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Implausipod E0010 – AOL, Fediverse, and Eternal September

Introduction:

What does the relationship between a 40 year old game console company, and ancient internet protocol, and American Online have to teach us about the current issues faced by new users to the Fediverse? Let’s find out on this episode of the Implausipod.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1935232/episodes/13373854

Transcript:

Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. September is almost on us again, and with it the 30th anniversary of the Endless September, the date when the internet changed forever. Join me on this deep dive on the Implausipod.

So if I told you that a video game service developed for the Atari 2600, back 40 years ago in 1983, had implications for the future of social media in 2023, you’d be like, okay, that sounds a little implausible, but uh, “give it to me straight, doctor, I can take it!” and I’m like, “alright…”. That company, Control Video Corporation would about a decade later as AOL allow its users unfettered access to the nascent internet, especially Usenet, and that has direct parallels to the mass migration of users that were seen in 2023 due to the social media meltdowns of the former Twitter and Reddit, and researchers that are investigating the user experience of that migration are uncovering some things that have parallels to that transition in 1993. So the lessons learned back then are still relevant to us today.

So this episode will cover all three, the history, the recent research, and how we can apply those lessons learned. So to begin with, let’s take you back to a dark and scary time called the eighties. Ooh, frightening.

In 1982, the Atari 2600 was the absolute market leader in home video game entertainment. It was pretty much everywhere. They had sold about 10 million copies of the VCS in North America, and while there was competitors like ColecoVision, Atari still had like 60% of the market. Now those who know their video game history are aware that 1982 was not the best time to be getting into the market, but at the time things looked rosy. There was an upcoming game called ET that was due to come out for Christmas that year, and things were looking pretty good. Pacman had just sold like 7 million units, and while it didn’t quite replicate the arcade experience (to put it mildly), you know, sales are sales, right?

And it was into this tech landscape that Control Video Corporation was born. What the company was working on was developing a system that would deliver games over telephone lines for the Atari 2600 video game console. The service called Game Line would allow the users to download the game and keep playing it as long as the console stayed on.

It was basically they sold a modem to the users and allowed them to use it. And it’s a reminder that there was a lot of really interesting things happening with computers long before the era of the internet. I mean, you also had like the Mintel system in France that was contemporaneous with this, and I think Mintel will absolutely deserve its own episode in a little while.

But while CVC was getting the product up and running and actually delivering games to customers, they hit a bit of a road bump, and that road bump just happened to look like a landfill out in the New Mexico Desert where all the unsold ET cartridges were dumped. So as the video game console market came to a screeching halt in 83 and 84, CVC began to hemorrhage cash, and by 85 they had reformulated into Quantum Link Corporation, or Quantum Computer Services, and they began to leverage and market their online technologies, which were innovative by all means. And they provided these online services to other computing companies and manufacturers with names like Commodore and Apple and Microsoft, and this ability of theirs to diversify and to provide services to multiple vendors allow them to thrive in a turbulent market where larger competitors that were tied to a particular vendor would fail if that vendor failed.

Quantum Computer Services was able to tailor their product to the various manufacturers that they were dealing with. So you’d have QLink on the Commodore or Apple Link on the Apple machines. And the product that they’re offering was basically what we now think of as an online portal. They were like a BBS front end. It had graphics and chat and you could do a little bit of research or play some games, which could max out at an amazing 320 by 200 resolution. But often the games were in the text mode version, which is usually 24 across and 21 down, and it just used a lot of built-in sprites and pixels, and it looked a lot like playing DwarfFortress or a retro game like that.

And we can see versions of this portal with a still and everything from Yahoo to Google to Facebook to any of the social media sites. And that kind of gives us a hint of where we’re going with this. But in the meantime, Quantum Computing Services was having some success with the product, and in 1989, they rebranded it as America Online as part of their approach to attract new users to using online computing, and they’re pretty innovative in this approach as well. I mean, there was other competitors like Compuserve, but they focused the AOL experience on the new user, and that paid off because there was a lot more people not using the internet in 1989 than there was anywhere close to it. Computer use, especially online computer use, was very much a minority proposition at this point in time.

