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Terminus Est

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 43 on February 5th, 2025)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16530739-e0043-appendix-w-99-terminus-est

In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to and end. Join us as we look at the impact of the Appendix W on real world events through a look at one of the most iconic blades in fiction: Severian’s Terminus Est from Gene Wolfe’s 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer. But much like the blade, there is much, much more hidden below the surface of this episode.

In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to an end. So too with Appendix W, as we have reached the final episode, where we take a look back at what has come before. Since the launch of this podcast, real world events have disturbingly breached through from the chaos of the warp into this reality.

We will look at the root causes of why, in this Appendix W episode, The Implausipod. Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this special Appendix W episode, I wanted to get to the end point of what Appendix W is all about, because since we started it, I’ve always known where the end point is going to be.

There’s a line I remember from my childhood, from the theme from Mahogany. Not the original song by Diana Ross, but a cover out of Europe. Do you know where you’re going to? When it came to Appendix W, the answer was an emphatic yes. I had a good idea at the outset where this would lead since the initial post back in 2021.

This comes with the benefit of hindsight and experience, where one can develop a good idea of the feasibility of a project at the point of inception. However, while you may have a destination in mind when you start a project, the place you may wind up at may be wildly different, or at least the path may be more circuitous than expected.

So if I didn’t discover anything new along the way, it would have been fine project, but I would have been a little disappointed. And we did uncover some new things, and that’s been fantastic. Of course, anyone familiar with that rather famous song knows the next verse starts with, did you get what you’re hoping for?

And the answer to that is, not quite. So in this penultimate episode of season one, and I say penultimate with the biggest bunny ears possible, we’ll get into the whys, wherefores, and what we learned along the way. The original endpoints of this project can be seen in some of the sections that we started with.

The descriptions of technology, the methods of travel, the aliens encountered, all overarching aesthetic elements by which we classify something as sci fi. And while we were off hunting for the origins of things, we began to weigh how much these tales had directly influenced their descendant that they had heavily inspired.

That inspiration can be seen directly in how some of those aesthetic elements were portrayed by their modern descendant, Warhammer 40, 000. But there’s more to it than just the aesthetic dimension, as the beliefs and ideologies of those authors were also embedded in the fiction they wrote as well.

Sometimes explicit, as seen in Starship Troopers or The Forever War. Sometimes more tacit or obfuscated. These beliefs were those of the post war era, in tales written by men who often served or came of age during World War II. Their science fiction reflects that era. We see large militaries and bureaucracies, hierarchies and authoritarianism.

Of the belief in the rightness of one’s cause, of being on the winning side. Sometimes this is questioned, as in Dune, and sometimes it is exaggerated to the point of satire, as in Judge Dredd. But regardless, they were common enough that the tropes and stereotypes begin to be repeated. I’m looking at you.

So, part of our original goal with Appendix W was to see how the impact of these ideologies can be traced as well. That line that follows through fiction throughout the decades. The continuous feedback loops between fiction and the real world. And this is still one of the goals. But, the real world has funny ways of moving faster than you might like, and real world events are starting to see the manifestation of these ideologies in ways that it wasn’t thought possible.

While real world events were perhaps the main reason that Appendix W wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, those real world events also offer us an opportunity to frame and focus our story, and to understand why we’ve come to the end. Terminus Est Why Terminus Est? Well, in Latin it quite literally means, It’s the end.

But it means something rather different in the context of science fiction and Warhammer 40k. In sci fi, it is one of the great swords of fiction, in a pantheon of named blades along with Stormbringer and Dragnipur and many others. Terminus Est was the sword of the executioner Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

We mentioned it in passing when we talked about that book back in episode 24 of Appendix W. You can see an image of it from the cover of the paperback edition of the book in the thumbnail episode of the show. It is from this iconic presentation that all of its other manifestations flow, whether in Castlevania and Path of Exile, to the manga of Blade Dance, to all of the other ridiculously oversized two handed swords and daiclaves that show up in anime, D& D, and Exalted, to an appearance in Warhammer 40, 000 itself as the name of the flagship of the Death Guards we’ve covered before.

The aesthetics of Gene Wolfe’s work in the Book of the New Sun, the imagery and use of language can be seen redolent throughout the lore of 40k. That idea of a fallen humanity long in the future dealing with technology that they no longer understand is seen throughout the work. Perhaps we can best show this in how Terminus Est is introduced to the readers on page 106 of the Timescape edition from 1980.

Quote, the sword herself. I shall not bore you with a catalogue of her virtues and beauties. You would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an L in length, straight and square pointed, as such as swords should be. Man edge and woman edge could part a hair to within a span of the guard.

Which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end. Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished upon her. But it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so. And so Art had nothing to give her.

The words Terminus Est had been engraved upon her blade in curious and beautiful letters. And I had learned enough of ancient languages since leaving the Atrium of Time to know that they meant, This is the line of division. End quote But Terminus Est is an unusual blade, and she holds some secrets within her.

Quote, There’s a channel in the spine of her blade, and in it runs a river of hydrogyrum, a metal heavier than iron, though it flows like water. Thus the balance is shifted towards the hands when the blade is high, but to the tip when it falls. So, light to raise, weighty to descend, as we hear so often throughout the series.

And, if this is to be the end, then there is no more fitting artifact to focus on for this episode. So let’s take a moment to look back at Appendix W through the lens of the Executioner’s Blade.

While we’ve covered an incredible amount in the previous 98 episodes of the series, I’d like to mention some of the highlights for me. Of course, whenever channels look at the influence of 40k, there is a focus on the obvious ones. Dune, Starship Troopers, and Judge Dredd. And we did touch on all those, but for me.

The delight was in finding and uncovering those hidden little gems that found their way into the lore. Star Trek isn’t generally mentioned as a direct influence on Warhammer 40, 000 in the way that those other titles are, mostly due to the more utopic view of the future that that series held, though the 40k orcs have a lot of parallels to the Klingons.

It was the revelation of the origins of the Terran Empire that surprised me the most, that Alternate universe version of Star Trek, first seen in the episode Mirror Mirror, where Spock famously wore a goatee, so you knew he was one of the baddies. The agonizers and the punishment that has become staples of both the Imperials and Dark Eldar in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe showing up there was a nice touch, and I’m glad we spent several episodes going through our deep dive on the original series.

These small influences showed up again in our very first episode, where we saw the enslavers from the Rogue Trader rulebook appear as they did on screen in an episode of Space 1999 in the episode titled Dragon’s Domain. This is sci fi with a more British feel than Star Trek, and this difference can be seen when we looked at Blake’s 7 back in episode 17.

Yeah, I know it would have worked out better if I had planned that one ahead, but I enjoyed our further look at the instrumentality in Episode 7 instead. That same instrumentality played a huge part of our review, as we spent three episodes on it throughout the series. The amount of influence that Cordwainer Smith’s writing had on Warhammer 40, 000 was perhaps understated, and he indirectly impacted Dune as well, but this gave us birth to so much of the day to day of the Imperium, the warp, the mechanicum, and the relationship they have to technology.

It was a real pleasure to share that with you. Of course, Smith’s work was a very American, West Coast view of sci fi, as was Herbert’s, and Gene Wolfe’s too, who we looked at as we reviewed each of the four books of the Book of the New Sun, and here again in this episode with the Blade, Terminus Est. All three of these series, the Instrumentality, Dune, and the New Sun, touched on the themes of the Earth in the distant future, of the dying Earth genre, though we only spent a little bit of time on Jack Vance’s work of the same name.

Deep Time appeared repeatedly as seen in Foundation series we did back in episode 50, though I’ll admit it was hard to separate the book from the TV adaptation on Apple. And here we can see some of the commonalities of the authors of the early influential science fiction as Asimov, Heinlein, Smith, and Vance all worked for the U.

S. military in various capacities during World War II. We’ll pick up on this thread in a moment. Of course, even though much of the sci fi of the quote unquote Golden Age was written by Americans following their experience in the war, there was no shortage of British influence as well. We mostly skipped over the rather obvious Tolkien influences, opting for just a quick episode there discussing how those contributions to the fantasy genre as a whole found their way to 40k through the influence of Games Workshop’s fantasy series, the original Warhammer.

