watch, trying to become a watchmaker, making new watches. The question might be, what would an AI even want with a watch anyways?

Thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host Dr. Implausible. We’ll explore more on the current state of AI art tools and their role as assistive technologies in our next episode. called AI Refractions. But before we get there, we need to return to our last episode, episode 36, and offer a postscript on that one.

Even though it’s been only a week, as of the recording of this episode, September 22nd, 2024, we regret to inform you of the passing of Professor Frederick Jameson, who was the subject of episode 36. As we noted in that episode, he was a giant in the field of literary criticism and philosophy, and a long time professor at Duke University.

Our condolences go out to his family and friends. Rest in peace. If you’d like to contact the show, you can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license.

You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there is no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two.

and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at implausipod. com which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Until then, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The New American Library.

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Gal, Y., Papernot, N., & Anderson, R. (2024). The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget (No. arXiv:2305.17493). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.17493

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Papernot, N., Anderson, R., & Gal, Y. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature, 631(8022), 755–759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Snoswell, A. J. (2024, August 19). What is ‘model collapse’? An expert explains the rumours about an impending AI doom. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/what-is-model-collapse-an-expert-explains-the-rumours-about-an-impending-ai-doom-236415

Nescience and Excession: Jameson and Nostalgia

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 36 on September 15, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15676490-e0036-nescience-and-excession-jameson-and-nostalgia

Further detail looking at The Nostalgia Curve from Episode 35, and comparing it with the Fredric Jameson’s “Nostalgia for the Present” (1989) to see what the established literature says about the topic. We go into Jameson’s writing on science fiction and Philip K Dick’s “Time Out of Joint” (1959), and take a deep look at the Rumsfeld Matrix in order to introduce the idea of Nescience: the intentional act of not engaging with a known-unknown.

Let me ask you a question. Do you ever have something that you know you need to know, but you know you can’t know just yet? Yeah, me too. In February of 2002, the world was introduced to the concept of Unknown Unknowns by then U. S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don’t know, we don’t know.”

Because of the way it was presented, and the seeming incongruity of it, it instantly became fodder for the comedians on late night TV.

But it is one of those things that makes sense if you stop to think about it for even more than a moment. As Rumsfeld stated, Unknown unknowns are those things that we don’t know that we don’t. But here we’re talking about something a little bit different. These are things that we know we don’t know.

More like the known unknowns that Rumsfeld talked about back then. But rather than rushing out and finding out what it’s all about immediately, we hold off for a little bit longer. In order to get our own thoughts down. This is an act of nescience, and when it comes to the nostalgia curve that we talked about last episode, I had to hold off for a little while, but now it’s time to fill in those gaps in this episode of The Implausipod.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And early on, when I began looking at Nostalgia in the beginning of August, it became very clear that there were some key authors that had written on Nostalgia. Authors that I was aware of, but authors I’d never engaged with yet.

So in order to get my own thoughts down and kind of get everything together, I had to engage in that act of nescience, of not looking at what those authors had written until I had everything down that I wanted to say for myself. And this act of nescience comes from having a pretty good idea of what the limits of my knowledge is and where the things that I know come from.

Now, this may be a side effect of working on a PhD, of developing that body of knowledge and intensely studying things, but also comes from some reflective practice of looking at what you know, citing the information and keeping track of everything. So when it came to looking at nostalgia, I knew that Frederick Jameson had written on nostalgia in a work called nostalgia for the present.

I’ve seen the title before, but I had never engaged with it directly. So I had to put that aside as a TBR to be read. So, nescience. Now nescience is lack of knowledge full stop. It’s contrasted with something like ignorance, which is the act of not knowing. And you might be saying, well, isn’t my intentional act of not engaging with Jameson an act of ignorance?

Well, kinda. The popular, or, you know, Lay understanding of ignorance is generally that wilful stupidity that happens. And here we’re trying to describe an intentional act of delayed learning. And I wanted to dissociate it from all the negative connotations that ignorance has. Nescience is the unknown. In this case, both the known unknown and unknown unknown that Rumsfeld spoke of.

The thing that we don’t know that we don’t even know. Many of the mysteries of the universe would fall within this category, for we are tiny and small creatures on a little rock far off in a distant galaxy. Besides, Nescient sounds better, and we’ll lean towards the poetic where we can. There might be lots of things we’re all Nescient about.

Often this comes up in the terms of, like, media titles, like books we haven’t read, TV shows we haven’t seen, movies we haven’t watched yet, games we haven’t played. We might know of them, and given the way modern marketing works, it might be impossible to escape them, but there could be things out there that we’ve never ever seen.

Even though we’ve seen so many clips and memes and spoofs and parodies that it feels like we’ve seen the whole movie. For me, this includes things like Titanic and Schindler’s List, Frozen, American Psycho, Sopranos, Lost, and the list goes on and on and on. Some of the titles that I haven’t seen might surprise you, but there’s a lot of stuff out there, and we’re all constrained with respect to time and resources.

Our time on this planet is finite, after all, and there’s more videos that are uploaded to YouTube every single minute that can be seen in a human lifetime, so, we gotta pick and choose, right? And sometimes what we pick and choose is dependent on what we’ve seen in the past, which reminds me of that Rumsfeld bit from the beginning.

Now I’ve put a copy of the Rumsfeld Matrix up on the blog because describing something that’s inherently visual often seems like a fruitless task, but there’s many copies of it floating around. So a quick trip to the old Bing there should find you some results. Remember we don’t Google in 2024. But within that matrix, we end up with four categories, the known-knowns, the stuff that we know that we know, stuff we can recall readily and state with confidence.

We have the known unknowns. And this is things that we know we don’t know. We’re aware of, they might be out there. It could be a book or a movie or whatever, as we mentioned before. This also includes things like weather, travel. external events that happen while you’re not paying attention, that kind of stuff.

And you might not know about it yet, but you’ll find out soon. And then there’s the unknown unknowns, things we don’t know that we don’t know. These are outside of context problems. They’re outside our ability to even imagine in some cases. And we’ll get into the details of these in just a moment. And there’s a fourth category that Rumsfeld left out that’s rather obvious.

It’s the unknown-knowns. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek sniffed this out, and these are the things that we are unaware that we know. These could be tacit knowledge, or instinctual knowledge that we would struggle to explain, or things that we’ve forgotten that were part of our memory. And according to Žižek, they’re also items which one intentionally refuses to acknowledge.

Like, I can’t know that. These include Disavowed beliefs and other things we pretend not to know about, even though they’re probably part of our public values. This can be hazardous in some cases. But Zizek has somewhat of a narrow focus here. In The Unknown Knowns, one of the key elements is that of memory, and memory ties directly into nostalgia.

Memories can be with us constantly, but they often can lay dormant and come rushing back to us in a flood if they’re triggered by something. And those groups that are trying to operationalize the nostalgia curve, and often for monetary gain, are doing a whole lot to bounce up and down on those triggers.

Trying to evoke or elicit long forgotten memories of childhood, of toys or cartoons, of lazy Saturday mornings and long summer days, and market them or re market them to an older, more mature, and gainfully employed audience that’s been carefully diagnosed and segmented. And this is where a lot of the literature on nostalgia resides.

And why I had to engage in an act of nescience. Frederic Jameson is a literary critic and philosopher who, as of the recording of this episode in 2024, is the director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He’s written a lot in a lot of fields, most notably on things like postmodernism and capitalism, and Nostalgia for the Present was one of his key works.

Originally published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, it’s been reprinted in various books and collections of his since, such as 1992’s Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which, given some of the topics that we’ve talked about here on this podcast, you might be surprised I haven’t read either.

But, as we said, time is finite, and we come to these things as we’re meant to. So for me, that intentional act of not engaging with it, that act of nescience was me understanding that, yes, he’s written a lot on it, but I wanted to get my own thoughts on nostalgia down as best I could, which we’ve seen in the previous episode on the podcast, as well as the number of blog posts over on the implosive.

blog and. Getting those down helped me to get a sense of where I am and how that would be in relation to what Jameson has written. So to quickly summarize our last episode, for us nostalgia is representational in a memetic way. You might say that nostalgia is an assemblage that puts various parts together and that the perceived value of the nostalgia of a property can impact financing and development of that property.

This value is subjective and also relative, so Different producers might value it differently. Nostalgia is often subjective and can be constraining because you’re limited by what’s gone before. Nostalgia can be contrasted with novelty or that idea of something new. And real nostalgia can be the audience longing for something that was actually produced.

Whereas imagined nostalgia is something the audience thinks they’ve seen before. And nostalgia can be organic, coming from the audience, or manufactured by the producer. Finally, we could say that nostalgia is also substrate neutral. It means it can happen in almost any field, especially with respect to the arts.

But it’s also transferable. It’s a transmedia property. That, if I have nostalgia for Pokemon, for instance, I might be interested in a Pokemon video game, even though I only really watched the cartoons when I was young. I don’t know why I’m referencing Pokemon specifically. But It’s clearly after my time, but In any event, what does Jameson have to say about nostalgia?

Nostalgia for the Present is a piece of media criticism where Jameson looks at the role of nostalgia in three works, Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint from 1959, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild from 1986, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, also from 1986. The three titles comprise a unique selection of content, or at least as diverse as one as one might choose to analyze on any given topic, I suppose, though given the breadth of what we cover here on this channel, I shouldn’t be much to criticize or throw stones in glass houses and all that.

Time Out of Joint is a faux time travel story where a man who was apparently trapped in the 1950s notices small differences in errors in reality, which leads him to suspect that something weird is going on. Kind of like the deja vu moment in The Matrix. These themes are typical of Philip K. Dick.

They’re what we’ve come to expect, the representations of reality and the notion that there’s something behind the scenes and the wavering nature of it. The false consciousness that often pervades his work. Looking at it in 2024, we’ve seen so many of those elements and other adaptations of it. The Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, and more.

