The Nostalgia Curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dial-up Pastorale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TikTok Tribulations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

City of Heroes: Homecoming

Implausipod Episode 16 – Spreadable Media

The Implausi.blog Newsletter

Baked In: Social Media and Tech Determinism

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0032 on May 26th, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14896508-e0032-baked-in-social-media-and-tech-determinism

How much of your experience online is dictated by the environment you’re
in, and how it was constructed?  What is you rebuild Twitter, and it
still ends up being toxic?  Did you fail, or succeed without knowing it?

These are the kinds of questions that arise when we look at technology from a
deterministic point of view: that technology is the driver of cultural and social change and growth.  And while this ideology has its adherents, many of the assumptions about technology, and tech determinism are already Baked In to the way we deal with tech in the world.

What if you rebuilt Twitter from the ground up, and it ends up being as toxic as the old one? Did you do something wrong, or were you just wildly successful? That’s the question we’re trying to address in this week’s episode, but perhaps we need to approach this from a different angle. So let me ask you, when you visit a website online, or use an app on your phone.

How does it make you feel? Do you feel happy? Amused? Upset? Angry? Enraged? And did it always feel that way? Did it used to feel good and then perhaps it took a turn for the worse? It became a little bit more negative? If it doesn’t make you feel good, why do you keep going back? Or perhaps you don’t, perhaps you move on to someplace new, and for the first little while it’s cool, it feels a lot like the old place used to be, but you know, before things changed, before other people came along, or before the conversation took a turn for the worse.

But the question is: How long before this place starts going downhill too, before the same old tired arguments and flame wars that seem to follow you around through the years and decades keep catching up to you? I mean, maybe it’s you, there’s always a chance, but let’s take a moment and assume we’re not slipping into solipsism here, as this seems to be a much more widely reported experience, and ask ourselves if maybe, just maybe, that negativity that we experience on the internet is something endemic.

It’s part of the culture, it’s baked in.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to address the question of how much of your experience online is shaped by the environment you’re in and how it is constructed.

Because there is no such thing as a natural online environment, all of these things are constructed at some point, but it’s a question of what they’re constructed for. We know that social media spaces can often be constructed for engagement, which is why it lends itself to rage farming and trolling. But how far back does it go?

We know we see commonalities in everything from Facebook and Twitter, to YouTube comment sections, to web forums, to Usenet, to email. Are these commonalities that we see related to the technology? Is there an element of what’s called technological determinism at play? Or are the commonalities that we see just related to the way that humans communicate, especially in an asynchronous environment like we see online?

Hmm. Or perhaps it’s something cultural. It’s part of the practice of using these tools online. And as such, it gets shared and handed down, moves from platform to platform to platform, which is what we seem to see. Now it could be a combination of all of these things, and in order to tease that out, we’re going to have to take a look at these various platforms.

So I’ll start with the one that was the genesis for this question for me. Mastodon, which is part of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon in many ways replicates the functionality of Twitter along with the look and feel with toots replicating the tweets, the short microblog posts that may include links or hashtags, an image or short video clips.

And depending on the client you’re using to access it, you’d hardly notice the difference. It’s this similarity that led me to the question that started off the show. What if you rebuild Twitter and it still ended up being toxic? So in order to explore this question, we’re going to take a quick survey of the field and look at the problems that can be seen in a lot of different social media platforms.

Then we’ll go into more depth on the potential causes that we mentioned, including the technology, the nature of communication online, as well as Cultural factors, and then conclude by seeing if there might be a more hopeful or optimistic way that we can approach this and our online interactions.

So when we look at these online platforms, you might want to see how they’re all just a little bit broken while we’re overwhelmingly a positive podcast here, and we try and accentuate the positive elements that exist in our society. I’ll admit. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard, and when we start looking at online platforms, we can see that much like families, each dysfunctional one is dysfunctional in its own ways.

However, that being said, we might be able to tease out a few trends by the end of this. Our baseline for all of this is, of course, going to be Twitter. Whether you call it X or Twitter, it’s been one of the most studied of the social media platforms, and that gives us a wealth of data. And it also allows us to make a clear distinction by calling it Twitter prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk and But regardless of whether we look at Twitter or X, the results aren’t great.

In a recent study of the University of Toronto by Victoria Olemburgo De Mello, Felix Cheung, and Michael Inzlicht, the authors find that there’s no positive effects on user well being by engaging with X. Even the occasionally touted greater sense of belonging by participating in the platform didn’t lead to any long-lasting effects.

Instead, what they found was an immediate drop in positive emotions, so things like joy and happiness are right out the window, and there was an increase in outrage, political polarization, and boredom. So using X, even if you’re a little bit bored, is probably a net negative. And this is just from a recent study.