This is where the works of Michael Moorcock showed up as well, back in episode 10 when we looked at Stormbringer. The sword with a trapped demon within that inspired the whole mythology of daemon weapons within Warhammer. For me personally, the biggest revelations came from my first exposure to much of the British media that I had only rarely glimpsed growing up.

As a Canadian, we tended to get overlapping coverage of both British and U. S. culture, but it was very selective, and there was some stuff I really hadn’t seen at all. So whether it was Doctor Who, or Blake’s 7, or the various comic series included as part of 2000 AD, Discovering how those filtered into Warhammer 40, 000 was fascinating, and I’m glad I got to share those with you in the multiple episodes we did.

I’m also happy we brought in some outside experts for a look at the Gundam series with an interview with veteran modelers and fans of the franchise. Even the Gundam influence on Warhammer 40, 000 didn’t really start showing up until later in the 1990s with the release of the Tau Empire, but big stompy robots were there from the beginning.

But, uh, no exploration of sci fi influences would be complete without looking at the impact of Hollywood. Perennial franchises like Star Wars, Aliens, and Terminator all showed up in various ways, and I’m glad we got to those franchises eventually. But as we mentioned in those episodes, they are widely popular and well known, so I’m also happy we waited as long as we did before taking a look at them, as the little details of the earlier, smaller titles would have been eclipsed by the giants of the genre.

However, it is in the films that we can most easily see the differences in the sci fi ideologies that are represented within the series.

And what are the ideologies that we see? Well, as with most popular culture, what we see is a reflection of our own society. Which is why we see militarism, corporatism, hierarchies, and a focus on the commodities and trade in many of the stories. Some aspects of our society seem inescapable, what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, where it is easier to imagine a far future than a coherent end to capitalism.

Which is why, even in the far future of the Dune universe, filled with religion and medievalism, we have a monopolistic corporation like CHOAM controlling the economy behind the scenes. But the underlying ideology and our relation to it can change over time, and while this might not be stated explicitly, we can see it in the changing visual representations of pop culture.

Within sci fi, cinema, and television, we can see certain eras that are most clearly identified by their aesthetic. We start in the 60s, the clean era, where shows like Star Trek, the original series, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 both draw in inspiration from the space programs of the time. The clean lines and shiny panels everywhere, with hardly a mote of dust to be seen.

A show like Space 1999 serves as a transition piece, as the space station becomes more worn down over time, reflecting the diminishing resources of the station, and the economic malaise and uncertainty of the time, bringing us the era of grit and grime. Exemplified by the late 70s pieces of sci fi like The Star Wars and Doctor Who.

And as the 70s drew to a close, that grit turned into grease and grime, to the greasy production of shows like Alien and Ice Pirates. With steam filling the atmosphere and hiding the sets, and condensation and grease liberally applied across the surfaces. The grit was still there, of course. The recently deceased director David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune and the frenetically paced post apocalyptic Road Warrior still had much dirt and dust, but the bright future of the 60s had definitely drifted over to the dark side.

So too in the fiction. While we noted that the foundational elements of 40k consisted of a blend of British American and occasionally Japanese or European sci fi and fantasy, there was a strong showing by American writers of sci fi that focused on the deep history in the dying earth, Asimov’s foundation, Smith’s instrumentality, Vance’s dying earth, and Herbert’s dune, if we were to lay them out roughly chronologically.

But this underlying ideology has connections to U. S. military policy. As noted by Chris Hables Gray, not only has science fiction predicted many of the recent changes in war, there is a strong argument that it has influenced them to some extent. Military science fiction and military policy coexist in the same discourse system to a surprising degree, and we have sci fi as policy.

And for Gray and others, this can be seen again and again. Gray notes how H. Bruce Franklin looks at how superweapons occupy space within the American collective imagination, that space we talked about back in episode 26, Silicon Dreams. There, we were introduced to the idea of the collective imaginary with respect to virtual reality and artificial intelligence, but we find it again here too in terms of superweapons and mechanized warfare, which even Thomas Edison was talking about as early as 1915.

While the earlier sci fi had militaristic themes, as those early authors like Heinlein drew on their military backgrounds, showing us vast navies, hierarchical organizations, authoritarian systems, and War Amongst the Stars, this shifted in the 70s and 80s with the rise of the subgenre of mil sci fi. We covered some of it, from the hover tanks of David Drake’s Hammer Slammers, to the eternal wars between Man and Kzin in Larry Niven’s known space universe, to the Janissaries universe of Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle, who passed in 2017, was a former Korean war vet who worked in the aerospace industry and entered academia, earning degrees in psychology and political science. While we didn’t cover much of his work directly, save for our discussion of orbital bombardments in the episode on Satellite Warfare and the origins of the Exterminatus in Warhammer 40k, he did collaborate with a number of other authors we looked at and was a prolific writer in the field.

However, he may be more influential on the field for his academic writing rather than his sci fi. Specifically, 1970’s The Strategy of Technology, co authored with Stefan Possony, where they argued for the demonstration of technological superiority as part of a country’s doctrine. And this was seen in the American pursuit of stealth technology, and Reagan’s SDI program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars.

It could be argued that these are all elements of what Mary Kaldor calls the Baroque Arsenal, and we can see that Baroque style seeping through in the arcane elements of A Forgotten Technology in Terminus Est, and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in Dune, and in Warhammer 40, 000 itself. I bring up Jerry Pournelle because his political views were embedded within his work, and he recognized and acknowledged this.

He self described as being, quote, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, but his conservatism tended more to the isolationist view, what is now described as paleoconservatism, that was opposed to the Roosevelt New Deal, and has been supplanted by neoconservatism in the US. And like, Many of his sci fi colleagues, he worked as a consultant, an advisor, or a futurist for various organizations during the Cold War.

And this is part of our rationale for ending. It leads us into why we’re wrapping up this chapter of The Appendix W. Or speedrunning to the end at least. Since we started this project the world has gotten darker and those dark elements of our entertainment are escaping the turbulence of the warp and manifesting in our reality.

Khornate imagery and iconography adopted by troops fighting on the front lines of the Russo Ukrainian war with sayings such as Blood for the Blood God being bandied about everywhere from internet commentary to the pro wrestling forums, the brutality of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is seeping into our public discussion, stripped of the irony and satire attached to it in the in universe materials, where every text is issued by an unreliable narrator.

The audience still realizes that, right? That it’s satire? Sometimes I question this, as dank memes in support of certain public figures as the god emperor of mankind are posted in earnest on the internet, or if Posted with an ironic wink by the commenter, perhaps taken up and spread less ironically by the followers and algorithms that lift it up to virality.

Spreadable media of the most infectious kind. Papa Nurgle would be proud.

And of course, there’s the cosplay, which has grown in recent years to become an industry unto itself, but has also seen growth in the fandom of the adversaries in the various sci fi universes that we enjoy. While many cosplay conventions have adopted explicit rules against historically fascist or racist imagery, They are much more lenient when it comes to allegorical representations, and as we’ve mentioned throughout this episode, and series, sci fi is rife with allegory.

Elements that were clearly presented as allegorical in the original fictions were shaded in with grey during the intervening years and have been embraced by the fandoms at different points. Elements of clear satire, Starship Troopers and Judge Dredd most specifically, were taken at face value. And so, The critique they presented on the police state or militarization of fascism gets subsumed by the larger sci fi trappings of the settings.

These fandoms have become groups unto themselves, with groups like the 501st, a now international troop of cosplayers that wear stormtrooper armor and march around conventions and other events. The group that represent the baddies in Star Wars, wearing armor and helmets designed to look like skeletons and skulls, were originally patterned off of the Americans in Vietnam.

The rebels of which Luke and Leia were a part of were the Viet Cong, according to an interview George Lucas gave with director James Cameron in 2018. And the 501st is not alone in groups of bad guys that find representation within the cosplay community. But the issue is that fashionable cosplay becomes fashionable dress rehearsal, and from there it seeps into everyday life.

So too with Warhammer 40, 000. The grim darkness of the 41st millennium finds no shortage of representations of evil. From the grinding military machine of the Imperial Army, the Astra Militarum, with its Commissars and the World War I German inspired Death Korps of Krieg, To the transhuman space marines, the Adeptus Astartes draw an inspiration from the armored soldiers of Starship Troopers, the Forever War, and the Sardaukar of Dune.