Time Out of Joint seems almost unique among Philip K. Dick’s works in that it hasn’t been adapted for film or television yet. Truth be told has been copied many, many times before in time out a joint. The protagonist sense that there’s something else going on behind the reality is quite astute. He is captured in a Potemkin village of the 1950s, rebuilt in 1997 during an interstellar civil war.

It’s not quite like the 1997 and our reality, of course, we’re obviously nowhere near to interstellar capabilities and like a lot of older science fiction is now firmly rooted in our past. In a future that will not come to be. At times, Time Out of Joint feels more like a rough draft of The Truman Show, the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey, where the apparatus moves around to ensure the world is static for this one particular man, and this feeds into our various narcissistic main character desires.

And while The Truman Show isn’t quite a direct copy, the film clip that best describes Time Out of Joint would be the epilogue to Captain America the First Avenger. Where he wakes in a room and recognizes from the radio broadcasts that things are not quite what they seem. If there was a Cliff Notes version of this 220 page novel, that would probably be it.

But, there’s more. Jameson notes how Time Out of Joint is set up to be a model of the 1950s. As something that the protagonist will accept. which again echoes the Matrix in that the machine’s creation of the late 1990s as their virtual world in order to pacify the humans that are kept in the endless rows of creches.

So aside from elements from Time Out of Joint appearing in at least three major motion pictures, I’m pretty Much like many of the works of Philip K. Dick, which have been copied so many times, like at least six by our count, that it’s hard to recognize that original source. Maybe that speaks to why this hasn’t been adapted anywhere else, or at least not directly.

As Jameson states, Time Out of Joint, quote, is a collective wish fulfillment and the expression of a deep unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system. A small town utopia very much in the North American frontier. tradition. And this is where that nostalgia comes in. We mentioned last episode how you can have cultural and social and political nostalgia for those simpler times where things were kind of more manageable.

And that yearning can be felt by a lot of people, which means it could be operationalized and mobilized and directed to various purposes. But again, this is nothing new. Jameson was writing in 1989 about something from 1959, and this cycles back much, much further. Jameson wrote about two other titles, too, of course, Demme’s Something Wild and Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and while they’re fantastic films, they’re here mostly to bolster Jameson’s case and provide further evidence that allowed him to triangulate towards the element of nostalgia that he’s looking for, as our familiarity and focus is more towards the science fiction side of things here on the ImplausiPod.

We’ll stick towards that and see what Jameson has to say about science fiction.

For Jameson, science fiction is a category. And if you’re hearing that with me making bunny ear signs, then you’re hearing correctly. Nowadays, we might just want to call it a genre. One that came about during that Eisenhower period, a period of the U. S. conquering space and battling communists. And all the ideology that’s inherently bound within the literature from that era.

The category might be bigger, going large to include some real lit, like Moore’s Utopia and others. Or it might be more tightly bound to the pulp novels. Personally, I like the expansive view of sci fi for our point of view, one that loops in Shelley’s Frankenstein by definition and intent and starts maybe with Jules Verne writing Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864 because that scoops up H.

G. Wells’s stuff as well and gives us a really strong foundation for what science fiction is. The classic era of science fiction is probably that 1950s era, the golden age of rocket ships and the like. A particular vision of the future, both technologically and aesthetically. An aspirational view of the future that helps to come to terms and process our own history, understand how we feel.

fit within the current era. Basically, how did we get to now? Jameson contrasts sci fi with the historical novel, a cultural form that along with costume films and period dramas on TV reflected the ideology of the feudal classes and had fallen off throughout the late 20th century as the then new middle class sought something different, something alien that amped up their own achievements.

Sci fi came on the scene and said, hold my ray gun, I got this. The historical novel failed not simply due to the feudalist ideals, but because according to Jameson, quote In the postmodern age, we no longer tell ourselves our history in that fashion, but also because we no longer experience it that way, and indeed, perhaps no longer experience it at all.

End quote. For Jameson, at least at the time, our mediated nature meant that we were living in an ahistorical age. And while this may have been true in 1989, I don’t know if that’s any longer the case. The recent rise in historicism and historicity in its forms in the 21st century may suggest that various authors talking about the rise of techno feudalism might be more right than we suppose.

But there’s another question there. Did the return to those historical feudal ideals, the types of stories you tell about kings and queens, become more popular because we are living in that type of age? Or did they help bring it about? Which came first, Shakespeare in Love and Lord of the Rings, or Technofeudalism. Hard to say, but this feels like something we should save for the ongoing debate about fantasy versus sci fi, and we’ll touch in on that at a later point in time. For Jameson, science fiction is an aspirational vehicle for the masses who are rejecting the previous historical viewpoint.

Compared to the historical novel, Quote, Science fiction equally corresponds to the waning of the blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our own time in the postmodern era, to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression. End quote. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs, and they have less to do with the content, though there are parts of that too, to be sure, or at least particular aesthetic choices that are made, and more to do with the socio economic conditions of today.

post World War II USA, and North America, and the United Kingdom. And again, this is another place where nostalgia starts to come in, because both historical novels and sci fi have a tie to the imagination, an imagined past, or an imagined future. They can use representation in their relationship with the past or future, but they are really a perception of the present as history, a way that we can look at our own situation through a few steps removed.

This is the conceit that’s seen throughout the Star Treks, the Star Wars, the Warhammers, the Aliens, the other is but an aspect of ourselves, our society, and our culture that we are trying to take a closer look at. And in Time Out of Joint, that society that we’re trying to take a closer look at is the 1950s.

Philip K. Dick was writing Time Out of Joint in 1959, or at least it was published then, he was probably writing it a little bit earlier, and he was looking at the decade that just passed and choosing what the essential elements might look like from the perspective of someone from 1997. the year of the fictional interstellar war in the novel, and for the most part, he got it right.

Jameson presents us with a list of things that evoke the 1950s from time out of joint. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, PTAs, and the like. And if the list that Jameson gives us reads like a certain Billy Joel song, that’s probably not by accident. Though, we didn’t start the fire also being released in 1989 is almost certainly coincidental.

Nostalgia can often look like a collection of stuff in some hoarder’s back room. The items are referents to that era, not facts per se, but ideas about those facts. The question Jameson asks, the thesis for his whole paper, is did the period see itself this way? And Philip K. Dick’s choices seem to suggest that the answer is yes.

There’s a realistic feel to how PKD describes the 1950s, a feel that arises from the cultural reference that are used. And Jameson notes that if there is a quote unquote realism in the 50s, in other words, it is presumably to be found there in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing and able to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town of normalcy and non deviant everyday life, end quote.

So for a spectator looking back from the 1980s The image of the 1950s comes from the pop culture artifacts that the people in the 1950s understood themselves by as well. We’re looking at them from a distance, through a scanner, darkly. And one that’s getting darker over time.

What this whole process accomplishes is a process of reification. The reality gets blurred by the nostalgic elements, and this ends up becoming the signifier that represents the whole. So our sense of ourselves and of any moment in history may have little or nothing to do with reality. The objective reality, that is.

Which is the biggest Philip K. Dick style head trip that you’ve ever felt before. It’s hard to put it into words. Though all the works of Philip K. Dick and all the Philip K. Dickensian inspired media out there keep trying to show us and tell us over and over again, it’s tricky though. There’s a lot of speculation that’s required, and time out of joint is ultimately a piece of space.

Speculative fiction, quote, it is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit, the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality. End quote, how we think of ourselves, our histories and our generations are only tied to a fractions of the things that are out there.

And much of it may be that imagined nostalgia we talked about a little while ago. There’s a whole lot of unknowns out there, and all of us are privy to only a small fraction of what’s available. And this brings us back to what we were talking about near the beginning. Now, what did Frederick Jameson have to say about nostalgia in total, and how does that connect with the concept of the nostalgia curve that we introduced last episode?

Are there elements of the Jamesonian idea of nostalgia and what he was talking about that at least connect with us? And we can kind of see that in at least three of his books. four of our categories. We can see how our idea of nostalgia being a representation of a thing rather than being the thing itself is fundamental to Jameson’s work and carries on throughout it.

The idea of a thing, not the thing themselves. And for Jameson, those mediated examples coming from pop culture versions then informing the quote unquote generational logic for successive viewers is important too. It connects with our idea of imagined nostalgia, the kind that the audience thinks that they are remembering rather than they actually experienced.

Jameson himself doesn’t really distinguish between different kinds of nostalgia, at least not in the ways that we do. He doesn’t look at the source of where it is produced, but looks at what the nostalgia is for, hence the title, obviously. A 1980s audience looking for the imagined view of the 1950s or an interstellar warrior in the text longing for their imagined view of the same decade, or a writer from that decade of the 1950s constructing a longing for the decade while it is still happening.

These are all nostalgia writ large to Jameson, whereas we’ve increased the granularity a little bit to fine tune our analysis in the nostalgia curve last episode. Jameson looks at the construction of nostalgia in various media, novels and film in this case, though there could be others, and this ties in with our idea of substrate neutrality, that the nostalgia curve could be a transmedia property and not particularly tied to any one kind or another.

So whether we’re looking at Pokemon or action figures or whatever, we can see it across the various realms. The elements of nostalgia that we looked at that were focused on value are largely absent from Jameson’s work. They’re not completely absent, but he was looking for reification of ideology that takes place via nostalgia and not necessarily at the production culture, political economy elements that we’re looking at that tie back directly to the development of new titles in Hollywood or beyond.

