The recent reveal by a number of Chinese companies that they were behind the manufacture of goods for high-end luxury brands like Hermes and Lululemon, and that consumers were vastly overpaying for the goods relative to the actual cost of materials and labour that went into their production led me to recall the idea of a Veblen Good, and the role that they play in Conspicuous Consumption.
Of course, the very idea of Conspicuous Consumption leads one to infer that we might have other versions of that formulation. What is the opposite of it? What would that look like? Much like our look last summer at Nescience and Excession, we can break it down…
Conspicuous Consumption: this is the place where your Veblen goods reside, items used for displaying ones membership in the leisure class (and up). The material goods that are part of this are fairly well-studied and understood, but there are some other “lifestyle” options that some might not recognize as Conspicuous Consumption as well. The whole “trad” movement (trad life, trad wife, etc.) would fall in here, as would various overconsumption movements like quiverful or polygamous groups.
And the form of Conspicuous Consumption can vary as well, based on culture: CC in urban areas, with designer goods, may look different than CC is rural ones, where an outsized RV or a boat, or even owning horses, serves the same purpose as having a backyard swimming pool or a kid in hockey (as opposed to soccer or something).
Inconspicuous Consumption: This is where basic needs are met, or if you’re in a luxury market or a higher tax bracket, you have the good sense not to let on too much. This can be where the consumption “just happens”, or it is subsumed in the background, and is just shown through use (I’m thinking of music instruments or computer gear here specifically) and lacks the branded hyper-specific consumption seen above.
Inconspicuous Non-consumption: The land of ghosts, the place of no comment and no return. Of people passing by and saying “not for me”, and go about their lives not doing things. This is fine of course, you’re not owed anything, but it can sometimes be tough on the producers’ side to understand why people aren’t picking up what you’re putting down. Still, this is relatively innocuous as far as positions go.
And finally, the worst:
Conspicuous Non-consumption: This is the the realm of aggro and internet arguments. The land of `1-star Yelp reviews. The place where the haters dwell, where hate-watching was born. A place where the vegan crossfitters who don’t even own a TV will let you know all about their life choices. This place is the worst.
I hate that I’m stuck here.*
But there’s so much of it. Because if consumption is a performative act, then not-consuming something becomes performative as well, as the antithesis of it. I feel like it arises from a desire, and a lack, so there’s likely something very Lacanian about all of it. The desire, of course, is in both wanting something to be better, so choosing not to use it becomes an element of identity, and then a desire for recognition of your explicit choice not to do something, which may be something that the Non-Consumer has chosen on what they perceive to be moral, ethical, ideological, or other grounds.
The decision not to watch TV (as an example), or eat meat, or any of these other actions that are assumed as something that everyone does, as part of the culture one belongs in, needs to be communicated to others (and sometimes reinforced for the self) to let them know about the “rightness” of one’s actions. If one truly didn’t care about using Generative AI (for a different example), one would just go about one’s day not using it, like with the rest of the Inconspicuous Non-consumption above.
It’s the telling that’s the key.
And because it takes on that tone of preaching and/or proselytization, it becomes irksome quickly. Hopefully it isn’t the sole defining fact about one’s identity, and that it can be something that is only mentioned in passing when relevant, rather than constantly shouted from the rooftop.
*: with respect to certain things, like Substack being awful, and Spotify too, and a fair few other things. Feel free to let me know if I get too preachy.
What happens when a change is on the horizon, one that is approaching that will force you to move but is outside your control? When a community knows it will be disrupted, it may be facing an Incipient Diaspora. For the US denizens of the TikTok app, facing a ban in that country on January 19, 2025, we can observe how they reacted and prepared, and what lessons can be learned from the ongoing situation.
A famous poet once wrote that the waiting is the hardest part. Sometimes the antici-pation, can be wonderful, sometimes it can be terrible. But as we wait, that sound of inevitability, that rush of air in the distance signaling the approach of the sublime, sometimes all we can do is our best to get through the storm.