We see this continue in the Judge Dredd inspired Adeptus Arbites, the space cops that police the regular population, and the Inquisitors that purge out heresy with the ferverance of the now expected Spanish Inquisition. Games Workshop has repeatedly stated that their work is satire, but how much weight do those statements carry, especially compared to the evidence of all the other material published for their universe?

In a statement made on their website in 2021, Games Workshop stated, “The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40, 000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.

For clarity, satire is the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system of flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh out loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime turned up to eleven.

The Imperium is not an aspirational state outside of the in universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilization, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see. That said, certain real world hate groups and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co opt them for their own agendas.”

This statement was issued as a response to someone wearing full Nazi regalia to a tournament in Spain in 2021. But it’s indicative of the larger issue, and I think we need to look forward for solutions. Games Workshop may disavow the use of their material by hate groups and claim that it is satire, but it’s not clear that some groups are getting it, or rather, that the preponderance of darkness within the universe provides cover for those who would use it for nefarious ends.

The issue is that you run the risk of being that kind of bar. Now, it’s not that I think that Warhammer 40k is irredeemable, it’s just that the Grim and Dark is just that, Grim and Dark, and that sometimes the best way to combat the dank memes is to know where they come from, to detoxify them. And I know some of the audience loves the dank, and think the dankness is their ally, but you merely adopted the dank.

I was born in it, molded by it, I didn’t see Mr. Rogers until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but blinding. But I digress.

Warhammer 40, 000 Rogue Trader was originally published in 1987, and it collected its inspirations, wove them together, and wore them on its sleeve, adding more fabric to the quilt as time went on. Early editions became incorporated into the design such that the sources are forgotten, and this is what we are highlighting here, especially with the more obscure titles.

But eventually, 40k grew to be enough of an influence in its own right that it was influencing the culture that it had previously assimilated. In 2025, it’s something that needs to be stressed, that the media environment that 40k was released into was vastly different than the one that existed even 10 years later, as the 20th century drew to a close.

Some of the concurrent and subsequent influences of Warhammer 40, 000 can be seen in other media titles, titles like Aliens, which was released in 1986, or Star Trek The Next Generation, originally starting in 1987, and their subsequent introduction of the Borg as an antagonist in episodes like Q Who in May of 1989, and June and September Two Parter The Best of Both Worlds in 1990.

Big sci fi movies like Independence Day came out in 1996, Starship Trooper’s movie was released in 1997, the video game Starcraft came out in March 31st of 1998, and Terminator 2 was released in 1991, and the Star Wars prequels coming out in 1999, and all of these had subsequent influences on Warhammer 40, 000.

As we go forward with the Appendix W, and we will be going forward, we will be looking at the interplay that took place during the early 1990s, a fallow period in sci fi which allowed, or forced perhaps, 40, 000 to build on its own mythology and become the cultural icon and brand that it turned into. Why are we doing this?

Well, As I stated, partly it’s a speedrun in order to catch us up to the present as current events have forced the timeline along and we don’t want to be looking at stuff that’s so hopelessly dated that it has no impact or anything to say about what’s going on currently in our world. And from this point forward, episode 99, we’ll be looking both backwards and forwards at the various titles that influence and shape what’s going on.

This will be shaped a little bit by whatever gives me joy in the moment, but I’ll do my best to announce in advance whatever it is I’m working on so that you, the listener, can follow along. I don’t know if many podcasts have tried something like this before, or if some have but have scrapped it because it’s a bad idea, but We’ll give it a shot, because it gives me a little bit of joy to do so, and that joy is critically important.

As you may have noted, since it’s been over ten months since we last published an Appendix W episode, I’ve been struggling a little bit with that joy, with that creativity, and this has taken place over the holidays and has been through into the new year as well with the seemingly unending flood of bad news.

As you can tell by the existence of this podcast, we managed to get things moving a bit, but the first step was turning off the fire hose and following through with some steps that you can do to make constructive actions to your own media and mental health. The second step was to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing towards a friend, it was pointed towards an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that she had made with the National Press Club.

The relevant bit 57 minute mark in the clip and I’ll link to it in the show notes. The gist of her advice is to behave with joy as a means of resistance. Do the things that matter to you and that you can bring to the people around you, end quote. We can meet the moment and as scholars be honest and by doing the best scholarly work we can, we contribute back to humanity.

And the Appendix W and the podcast at large are both Scholarly works; it’s stuff I studied in grad school, and I want to continue bringing that knowledge and information back to a larger public. Even though contributing back to humanity seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channel that mostly focuses on the intersection of sci fi and technology, it is

what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought. But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube, which I hope to publish more on in 2025, and the various other bits that we have going on here.

So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. So let’s pick up that long, finely honed blade of Terminus Est one last time. Though, not to wield, but to return to its scabbard and look toward the future.

Thank you for joining us on this special Appendix W episode of the ImplausiPod. We’ll return next episode with the start of our series on cyberspace and examine some of what is being built around us, what this is all about. After that, we’ll be looking at the first season of and or, and we may have just a few other surprises to throw your way.

In the meantime, I’m your host, Dr. Imp plausible. You can reach me at Doctor implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows @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. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at Implausiapod.

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 next time, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

Chris Hables Gray- “There Will Be War!”: Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2023, from https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/gray.htm

Kaldor, M. (1981). The Baroque Arsenal. Hill & Wang Pub.

https://www.amc.com/blogs/george-lucas-reveals-how-star-wars-was-influenced-by-the-vietnam-war–1005548

https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpovancouver/costume-policy

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/1Xpzeld6/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not

Heather Cox Richardson interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…

Media Health, part 1: turn off the firehose

The last few weeks of January 2025 has seen a torrent of news stories coming down the pipeline, and it can be daunting and exhausting, and deeply healthy. Perhaps we need to think of this in terms of our media health, in the same way that we have physical health and mental health. We’ll make this distinction from things like media literacy, which is talking about something different, though still related, and focus on practical steps that can help maintain a healthy interaction with the media.

And, as indicated by the “part 1” in the title, this will be a series. It’s one that likely should have been shared more widely over the last few years, but while the best time to start was 10 years ago, the next best time is now.

Let’s get started with a summary of some steps for dealing with the flood:

Turn the firehose off. The flood of information is done by design, to overwhelm you, to give a sense of inevitability and omnipresence. Stay vigilant, but don’t doomscroll.

Don’t check the news first thing in the morning. Check a trusted source of information at an appropriate time: end of the workday or after supper. Not right before bed (bad for sleep) or first thing in the morning (uses up all your spoons early, and you’re back to scrolling or wiped out).

If there are “news” feeds or influencers that trade in rage bait for views, delete or block, and if you find you’re more on edge after seeing a particular creator, block or mute too. This might include “friendly” sources of info. Find a digest or summary version rather than a firehose. I can’t stress this enough. Within the attention economy, stuff that looks like it’s on your side can still be utilizing tactics that are not in your best interest.

The one place you (may) want to make an exception is for local news sources, as this will have a more significant impact than the national flood. Stick with a trusted local source, that doesn’t fold in all the national stuff, and keep your ear to the ground for the stuff that affects you.

Alright, now that the firehose is off, how do you start dealing with the accumulated flood? I think we’ll need to deal with that in part 2.

Incipient Diaspora

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 42 on January 17th, 2025)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16453686-e0042-incipient-diaspora

What happens when a change is on the horizon, one that is approaching that will force you to move but is outside your control? When a community knows it will be disrupted, it may be facing an Incipient Diaspora. For the US denizens of the TikTok app, facing a ban in that country on January 19, 2025, we can observe how they reacted and prepared, and what lessons can be learned from the ongoing situation.

A famous poet once wrote that the waiting is the hardest part. Sometimes the antici-pation, can be wonderful, sometimes it can be terrible. But as we wait, that sound of inevitability, that rush of air in the distance signaling the approach of the sublime, sometimes all we can do is our best to get through the storm.

As we start 2025, we can see multiple storms on the horizon, some closer than others, and communities are handling this differently. One of the worlds we’ve been looking at is deep within cyberspace, and for the netizens of TikTok, the citizens are facing the looming dissolution of their world. Everyone is making plans on what to do next as they pass through that singularity, leaving messages about how to find one another on the other side.

We talked about this a little bit back in June of last year in TikTok Tribulations, but the trouble with tribulations is that they don’t just go away. When faced with an incipient diaspora, what do you do? Is it about the waiting or is it about the recovery? We’ll talk about both in this episode of the Implausipod.