It isn’t counting the systemic changes that have taken place on the platform since the acquisition by Elon Musk, and the platforming of hate speech, and the reduction of moderator tools, the increasing attack vectors by removing the ability to block harassers, and all the other changes that have taken place as well, including creators just upright and leaving the platform.

But that’s the state of things right now. The question is, Did Twitter always suck? And the answer is kind of yeah. The University of Toronto study we mentioned was collecting data back in 2021 prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk, and so if things have gone downhill since then for the reported outrage and lack of joy, then I can’t really imagine what the place is like now.

But enough about the service formerly known as Twitter. When looking at some of its competitors, what are their downsides? Are they as toxic too? There’s Threads, the Facebook owned offshoot of the Instagram platform, primarily focused on text-based messaging. Even though it launched in July of 2023, it came together rather quickly, seemingly as an attempt to capitalize on the struggles that Twitter was having, struggles that soon led to it being rebranded as X later that month.

One of the challenges with threads is they’re adding features as they go, and while they leverage their existing user base from Instagram, it hasn’t led to the same level of active retention that one might think. Despite the lack of explicit advertising, they still have issues with spam posts, for example.

And then there’s the whole challenge with Facebook ownership in general, which we’ve discussed on in previous episodes, like when we talked about Triple E back in episode 15. BlueSky, or B-Sky, was another Twitter alternative built on the prospect of having an open source social media standard, and up until May 5th of 2024, it had Jack Dorsey, a former Twitter CEO, on its board.

His departure is indicative of some of the challenges that lay there, that it’s somewhat lifeless with minimal community involvement, and that despite it being built as a decentralized platform, until that gets rolled out, it very much is a centralized form of control. Usenet, the almost OG social network, built off of the Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, that we talked about a lot back in episode 10, still exists, technically, but on the text-based servers it’s mostly dead with tons of spam and minimal community, though there are a few diehards that try and keep it going.

The existence of the binaries groups there as a file transfer service is a completely separate issue far beyond what we’re talking about here. LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, feels incredibly inauthentic and performative, and it feels like the functionality that you find there would be better served by being on almost any other social media platform.

Reddit, with all the pains that it had in 2023 with its shift to the IPO and the strike of the various moderators, is still a going concern with high user counts, but a lot of that content may be now fed into various AI platforms, turning conversations into just so much grist for the mill. Stack Overflow, the tech-based Q& A site, has done much the same thing, turning all that conversation into just so much AI fodder.

Platforms like Discord, which have, again, corporate control, and may lead to all the content they’re in being memory old. And that brings us back to Mastodon, which, despite all the promises of an open social web, can have, in certain places, an incredible toxic community. It’ll have Federation Wars, as various servers join or disband, based on.

Ideological differences with other active servers, there’s access problems for a number of different users, there’s differing policies from server to server, and there’s inconsistent moderation across all of it. And despite all these problems, it might be one of the best options when it comes to text based social media.

So this brings us back to our main question, why do they all suck? Is it something that’s baked in? Is it something that’s determined by the technology?

So let’s take a moment and introduce you to the idea of technological determinism. Tech determinism is a long running theory that’s existed in some form or other since the 19th century. Technological determinism posits that the key driver of human history and society has been technology in its various forms.

It leads to a belief that innovation should be pursued, sometimes at all costs, and that the solution to any issue is more technology, even if those issues are caused by other technologies in the first place. Tech Determinism exists on a bit of a spectrum, where its adherence can be more or less hardcore with respect to how much technology determines our history and how much attention is paid to any explanation outside the scope of technology.

According to technological determinism, all social progress follows tech innovation, and there’s a certain inevitability that’s part and parcel with that. If I was able to license music for this show, I’d queue up You Can’t Stop Progress by Clutch off their 2007 album From Beale Street to Oblivion. But, uh, in this case I’ll just ask you to go to YouTube or your other music streaming site, or grab your CD off the shelf and put it in and play along.

But back to our spectrum. Hardcore technological determinists don’t think society or culture can have any impact on technology, or at least the direction of it. And that goes back to that inevitability that we were talking about. There’s a softer form of technological determinism as well, where the technology can be dependent on social context and how it is adopted.

And this ties back to what Penelope Quan Haas talks about as social determinism. Social norms, attitudes, cultural practices, and religious beliefs are perceived as directly impacting how technology is used and what its social consequences are. This is a little bit more of a nuanced view and takes us away from the instrumental view where technology is seen as neutral and just a tool to be used.

But as pointed out by Langdon Winner back in 1980 in a rather famous article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, that neutrality is something that’s very much circumscribed. The design of a tool can have very specific impacts about how it is used in society. And I think this starts bringing us back to those design spaces that we’re talking about, those online platforms.

Each of them present themselves in various ways and suggest various actions that might be taken. done. These are what Don Norman calls affordances or the perceived action possibilities of a certain piece of technology. When it comes to online spaces, it doesn’t matter whether that space is presented to the user on a smartphone or on a desktop computer, laptop, or some kind of terminal, the preferred form of action is going to be presented to the user in the most accessible place to reach.