We might wanna say that everybody at this point was an early adopter of the internet. I mean, that’s not precisely true based on Roger’s diffusion curve, but it’s close enough, especially when compared to the size of the market now. And one of the ways they approached getting these new users was probably their biggest innovation, which was the mass distribution of their software through the floppy disks.

And I wanna be clear, that was an innovation because marketing innovations totally count. And AOL wasn’t technically superior to any of its competitors, especially the ones on like university campuses and government departments. And the funny thing is, it totally worked, it allowed for a ton of new users because at the time, I mean the floppy disks was still a useful, you could rewrite on them and they cost money at the store. So gather them up and you had something that you could go with. But for a new user that’s unfamiliar with the internet, it was software. All you need is a modem, and here you are, you’re connected and going on the internet as quickly as possible. And when I say “internet”, I wanna be perfectly clear because I’m not sure the air quotes that I’m currently miming are coming through clear over the podcast, but you know what I mean. ’cause it was a walled garden. Using America online in 1990 was a lot like logging on in 2023 and thinking Facebook is the entirety of the internet. I mean, for some users it may as well be, but you know, there’s a bigger world out there. But that being said, Quantum Computer Services was incredibly successful with their America online product and rebranded the company after the product.

In 1991, it became AOL, and at the time AOL was super successful with their floppy disc campaign. They were maintaining growth of anywhere between 36 to as high as like 197% year over year. That’s amazing. For a lot of people, America Online was the internet, but one of those other parts that was outside of its walled garden was Usenet.

Usenet was a distributed discussion forum, think Reddit, but not really owned by anybody and people just ran their servers for it. It used the NNTP protocol, the network can use transfer protocol, and it was really similar to like email, which was using the SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. So similar but with like a few extra features that allowed for grouping and threading and, uh, distribution of the messages. Servers running the software would store and forward the messages to other servers in the network so that everybody had a copy that was pretty much local. Now there was rules for it, so not everybody carried everything, but by and large, you could get news or information from around the world depending on what, what the users were posting. So it was all user generated content in a way similar to TikTok and Twitter and everything else nowadays. It was almost the original social media network, but there was a lot of academic stuff on there as well, because a lot of the servers were on universities. There weren’t that many ISPs out in the world at the time.

One of the big things within NNTP over email was it allowed for threaded communication, so if you’re ever wondering where Facebook got the idea for their current app, well there’s a hint. Over time, the group self-organized based on topic and interest and a culture of the internet kind of grew up around it.

There was a hierarchy to it where you had higher level domains that were structured around broad interest groups like comp or sci, or news or rec, and then lower-level domains that were more specific to a given topic like science fiction or wrestling or Linux or whatever. Some of these news groups were moderated, but most weren’t, and because of the way they were structured, they were very much those recursive Publix that we talked about in the last episode. NNTP was originally proposed in 1979 and became the dominant form throughout the eighties. It was basically what the internet was, along with bulletin-board systems and a few other servers.

And because of this, it developed a culture all of its own. A lot of the things that are still central to how we deal with things online, like flaming and spam, and FAQs all came from Usenet. The fact that some of those enduring elements are kind of negative maybe speaks a little bit to what the culture was like. Even though it was all text-based, it could be on occasion incredibly toxic. The lineage to 4chan is probably closer than a lot of your more highbrow forums. And when I say all text-based for the purpose of this discussion, I’m not getting into the binaries news groups at all. We’re just really focusing on the conversation now because these servers were mostly academic and a culture had developed around them.

Every year something wonderful happened, and that is in September, there was a bunch of new admissions to university who got access to the internet or to Usenet for the very first time, came online and started talking like they owned the place. And all of a sudden, the Flame Wars started developing again, as people got told. In a text-based forum, your options for communication are somewhat limited, so the communication could be somewhat terse, and your options for going to another server or rolling your own are well, “Hypothetically” there: you could engage with the protocol, set up a server; but at the time, and especially given the cost of these things, it was highly unlikely and there’s few limited commercial options.

