economics – The Implausi.blog

The California Ideology

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

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

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

Let’s start with a question. What do you think of when you hear the word California? What’s the picture that comes into your head? If you had to hazard a guess, what would something called the California Ideology be? Take a moment and walk in your answer. We’re going to have a look during this episode of The ImplausiPod.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And what is the California Ideology? Let’s see. Well, if you pictured a mix of hippies and high tech, of new wave and new money, you’d be pretty close. But the California ideology is something that didn’t start in the 2020s or even the 2000s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In it, Californians voted 53. 3 percent against.

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

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

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

You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license.

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

Until next time, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Value of Nostalgia?

This is part 2 of the Nostalgia Curve; part 1 and part 3 are already posted.*

In the first post of this series we described 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 to the question: how to determine the value of nostalgia.

Now, I’m not particularly privy to the internal calculations of Hollywood finance, but it might be worth plotting those out, comparing released titles in a franchise versus the real (or subjective) value they held for the franchise owner. For illustrative purposes, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the streaming era. Those include the following:

Star Trek Discovery (2017-2024): a prequel series with an all-new cast, and the first Star Trek series in 10 years, with a premiere on regular television before the rest of the episodes were released via streaming. There was some contention over earlier episodes, but it received high praise, and was noted as a driver of subscriptions.

Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023): a series following the captain of the Enterprise from Star Trek: the Next Generation, with eventual appearances of other cast members from that series. It received critical acclaim, with reviews generally around the 80% range, and it was a driver of subscriptions to the Paramount+ online channel.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-ongoing): an adult animated series based on a premise from a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode from 1994, following the misadventures of low-ranked characters. Lower Decks has gathered critical praise and generally positive reviews, but it doesn’t appear to be the driver of the ongoing Star Trek stories in the way that the other series are.

Star Trek: Prodigy (2021-ongoing): a computer animated Star Trek show aimed at children, with a tie-in to Star Trek: Voyager. Appearing on Nickelodeon, it was cancelled after one season despite critical praise and an Emmy, and picked up by Netflix for the second season, and possibly more.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022-ongoing): follows the Enterprise before Kirk became the captain and the events depicted in Star Trek: the Original Series (1966-1969). Feeling in some ways like a direct homage of the original show, it has received accolades, with a third season in production and a fourth ordered.

For all these series, we can see a number of commonalities: varying degrees of nostalgia, with some series tying more directly to past properties and the extended universe; there is a difficultly 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.

Plotting these series out, we start to see what the curve looks like:

There are several takeaways:

Value is subjective; absent real data on the viewership, it can be tough to place the titles on the curve, or to judge their impact
Value is relative; for a show like Prodigy, it wasn’t worth it for Nickelodeon, but Netflix was more than happy to pick up and release the show.
Nostalgia is also subjective, but the more closely tied a property is to what has gone before – the trappings and tropes of the extended universe – the more constrained the creators can be in what they can make.

But there are other approaches we can take: value isn’t the only way to rate nostalgia. Perhaps point three can give us a clue: comparing the nostalgia a show evokes versus the novelty that it approaches the subject with. Let’s take a look at the Shape of that Curve in our next post.

* Disclaimer: due to the vagaries of blogging and this being an exercise in “thinking through writing”, this piece (part 2) ended up getting posted after part 3 on “the Shape of the Curve“. Whoops! My bad. Hope it didn’t cause too much confusion.

Échanger

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 25, on January 2, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14232183-implausipod-e0025-echanger

[buzzsprout episode=’14232183′ player=’true’]

Échanger

Bonjour. J’ai une question à vous poser. Voulez vous échanger avec moi? Really? Are you sure? That’s fantastic! Because sometimes the English language doesn’t have the right word that does exactly what you need it to do, that expresses the entirety of what you’re looking for. And in this case, that word, échanger, is what we’re going to use when we’re talking about automation.

I’ll explain more in this episode of The Implausipod.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to take a look at part three of our two part series on the sphere in Las Vegas. Yeah, things got out of hand. And follow through on an observation that dominated the discourse in 2023 and serves to be at the forefront of our discussion about technology in 2024 and beyond.

And that concept is échanger.

So I mentioned this the other episode when we were looking at the Sphere in Las Vegas and how it had a lot of workers that were doing fairly regular rote tasks, like holding up signs and directing traffic. And as they funneled everybody into the entrance of the Sphere, into the first floor of that massive auditorium, We met the robots, the auras, that were doing almost exactly the same thing:

responding to the crowd, answering questions of the audience, and directing them. But responding to them personally. And it struck me at the time, especially as we were kind of going through and looking at five different Auras, the sisters, that were explaining what we saw in each of these stations, that each of them could do the job of the others, their human chaperones, without too much more training.

It was job replacement made real. And this is where I started to look for a term that can kind of encompass that. Now, it’s something that’s been discussed a whole lot, that idea of job loss through automation, and it’s accelerated in the last year since the release of ChatGPT and the other AI assisted art tools or large language models, as people are worried that that’s going to directly lead to job loss.

But that’s only one part of the story, as there’s also things like the development of the Boston Dynamics robots, and other robotic assisted tools that are taking the roles of persons, and dogs, and mules within various environments. And so we have this assemblage of different things that are all connected to this job loss.

And in order to encompass these factors, I found myself stumbling for a word. I recalled back to some of my training in grad school where we were looking at the idea of actor network theory and the author Michael Callon. In 1986, he came up with the idea of interessement, And obviously he was French, but in his work titled Some Elements of the Sociology of Translation, he was talking about that shift that took place, and he was using the French language to describe it, a specific instance.

So I thought I’d reach out and draw on that inspiration, and see if perhaps a verb in French could encompass what we are seeing within the world at large. Hence, Échanger. And I like it. It works. I know there’s been some other authors who have used other verbs to describe different processes within the tech sphere lately, and sometimes those will get caught by language filters and sometimes they won’t, but I think Échanger, with all its multiplicity of meanings, adequately captures the breadth of what we’re looking for here when we’re talking about automation, agentrification via AI tools, and virtualization,

and what they might mean for workers that are working alongside machines that will replace them. That’s what the term means, or what it means now in the context of this episode, and in my reference to technological replacement. And speaking from a personal perspective, I have more than just an academic interest in echange.

I’ve been automated out of jobs on at least a couple different occasions over the last 30 years, and I’ve experienced outsourcing from a worker perspective on a couple occasions as well. And in some cases, both at the same time. For example, in one of those instances, I was working for a local tech company that was manufacturing phone handsets.

And there was seven people working on the assembly line, and after a few months, they brought in one machine that could replace the role of one of the persons on the line. And our duty was to feed material into the machine. And then after that was tested and worked out, within a month, they brought in another one.

And slowly, that team of seven was whittled down to two, as we’d just really need somebody at the front end to load the parts, and at the back end to take out the manufactured ones and test them. And it ran pretty much 24 7. And after they had fine tuned that, they packed up the whole factory and shipped it down to Mexico.