Now, there’s more to nostalgia than just the meaty aspects, though, and we’ll need to take a look at the connection that nostalgia has with memory. The other place that nostalgia is showing up in is part of our soylent culture, which we mentioned earlier. The various bits and pieces of past properties that show up or are dredged back up by the cultural saves that are our generative AI tools and the platforms that encourage their use as spreadable media.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about how new media is built out of the pieces of the old, and nowhere is that more true than our current online culture. So we’ll have to take a deeper look at this next episode. I hope you join us then, on the Implausipod.

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The Nostalgia Curve

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 35 on August 31st, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15669349-e0035-the-nostalgia-curve

The box office for the summer of 2024 has been driven by titles relying heavily on the audiences nostalgia, with titles like Deadpool and Wolverine and Alien: Romulus leading the charge. But nostalgia as a driver for the movies isn’t new, and we’re seeing nostalgia across all areas of our society as well. So what’s going on? What are the factors that places something along The Nostalgia Curve?

In the summer of 2024, some of the biggest movies released were throwbacks to the past, sequels, or new entries in long standing franchises. But that’s no surprise, that’s been the way Hollywood operates for decades now. What was unique was the extent that these titles, like Deadpool and Wolverine and Alien Romulus, explicitly called out their past.

Part of their value proposition, the Pitch that allowed them to get made was that they were operating on the Nostalgia Curve. And what exactly is that? Well, stay tuned, we’re going to find out about it in this episode of The ImplausiPod.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And despite what you might hear in certain places, Hollywood is actually a fairly conservative town. And by conservative, we mean that it’s risk averse. When you’re playing around with big money, you want to make sure you get a return on your investment, and Hollywood is a very much a big money town.

This risk aversion lends them to trade in established properties, which is why you’ll see a hundred sequels or adaptations or remakes in a given year before you see something truly original. That isn’t to say that there isn’t anything creative taking place, it’s just that it’s constrained, it’s operating within certain limits, and these limits can often be defined by the nostalgia that a title evokes.

The characters, the scenes, the lines, the callbacks, all the expectations that an audience has for a long run property. In a YouTube video by the channel ScreenPrism discussing Twin Peaks: The Return, the authors note that nostalgia can act as a bridge. Balm, that’s B-A-L-M. Soothing the audience by giving them what they want, but to effectively use it.

There always has to be a tension there, and the audience might not know that they’re going to get what it is that they hope for. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Liking what you like and asking for, and maybe even getting more of it when it is available. And this is most noticeable in some of the more longer running, and let’s call them “eternal” fandoms.

Things like Star Trek, and pro wrestling, and comic books. And I know those cross the boundaries between different types of media, and different art forms, really. But, those fandoms have endured for decades, through ups and downs, through periods of cultural relevance, to cultural obscurity, and back again.

And I think that makes them interesting to look at to illustrate the nostalgia curve, to see how these fandoms relate to and engage with new material produced for them. Now, these fandoms aren’t exactly equivalent, but they’re more alike beneath the surface than is usually acknowledged. All three of them cater to niche fandoms and have persisted long enough that most of the population has had the opportunity to engage with them at some point in their lives.

The slipping in the In and out of the zeitgeist that comes with the success of waves of popularity is a critical part of that. As nostalgic parents introduce their children to the media and by extension, the fandoms that they enjoyed when they were younger. Both comic books and pro wrestling live in this weird kind of eternal now that can acknowledge and play off their history.

And often they use this as a means of generating credibility or cachet, but continually inexorably, they have to put out new product. Weekly or monthly, and sometimes they’ll reintroduce old characters in a new way to play off that, either through legacy characters, or children, or relatives of past performers, but the trends are largely the same.

Star Trek is different, for the most part, as it continually has to create new stuff that is kinda like the old stuff, but still new and distinct enough that the fans will enjoy it. Witness the titles that have been put out under the Star Trek brand banner during the streaming era. With the dichotomy between Discovery, Picard, the Lower Decks, Prodigy, and the Strange New Worlds all coming out during roughly the same time period, and all engendering different reactions as they touch down on different points along the Nostalgia Curve.

Now, obviously other properties play with the nostalgia curve at times too, especially long running ones like Star Wars and Doctor Who come to mind, and gaming titles like Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon and Warhammer 40, 000 are all getting old enough to test the waters as well. So let’s maybe get to the point.

What is the nostalgia curve? Maybe it’s best to think of the amount of nostalgia a given property can evoke as existing along a gradient or a continuum or something like that.

When something appears in a long running piece of media, one with an inherent fandom, it can be a challenge to separate something from appearing for nostalgia purposes, i. e. marketing or whatever, and something existing just because it’s part of the setting. Like how do you differentiate between a trope, something that makes Star Wars, “Star Wars”, like a Wookiee or a lightsaber or whatever, and something that’s showing up just to evoke that nostalgia.

It’s not like Wookiees are going to disappear until a new shows shows up 20 years from now. Wookiees aren’t going anywhere. I mean, they’re. Like Top 5 Furry Beasts, easily. But, back on topic, is that the commodification of nostalgia, where whether or not a given movie or project even gets made, depends on how much the perceived nostalgia factor is worth.

And this is what’s really the issue. If the perceived value is enough, if you’re far along the nostalgia curve, then the movie can get made and the Hollywood being a place where money talks as we mentioned earlier It may be worth trying to create nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place if you can create or Incept I guess a fake thing which evokes real nostalgia or I guess let’s call it uncanny nostalgia from here on out We might have to work a focus group or something to actually get the name going, but then if you have this incepted nostalgia, this uncanny nostalgia, you can commodify that in the same way that the recent Deadpool movie did with Wolverine showing up and the quote unquote “comic book accurate” costume that still isn’t 100 percent there.

Basically. All these elements of nostalgia are memes, or what we think of as memes. () Have we done the meme episode yet? If not, we’ll put that into the near future.) But, nostalgia is representational, in a memetic way. Like, earlier in the flick, where Deadpool explicitly calls out the montage during a fourth wall break, and each scene in the montage is iconic within the comic books, and instantly recognizable to a longtime fan of those books, Even though they never have occurred on screen at any point prior.

Every point of nostalgia is an assemblage, or container, or docker, or however you like to term these things, for all the associations that accompany it. And these are all shorthand for everything else that is associated with those books. And this everything can include the year of publication, the era that they were published in, the creators, writers, writers, artists, editors, the events that they occurred in, whether it was like age of apocalypse or secret wars or fall of the mutants or something, all of these elements are compacted and drawn within these images and scenes that we see.

You can’t evoke a scene from the Age of Apocalypse comic book series and put it in a movie without drawing in all those other associations with it. Thus, each and every nostalgic element that’s put in the movie packs in more and more until a metatextual movie like Deadpool and Wolverine can’t help but burst at the seams.

But at least in the case of Deadpool and Wolverine, it feels deserved. A recent IGN review of Deadpool and Wolverine lumped the movie in with the adaptation of Ready Player One, a film that was similarly stuffed to the brim with hey I recognize that moments and criticized it as being one of Steven Spielberg’s Now, Spielberg has probably forgotten more about making fantastic movies than most any human will ever know.

So, were the failures of Ready Player One Spielberg’s fault, or was he simply being faithful to the source material? I’m asking because, honestly, I couldn’t stand the book, and punted it, and decided not to watch the movie when it came out. Seeing the trailers made it feel gimmicked and trying too hard, and I Noped out of it well in advance, whereas, as I said, with Deadpool and Wolverine, it seemed earned.

What I’m getting at here is that nostalgia is a hot commodity. It isn’t going away anytime soon, and even though we all yearn for something fresh and new and endlessly scrolling on our apps of choice to find it, we end up finding community and joy in our shared nostalgia for things we’re pretty sure we never saw.

Or at least not the way we imagine them to be. And I think that in and of itself is worthy of exploring.

In order to explore the nostalgia curve, we need to lay out some basics, set down our foundation. We’ve been describing how nostalgia functions as a factor in the calculus of content production, how it feeds into the algorithm of whether something gets made. So that leads us to question, how do we determine the value of nostalgia?

So, we’re not particularly privy to the internal calculations of Hollywood Finance and its Byzantine algorithms, but it might be worth plotting those out, plotting what we can see. Comparing release titles in a franchise versus the real or subjective value they held for the franchise owner. We mentioned a couple different types of franchises earlier, but for illustrative purposes, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the streaming era.

Those include The following, Star Trek Discovery from 2017 to 2024, which was a prequel series with a new cast and the first Star Trek series in 10 years. It premiered on regular television before the rest of the episodes were released via streaming, and while there was some contention over earlier episodes, it did receive high praise and was noted as a driver of subscriptions for the network it appeared on.

Star Trek Picard was released in from 2020 to 2023, which followed the Captain of the Enterprise from Star Trek The Next Generation, and several of the films, with eventual appearances of other cast members from that series. It received critical acclaim, with reviews generally around the 80 percent mark, and it was the driver of subscriptions to the Paramount Plus online channel as well.

Star Trek The Lower Decks, which was an adult animated series that started in 2020, is still ongoing, and it was based on a premise from a Star Trek The Next Generation episode from 1994. It follows the misadventures of lower ranked characters within Starfleet, and it’s again gained critical praise and generally positive views.

It doesn’t appear to be the driver of the ongoing Star Trek stories in the way the other series are, but again, it’s a fan favorite.

Star Trek Prodigy was a computer animated Star Trek show aimed at children, and I said was, it still is, but there’s something special there. It appeared on Nickelodeon as a collaboration, and it was cancelled after one season despite the critical praise, and winning an Emmy, and it was picked up by Netflix for a second season and possibly more, so more to come on that one.

And Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which started in 2022 and is still ongoing, with up to a fourth season ordered. It follows the Enterprise before Kirk became the captain in events depicted in Star Trek The Original Series from 66 69. It feels in some ways like a direct homage of the original show, even though it’s set slightly before it, and it’s received accolades with a third season in production and a fourth order.