You had your CompuServe, or Prodigy or Delphi, but really there wasn’t a lot of options that you could use to get onto Usenet unless you had access through your institution, so people either learned and became accustomed to it, and over the month or two, you know, by November you became good net citizens or they left. And when they left, they left. For other systems that had different cultures, either a BBS or like the private walled gardens, like the ones run by AOL. And that was fine. People could find a place where they fit in a cyberspace, where the culture worked for them and, you know, go about their business of being online.

This changed in 1993. As we said earlier, AOL was experiencing massive growth, and in September of 1993, they opened up the floodgates by allowing full access to Usenet for all their customers. So the influx of newbies far exceeded the capacity for the community to bring new people in and acculturate them to the process of the way things were done. And so things kind of changed. Forever.

This was the Eternal September, and for the rest of the nineties UseNet that was radically different than what it was before.

So if that’s where we were in 1993, what does that have to do with now? What does a 30 year old change in the internet have anything to say about social media in the 21st century? Well, let’s run through it at a high level:

We have a distributed system of servers, running communication groups that are mostly text-based with an incumbent population, and they’re dealing with an influx of new users coming from various online communities that have different cultures, and they’re struggling to deal with the changes.

Well, let me ask you, does that description cover Usenet in 1993, or Mastodon and the larger Fediverse in 2023 following the implosion of Twitter and Reddit? Right. Maybe they’re a lot more similar than we think. So the lessons learned from the 1993 Endless September may have some implications for how the Fediverse can deal with incoming new users in 2023 and beyond because the Fediverse, and Mastodon in particular, are not without their problems.

It’s a relatively young protocol with ActivityPub being developed in 2018, and for the most part of that, it’s had relatively small user count, similar in a lot of ways to Usenet back in the nineties. And for the most part, the implementations that are built on top of the ActivityPub Protocol are trying to replicate various other social media sites or networks in a more open or friendly or accessible way to break out of the walled gardens of Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, in a similar way that AOL was a walled garden back in 1991. While some of these implementations are focused on videos or images like PeerTube or PixelFed, I’m gonna focus on the text-based ones like Lemmy, kbin, and most notably Mastodon.

Mastodon is one of the Twitter-style micro blogging implementations of the ActivityPub protocol in the FediVerse, and it’s the most prominent one. In 2022, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it saw a significant spike in its user base. The number of people that were looking for ABE, or Anything But Elon, found Mastodon (including yours truly, even though I wasn’t a significant Twitter user for the prior 15 years).

In 2022, not being on Twitter seemed prudent, but for people looking for ABE, Mastodon isn’t the only option. There are other alternatives like BlueSky, which is a new Microblogging service currently in beta, headed up by Jack Dorsey, the former honcho of Twitter, and there are some users that have moved to BlueSky as an alternative to Twitter who found that Mastodon wasn’t the thing for them, that BlueSky presented a more “Twitter-like” experience.

And for an example of some of the reasons why users might have opted for BlueSky instead of Mastodon, writer Erin Kissane did a survey of some of those “ex-Mastodon, now BlueSky” users and posted them to their blog. The piece is titled “Mastodon is easy and fun, except when it isn’t”, and it’s a really excellent piece that they posted up on July 28th, 2023, and in the Post, Erin includes some of the excerpts, the thick description that we’d expect to see in some qualitative research. And as I know from my own research in grad school that description is really where the meat of the responses can lie, and it allows you to uncover those insights as to what’s actually going on.

Erin groups the responses in four main categories, as well as a fifth meta category. I’ll give you the rough taxonomy right now, they are in order:

One: Got yelled at, felt bad.

Two: Couldn’t find people or interests people didn’t stay.

Three: too confusing. Too much work. Too intimidating.

Four: Too serious. Too boring, anti fun.

And then the meta category is the complicated high stakes decisions that go into the choices that have to be made when you’re engaged with the Fediverse.

So let’s look at those in order with an eye to everything that we’ve previously discussed about AOL and Usenet, as well as the idea of publics and communities online in the previous episode, and we’re gonna break those four into two groups because I think there’s a little bit of natural overlap between groups one and three and two and four.