So we had both replacement, échanger, and outsourcing happening within the same instance. Now, obviously, this isn’t anything new, it’s been happening for years. The term technological unemployment was originally proposed by Keynes and included in his Essays in Persuasion from 1931, and has been returned to many times since, including by Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief in his paper titled Is Technological Unemployment Inevitable?

Daniel Suskind writes in his 2020 book, A World Without Work, that there can be two kinds of technological unemployment, frictional and structural. Frictional tech unemployment is that kind that is imposed by switching costs and not all workers being able to transition to the new jobs available in the changed economy.

The friction prevents the workers from moving as freely as needed. And this is what was happening in my experience with the jobs where échanger occurred. I want to be clear, a lot of those jobs that I was automated out of were not great. It was hard, demanding work, or physical work that was replaced by labor saving devices, in this case, machines.

But it still meant a job loss, and there was one less role, or entry level role, for a high school student, or college student, or casual worker, or whatever I was at the time.

Échanger. (part 2)

And that’s part of the problem. On March 27th, 2023, the Economics Research Department at Goldman Sachs released a report titled The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, otherwise known as the Briggs-Kodnani Report. The report was published several months after the release of ChatGPT4 to the general public and captures the fear that was seen during its initial wave of use.

The report focuses on the economic impacts of generative AI and its ability to create content that is, quote, indistinguishable from human created outputs and breaks down communication barriers, end quote, and speculates what the macroeconomic effects of a large scale rollout of such technology would be.

Now, the authors state that this large scale introduction of AI tools would be, or Could be a significant disruption to the labor market. The authors take a look at occupational tasks on jobs, and using standard industry classifications, they find that approximately two thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation.

And the generated AI could, quote, substitute up to one fourth of current work. Now, if you take those estimates, like they did, it means it could expose something like 300 million full time jobs to automation through AI, or what I like to call agentrification. And that’s over a 10 year period. This would create an incredible amount of churn in the workforce, and whenever we hear about churn, we need to consider the human costs behind those terms.

A lot of people will lose their jobs, and well, the Schumpeterian creative destruction generally means that people get new jobs, or that old workers that haven’t moved become more productive, as a study by David Autor and others from 2022 found when they looked at U. S. census data from 1940 to 2018. and found that 60 percent of workers in 2018 were working at jobs that did not exist in 1940, and that most of this growth is fueled by technology driven job creation.

But there’s usually a lag between the two, between losing one job and having tech create new positions, the frictional tech unemployment we mentioned earlier. But there could also be more, the second kind mentioned above, structural technological unemployment. As stated by Briggs and Kodnani, there could very well be just some permanent job losses, and that can be a challenge for us to address as a society.

Now, with the productivity growth, Briggs and Kodnani argue we could see a 1. 5 percent growth over a 10 year period following widespread adoption, so the timing for all of this is actually quite distant. Everybody’s thinking everything’s going to end immediately, and that’s not necessarily the case. But it sure can feel like it’s coming around the corner right away.

The authors also estimated that GDP globally could increase by 7%, but that would depend on a whole lot of factors, so I’d like to bracket off that prediction, as there’s too many variables involved. The two things I really found interesting about their report was a, the timescale that they’re looking at this and B, the specific jobs that they’re looking at.

So, as I said, the ability to predict the specific GDP on something as large scale as this across the economy on a 10 year timeframe is just like, let’s not do that. It’s just. There, you can put numbers into it, but I think there’s just far too much speculation involved in actually being able to get to that level of precision with anything.

The interesting thing in the paper was their estimate of the work tasks that could be automated in the industries that could be more significantly affected. There’s two key charts for this. It’s Exhibit 5, which is the share of industry employment exposed to automation, and Exhibit 8, which is the share of industry employment by relative exposure to automation by AI.

And there’s some of these that are, you’re not going to see any automation improvements in. Some industries are just not really going to take a hit. But some of them could have AI as a complement, and some of them will have AI as a replacement. And this is in Exhibit 8, and I think this is probably the most interesting thing in the whole article.

The thing the Briggs and Kodnani report captures is a lot of the public’s initial impressions of OpenAI, and of ChatGPT as well. This drove some of the furor because as people were able to access the tool and use it, one of the things they’d naturally do is go, Well, does this help me? Can I use this for my own job?

And B, how well does this do my own job? So a lot of the initial uproar and the impacts from ChatGPT was people using it to see how it would do their job and being concerned with what they saw. So I think a lot of their concerns and fears are well founded. If you’re doing basic coding tasks, and the tool is able to replicate some of those tasks fairly simply, you’re like, oh my god, what’s going on?

If you’re doing copywriting or any of those roles that receive a significant amount of replacement, as in the Table 8 on the Report, like office and administrative support, and legal, you know, traditionally one of those things we didn’t really think would be automated, you’re going to have some serious concerns.

Martin Ford’s book, The Rise of the Robot, talks about that white collar replacement, where we’re seeing job loss and automation in roles that traditionally hadn’t seen it before. When we think of échanger. When we think of automation, we think of it as, like, large industrial machinery. We’re thinking of things like factory machines, being able to produce something that a craftsman might have had to work at for long hours, but able to do that at an industrial scale

or rapid scale. And this change has us going all the way back to the era of the Luddites in the early industrial revolution in England. Now, when ChatGPT launched, we’re starting to see the process of what I like to call agentrification, tech replacement through AI tools. And basically, we’re having automation of white collar work in things like the legal field.

I mean, this might fly under the radar for a lot of academic analysis, but if you’re paying attention to what gets advertised, there were signs. Tools like LegalZoom were continually advertised on the Jim Rome sports talk show over a decade ago, and we note that being able to be centralized and outsourcing that work would indicate that there’s, you know, some risks of échanger involved in those particular fields.

Now, there’s other fields where this white collar work is at the risk of echangér as well. The Hollywood Strikes of 2023 had similar motivations. Though their industries were moving quicker to roll out the tools, being on the forefront of their use, the Actors Guild and the Writers Guild were much more proactive against the tools because they saw the role that would take place in their replacement.

Given the role of the cultural industries, like movie production, being at the leading edge of soft innovation, we were already seeing digital de-aging tech and reinsertion in major motion pictures, notably from Disney properties like Star Wars with both Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher, whose likenesses were used in films after they had passed away, and the de aging of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones 5.

This leads to an interesting question. Can Échanger lead to a replacement of you with your younger self? I don’t know. Let’s explore that a bit more, next.

Échanger (part 3)

On December 2nd, 2023, the rock band KISS played their final show at Madison Square Gardens. Now, this may have not been newsworthy, as they had been doing Last show ever since late last century, but as the members were now in their 70s, there was a feeling that they really meant it this time. However, at the end of the show, they revealed that they weren’t quite done just yet, and they unveiled their quote unquote immortal digital avatars that will represent the band on stage in the future.

Now, KISS aren’t the first in doing this by any means. The Swedish pop band ABBA has been doing this for a while, and Kiss contacted the same company, Pop House Entertainment, to work on their avatars. Now, Bloomberg News reports that the ABBA shows are pulling in 2 million a week. Yes, you heard that correctly.