As we start 2025, we can see multiple storms on the horizon, some closer than others, and communities are handling this differently. One of the worlds we’ve been looking at is deep within cyberspace, and for the netizens of TikTok, the citizens are facing the looming dissolution of their world. Everyone is making plans on what to do next as they pass through that singularity, leaving messages about how to find one another on the other side.
We talked about this a little bit back in June of last year in TikTok Tribulations, but the trouble with tribulations is that they don’t just go away. When faced with an incipient diaspora, what do you do? Is it about the waiting or is it about the recovery? We’ll talk about both in this episode of the Implausipod.
But before we begin, a brief note. After we had started recording this episode in late December 2024, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades wildfires have devastated communities in Los Angeles, California, destroying thousands of homes and displacing many thousands more. Our hearts go out to those affected, our thanks to the firefighters and others involved in the recovery, and we urge you to contribute to a charitable organization that can assist with helping the survivors.
This episode is about loss and displacement, but it is not a commentary on the specific events of the 2025 L. A. wildfires. Thank you.
Welcome to the Implausipod,
a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. In the last weeks of 2024, it was clear that there was a change in the air. The tone of the content made by various posters on TikTok started to change. A lot of people started making posts about other places they could make content on, or for the more casual poster, where everyone was going.
There was more than a few lurkers asking where the party was going to be, it had some real Steve Buscemi with a skateboard saying hello fellow kids energy. It was the collective realization that, absent any acts of deus ex machina, by January 19th, TikTok would go away, with legislation in the United States poised to ban the company from operating within those borders.
Of course, TikTok has a global audience, so various Brits, Australians, Canadians, and people from other countries behaved as if they were unaffected, because largely they were, but the net impact of the American audience and participants realizing that things were about to change shifted the tone of the discourse on the app as a whole.
It became a moment of incipient diaspora. As an observer, I’d like to capture a snapshot of what that moment was like as it was going on. It began shortly before Christmas 2024, as I saw people with more time on their hands, with their kids off from school, or university students home for the holidays, starting to realize that the time left with the app was short.
That there was under a month left to go. Some forward thinking people were starting to make posts asking what was going to happen in the new year. As the holiday festivities wrapped up and those who had vacations slipped into that weird, liminal, timeless zone between Christmas and New Year’s, where everyone is sleepy from gorging on turkey dinner, leftover wine and cheese, and enjoying their holiday gifts.
The trend continued, with more people starting to ask questions, and by the time New Year’s would have rolled around, everybody realized that time was drawing short. People began posting lists of links of their other social medias, other places that they could be found on. This was not unusual in and of itself, as something that happened fairly regular with content creators that derived their income from posting in various places.
Would often try to drive traffic to places that they had monetized. Or were able to capitalize off the audience. For a lot of creators, places like YouTube and Instagram were much better suited for that. So that wasn’t that noteworthy, but by January 7th, this practice had spread to the smaller creators, too.
Those who hadn’t necessarily monetized their content, but wanted to remain in contact with the friends that they had made, and the communities that they had become a part of, while on the app. In early January, this still included places that were the most wide ranging and popular, places like Facebook, Instagram, and X or Twitter.
Though the last one wasn’t quite as prominent, as there was more mentions of Blue Sky, with the migration that had already begun there following the U. S. election in November 2024. However, this was soon to change, as by the end of that week, the U. S. Supreme Court would hear arguments requesting a state of the ban.
Politically minded posters and legal scholars noticed the upcoming case and started commenting on what they thought would happen, and this spread from there to all corners of the app. with many posters expressing concern about what the outcome might be. There was an additional group of commenters who put down their epidemiologist certificates they’d been using for the last few years, dusted off their internet law degree, and stepped outside of the Motel 6 they stayed at the previous night to offer their opinions about what was going on.
But perhaps I’m being too harsh. What I’m suggesting is that a lot of people were commenting on the outcome of the case, but many of them were adding noise rather than signal to the conversation. Regardless, by the day the case of TikTok versus Merrick Garland was going to be heard, January 10th, 2025, everybody’s attention was focused on it.