This is why you’ll see the swipe or like or comment buttons presented where they are. On a smartphone, that’s anything that’s in easy reach of the thumb of a right-handed user. For X, it’s that little blue button in the right-hand corner, just begging you to use it. And by reducing the barrier to entry to posting, you get a lot of people posting really quickly.

Emotionally, reacting to things, getting the word out there. Because, heaven forbid, somebody is wrong on the internet. And this leads us to the second factor that may be leading to such horrible online communication. The very nature of online communication itself. And this has been recognized for a long, long time.

At least 20 years. On March 19th, 2004, in a post titled “Green Blackboards and Other Anomalies”, the world was introduced to the GIFT theory. And we’ll call it the GIFT theory because we’re on the family friendly side of the podcast sphere. As Tycho from Penny Arcade explained at the time, a normal person plus anonymity and an audience equals a GIFT.

And because that anonymity was kind of part and parcel with online interactions that you really didn’t know who you were dealing with. And that all identities online were constructed to a degree, it might lend people to say things online or behave online in ways that they wouldn’t if they were face to face with the person.

And because having an audience can allow for someone to get a larger reaction, people might be more predisposed to behave that way, if they thought their words could be traced back to them. Now, this is 2004, so pre social media. Twitter and Facebook would take off after that. And it became slightly more common for people to post using their real names, or at least a slightly more recognizable one.

And we found out that that really didn’t change things at all. So perhaps it has more to do with the audience rather than the anonymity. Regardless, the culture that had developed through early Usenet and then AOL chat rooms, through to online gaming, instant messenger apps, and IRC, kept encountering the same problems.

Which the tech determinants would take as a sign that suggests that the technology is the cause. But what if the social determinists are right? Social determinists being the flip side of the tech determinists, that all interactions that take place are due to social cues. This leads us to our third potential cause.

What if it’s the culture of online interaction? In 1993, Howard Rheingold published one of the first books on online societies, The Virtual Community, subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. This is based on his experience as a user in The Well, the Whole Earth Electronic Link, a BBS based in San Francisco run by computer enthusiasts that were part of the Whole Earth catalog.

Following up on his previous books on hackers and virtual reality, he wrote a book that took a wide-ranging survey of the state of the web in 1993. Or at least, what we now call the web, as much as the book focused on BBSs and other portals like The Well, terminal systems like Francis Minitel, commercial services like CompuServe, and email, all under the umbrella of CMC, Computer Mediated Communication.

Though this acronym is now largely forgotten, save for in certain academic circles, it bears repeating and reintroduction to those unfamiliar to the term, as it explains in the distinction it makes. And, open parenthesis, not that I’m saying that a term is acting with intentionality here, I’m not that far down the memetic rabbit hole, but rather that we can consider it as the focus for our agentive discussion. Close parenthesis. 

Rheingold was looking at early implementations of the web. Cross cultural implementations, when there are largely local phenomena, national at best, and rarely the international level that we now expect. You looked at France’s Minitel at CalvaCom, as well as sites in Japan and the well on the west coast of the United States.

Yes, they could all be accessed outside of that, but long distance was costly and bandwidth was low. And time and again, the same phenomena was observed. Talking with Lionel Lombroso, a participant with CalvaCom in France, about his experiences with 80s, one of the biggest challenges was dealing with like the perpetual flame wars, in this case one involving Microsoft and the evils therein.

Lombroso goes on to state that, quote, I think online is a stage for some people who don’t have opportunities to express themselves in real life. Again, this is the late 80s, early 90s. HTTP is just being invented around the same time. The web as we know it doesn’t exist yet, but online communication, computer mediated communication, does.

And they’re seeing this already. Where arguments based on politics or ideology lead to intractable discussions, which invariably force decisions to be made between censorship and free expression, and attempts to limit the flame war will invariably shift to this regardless of the forum, as has been seen in the Well, Twix, Calva, and so many other sites as well.

So, if antagonism online goes back this far, if we can see the roots of the quote unquote Seven Deadly Sins Then perhaps we’re close to finding our answer. Antagonism online can largely be a cultural thing. And just as a parenthesis, ask me sometime about those seven deadly sins and I can tell you how you can tell if you’re stuck in a 7g network.

If online toxicity is well and truly baked in, being part and parcel of the culture from the very beginning, is there a way to fight back against it? One of the biggest problems is the expectations of use. People coming to Mastodon, for instance, which looks and feels a lot like Twitter in many ways, is a lot of the initial participants are coming directly from Twitter and bringing all their old habits and patterns with them, for good.