Clearly, I’m in the wrong business. But this trend to virtual entertainers has been happening for a while. When a hologram Tupac appeared with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012, it was something that had already been in the works. Bands like Gorillaz and Death Clock had long used virtual or animated avatars, and within countries like South Korea, virtual avatars are growing in popularity as well, like M.A.V.E., the four member virtual K pop group that’s been moving up the charts in 2023. We noted a few episodes ago that one of the challenges for 21st century entertainment complexes like the Sphere is providing enough continuous content, and virtualized groups like this may well be able to fill that role and allow the Sphere to provide content worldwide by having virtual avatars that can fill the entire space in ways that Bono and the Edge on a small stage in front of a massive screen can’t quite do. And more than just this, the shift to remote that’s happened as part of the pandemic response could mean this technology could be rolled out in education and other fields as well.

So we’re just seeing the thin edge of the wedge of this virtualization component of Échanger. With large companies like Apple and Meta continually pushing the Metaverse, we’re going to see more and more of it in the coming years. So 2024 may well be the year of virtualization. We’ll dive further into virtualization and the Metaverse in upcoming weeks here on the Implausipod.

Why échanger? (part 4)

Well, basically it covers three things. We’ve kind of discovered it covers automation, which is the industrial process that we’ve been seeing for centuries now. It covers virtualization, the shift to digital in entertainment, education, conferences, and distribution. And the third thing it covers is agentrification, the replacement of workers or roles or jobs by AI.

So, this is different than outsourcing, as outsourcing may work in conjunction with some of the above, as noted in my own personal experience earlier, and these are all metaprocesses of the trends towards technological unemployment. If we look at any of these, automation, Virtualization and agentification, they’re all metaprocesses of translation.

Now, the work I mentioned earlier by Michel Callon, in Some Elements Towards the Sociology of Translation from 1986, is basically talking about that, describing what we call a flat ontology. An ontology, in this case, is a way of describing the world. And what a flat ontology does is it treats the actors in the world as similar.

So, normally, when we talk about an ontology, we’re talking about like with like, right? We’re talking about people, or we’re talking about things, or we’re talking about institutions, firms, we’re looking at things on the same level. When we flatten the ontology, we treat all the actors or agents in the system equally, and we can look at the power relations between them.

We use the same terms for the actors, so in this case, it would mean human and non human actors are treated in the same way. We treat the things the same as the people. That doesn’t necessarily mean we treat the people as things, but we say that everything here has to be described with the same terms when it comes to their agency.

This is what interessment means. That’s the agency. In between state, the interposition, when Michel Callon is talking about translation between asymmetrical actors, it’s that moment where we connect dissimilar things. And so this is where we come into the idea of échanger as a metaprocess for these three trends of replacement.

And that’s why we chose échanger for this process of translation as well. Échanger is a process of translation of a different kind. Échanger is the metaprocess of having something different do the job or being a replacement for the task. So if échanger means in French, literally a trade and exchange, a swap, then we’re extending or exapting the term a little bit in this case, where to us échanger means replacement in place.

So if we return to our example from the Sphere in Las Vegas, we can see this happening with the Auras and the workers. The role is similar, but it’s a different agent, different actor that is taking that place. This is what we see with virtualization as well, or automation, the agentrification that’s taking place due to AI.

And sometimes those machines, those tools, those devices, means the job of many can be done by one. But it also means that the one still occupies the same place within the network of tasks and associations within the process around it. Think of those machines embedded in the assembly line I mentioned earlier.

Where the staff went down from 7 to 2 and the production line was turned into a black box with inputs and outputs. But what’s actually going on in that black box? We can have some questions. With some automated processes, we can tell. But with AI tools, we don’t necessarily know. And that can be a significant problem. Especially when we’re facing Échanger.

Bibliography:

Autor, D., Chin, C., Salomons, A. M., & Seegmiller, B. (2022). New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 (Working Paper 30389). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w30389

Hatzius, J. et al. (2023)The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth . (Briggs/Kodnani). Retrieved December 5, 2023,

Ford, M. (2016). The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment. Oneworld Publications.

Leontief, W. (1979). Is Technological Unemployment Inevitable? Challenge, 22(4), 48–50.

Susskind, D. (2020). A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Metropolitan Books.

They’re not human? AI-powered K-pop girl group Mave: eye global success. (2023, March 17). South China Morning Post.

Tupac Coachella hologram: Behind the technology – CBS News. (2012, November 9).

Implausipod E0017 – Not a Techno-optimist

Introduction:

If you had asked me on October 15th, 2023, how to self describe myself, I might say I was a techno optimist. But on October 16th, Mark Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, released the Techno-optimist manifesto, and I can no longer say that I’m a techno optimist.

In this episode we’ll walk through the quick scan of the document, and the red flags that it raised while looking through it, and where some of the problems lay in the underlying assumptions of the manifesto.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/13859916-implausipod-e0017-not-a-techno-optimist

Transcript:

Technology. If you’ve listened to this podcast for more than a few episodes, you realize that that’s one of the underlying themes here, that I’m interested in technology, how it appears in popular culture, how it’s developed, it’s what I’ve researched, written about, taught about, and I think about it a lot.

I think about its promise and potential and what it can offer humanity. And if you had asked me on October 15th, 2023, how to self describe myself, I might say I was a techno optimist. But on October 16th, Mark Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, released the Techno-optimist manifesto, and I can no longer say that I’m a techno optimist.

I’ll explain why in this episode of the Implausipod.

When the manifesto was originally published, I gave it a quick scan, and that scan raised a number of red flags. And throughout the rest of this episode, we’ll look at those red flags as if they were laid down by a surveyor on the landscape. But before we do, I want to go into the value of giving something a quick scan, of jotting down your initial impressions.

I’m going to employ another surveyor’s tool, one of triangulation, of being able to hone in on the target by looking at it from different angles and directions, from different points of view. Because, as we talked about a few episodes ago, that empathetic view of technology requires that triangulation; of being able to step outside of one’s own perspective and view it from the perspective of somebody else. And this can be done for both things we find positive, and things that we find negative as well.

So as is tradition, we’re going to talk about something by chasing down a couple tangents first before we get back to those red flags. But bear with me, it’ll all kind of come together at the end.

So when it comes to the techno optimist manifesto, the thing that really struck me was the ability to identify those red flags, to spot them, to pull them out of the larger text. (And it was a 5200 word text. There was a lot going on in there.) but I think identifying these red flags speaks to something larger: the ability of experts or people heavily involved in the field to identify key elements or themes and figure out where a problem might be lying. It doesn’t matter which field it’s in: whether it’s a mechanic or medical doctor, academic or art historian.

And if that last one rings a bell, it’s because there’s a source for it. In his 2005 book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the process by which an art historian was able to evaluate a statue that was brought into the Getty Museum. and at a glance, the evaluators were able to identify key features that led them to believe that it was a forgery, that the statue in question had never actually ever been in the ground and subsequently recovered. It’s the ability to spot the minutiae of a given artifact or piece of art, and through long experience and knowledge and exposure, be able to determine its authenticity, the validity of a piece of work. And again, this isn’t just an academic thing. It goes across so many fields, crafts, trades, practices. It’s a key, essential element of them.