But before we begin, a brief note. After we had started recording this episode in late December 2024, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades wildfires have devastated communities in Los Angeles, California, destroying thousands of homes and displacing many thousands more. Our hearts go out to those affected, our thanks to the firefighters and others involved in the recovery, and we urge you to contribute to a charitable organization that can assist with helping the survivors.

This episode is about loss and displacement, but it is not a commentary on the specific events of the 2025 L. A. wildfires. Thank you.

Welcome to the Implausipod,

a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. In the last weeks of 2024, it was clear that there was a change in the air. The tone of the content made by various posters on TikTok started to change. A lot of people started making posts about other places they could make content on, or for the more casual poster, where everyone was going.

There was more than a few lurkers asking where the party was going to be, it had some real Steve Buscemi with a skateboard saying hello fellow kids energy. It was the collective realization that, absent any acts of deus ex machina, by January 19th, TikTok would go away, with legislation in the United States poised to ban the company from operating within those borders.

Of course, TikTok has a global audience, so various Brits, Australians, Canadians, and people from other countries behaved as if they were unaffected, because largely they were, but the net impact of the American audience and participants realizing that things were about to change shifted the tone of the discourse on the app as a whole.

It became a moment of incipient diaspora. As an observer, I’d like to capture a snapshot of what that moment was like as it was going on. It began shortly before Christmas 2024, as I saw people with more time on their hands, with their kids off from school, or university students home for the holidays, starting to realize that the time left with the app was short.

That there was under a month left to go. Some forward thinking people were starting to make posts asking what was going to happen in the new year. As the holiday festivities wrapped up and those who had vacations slipped into that weird, liminal, timeless zone between Christmas and New Year’s, where everyone is sleepy from gorging on turkey dinner, leftover wine and cheese, and enjoying their holiday gifts.

The trend continued, with more people starting to ask questions, and by the time New Year’s would have rolled around, everybody realized that time was drawing short. People began posting lists of links of their other social medias, other places that they could be found on. This was not unusual in and of itself, as something that happened fairly regular with content creators that derived their income from posting in various places.

Would often try to drive traffic to places that they had monetized. Or were able to capitalize off the audience. For a lot of creators, places like YouTube and Instagram were much better suited for that. So that wasn’t that noteworthy, but by January 7th, this practice had spread to the smaller creators, too.

Those who hadn’t necessarily monetized their content, but wanted to remain in contact with the friends that they had made, and the communities that they had become a part of, while on the app. In early January, this still included places that were the most wide ranging and popular, places like Facebook, Instagram, and X or Twitter.

Though the last one wasn’t quite as prominent, as there was more mentions of Blue Sky, with the migration that had already begun there following the U. S. election in November 2024. However, this was soon to change, as by the end of that week, the U. S. Supreme Court would hear arguments requesting a state of the ban.

Politically minded posters and legal scholars noticed the upcoming case and started commenting on what they thought would happen, and this spread from there to all corners of the app. with many posters expressing concern about what the outcome might be. There was an additional group of commenters who put down their epidemiologist certificates they’d been using for the last few years, dusted off their internet law degree, and stepped outside of the Motel 6 they stayed at the previous night to offer their opinions about what was going on.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. What I’m suggesting is that a lot of people were commenting on the outcome of the case, but many of them were adding noise rather than signal to the conversation. Regardless, by the day the case of TikTok versus Merrick Garland was going to be heard, January 10th, 2025, everybody’s attention was focused on it.

The high degree of uncertainty about what the outcome of that case might be led to two notable things happening. The first was that everybody started making contingency plans, posting about other apps that they were on, places that they could be found, or profiles that they had made, and the second was that they started taking a deeper look at why the ban was taking place at all.

The argument that the app was a national security risk drew some scrutiny, and a lot of people started looking at the lobbying efforts of TikTok’s biggest competitors. Again. Meta, or Facebook. Now, Meta, the company, and the practices that it engages in and the commodification of the audience is something we’ve commented on many times on this podcast before.

We discussed the audience commodity way back in Episode 8 in July of 2023, and we touched on it a little bit more in Episode 15, entitled Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and of course the TikTok Tribulations episode from June of last year. We’ve also commented on this in the blog and the newsletter, so let’s just say it’s an ongoing topic of discussion.

If you’d like to hear more about it, I’d encourage you to check out some of those past shows in the archives on implausopod. com. But back to the topic at hand. With TikTok users realizing that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were one of the larger reasons that the ban was actually going forward, There was a collective pushback against moving to meta owned properties like Facebook, and Instagram especially, as they were seen as the more direct competitor to TikTok.

There was also a pushback against moving to X, as people saw Musk as equally complicit in the ban, due to his recent role with the US government. And this manifested in posters explicitly calling those platforms out and looking for direct alternatives to TikTok that weren’t owned by those companies.

This pushback was exacerbated by an announcement that Meta made on January 7th that they would no longer be using third party fact checkers, and an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast. Again, there’s a lot going on, and it’s all happening roughly contemporaneously. Following the initial arguments in front of the U.

S. Supreme Court, the users became much more active in finding alternative places. They began mobilizing, began contacting their various political representatives, and in their search for alternatives, they came up with an unlikely option. The app known as Zhenghongshu. Little Red Note, an app that was pitched as a Chinese version of TikTok, but was actually more akin to a Chinese version of Pinterest, an app that was actually Chinese state owned, operating in mainland China, and whose discourse took place largely in Mandarin.

Within two days, the TikTok userbase had collectively made this the most popular app in the App Store, and showed that they would rather learn a foreign language and deal with a directly foreign owned app than deal with a meta product again. The pettiness and spite of the American TikTok userbase apparently knows no bounds.

Much like Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan stating, From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee. The TikTok userbase were deciding to go out in epic fashion and take Meta down with them. And this brings us forward to now, January 17th, 2025, two days before the ban.

The diaspora is in full swing, and still nobody has an idea of what’s going on. It leads us to a question. Is the incipient diaspora about the waiting, or is it about the recovery?

While as of the morning of January 17th, the U. S. Supreme Court has still yet to make a statement on their decision, and both U. S. administrations, both outgoing and incoming, have somewhat punted on making a final determination, lending to much uncertainty even two days before the ban, there’s a lot that we can learn from the observations we’ve made about the reactions of the residents of TikTok.

The first observation speaks directly to that uncertainty. There’s a from the creator of the Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Now, William Goldman was referring to Hollywood, and that nobody can really tell when it comes to creatives pursuits, what is going to take off, what would be a hit and what wouldn’t.

But it applies in this situation as well, because January 19th is somewhat of a singularity. No one can tell for certain what’s going to happen after that point. In early to mid January, there were posters that were stating with absolute certainty and confidence about what would happen, but they had no special knowledge about what was going on.

In those times of uncertainty, the best approach is to put on one’s critical thinking hat. Because the truth is that nobody knows, and even the best can only make an informed decision based on past events and can’t say for certain what’s going to happen. However, in an era of uncertainty, there will be those courting clout and influence that seek to provide answers to a questioning audience, even where no answers exist.

In an era of uncertainty, all you can do is make backups, plan for contingencies, establish lines of communication, and try your best to ensure that you can see people on the other side. And that speaks to the second point, that there are identifiable actions that can be done. Even in an era of uncertainty.

The mantra of the three S’s, Save, Share, and Spread, goes a long way in ensuring that those challenges can be met. The first one is that you save your information. You save your peeps. You get a list of everyone you need to keep track of, everyone you need to contact, and that makes it easier to get in touch with them afterward.

You know who the real ones are, and you ensure that those are available. And this is good disaster prep in general. Have that documentation available, and have backup copies too. The second is that users need to share their info. Have that copy a list of places that they can be found and contact cards, and share that widely with the people that they want to be able to track them down.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just has to be a list of contacts on a card. For an older audience that may dimly remember the era before mobile phones, this is the list of places that people can track you down at. You know, if I’m not at the arcade, I’m at the rec center. If I’m not at the rec center, I’m at your mom’s house.

You know where to find me, right? And the third task is to spread that information. If you see a mutual acquaintance that has that contact card, you keep a copy and share it to other acquaintances so it’s more widely available. If there’s multiple copies of something around, then it’s more likely to survive and be able to be passed on.

