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Additive “Manufacturing”

When it comes to content, thinking in terms of building up from multiple small things.

Tweets/Toots/SMS -> Blog Post -> "Essay" - "Book" Vines/Shorts/TikToks/Reels -> YouTube -> Video Essay -> "Documentary Film" Riff -> Chorus -> Song -> Album

And how the skills developed in building the small things can accumulate into something much bigger, over time, or lead to building something more as well.

This can work in other realms too:

Take a step, jog around the block, run a mile, run a marathon, hike up a mountain.

Build a box, build a chair, build a garage, build a house.

Sometimes you’ll aim for the big thing at the outset. Often this can be due to need: I need a house, f’rex, preferably sooner rather than later, but more likely you’ll be making smaller steps along the way. Not everyone writes a full-length novel or films a feature length documentary on their first time out.*

There’s usually some baby steps involved.

There is a danger though, in following the reductive path.

Because at the end of the day, 1000 tweets*** is not the same as a novel, nor is 1000 15-second Tiktoks a feature film. The aggregate is not the same as the monolith, even though they are the same in “weight”. Sandstone is not granite, at the end of the day. And yet…

…and yet, the aggregate can be something more, something unique, something different. Witness the stitched fan film recreations of Raiders of the Lost Ark (Strompolos, 1989[2015]), The Princess Bride (Reitman, 2020), or the various Star Wars fan films. Each of these recreations brings something new to the material, an energy, an earnestness, an authenticity.

And, regardless of the outcome, it is in the making, the building – piece by piece – of the work, layer by layer through Additive Manufacturing, that the skills develop, and the project takes shape.

This “manufacturing” then, is really “content creation” writ large. The ‘E’ in the EFP. Short for Extruded (Mass Content) Production**. The material that drives the platforms that are Architects of our Attention. The production has been outsourced, or offloaded at least, to the millions of us engaged in making it. Each tiny element can be done quickly, or it can take as much time, energy, and resources that one wishes to devote to it.

The trick, I suspect, is knowing when each of those pieces are done. For now, this one will do…

Footnotes & References

*: and those that do often have some significant help, assistance, or a leg up. Don’t let that stop you from being amazing though.

**: EFP, Extruded Fantasy Product. A catch-all for those Fantasy series that seem to proliferate across bookshelves where the authors magically produce another doorstop on a regular, perhaps annual, basis. (see also: Creativity, and Sanderson, Brandon.

***: or Toots, or Xs, or whatever the microblog equivalent is at the time you read this. July 2023 is/was weird.

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!)

Grimdark, Tone, (and Disney)

What’s happening to the Star Wars universe? I mean, yes, there are problems, and some of these are coming to the forefront, where the demand for increased throughput of the EFP (ie “content”) through the pipes of consumption exposes any flaws or imperfections in the infrastructure, and… to absolutely bury the metaphor… eventually the system buckles under the pressure and cracks…

Spewing stuff everywhere in full Technicolor with Dolby sound… ?

Anyhoo, this is an article on tone, mostly. Shades of grey and brown, apparently. Disney isn’t using the full color palette is what I’m getting at. But we’re starting at the end of the discussion, with burst pipes and a flooded basement. How did we get here?

It started with a re-watch of SW9:RotS on the streams a little while back. I was half interested, and hardly paying attention when the scene in the Emperor’s rejuvenation chamber came up… and it struck me.

The Grimdark.

The biomechanical rejuvenation chambers, the archaeotech, the fractured remains, the body horror.

These are not elements of a Star Wars movie.

They come from… elsewhere.

And I think this speaks to the recent disconnect [between the fans and the franchise].

As we’ve argued elsewhere on the Grimdark* , it is an essential feature of the Warhammer 40K universe.

(*check out podcast episode #… Whoops. Did I post that? One moment…)

And as we’ve argued at the outset of the Appendix W series, W40K was a hodge-podge of every science fiction trope from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, put in a blender, and with the mix pushed through the speakers turned up to 11. And early Star Wars (the original trilogy, plus some of the EU stuff available at the time, like the ongoing Marvel comic series and early novelizations) was definitely thrown in the blender like everything else.