And to link it back to the ongoing discussions about AI, it’s one of those things that AI generated texts or artifacts often lack. It’s that authenticity. We can sense that there’s something off about the piece. As the saying goes, we can tell by the pixels. So this assemblage of tools that we have, the skills and knowledge and practice and experience, all come together to form what we might call a set of heuristics.

It’s similar to what Kenneth Burke calls equipment for living, and there he’s referring to literature and proverbs function in a way similar to the memes we talked about last episode, but these are the tools that we can use to judge something, and how we come to an assumption about what we’re seeing in front of us. We do this for pretty much everything. But when it’s something that’s particular to our skill or our particular area, then we can make some judgments about it.

And when it comes to those particular topics, perhaps we have a duty to communicate that information, to share that knowledge with the world around us. So that’s what we’re going to get into here with the techno optimist discussion and the red flags, because I’ve read a lot of the texts that Andreesen cites within the manifesto, but obviously have a radically different worldview, and we can, discuss why we might come up with those radically different interpretations at the end.

But before we do, I want to throw one more point into the mix, one more element or angle for our triangulation on the topic at hand, and something I like to call the Forest Hypothesis. Now, this is different than the Dark Forest Hypothesis, where we are, as a species are tiny mice in a universe filled with predators lurking in the darkness (which we’ll touch on next episode). Rather the Forest Hypothesis is related back to the Blink idea, that it’s a way of evaluating knowledge, of evaluating expertise. The Forest Hypothesis basically asks how much can you talk about on a given subject if you’re out in the forest away from any cell phone signal, Wikipedia, handheld device, book, or any other form of external knowledge, something that was extrinsic to yourself.

And it’s a good test. There are people that can expound endlessly on stuff that they know about, and there are those who may be less comfortable discussing things online, or in an academic setting, but you know when push comes to shove, they actually do know things, and they don’t have to just reach out to their Wikipedia on their phone. Now, the analogue to this is the bar talk phenomenon that we used to have, where no one had access to phones, and we’d get into discussions about who could recall what. We could call it the Cliff Claven Corollary, right, where we’re not necessarily sure in the moment, but we can use those rhetorical strategies to ask: “eh, does that sound right to you, or are you just, like, making that up?”

And in the interest of full disclosure, much of the rest of the episode about the red flags came from two conversations that I had with different sets of colleagues about the techno optimist manifesto and the material espoused within. So much of the rest of this episode is going to be me recreating that discussion and talk off the top of my head as best I can. I’ll refer back to specific elements, but without further ado: why I am not a techno optimist.

So, as stated, the Techno Optimist Manifesto was published on the morning of October 16th, 2023. During the day, it started making the rounds on social media, on Mastodon, and elsewhere, and I saw numerous links to it, so I thought I’d dive in and give it a quick look. There’s been articles written about it since, in the intervening ten days or so, but I want to really just capture my thoughts that I had at the time.

I had jotted them down and had them in conversations with colleagues, as stated. So flipping through the manifesto, I kind of gave it a high level skim and a couple of things started to pop out. And these were the red flags that started to be a cause for concern. The first of those was some of the works cited. Now, one of those heuristics that we talked about earlier that you can use whenever you’re evaluating an article is kind of, you read it from the front, you read it from the back, and then you can read the meat of the article itself, which means take a look at the abstract or the introduction, and then take a look at some of the authors they’re citing, because if you’re familiar with them, that can give you an idea of where the conversation’s going to go.

But with respect to the manifesto itself, early on in the work Mark Andreesen starts referring to a number of economists that were influences for the work that he was producing. The first one he mentions is the work of Paul Collier, who wrote an influential book called The Bottom Billion, which talks about development and in the global south. There’s nothing really wrong there. He’s going into some interesting information about what’s happening in the developing economies around the world.

But then Andreesen goes on to cite Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman as influences. Now from a glance and, these are, you know, well known and respected economists, and Hayek in particular for his work on the Knowledge problem. But both of them were influential in other ways, and drove the policy for the Thatcher governments in the UK in the 70s and 80s, as well as the Reagan governments in the U.S. in the 1980s, So they had a very neoliberal bent to them and a lot of the underlying ideology from their economic works are what we still see in policy circles today. Taking a look at the state of the world and the economic system, we may want to questions those underlying influences, and seeing them in this manifesto is raising some red flags again. Now, even though, some economists like say Tyler Cowen would recently would include both Hayek and Friedman is part of the greats of all time, and again, I’m not disputing this: they have a massive influence. But those influences can have outsized effects for millions and billions of people across the world.

Some of the other elements that, showed up as red flags in Mark Andreesen’s work was the section of the manifesto, and just a quick second, whenever you declare something as a manifesto, that in and of itself is a red flag, it’s a cause for, just to maybe look at the document from a particular point of view, to go through it with that fine tooth comb.

A manifesto can be seen as like an operating manual, like “this is what we’re working with; these are our stated assumptions” and sometimes getting that down on paper is fine. It gives you a target that you can refer back to. But when we see a manifesto, we also want look at it with a greater degree of incredulity, to dig a little deeper on what’s included therein.

So in the manifesto, there’s this section of beliefs that Mark Andreesen goes through, where each sentence starts “we believe that dot dot dot”. And beliefs are fine, there’s nothing wrong with having beliefs, but it’s when we have beliefs that are contrary to evidence that it can become a problem. And in the belief section, you see a lot of these statements, where the belief is contra to evidence.

One of the things he says is they believe in… That energy should be too cheap to meter, and that if you have widespread access to this energy that’s too cheap to meter, then that can be a net societal good, and by and large, I agree. Now, the method they decide to get there is part of the problem. They say that through nuclear fission, they will be able to achieve energy that’s too cheap to meter. Now, this is part of the problem, because nuclear fission alone will not get there. Aside from the massive environmental costs of nuclear fission, of the plants that are currently existing (and I’m referring here to an article on phys dot org from 2011, that I still remember), and it was basically saying that at the time in 2011, there was 440 existing nuclear fission reactors that supplied, you know, a portion of the world’s energy. To supply the full energy demand through nothing but nuclear, we would need 15,000 additional nuclear reactors with all the associated costs, the fissile material, the environmental costs, and they’d still be putting out the, you know, the heat, the steam that is released from nuclear reactors. So, there would still be a massive environmental cost from transitioning to that source, and that would require building, like, ten reactors a day, every day, for like half a decade to get us close to those numbers.

There’s no way for us to… as a society build up that kind of capacity through nuclear fission alone. And Andreesen states that that would allow us to provide energy too cheap to meter that we could move away from an oil and gas economy. So, the actual path is through more passive elements like solar, wind, and alternative energy sources, but nuclear fission will not get there, and using nuclear fission to accelerate us into nuclear fusion is also a problem, in that nuclear fusion has always been about some mythical target 20 or 30 years down the road and much like AGI seems to always be off in the future. We’re never quite getting to that point. So citing that as a goal is necessarily a bit of a problem.