The tech is static, but the new tech looks like the old tech and provides the affordances of the old tech, so it gets used in similar ways by people who expect it to behave in a certain way. And they may not be entirely conscious of that. That, much like Taylor Swift sings, It’s me, me, I’m the problem, it’s me.

So how might this be combated? There’s a number of options, and they’re not mutually exclusive. The first is to change the interface in order to change the interaction. This may be productive, as it would shake the users out of assumed patterns of use. However, it’s double edged, as one of the elements that makes a new platform attractive is its similarity to other existing platforms.

And to be clear, Despite the similarity of interface, tools like Mastodon are still facing an uphill battle in attracting or retaining users that are leaving X and or Twitter. And I’m saying and or, that despite it being X, we’re talking historically over the entire period that, say, tools like Mastodon have existed.

The second option can be heavier moderation. And this can be one of the big challenges for the Fediverse, which largely operates under donations and volunteer work. This approach has been taken by some private entities and the DSA in the EU, that’s the Digital Service Act, has required large social media platforms to disclose the number of moderators they have, especially in each language.

And in articles on Reuters and Global Witness published in November and December of 2023, we got a look at what some of those numbers were. For example, X had 2, 294 EU content moderators, compared with 16, 974 for YouTube, 7, 319 at Google’s Play service, and another 6, 125 at TikTok. And those numbers are largely for the English moderators.

The numbers drop off rapidly for non-English languages, even in the EU. And if large multinational corporations are challenged by and struggling with the lack the ability to moderate online, the largely volunteer versions that exist in the Fediverse can have even less recourse. 

So a third solution may be education on social norms and online toxicity. In this, networks like the Fediverse have some advantages, as they’ve been able to put in tools to assist users and creators that can modify the content in certain ways. Content warnings, which can hide certain content by default. Alt text for image and media descriptions for persons that need to use screen readers, using camel case for hashtags in order to increase readability.

But all of this is a long and constant battle as it’s on the user to institute them when they’re using it. And we’ve seen earlier forms of this happen online. As recounted in the Eternal September, and you can check out our old episode on that. But, as the name implies, it keeps happening as platforms need to acculturate the influx of new users in order to use the platform successfully.

And, as those new users still have all the same expectations of use that they’ve picked up in every interaction online that they’ve had up to that point in time. It’s still going to be a sticking point. So maybe we have to put it on the user, which leads us to our fourth option that the user needs to be the change that they want to see.

And I can see reflections of this in my own online interactions, that I realized maybe I wasn’t the best online citizen in the past, but, you know, we can all reflect about how we interact online and try and do better in the future. One simple method would be to follow George Costanza’s lead. And I’m serious on this, George Costanza in season 5 episode 22 on Seinfeld, this was the show called The Opposite, and Costanza tries doing the opposite of his instinct for every choice and interaction he has online, and his life ends up improving because of that.

He realizes that, hey, much like Taylor Swift, he might be the problem. And he tries to do better and make conscious decisions about how he’s interacting with people online. I don’t know if that’s something you can implement in software, but there are methods, like notifications that pop up when somebody’s going to reply to somebody they’ve never interacted with before.

Or, for instance, notifications for users when they’re going to post something online, letting them know that, hey, this is being distributed to a mass audience and not to your 12 closest friends. The other option for trying to be the change you want to see, you would just be actively working to try and make the internet a better place.

And we can see this in things like the happiness project on March 20th, 2024, the second day of the third FediForum, an unconference where individuals can come together online to discuss things related to the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon and other ActivityPub tools. Evan Prodromou, a co-author of ActivityPub convened a panel on happiness in the Fediverse, and the discussion centered around what makes us happy when we engage online.

How do we build those strong social ties and positive engagement that we’d love to see in our own lives? How do we ensure that our social networks lead to positive mental and physical health and well being? positive mindset overall? Those are not easy questions, by all means. One of the things the participants noted is that happiness requires active work, in that posting positive things requires an act on the part of the creators there, and it’s not always easy.

There can be a number of very stressful things that are inherent in social media, and especially the ways we use them now. As I participated in the panel, I mentioned some of the things that have brought up previously both in this episode and in previous ones, letting them know that we may need to be much like George Costanza and try and do the opposite.

But also I left the panel with a question that I began this episode, how much of your experience online? is dictated by the environment you’re in and how it’s constructed, that we need to consider both the architecture and the practices. And perhaps this is ultimately the solution. We create community by building a better place, supplemented by the technology, but created through the culture and patterns of use.

It has to be explicit though, as good interactions may go unnoted. And those who are unaware of them, or those who are new, may not notice that things are done differently. Ultimately, all these things can be incredibly positive for community. However, what happens when your community is taken away from you?

We’ll look at that possibility in the next episode of the ImplausiPod.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike license. 

