Bookshelf – The Implausi.blog

Networks of Resilience

This is part 1 of our series on Networks of Resilience. See the rest at this link.

Recent events have highlighted the need for community and connection, and the increased importance of building and maintaining that connection during benign times in order for it to be there during times of distress and strife.

Or, failing to do that, scrambling to get it done as the storm builds on the horizon.

And as that storm is within sight, let’s turn away from the sci-fi bookshelves for a moment and look at the titles that are focused on community and practice and how to engage with each other.

Together (Sennett, 2012)

I both The Craftsman (2008) and this as part of the work I did researching makerspaces for the PhD, and Sennett’s sociological work left an impact on how we view cooperation. This is in both the overt theme of the book, about how cooperation – goal-directed, meaningful cooperation – is a skill that can be nurtured and grown, but also from the sense that cooperation is not just an intellectual exercise, nor a discursive one, but one that can arise from physical presence, proximity, and labour, and it is through these shared actions that we build community together.

Lifehouse (Greenfield, 2024)

During the course of 2022 and 2023, the author would post elements of his work that would come to be collected in this volume, and this is one that is clearly directed towards the challenges at hand. The focus here is on learning from community practices and efforts from the 20th century, and seeing how systems of mutual aid and care were able to sustain small local groups during times of turmoil and external threat.

The World Beyond Your Head (Crawford, 2015)

Much like the Sennett book above, I used one of Crawford’s earlier works, Shop Craft as Soulcraft (2010) in my academic career, and I found much overlap – and confirmation – with Sennett as well. Here we have something different – about how to engage with focus and mindfulness on the tasks we have to deal with. Despite the focus on the individual, it teams well with the other works here, as the frame of self-mastery (which can often flip into solipsism or the failings of accelerationism) here describes someone who can engage with others with confidence and conviction.

The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Bookchin, 2022)

I picked this up after hearing about it on an episode of the Philosophize This! Podcast (recommended, by the way) and I found it interesting. Bookchin centers humanity within the world – we are not apart from it – and in order to live with it and each other we need to approach the problems that we face from a communal perspective. Again – the key here, the thing that sets it with the other books, is our need to work together.

In order to build a resilient network, more is required than just books, however. There are some practical tools that can assist in developing local resilience that enhances the community, that helps build and maintain the structure. We’ll look at a few simple steps over the next few posts, and continue building our network into the future.

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…

Cellphone, (2004), Paul Levinson

Currently on the reading pile, for some upcoming work, and this one is kinda interesting, especially coming at it in (early) 2024.

Because this book was published in 2004, twenty years ago, and the entire history of the smartphone hadn’t even happened yet.

This is a history of the cellphone, the ubiquitous pocket device, as it appeared in the era of Y2K and The Matrix movies. Of Nokia bricks, and flip phones and Razrs and maybe even a Blackberry or 3.

And it’s fascinating because of it.

I can’t go into too much detail about the current project, but the short version is that it’s about what changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and how our culture shifted.

But in order to figure that out, we need to know what it was like in the before times. And here Paul Levinson’s book does a wonderful job.

The most interesting part (for me) is Chapter 11, Future Calls, the speculative chapter about where the cellphone might be headed. But even in doing so, he shows how much of the current use of the phone showed up as early as 19`14, in various texts and comics, and it was only through some historical accidents that we didn’t get videophone development until much later. The picturephone has been floating around as an idea for nearly 100 years, even though now we take it for granted.

Much of the reason for the lack of development was the lack of interest: people couldn’t imagine them using it, and feared being seen on camera. It took half a century of television as passive entertainment, and the audience being accustomed to talking naturally on the phone to being comfortable with talking “face-to-face” as well.

So, I think this is a keeper, and I might have to track down a personal copy. This one was a serendipitous find at the local public library, and I grabbed a few others I’ll need to talk about soon too.

Levinson, P. (2004). Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything! New York, N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan.

The Audience Commodity, an overview

From posts made to Mastodon account as of 2023-07-04
https://mastodon.online/@drimplausible

With looming introduction of Threads and the subsequent integration with the fediverse I thought a quick summary of a key piece of economics literature is in order. Likely too late, but perhaps not.

Basically, what is the Facebook or Meta business model?

The production of the audience commodity

(This is from 1977, by Dallas W. Smythe, so some of it may seem obvious in retrospect. Please read it through. Also I’m posting as I go, so it might take a bit).

So what is the question Smythe is trying to answer when it comes to the audience commodity? Basically, “what economic functions for capital do mass communications systems serve?” (And Google and Facebook both fit in with the “mass” in mass communications here).

In order to figure out this function, you need to figure out what the commodity they produce actually is. You might think you know the whole “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” line. This is part of that.

Now if you’re asked “what does media produce” you might answer something like content or information or messages or entertainment.

This is understandable. This is what it looks like they do. You’re forgiven if you thought that’s how it worked. This is the trad, orthodox, “idealist” POV. This is held by everyone from Galbraith to Marx to Veblen to McLuhan

So there’s a lot of press on this idea. Smythe’s argument is that it misses the point.