Vader as an armored force-using, laser sword wielding transhuman cyborg super-soldier definitely counts as a proto-40K influence.

Of course, in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there’s a couple thousand like him working for the Imperium of man alone. In W40K, the dial that goes up to 11 increases exponentially. Darth Vader would be in for a very tough fight.

The other big influence that makes the Grimdark grim and/or dark is that fallen sense of technology. The “dying earth” subgenre of sci-fi, where the 20th century may be a distant memory. Often indistinguishable from fantasy, and drawing mostly from a couple strong influences like well, Vance’s Dying Earth and the Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer series**. And Herbert’s Dune, after a fashion. All of these are in the grimdark blender too.

** Did we post that up in the Appendix W either? No? Well then, shortly.

And while there is a pretty direct line between Dune and SW4:ANH, the grim dark filter hadn’t been built yet. So the appearance of the Grimdark in the SW universe in 2019 signified a rather significant shift in tone. And it’s appeared in the Mando-verse as well over on Disney+, notably in Season 3, with the Armorer and the mass jet pack fight.

Much like the emperor’s rejuvenation chamber in SW9:RotS, the overlap of the grimdark becomes readily apparent in Mando S3. Part of this is just the material there’s only so many ways to portray a massed group of faceless space knights, and the shift in focal point characters in SW from “space monk with laser sword” to “power armor space knight” will by necessity lead in certain ways. There’s just certain kinds of stories you can tell in that framework, and GW has managed to deliver an exterminatus to the concept with over 100 novels(?) in the 40K universe.

But I digress: when we see the jetpack assault by the massed Mandalorian army in S3E8, there has been no better cinematic visualization of an Adeptus Astartes assault company incursion. And Paz’s stand with the minigun (with it’s echoes of both Jesse “the Body” Ventura’s Blain in Predator (1987) and Jiang Wen’s Baze Malbus in the aforementioned Rogue One (2016)) could substitute for 35 years of a Terminator Astartes armed with an Assault Cannon facing off against innumerable foes. And that last image provides us a rather helpful clue.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of inception, when the SW universe made the Grimdark turn. While there are elements of it throughout the sequel trilogy, Rogue One (2016) feels like a reasonable candidate. It too marked a dramatic shift in visuals and tone, standing apart from the “mainline” Star Wars films the way that it does, and with the generally positive fan and critical reception it enjoyed as well. Rogue One was still recognizably Star Wars, though darker in tone and “more mature”, appealing to an older audience that had fond memories of the original (and perhaps even the prequel) trilogies, and appreciated the mature take. In a post-AGoT era for genre on the big screen, the expectations of a more mature audience were met by Rogue One‘s screen presence.

But this more mature audience isn’t necessarily the audience that the sequel trilogy was needing to court. Star Wars seems to be pointed at a mainline audience of “the eternal 12 year old”***, an archetypical audience that is seduced by tales of the hero’s journey and see themselves within it, as long as they have the merch to go with. And Disney loves getting new fans for their franchises.

***: I could be wrong; they could be as young as eight.

And this is where the tone comes back into the picture. Because the Grimdark is defined as a universe where everything sucks and there are no good guys. Star Wars is more famously a universe with a New Hope.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for darker tales within the Star Wars universe; there most definitely is. The challenge comes in crossing the streams, mixing the Duff with the Duff Dark and Duff Light. Bringing the grimdark aesthetic over from a one-off that was successful for a host of reasons (of which the aesthetic was only a small part) into the mainline film series risks turning off the fans that the mainline audience are geared toward, the ETYO that Disney craves. Star Wars is an umbrella brand, and not all components that contribute to the franchise need to be geared to every part. They recognize this with the merch (I’m sure there is some overlap between Grogu squishmallows, SW Lego builders, and Mando cosplayers, but y’know, different strokes rule the world).