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

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

So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes. Coming soon, we’ll be following up on this episode with what happens with the loss of online community. In an episode titled, Tick Tock Tribulations. After which we’ll have some special guests join, for a two-part discussion of the first season of the Fallout TV series, followed by a look at the emergence of the dial up pastorale, and then the commodification of curation. I think those episodes will be fantastic, I can’t wait to share them with you. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:
Chee, F. Y., Mukherjee, S., Chee, F. Y., & Mukherjee, S. (2023, November 10). Musk’s X has a fraction of rivals’ content moderators, EU says. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-x-has-fraction-rivals-content-moderators-eu-says-2023-11-10/

Drolsbach, C., & Pröllochs, N. (2023). Content Moderation on Social Media in the EU: Insights From the DSA Transparency Database (arXiv:2312.04431). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04431

FediForum.org. (n.d.). FediForum | Happiness in the Fediverse. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://fediforum.org/2024-03/session/4-d/

Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies)—Penny Arcade. (n.d.). Retrieved May 19, 2024, from https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies

Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Cheung, F., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage. Communications Psychology, 2(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00062-z

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

GPT Squared

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0031 on March 31, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14799673-e0031-gpt-squared

Are the new GPTs – Generative Pre-trained Transformers – powering the current wave of AI tools actually the emergence of a new GPT – General Purpose Technology – that we will soon find embedded into every aspect of our lives? Earlier examples of GPTs include tech like steam power, electricity, radio, and computing, all tech that is foundational to our modern way of life. Will our AI tools soon join this pantheon as another long wave of technological progress begins?

Let’s start with the question. Do you remember a time before electricity? Unless this show is vastly more popular with time travelers and certain vampires than I thought, the answer is probably not. But now, in 2024, it’s literally everywhere. It’s sublimated into the background. It’s become part of the infrastructure, and we no longer really think about it.

We flip a switch and the lights go on, and we can find a plug in almost anywhere to recharge our devices and take that electricity with us on the go. But how long did it take to get to that point? And the answer is longer than you think. The production of electricity was invented in 1832, but it took half a century for it to become commercially viable, and then from there another 70 years to effectively transform our lives with everything from lights and appliances to communication devices like radios and television.

And even now we’re still feeling the effects of that transformation as we move to electric powered vehicles for personal use. So across all those decades, it took a long time for electricity to come from concept to application to becoming a general purpose technology, or GPT. And in 2024, we’re just starting to feel the impacts of another GPT, degenerative pre trained transformers that are powering the current wave of AI tools.

So the question we’re really trying to find out is, are these current GPTs a new GPT, or what we might call GPT squared, in this week’s episode of The Implosipod.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’ll be exploring exactly what a GPT is, a general purpose technology, that is, and how they have had a massive impact on society. By looking at the definition and some commonalities amongst them, we’ll be able to evaluate whether the current GPT, the generative pre-trained transformers, are going to have the same impact, or whether they qualify as a GPT at all.

As always, I’m using a couple of references for this, and I’ll put the bibliography in the show notes so you can track back the people we’re citing here. For us, the two main sources are going to be Engines of Growth by Bresnahan and Trattenberg from 1992 1995, and Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology, Understanding the Second Gilded Age, a book he published in 2023.

Kurz is a professor of economics at Stanford University, and his first book was published back in 1970, so he’s literally been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. And in addition to those, I’m sure we’ll fold in a few more references as required. Now, for the first half of this episode, whenever I mention GPT, we’re going to be explicitly talking about general purpose technology, so I’ll call out the AI tools when mentioned.

And we’ll get to the discussion of those in the second half after we talk about the cyclical nature of technological development. But for the moment, we should get right down to business and find out exactly what is the GPT. A general purpose technology is basically that, a technology that can apply broadly to virtually all sectors of the economy.

And by doing so, it can change the way that society functions. They do this by being pervasive, in that they can be used in a wide variety of functions. And they also do this by sublimating into the background, as David E. Nye notes in his history of the Electrification of America, that once they’re part of the infrastructure, we can stop thinking about it and use them in almost any function.

Now, it took a little while for electricity to get to that point, but that’s part of their nature, that the general purpose technology will evolve in advance and spread throughout the economy. For previous instances of GPTs, that led to productivity gains in a wide number of areas, but even if we’re not specifically looking at Productivity growth, we can still see how they have beneficial impacts.

Now in the original study on GPTs, Bresnahan and Trattenberg’s engines of growth from 1992, they looked at three particular case studies, steam power, the electric motor, and the integrated circuit. And by studying these GPTs, they were able to come up with some basic characteristics. The first and most obvious is that their general purpose, that the function they provide is generic, and because of that generic nature, they’re able to apply it in a lot of different contexts.

If we think of all the ways that the continuous rotary motion that was provided by steam power and then electric engines has been adapted and serves throughout our economy, it’s massive, it’s fascinating. And once the production of the integrated circuit really started taking off in the 60s and 70s, it became a product that could be embedded in almost anything, and very nearly has.