For all these series, we can see a number of commonalities. There’s varying degrees of diversity. Nostalgia, with some series tying more directly to past properties in the extended universe. There’s difficulty judging the impact, as the streaming services are reticent to provide their viewership data, and tailoring each show to appeal to different segments of the larger Star Trek fandom.

And I think that’s interesting that we have this segmentation going on. If we plot these series out, and I know if you’re listening to the podcast, this might not be the most visually engaging thing, but if we put these series or media titles or, you know, elements of a franchise in general, along a continuum based on the degree of nostalgia that they have, they can see that they all plot out at different spots, right?

We can say that something is more or less nostalgic, but Relative to other titles in the brand with the Star Trek streaming titles. I’ve been looking at the continuum might look something like Star Trek discovery at one end, Star Trek prodigy on, you know, next to that lower decks in the middle and something like Star Trek Picard or strange new worlds at the far end of our spectrum and Star Trek is not unique as a franchise among long running media titles.

They all trade in nostalgia to a degree, but here we can see titles like Picard and Strange New Worlds that lean heavily on other characters, settings, and aesthetics to bring the audience on board where Discovery and Prodigy are further removed from that. This is a useful metric. We can start to see how nostalgia plots out.

But a more complete look at nostalgia involves that contrast that we talked about. If we plot nostalgia on one axis and value on the other, we can see shows that have a very low nostalgia factor, shows like Star Trek Prodigy, where there’s almost none of the characters that appear in previous episodes and it’s almost wholly new, are very low on nostalgia and they’re not as much of a driver as well.

Whereas a show like Star Trek Picard, which is very high on the nostalgia factor, drawing on a loved character from a past show. is very high on that, but also high on value, so we can see where this line can be drawn basically directly between them. There are several takeaways. Value is subjective, so absent any real data on viewership, it can be tough to place the titles on the curve or to judge their impact.

Value is also relative. So, for a show like Prodigy, it wasn’t worth it for Nickelodeon to air the show, based on the budget. But for Netflix, the calculus made up for it, and it was, they were more than happy to pick up and release the show. And finally, nostalgia is also subjective. But the more closely tied to property as to what has gone before, like the trappings and tropes of the extended universe, the more constrained the creators can be in what they can make.

But we’re not limited to judging nostalgia by value. It isn’t the only way we can read it. This isn’t some Fisherian capitalist realist thing where that’s the only way we can picture things. There are other approaches we can take. Perhaps the fact that nostalgia is subjective can give us a clue. We could compare the nostalgia to show folks versus the novelty that approaches the subject with, and remap the curve with those elements on the axis.

So what does the nostalgia curve look like if it’s compared to different? For the sake of our example, we’ll continue to use the Star Trek series released during the streaming area that we’ve been mentioning so far. And these will form the data points along our curve. The shape of the curve will depend on some of the choices we make.

So, let’s see what our options look like. Our first comparison will be to swap out value. For novelty. Novelty’s long been a proxy for things like innovation. So there’s a track record, at least, of using it in academic contexts. When novelty occurs with respect to these franchises, something new is introduced to the setting or the larger universe and the traditional tropes and aesthetics of the universe are muted.

We can see that nostalgia isn’t absent with the more novel titles, but their focus on novelty moves them further along the curve. And again, in our description of the visual, this puts shows like Star Trek Discovery and Prodigy, high in novelty, lower in nostalgia, up on the top left, and shows like Picard and Strange New Worlds.

High on Nostalgia, lower on Novelty, down in the bottom right and we have that large sweeping downslope. And titles appear at various places along the curve. There’s no implicit value here, we’re not saying something is better or worse, we’re just saying things plot out differently along the curve.

Another way we can think about nostalgia is the extent which is real or imagined, on the part of the audience. Now, I guess that creatives and other content producers can be part of this audience as well, as it’s not uncommon for the producers on long running series to be fans or marks for the product, but that’s an aside that we can explore at a later date.

Real nostalgia, and you know, there’s quotes there, but real nostalgia would be the fans longing for something that was actually produced and published in the past. It can be sighted, looked at, enjoyed. Imagined nostalgia would be something that the audience thinks they have seen but never actually happened.

For a recent example, we could look at some elements in the Deadpool and Wolverine film, like the yellow costume, or Gambit’s appearance in the film, as That version of Gambit had never shown up in any cinematic version before. Neither of them have ever actually happened. They’re adaptations of elements that have shown up previously in other media, and granted the nature of transmedia storytelling necessarily means that there’s going to be a lot of adaptations going around, but the audience is doing a lot of the lifting here, getting something close to what they think they wanted.

If we map real versus imagined nostalgia with respect to our Star Trek streaming title curve, the ST:ST curve, it would look like almost a straight downward slope, with Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks being high on the imagination and lower on the real, and Star Trek Picard again being very heavy on real elements of nostalgia being evoked during the series.

Now, there’s at least one more way we can look at this. We mentioned the incepted nostalgia, that uncanny nostalgia that was created by the content producers to evoke nostalgia within a given title, the organic versus manufactured. If you have organic nostalgia, that which is experienced by the audience on their own, it is somewhat inherent in the titles that we’re looking at. This can occur due to that elements, aesthetics, tropes of the shared universe. But it is on the audience.

Organic nostalgia is related to our second curve, that of real versus imagined, as both real and imagined could be counting as organic having been experienced by the audience. But I guess that’s just depending on how we frame it. Manufactured nostalgia is that incepted form, something brought in for the express purpose of pleasure.

Pushing the audience’s nostalgia button, and Star Trek as a franchise pushes this button hard, don’t get me wrong. Each series relies on it to some degree. So much so that series might not even be the right analytic unit for this, it might be worthwhile to go intro series for the analysis, comparing the series on an episodic basis or comparing series versus other series for other franchises.

With respect to organic versus manufactured nostalgia, we can see that the organic ones again are tied heavily to our real nostalgia, things like Star Trek, Strange New Worlds and Picard echoing previous series. rely heavily on the audience’s nostalgia for the elements there. Whereas something like Prodigy, with its computer generated characters, it feels wholly manufactured in some ways.

That doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. When Wesley Crusher shows up in the series In the second half of season one, any nostalgia that fans of the show have would be authentic, but his appearance there is manufactured, right? What I’m getting at is that there’s a lot of different ways that nostalgia applies to the media titles that we love and enjoy.

The value proposition plays a large part in driving the appearance of nostalgic elements in a show. In 2024, the summer box office seems to be thriving on it. I was originally inspired to start looking at this by the release of Deadpool and Wolverine, as I noted, and as I’m writing this, Alien Romulus has recently been out drawing heavily on James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens film, so much so that people are pointing out shot for shot scene comparisons, where Alien Romulus directly compares to James Cameron’s work.

This happened in Deadpool and Wolverine as well, with flight choreography coming directly from Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider Man film, any, many other elements that showed up in the shows and these movies are doing well with positive word of mouth circulating about each film, so Something is in the air pushing us along the nostalgia curve

And whatever’s blowing the winds of nostalgia is pushing it into all areas of our life Because we can see it happening in many more places than just with our media properties that we liked when we were young. By dint of nostalgia being present in so many of these areas, it seems obvious that the nostalgia curve may be more generalizable to other properties than just those that shape and deliver the content that is brought to our doorsteps.

We hinted at how the nostalgia curve gets adopted by one type of social activity. Gaming. And a keen observer will recognize that appeals to nostalgia in culture, politics, and technology, too. Let’s deal with those in turn. When it comes to nostalgia in gaming, I’m talking mostly about tabletop role playing games.

I’ve long held that interesting things arise out of the periphery, and gaming, especially tabletop gaming, has existed on the fringes in some fashion or another for most of my adult life. The recent surge in popularity due to stranger things and role notwithstanding. Gaming culture has been both an area of entertainment and an academic interest for me for a long time, and nostalgia has been fueling gaming since at least the 1980s.

It was pretty much baked in from the beginning, with the appendix and of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide for D& D detailing the titles that the game’s creators were nostalgic for. It’s also present in every new title and media tie in RPG released, whether it’s westerns and spy thrillers or Conan, Capes, Cthulhu, inspiring the current cop of adventures.

This nostalgia might have kept the lights on, but with the dawn of the new millennium, a new wave of titles kicked the nostalgia into overdrive. Following the release of the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 and the creation of the Open Gaming License, or OGL, along with it, the portal was opened and a number of retro clones spilled forth.

This led to the rise of the OSR, or Old School Renaissance, or Old School Revival, but Terms are a little bit interchangeable. It’s a series of games that looked to the hobbies roots for inspiration. Sometimes in terms of game design, often in look and feel, and sometimes both like in titles like dungeon crawl classics, these retro clones evoke a simpler time in gaming where they each tried to emulate that earlier era, either to bring in old or new.

lapsed fans, or to court new players with simpler mechanics, and often cheaper entry points too. But while the OSR began with small publishers putting out material they wanted to use and finding a like minded community, Wizards of the Coast has also reissued classic books in new formats or adventures Connect with the rich history of the classic early tabletop RPGs, revisiting characters like Strahd and Vecna and other iconic entities from time to time.

D& D isn’t alone in this either, as Wizards of the Coast regularly places products along the nostalgia curve in order to move the product for their other major property, Magic the Gathering. MTG is no stranger to nostalgia, either internal or external. It finds itself locked into a game design from the early 90s, with a card back which, by necessity of competition, it needs to maintain for every set they produce, but it also digs deep into the wells of its own past for artwork, creatures, game mechanics, characters, planes, themes, all of these resurface from time to time to renew or maintain interest in the property.

Sets like Ravnica, Mirrodin, Urza, and others evoke a host of associations for the long time gamer. Now, extrinsically, Magic is Gathering reaches outwards to other properties with its secret lair series, bringing in fans of other media properties like Warhammer, Doctor Who, Walking Dead, Lord of the Rings, even Transformers, for specially themed cards and decks.