4/ So if the trad, orthodox, normal economics view of mass communication gets it wrong, what do they produce? What is the commodity form of advertising sponsored (mass)communications under late capitalism ?

Audiences and readerships.

The audience commodity.

Here the work, the labour power of the workers is resold to the advertisers. This is nominally the “consciousness industry”.

Remember: TV stations and walled platforms on the internet are factories that produce audiences for advertisers

So that’s a lot of the overarching stuff. let’s get into the specifics. Smythe has 8 main points. We’ll cover these quickly then move on to how it connects to Facebook and the fediverse

Q1) What do the advertisers buy with their money?
A) The services of audiences in predictable numbers.

It’s a service economy and we’re the ones providing the service.

(We’re also the ones being served up. Ironic!)

The commodity is the collective.

Q2) How do advertisers know they’re getting what they paid for?
A) Various ratings agencies, bitd, and the analysis which has largely moved in-house for streaming and internet platforms. This would be the Nielsen’s and a whole host of stuff under the umbrella of “market research”.

Q3): What institutions produce the commodity that advertisers want?
A) Principally, and traditionally, it’s the owners of TV and radio stations, and newspaper and magazine publishers. You can add most web platforms to this nowadays. Of course, there’s a host of secondary producers, and industries that provide content for the principal market, obviously, but this is the main outlet.

Q4) what is the nature of content in economic terms under late capitalism ?
A) it’s an inducement. It’s the “free lunch” that attracts the audience in the door, and encourages them to stay.

This speaks nothing to cost, “quality”, or format. In fact, the cheaper this can be procured, the better. A free lunch isn’t free, obvs, but someone is providing the bread and meat.

If the users bring their own, even better.

Q5): “What is the nature of the service performed for the advertiser by members of the purchased audiences?
A): The audience commodity is “a non-durable producer’s good bought and used in the marketing of the advertiser’s product”. The work the audience does is to learn to buy and consume various brands of products, and spend their income accordingly. If they can develop brand loyalty while doing this, even better

(Almost done, honest.)

Q6) How does the management of demand relate to the notion of “free” or “leisure” time under the labour theory of value?
A) The goal under monopoly capitalism is for all non-sleeping time to be work time. (For most of the population. I’ll let you do the math on the missing percentage yourself). Free time and leisure time are turned into work time. (And in the 21st century even work time can do double duty.)

(Note: Smythe goes on for 4 pages in Q6, above. It’s his key point and there’s a lot to unpack.)

Q7): Does the audience commodity perform an essential #economic function?
A) it’s complicated. As noted above, orthodox theories didn’t really go into this, and mass media and brands were before Marx ‘s time, so he didn’t say much about them either.

Smythe turns to the Grundrisse to tease out an answer: “production produces consumption” (p.91-2; that whole paragraph).

So, yes: essential.

Q8) Why have Marxist economists been indifferent to the role of advertising and focused on content instead?
A) Shiny things, obviously. Remember, this is being published in 1977, a decade before authors like Noam Chomsky would publish Manufacturing Consent.

Smythe published two versions of this, the peer-reviewed article I’ve been using, and again in 1981 in Dependency Road. Again, foundational. Critical for understanding what’s going on.

What does it mean for right now?

So just to link the above thread with some current events in social media:

Both Meta and Alphabet are well entrenched as advertising companies at this point. No surprises.

Also, it’s reasonably well known what’s going on, with the auction service being detailed in this explainer from @themarkup :
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/23/how-your-attention-is-auctioned-off-to-advertisers

And follow the link in their article to the breakdown of market segmentation by Microsoft in their Xandr platform.

(Part 2 coming tomorrow!)

Foundational Books

What are the books that shape you?
…that influence your beliefs>
…that change your mind?
…that transform you into the person you are today?

I was looking for something on the bookshelf the other day and came across a book that I hadn’t looked at in quite some time (Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, fwiw), and saw the notes and underlining, clearly made with intent, by some other me decades ago.

So I dug deeper into the bookshelf, and came up with a list:

John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion
John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, Creativity
G.M. Peter Swann, Common Innovation
Douglass Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Raymond Williams, On Television

Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor
Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics
Richard Lanham, Economics of Attention
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Eric Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming

Now, a few words. This is a foundational list. But there are several things that it’s not, so we’ll define it by that. It’s not a top ten, and it’s not in any order, save for as they came to mind. (This may reveal the associations and linkages in my mind, but no more). And looking at it, it is necessarily incomplete; it’s a start.

They may not be the most notable or celebrated work by some of these authors (though in some cases they are), but they are the ones I bought, read, experienced, and retained, and through all of them I can find echoes of my current beliefs, attitudes and outlooks, so in echo of Borges’ Quixote, I’ll note them down so the path can be retraced.

I think a book a week is a good pace for a re-read. Let’s dive into the foundations of the bookshelf…