Users are in the process of developing a network of resilience, and that’s what they need in order to manage the uncertainty that may be happening during this era. This is because the place that they’re looking to land might not even exist yet, or it might be just a app that’s in beta someplace, and not really readily available.

Users might not know where everybody’s going to be, but the idea is you create that network and you become that lighthouse that can guide the other users back to the community when you find one. And the third observation follows from that, and that is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And when we’re talking about third spaces, both real and virtual.

virtual, sometimes it’s best to take something that exists and meets some of your needs than the perfect option that doesn’t exist or may never exist. You can’t let something not being your optimum choice deter you from using what’s available. When it comes to third spaces, both real and virtual, you need to look at what you’re trying to do.

Now, some of this builds on what Ray Oldenburg was talking about in The Great Good Place when he was originally discussing what third places are. When it comes to third spaces, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the good that you’re trying to do is to build community. When you’re trying to build community, you can use the tools that are available to you.

In the late summer of 2024, there was a discussion of third places that was taking place online, both in blogs and on TikTok and other sites, and there was a lot of headcanon or misconceptions about what third places are and what counts. There are statements like a third place can’t be a business, or can’t have people working there, and if there are, then it doesn’t count, and frankly, this is nonsense.

It might not be optimal, but it can still count as a third place. Remember, a third place is just someplace that isn’t work or home, but a place where you can relax and spend some time. Some of the original examples of things like third spaces were things like barbershops or bars or coffee shops or pool halls, and these are all businesses, but they still count.

So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a McDonald’s or a Rotten Ronnie’s, or a mcds or a raunchy, Rons or a Macas. Those can all count as third spaces. You can go there every morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit around with your friends or acquaintances or people from the community or even just people passing through, and that might be the best part as you’re exposed to news from elsewhere, and you can have a discussion.

This is how community is built. It might not be perfect because it’s corporate and policy changes might change how things are going. They take out the seats or the price of coffee changes or whatever. Or this could reshape the environment and not make it as conducive to having that community and discussion.

And this can happen with the change of ownership of smaller businesses as well, whether it’s a barbershop or a pool hall or whatever. But it is something that can be used while community is being built up. This is something we talked about in our earlier episode on recursive public. So if you want to go back and check that in the archives again, I encourage you to have a look.

But this is something that we need to get over, the idea that our virtual spaces have to be perfect from the get go and not recognizing that the previous ones that we had built up over time and acquired characteristics as the users interacted with them. So again, the rule is if you find a place that’s suitable, you work to build that up and you become a lighthouse to your community and bring them in with you.

You start where you are, you use what you have, and you Do what you can. And I’m not just saying this from my own experience as someone who spent 18 months doing field work at Third Spaces looking at how communities form and interact. I mean, I am that person, but I’m not just saying that. But the point being is that a community has to be built, and it takes the effort of the individuals involved in it to come together and build and shape that community into something that works for them.

And then the fourth big takeaway from the observations is that users can make informed decisions and that their choices do matter. This became most obvious as the tide started to shift against using meta and its related products like Instagram and Facebook as An alternative to TikTok. There’s a phrase that goes around that our audience may be aware of, that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That in that system, someone somewhere is getting the short end of the stick. And while that’s true, there’s often an element or undercurrent of resignation, of engineered helplessness. Designed to get somebody asking, if every choice I make is wrong, if there is no ethical choice, then what does my choice matter?

But as I said earlier, that choice is critical because for users and for creators who are consumers of platforms, the choice of which platform to use really matters. On January 7th, when Meta announced that they’d no longer be using third party fact checkers, or an earlier announcement where they said that they’d be using AI agents within the stream so that your audience may no longer be an audience, one begins to wonder why even use those products at all.

A user or creator would have to ask themselves, does continuing to use this product legitimize those practices? This is a question that a number of users and creators started asking themselves when it came to X slash Twitter, and that led to the mass migration to Blue Sky as they finally realized that their presence, especially that of the journalists and academics, legitimized Twitter as a platform.

I say, finally, as it seemed like a patently obvious outcome with the change in ownership in 2022, and I’d be standing here like John McClane shouting out the window yelling, Welcome to the party, pal, but We all come to these things in our time. The point is, is once you make that realization, is you need to take action.

Long term, who’s to say that blue sky was the right choice, but right now it seems to be a safer choice, even though it might just be a big pot of honey that one day will become commodified once the resource has been sufficiently built out and another wave of migration will take place, but Such is the way of life on the internet.

The last comment we’ll make is the idea of the root causes of the ban. As we noted earlier, there was a lot of speculation about what those causes were, but most of it just boils down to two words, and those two words are market power. Market power is the ability of a firm to set the price of its good above the marginal cost.

And in this case, it’s helpful to remember what the product of a social media company is. They sell audiences to advertisers. This includes you, and me, and Everybody else and everything that’s done on those platforms, which is then packaged up and sold off to advertisers looking for those specific demographics.

In order to maintain that market power, you need to be able to manipulate either the supply or the demand. And for social media companies and other high tech firms, that works a little bit differently, because an innovation can come along and disrupt the market that they’ve gathered. For example, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best film camera company in the world, if everybody shifts to digital cameras and nobody’s taking pictures anymore.

So for firms that obtain that monopoly position that allows them to exert market power, they’ll often do a lot to retain that market power and maintain the ability to charge what they want. And I say monopoly, but it’s often usually only one or two firms within any given high tech segment. Think about Microsoft versus Apple on the desktop or.

Android versus iOS on your smartphones. Regardless of whether it’s a monopoly or a duopoly, they don’t want competition. It messes with their vibe. And their vibe is the ability to extract exorbitant profits. Now, I’m drawing this from Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology, published in 2023.

Kurtz is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, and he’s been doing this for a long time. The book is pretty dense and technical, but it’s been written with an eye to a lay audience, and there’s sections of it that are very readable and include some real solutions as well. We reviewed it in a newsletter a few months back, and as I said, it was written in 2023, but what we’re seeing with the TikTok ban reads like a case study.

It’s like chapter and verse of the observations that Mordecai Kurz made in his book about market power and how it’s exerted in high tech firms. This is why something like TikTok, whose technologies presented a threat to the dominance that Meta had on its social media properties, was something that had to be dealt with from a lobbying perspective.

And I say technologies here because it’s an assemblage of technologies. It isn’t just the algorithm, which seems to draw a lot of the interest, but it’s also the app and the associated tools, the way it functions, the way it’s designed to allow users to create. All these things come together to provide a compelling alternative to met as products that are offered.

And it is in much the same way that all these observations come together to give us a picture of what happens during the incipient diaspora, the root causes as well as some of the effects that take place. As we asked earlier, when we look at an incipient diaspora, is it about the waiting or the recovery?

And in this case, What happens next?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. We’re happy to start 2025 with you, and we’ve got some new episodes coming out to you soon. We’ve been preparing them for a while, so I’ve been looking forward to sharing them with you. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod.

com, and as mentioned, you can also find the show archives and 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 is used in the production of this show, though I think there’s a machine learning algorithm in the transcription software that I use.

As stated earlier, we do make allowances for accessibility. 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.

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. Until next time, take care, and have fun.

The California Ideology

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 39 on December 7th, 2024)

What do you think of when you heard the word California? What do you think it’s “ideology” might be? If you work in or on high technology, that California ideology may be shaping the way that you work, the projects that you work on, and the business models that high technology pursues.

What does it all mean? The thinking that is driving the pursuit of certain developments in technology, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, and the rise of accelerationism need to be understood by looking at the underlying philosophies. Join us as we dig deep to find out what’s going on.

Let’s start with a question. What do you think of when you hear the word California? What’s the picture that comes into your head? If you had to hazard a guess, what would something called the California Ideology be? Take a moment and walk in your answer. We’re going to have a look during 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 what is the California Ideology? Let’s see. Well, if you pictured a mix of hippies and high tech, of new wave and new money, you’d be pretty close. But the California ideology is something that didn’t start in the 2020s or even the 2000s.

We have to go back even earlier. It’s something that came about in the 60s and 70s, that mix of new mysticism and new technology that was coming through, funded in part by a whole lot of U. S. Cold War defense spending. Writing in 2001, Mark Tribe described it as, quote, a deadly cocktail of naïve optimism, techno utopianism, and new libertarian politics popularized by Wired magazine, end quote.