Seeking out these fans or lapsed fans, if they were to lay out a typology, to come back to Magic by engaging with the other things that they love. Wizards of the Coast isn’t the only gaming company that does this either, as Games Workshop, another giant in the industry, will engage heavily in the rich lore and history of their various game worlds, putting games on hiatus for years and bringing them back in a new edition.

Or a reimagining to fans who will leap at the opportunity to grab them lest they disappear once more. FOMO counts as a factor in the corporate quarterly reports of these massive, multi million dollar companies. Now, all of these elements that we’ve been talking about so far, Film, television, gaming, they could all be typified as part of the cultural industries, but cultural nostalgia exists too, socio-cultural nostalgia, and this extends far beyond media properties.

It’s not quite lifestyle, though there is an element of that too, but more a combination of time and place and often historical, though again, this can be real or imagined to various degrees, as we pointed out previously. Historical recreation societies are Large part of this they can celebrate a time long past or a location with arts, dance, music, and more that may seem anachronistic.

It can be part of the Western Era or Medieval Europe, Imperial Rome, Shogun Era Japan, or other periods, though I will note that there’s a connection here. If you can imagine a world for it in Westworld, it probably exists as a real form of recreation as well. At certain inflection points, historical recreation can tip over into experimental anthropology, of which I’ve spoken about elsewhere, but a large part of historical recreation is done via Military re-enactors, whether it’s the Civil War in America, World War II, Napoleonics, or the like.

Live action roleplay, or LARP after fashion, and the deep ties it has between gaming and LARP need to be examined. The Society for Creative Anachronism, the SCA, was formed in 1966. Preceding the invention of Dungeons Dragons by a few years, but rising roughly to with the development of tabletop wargaming hobby more broadly.

Within the SCA, we see the development and creation of an imagined nostalgia for a place and time that didn’t quite exist, but was co created as a mutual social imaginary. But within the socio cultural sphere, the most glaring example of the nostalgia curve is those that are taking place within the political arena.

There are examples of plenty of movements that evoke the good old days that want to go back to an imagined past. And this isn’t a political podcast, really, and it isn’t seeking to be. This political nostalgia is being mentioned for completeness, lest we be remiss in their omission. But they do have a connection to the nostalgia curve.

And lest we think that all nostalgia is backward looking, Science fiction isn’t immune to nostalgia either. For what is ostensibly a forward looking genre, there’s a lot of looking to the past that takes place within the fiction presented to the audience. Not just with time travel jaunts of the past, like in the Star Trek episode from the original series, The City on the Edge of Forever, and Constantly throughout that series, and pretty much any early Doctor Who episode, and both of these just involved that hop to the next soundstage in the prop closets as much as anything else, where production constraints shape the creative direction of the shows.

But also in the endless tales of plot twists, Past historical battles like Marathon, Thermopylae, Hastings, that were being waged anew with serial numbers closely filed off. It wasn’t just the props, the battles and the ideology. And here I’m looking at you Starship Troopers that can be retrograde. Science fiction often gives us nostalgia for a future that will not come to be.

This is retro-futurism, science fiction with the aesthetic appeal of an earlier age. This was seen best in the recent Fallout video games and TV series, and the short story The Gernsback Continuum by author William Gibson. Longing for past visions of the future, which brings us to the technological nostalgia we talked about last episode.

The Dial up pastoral. Nostalgia for technology isn’t limited to older non electric technologies, though there is tons of that that goes on, as seen with our LARPer example earlier. Technological nostalgia can be for anything from classic cars to phones that go ring, the tools that we have used and grown up with that are deeply connected to us, and all of these can evoke those lost feelings as soon as they are seen or held.

Now, Often after we use them for a little bit of time, we can remember why we moved on from them, but the feelings we have for them remain. So in all these fields and categories, the nostalgia curve is present. And in many more fields than besides, as we intentionally avoided whole realms where it could be seen like sports, food, fashion, language, music.

All of these and more, nostalgia occupies a place. There’s a through lines in the ones that we did choose, and I hope that’s apparent from gaming, to LARPing, to historical cosplay, to historical politics, to shared imagination of the future, for a longing for how technology was in our youth, but There’s only so much room.

I’ve been intentionally avoiding a lot of topics during this episode, and we’re already over half an hour, but this intentional avoidance, something called nescience, has been happening in another area too, and that of academia. The preceding episode is a summary of my thoughts on the topic of nostalgia, and I’m aware that other authors have written extensively on the topic.

I’ve kept those titles on the bookshelf while getting down my thoughts on the subject of nostalgia. And in our next episode, I’d like to explore what some of the academic literature on nostalgia has been saying. So join us next episode when we examine the works of Fredric Jameson, John Ralston Saul, and others, and we go deeper into the nostalgia curve in an episode titled Nescience and Accessions.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along. In addition, we’ve started a newsletter on the blog, feel free to check out the link in the show notes and sign up to that.

Please join us soon for our next episode, until then, take care, and have fun.

Dial-up Pastorale

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0034 on August 7th, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15353380-e0034-dial-up-pastorale

What is behind the recent trend seeking a wistful return to a more idyllic age of the internet, real or imagined? We’ll call this the Dial-up Pastorale. The trend became apparent in a number of papers and blog-posts that have popped over the last few months (or at least came to my attention). Let’s find out what is going on.

Can you go home again, on the internet? Can you go back to the before times? To the times of MySpace, and web rings, AOL Instant Messenger, and forum posts? To static webpages that you found on Yahoo, that just happened to be somebody’s hobby? To a simpler time, where the web felt full of possibilities, but also somehow familiar and knowable?

We’ve talked in the past few episodes about what happens if your online community disappears and moves. What happens if you try to rebuild it, but there’s still embedded problems, but we haven’t really addressed the question of can you go back again? And why might you want to over the past few months has been an increasing call for the return to the simpler days of the internet Return to a dial up pastorale, And we’re going to look at that in this episode of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to weave together some disparate threads, all calling in their own way for a return to a simpler internet. This is an expanded audio version of our newsletter that we originally published back in May of 2024, building on the themes that we discussed there.

So if you have already read that, then thank you for joining us, and stick around, we’re going to explore it in a little bit more depth. And if you haven’t checked out our monthly newsletter yet, then by all means, go check the link in the show notes and subscribe if you’d like. But let us return to the topic at hand.

What exactly is the Dial-Up Pastorale? What is going on? Back in March of 2024, I started noticing a common theme in a number of articles that were being published. And while I’m not sure if this is just a coincidence, a trend, or perhaps just a case of the Baader-Meinhof effect, you know, where if someone mentions something like a VW Beetle, you start to see them everywhere, or frequency illusion, it seems that there’s something more floating around in the zeitgeist.

And in this case, it’s a wistful return to that idyllic age of the internet, whether it was real or imagined. Back last year, when we were talking about how various internet platforms function as the public sphere, here as reading. Juergen Habermas’ Further Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which is an article he published in 2022, where people were looking at these digital platforms and seeing how the theory had changed in the internet age.

And having that floating around the background is probably what primed the pump or enhanced my senses up to just below spidey levels in order to get a sense of what was going on, and that seems as good a starting point as any.

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher who, at the age of 95 in 2024, is still somewhat active, as noted by this paper we’re looking at that was published in 2022. It’s titled Reflections and Hypothesis on a “Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere”, and it was published as part of a special issue of Theory, Culture, and Society in that year.

Here they had invited a number of authors to talk about how the internet had changed the public sphere in the 21st century, how the traditional public sphere was morphing and reacting to those changes, and some speculation about what might be coming next. And Habermas, as the public sphere guy, provided a conclusion and overarching summary.

Now, his work on the public sphere isn’t perhaps his best known work, that would rather be the theory of communicative action. He is one of the top ten cited academics in the social sciences and humanities, up there with like, Goffman and Marx and Weber. But the theory of the public sphere is still incredibly relevant to our understanding of the communication systems and infrastructure that we have in our society.

Especially with the changes that have come around because of the internet. Habermas originally published the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962 in German, even though it took a few more years before there’s a translation in English and it became more widely known. And in the article, he’s providing commentary on the changes that have happened in the last 60 years since its initial publication.

And because of this, his work feels both timely and dated at the same time. The disruption that has taken place in media since 2008, to pick a date at random, quote unquote, warrants this re examination, but the historical nature of Habermas work is looking at traditional mass media, what we think of as newspapers, magazines, radio, and even TV.

And that feels pretty good. really, really dated in 2022 or 2024. In 2024, are mass media even still a thing? I mean, maybe yes, if we’re looking at something like the Olympics, but the relevance of mass media is slipping away. Habermas recognizes the changes somewhat, noting that the reach of new media, TV and radio have held ground, and newspapers and magazines have cratered as the unrelenting wave of quote, digitalization is transforming the structure of media.

The online platforms and digital gardens are rising in ascendancy, and this is, quote, taking place in the shadow of a commercial exploitation of the currently almost unregulated internet communication, end quote. The challenge then is whether the instability that we currently experience can be addressed, or if we’ll return to an earlier pre Renaissance way of forming public opinion.

And we can see some of this in the work of other authors, like that of Yanis Varoufakis, who talks about the rise of techno feudalism. More on that in a future episode. With respect to Habermas’s statement, I think he’s largely correct that the digitalization and digitization of everything has really changed media, even though I might contest whether TV and radio have held ground.

I feel they’ve really dropped off. But his point is, Experience in the current media landscape of the EU might be radically different than mine. Our mediated experiences are not necessarily exactly the same, and that’s really what we’re talking about, because the structural transformation of the public sphere was a historical account of the co evolution of privacy and publicity in a mediated world.