We’re barely getting started and we’re already three flags in. Now, the next one is that in this area, they also self identify as apex predators. Earlier, on he draws a comparison to sharks in nature: move or die, and that ties into this apex predator bit later on. He says that they are predators, that they are able to make the lightning “work for us”. It moves directly from their to a return to the “great man theory” lionizing the technologists and industrialists who came before. Hmmm. Really? Do tell. Whenever you’re self identifying as a predator, that’s just like a massive red flag, a warning sign.

And I want to be clear, that there are aspirational elements to the work, it’s just that the aspirational elements are like flowers in a garden filled with these bright red flags.

I can get behind the aspirational elements, but even some of those have a massive disconnect with reality. They see the earth as having a caring capacity of like 50 billion humans. we can barely manage with the 8 billion that we currently have, which is massively overusing the resources available to the tune of requiring three earths worth at current consumption rates. And while the may be able to support 50 billion humans, but that would require a massive change in organizational and resource usage and resort in horrible inequalities across massive amounts of that 50 billion, with a very select few having anything close to the living standards that we have now or that are seen across much of the OECD nations, let alone the globe as a whole.

We see a number of other aspirational elements, other flowers in the garden, in quotes from Richard Feynman, Buckminster Fuller, and others, with odes to the transformative power of science to enlighten us and provide answers to the mysteries of the world around us. But this also comes hand in hand with a de-legitimizing of expertise, using the Feynman quote to propose a return to the “actual scientific method” using “actual information”. Whenever we start seeing echoes of the No True Scotsman fallacy in a text, making distinctions about what counts, once again, red flag. Actual information? Who decides? Isn’t that what science is about?

And from there, the Andreesen leans heavily into accelerationism. And again, this is a massive flag for me personally, whenever someone self identifies as an accelerationist, I start to seriously question everything they’re talking about.

Accelerationism is basically the belief that what capitalism really needs is for the gas to be put all the way down to the floor, to press the pedal all the way down so that we can actually hit “escape velocity” quote-unquote, and move quicker along the curve towards the singularity or whatever.

If you consider technological development as a curve, as a growth curve, then the only way to get higher up it is to go faster. Now, if you look at Geoffrey Moore’s work on innovation in Crossing the Chasm, which is an adaptation of Rogers’ work on the diffusion of innovations, of the innovation adoption curve, there’s a point where any new technology will succeed or fail, based on the point of low down on the slope. If I do the video version of this, we’ll put this on the screen, but basically at the low end of the slope, there’s this little thing, which Moore calls the chasm. And that chasm is where you have the innovators and early adopters have kind of picked up this new tech, and then you’re trying to take that product, that technological tool or artifact out to larger market, to get widespread adoption, and then see if it flies. Basically we’ve seen it with things like virtual reality or DVDs or home video recording, smartphones, whatever. There’s a point where the product might be under development for a while, and then the larger population says, okay, we can use this and they adopt it. And then it sees widespread distribution.

Accelerationism views that as a challenge and views tech more generally. And that, like we said, things need capitalism just really needs more gas, more fuel. Problem with it is that obviously you can’t necessarily tell what’s going to take off, what’s going to get adopted – you can’t necessarily make “fetch” happen, even if you’re a billionaire, and there’s a lot of problems when you start going that fast with no brakes. If the road starts to swerve ahead of you, you might not be able to change direction in time, and this is where the other side of accelerationism comes in.

You see, Accelerationism isn’t necessarily something that’s either left or right. There are accelerations on both sides of the political spectrum. There’s accelerationists on the right, that are pro-capitalist, pro-tech version seen here. There are other accelerationists on the right, and you can go check out the Wikipedia page to see what other groups are associated with it. There’s also accelerationists on the left who view that capitalism is inherently unstable and want to see it go faster because that will expose the iniquities in the system and help it go off the rails so something better can be rebuilt.

You see this in the works of like Slavoj Zizek and other academics on the left though. Zizek himself is kind of… Um, mid, I guess, but you’ll see that amongst those who are critics of capitalism, who also want it to go faster. There’s a problem with both these perspectives and the problem is basically that, and this is the problem I have with accelerationism is that it is a perspective of a tiny elite minority and would result in massive amounts of pain for millions and billions of people, while that acceleration is resolving itself.

While things are going faster, more fuel is getting added to the system. You know, the climatic change that we see because of more fuel literally being added to the system. Just the disruption that we can see happening would cause starvation, job loss, and untold pain and suffering, if the current systems we have are disrupted is also a problem. And so, from my perspective of doing the least pain, of not wanting to see humanity as a whole suffer, then accelerationism is necessarily a bad thing. Let’s find a different way.

Now, this is about the point where the Techno Optimist Manifesto gets into the list of enemies as well, and while that may or may not be typical for a manifesto, I think whenever you’re writing something and you have a enemies list, you know, that’s a warning flag in and of itself.

Now amongst the enemies for the technological optimist are things like sustainability, sustainable development, social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, de-growth, and others besides. And when you start to look about who your enemies are, what you’re against, then you start wondering really what you’re for, right? So the concern here is that any kind of regulation or responsible governance is seen as an enemy, as something to be combated, to be avoided, to be dealt with. And aside from being a massive red flag, it reveals some of the under some of the underlying ethos as well.

This is what they’re against. They’re against regulation, things that were put in place for safety, for ethical use, for management, for sustainability, for our continued existence on the planet. And these are things they’re against. And I think that is, again, a massive warning sign. And from there we get to the last one.

The last red flag sign is a quote that comes up near the end. Now the quote is uncited, unattributed. We don’t see the conviction to actually state who this is from because that may be actually make it too obvious. The quote is as follows:

“Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

That quote is from Filippo Marinetti, from 1909, from the Futurist Manifesto which he wrote. If you’re not familiar with Marinetti, here’s the low down, and it’ll highlight the problem. Like I said, it was uncited, but if you know who Marinetti is and the story, then that is the biggest warning flag in the entire document, of the entire list of warning flags that we’ve already seen. Marinetti, of course, is the founder of the Futurist School in Italy and wrote the Futurist Manifesto in 1909.

Here’s some of the elements of futurism: technology, growth, industry, modernization. Okay, but also these other elements: speed, violence, destruction of museums, war as a necessity for purification… Hmmm. Now, Marinetti would go on to get into politics in Italy a few years later, and work with another group of Italians on another manifesto in 1919. That, of course, is the Fascist Manifesto, which he co-authored. So there’s a direct lineage from Marinetti’s work and elements of it that appear in that later manifesto and the works that that was adopted to as well.

If we take all these things, all these red flags together: a list of neoliberal economists, denialism and beliefs contrary to facts while downplaying education, self identifying as predators, accelerationism, lists of enemies, and citing proto-fascist literature. All this combined is a massive red flag and why I am not a techno optimist.

So, that being said, then how would I identify?

And that’s a fantastic question, because judging on the words alone, “Technical Optimist” is pretty close to where I am. I believe that technology can be used as an assistive tool, as we’ve stated prior, and that it can help people out, and is generally an extension of man, that we can use it for adding to our capabilities.