So for groups one and three, the got yelled at felt bad and the too confusing, too much work, too intimidating group, w absolutely see echoes of Eternal September, the onboarding of new users to usenet and the acculturation process that took place. Now, what Erin captures here is a moment in time, and I want to stress that by way of example: between starting recording this podcast and wrapping it up, which sometimes takes me a day or two, there was a significant change to the Mastodon software with search being added (note: in beta), and that’s been one of the things that’s been discussed for quite some time as a missing feature, but that can also cause problems, s there’s been a lot of debate. Anyways, the point being is that conditions may change, and what we’re talking about at any given point in time may have changed by the time you’re listening to this, whether it’s weeks or months later.

Now, a lot of the scolding that was coming from the incumbent Mastodon users was on content warnings and etiquette, things that have been a bone of contention on various servers and software platforms for forever, for at least the 30 years, since the Endless September, and honestly since the dawn of the internet. Some of these may be endemic and some of them may be just people overreaching their authority on what other people can do on a given platform, as it may come down to the mods or administrators and what their particular preferences are, but the federated nature of the servers on just one implementation of the ActivityPub on, you know, Fediverse – Mastodon – means you’re gonna have a lot of different versions of what is acceptable and they may not scale across the entire thing, but finding that out, finding where your particular group is, is speaks to the second half of this, the intimidating and potentially confusing nature of it. But again, this is something that the devs and admins are aware of and making changes to, and in the nine months that I’ve been observing Mastodon, there’s been remarkable improvements in that onboarding process, even though I don’t think it’s still a hundred percent where it needs to be.

Now, as for the second group of responses, the ones that I’ve grouped together, which are Erin’s responses two and four, the “Couldn’t find people or interests” and the “too serious, too boring, anti fun” groups. I think I’ve covered a number of these in my Locally Boring post on the blog, but I’ll go into the details here.

I recognized a fair amount of my own experiences in the responses that Erin captured in their survey, and what the survey captures is that notion of what I call locally boring, that absent an algorithm or the ability to import a social graph and have a preexisting group of connections, there might not be a lot of content there. It functions very different, and “it’ being here, Mastodon, and the way it displays the information that’s available. Unless you’re following a specific hashtag or a specific group, you may only be seeing local information and depending on what’s available on your server, that might be not necessarily something you’re interested in. Now, you’re not tied to the feed from your server, but that might not be initially obvious. It’s a lot like, you know, starting a new online role-playing game and all your friends decide to stay on World of Warcraft, you’re gonna be doing a lot of questing alone, and depending on a combination of your personality and the software, it may be a lot more or less fun.

And if it’s less fun, you’re less likely to stick around. And if you don’t stick around, you’re unlikely to build a community or find one. So depending on your tolerance for these things, your ability to endure through the fallow period, or the “Desert of Boredom”, or whatever you wanna call it, it may be tough to get to the other side and actually reach the Promised Land, but there are some solutions that you can use to mitigate these.

Now Erin gets into a number of these in that amazing blog post, but I wanted to get into it, especially in context of what we were discussing at the start of the episode: AOL and Usenet. You see, I wanted to provide that context because I think it’s really important to realize that a lot of these issues are not new and that these problems have existed and that solutions have been tried over time.

What we’re seeing with the Fediverse is a period of decentralization in response to the centralization that occurred with the walled gardens of the various social media platforms or what Deleuze would call deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and that this happens cyclically over time, and it’s just the newness of the internet, (even though 30 years can feel like several lifetimes on the internet), but the relative newness of what we call new media on all of its platforms means we’ve only seen a few waves of this. Honestly, given the rapid developments of media as a whole during the 20th and 21st centuries, we often only see it once on any given platform like radio and film and television and the internet, so seeing it twice is kind of interesting, but I digress.

Any of the solutions that have been introduced over time have come with their own host of associated problems, and this is common with any study of technology we see this time and time again, regardless of the sphere. If the problem is discoverability or lack of content in showing up in people’s feeds, then you can use an algorithm to drive that content, but that could be gamed with potentially tragic results.

Similarly, if there’s low engagement, then you can add tools that increase shareability or spreadability, but that can lead to the development of parasocial relationships and potentially stalking and harassment. So there’s always a trade-off, and this is what Erin Kissane notes in their commentary about the meta-topical issues that we see in these spaces, that the divide between health and safety, and personalization and control, can lead to compromises being made that end up satisfying no one. So choices need to be made and in the Fediverse, that often happens at the server or instance level rather than at the aggregate level. Though that can happen as well when changes are made to the software or the apps or the overall user experience.