And from the tone you can sense that there was a point of criticism there. Because the Californian ideology was being defined by European academics, media theorists, and thinkers, who might not have had a technological edge, but definitely had the upper hand when it came to theory. Mark Tribe wrote that definition in 2001, in the introduction to a book by one of those European thinkers, Russian émigré artist and media theorist Lev Manovich.

A few years earlier, in the mid 90s, Manovich had published a piece on Mark Tribe’s Rhizome mailing list, This is back before blogs were even a thing. We might call it a web ring or a web forum now. In that piece, called On Totalitarian Interactivity, which, in 2024, reads like it was written by a time traveler, in the way it absolutely nails our current situation, Manovich compared the two opposing schools of new media philosophy, the Eastern and the Western, and he was Critical of both, having seen both of them first hand.

For Manovich, the belief in the power and potential of a new technology is drawn from the experiences of the user, to which we wholeheartedly agree. Those beliefs are going to shape a lot of the way things try and get used, which we’ve talked about a lot before here. But those beliefs are also going to shape the types of things that try to be made.

The technologies that engineers will try and work on, that companies will try and bring to market, that governments will try and fund research in, and that users will eventually adopt. Or not. And this is why it all boils back down to ideology. As Manovich said, quote, Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously and despair when it does not work, end quote.

And the solution for the Western artists is often more technology. Manovich goes on further and states, quote, A Western artist sees the internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring the art to the people. Parentheses, while in reality more often than not using it as a super media to promote his or her name, end parenthesis, end quote.

And in 1996, if someone was going to try and describe influencer culture on social media, I think he kind of nailed it. Like I said, time traveler. But both these quotes kind of hint at what the California ideology is. Manovich would go on further to write a book in 2001 called The Language of New Media, which went much more in depth on some of the topics we’re discussing here, and we’ll return to that at a later point in time.

To really understand the Californian ideology, we need to look at where it originally came from. And the best place to do that is to look at the paper that originally identified it. A 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. And buckle up, this one might take a bit.

The Californian Ideology was originally published by the authors in 1995 in a British magazine titled Mute. It was a mix of online and print versions, so I can’t tell exactly which format the original came out in, and there’s been a couple different versions that have been published since. It’s still accessible online, so I’ll put the link in the notes.

You can go to the metamute. org website if you want to see their archives as well. The essay is typical of a lot of those mid 90s works on the internet, as everything’s starting to come on board, and people are really just feeling their way around it and trying to figure it out. Here, the authors describe the internet as hypermedia.

Drawing on very McLuhan esque terminology in order to situate it, but we can see where they’re going with it, and looking back with nearly 30 years of hindsight, it’s clear what they’re talking about. There’s very much a leftist, anti-capitalist view to much of their work, and we can see that in some of the terminology they use, even in the opening paragraph.

Quote Once again, capitalism’s relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labor is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, Play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts.

When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, Existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. End quote.

And they go on further to say that anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what’s going on will be listened to, and this has come about through a quote, “Loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists, and artists from the west coast of the USA”.

And what those people have come up with is the Californian ideology, which is quote, A heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age. The Californian ideology is this blend of hippies and high tech. It’s, as they say, an amalgamation of opposites, combining a freewheeling spirit and an entrepreneurial zeal where everyone will be both hip and rich.

And because it’s optimistic and positive and allows space for everybody, kind of like Clay Shirky said, it allows computer nerds, slackers, capitalists, social activists, academics, futuristic bureaucrats, and opportunistic politicians to say the least. To buy in, to get traction, to be seen as forward thinking if they hop on the early wave of this new technology.

And Barbrook and Cameron characterize this as an extropian cult, one that also sees buy in from various European artists and academics as well. In order to really understand the Californian ideology, Barbrook and Cameron go deep into the rise of the virtual class. who are, according to Arthur Croker and Michael Weinstein in their book Data Trash, the techno intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video game developers, and all the other communications specialists.

This echoes a lot of what Daniel Bell was talking about in 1973 in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, and here, 20 years later, they’re starting to actually see it become reality. And we can see the roots in what all of these authors were talking about and what rose to become the gig economy. As they were discussing this already happening to the virtual class in the 1990s.

It’s important to remember that the gig economy did not first come for the taxi drivers, it came for the tech workers, and then they thought it was good enough for everybody else. But this is in part because the digital class, the virtual class, was incredibly myopic. They were a very privileged part of the labor force, and the benefits that they incurred did not necessarily apply to the population at large.

Barbrook and Cameron note that “the Californian ideology therefore simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.” End quote. And this new technology allowed for the possibilities of the social liberalism that the hippies were looking for.

Along with the economic liberalism, or the libertarianism, really, that the new right was looking for. And what both of them were looking for, in a way to legitimize what they were talking about, is a link back to the founding fathers of the United States democracy. Quoting from Barbrook and Cameron again, “Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics.

They want information technologies to be used to create a new Jeffersonian democracy. Where all individuals would be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” And while that sounds like a great idea, looking back to the roots of American democracy, that’s not without its problems. Because Jeffersonian democracy, that popularized by the American founding father Thomas Jefferson, had very particular ideas of who counted when it came to that democracy.

Quote, their utopian vision of California depends on a willful blindness towards the other, much less positive, features of life on the west coast. Racism, poverty, and environmental degradation. End quote.

What the authors are saying is that there’s a deep history of exploitation that goes hand in hand with the development of that ideology. And that in order to bring it about, you have to hide or ignore some of the realities of that history.

At the core of the Californian ideology, there’s a lot of ambiguity as it’s bridging that gap between the left and the right, but the best way to understand it is probably to realize that it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. It’s a hybrid faith that’s trying to cater to both the new left and the new right at the same time, and realize the utopian visions of both.

And regardless of whether it’s drawn from the left or the right, the Californian ideology is a capitalist ideology. As I said earlier, this was written in the mid 90s in the early days when people were figuring out what the internet would become, but for Barbrook and Cameron, they note that hypermedia, what they call the internet, would be a key component of the next stage of capitalism.

On the new left, the authors see the proponents of the virtual community with people like Howard Rheingold, where the internet could allow for the rise of a high tech gift economy based on the voluntary exchange of information and ideas and knowledge. On the new right, they note how there’s an embracer of the Laissez faire ideology, where tech culture publications like Wired would just uncritically reproduce works by Newt Gingrich, for example, buying into McLuhan esque technological determinism and thinking that the electronic telecommunications will give rise to an electronic marketplace.

For the authors writing in 1995, they weren’t sure what this would lead to. Quote, What is unknown is the social and cultural impact of allowing people to produce and exchange almost unlimited quantities of information on a global scale. End quote. And looking at the state of the internet 30 years later, we see the merger of both of those ideas of an electronic marketplace and a virtual community with the free exchange of ideas.

But that often can be deeply contested and there’s a lot of friction involved. The California ideology promises that each member of the virtual class can become a successful high tech entrepreneur, much like the way that many Americans consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and that these people are quote, “Resourceful entrepreneurs who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks.”

The Californian ideology proposes a world where, quote, “visionary engineers are inventing the tools needed to create a free market within cyberspace, such as encryption, digital money, and verification procedures,” end quote. And if this sounds like it was ripped out of the pitch deck for any recently proposed crypto venture of the last five years, then I want to remind you, again, this is 1995 written by people that were critical of what was happening.

One of the things Barbrook and Cameron note about the Californian ideology is how much it ignores its own history of the government funding that went into the development of the technology, especially on the West Coast, and the rise of the mixed economy there. Much of this is covered by researcher Teng-Hui Hu in their book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, published in 2016, where they note how much of the infrastructure of the internet mirrors the physical surroundings, especially on the West Coast.

And my own take is that these particular visions of cyberspace were removed from the physical realm where it was thought that everything was formless and weightless and that anybody could be anything. We see the creation tales from many elder myths made manifest once again in the mythic visions of cyberspace and the new cyber religion, so it follows.

We talked about these mythic visions back in episode 26 titled Silicon Dreams, so I encourage you to go check that one out if you’d like. What those mythic visions were really good at was inspiring the DIY culture that really developed some of the innovative ideas that were extent within the burgeoning computer scene.