So is this a problem? No, not really, not in the sense that we’re contributing to the “Problemitization of Everything”. And perhaps not in the sense of it’s connection to other ongoing issues. Just an observation, drawn from the images on screen, and the connections and linkages that exist. It’s part of a trend, perhaps, one that fits with some other things that are going on.

The shift in tone, may be a larger problem, long-term, for a multi-billion dollar corporation that is struggling with producing sustainable results while keeping the franchise afloat. But that’s a them problem, and possibly unrelated to this shift in tone.

But it might be, too. I feel like this bears looking out for over the coming years.

Credits:

Where is the line? AKA “Cuddlefication of Brutality”

Where is the line…
… when the joke stops being funny?
… between cosplay and copaganda?
… between parody and promotion?
… between representation and reinforcement?
… where the successive waves of Disneyization of the Star Wars universe have blurred the lines so much that we forgot what the original represents.
That those are indeed “the baddies”.
Because if we look at the subtext here, or perhaps even the literal text, it isn’t that subtle.

Then what we have here is objectively terrible:

A foot soldier of an authoritarian and fascist empire uses a war trophy taken as spoils following the extermination of a minority population and celebrates with the unboxing of a new weapon of war.

Did the above capture the essence of it?

Ah, it’s funny, it’s goofy, it’s relatable.
And through this cuddlefication of brutality*, the line continues to blur.

When we look back, can we tell when the line has been crossed? Or is that only something we can tell in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight?
(Do we know we’ve reached the Rubicon, or are we informed after the fact?)

Where we can say this, this is the point where we became accommodating, where we become comfortable with fascism, with the fun-loving stormtroopers and their goofy antics, where the clear delineations of the original films become blurred and muddied, cuddly and coddled.

So if this is the line, when do we step back? Can we back away? Are we already too late?

(*Perhaps I’m being dramatic? Maybe, but I don’t think so.)

The genesis for this was a cutesy stormtrooper “unboxing” video that circulated on social media, most notably the ‘Tube and the ‘Gram, with the cover that I embedded above. (There’s other similar videos up there as well.)

If you need to see the originals, you can find them on the following YouTube channel:

I had thought about directly embedding them, but decided not to based on the subject matter.

It’s possible to recognize that a lot of skill, talent, and resources went in to the production of the videos on that channel. We’re trying to address the broader impact of the spread of this content, and the underlying ideology that it supports.

This also was (one of) the reasons underlying the Not Feeling the Fourth post from a few weeks back. More on the other reason will be coming soon.

Invent your own life’s meaning

Bill Waterston is the GOAT, of course, a cartoonist whose impact reached out through the newsprint and embedded itself into the zeitgeist, across all levels of society. He achieved fantastic levels of success for his syndicated Calvin and Hobbes strip.

…and then he walked away.

But this was not without precedent. Prior to starting his strip, he had been fired as an editorial cartoonist, and had to re-invent himself as an artist practicing his craft. He took a graphic design job, worked through it while developing his strip and left it once he found where purchase with his new career.

Years later, giving a commencement speech at a college, he imparted some words of wisdom, and they’ve stuck with me over the last 10 years since I first encountered them:

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed… and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Bill Watterson

I tacked this up on the wall behind the monitor at the tiny cubicle the university provided the grad students when I started my PhD research. I kept it as the desktop on the same computer too, just to remind me of the goal, that the reason I was there was to do something different, to engender a change in the processes of life that had left me aimless prior to embarking on that journey.

(It had happened at least twice before, but more on those stories at some future date. Bientot!)

I had encountered this quote in the panels draw by the artist Gav at their zenpencils blog in 2013. I probably found it via a link on Slate or Twitter or some such, as the post gained some traction. The panels in question are here:

All credit to the artist. You can follow the link back to the full comic and the story behind it.

It’s remains one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve encountered in the last decade or so, and it’s stuck with me. And so, in case you haven’t heard it, or needed the reminder, I’m passing it on to you.

You can invent your own life’s meaning. It is allowed.