But it’s an ongoing and recursive process as we discussed last time. So for those making the decisions at those higher levels, maybe – just maybe – something can be learned from America Online of all places, about how they improved on the Usenet process. Back in the day, one of the things that AOL did was basically a process of “McDonaldization for the internet”, to borrow George Ritzer’s term, and what that process is, is a process of rationalization, to borrow a very Weberian approach, and it happens along four main dimensions, which are efficiency, countability, predictability, and control.

What AOL did was really cultivate the experience for that new user, catering to them and developing something that a complete beginner would be able to get working with minimal effort and make it easy enough that they could share it with their friends, becoming Spreadable Media in an era before Spreadable Media. The service had large, easily identifiable buttons and a very predictable interface from the standpoint of the customer. There was very few major version changes and even the minor version changes didn’t really have an appreciable difference in appearance.

The most unpredictable thing was the connectivity issues that plagued dial up in the nineties, and part of that was just due to the rapid growth that they had and having to bring onboard new servers. But even then, a lot of the service was calculable and knowable. They (the user) could know how much they were gonna be billed for based on time, and engage with it, uh, to the extent that they needed to. AOL minimized the number of options available that were presented to the customer, but still made them available under the hood if needed. And a lot of this beginning experience could be totally ported over to the Fediverse. And here I’m gonna stray away from the site its sources a little bit and talk about more of the overall view of the Fedi verse.

A lot of the existing implementations of the ActivityPub protocol are replicating already existing apps, programs or platforms, there’s a point of confusion, not just on picking the right server on Mastodon, but whether they should be on Mastodon at all as opposed to kbin or Lemmy, or PixelFed or PeerTube or whatever. From the outside viewer’s perspective, a lot of the different implementations appear to be a distinction without a difference. And if they can all talk to each other, what does it matter that you’re choosing one rather than the other? So it’s a stressor, it’s a point of confusion.

And the other thing that I’d like to point out is an observation. We’ve talked before about how the social web and online platforms in general treat the audience as a commodity and present ads to them. And for the Fediverse that lack of the commodification of self may be the very thing that the audience is missing. It lacks the warm all-encompassing goo of what Michael de Zengotita calls the “blob of post-modernity” or late capitalism.

Now, I’m in no way arguing for the introduction of advertising on the Fediverse. It is perhaps not a thing to be wistful or nostalgic for. But the Dumpshock that can be felt can be very hard to take, especially for those who have grown up swimming in the flood of capitalist realism. Now, this isn’t a call to action, there’s no need to introduce that. It’s just an observation that the people experiencing that might be feeling something very different when they enter the Fediverse for the first time.

So as September draws near, this has been one of our longest episodes yet. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for hanging around. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and maybe learned a little something. I’d like to give a shout out to some of the sources that I’ve used, including Kara Swisher’s work on AOL from the nineties, Erin Kissane’s blog, as well as a number of other academic texts that I’ve referenced in the bibliography.

As always, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons, share-alike 4.0 license. Music is by me, production is by me, research is by me. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausi dot blog or on whatever Mastodon instance I happen to be on this week. If there’s anything you found interesting or would like me to expand on, please let me know.

But in the meantime, have fun.

Links and References:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

De Zengotita, T. (2006). Mediated: How the media shapes your world and the way you live in it. Bloomsbury

Kissane, E. (n.d.). Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t—Erin Kissane’s small internet website. Retrieved July 29, 2023, from https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

Op’tLand, R. (2009). Another Endless November: AOL, WoW, and the Corporatization of a Niche Market. Journal For Virtual Worlds Research, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v2i3.660

Ritzer, G. (2000). The McDonaldization of society (New Century). Pine Forge Press.

Swisher, K. (1998). AOL.com: How Steve Case beat Bill Gates, nailed the netheads, and made millions in the war for the Web. Random House.