Here Habermas went back to the Renaissance era as he traced the origins of public opinion and how it was formed and shaped. And that was what was in the original book. It was by its nature a political work, and this continues here in his new article. He notes that there are some improbable conditions that must be fulfilled if a crisis prone capitalist democracy is to remain stable.

And this is a situation that we are very much living in. And we haven’t quite reckoned with this with respect to our social media platforms, especially with all the elections that are taking place worldwide in 2024. We’re seeing how our online discourse is being shaped by Misinformation and disinformation campaigns and the rise of generative AI tools that are being used to facilitate this.

If you’re swimming in the fast flowing stream of social media, it may seem almost hopeless that there’s too much of it happening. It’s coming at you too fast. But in Habermas’s paper here, there is an element of hope as the creator generated aspect of modern social media allows for new voices to rise through.

As Habermas notes, quote, The platform character of the new media creates a space of communication alongside the editorial public sphere in which readers, listeners, and viewers can spontaneously assume the role of authors. End quote. This is where the audience commodity fights back, it goes. against their commodification.

And this is what’s so powerful about platforms like TikTok as well as other creative driven practices like blogging and podcasting. But these are also further sources of tension. They expose, quote, the structural conflict between the public and private rules of citizens. And this is where something like TikTok is a great leveler, as it makes those private sphere moments public, as we discussed last episode.

But, on the same hand, those platforms can also highlight the incoming inequality that we experience as the increasing media literacy, uh, of the users has shown the disconnect between the lives of influencers and the rest of us. In May of 2024, this manifested as an almost all out revolt against the influencers with the creation of the hashtag Digiteen, which started as a response to a video by New York influencer Haley Bailey saying, let them eat cake in a Marie Antoinette inspired dress at the Met Gala.

This completely tone deaf presentation, when average families are struggling with the increased inflation and basic. food prices and rent, led to the internet users deciding to cut off the influencers from the source of their power, their followers, their massive audiences that they command, and started a mass blocking campaign.

This saw Bailey losing 10 million followers, Kim Kardashian losing 9 million, Taylor Swift reportedly losing 3 million within the first weekend of the campaign. Now, Since May, I’m sure they’ve bounced back a little bit, but the fact that the internet does recognize that the influences are beholden to their audiences does give me some small hope.

Maybe, just maybe, the message is getting through. And regardless of the outcome, there’s a very retrograde feel to it, something that ties in with our dialogue pastorale, which is all about looking back to earlier eras. And this brings us to our next stop, a call to rewild the internet. Originally published on the online magazine Noma in April of 2024, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon’s article, We Need to Rewild the Internet, looks at the internet through an ecological lens, and they suggest that a specific call to action is needed, one that can combat the affront of the entrenched culture.

Promoted and increasingly walled gardens of what Yuval Farafakis calls the Cloudalists, the Technofeudalists and their fiefdoms, the Zuckerbergs of the world. So they start with a historical look at failures in ecology, in particular a case of German forestry in the 19th century. How a particular model of a monoculture in forestry led to a systemic collapse and a completely devastation of the industry.

What the authors note is that in writing on the internet, whether it’s academic or not, there’s a fundamentally flawed assumption and that is that the internet is an ecosystem and that metaphor is pervasive throughout all analysis. The reason it’s flawed is because they state that online spaces are plantations.

And they make a strong case, and this jives with a lot of what we’ve talked about on this podcast before as well, with respect to the commodification of audiences. They look at the commodification that occurs online, initially of the audiences, and now of the very content that they create, which is then tossed into the hopper of the digital shredders, providing fuel for the generative AI tools that sell our soylent culture back to us for a monthly fee.

However, all this machinery is starting to heat things up. In order to combat this climate change for the internet, the authors argue that it is necessary to rewild it, to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. For Feral Imbersion, the challenge that they see is that the internet as it stands is pretty close to a monoculture, with choices limited to one or two vendors in most areas when it comes to ICTs.

The infrastructure is, quote, locked in, and the values that are embedded in that infrastructure are designed for extraction and control. They quote Leanne Starr’s work on infrastructure from 1999, and note how built environments can have values embedded in them. bedded within it and that specific choices need to be made when deciding what to use.

Now, for the authors, the tools that can rewild the internet already exist, and those are the tools of the simpler internet, the RSS feeds, the blogs, the Newsletters, email lists, podcasts, and other simpler forms of association. They specifically mention the Fediverse, which we’ve talked about at length in other episodes, especially episode 10, as an option that exists outside the current social media spaces.

And they also note that a rewild internet won’t look like it’s out of the 1990s as if it was made out of AOL links and gopher, and they all came back to dominance. That’s a bit of a shame because the internet did feel a lot more knowable back in the nineties and that’s unlikely to ever. ever happen again.

Still, there is a shift taking place. And that shift is seen in the next of our articles as well, The Revenge of the Homepage, which was originally published by Kyle Chayka on The New Yorker in May of 2024. In it, Chayka looks at the recent successes of various websites that decided to function as a place Places like Verge and Semaphore, which both made a conscious decision to angle away from algorithmically optimized content to avoid the buzzfeedification of everything.

And the author traces this shift back to the dissolution of Twitter as the commonplace of the internet, the internet public sphere, as we mentioned earlier, and the dispersal of everything back out to, well, the internet. everywhere. The article is still largely focused on the corporate websites like the New York Times and Verge and Semaphore and it continues the maddening trend that characterizes social media in a way that just means Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and excludes the TikToks and Snapchats and social media companies that are actually challenging the arguments that the author is making when it comes to community formation.

But overall there is a thread here that gets it right, that there is a return to websites as places one goes to directly and not hitting the filters and aggregators of social media indirectly. Whether that works for everyone or not, I can’t say, but it’s interesting that the dial up pastoral has found its way even to the pages of the New Yorker.

Is there an urban desire for the bucolic countryside? Well, perhaps, and perhaps that’s always been part of what made the pastoral the pastoral.

But perhaps nothing sums up that. Pastor Al, that desire to go back to the internet of our youth, and Molly White’s article, We Can Have a Different Web, from her newsletter’s citation needed in May of 2024. Within the article, she presents an ahistorical take on the history of the internet, focused on the good old days, a period of personal webpages, fewer trolls and bots, and an earlier aesthetic and ethic of what the world wide web could be.

She states that none of this is gone, which is largely true, even though it’s now a fraction of what it once was, made even smaller as it is dwarfed by social media giants that now dominate the landscape. But the ahistorical nature of this piece is that the tiny window where this imagined space of the internet might have existed is such a tiny sliver that I don’t even know if it ever actually existed.

took place. The non commercial web was always present. There was always only a sliver of time when it’s on its own. CompuServe was offering limited internet access by 1989. AOL launched their DOS version in 1991. The corporate backed Prodigy system allowed web hosting access to the web in 1994. And these big three accounted for most of the users of the internet who weren’t using university accounts or, you know, small providers.

So the walled gardens that white refers to were always there. It’s just that different walls were put up in the 2000s that encompassed social media companies that we now think of. And this is perhaps the greatest strength, the biggest failing with the piece. It’s an aspirational piece. It refers to an imaginary web that we think we remember, but one that historically never happened.

It alludes to the social imaginary of a slower, more pedestrian internet, but it leaves out that it was already corporate by the mid 1990s. We may have just have forgotten the extent to how corporate it was back in the time. So, What is the dial up passed around? Well, it’s the sum of all these takes, not just the articles themselves, but also the online discussion that takes place.

People that react to those articles and say, yes, this speaks to me as well. That confirm this, even if they’re things that never really took place. And this speaks to what’s happening, right? That there is an underlying thread that connects these various return movements in the real world. As a researcher of the internet and online culture, among other things, and one of the things I like to say back when I taught classes on new media was there’s generally nothing different between online and offline spaces, aside from the velocity that comes from the annihilation of distance.

And if we take that as a truth, then there should be similar patterns seen in various return movements that are seen in the real world examples that we see online. Does this mean that there’s a conservative tendency inherent within these return movements online, even though most people involved likely not identify as conservative and would scoff at the suggestion?

Perhaps. Not all of these return movements are on the level of Gatelon Castle in France, the experimental archaeology project, trying to rebuild the castle using traditional methods. But I think there’s a connection to the ethos of the movement, a closeness to the previous lived experience where it is knowable.

and the processes of daily life are more available at hand. The digital pastoral is a retreat from the liquidity and flow characterized by the algorithms, and a desire to plant one’s feet on solid ground. Of course, the pastoral is also a musical mood, whereas pastoral is the longing for an idyllic kind of life, of simpler times and shepherding and gardening and bringing together so many ways.

We adopt pastoral here, as the collection of these voices, independently crying out for a return to that simpler era of the internet. The pastoral is an assemblage of pastoral voices, brought together to raise a symphony that calls out to those yearning for that long ago time. A call that is faint, yet just loud enough to be heard by those attuned to the wavelength.

That wavelength, that of the dial up pastoral, that of websites and personal homepages seems idyllic, though I think they neglect the next element needed, that of finding one’s way of search, or absence search, as Google goes downhill and AI search can’t be trusted, a map, a path through the pasture, a directory.

Perhaps not quite the network of pre Google homepages we had, the AOLs and Geocities and Yahoo’s, but maybe this, but something closer to DMOZ, a shared set of links and known good websites build on trust and personal recommendation and curation. This has happened before. How did it work and why did it go away?

We’ll look at this in a future episode of the ImplazaPod.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along. In addition, we’ve started a newsletter on the blog.

Feel free to check out the link in the show notes and sign up to that. Please join us soon for our next episode. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:
Chayka, K. (2024, May 1). The Revenge of the Home Page. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-revenge-of-the-home-page

Farrell, M. and Berjon, R. (2024). We Need To Rewild The Internet. https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet

Habermas, J. (2022). Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(4), 145–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221112341

Habermas, J. (with Lawrence, F. G.). (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press.

Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326

Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.

White, M. (2024, May 1). We can have a different web. Citation Needed. https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

TikTok Tribulations

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0033 on June 10th, 2024)

What happens if your community disappears? How do online groups deal with the challenges of maintaining their social ties across fickle and fleeting platforms? And are there lessons to be learned by the TikTok creators from the online MMO communities that were shut down in the early 2000s?

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15146242-e0033-tiktok-tribulations

[00:00:00] DrI: On the last episode of the ImplausiPod, we asked what happened if you built an app and the community was still toxic, like, whoops, what do you do next? But there’s a darker side to that question. What if you built a successful community and then it disappeared? On April 24th, 2024, the US President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package bill that included legislation demanding that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, divest itself of those holdings to an American owned firm or face banning in the United States. If the sale doesn’t happen within 270 days, TikTok would be prevented from appearing in app stores, as well as certain internet hosting services. Now, of course the story isn’t over, this will be contested and appealed, but for those individuals who had developed or participated in communities on TikTok, it can be a significant loss.

A loss that we’re going to look at in episode 33 of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And today we’re talking about the closure of online communities. It’s rare that a thriving online community is shut down, or explicitly banned. Often what happens is that a new competing service opens up and the user base dwindles until all that is left is a shell of the former community.

Other times, the service gets sold off, changing hands, and the community gets parceled off, the data being sold, the policy changes making the community lose interest and find alternatives. The latter can be seen in services like Yahoo Groups, Tumblr, Google Groups, Google Wave, Google Plus. There might be a bit of a trend there, is what I’m saying.

Examples of services actively shutting down can be seen more often in the video game market, especially in MMOs. The glut of MMOs in the early 21st century, all built on the assumption of online play and needing an engaged community to drive the operation, led to the abandonment of that community when the service shut down, the game was canceled, or the servers were closed.

Now, in some cases, the community was strong and was able to keep things going after a fashion, but in most cases, closure of the servers meant the end of the game, and the dispersal of the members of the community. Sometimes the community knew it was coming and were able to go out with a blaze of glory, as seen on the Matrix Online or the original City of Heroes, but sometimes the community just ended.

The server’s turned off, and the light’s no longer on. And this closure, with a looming deadline, is what communities and creators on TikTok are now facing. The announcement on April 24th started a ticking clock, a 270 day countdown timer with a date for divestment of the app by its parent company. And, in late April and early May following the announcement, a number of creators on the app, some recognizable figures, some longtime lurkers, first time posters, made heartfelt appeals.

To the communities that they built or discovered during their time on TikTok. I’d like to share a couple of those with you right now. They’re short because, well, it is TikTok after all, but if there is a video version of this podcast, I’ll try my best to splice them in. The first is by a creator by the name of Vegas Starfish, an events planner in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

At the time of recording of this episode, Her post had received a quarter of a million views, garnering 40, 000 likes and several thousand comments. Here’s her post, in her own words.

[00:03:39] Vegas: This is my farewell to TikTok. As you know, TikTok was just banned in the United States. This app changed my life. This is me before TikTok, and this is me after.

I was a miserable, mid level casino executive. I started making content about my city and how much I loved it, and then I started living life. I have never made this platform about me. It was always about the city, but I want to show you a glimpse at the creator behind the videos. I’ve always been socially awkward.

And it was through this app that I was able to meet other creators and most importantly, meet so many of you, every single one of you changed my life. Suddenly my voice mattered and I had a purpose and I started living boldly. I began traveling all over the world. As my self worth and self confidence grew, I became a better parent, a better friend, and I’ve never been great at making friends, but the best ones I’ve ever had came through this app.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with incredible artists and creators, people that I would have never had access to otherwise, and together by creating dynamic content, we’ve been able to change the paths for thousands of small businesses by directly highlighting great people doing great things. We’ve done so much good.

I know that the loss of this app will hurt creators and businesses financially, but I’m afraid of losing the human connection. We’ve been able to take you along for amazing resorts opening and iconic ones closing. Together we were among the first to discover a massive corporate hack last fall. You were with me when the sphere opened and we saw F1 cars race down the Las Vegas Strip together.

I have shared thousands of moments with millions of people. It has fundamentally changed my life and the lives of so many others. I am eternally grateful for every experience and every interaction. It has been a whirlwind. And I appreciate you more than you know. I hope to see some of you on IG. And thank you for following me for all the Vegas.

A special shout out to the feral cat from the Rio who helped me go viral in the beginning. You’re the real MVP.

[00:05:40] DrI: Here we can see how a person was able to change their career, find and build a community, and increase their personal happiness by becoming more engaged with the job they were doing. sharing that and then reaching out and taking a more active role within the community to the extent that they experienced better mental and physical health and career growth and wellbeing.

Pretty awesome all around. And while her story was specific to TikTok, there are similar stories like hers on many other platforms. During the same week that Vegas starfish posted, there was another post that was made that also. went somewhat viral, and it went into the benefits of TikTok for that person.

This was a first time post by a long time lurker, who felt compelled to reach out to her community for the first time because of the impending ban. I’ll play a portion of that post here, as the full post is over four and a half minutes long.

[00:06:36] Katy: Hi, my name’s Katie. And I’ve never posted on TikTok before, and I probably never will again, but I was watching the live vote today on TikTok, um, for Congress to ban it.

And I just started really reflecting on the past four years that I’ve been watching TikTok. I’ve been just a lurker. I don’t post. I just watch. Um, but it’s meant a lot to me and I wanted to maybe record my first and only video as a thank you. It’s going to be pretty rough because I had to look up how to do all of this.

So I apologize for that. I found TikTok in 2020 during COVID when my children with disabilities came home from school and instead of just mother, I was mother and teacher. And it was overwhelming. And I lived in a pretty homogenous suburban neighborhood where there was very much one way to be. And. I had a mental breakdown.

I know I’m not the only one and I was prescribed more antidepressants or maybe a stay in a treatment facility for an eating disorder. But instead, the thing that really helped me was discovering TikTok and all of you. I Learned a new parenting language toward my children that was very different from the one that I was taught from Mama Cusses.

Um, I was diagnosed with ADHD, as were we all, and I learned how to manage it and do struggle care, closing duties, and reset to functional with Casey Davis. Um, I learned how to normalize being normal from Emily Jean, I, um, watched TV shows and movies and pieces that I never would have watched before because of ADHD and anxiety comfort.

Always like watching the same thing. I learned that it’s. Um, normal and okay to cosplay, to, um, treat your fandoms like old friends, to like to read spicy fiction. Um, I learned more about my neurodivergent or neurospicy children in the last four years on TikTok than I did online. Almost all of the earlier childhood.

[00:08:49] DrI: And from there, Katie goes on to thank some of the specific creators that she followed and whose content she enjoyed. And we can see within her posts some of the challenges that she was facing, both as a mother and a teacher, dealing with a mental breakdown and parenting children with special needs, learning concepts like struggle care and normalize, and being exposed to new media, new hobbies, new fandoms, basically learning in all of these instances.

And in her post, we can see how much community contributed to that. And this is the power of community to the audience. Now, sometimes they’re derogatorily referred to as lurkers and the level of involvement and investment that they perceive to have of themselves with relation to the community. These can often be referred to as

parasocial relationships, and this can be true. Parasocial relationships are one sided relationships where someone develops a sense of connection or familiarity with someone they don’t know, like a celebrity or a media figure. With the rise of social media, creating more media figures than ever before, People have observed the rise of these relationships, but the term has been around since the 1950s when Horton and Wohl observed it in television audiences.

These relationships may look fake to the outside observer, but we can also see the power that these invisible social ties have. This is the demonstration of a well known phenomenon in the social sciences. In 1973, Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper called The Strength of Weak Ties. You might not have heard of the paper, but judging by the nearly 40, 000 times it’s been cited, perhaps what was in the paper has been filtered out to become common knowledge.

In this paper, Granovetter was looking at job hunting specifically, and how people use their connections when searching for a job. And found that it was the secondary social ties, not your best friends, but your more casual acquaintances, that were more likely to come through in something like a job search.

Because your best friends, your strong ties, are more likely to run in similar social circles. They would be aware of similar opportunities. But those more Distant ties allow for further reach, and can be helpful as one looking for a career change, for example. We can see the effects of both of these in the posts I included above.

Both creators spoke of new connections they made, the knowledge they gained, and how they both Benefited from those social connections. There was another benefit that both creators had as well, though it isn’t as obvious. In the second post, Katie’s post, we can see how easy it was for a first time creator to reach out and make a post that was able to reach a million.

This has been one of the strengths of TikTok as a platform. As a tool, it democratized content production, turning users into Creators able to produce fully edited videos along with effects, captions, and connected to other content at the push of a button. And I cannot stress this enough, comparing something like TikTok to what needs to be done to produce this podcast or YouTube video, for instance, is night and day.

As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does. A well known systems theory quote from Stafford Beer. And this is what TikTok succeeds at more than most. It isn’t just the algorithmic content delivery and sorting mechanisms that go on behind the scenes, but also turning more and more people into content creators.

To this end, TikTok democratizes the opportunity to create. It removes gatekeepers from the products and allows users to make the materials that they want to see. Often, when we talk about democratization, we’re talking about material things, but here we’re seeing it with informational objects as well.

People can create exactly what they want to see and then share it with everybody and perhaps find an audience for those kinds of things, whether they knew one existed or not. And as Eric von Hippel points out in his 2005 book on innovation, it’s more than just the products quote, it’s the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities that are also important.

These experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. End quote. And I really want to stress this because this is what pretty much every article that I’ve seen on TikTok misses the fact on. Everybody points towards the algorithm or the social network and those elements of it, but the true secret sauce of TikTok is the ease of use of the content creation tools.