The high degree of uncertainty about what the outcome of that case might be led to two notable things happening. The first was that everybody started making contingency plans, posting about other apps that they were on, places that they could be found, or profiles that they had made, and the second was that they started taking a deeper look at why the ban was taking place at all.
The argument that the app was a national security risk drew some scrutiny, and a lot of people started looking at the lobbying efforts of TikTok’s biggest competitors. Again. Meta, or Facebook. Now, Meta, the company, and the practices that it engages in and the commodification of the audience is something we’ve commented on many times on this podcast before.
We discussed the audience commodity way back in Episode 8 in July of 2023, and we touched on it a little bit more in Episode 15, entitled Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and of course the TikTok Tribulations episode from June of last year. We’ve also commented on this in the blog and the newsletter, so let’s just say it’s an ongoing topic of discussion.
If you’d like to hear more about it, I’d encourage you to check out some of those past shows in the archives on implausopod. com. But back to the topic at hand. With TikTok users realizing that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were one of the larger reasons that the ban was actually going forward, There was a collective pushback against moving to meta owned properties like Facebook, and Instagram especially, as they were seen as the more direct competitor to TikTok.
There was also a pushback against moving to X, as people saw Musk as equally complicit in the ban, due to his recent role with the US government. And this manifested in posters explicitly calling those platforms out and looking for direct alternatives to TikTok that weren’t owned by those companies.
This pushback was exacerbated by an announcement that Meta made on January 7th that they would no longer be using third party fact checkers, and an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast. Again, there’s a lot going on, and it’s all happening roughly contemporaneously. Following the initial arguments in front of the U.
S. Supreme Court, the users became much more active in finding alternative places. They began mobilizing, began contacting their various political representatives, and in their search for alternatives, they came up with an unlikely option. The app known as Zhenghongshu. Little Red Note, an app that was pitched as a Chinese version of TikTok, but was actually more akin to a Chinese version of Pinterest, an app that was actually Chinese state owned, operating in mainland China, and whose discourse took place largely in Mandarin.
Within two days, the TikTok userbase had collectively made this the most popular app in the App Store, and showed that they would rather learn a foreign language and deal with a directly foreign owned app than deal with a meta product again. The pettiness and spite of the American TikTok userbase apparently knows no bounds.
Much like Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan stating, From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee. The TikTok userbase were deciding to go out in epic fashion and take Meta down with them. And this brings us forward to now, January 17th, 2025, two days before the ban.
The diaspora is in full swing, and still nobody has an idea of what’s going on. It leads us to a question. Is the incipient diaspora about the waiting, or is it about the recovery?
While as of the morning of January 17th, the U. S. Supreme Court has still yet to make a statement on their decision, and both U. S. administrations, both outgoing and incoming, have somewhat punted on making a final determination, lending to much uncertainty even two days before the ban, there’s a lot that we can learn from the observations we’ve made about the reactions of the residents of TikTok.
The first observation speaks directly to that uncertainty. There’s a from the creator of the Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Now, William Goldman was referring to Hollywood, and that nobody can really tell when it comes to creatives pursuits, what is going to take off, what would be a hit and what wouldn’t.
But it applies in this situation as well, because January 19th is somewhat of a singularity. No one can tell for certain what’s going to happen after that point. In early to mid January, there were posters that were stating with absolute certainty and confidence about what would happen, but they had no special knowledge about what was going on.
In those times of uncertainty, the best approach is to put on one’s critical thinking hat. Because the truth is that nobody knows, and even the best can only make an informed decision based on past events and can’t say for certain what’s going to happen. However, in an era of uncertainty, there will be those courting clout and influence that seek to provide answers to a questioning audience, even where no answers exist.
In an era of uncertainty, all you can do is make backups, plan for contingencies, establish lines of communication, and try your best to ensure that you can see people on the other side. And that speaks to the second point, that there are identifiable actions that can be done. Even in an era of uncertainty.
The mantra of the three S’s, Save, Share, and Spread, goes a long way in ensuring that those challenges can be met. The first one is that you save your information. You save your peeps. You get a list of everyone you need to keep track of, everyone you need to contact, and that makes it easier to get in touch with them afterward.