Implausipod EP008: Audience Commodity

(Editor’s note: this is part 2 of the previous post on the audience commodity, which was drawn from a discussion thread on Mastodon. Much of that made it into the transcript of both the Youtube episode and the Podcast (both embedded below). This post will include the full transcript of the audio (and video), so there may be some duplication with the previous post, in the interest of completeness.

If this format of posting works out, then they should be better aligned in the future. Still working on the basics of the POSSE system. Better life through Additive Manufacturing though; iterate and improve. In the meantime, enjoy!)

The link to audio version, from Implausipod Episode 008 is here: https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/13185814-implausipod-e0008-audience-commodity

Introduction

Getting started with a brief rundown of an old article that details the rise of the Audience Commodity: Smythe (1977) “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”, we use that to explain the recent events of the internet of the last month or so, including the Twitter-pocalypse, the Reddit Meltdown, the rise of ChatGPT, and some general media theory too.

Transcript

Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and as we return to a regular recording schedule, I’m going to introduce you to the audience commodity, an old idea from economics tat goes a long way to explain some of the current events we’re seeing in the social media spaces.

What exactly is the audience commodity? Well, that’s a fantastic question. With the recent introduction of Threads a little bit ahead of schedule because of the Twitter apocalypse, I thought it’d be worth going into the background of it because it’s really got some relevance for the current events that are happening today. Because it was published in a relatively obscure Canadian academic journal back in the seventies, it hasn’t seen that much adoption by mainstream economics, but we’ll get into it. If that the kind of thing is your bag, then by all means, stick around.

In short, the audience commodity is all about how you and I and all of us really are turned into products by the cultural industries, whether it’s media or advertisements or websites.

I’ll put the citation on the screen (see below) for those that are interested. The author, Dallas W. Smythe was writing it as a bit of a challenge to traditional Marxist economic thinking at the time in the seventies. He said they were getting it wrong when it came to the cultural industries and the impact that they actually had, what they were doing.

Now Dallas Smythe was a former economist at the FCC, and he was blacklisted due to McCarthyism. I mean, Hoover had a file on him, for reasons, and he is drawing heavily on a book called Monopoly Capital that was put out in the sixties by Baran and Sweezy. We should probably do a whole episode on that at some point in time, but we’ll see how this goes.

Now for Smythe, the main argument speaks directly to Facebook or Meta’s business model. This goes the same for like Google and everything else too. And what is their business model? Websites? No. Apps? No. Advertising? Close, but still not the whole picture. Their business model is the production of the audience commodity. Advertisers buy audiences and those audiences. Time is their labor. And how did Smythe come to this conclusion? Well, he’s asking a simple economic question. Basically, what economic functions for capital do mass communication systems serve? And in this case, both Google and Facebook, Meta and Alphabet, whatever, both fit in the same “mass” of mass communication. They have a huge reach. So in order to figure out the economic function, you need to figure out what the commodity those companies produce actually is. And you might think you know what this is, it’s the whole: “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” line. And this is a part of that, only in a lot more detail.

A part of Smythe’s argument is that traditional economics was getting it wrong. If you asked “what does the media produce?”, you might answer something like content or information or messages or entertainment or shows or something like that. And that’s understandable. It’s what it looks like they do. So you’d be forgiven if you thought That’s how it worked, because that was the traditional orthodox idealist point of view. It was held by everybody from Marx to Galbraith to Veblen to McCluhan. There’s a lot of academic writing on this idea and non-academic writing too. Everybody thought that’s what was going on. Smythe’s argument is that it misses the point. If the trad orthodox view of economics is getting it wrong, what do the media companies actually produce?

What is the commodity form of advertising sponsored communications under “late capitalism”, or “monopoly capitalism” as Baran and Sweezy would say? The answer is audiences and readerships, or just the audience. The audience commodity here, the labor power of the workers, is resold to the advertisers. This is normally in the parlance of the time called the Consciousness industry.

So remember this: TV stations and walled platforms on the internet are factories that produce audiences for advertisers. That’s what’s coming outta the end of the factory. So that’s a lot of the overarching stuff. Let’s get into some of the specifics. Smythe has eight main points, and we’re gonna cover these quickly and then move on to how it connects to the social media platforms: Threads, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, AOL, Reddit, whatever.