It can literally, with the push of a button, turn anybody and everybody into a television producer. Or director, or actor, or creative of some form. If TikTok is the new television, which I argued four years ago or so now, then everybody who posts on TikTok is a TV content creator of some kind. And I’m gonna let that sit for a second.

To expand further on that idea of democratization, I’m gonna return to Eric Von Hippel and quote at length. User firms, and increasingly even individual hobbyists, have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price.

With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services, and music and art. At a satisfyingly sophisticated level, then if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product, software you can use or music you can play, end quote.

Now that was published in 2005, so we’re seeing him capture in writing the effects of both the dot com revolution and the wide scale rollout of new computing in advance of the Y2K issue. That saw a massive expanse in computing products as everybody was purchasing new machines that were Y2K compatible.

But let’s go back to Von Hippel’s quote there. So, individual hobbyists having access to sophisticated design tools. Check. Allowing musical composition, video editing, all at the touch of a button. Absolutely. That’s what TikTok does. They could run on a personal computer at the time or now just the phone that is pretty much readily available to everybody.

Check. Rapidly coming down in price. Check. Basically free with an app or several apps in some cases with relatively little training and practice. Yes, new products and services and music and art all these things and we see some of this with AI tools Even though that’s not what we’re talking about right now and at a satisfyingly sophisticated level Good enough to show on the internet and a lot of people are obviously engaged with it and then software you can use music You can play Yes, the design is the product.

The thing that gets put out, gets shared with everybody, and that is the thing. And, as he said in the previous quote, this builds and allows access to creative communities, which ties directly to the quotes from the two TikTok users that we saw. There’s also another side effect of this democratization of content, and that is the increasing media literacy.

If we posit that literacy is not just being an informed reader, but also allows one the ability to write, so both input and output, upstream and downstream, then being more aware of content production The difference between what gets recorded, what gets seen, and how the audience reacts makes everybody involved more media literate.

Or at least it would if they’re paying attention. And I think to a large degree people are becoming more aware. However, more than just examples of democratizing content production and enhancing media literacy, Both posts from the users that I shared are evidence of the positive benefits of community.

We’ve referred to Howard Rheingold’s work on the virtual community earlier, and he quotes at length from M. Scott Peck’s Different Drum at the start of his book, and Scott writes, quote, We know the rules of community. We know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world?

We human beings have often been referred to as social animals, but we are not yet community creatures. We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival, but we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community.

It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries. It is our task, our essential, central, crucial task, to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed.

It’s a rather lengthy list that Scott has there in the middle of that quote. Inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community. But, I think it’s an essential one. When we think of the world around us, those are all things that we could use a little bit more of.

And as sociologist Richard Sennett notes in his book, Together, this community can be vocational as well. That working towards building the community can have such significant effects that it’s beneficial to all those involved, even the bystanders. As we saw with The Lurker in our second quote, that the audience gains benefits from the community as well.

The communities described by both creators are both meaningful. real despite being online. As we mentioned last episode, and probably often, is that there is no difference between online and offline communities save for the annihilation of distance and time. The distinctions made between cyberspace and quote meat space is often a false dichotomy.

Within academic writing on online communities, social networks, and the like, This difference was sometimes highlighted early in the literature, though more recent critical or reflective writing may no longer make that distinction. And that happens because in the 30 years or so since the publication of Rheingold’s Virtual Community, we have some Fantastic real world examples of what happens in online communities, especially when they go away.

And the reason there are so many online communities that went away is that in the early 2000s, having an online community was part of the business model of a number of companies. Including companies that were developing online games. And specifically those developing MMOs. The wave of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games that relied on a monthly subscription model.

This largely paralleled the shift to Web 2. 0 that was occurring at that time. around 1999 to 2004. But as we’ve been seeing with a lot of things gaming related during the course of this podcast, the gaming community somewhat preceded it, acting as a harbinger of things to come. Web 2. 0 is of course the change in the web from static web pages to user generated content, or UGC.

The MMO boom started in 1997 with the release of Ultima Online. where the term was coined, but it really took off beginning in 1999 with the release of EverQuest, and then heading straight to the moon with the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, and not 2001’s Shadows of Luclin expansion as maybe three people listening to this podcast might have been guessing.

Within the window of the MMO boom, numerous MMOs were launched based on a wide variety of intellectual property. Some licensed, some original, and all developed a community of some fashion around them. Even though the subscription based model that most used during this initial period represented a kind of Software as a Service, or SAAS, They were really more like community in a box.

The games relied on the volunteer labor provided by the community in terms of guides, maps, strategies, and communication hubs, external to the games themselves. In many cases, the games would be extremely difficult without the shared knowledge bases that the communities provided. It was the epitome of participatory culture that we discussed back in episode 16 on Spreadable Media.

And the communities. built around these games in part on the shared labour and collective action that was put into their creation. MMOs lived and died by the communities that existed around them. Alas, in a very dense and competitive marketplace, not every MMO succeeded, even if the community was there.

So I’d like to take a look at three that had high aspirations but ended up shutting down. These three were Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies, released in 2003, Cryptic Studios slash NCSoft’s City of Heroes, launched in 2004, and Monolith Productions 2005 release of The Matrix Online. Each of these were big budget MMOs with a large fanbase.

Some due to the tie ins with existing popular media licenses, and in City of Heroes case, being a generic superhero simulator in the era prior to the rise of the MCU wasn’t a bad thing. It emphasized team play, with groups of heroes working together to complete missions and fight larger threats, emulating the fiction of the superhero comics in general.

Star Wars Galaxies was developed by Sony Online, with a rich user driven in game economy developed by Raph Koster, one of the more notable MMO designers from his work on Ultima Online, who pushed for a simulationist view, where players would be crafting all the gear and materials used in the game. At least, initially.

And the Matrix Online provided a rich narrative experience, providing what is called transmedia storytelling, as the events taking place in the game are part of the larger continuity of stories told about the Matrix, coexisting with the events of the movies and other properties like the Animatrix. Each of these games managed to develop a dedicated community of players, active participants in engaging and extending the world.

But despite this active community, each of these properties failed, and the MMOs were closed. For The Matrix Online, it was shut down in 2009 due to low player numbers, as competition was tough, and honestly, the 2008 crash saw a number of properties struggle with their business model. For Star Wars Galaxies, when it closed in 2011, it was stated it was due to the loss of the license for Star Wars gaming,

which is a risk for any media property as well. For City of Heroes, without the licensing issues of the other two, it was a change in the focus of the publisher as the stated reason for its closure in 2012. At least, for a little while. The interesting thing is how these communities reacted to the closing of the servers, of knowing that the community that they had lovingly built was was going to disappear at a specified point in the future.

Each of the games had a massive farewell event, with the community coming online to celebrate the last moments. The Matrix Online turned it into a story event, and you can check out the link to the videos of that storyline in the show notes. The fans of Star Wars Galaxies created a similar event, and I’ll link that one too, culminating in a massive battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance that was live streamed on the internet.

City of Heroes had a number of player run events leading up to the servers being shut down. When they went dark, all three Of these MMOs saw their communities dispersed, a virtual diaspora drifting out to other online places and virtual spaces.

But for both Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, the game lived on. Fans of each game had started private servers using emulation software, allowing the members of the community to meet up again and play the game, after a fashion, much the same as they had before. Not every member of the old community signed up for the emulator servers, of course, and they did skirt the bounds of legality, but it allowed the games to continue.

It allowed the community to continue. And for City of Heroes, the under the radar private server launched in 2019 became an officially licensed private server in 2024, free to play but funded via donations for server costs and the like. The online community was able to rebuild and bring it back to an audience 12 years after it closed, at least officially.

SInce the private server relaunched in 2019, the devs working on the game have added new material, new missions, and new features, showing that an active community can still support a game enough to allow future development. The gaming community may be showing the TikTok community a path forward if the proposed legislation goes through in the United States.

While there are current alternatives to the short form video that TikTok popularized, like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Clapper, and others, each of those have appealed to a different community and haven’t seen the wholesale move of the TikTok user base. It may happen, as often users will move to a site or page or app or whatever that they find most appealing, but this isn’t always the case.

There may be an opportunity for users to build their own. Tools like loops. video, which is currently in alpha testing at the time of this show’s publication, allow a very similar short video format. built on the ActivityPub protocol that we’ve discussed last episode and several times before. And much like Meta’s threads was built in record time to capture disaffected Twitter users, we may see other options spring up if TikTok is truly banned in the United States.

We’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops, and come back to it in a few months to see what the results are, and where the community goes.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI tools were used in the production of this podcast, save for the transcription software, which I believe is just machine learning. You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a, buy me a coffee link on each show at applausopod.

com, which would go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time. So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Coming soon on the ImplazaPod, we already have some episodes in the pipeline, though I’m not quite sure of their release order yet. We have a two part discussion on the first season of the Fallout TV series, as well as a recap of the most recent season of Doctor Who. And we’ll be looking at a few other online activities, including the emergence of the dial up pastoral and the commodification of curation.

I hope you join us for them, they’re going to be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:

Bartle, R. (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Press.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press.

Koster, R. (2004). A theory of fun for game design. Paraglyph Press.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT Press.

Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Yale University Press.

The Matrix Online Videos—Giant Bomb. (2012, July 12). https://web.archive.org/web/20120712062536/http://www.giantbomb.com/the-matrix-online/61-9124/videos/

There Is Another: The End Of Star Wars Galaxies – Part 01 – Giant Bomb. (2012, January 7). https://web.archive.org/web/20120107150559/http://www.giantbomb.com/there-is-another-the-end-of-star-wars-galaxies-part-01/17-5439/

von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. The MIT Press.

Links:

City of Heroes: Homecoming

Implausipod Episode 16 – Spreadable Media

The Implausi.blog Newsletter