So I might be a techno-optimist, or at least I was until October 16th. Other terms I’ve seen floating around that I could self-identify as include things like techno revivalist, which is close, but not quite. That feels like it ties more into like experimental archeology, where we try and recreate the past or use methods of the past in the modern era to kind of figure out what they were doing. It’s a fascinating field. We should talk about it at some time, but that isn’t really where I am.

Solarpunk isn’t quite where I’m at either because, well, or cyberpunk either. I don’t think I’m really fit within any of the punk genres. I’m pretty straight-laced. I’m a basic B to be honest.

Taking the opposite stance doesn’t work either; I’m not a techno-pessimist. I’m generally hopeful for the opportunities that the new technologies can bring. I think that’s part of the challenge is that there isn’t a good line for where I sit. Aside from what is now defined as a techno optimist. And I don’t think it can be reclaimed because as I went through the number of red flags there, the well is really well… well and truly poisoned and with the breadth of reach that that particular manifesto got and the reporting that it saw in multiple areas, I don’t think that that would ever come back, even though much like Michael Bolton in Office Space, why should I change if they’re the ones that suck, right?

So I think techno-optimist as a term is where it is, and that will not change. But I am almost anything but that. And why? Well, part of it I think is just exposure and upbringing. As I said, I’ve had a significantly different path. One that doesn’t lead through Silicon Valley, one that’s not even in the same solar system as a billionaire.

When you have to go about the business of daily life, when you’re almost middle class, you’re going to have a very different view of technology and its uses, and how it can be used for exploitation as well. And I think that comes through in some of our work.

So, to tie this back to the beginning, to close the loop on why we had to triangulate with examples before we could assay the manifesto: if exposure and experience are what lead one to be able to make quick judgments about a particular work and see where the references are coming from, they also can allow one to see some of the harms that might come about from exposure to those statements as well. And that’s really what we’re trying to do: to bring some of those associations to light through this particular podcast episode.

So as I still search for a term: Retro Tech Enthusiast, just Tech Enthusiast perhaps, media historian, media archaeologist, etc. I’ll keep working on it. And once we figure it out – and the figuring it out is what I think is going to be the journey of this podcast as a whole – once we figure it out, I’ll let you know.

But if you have any great suggestions in the meantime, reach out and let me know at drimplausible at implausipod. com or on the implausi dot blog. I’ll see you around. Take care.

Implausipod E015 – EEE, Embrace Extend, Extinguish

EEE, or Embrace Extend Extinguish has been making the rounds again in 2023 as a number of silicon valley tech companies have been coming under the spotlight for their business practices, and some striking similarities are showing to a strategy outlined by Microsoft in an internal memo back in the 1990s. Everything old in tech is new again.

Transcript

In 1999, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U. S. District Court of Columbia issued his findings in the case of United States v. Microsoft Corp., the antitrust suit that was brought by the government on the tech giant due to allegations that it was using its power to bundle the browser with the Windows operating system, and this constituted an abuse of its monopoly position within the desktop computer market.

During the course of the trial, it was revealed that Microsoft had an internal policy of embrace, extend, and innovate. But during the trial, witness Steven McGeady revealed that privately Microsoft executives referred to this as embrace, extend, extinguish with the goal of marginalizing or eliminating direct competition. Other tech companies started taking notes for use in the 21st century. Let’s talk about Triple E in this week’s episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and since we came back from hiatus with episode eight, we’ve mentioned EEE a few times in relation to things like the Fediverse, so I thought there was no better time than now to get caught up.

First off, the reason why a case from the 90s still matters in 2023 is that it never really went away, and here and now we’re starting to see some more signs of it with some big players, both new and old. Potential examples in 2023 include Facebook, Google, and again Microsoft, and it may affect things that you use on a daily basis.

Let’s cover off the main points. What is Embrace Extend Extinguish, and what does it mean for computing and the internet? EEE or Triple E That’s right, this episode is all about the game, and the game is follow the leader. Anywho, Triple E was an internal policy pursued by Microsoft in the 90s with relation to its competition in a number of key markets. First revealed during the antitrust case that I mentioned in the open, where an internal memo that was brought into evidence showed that they referred to the strategy as Embrace, Extend, and Innovate. This was part of a number of texts that were submitted into evidence, including emails and quotes from Microsoft executives and others, like Steve McGeady of Intel, where he was a VP at the time.

During testimony during the trial, McGeady revealed that they, Microsoft, had referred to it as Extinguish internally. Now, these documents are from the Antitrust case, and are separate from another set of docs, collectively referred to as the Halloween document, which will leaked to Eric S Raymond and detailed Microsoft’s attitudes and plans regarding Linux and open-source software. Those show that Microsoft was still aggressive against competition but had to use a different approach due to the distributed and non-commercial nature of the FOSS community. Here, they pursued tactics like the development of FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or announcing vaporware products, stuff that would compete with a given product if it came to market, but they had no intention of ever actually making.

They’d also engage in the practice of extending protocols and developing new ones, and de-commoditizing existing protocols in order to crater the market for stuff that was running on it. And from these latter documents, we can better see what their corporate strategy goals were. It was a set of social and policy actions which they used to maintain their market position against other vendors, who often had better technological solutions, similar to what we talked about in the Endless September episode, where AOL had a technically inferior product, but were able to compete on presence in the marketplace with the ubiquitous floppy disks and CD coasters and a streamlined user experience, this was one of the reasons that the case was so important.

By using their market size to shut out other vendors from the market, they were stifling innovation and preventing competition. And this is something that still raised some eyebrows back in the 90s. With the original case, Microsoft ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act. It was a business-to-business crime, B2B, so when the afflicted parties petitioned the U.S. government about the impacts and the concerns were raised about the lack of competing alternatives, they, the government, eventually took action.

As a reminder, this was before smartphones were a thing in the market and shifted. Apple had a tiny fraction of the desktop market, around 3 percent in 1999, and Linux was very niche and other operating systems were mostly found use within specific corporate use cases, but had a tiny user base compared to windows as well. All told Microsoft was on about 95 percent of all desktops and laptops sold. And this number was actually growing through the Y2K period up to the dot com crash.

And the reason we’re bringing it up here again in 2023 is that apparently everything old in tech is new again. There’s been the rollout of some new apps, programs, and tools, and there’s a number of court cases actually taking place right now in the fall of 2023 involving major tech players that you’re not hearing about because of other criminal enterprises currently in the news.

So I’m going to take a moment to cover each of them in turn and how they relate back to Triple E and cover some of the theoretical background while we’re doing this as well. And the first one we want to talk about, of course, is the one that started this whole thing. Threads, the Twitter like communication app, launched by Meta, nee Facebook, under their Instagram brand, was made available to users on July 5th, 2023.