And while this includes technological developments, like the early personal computers that were developed in garages across California, it also includes social elements, like new agers, surfing, skateboarding, LGBTQ, liberation, health food, yoga, pop music, and a whole bunch of else besides. The fact you didn’t necessarily need to be a tech innovator helped get buy in from a lot more groups with respect to the California ideology, and the tech was definitely helped a whole lot by government spending.

And the contribution by all these groups, the community, the DIYers, the popular culture, and the government at large, is something that often gets ignored by the entrepreneurs and other supposed tech visionaries. As their authors state, all technological progress is cumulative. It depends on the results of a collective historical process and must be counted At least in part as a collective achievement.

But this idea of collective achievement goes against much of their narrative. But that narrative draws on many sources of inspiration, and given that we’re dealing with high technology, at least one of those is science fiction. Now, sci fi, whether it’s cyberpunk or otherwise, often has a very libertarian ethos.

The authors note how the utopian visions of the future on the right side of Californian ideology often echoed the predictions of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other sci fi writers, quote, whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, super slick salesmen, genius scientists, Pirate captains and other rugged individualists, end quote.

This is the trail that led back to the Jeffersonian democracy and the Founding Fathers. In the 80s and 90s, that same character would show up, a hacker, a quote, lone individual fighting for survival within the virtual world of information. End quote. And this is where the California of that present connected with the California of the past, the ideology of the gold rush, of the self sufficient individual living out on the frontier.

It never really went away, it just became part and parcel of the underlying ideology of cyberspace, of the internet, of high technology, of California. And that ideology is what tech calls thinking.

What Tech Calls Thinking is a book published in 2020 by Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford. And what he shows us is that despite being 25 years later, we’re still seeing a lot of the same old thinkers show up. Even though Silicon Valley itself has gone through some major changes since 1995, as the only players of note from back then are Microsoft and Apple, as Google was just in its infancy, and Amazon, Facebook, and the rest of social media didn’t exist at all, and the owners of some of those companies are now famous enough to be recognizable by only their last name.

We can call it the Madonna Zone, or Maybe even the Cher Zone, though these guys aren’t about sharing. They have names like Bezos, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and I guess we could add Altman to that list now, too. In Altman’s recent essay, The Intelligence Age, he outlines some of the philosophy driving his quest towards AGI.

But, regardless of the name or the company that they founded or own, not always the same thing, we need to point that out, these tech oligarchs express a strikingly similar ideology. We covered a little bit of that almost a year ago when we looked at the Tecto Optimist Manifesto published by Mark Anderson, formerly of Netscape, but Dow covers it sufficiently well.

In each of the seven chapters of the book, Daub covers one of the ideas that’s central to the philosophy behind Silicon Valley, usually characterized by a single author, perhaps two. These writers and philosophers include some familiar names like Marshall McLuhan, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Girard, Joseph Schumpeter, Cass Phillips.

And if we’ve heard a bunch of those names already, it’s not by accident. Like I said, there’s a lot of consilience and overlap. In the course of my own studies in grad school, I covered a few of these names in depth, though I’ll admit not all, but what I see here overlaps a lot of what I’ve studied elsewhere.

The overarching aim of Daub’s work is to get behind the media’s focus on the tech industry’s thought leaders, the public intellectuals that get written up so often in media pieces, and trace the ideas and where they’ve come from. And the key point of inception for Daub is Stanford. This is the inflection point, or quilting point, where everything comes together.

This makes some sense for Daub. It was where he was located and viewing his surroundings. And there are other universities involved as well. When one thinks of big tech schools, MIT surely comes to mind, too, but for a Californian perspective, we need to look at Stanford. And the university is important, because a lot of tech’s ideas are quote, university adjacent, or quote, academic.

Big Tech seeks the legitimation of their ideas via the proximity to higher learning, as the people involved have often dropped out or not completed their education. Dropping out is the focus of Chapter One, as it allows founders to buy into the pre existing narrative, one that’s pre packaged and ready for them, and makes for easier work for the journalists covering the field.

There’s a visibility of being associated with the college, but only briefly. Don’t overstay your welcome if you want to be treated as a visionary. As Daub points out, What this means is that the education of these founders is often incomplete, missing the context that would come with more advanced study and absent from a general studies survey course.

Usually, I’ll admit to having been blessed with a couple great profs back in the day myself, but dropping out allows one to fit the role of a maverick, able to reject elite institutions and not constrained by conventional thinking. to really allow one to engage in the creative destruction that comes from disrupting the market.

And that Schumpeterian creative destruction features heavily, comprising much of Chapter 6. Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who worked at Harvard starting in the 1930s, and he coined the term as part of his observations of the nature of the business cycle. Much of what he was talking about was the instability of capitalism and the inevitability of socialism, but this was done through the lens of the role of the entrepreneur in the process of innovation.

a bringing something new to market. Quote, The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from new consumer goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. This is from Schumpeter, which Daub quotes at length in his work.

This shaking up is what keeps it afloat. If it wasn’t for the shakeup, the instability in the system would get too much, and it all falls apart. As Daub notes, quote, The concept of creative destruction sublimates the concept of revolution. End quote. Things continually get disrupted, and the only constant seems to be change.

Of course, the title of chapter six is disruption, that underlying ethos that impels so much change within Silicon Valley. Disruption is one of those totalizing terms that gets leveraged by Silicon Valley to suggest that this is the only way that change or innovation can happen. As Daub notes, quote, Disruption plays to our impatience with structures and situations that seem to coast on habit and inertia, and it plays to the press’s excitement about underdogs, rebels, and outsiders.

It’s that personal narrative that we talked about a few minutes ago that allows these multi billionaire founders to consider themselves still the plucky underdog from their favorite movies when they were young. And it allows them to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing that perhaps they’re on the other side.

Because once you’ve got a couple billion dollars behind you, you are the establishment, no matter how you might frame yourself. Narratives about disruption are ultimately narratives about change, but only in a certain constrained direction. As Daub notes, disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness, revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything from revolution.

And that idea that Silicon Valley is introducing something that’s genuinely new really needs to be looked at with a hard, critical eye. Daub notes, one ought to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims of something being totally new and not following the hitherto unestablished rules of business, of politics, of common sense.

The amount of stuff that’s actually new or a radical innovation is incredibly tiny. For an example, one needs to look no further than a single episode of the show Connections, hosted by the British historian of science and technology, James Burke, where he traces the multiple contingencies and coincidences that have led through the path of history to our modern inventions and technologies.

And if we apply this kind of historiographic analysis through a critical To nearly anything that’s claimed to be disruptive, we can see the path through history that led up to that point. Genuine newness is very, very rare. And even the claims that the tech industry has, there’s dog quotes that they’re making fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, can be looked at with a skeptical eye.

Because as Schumpeter was writing 100 years ago, and Marx decades before that, That’s just how capitalisms always work. Disruption is just faster and more far reaching, and as we suggested, it’s totalizing. As Daub quotes, Disruption seems to suggest that the rapids are all there is and can be. And we’ve talked about those rapids before, back in episode 27, The Old Man and the River, back in February.

But the speed is the thing. Quote, Disruption seems to lean in the direction of more capitalism, end quote. And this is not by accident. The disruptions want to go faster, and that theory of move fast and break things has a historical antecedent nearly a hundred years ago. That theory is accelerationism, and we need to talk about it.

Accelerationism is an ideology or set of philosophies that crosses between party lines. It kind of exists on both the left and the right, and what it calls for is the radical acceleration of everything that’s going on. An intensification of the capitalization of everything in order to get to some perceived next level of human growth or achievement.

There’s this idea that we’re not going fast enough, that the checks and balances that we put on society are holding us back from reaching that. And if we just go faster, harder, we’ll have enough technology or AI or whatever that’ll help solve those problems. And we can deal with it in whatever imagined future state where we have the technology.

And it should be noted that there’s left wing groups that believe in this accelerationism as well, who believe if you allow capitalism to put the pedal to the metal, it’ll be It’ll eventually go off the rails and then you can rebuild out of the ashes of whatever’s left. You know, once we get through that cool Mad Max stage and actually get around to rebuilding society.

But as you can tell from my tone, it’s an incredibly bad idea. First off is there’s this assumption that whoever is pushing the pedal to the metal that As their hand on the throttle will be there at the end to reap the rewards, once we get there. You know, that they’ll be among the survivors. And two, is that an incredibly large number of people will get hurt in the process of going faster and harder.