This is obviously scaled over time as integrated circuits have followed Moore’s Law, providing exponential growth in the amount of circuitry that can provide it in the same space, and complementary technologies like batteries have also improved and shrunk and been able to service the chips that have gotten more and more power efficient over time, leading to even more widespread adoption.

And this brief description hints at the second and third characteristics. The second one is that they have technological dynamism. That continuous work is done to innovate and improve the basic technology that makes it more efficient over time. This is why you often see that costs to use that GPT drop over time.

And that’s why it shows up in more and more parts of our society. And the third characteristic of GPTs that Bresnahan and Trattenberg talk about are the innovational complementarities that technical advances in the GPT make it more profitable for its users to innovate and vice versa. And we can see hints of that with how the improving battery technologies went hand in hand with the development of integrated circuits.

One of the things that B& T note, especially in their example of the steam engine electric motor, is that the function that they provide isn’t necessarily obvious with respect to some of the jobs. That the continuous rotary motion that is now used in a lot of things, everything from sewing, polishing, cutting, wasn’t necessarily seen as something that could be adapted to those skills.

So the people that were doing them were surprised when there was a technological replacement for the things that they were doing. Let’s put a pin in that idea and we’ll come back to it in about 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes the way that the GPT is applied is inefficient initially, but as price and performance ratios improve, as the technology and the complementary technologies around it improve, then it becomes more feasible.

Sometimes those payoffs come quickly, but Often it takes a long time for it to get distributed throughout the economy. In the case of electric motors, they note that it took about three decades to go from 5 percent of the installed horsepower in the U. S. to over 80 percent by 1930. And those productivity gains came because everything was getting electrified at the same time.

The infrastructure was there. And these all go hand in hand. They’re complementary. B& T quote at length from Rosenberg from 1982. Quote, the social payoff to electricity would have to include not only lower energy and capital costs, but also the benefits flowing from the newfound freedom to redesign factories with a far more flexible power source.

The steam engine required clumsy belting and shafting techniques for the transmission of power within the plant. These methods imposed serious constraints upon the organization and flow of work. which had to be grouped according to their power requirements close to the energy source. With the advent of fractionalized power made possible by electricity in the electric motor, it now became possible to provide power in very small, less costly units.

This flexibility made possible a wholesale reorganization of work arrangements and in this way, made a wide and pervasive contribution to productivity growth throughout manufacturing. Machines and tools could now be put anywhere efficiency dictated, not where belts and shafts could most easily reach them.

Now, I want to state that I’m not a member of the cult of efficiency by any means, and that Rosenzberg’s claim that quote, it’s not some contradiction to that Foucauldian argument that the architecture of society is shaped by the architecture of our factories and our other buildings. That we have some Deleuzian form of control society because the very hierarchy of the way our power is distributed within our factories lends itself to certain forms of social organization.

Far be it. I think these are saying exactly the same thing. Different perspectives. What the subtext of all these articles is, is that to get past those hierarchical forms, united find different ways to distribute the power. And by doing so, you can have very liberating effects on society as a whole. And.

Ultimately, this is what a GPT is. It’s what it provides. As Kurz notes, GPTs reflect fundamental changes in the state of human knowledge that occur maybe once in a generation or once in a century. They are technologies that enable up to Paradigm Shift, and as Kurz notes,

we need to distinguish between small changes within a given technological paradigm and revolutionary technologies that change everything.

End quote. A GPT serves as a founding technology or platform for Further technological innovation. And because of that, it’s really important to note something on the work that goes into the development of a GPT as both B&T and Kurz note, quote, it is vital to keep in mind the distinction between innovations within the paradigm of a GPT.

And innovation of a new technological paradigm, or a new GPT. Some GPTs, like electricity or IT, change everything and ultimately transform the entire economy. Others, like the discovery of DNA and genetic sequencing, change completely only a segment of the economy, like we’ve seen with CRISPR and genetic engineering.

And this idea of a paradigm shift is perhaps one of the most central features of the introduction of a new GPT, especially if you’re a large incumbent firm well established within the Current dominant technological paradigm for you see a paradigm shift threatens to upset the natural order of things where the large Incumbent firms exercise their market power and use small firms operating within that paradigm effectively as research labs acquiring them if they happen to develop a patent or an innovation that would prove it to be useful or would Threaten their own dominance within the marketplace These patterns have been well observed historically within the development of electricity, with the rollout of radio and television, with the early computing industry, and can be even seen within 21st century industries, where a dominant player like Facebook will acquire Instagram or WhatsApp.

that may threaten their dominance. And if they’re unable to acquire those competitors outright, they may exert their market power through lobbying or other efforts in order to challenge them, as we’re seeing currently in the United States with the proposed TikTok ban of March 2024. This is all standard operating procedure.