You know who the real ones are, and you ensure that those are available. And this is good disaster prep in general. Have that documentation available, and have backup copies too. The second is that users need to share their info. Have that copy a list of places that they can be found and contact cards, and share that widely with the people that they want to be able to track them down.
It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just has to be a list of contacts on a card. For an older audience that may dimly remember the era before mobile phones, this is the list of places that people can track you down at. You know, if I’m not at the arcade, I’m at the rec center. If I’m not at the rec center, I’m at your mom’s house.
You know where to find me, right? And the third task is to spread that information. If you see a mutual acquaintance that has that contact card, you keep a copy and share it to other acquaintances so it’s more widely available. If there’s multiple copies of something around, then it’s more likely to survive and be able to be passed on.
Users are in the process of developing a network of resilience, and that’s what they need in order to manage the uncertainty that may be happening during this era. This is because the place that they’re looking to land might not even exist yet, or it might be just a app that’s in beta someplace, and not really readily available.
Users might not know where everybody’s going to be, but the idea is you create that network and you become that lighthouse that can guide the other users back to the community when you find one. And the third observation follows from that, and that is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And when we’re talking about third spaces, both real and virtual.
virtual, sometimes it’s best to take something that exists and meets some of your needs than the perfect option that doesn’t exist or may never exist. You can’t let something not being your optimum choice deter you from using what’s available. When it comes to third spaces, both real and virtual, you need to look at what you’re trying to do.
Now, some of this builds on what Ray Oldenburg was talking about in The Great Good Place when he was originally discussing what third places are. When it comes to third spaces, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the good that you’re trying to do is to build community. When you’re trying to build community, you can use the tools that are available to you.
In the late summer of 2024, there was a discussion of third places that was taking place online, both in blogs and on TikTok and other sites, and there was a lot of headcanon or misconceptions about what third places are and what counts. There are statements like a third place can’t be a business, or can’t have people working there, and if there are, then it doesn’t count, and frankly, this is nonsense.
It might not be optimal, but it can still count as a third place. Remember, a third place is just someplace that isn’t work or home, but a place where you can relax and spend some time. Some of the original examples of things like third spaces were things like barbershops or bars or coffee shops or pool halls, and these are all businesses, but they still count.
So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a McDonald’s or a Rotten Ronnie’s, or a mcds or a raunchy, Rons or a Macas. Those can all count as third spaces. You can go there every morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit around with your friends or acquaintances or people from the community or even just people passing through, and that might be the best part as you’re exposed to news from elsewhere, and you can have a discussion.
This is how community is built. It might not be perfect because it’s corporate and policy changes might change how things are going. They take out the seats or the price of coffee changes or whatever. Or this could reshape the environment and not make it as conducive to having that community and discussion.
And this can happen with the change of ownership of smaller businesses as well, whether it’s a barbershop or a pool hall or whatever. But it is something that can be used while community is being built up. This is something we talked about in our earlier episode on recursive public. So if you want to go back and check that in the archives again, I encourage you to have a look.
But this is something that we need to get over, the idea that our virtual spaces have to be perfect from the get go and not recognizing that the previous ones that we had built up over time and acquired characteristics as the users interacted with them. So again, the rule is if you find a place that’s suitable, you work to build that up and you become a lighthouse to your community and bring them in with you.
You start where you are, you use what you have, and you Do what you can. And I’m not just saying this from my own experience as someone who spent 18 months doing field work at Third Spaces looking at how communities form and interact. I mean, I am that person, but I’m not just saying that. But the point being is that a community has to be built, and it takes the effort of the individuals involved in it to come together and build and shape that community into something that works for them.
And then the fourth big takeaway from the observations is that users can make informed decisions and that their choices do matter. This became most obvious as the tide started to shift against using meta and its related products like Instagram and Facebook as An alternative to TikTok. There’s a phrase that goes around that our audience may be aware of, that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
That in that system, someone somewhere is getting the short end of the stick. And while that’s true, there’s often an element or undercurrent of resignation, of engineered helplessness. Designed to get somebody asking, if every choice I make is wrong, if there is no ethical choice, then what does my choice matter?