So Smythe’s questions are in order. Here we go. Question one, what did the advertisers buy with their money? Answer: the services of audiences in predictable numbers. It’s a service economy and we are the ones providing the service. We’re also ones being a served up, which is, I guess, ironic. The commodity is the collective.

Question two, how do advertisers know what they’re getting what they’re paid for? Well, various rating agencies back in the day, like the Nielsen’s and whatever, and the analysis, which has largely moved in-house for streaming and internet platforms. There’s a whole host of stuff that falls under the umbrella of market research.

Question three, what institutions produce the commodity that advertisers want? Well, we’ve hinted at this, but it’s principally and traditionally the owners of TV and radio stations and newspapers and magazine publishers, and we can add most web platforms to this nowadays ’cause they all work on the same model. Of course there’s a host of secondary producers in industries that provide content for the principal market, obviously, but this is the main outlet.

Question four, and what is the nature of that content in economic terms under monopoly capitalism or late capitalism? Well, it’s an inducement. It’s the free lunch that attracts the audience to the saloon. It gets ’em in the door and encourages them to stay. Now this speaks nothing to the cost, the quality, the format. In fact, the cheaper that this can be procured, the better. A free lunch isn’t free, obviously, but someone is providing the bread and the meat, and if the users bring their own, it’s the case of social media then even better. And what are those users doing?

Question five, what is the nature of the servers performed for the advertiser by members of the purchased audiences? Well, the audience commodity is in economic terms, a non-durable producer’s good bought and used in the marketing of the advertiser’s product. The work that the audience is doing is to learn to buy and consume various brands of products and spend their income accordingly.

If they can develop brand loyalty while doing this, then that’s fantastic. Now, there’s a whole lot of work that goes into that learning. It’s like the reproduction of ideology and Ian terms and a whole lot more going on. But we will again, delve into this and either later in this episode or in future episodes as we keep this going on, but for Smythe, question five is all about the management of demand.

And question six is the big one: How does the management of that demand relate to the notion of free or leisure time under the labor theory of value? And for Smythe the answer is: the goal under monopoly capitalism is for all non-sleeping time to be work time for most of the population. I’ll let you do the math on the missing percentage yourself, but basically free time and leisure time are all turned into work time and in the 21st century, even work time can do double duty as branded elements take place within work.

Now Smythe goes on for about four pages in answering number six. It’s this key point and there’s a lot to unpack there. So again, we’re gonna circle back, but in the interest of brevity:

question seven, does the audience commodity perform an essential economic function? Well, the answer there is “it’s complicated”. As noted above, Orthodox theories didn’t really go into this, and mass media and brands were before Marx’s time, so he didn’t have much to say about them either. Smythe turns to Marx’s Grundrisse to tease out an answer where production produces consumption, which is, I think page 91 and 92. There’s a whole paragraph on it. So yes, there’s an essential economic function that’s taking place, but again, it isn’t what we think it is.

Question eight addresses some of that, what we touched on earlier, which is why have the traditional Marxist economists been indifferent to the role of advertising? They were focused on content instead. Again, this is in the seventies, and it was obviously shiny things. The content was front and center, so people thought that that was what was going on. Remember, this is 1977, a full decade before authors Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky were publishing “Manufacturing Consent”, even though this was contemporaneous with some of Edward Herman’s earlier writings.

Now Smythe had actually published two versions of this paper. The peer reviewed article from 1977 that we’ve been using, and again, it came up as a chapter in 1981’s Dependency Road. These are again, foundational, critical for understanding what’s going on, but what does it mean for right now? Now as I’m recording this, on the evening of July 6th, 2023, Facebook has just launched Threads their Twitter competitor within the last 24 hours.

Earlier this week when I was writing it, I thought the main argument would be the Reddit implosion and Twitter’s issues, which were leading to a mass exodus of users looking for an alternative and heading towards the Fediverse, including Mastodon, which is an ActivityPub protocol tool that’s very similar in some ways to early Twitter.

Earlier, back in June or a thousand years ago, it seems, there was a lot of discussion on the Fediverse because there was news that Facebook was using the ActivityPub protocol for their Threads tools. All of this has gone by in like, you know, Lightspeed, where weeks, sometimes decades happen, right.