It’s the way these things seem to work. But when a new technology comes around, when the paradigm shifts, that’s when things get interesting. As Kurz notes, it’s a period where Quote, the most intense technological competition arises when a new GPT is invented. This leads to the eruption of economy wide technological competition in which winners begin the long journey to consolidate market power.

During that period, we’ll either see new players rise to the level of the incumbents, pushing out the old dominant players that can’t adapt. Or we’ll see those dominant players do everything they can to try and keep their hand in the game. Which is what we’re starting to see already within the field of AI, which is one of the reasons we suggest it might be a new GPT, a General Purpose Technology.

But as we’ve hinted at, these things go in cycles, so let’s look at what some of the earlier ones were.

The idea that the economy behaves in a cyclical manner was first introduced almost 100 years ago, in the 1920s, by Nikolai Kondratiev. They’ve been subsequently named in his honor. Kondratiev hypothesized that these cycles were due to the underlying technological basis of society, the technological paradigms that we’ve been discussing in the first half of this episode, where we see rising boom and bust cycles that take place over a period of roughly 50 to 60 years.

Now, the Kondratiev waves, or what are sometimes called long waves or Carrier waves are only one of the various economic waves or cycles that have been observed. Others, including those proposed by Kuznets or Jugler or Kitchen, look at things like infrastructure or investment or even inventory for various products, and development time frames can have a major impact for all of this as well.

When you map these all out on a timeline, the various economic waves can all seem to interact, much like overlapping sine waves in a synthesizer, where the sum of the smaller waves occasionally comes together in a much larger peak, or ocean waves come together out of nowhere and suddenly form a rogue wave big enough to sink a ship.

When Kondratiev was originally observing that a long 60 year period, he said that there was three phases to the cycle, a period of expansion, stagnation, recession, and nowadays we’ve added collapse into that as well. When Kondratiev was originally writing in the 1920s, he identified a number of periods that as it’s originally taken place with, starting with the Industrial Revolution, followed by the Age of Steam and the expansion of the railways, and then the subsequent rise of electric power that took place, as noted, between the 1890s and 1930s in North America.

Since then, we’ve seen the cycle continue in two other long waves, the rise of the internal combustion engine, the associated technologies that that facilitated, like the automobile and air flight, and then the rise of the microchip and the transformation that the computing technologies and communication technologies had across the face of a modern world.

Now, the idea of an economic long wave has had an enduring appeal. People have taken the theory and have Cast it back earlier in time and a lot of predictions have come about trying to guess what the sixth long wave would be. Again, five that we’ve had so far if we started at the industrial revolution.

Some of the possible contenders as a driver for the sixth Kondratiev wave include that of renewable energy and green technologies as proposed by Moody and Nagredi, or that of biotechnology as proposed by Leo Neffiato. Back in 1996. And while those are strong contenders, they haven’t necessarily turned into the drivers of economic change that we might have expected.

They may still yet, but in some ways they lack the general purpose nature of the technologies that we’ve seen as drivers of previous long waves. In 2024, it looks like another contender has emerged. A GPT build out of GPTs, the generative pre-trained transformers that power our AI tools. So based on our three characteristics of those GPTs that we mentioned earlier, we’ll take a closer look and see if those AI tools might qualify.

As we said earlier, with Bresnahan and Trattenberg’s definition of a GPT, the three characteristics were general purposeness, technological dynamism, and innovational complementarities. Within their paper from 1992, they use the case study of semiconductor technology, which is the dominant GPT at the time of the 1990s.

At the time they were writing, the pervasiveness of computing had already been assumed, but initially that assumption wasn’t the case. Hence early prognostications like Thomas Watson’s from IBM famously saying that I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, a prediction that turned out to be drastically wrong.

By the 1970s, the integrated circuit was well developed and its use in the computing mainframes of large banks was already well underway. What allowed electronic circuits to become a general purpose technology was that they could work inside virtually any system. Those systems can be rationalized and broken down into their component activities, and each of those activities could be replaced with a integrated circuit or transformer at certain stages.

And if you can break the steps down to something that can be replicated by binary logic, like ones and zeros with gates opening or switches turning on and off, then you can apply it anywhere within a production process. It meant that there was a wide range of. technological processes that at its root were pretty simple operations.

But as B& T note here, even though substituting binary logic for a mechanical part was often very inefficient, because you might have to increase the number of steps in order to accomplish something with binary logic, as the price dropped on the circuits and more and more processes could be included within one circuit, it became much easier to actually implement the technology.

electronic circuits within the system. And as the costs came down and the processes were improved, they became more widely implemented within a lot more sectors of the economy, to now that they’re basically everywhere. So, do our current GPTs, the current crop of AI tools, exhibit these same characteristics?