But as I said earlier, that choice is critical because for users and for creators who are consumers of platforms, the choice of which platform to use really matters. On January 7th, when Meta announced that they’d no longer be using third party fact checkers, or an earlier announcement where they said that they’d be using AI agents within the stream so that your audience may no longer be an audience, one begins to wonder why even use those products at all.
A user or creator would have to ask themselves, does continuing to use this product legitimize those practices? This is a question that a number of users and creators started asking themselves when it came to X slash Twitter, and that led to the mass migration to Blue Sky as they finally realized that their presence, especially that of the journalists and academics, legitimized Twitter as a platform.
I say, finally, as it seemed like a patently obvious outcome with the change in ownership in 2022, and I’d be standing here like John McClane shouting out the window yelling, Welcome to the party, pal, but We all come to these things in our time. The point is, is once you make that realization, is you need to take action.
Long term, who’s to say that blue sky was the right choice, but right now it seems to be a safer choice, even though it might just be a big pot of honey that one day will become commodified once the resource has been sufficiently built out and another wave of migration will take place, but Such is the way of life on the internet.
The last comment we’ll make is the idea of the root causes of the ban. As we noted earlier, there was a lot of speculation about what those causes were, but most of it just boils down to two words, and those two words are market power. Market power is the ability of a firm to set the price of its good above the marginal cost.
And in this case, it’s helpful to remember what the product of a social media company is. They sell audiences to advertisers. This includes you, and me, and Everybody else and everything that’s done on those platforms, which is then packaged up and sold off to advertisers looking for those specific demographics.
In order to maintain that market power, you need to be able to manipulate either the supply or the demand. And for social media companies and other high tech firms, that works a little bit differently, because an innovation can come along and disrupt the market that they’ve gathered. For example, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best film camera company in the world, if everybody shifts to digital cameras and nobody’s taking pictures anymore.
So for firms that obtain that monopoly position that allows them to exert market power, they’ll often do a lot to retain that market power and maintain the ability to charge what they want. And I say monopoly, but it’s often usually only one or two firms within any given high tech segment. Think about Microsoft versus Apple on the desktop or.
Android versus iOS on your smartphones. Regardless of whether it’s a monopoly or a duopoly, they don’t want competition. It messes with their vibe. And their vibe is the ability to extract exorbitant profits. Now, I’m drawing this from Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology, published in 2023.
Kurtz is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, and he’s been doing this for a long time. The book is pretty dense and technical, but it’s been written with an eye to a lay audience, and there’s sections of it that are very readable and include some real solutions as well. We reviewed it in a newsletter a few months back, and as I said, it was written in 2023, but what we’re seeing with the TikTok ban reads like a case study.
It’s like chapter and verse of the observations that Mordecai Kurz made in his book about market power and how it’s exerted in high tech firms. This is why something like TikTok, whose technologies presented a threat to the dominance that Meta had on its social media properties, was something that had to be dealt with from a lobbying perspective.
And I say technologies here because it’s an assemblage of technologies. It isn’t just the algorithm, which seems to draw a lot of the interest, but it’s also the app and the associated tools, the way it functions, the way it’s designed to allow users to create. All these things come together to provide a compelling alternative to met as products that are offered.
And it is in much the same way that all these observations come together to give us a picture of what happens during the incipient diaspora, the root causes as well as some of the effects that take place. As we asked earlier, when we look at an incipient diaspora, is it about the waiting or the recovery?
And in this case, What happens next?
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. We’re happy to start 2025 with you, and we’ve got some new episodes coming out to you soon. We’ve been preparing them for a while, so I’ve been looking forward to sharing them with you. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod.
com, and as mentioned, you can also find the show archives and all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI is used in the production of this show, though I think there’s a machine learning algorithm in the transcription software that I use.
As stated earlier, we do make allowances for accessibility. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along.
There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod. com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Until next time, take care, and have fun.
(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.
You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along. There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod dot com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.
Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up, and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.
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.
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.
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).