Now prior to its launch, there had been rumors of its development. On an article on TheVerge. com on June 8th by Alex Heath, they had gone into the details of the app, which at the time was called “Project 92”. The main rumor was that it would be using something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which as we’ve discussed plenty of times, is the thing that’s powering Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse, and this rumor caused a lot of consternation, especially within the Fediverse at large, mostly due to Meta’s past track record, which hasn’t been great. If you’re wondering what kind of things might be involved, just do a web search for Cambridge Analytica, or for Rohingya in Myanmar. Don’t search for it on any Meta owned properties, because you won’t find much and for those reasons and more a number of the people that were already on the Fediverse that were early adopters of the protocol were engaged with it because it was explicitly not a Facebook property.

So when a post was made on June 18th by an admin from one of the larger instances on Mastodon that, yes, they’d been in discussion with Meta regarding the ActivityPub protocol and the possible integration that would take place, there was a lot of uproar and consternation, and one of the things that got mentioned a lot during the ensuing discussion was the idea of Triple E. Now admins of some other instances and some users said they were going to pre-block meta because they’re concerned that any particular connection with them may allow leverage or for their information to be shared.

You know, they’d be turned into a commodity, much like we’ve discussed earlier. There are those who are online who don’t want any part with Facebook. And the other concern was that Facebook would go full triple E on the ActivityPub protocol: embrace it, by letting Threads link to it directly; extend it in some meta-friendly way, probably by allowing advertising or something similar; and then extinguish it ultimately at some unspecified point in the future as they roll on to a new program or a new platform, but in much the same way that we’ve seen with standard operating procedure for Microsoft back in the 90s. In so doing, the people that had found a home away from Meta, away from Facebook, would lose their online homes, so you can understand their concerns, but there’s a related set of concerns tied directly to the triple E phenomenon, and that is the notion of path dependency and vendor lock-in.

There’s an old story, we might call it a meme, that does the rounds on the Internet every six to nine months or so. Stop me if you’ve heard it. It goes the size of the space shuttle’s boosters was determined by the width of a roman chariot, or two donkeys or something like that. I’ll let you look it up. There’s a couple recent examples Also, i’m not going to stop even if you’ve heard it.

Here’s the full story: as it goes, the diameter of the space shuttle boosters are the size they were due to the fact they had to be shipped via rail cross country from Utah to Florida. Standard gauge railroads in North America are 4 foot 8.5 inches. The size of the standard rail gauge is because the Americans bought their early equipment from the English who used a similar gauge for their equipment. And this was fixed because the English tram manufacturers designed their wagons to fit the roads of the English countryside. And these were set at the distance because of the Roman chariots that had driven on the roads millennia before and had worn groves in the roads, which had then been used for generations of Englishmen. So the width of the train tracks was directly influenced by the width of the two Roman horses, or donkeys. There’s variations in the stories, you may have heard it differently.

It is, of course, nonsense.

The size of a donkey had very little to do with the size of the Space Shuttle. There were multiple different standards of rail lines in use in North America between 1831 and 1981 when the Space Shuttle first launched, but its design had begun significantly earlier. Any of these could have been the standard, though again, there were some significant advantages that some gauges had over others. More on this later. But tracing the links of contingencies, facts, and counterfactuals necessary to draw a straight line from donkey carts to rocket boosters requires levels of hand waving once reserved for members of the royal family. It just ain’t a thing.

Especially when you consider that the diameter of the SRB is 12.17 feet. You’d need to be doing some Steiner math to get that story to work. But what it does illustrate is the idea of path dependency, the link which is back that might be caused by initial embedded choices. And I know this may seem like an odd rhetorical strategy, undermining a specific well-known example in the aid of explaining what it is, but in this case the particular illuminates the general case, even if it doesn’t specifically abide by it.

Path dependence can be a real issue, especially when it comes to technology. It’s usually brought up in terms of standards. We can think of things like the QWERTY keyboard design, or the various forms of coffee pods that are used as shaping the direction of the market. And these can both be True, but to really get a hand on path dependency, let’s think about it in terms of something massive, like really big, like the automotive market in North America. It’s so big and entrenched that makes substantive changes to it would be extremely difficult. So how would one go about changing the auto system? By using something that can overlap with the grooves that are already cut to a greater or lesser degree. You add in electric vehicles that mirror the shape and conform to the systems that are already present and offer charging stations that resemble in some fashion the filling stations that are currently familiar to your audience so that they can be more easily adopted. Moving to electrical vehicles that look like cars leverages over a century of design decisions and development and allows for an easier adoption for new customers, or at least that’s how the thinking goes. So electric cars follow the path dependency laid down by successive generations of gas-powered automobile designs and drivers.

What’s related to path dependency, though not exclusive from it, is the idea of technological lock-in. And this is where those K Cups and keycaps come back into the picture. The keycaps in this instance are the ones that spell out Q W E R T Y on the top of your keyboard. Though in this day and age, you can order a version that spells out anything you like. (At some point, we’re going to have to have a chat about innovation as a driver of change in secondary or tertiary markets, but we’ll move on for now.)

So the idea of path dependency really came about from the field of evolutionary economics. Paul David wrote about it in 1985, about the risks of technological walk in, in his famous paper on “Clio and the economics of QWERTY”. Okay, famous among economists, but still famous. Clout’s clout, right? David was writing about the historical competition between two famous keyboard layouts, the QWERTY keyboard, the one that you’re likely familiar with, as well as the DSK or Dvorak standard keyboard. DSK was patented in 1932, and it was faster, better, more efficient, and the U.S. Navy even tested it out and found that it only took about 10 days or so to recover the cost and retraining. The DSK or Dvorak keyboard was about 20 to 40 percent more efficient than the QWERTY version.

Now, the QWERTY version had already existed for a while. It was patented between 1909 and 1924, depending on what country you’re in. Originally developed by Christopher Latham Scholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and some of his partners, including Carlos Glidden and Samuel Sewell. Now, they were engaged with, uh, let’s see, I guess, entrepreneur, James Densmore, you might want to say, promoter slash venture capitalist. And Densmore had some contacts with a manufacturing company that had some significant machine tool capabilities, an arms manufacturer by the name of Remington. They were also getting into sewing machines at the time, you know, diversifying the portfolio, so to speak. And while business was good during the civil war, the economic downturn that followed in the decade after in the 1870s meant that sales weren’t much. They were selling just for the record, about 1200 units a year. So at the time typewriter sales are more like what we see with like mainframe computer systems today, but at the time in the 1870s, there was actually a lot of development going on. Edison was working on his teletype machines and there’s patents for that in 1870s There’s a lot of other communication equipment being developed and it was being rolled out across the country.

So it was actually A lot of innovation taking place within that space. And in that we have the development of the QWERTY keyboard. There was other competing types as well. Like we said, the Dvorak didn’t come around until the 20th century. There was the “Ideal” keyboard, which had the sequence D H I A T E N S O R in the home row, those 10 letters being ones you could compose 70 percent of the words in the English language with. And all of this development was indicative of a lot of growth going on in the field. The singular advantage that QWERTY had was that, you know, it slowed down the typist so it didn’t jam as often. And that led to a small but minute advantage over some of the other competitors, in addition to having like Remington being the manufacturer for them. And this advantage was multiplied with the advent of touch typing in the 1880s, as the hunt-and-peck method kind of fell out of use. Keyboardists that could type by touch were in demand because that learned skill of being able to use a QWERTY keyboard meant that they were that much more efficient, at least compared to the hunt-and-peck typist, and again, like we said, the tech wouldn’t jam up and result in a slowdown. And it was this learned skill that led to the technological lock in and a suboptimal design like the QWERTY keyboard being the de-facto standard.