It’s just incredibly irresponsible, and there’s no guarantee that we get there either. It’s an assumption that they make that, hey, if we strap a rocket to our back like Wile E. Coyote, we’ll get to where we’re going faster. But it’s not necessarily borne out. It’s all in theory. We talked about it on one of our episodes of the podcast about a year ago, episode 17, called Not a Techno Optimist.

So, my apologies for recovering some old ground, but it’s worth mentioning again. Go check it out in the archives if you’d like. There’s more to talk about when it comes to accelerationism, but we’re going to have to get into that in a few episodes from now. The main thing is this idea of being a disruptor.

It isn’t a thing of science fiction, which inspires so much of Silicon Valley. It’s Fantasy. Daub also talks about the continued role of Ayn Rand and her influence on the libertarian elements that are so prevalent in technology. I think the best quote summarizing Ayn Rand can be attributed to John Rogers.

Quote, there are two novels that can transform a bookish 14 year kid’s life. The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel.

The other is a book about orcs. End quote. Of course, Maybe not skipping that English lit class in the college you dropped out of would help give a little context for understanding Rand. However, we’re not here to chase that particular rabbit. The big takeaway from Dobb’s work is a look at the tech industry’s philosophical roots and its focus on money.

As he notes, The tech industry we know today is what happens when certain received notions meet with a massive amount of cash with nowhere else to go. End quote. Absent an idea of what to do with all that money, tech looked around for legitimation. And, as Daub notes, quote, the ideas that tech call thinking were developed and refined in the making of money, end quote.

This is accomplished via a blend of state intervention and capitalist entrepreneurship that leverages DIY culture, relying on it for essential contributions by innovators and early adopters, to be sure. And much of tech has resulted in the development of, quote, mass markets for private companies to sell existing information commodities, end quote, things like films and music and television.

Stuff that we would normally call art has been transformed by the shift from representation to manipulation that occurs within the digital realm, according to Manovich. Further, he notes that Western artists appear to break down hierarchies as part of the process of building a personal brand for themselves, and coming out of the influencer decade of the 20 teens where catchphrases like the brand is you get tossed around, this seems self evident.

It’s a commodification of the self. But we’ll have to wait for a later date to do a deeper dive into this process of becoming which drives influencer culture. We’ll let you know when that episode is ready to go.

By contrast, for Manovich, the Eastern artists, quote, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, it will always break down. It will never work as it is supposed to.

For the outside observer, we can see how this makes sense, where the failures of one technology provide the opportunity for the sale of another technology to solve the problems of the first one. And one thing tech likes is another sale, because tech is ultimately a capitalist enterprise.

And it is this focus on capitalism which underlies the Californian ideology as a whole. The connection point between Daub and the work 25 years previous is that those ideas never went away. The tech industry in 2020 is pretty much still the same industry it was that Barbrook and Cameron identified back then.

Witness that quote about the crypto pitch deck we made earlier. The big difference is that there is more of it, the increased focus on the money. We’re just later along in the late stage capitalism. We’re not so far along that we’ve reached the sci fi aspirations driving some of them forward, as mentioned earlier, but those aspirations exist in both works too.

Barbrook and Cameron note that there is a drive for the emergence of the post human that we can see in N. Katherine Hayle’s work, as well as various cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and others. Post humanism is, after all, a quote, biotechnological manifestation of the social privileges of the virtual class, end quote.

This is why there is such a strong connection to the accelerationists mentioned earlier. The remaining virtual class are aging and looking to live longer. There is a fear of death motivating much of the virtual class, characterizing them as extropian, that sect of transhumanists seeking to extend their lifespans to the extent that they may one day live indefinitely.

They seek to advance technology faster, as that dark specter inexorably catches up with them. The third point in common between what Tech calls thinking and the Californian ideology, two works separated by 25 years, a continent, and an ocean, is the critique of the underlying ideology of the virtual class itself.

There’s other names for it floating around, of course, calling them Tech Bros, or TESCREAL, or whatever, but like Manovich pointed out earlier, it’s all of the same thread of Western critiques of Tech. And seeing as we mentioned Lev Manovich, let’s return to a bit of what he had to say on totalitarian interactivity.

There, from his position as a quote, post communist subject, he saw the internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era where everybody spies on everybody else, or as a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up.

As in the moment, we are witness to a mass migration from Twitter to BlueSky, with some people deleting their posts and accounts, and others not, just fleeing, as statements ring poignantly true. We are witnessing the migration of much of the virtual class in real time, as platforms shift and become unstable, and new platforms are found.

There’s a degree of insulation that comes with this, as if moving platforms is somehow enough of an action to take. There’s a blending of beliefs going on here. As Barbrook and Cameron note, quote, Many members of the virtual class want to be seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the new right, end quote, a term that describes the newt gingrich era republicans in the U. S. in the mid 1990s.

That belief and enthusiasm affords them the opportunities to continue living much as they had previously. Not all internet users are so lucky. There are clear divides. Redlining by telephoning companies creates a very real gap in accessibility to the information superhighway.

As this was written around the same time as the U. S. Department of Commerce was warning of the digital divide in 1995, which would soon be picked up and championed as a term elsewhere by those advocating for more widespread internet adoption. We can see why.

The scholar Teng-hui Hu traces this very real phenomenon of the physical geography’s effect in shaping the rather ephemeral nature of cyberspace in their book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 2015.

For those members outside the virtual class, the prospects are much more bleak. Quoting from Barbrook and Cameron, The deprived only participate in the information age by providing cheap, non unionized labor for the unhealthy factories of the Silicon Valley chip factories. End quote. Fifteen years later, this could still describe Foxconn making iPhones for Apple, or the warehouses at Amazon, or drivers for Uber.

The trend toward the gigged economy had a long arc that started well before the smartphone era. The digital artisans were, quote, living within a contract culture and, quote, gigged long before others, well paid in a manner that decentralized collective action. To quote the authors again, Although they enjoy cultural freedoms won by the hippies, most of them, that is the virtual class, are no longer actively involved in the struggle to build ecotopia.

End quote. The true believers of the new left involved in the building of cyberculture took their stock options and left the suburbs behind. This cybernetic libertarianism was very much in the whatever I’ve got mine mindset, never imagined that one day those cyber leopards might eat their faces. And this follows from the ideals of the Jeffersonian democracy that drives the Californian ideology.

In a section titled, Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves, Barbrook and Cameron note that the fear of the rebellious underclass has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian ideology, its belief in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. However, as they note, those technologies of freedom are turning into machines of dominance.

The crux of the Californian ideology is in Barbrook and Cameron’s description of the racial divide in California. “If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of artificial intelligence reveals this desire for the golem. A strong and loyal slave whose skin is the color of earth and whose innards are made of sand.”

As we discussed back in episode 17, there is a utopian vision here, and Barbrook and Cameron note how these techno utopians, quote, imagine that it is possible to obtain slave like labor from inanimate machines. However, slave labor cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved, end quote. And this can be seen in very recent history, too.

Anyone wondering about the results of the voting for Proposition 6 in California during the recent national election in the United States on November 2024, for any future listeners, will find their answer here.

Proposition 6 was a proposed amendment to California’s constitution that would bar slavery in any form and repeal involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

In it, Californians voted 53. 3 percent against.

The Californian ideology has a dark history, one that still has a hand in shaping the future.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. I’m your host Dr. Implausible. Join us for the next few episodes as we continue our journey into exploring what the Californian ideology has left us. As we look into those Californian roads and car culture. And then what that utopic vision of the world would look like as we delve into the world model that we hinted at when we talked about Sam Altman’s intelligence age essay.

I hope we can explore these before the end of 2024 and then we’ll see what 2025 has in store.

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. There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod dot com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.

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Until next time, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography

Altman, S. (2024, September 23). The Intelligence Age. https://ia.samaltman.com/

Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1995). The Californian Ideology. Mute, 1(3). http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/

Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. Basic Books.

Daub, A. (2020). What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1 edition). University Of Chicago Press.

Hu, T.-H. (2016). A Prehistory of the Cloud (Illustrated edition). The MIT Press.

Manovich, L. (1996). On Totalitarian Interactivity. https://www.manovich.net

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

Schumpeter, J. A. (1962). Capitalism, socialism and democracy (First Harper Torchbook ed). Harper & Row.

Tribe, M. (2001) “Introduction” in Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT Press.