Is there a general purpose-ness to them? Well, qualified yes. I think when it comes to the current AI tools, we need to recognize a few things. The first is that they’re part of a much longer process that a lot of the tools that we’re seeing right now were two years ago called machine learning tools, and they’ve just been rebranded as a I tools with the popularity of Chat GPT and some of the AI art tools like stable diffusion and mid journey.

So both the history of the technology and its implications go back much further. And it’s actually uses are much broader than we’re currently seeing and thinking about the range of industries where I’ve seen AI tools adopted far exceed just the large language models popularized by Chat GPT, or the art tools that were seen online increasingly.

We’re seeing machine learning algorithms deployed in everything from photography to astronomy, to health, to production, to robotics, to website design, to audio engineering, and a whole host of industries. And this explains partially why we’re seeing so many companies involved, which feeds directly into the second characteristics of GPTs, the dynamism, the continuous innovation that’s being brought forth by companies that currently developing those AI tools.

Now, is everyone going to be a hit? No, there’s a lot of them that are absolutely not places where AI should be involved. But some of them are going to be creating tools that are well suited to the application of AI. And just as the early days of electricity and radio and television all saw a lot of different ways that people were trying to apply the new technology to their particular field or product or problem.

We’re seeing a lot of that with AI right now, just as any company that has a machine learning model is either rebranding it or adapting it to the use of AI. I think a lot of people are recognizing that. AI tools could be that general purpose technology that would be applicable to whatever their given field is.

There’s definitely a speculative resource rush component that’s driving some of this growth. There’s a lot of people are getting into the market, but, but as Mordecai Kurz points out, there’s a difference between working within the new paradigm created by a GPT, which a lot of these companies are doing, and on working Directly on the GPT itself, those working directly on the AI tools like OpenAI are the ones that are looking to become the new incumbents, which goes a long way in explaining why Microsoft has reached out and partnered with OpenAI in the development of their tools.

Incumbents that are lagging behind in the development of the tools may soon find themselves locked out, so a company that was dominant within the previous paradigm, like Apple, that currently doesn’t have much in the way of AI development, could be in a precarious position as things change and the cycle of technology continues.

Now, the last characteristics of a GPT was the complementarity that it had that allowed for a Other innovations to take place. And I think at this point, it’s still too soon to tell. We can speculate about how AI may interface with other technologies, but for now, the most interesting ones look to be things like robotics and drones.

Seeing how a tool like OpenAI can integrate with the robots from Boston Dynamics, or the recent announcement of the Fusion AI model that can provide robotic workers for Amazon’s warehouses. Both hinted where some of this may be going. It may seem like the science fiction of 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, but as it was written back then, the future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.

Ultimately, the labeling of a technological era or a GPT or a Kondratiev wave is something that’s done historically. Looking back from a vantage point, it’s confirmed yet, yes, this is what took place and this was the dominant paradigm. But from our vantage point right now, there’s definitely signs and it looks like the gts, maybe the GPT we need to deal with as the wave rises and falls.

Once again, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Implausipod. I’ve been your host Dr. Implausible, responsible for the research, writing, editing, mixing, and mastering. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com and check out our episode archive at implausipod. com as well. I have a few quick announcements.

Depending on scheduling, I should have another tech based episode about the architecture of our internet coming out in the next few weeks. And then around the middle of April, we’ll invite some guests to discuss the first episode of the Fallout series airing on Amazon Prime. Or streaming on Amazon Prime, I guess.

Nothing’s really broadcast anymore. Following that, Tie in with another Jonathan Nolan series and also its linkages to AI, we’re going to take a look at Westworld season one. And if you’ve been following our Appendix W series on the sci fi prehistory of Warhammer 40, 000, we’re going to spin off the next episode into its own podcast.

Starting on April 15th, we’re currently looking at the Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel, The Forever War. So if you’d like to read ahead and send us any questions you might have about the text, you can send them to Dr. implausible@implausiblepod.com. We will keep the same address, but the website for Appendix W should now be available.

Check it out@appendixw.com and we’ll start moving those episodes over to there. You can also find the transcript only version of those episodes up on YouTube. Just look for Appendix W in your search bar. We’ve made the first few available, and as I finish off the transcription, I’ll move more and more over.

And just a reminder that both the Implausipod and the Appendix W podcast are licensed under Creative Commons Share A Like 4. 0 license. And we look forward to having you join us with the upcoming episodes soon. Take care, have fun.

Bibliography
Bresnahan, T. F., & Trajtenberg, M. (1995). General purpose technologies “Engines of growth”? Journal of Econometrics, 65(1), 83–108.

Kurz, M. (2023). The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age. Columbia University Press.

Nye, D. E. (1990). Electrifying America: Social meanings of a new technology, 1880-1940. MIT Press.

Rosenberg, N. (1982). Inside the black box: Technology and economics. Cambridge University Press.

Winner, L. (1993). Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology. Science Technology & Human Values, 18(3), 362–378.