As David described, there was three characteristics that led to this. There was tech interrelatedness, there were economies of scale, and the quasi-irreversibility of learning the skill.

Now the tech interrelatedness was the link between the hardware of the typewriter and the software of the typist, or we might rather say wetware of the typist. To use Rudy Rucker’s term, I mean, the particular arrangement of any given keyboard was largely irrelevant. But the installed user base, so to speak, of the typists that were able to use that arrangement quickly and efficiently by memory was much more important.

The economies of scale were linked directly to the manufacturing capabilities that Remington had. As we said, they had a great machine tool set up. So they were able to produce the equipment. And then as other vendors adopted it, it was more and more available for other typists to use. So if a typist is going to pick among any given available option to use, they might as well learn QWERTY because people were paying for people that can use it.

And the training wasn’t for free, right? The typist had to learn it on their own and then bring the skill to the company and it wasn’t being handed out there. And this relates to quasi-irreversibility as well. Like you can retrain, but it’s going to cost you money. And while you’re retraining, you’re obviously not earning anything and you may still have some crossover or issues, and you don’t know if the thing you’re training to is going to be any better than the one you already know. In this case, if you know QWERTY, you’re probably going to stick with a QWERTY keyboard or demand that at your new employer. Like I can offer QWERTY, do you have it? Similar to what we see with like Adobe Photoshop and other technological versions that are currently extant.

But this is ultimately one of the problems and downsides of path dependency and lock-in, and to quote David, as he states: “competition in the absence of perfect futures markets drove the industry prematurely into standardization on the wrong system.” End quote. Because nobody could really see that the technical problems that the QWERTY system was designed to solve would soon need to be resolved, and here we are in 2023 with electronic keyboards still using this same layout even though it has no impact because it’s designed to resolve a mechanical issue that came about 150 years ago.

So yeah, if you don’t necessarily have the best technical solution like VHS or AOL or Microsoft in this instance, try unlocking the market by other means. The path dependency means it may pay off for you in the long run if you can stick around.

And just to bring this back around full circle to our example of Roman roads, rail lines, and rocket ships, that’s an example of path dependency. There’s no direct causal relationship, which is what everybody gets wrong about it. As David states: “important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance. There are things that shape our economic decisions that are well beyond our ability to fathom or even control.”

Now earlier I did state that there was a number of examples like Triple E or things like it in the news and it’d be prudent to get onto the next one. Now one of the bones of contention in the Microsoft antitrust case was their bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. People said that that was anti competitive and that they’re using their monopoly power to push that as a de-facto standard. And that’s one of the ways that lock in can happen when a functional standard becomes a de facto standard. Now, currently we’re seeing this with Chromium, which is the engine behind Google’s Chrome browser and used by everything from Edge to Opera to Chrome itself. And it’ll also be in the default install on every Android device.

Much like how Microsoft’s Windows in the 1990s was about 95 percent of the personal computing market, Google’s Chromium makes up about 95 percent of the browser market in 2023. The alternatives are pretty much limited to Firefox, Safari, and a few derivatives. So when Google decides to make major changes to Chromium, it can reverberate throughout the industry. It affects everybody. And in late July and early August, they started doing that. They rolled out something called WEI or Web Environment Integrity as a proposed change to Chromium. It first appeared in July as a proposal in the GitHub repos of some of Google’s Chromium engineers, and it received a pretty universal outcry against it from those that were paying attention to it. What it proposes is that there’s an attestation check that’s done between the browser and the hardware of the machine. Ostensibly it’s used to combat online piracy or cheating in games, but the problem is that those are edge cases and it could be used for other purposes. One of the ones most noticed is it could be used to detect whether somebody’s running an ad blocker on their browser or single out specific extensions. It turns the internet into a permission-based system rather than an allowable system. It turns everything into a walled garden run by Google where they can pass judgment on the users based on whatever opaque criteria they might have. And while that’s one example, that’s not the only case currently involving Google.

The other one that’s going on right now is the antitrust case that was brought by the U. S. Department of Justice against it for its monopoly power with regards to online search. And if you haven’t heard much about that one, it’s not surprising because Google’s been doing pretty much everything it can to limit the exposure or any information that’s coming out of the trial. Much of it’s happening behind closed doors. There’s been some reporting on the New York Times, Bloomberg and Ars Technica, and I’ll put some links to that in the notes.

And that’s not the only case going on because on September 26, 2023, the FTC in the U S and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon.com alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a “set of interlocking, anti competitive, and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon. It alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging.” End quote. At the time of recording, that’s just a couple of days old. So as they say, more to come.

Now there’s nothing in particular that links an alleged monopoly in online shopping to another one that’s alleged for online search to a potential one for, uh, social networking to another one that has the impact of online browsing that maybe links it to one, another, uh, case that, uh, dealt with monopoly regarding operating systems and online browsing from, you know, 20 years ago, but there are some commonalities. Aside from them all being massive tech companies, and in some cases the same ones. As Bill Gates commented in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of the antitrust suit, one of the things the tech companies learned is that they had to be more present in Washington and to lobby more effectively.

Back in the 90s, it was Bill Gates point of pride that they never really engaged with lobbyists. But they changed their strategy with respect to that following the antitrust trial. And everybody else in the tech industry took notes and followed suit. Now, depending on your level of involvement in online tech news, a lot of what we shared here may seem like common knowledge, but not everyone may share that.

What we’re trying to do is just bring attention to the ongoing events that are still taking place, especially with everyone’s eyes thoroughly focused on things like LLMs, generative AI tools like chat GPT. These are just current examples, high profile ones that attract our attention. And there’s others that are happening at various levels of technological development that we might not see or might not have a large impact just because it’s affecting a very niche audience and doesn’t have the broad reach of things like shopping and search and browsing and social media.

What I hope to bring to your attention is the impacts that things like locking and path dependency can have on that development, that it can reduce the available options, and we maybe get stuck with an outmoded technology, something like a QWERTY keyboard, where there would be better solutions available to us.

Because it keeps happening again and again and again, maybe it isn’t necessarily a case of path dependency where we keep falling into the ruts that have been well worn before, but rather perhaps the environment as a whole affords certain outcomes in a regulatory framework of monopoly capitalism that we’ve discussed in the past. We can see it more often happening in such a framework. So rather than being one particular path, the slopes of the hill encourage flows in certain directions. Exploring this would shift us more thoroughly into evolutionary economics full stop, which we’ll leave for a future episode, a path off in the distance.

Next time, in episode 16, we’ll be looking at spreadable media, which we’ve hinted at earlier. And with the WGA strike being potentially resolved by the time you hear this, with hopefully the SAG AFTRA strike soon to follow, we may be returning to some media focused episodes soon, too. Until next time, I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. You can contact me at drimplausible at implausipod. com. Have fun.

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