Anyways, when I started drafting this in response to those particular events and the general bad idea of engaging with Facebook on anything, (we’ll get into what Triple E means, probably in a future episode too), the online universe was vastly different. The Reddit moderator strike wasn’t even a thing that had happened yet, and even though there was problems at Twitter, it didn’t seem to be the mass expulsion that happened on July 1st.

So let’s tie it back to our main characters. Both Meta and Alphabet, Facebook and Google are well entrenched as advertising companies at this point. There’s no surprises going on there, and it’s also, it’s reasonably well known what’s going on when the auction service is used, being detailed in this explainer from the markup (see below). I’ll put the link up in the show notes here. I.

They also have a wonderful explainer article going into the breakdown of market segmentation that’s done by, in this case, Microsoft and their Xandr platform, but actually takes place behind the scenes by all of these major social media companies. And these major companies know exactly what they’re doing, or they get into troubles when they lose sight of exactly what their core business model is serving up an audience to their customers, the advertisers.

Often they get themselves distracted by thinking themselves of content providers, and really that’s not the case. The most famous example of this would be like AOL. When they bought Time Warner and moved into providing content on a more regular basis, they kind of lost track of what they’re doing. Their subsequent failure and being overtaken by like everything else on the internet really speaks to them losing sight of that fact and investing in areas where they shouldn’t have. If AOL had focused on either infrastructure or their core business model, the audience, they would’ve weathered the dot-com bust significantly better than all the other companies out there.

But they got distracted by the shininess of Hollywood and thought that they were in the content business. So too, for Reddit and Twitter is some of the problems that they’ve had or because of moves that they’ve made to protect that content. But they can be forgiven slightly because there’s something that changed, something that Smythe didn’t foresee back in 1977.

And that’s AI. See AI flipped the equation around a little bit and turned all that user generated content stuff provided by the labor of the audience for free into something useful data for their large language models. You can understand why Elon Musk and Steve Huffman are a little bit miffed. Imagine you had a lumber mill and someone came in and took a look around and said, “Hey, you’re doing anything with all that sawdust?” and he said “No, take it”. And then they took that useless byproduct and added a little bit of glue to it, and all of a sudden turned it into, I don’t know, designer Swedish furniture and made a mint. You’d be like, what’s going on here? And try and stop them from taking the sawdust and figure out how to use it yourself, because all of a sudden, that stuff’s gold.

Jerry Gold. Because they didn’t know it or didn’t understand the process, both read it and Twitter in the process of lighting a fire in their factory and burning it to the ground. And meanwhile, the users, the audience commodity that was driving their business are all exiting stage left. And that pretty much gets us up to now.

Now we haven’t even gone into some of the other events like TikTok and the proposed ban that seems to be continually ongoing or some of the other social media networks or television, broadcast tv, what’s happening over there. And we also haven’t really gone into Threads and their use of the ActivityPub protocol that we kind of hinted at it.

But we need to get into something else related to that. And that’s a philosophy called Triple E or Embrace Extend Extinguish, but I think that’s gonna be a whole other video. Things are moving pretty fast and I’m just one guy. So for now, we’ll just wrap this up and try and catch the next one. I’m Dr. Implausible. The audio will be available over on the Implausible Pod and the text of the show should be available on the blog or in the comments sometime soon. The whole show is produced under the Creative Comments Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International Public License. We’ll try and make this one look prettier as I figure out how this whole video thing works.

But in the meantime, the world’s moving pretty fast, so we’ll see what it looks like in a week or so. I’m Dr. Implausible. Have fun.

Other links and references:

Baran, P. A., & Sweezy, P. M. (1966). Monopoly Capital. Monthly Review Press.

Smythe, D. W. (1981). Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (Revised ed. edition). Praeger.

Eastwood, J., Hongsdusit, G., & Keegan, J. (2023, June 23). How Your Attention Is Auctioned Off to Advertisers – The Markup. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/23/how-your-attention-is-auctioned-off-to-advertisers

Keegan, J., & Eastwood, J. (2023, June 8). From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you